or drawed on a paintin’ . . . or if they’re a statue, . . . dead, and outtta the way, and can’t talk back, then you dig ’em and full-a so much-a damn admiration and talk ’bout ‘‘our’’ history. But when you run into us livin’ and breakin’ ones, with the life’s blood still pumpin’ through us, . . . then you comin’ on ’bout how we ain’ never together. You hate us, that’s what! You hate black me!

Tommy’s point here echoes back to Bill’s attitude in the opening of the play, in which he ironically expresses disappointment that his friends are still alive, rather than being killed in the riot, because, as he tells them, ‘‘See there, you done blew the picture that’s in your memory.’’ Bill is more comfortable creating representations of people through his art than interacting with real, live people with ‘‘life’s blood still pumpin’ through us.’’ Bill’s state of obliviousness to the reality of the riot is thus symbolic of his removed attitude toward the reality of the lives of the ‘‘masses’’ of African Americans, who are not as privileged as he. This contrast is made concrete by the idea of a riot as a form of protest against racial oppression that is expressed through physical violence, whereas Bill prefers the abstractness of art as a means of making a ‘‘statement’’ about African-American culture.

Childress also employs humor in fleshing out the character of Tommy. Tommy’s sense of humor, which the other characters often appreciate, is important as an element of her personal charm—an indication of her lively, quick-witted mind, as well as being a part of what makes her a unique and attractive personality. Tommy’s losses as a result of the riot have been much more serious than those of any other character in the play—her apartment has been burned with most of her clothing and all of her savings, as well as her other belongings. And yet, Tommy finds humor and joy in interacting with other people, despite the ‘‘tragedy’’ that the riot has visited upon her. Sonny-man tells Bill, ‘‘She was breakin’ up everybody in the bar . . . had us all laughin’ . . . crackin’ us up. In the middle of a riot . . . she’s gassin’ everybody!’’ At Bill’s apartment, Tommy, who is enjoying the company, comments, ‘‘Ain’t this a shame! That riot done wipe me out and I’m sittin’ here havin’ me a ball.’’ Tommy’s resilient spirit despite her recent loss is representative of the spirit of countless African-American women throughout history, who have survived harsh, tragic lives and yet maintained a zest for life. Only at the end of the play does Bill come to understand the ‘‘beauty’’ of African-American women such as Tommy, who ‘‘came through the biggest riot of all . . . somethin’ called ‘Slavery,’ and she’s even comin’ through the ‘now’ scene . . .’’

Tommy’s sense of humor, to some extent, is based on the very qualities which Bill claims to despise in women. Bill’s description of ‘‘the worst chick in town’’ includes the idea that she is ‘‘crude’’ and ‘‘vulgar.’’ Yet Tommy causes ‘‘general laughter’’ among the other characters by talking about the ‘‘corn’’ on her foot—a topic some might consider ‘‘crude’’ or ‘‘vulgar’’ conversation material among mixed company that one has just met. When Oldtimer gives her a chair to sit down, Tommy comments, ‘‘Bet you can tell my feet hurt. I got one corn . . . and that one is enough.’’ She adds, ‘‘Oh, it’ll ask you for somethin’.’’ When she becomes suspicious that perhaps Bill has a wife or girlfriend lurking around, listening in on the conversation, Tommy intentionally speaks loudly to insist that she is not trying to steal anyone’s man away from another woman. She pointedly states, ‘‘I’m innocent. Don’t wanta get shot at or jumped on. Cause I wasn’t doin’ a thing but mindin’ my own business!’’—the stage directions indicate that Tommy says this ‘‘in loud tone to be heard in other rooms.’’ Clearly, Tommy has been in situations before in which she found herself in the home of a man whose jealous wife or girlfriend threatened her with violence. Tommy’s open expression of concern that she may be ‘‘shot at or jumped on’’ by another woman indicates her lack of social sophistication, in comparison to Bill, Cynthia, and Sonny-man.

Although some of Tommy’s humor is intentional, some of her comments and questions that add a comic element to the play are based on her ignorance of Bill’s cultural milieu. A number of humorous points in the dialogue of this play occur at moments in which Tommy misunderstands Bill’s meaning, particularly when it comes to aspects of his educated, intellectual, privileged lifestyle. After being introduced to Tommy, Bill offers her a drink. When she asks for wine, Bill assumes that Tommy is a ‘‘wine-o,’’ an alcoholic. Bill’s assumption betrays his attitude toward Tommy as a woman who is hopeless and at the bottom of the social ladder. Tommy, however, immediately points out that he is the one who keeps wine in his house. Bill then explains that he only uses the wine for cooking, to which Tommy responds, ‘‘You like to get loaded while you cook?’’ Bill of course meant that he keeps the wine to use as an ingredient in some recipes, but Tommy, it seems, is unfamiliar with the type of gourmet cooking that may call for wine. Thus, while Bill looks down on Tommy and assumes that she is a ‘‘wine-o,’’ Tommy turns the tables on him, suggesting that he is the ‘‘wine-o.’’

Tommy also makes a humorous commentary on Bill’s half-finished attempt at remodeling his apartment, originally a low-income tenement, to look like a stylish studio space. The set directions explain that Bill has ‘‘broken out walls and is half finished with a redecorating job. The place is now only partly reminiscent of its past tawdry days, plaster broken away and lathing exposed right next to a new brick-faced portion of wall.’’ Tommy is clearly not familiar with the stylish type of redecorating done by professional, privileged people such as Bill, who move into formerly low-rent districts in order to transform them into classy living quarters. To Tommy, it looks like Bill’s apartment has merely been torn apart in the riot. After pointing out that her own apartment was burned by rioters from within her own community—‘‘the Afro-Americans burnt down my house’’—Tommy looks around Bill’s apartment, commenting, ‘‘Looks like the Afro- Americans got to you too.’’ Tommy’s comment ironically points out to Bill that his abstract ideas about the black community as a unified group (the ‘‘Afro-Americans’’) are far from accurate, since it was ‘‘the Afro-Americans’’ who have destroyed her home and her belongings—as well as those of many others within the community.

Tommy also makes humorous comments to point out Cynthia’s class snobbery toward women who have less money and education than she. When the men leave, Cynthia criticizes Tommy for wearing a wig, insisting that Tommy’s ‘‘natural’’ hair must be ‘‘just as nice or nicer’’ than the wig. Tommy retorts, ‘‘It oughta be. I only paid nineteen ninety five for this.’’ Tommy later mocks Cynthia’s criticism of the wig, bitterly pointing out that women like Cynthia only make things worse for women like Tommy: ‘‘‘Do you have to wear a wig?’ Yes! To soften the blow when y’all go up side-a my head with a baseball bat.’’

Childress makes use of humor in this play to emphasize specific themes. In depicting Bill’s disengaged and critical attitude about the riot, she raises the issue of the relative merit of artistic expression in comparison to violent action in struggling against racial oppression. Through the character of Tommy—whose sense of humor demonstrates her resilient spirit (despite her tragic circumstances), her intelligence (despite a lack of education), her charm (despite her lack of refinement or sophistication), and her biting commentary on the divisiveness which exists within the African- American community—Childress offers a critical assessment of relationships between African-Ameri can men and women, class divisions within the African-American community, and the effectiveness of either violence or art as a means of political action.

Source: Liz Brent, Critical Essay on Wine in the Wilderness, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

In Wine in the Wilderness, Childress makes the point that the intersections of ‘‘sexism, racism, and classism are immutably connected to black women’s oppression while making it crystal clear that black women triumph because of a strong spirit of survival inextricably linked to an African heritage.’’ Enlisting the background of a Harlem riot as a controlling metaphor for communal and intraracial fragmentation, Childress foregrounds the underclass, undereducated heroine of Wine in the Wilderness as the true Africentrist, proud of blacks and her blackness. She stands in stark relief to bourgeois, intellectual blacks whose white assimilationist and classist values expose their racial disingenuousness. Espousing the in-vogue black power rhetoric of brotherhood, liberation, and nationalism, the middle-class antagonists of the play accessorize themselves with the trappings of African culture—the dashiki, the Afro hairstyle, and African objets d’art. But they relegate the black woman in the black movement to the same position assigned her by real-life activists like Stokely Carmichael: ‘‘prone.’’

The play’s gender conflict exposes the black consciousness movement’s ambition to establish a black male hegemony that replicated the gender and class biases of white patriarchy. The female protagonist of Wine in the Wilderness refutes the accusation that she is the product of a matriarchal society that has appropriated the manhood of the black male. Resistant to exploitation by pretentious middle- class blacks, she rejects the sexist prescriptions of passivity submissiveness, voicelessness, and domesticity. An African ancestral connectedness, which the other black characters have failed to cultivate or have lost, enables her to resurrect a guiding, affirming blackness in the middle-class blacks she encounters. As Elizabeth Brown-Guillory posits, the female protagonist of Wine in the Wilderness is ‘‘a very spiritual and spirited woman,’’ who ‘‘rises to serve as a healer to her wounded community whose psyche is in need of re-Africanization.’’

Childress situates the action of Wine in the Wilderness at the conclusion of a Harlem riot during the summer of 1964. Waiting out the storm of street violence in his apartment, Bill Jameson, a 33-yearold painter, receives a telephone call from his neighbors Sonny-man, a writer, and Sonny-man’s wife, Cynthia, a social worker. They announce that they have found the perfect model for Bill’s work-inprogress, the third panel of a triptych dedicated to the theme of black womanhood.

Before they arrive, Bill describes the triptych to Oldtimer, a homeless man, who drops by with loot picked up off the street. The first panel, titled ‘‘Black Girlhood,’’ depicts innocence—‘‘a charming little girl in Sunday dress and hair ribbon.’’ The second reveals ‘‘a beautiful woman’’ with ‘‘deep mahogany complexion’’ who is ‘‘cold but utter perfection, draped in startling colors of African material.’’ She is, Bill states, ‘‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’ . . . Mother Africa, regal, black womanhood in her noblest form.’’ He explains that the third canvas, now blank, will contain the image of ‘‘the kinda chick that is grass roots, . . . no, . . . underneath the grass. The lost woman, . . . what the society has made out of our women. She’s as far from my African queen as a woman can get and still be female. She’s ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude . . . vulgar . . . there’s no hope for her. . . . If you had to sum her up in one word it would be nothin’!’’

Wearing a wig and mismatched skirt and sweater, 30-year-old Tomorrow Marie Fields, called Tommy, arrives with Sonny-man and Cynthia under the impression that the two are trying to match her up romantically with Bill. Lacking the sophistication and college education of the others, Tommy, an eighth-grade dropout, is unpretentious, good-natured, and polite. When the men leave to get the Chinese food Bill promises Tommy in exchange for posing, Tommy shares with Cynthia her attraction to Bill. Cynthia attempts to discourage Tommy’s affection, warning that Bill’s art comes first and that she should not put her trust in men. Tommy, however, understands Cynthia’s true message, that she is ‘‘aimin’ too high by looking at Bill.’’

Seeking honesty, she asks Cynthia to tell her why men like Bill fail to find her attractive. Cynthia explains, stating ‘‘You’re too brash. You’re too used to looking out for yourself. It makes us lose our femininity. . . . It makes us hard. . . . You have to let the black man have his manhood again. You have to give it back, Tommy. . . . Don’t chase him. . . . Let him pursue you. . . . Let him do the talking. Learn to listen. Stay in the background a little. Ask his opinion . . . ‘What do you think, Bill?’. . . What we need is a little more sex appeal.’’ Wearing an Afro herself, she recommends that Tommy not wear a wig. The conversation between the women terminates with the return of the men. Oldtimer, Cynthia, and Sonny-man leave so that Bill can commence painting.

Admitting her ignorance about books, Tommy encourages Bill to share his knowledge of black history. In between his elaborations on Frederick Douglass and Monroe Trotter, he criticizes black women in general and Tommy in particular. Uncomfortable about her shabby clothing, Tommy suggests that he paint her another time. His insistence that she keep on the wig for the portrait vexes her, and she accidentally spills orange drink on herself. Perturbed by her clumsiness, Bill gives her an African wrap in which to change while he talks on the phone.

Tommy overhears Bill describing to the caller the ebony queen of the ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ panel and mistakenly thinks he is describing her. ‘‘You just make sure your exhibition room is big enough to hold the crowds that’s gonna congregate to see this fine chick I got here. . . . an ebony queen of the universe. . . . but best of all and most important. . . . She’s tomorrow . . . she’s my tomorrow,’’ he states. Feeling valued and possibly loved, Tommy, sans wig, emerges relaxed, confident, and beautifully draped. She sits on the model stand, reciting bits of her family history as conversation. Astonished by her radical physical transformation, Bill is strongly attracted to this Tommy. Unable to reconcile her present appearance with the earlier one, he loses his incentive to paint. The two grow closer, embrace, kiss, and ultimately spend the night together.

The next morning, an elated Tommy is deflated and angered when Oldtimer returns and inadvertently reveals that she is not the African queen but the ‘‘messed-up chick’’ of the triptych. Sonny-man and Cynthia arrive shortly thereafter, and Tommy denounces them all, accusing them of spouting problack rhetoric when in actuality they obviously despise ‘‘flesh and blood niggers,’’ as evidenced by their classist, sexist, and deceptive treatment of her. Bill’s consciousness is slow to be raised, but her insight takes the artist beyond his limited perception, inspiring him to begin the triptych anew. The ‘‘chick’’ of the old triptych, ‘‘a dream I drummed up outta the junk room of my mind,’’ was painted ‘‘in the dark’’ with ‘‘all head and no heart. I couldn’t see until you came,’’ Bill pleads.

The first panel of the re-visioned triptych will depict Oldtimer as emblematic of the black man’s past, when he was denied access to education, unions, and factory work. The second panel will contain Sonny-man and Cynthia, representative of the ‘‘Young Man and Woman working together to do our thing.’’ Bill persuades Tommy to pose for the center panel, the woman of the future, the ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ woman, who has come ‘‘through the biggest riot of all, . . . somethin’ called ‘Slavery,’ and she’s even comin’ through the ‘now’ scene.’’ As the black woman whose identity is clearly etched as survivor, Tommy will be the inspiration for the black men and women of tomorrow.

Cultural Symbol versus Cultural Substance

The setting of the play, Bill Jameson’s partially renovated Harlem apartment, is conspicuously dominated by cultural iconography. African sculpture, wall hangings, paintings, and books on African American history signify the occupant’s fashionable but vacuous preoccupation with African artifacts. An array of multicultural icons—a Chinese Buddha incense-burner, a Native American feather war helmet, a West Indian travel poster, a Mexican serape, and a Japanese fan—further objectifies Bill’s vapid efforts to proclaim a political kinship with other oppressed people of color. He cannot sympathetically or psychically relate to those other cultures represented in his apartment, however, because he has failed to connect wholly with his own.

A creation of elitist, black, middle-class culture in imitation of white patriarchy, Bill is more concerned with cultural symbols than with cultural substance. The most telling indicator of his cultural insubstantiality is the exotic cluster of African symbols and associations he attaches to his vision of ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness,’’ perfect black womanhood. The exotic ‘‘cold’’ image of the ebony queen of the universe, of the ‘‘Sudan, the Congo River, the Egyptian Pyramids,’’ in essence Mother Africa who ‘‘has come through everything that has been put on her,’’ bears no resemblance to flesh and blood African and African American women who have actually withstood the trials and tribulations of daily struggle and survival. His ‘‘gorgeous satin chick,’’ whom every man would ‘‘most like to meet on a desert island, or around the corner from anywhere,’’ panders to male fantasy.

Bill’s misguided vision of ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ is the Madison Avenue paradigm of physical female beauty, only in blackface. His queen is the slick, air-brushed, glamorized, ornamental woman who mutely stares from billboards and magazine advertisements. With her blackness defamiliarized in a traditional white imaging of beauty, she propagates the ideology of whiteness, not blackness. Antithetical to the struggling black woman in America, the woman on the canvas is nothing but accessories—‘‘ startling colors of African material’’ and ‘‘golden headdress sparkling with brilliants and sequins . . . [s]omethin’ you add on or take off.’’ Flawless in appearance and conceptualization, Bill’s ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ has no grounding in reality.

Mainstream Assimilation

Because of their assimilation of mainstream values, Bill and his neighbors, Sonny-man and Cynthia, more concerned with black symbols, black discourse, and blackness in the abstract than in the concrete, disassociate themselves from blacks of lower socioeconomic status. Their classist disrespect for Oldtimer, who represents age, experience, and their ancestral past, exemplifies their detachment. In all the time they have known Oldtimer, never have they been genuinely interested enough to ask him his real name. His serving as their court fool and as an up-close example of how politically untogether poor, uneducated blacks can be, has militated against their recognition of his personhood. Similarly, the trio is interested in Tommy for her symbolic value, not for her real self. Voicing both class and regional bias, they view her as ‘‘the kinda woman that grates on your damn nerves . . . back-country . . . right outta the wilds of Mississippi,’’ though she was born and reared in Harlem. Since she ‘‘ain’t fit for nothin’’’ and ‘‘there’s no hope for her,’’ political enlightenment and social empowerment are, theoretically, wasted on her. The only sensible response from privileged, enlightened blacks like themselves is ‘‘to . . . just pass her by.’’

Living in Harlem, a mecca of blackness, yet not identifying with their black sisters and brothers on the street, has severed the middle-class blacks of the play from their racial roots. Tommy forces them to face their intraracial bigotry and their illusion that they are different from ‘‘the black masses’’ when she comprehends that they see her as inferior:

Sonny-Man: The sister is upset.

Tommy: And you stop callin’ me ‘‘the’’ sister, . . . if you feelin’ so brotherly why don’t you say ‘‘my’’ sister? Ain’t no we-ness in your talk. ‘‘The’’ Afro-American, ‘‘the’’ black man, there’s no we-ness in you. Who you think you are?

Sonny-Man: I was talkin’ in general er . . . my sister, ’bout the masses.

Tommy: There he go again. ‘‘The’’ masses. Tryin’ to make out like we pitiful and you got it made. You the masses your damn self and don’t even know it.

Tommy reminds them that the white definition of ‘‘nigger’’ extends equally to them: ‘‘When they say ‘nigger’, just dry-long so, they mean educated you and uneducated me.’’ Her words startle Bill into a psychological journey toward black affirmation. Shocked, he discovers that counter to what he has been taught, the dictionary definition of ‘‘nigger’’ does not mean ‘‘a low, degraded person’’ but ‘‘A Negro . . . A member of any dark-skinned people.’’ Tommy’s definition of ‘‘nigger’’—by which she designates both the rioters who have burned her out of her apartment and Bill, once she discovers he has misrepresented his intentions in painting her—applies to those blacks who hurt and exploit other blacks to fuel their own self-esteem and to satisfy their own egocentric aims.

The racial denial, divisiveness, and do-nothing politics of Bill and other bourgeois blacks are just as destructive to black advancement and self-accept ance as the looting and burning done by those who destroy their own people’s businesses and homes in the name of revolution or as the scavenging of those who profit from the leavings. The rioters, as Tommy points out, holler ‘‘whitey, whitey . . . but who they burn out? Me.’’ Their violence is not unleashed on those they regard as the enemy but internalized, deflected onto the black community.

Contemptuous of black Harlemites, Bill, like the rioters, ironically abuses his own people, thereby revealing his unrecognized self-hatred and selfdevaluation. Quick to sermonize but lacking a plan of his own, Bill is critical of both black factionalism— the rioters and looters—and black unity the leaderships of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Nothing blacks do seems to please him. Even his suburban upbringing in Jamaica, Long Island, where everyone in his family worked for the post office and every house on his block had ‘‘an aluminum screen door with a duck on it,’’ receives his disdain. Tommy plainly points all this out to him, perceiving that his rejection of her symbolizes his rejection of his mother, his family, the ‘‘flesh and blood’’ black community:

Ain’t a-one-a us you like that’s alive and walkin’ by you on the street . . . you don’t like flesh and blood nig g ers. . . . If a black somebody is in a history book, or printed on a pitcher, or drawed on a paintin’ . . . or if they’re a statue, . . . dead, and outta the way, and can’t talk back, then you dig ’em and full-a so much-a damn admiration and talk ’bout ‘‘our’’ history. But when you run into us livin’ and breathin’ ones, with the life’s blood still pumpin’ through us, . . . then you comin’ on ’bout we ain’ never together. You hate us, that’s what! You hate black me! . . .

Maybe I look too much like the mother that give birth to you. Like the Ma and Pa that worked in the post office to buy you a house and a screen door with a damn duck on it. And you so ungrateful you didn’t even like it . . . You didn’t like who was livin’ behind them screen doors. Phoney Nigger!

Even with limited education and social exposure, Tommy knows that identity and self-worth do not come from acting out prescriptive black roles, reading black history, surrounding oneself with African art, or holding one’s familial roots in contempt.

A Guiding Africentrism

Essential to the sustenance of a positive black national culture, Childress argues, is the possession of a guiding respectful Africentrism. The nurturing racial attitudes that Tommy embraces serve as the essential ingredients for the propagation of that culture. Unlike Bill and his bourgeois neighbors, Tommy responds to Oldtimer, her elder and a survivor of past black oppression, as an equal. Her caring acknowledgment of his identity as Edmond L. Matthews recovers his personhood and reclaims his rightful membership in the social framework from which the others have consistently excluded him.

Tommy does not assume she ‘‘knows’’ Oldtimer by reading his physical appearance as a sociopsychological text. She respectfully tells him, ‘‘I’ll call you Oldtimer like the rest but I like to know who I’m meetin’.’’ The others have narrowly defined Matthews by what he is, not by who he is, while the who of his identity, as Tommy intuitively comprehends, is more important than the what. Her humanity toward Oldtimer is again demonstrated near the end of the play when he debases himself because of his intellectual deficiency. Tommy, gently rebuking his self-deprecation, remarks, ‘‘Hush that talk . . . You know lotsa things, everybody does.’’

Tommy’s respectful regard for the intimate relationships between black men and women is apparent from the moment she enters Bill’s apartment. Thirty and unmarried, she desires male intimacy and commitment; nevertheless, she is unwilling to sabotage the committed relationship of another black woman with a man in her own pursuit of love and companionship. For the benefit of any signifi- cant other possibly present in Bill’s apartment, Tommy makes it clear that she will have nothing to do with a married or attached man. Speaking loudly, she asserts, ‘‘Let’s get somethin’ straight. I didn’t come bustin’ in on the party, . . . I was asked. If you married and any wives or girl-friends round here . . . I’m innocent.’’ Later, when she concerns herself more with the benefits that marriage and a family will confer on her individually rather than on the race as a whole, she seems uncomfortable. Implicit in her apology to Bill that both ‘‘might be good; for your people as a race, but I was thinkin’ ’bout myself a little,’’ is the belief that considering herself first is a bit selfish.

Her familial and ancestral pasts empower Tommy. Unlike Bill, who is contemptuous of his parents and suburban upbringing, Tommy uses her now-deceased mother, a victim of spousal abandonment and its all too often ensuing cycle of poverty, as a major motivation for taking control of her life. Observing her mother ‘‘tyin’ up her stockin’s with strips-a rag ’cause she didn’t have no garters’’ and having herself had ‘‘[n]othin’ much’’ to eat when she returned home from school induced Tommy to seek employment and self-determination. She is not resentful that she had to terminate her schooling and does not blame her mother for their impoverished circumstances.

Tommy’s account of her family history further demonstrates her racial groundedness. In contrast to Bill’s detachment from the black community and black history, Tommy is closely attached to her hometown’s ordinary, local people, often members of her own family, and their small but real accomplishments— winning a scholarship in a speech contest, for instance, or tracing the family history back to slaves from Sweetwater Springs, Virginia. Reciting the geneses of The Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in which she taught for two years identifies her as an active bearer of oral tradition and preserver of her cultural heritage.

Directing no hatred toward whites, Tommy’s Africentrism is not predicated on racism; she simply prefers the company of blacks. Presented with the choice of a live-in domestic job on Park Avenue with her own private bath and television and work in a Harlem dress factory among her friends, she chooses the latter. In contrast to Cynthia, who attempted to date white men but gave up when she realized that her education would not ensure her passage into the ‘‘so called ‘integrated’ world,’’ Tommy affirms that she has never been interested in white men and doesn’t find them physically attractive. ‘‘When I look at ’em,’’ she tell Cynthia, ‘‘nothin’ happens. . . . I don’t hate ’em, don’t love ’em . . . just nothin’ shakes a-tall.’’

The Matriarchal Society

Cynthia, who is unable to shrug off the oppressive patriarchy of the movement and defines herself in contrast to the image of the black matriarch, perceives herself as the responsible black woman who willingly subjugates her autonomy, spirit, and vision to help establish a black patriarchal world order. Accepting the commands and chastisement of her husband, she is at his beck and call. Sonnyman’s directive that she run down to their apartment and perform the gender-specific activity of cooking eggs for Bill’s model draws from her a ‘‘weary look’’ but a complacent verbal response: ‘‘Oh, Sonny, that’s such a lovely idea.’’ Later, she is rendered mute by Sonny-man’s childlike chiding of her for apologizing to Tommy for their role in Bill’s deception. ‘‘Cynthia, I tell you all the time, keep outta other people’s business. What the hell you got to do with who’s gonna get what outta what?’’ Though she has not been totally deluded by the male rhetoric of the black consciousness movement, she has certainly accepted female subservience and the proselytizing of other women for the male cause.

The sociosexual hierarchy in which man is ‘‘mounter’’ and woman is ‘‘mounted’’ is not the acknowledged norm of the black society of Wine in the Wilderness but rather it is the ideal toward which Cynthia believes it should strive. Cynthia shares the view of Bill and Sonny-man that ‘‘the problem with the black subculture . . . is that it is a matriarchy in which woman is mounter, thereby depriving black men of their masculine role.’’ She counsels Tommy that her lack of attractiveness to Bill emanates from her excessive brashness, independence, and dominance. The only way Tommy can rectify her masculinized behavior is by returning the black man’s manhood, by staying in the background and allowing him to pursue her. Cynthia enumerates ways that black women can empower black men to counter the debilitating ‘‘Matriarchal Society,’’ but suggests no course for female empowerment.

According to Cynthia, Tommy’s domineering nature has been formed in a matriarchal society, a society ‘‘in which the women rule . . . the women have the power . . . the women head the house.’’ Tommy’s refutation of the charge that she was reared in a matriarchal environment once her ‘‘papa picked hisself up and ran off with some fingerpoppin’ woman’’ makes profound sense and de- flates Cynthia’s fraudulent appraisal of her upbringing in a single sentence: ‘‘We didn’t have nothin’ to rule over, not a pot nor a window.’’ Her statement succinctly dramatizes the fact that women who survive in the absence of men do not constitute a power structure and that their survival tactics are not emblematic of man hating. Furthermore, Tommy’s blunt pronouncement regarding her and her mother’s powerlessness exposes the myth of black matriarchy: that it means social, economic, political, and personal power, yet power in any form has been the primary feature of life to which black women have had little or no access. Iterating her powerlessness, Tommy refuses to assume any responsibility for the loss of black manhood. ‘‘I didn’t take it from him, how I’m gonna give it back,’’ she rhetorically questions Cynthia.

Cynthia’s wry parting utterance to Bill, that his portrait of ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’ is ‘‘exploitation,’’ supports the inclusion of the earlier scene where the women converse in the absence of the men and points to the possibility of women’s exchange functioning as a vehicle for consciousness raising, leading to in turn to sisterly honesty and solidarity. Gayle Austin draws the following conclusion from the construction of a ‘‘women only’’ scene in Wine in the Wilderness:

There is in this play, unlike so many by male authors, a scene between women, between Tommy and Cynthia, in which Cynthia realizes long before Bill does that the actual Tommy is not of the image they had preconstructed of her. Tommy raises Cynthia’s consciousness by sharing her experiences, which strike a note of recognition in Cynthia. This scene points out that race and gender liberation are separate but related pursuits for black women. The scene is permeated by a sense of honesty possible between women when they are not looked at by men. Such a scene is almost nonexistent in plays that do not portray women as active subjects. There is a power in women getting together that is dangerous to male dominance.

A truthful reconstructed image of Tommy, an outgrowth of the women’s dialogue, raises Cynthia’s consciousness and her caution. Hesitant to protest more aggressively the use of Tommy as the matriarchal messed-up chick and thereby be categorized as domineering herself, Cynthia stifles a desire to repudiate the slick glamorized image of black womanhood that bears no resemblance to her either.

Tommy’s Anger

Counter to the ineffectual anger of the street riot, the liberating forces of anger and self-reliance empower Tommy not ‘‘to wait for anybody’s byyour- leave to be a ‘Wine in the Wilderness’ woman.’’ Tommy fights for herself because no one else will, and her strong sense of values and self steer her clear of ‘‘take low’’ politics based on class and privilege. ‘‘There’s something inside-a me that says I ain’ suppose to let nobody play me cheap. Don’t care how much they know!’’ she avows to Bill. Recognition of her own self-worth allows Tommy to discount the false ideology that blames the matriarchal black woman for a legion of cultural, familial, and social ills. Rejecting educated black culture’s view of her, she contends that ‘‘the real thing is takin’ place on the inside . . . that’s where the action is. That’s ‘Wine in the Wilderness,’ . . . a woman that’s a real one and a good one. And y’all just better believe I’m it.’’ True liberation, Tommy discovers, is an internal phenomenon.

Not ‘‘cold but utter perfection,’’ not ‘‘messedup chick,’’ not ‘‘bitch,’’ not ‘‘the sister’’ but her own inscription of self sets Tommy up as ‘‘creator; she becomes the true artist etching the complexity of what it means to be a poor woman of color.’’ Her outbursts of spirit and anger against the prescriptive roles that men attempt to impose on her resonate with the message that ‘‘women must begin to name themselves, to express their totality, to fill up the blank page with recognizable images of women’’.

Source: La Vinia Delois Jennings, ‘‘Blacks in the Abstract versus ‘Flesh and Blood Niggers’,’’ in Alice Childress, Twayne Publishers, 1995, pp. 65–75.

Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress shows a black woman’s assertion of her autonomy in an ‘‘educated’’ black culture striving to imitate the white patriarchy. The associational clusters in the play reveal a false ideal of subservient, glamorous black womanhood, opposed to another false picture of contemporary black women as domineering matriarchs. The associational cluster surrounding Tommy, the protagonist, opposes both of these with an image of the self-reliant black woman seeking equality with men. Tommy’s symbolic actions are assertions of her autonomy, at first unconscious expressions of her character, and finally, in the climactic scene, a conscious rejection of the false ideals held by the other characters.

Because the white hierarchical structure has not been fully adopted by the black culture in the play, it is possible for Tommy to transcend the limitations of such a hierarchy herself, and to convert the society around her to an ideal of equality and mutual respect. The philosophic conclusions of the play are idealistic. Tommy’s individual spirit overcomes the societal determinants in the play, making it an optimistic statement of the feminist impulse. . . .

In the first scene of Wine in the Wilderness, two of the important clusters of associations in the play make their first appearances. Bill establishes the cluster of associations defining his ideal black woman, and the one defining her opposite, the ‘‘nothing’’ black woman, in this scene.

Before a word is spoken, the audience can tell from the setting that Bill has a taste for the exotic. According to the stage directions, ‘‘The room is obviously black dominated, pieces of sculpture, wall hangings, paintings.’’ It also ‘‘reflects an interest in other darker peoples of the world. . . . A Chinese incense-burner Buddha, an American Indian feathered war helmet, a Mexican serape, a Japanese fan, a West Indian travel poster.’’ Bill’s ideal woman, the ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ painting, shares the exotic quality of his furnishings:

Mother Africa, regal, black womanhood in her noblest form. . . . This Abyssinian maiden is paradise, . . . She’s the Sudan, the Congo River, the Egyptian Pyramids . . . Her thighs are African Mahogany . . . she speaks and her words pour forth sparkling clear as the waters . . . Victoria Falls.

These images, with the set decorations, form a cluster of associations around exotic, foreign beauty.

The second cluster of associations in this scene forms around the opposite of this ideal, the ‘‘lost woman.’’ Her associations are with ‘‘grass roots.’’ She is ‘‘a back country chick right outta the wilds of Mississippi, . . . but she ain’ never been near there. Born in Harlem, raised right here in Harlem, . . . but back country.’’ She is ‘‘ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude . . . vulgar.’’ This cluster of associations is the opposite of the first, negative rather than positive, and familiar rather than exotic.

Oldtimer, hearing the first cluster of associations, comments that Victoria Falls is a pretty name for a woman. So foreign are the associations clustering around Bill’s ideal black woman that they are laughably unfamiliar to an uneducated American black like Oldtimer. In contrast, when Oldtimer hears the description of ‘‘the lost woman’’ later in this scene, he recognizes it at once, and says, ‘‘Oh, man, you talkin’ ’bout my first wife.’’ The positive qualities in Bill’s triptych are unrecognizable to a black man off the street, but the negative qualities are a completely familiar critique of black women. Although this is evident to the audience from Oldtimer’s reactions in the first scene, it takes Bill the rest of the play to reach this awareness.

In the last scene, Tommy tells him:

If a black somebody is in a history book, or printed on a pitcher, or drawed on a paintin’, . . . or if they’re a statue, . . . dead, and outta the way, and can’t talk back, then you dig ’em and full-a so much-a damn admiration and talk ’bout ‘‘our’’ history. But when you run into us livin’ and breathin’ ones, with the life’s blood still pumpin’ through us, . . . then you comin’ on ‘bout how we ain’ never together. You hate us, that’s what.’’

And the stage directions tell us that Bill is ‘‘stung to the heart’’ by this distinction between the associations surrounding his ideal, and those surrounding his view of real black women.

When Tommy and Cynthia discuss Bill, the cluster of associations around his ideal grows. Cynthia says that in order to please Bill, Tommy should stop wearing her wig. She should also ‘‘let him do the talking. Learn to listen. Stay in the background a little. Ask his opinion . . . ‘What do you think, Bill?’’’ This description fits very well with Bill’s analysis of what is wrong with black women in a later scene. ‘‘Our women don’t know a damn thing ’bout bein’ feminine. Give in sometime.’’ The ideal black woman, he says, should ‘‘throw them suppers together, keep your husband happy, raise the kids.’’

The cluster surrounding Bill’s ideal of womanhood, then, includes not only exotic beauty but subservience to men. Cynthia and Bill envision a socio-sexual hierarchy in which men are dominant. Tommy, however, when she hears Cynthia’s suggestions, says, ‘‘Mmmmm. ‘Oh, hooty, hooty, hoo’,’’ a comment she has made a few lines earlier in reference to white men. ‘‘The dullest people in the world. The way they talk . . . ‘Oh, hooty, hooty, hoo’ . . . break it down for me to A, B, C’s.’’ Tommy is correct in associating Cynthia’s description with white men. The behavior that Cynthia says will please Bill is the behavior demanded of women in the white patriarchal society.

According to Cynthia, Tommy’s problem is having been raised in a matriarchal society which has robbed black men of their manhood. In other words, Cynthia is describing a reversal of the sociosexual hierarchy in which women are dominant. Tommy rejects this idea, saying that women did not rule in her family because: ‘‘We didn’t have nothin’ to rule over, not a pot nor a window.’’ When Cynthia tells Tommy to give the black man his manhood, Tommy answers, ‘‘I didn’t take it from him, how I’m gonna give it back?’’

To these two choices, the cluster of associations surrounding a subservient role for women in imitation of white patriarchy or the cluster surrounding a black matriarchy of ‘‘lost women,’’ Tommy adds a third alternative: equal roles for women and men. Describing her dream to Cynthia, Tommy says that she is looking for a man ‘‘to meet me halfway.’’ She does not expect him to support her; rather ‘‘the both of you gotta pull together. That way you accomplish.’’ She hopes for companionship: ‘‘Somebody in my corner. Not to wake up by myself in the mornin’ and face this world all alone.’’ The third cluster of associations, defining Tommy’s ideal, begins to form in this scene.

The three clusters of associations—around Bill’s exotic ideal, around the ‘‘lost,’’ matriarchal, black woman, and around Tommy, the woman seeking an equal relationship—continue to develop in subsequent scenes. In Tommy’s next scene with Bill, the cluster of associations surrounding his ideal grows to include Afro-American history. He has pictures on his wall of Frederick Douglass and John Brown, and tells Tommy about other figures in black history with whom she is not familiar. But he discourages her questions about them, saying, ‘‘Trouble with our women, . . . they all wanta be great brains. Leave somethin’ for a man to do.’’ Although his ideal includes heroic men and women in history, it also includes ignorant women in the present day, allowing their men intellectual superiority.

Tommy also finds a picture on his wall of a blonde, blue-eyed model who, Bill says, could sit on her long, silky hair. Tommy responds bitterly, saying that it is this attitude that forces her to wear a wig, ‘‘‘cause you and those like you go for long, silky hair, and this is the only way I can have some without burnin’ my mother-grabbin’ brains out.’’ Although Bill claims that his ideal is black, it is in fact an imitation of the white ideal of womanhood symbolized by the blonde model: an ornamental, subservient woman without intellectual independence.

Tommy counters this false ideal when, later in the same scene, she overhears Bill describing his painting and believes that he is in love with her. Confident of his appreciation, she appears without the wig symbolic of the false ideal of beauty. In an effective reversal of Bill’s history lesson, Tommy reveals her own local history, more personal and touching than Bill’s version, and showing honest pride:

I had a uncle who was an ‘‘Elk,’’ . . . a member of ‘‘The Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World’’: ‘‘The Henry Lincoln Johnson Lodge.’’ You know, the white ‘‘Elks’’ are called ‘‘The Benevolent Protective Order of Elks’’ but the black ‘‘Elks are called ‘‘The Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World.’’ That’s because the black ‘‘Elks’’ got the copyright first but the white ‘‘Elks’’ took us to court about it to keep us from usin’ the name. Over fifteen hundred black folk went to jail for wearin’ the ‘‘Elk’’ emblem on their coat lapel. Years ago, . . . that’s what you call history.’’

Tommy’s history, in contrast to Bill’s, is filled with ‘‘real’’ people, often members of her own family, and their small but real accomplishments— winning a scholarship in a speech contest, for instance, or tracing the family history back to slaves from Sweetwater Springs, Virginia. She reveals her personality in her history and in preferences such as pink roses for corsages and four o’clocks for bush flowers.

Bill’s negative associations with this kind of local, recent history, part of the cluster surrounding the ‘‘lost woman,’’ appear in his description of his own family:

Everybody in my family worked for the Post Office. They bought a house in Jamaica, Long Island. Everybody on that block bought an aluminum screen door with a duck on it, . . . or was it a swan? I guess that makes my favorite flower crab grass and hedges.’’

In Bill’s mind, only the exotic is positive; the familiar is always vulgar, not ‘‘together.’’

The three clusters of associations finally con- flict directly in the last scene when Tommy discovers that she is not ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ to Bill, but a model for the ‘‘messed-up chick’’ in his triptych. Her wig figures symbolically once more, when Tommy tells Cynthia that Tommy does, indeed, have to wear a wig: ‘‘To soften the blow when yall go upside-a my head with a baseball bat.’’ In other words, Tommy needs the wig, which she had felt safe in removing, as a defense against the false ideal of beauty.

Tommy makes the distinction between Bill’s positive, exotic ideal and his negative view of real black women explicit in this final scene: ‘‘Ain’t aone- a us you like that’s alive and walkin’ by you on the street . . . you don’t like flesh and blood niggers.’’ It is not the screen doors with ducks on them that offended him in his childhood, she says: ‘‘You didn’t like who was livin’ behind them screen doors. Phoney Nigger!’’

Bill’s ideal is false not only because it is unrealistically exotic and based on white values, but also because it objectifies the black woman—makes an ‘‘other’’ of her just as the white society does of white women. In the final scene, Tommy asserts her autonomy, her ability to be subject rather than object, to be a ‘‘real,’’ contemporary black woman who is admirable:

Bill, I don’t have to wait for anybody’s by- your-leave to be a ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ woman. I can be it if I wanta, . . . and I am. I am. I am. I’m not the one you made up and painted, the very pretty lady who can’t talk back, . . . but I’m ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ . . . alive and kickin’ me . . . Tomorrow Marie, cussin’ and fightin’ and lookin’ out for my damn self ‘cause ain’ nobody else ’round to do it, dontcha know.

The falsity of Bill’s ideal finally becomes clear to him. He rejects the exotic ‘‘other,’’ the black queen he has imagined. ‘‘She’s not it at all, Tommy, This chick on the canvas, . . . nothin’ but accessories, a dream I dreamed up outta the junk of my mind. You are . . . the real beautiful people.’’ The painting, and Tommy, are explicitly identified as representative at the end of the play.

In fact, each of the associational clusters has elements on each of the three levels distinguished by Burke: the sensory, the familial, and the abstract. On the sensory level are the physical descriptions of the ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ painting, of the planned painting of the ‘‘lost woman,’’ and of Tommy when she appears as her natural self in an African throw, without her wig. On the familial level, the ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ woman is ‘‘Mother Africa’’ and the ‘‘lost woman’’ is the domineering matriarch destroying her family. Tommy is associated with the positive, familial images of her family history.

On the abstract level, all three clusters operate as symbolic representations of black womanhood. The ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ painting represents the false ideal of exotic beauty and subservience in imitation of the white socio-sexual hierarchy. The ‘‘lost woman’’ represents the black matriarchy, a reversed socio-sexual hierarchy supposedly destroying black society. And Tommy represents the true societal ideal, autonomous and equal women and men.

Pattern of Symbolic Action

Tommy’s assertions of her own autonomy and pride in her race make up the pattern of symbolic action of the play. From the beginning, Tommy displays these qualities unconsciously in her behavior. By asking Oldtimer’s real name, something his friends have never bothered to do, she shows respect for another black person. ‘‘I’ll call you Oldtimer like the rest but I like to know who I’m meetin’,’’ she says. Later in this scene, Tommy explains that, although she could keep house for a white family on Park Avenue, she prefers to work in a factory and live among her black friends in Harlem. In her scene with Cynthia, Tommy says that she never gave up dating white men as Cynthia did. ‘‘I never had none to give up,’’ she says. ‘‘I’m not soundin’ on you. White folks, nothin’ happens when I look at ’em. I don’t hate ’em, don’t love ’em, . . . just nothin’ shakes a-tall. The dullest people in the world.’’ Throughout the play, Tommy shows more respect and love for her own race than the others do, just as she shows respect for herself.

Tommy tells Cynthia that she would like to marry because she is lonely, but ‘‘I don’t want any and everybody. What I want with a no-good piece-a nothin’?’’ Tommy has too much self-respect to marry someone she does not love and admire. Later in the play, she demonstrates this attitude again, when Bill brings her a frankfurter instead of Chinese food. She likes Bill very much, as she has just told Cynthia. But her liking and her hopes of marriage don’t stop her from objecting to this supper. ‘‘You brought me a frank-footer? That’s what you think a-me, a frank-footer?’’ Bill says that kings and queens eat frankfurters, but Tommy is not put off. ‘‘If a queen sent you out to buy her a bucket-a Fooyung, you wouldn’t come back with no lonely-ass frank-footer,’’ she says.

Tommy’s account of her family history further demonstrates her respect for herself and her race. And she consistently rejects Cynthia’s and Bill’s suggestions that she be more subservient, usually on grounds of common sense. When Cynthia suggests that she not chase Bill, ‘‘at least don’t let it look that way. Let him pursue you,’’ Tommy answers, ‘‘What if he won’t? Men don’t chase me much, not the kind I like.’’ When Cynthia tells Tommy that black women ‘‘do for ourselves too much,’’ Tommy answers, ‘‘If I don’t, who’s gonna do for me?’’ But to Bill’s suggestion that she should ‘‘keep your husband happy, raise the kids,’’ she responds, ‘‘Bein’ married and havin’ a family might be good for your people as a race, but I was thinkin’ ’bout myself a little.’’

This statement demonstrates the unconscious quality of Tommy’s assertions of autonomy. She seems to suggest that assertiveness and ‘‘thinking about herself’’ might be wrong, and that the subservient, objectified ideal held up by Cynthia and Bill might be more beneficial to her race. The turning point in the pattern of symbolic action comes when Tommy decides that she is right in asserting her autonomy.

Up until the point of her decision, the other characters have attempted to reprimand and correct Tommy’s assertions of her autonomy. Tommy, while she has not backed down, has admitted that the others probably know more about correct behavior than she does. When Bill tells her to say ‘‘Afro- Americans,’’ not ‘‘niggers,’’ she does, at least for a while. She tells Cynthia: ‘‘If there’s somethin’ wrong that I can change, I’m ready to do it. Eighth grade, that’s all I had of school. You a social worker, I know that mean college.’’ Examining Bill’s books and pictures on black history, Tommy says, ‘‘This room is full-a things I don’t know nothin’ about. How’ll I get to know?’’ All of these comments indicate Tommy’s acceptance of her own inferiority, and the unconscious quality of her own attitude of self-respect.

The turning point in the pattern of symbolic action comes when Tommy discovers that she was to model for the ‘‘messed-up chick’’ in the triptych. All of Tommy’s former assertions of autonomy and all of the reproofs she accepted from Cynthia and Bill appear in a new light to her at that point. She throws Cynthia’s advice on wigs back in her face in this scene. She corrects Sonny-man for calling her ‘‘the sister’’: ‘‘If you feelin’ so brotherly why don’t you say ‘my’ sister? Ain’t no we-ness in your talk. ‘The’ Afro-American, ‘the’ black man, there’s no we-ness in you. Who you think you are?’’ She tells Oldtimer: ‘‘You their fool too. ‘Til I got here they didn’t even know your damn name.’’ She rejects Bill’s knowledge of Afro-American history, knocking his books to the floor and saying, ‘‘There’s something inside-a me that says I ain’ suppose to let nobody play me cheap. Don’t care how much they know!’’ And she insists on calling Bill a nigger over his protests that she is using the word incorrectly because, he says, ‘‘A nigger is a low, degraded person, any low degraded person.’’ He looks it up in the dictionary to prove his point, and discovers that the definition is: ‘‘A Negro . . . a member of any dark-skinned people.’’

All of this only re-affirms what has already become clear to the audience: that Tommy is the truly autonomous individual, and Bill, Sonny-man and Cynthia are striving for a false ideal imitative of the white patriarchy, despite their education and sophistication. But the scene is important because it is the point in the play at which this distinction finally reaches Tommy’s consciousness.

Tommy’s earlier belief in the others’ superior education and her fear that her assertiveness is not for the good of the race are laid to rest in this scene. She regrets her previous assumption of her own inferiority: ‘‘Trouble is I was Tommin’ to you, to all of you, . . . ‘Oh, maybe they gon’ like me.’ . . . I was your fool, thinkin’ writers and painters know more’n me, that maybe a little bit of you would rub off on me.’’

Seeing the falsity of their ideal—the cluster of associations surrounding the ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ painting—she asserts that the elements of this ideal are just ‘‘accessories’’: ‘‘Somethin’ you add on or take off. The real thing is takin’ place on the inside . . . that’s where the action is. That’s ‘Wine in the Wilderness,’ . . . a woman that’s a real one and a good one. And yall just better believe I’m it.’’ And she starts for the door, having become fully aware of her own autonomy.

This new awareness is the significant change in motivation in the play. Tommy realizes that it is a change, and tells the others, ‘‘I hate to do it but I have to thank you ‘cause I’m walkin’ out with much more than I brought in.’’ She is walking out with a new awareness of her own strength, of her own power to assert her autonomy, something she has done unconsciously throughout the play.

Agent:Scene Ratio

Because Wine in the Wilderness shows a female protagonist, Tommy, asserting her autonomy in opposition to an unjust socio-sexual hierarchy, the play can be considered a feminist drama. Analysis of the agent-scene ratio reveals the play’s affinity to a particular philosophic school: idealism. Because Tommy’s achievement of autonomy is emphasized, the play is idealistic, showing the triumph of the individual spirit.

The depiction of scene, the unjust socio-sexual hierarchy, is unusual in Wine in the Wilderness. The socio-sexual hierarchy in which man is ‘‘mounter’’ and woman is ‘‘mounted’’ is not the norm in the society of the play, but rather is the ideal toward which the characters believe they should strive. The problem with the black sub-culture, Bill and Cynthia believe, is that it is a matriarchy in which woman is mounter, thereby depriving black men of their masculine role.

But Tommy disagrees with this depiction of her society. Women do not rule in the black society; rather, they are the most oppressed members of the oppressed black caste. Her own mother ‘‘ruled’’ in the home only because her father deserted the family: ‘‘My pappa picked hisself up and run off with some finger-poppin’ woman and we never hear another word ’til ten, twelve years later when a undertaker call up and ask if Mama wanta claim his body.’’ If black women are strong, Tommy maintains that it is because they have had to be selfsufficient.

Because black women have been forced to be self-sufficient, and because black men have been oppressed, the black culture has not succeeded in imitating thoroughly the socio-sexual hierarchy of white society. As a result, it is possible for Tommy to assert her autonomy within this sub-culture, and to seek a relationship of equality outside of either a patriarchal or a matriarchal structure.

In doing so, she is at first opposed by the scene, the ‘‘educated’’ element of black society which maintains that a patriarchy is the race’s hope of the future, and which holds up as ideal the glamorous but subservient, objectified ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ woman. Finally, however, Tommy’s assertion of her own individuality is revealed as a more sincere black pride, a more perfect ideal than Bill’s painting or Cynthia’s image of the patriarchal society.

According to Burke, if the agent’s achievement is featured in a play, the play is idealistic. In an idealistic play, spirit triumphs over matter; the individual transcends societal limitations. In Wine in the Wilderness, Tommy’s individual spirit transcends the hierarchical view of society formerly held by the other characters.

In the last scene of the play, Bill replaces the ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness’’ painting with a picture of Tommy, thus symbolically replacing the objectified, subservient image of black womanhood with Tommy, the autonomous subject. By speaking up for herself, Tommy has not only gained a new consciousness of her own individual spirit, but she has converted the society around her to a new ideal. Bill summarizes what her self-reliance and pride represent as an ideal for their race:

Look at Tomorrow. She came through the biggest riot of all, . . . somethin’ called ‘‘Slavery,’’ and she’s even comin’ through the ‘‘now’’ scene, . . . folks laughin’ at her, even her own folks laughin’ at her. And look how . . . with her head high up like she’s poppin’ her fingers at the world. (Takes up charcoal pencil and tears old page off sketch pad so he can make a fresh drawing) Aw, let me put it down, Tommy. ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness,’’ you gotta let me put it down so all the little boys and girls can look up and see you on the wall. And you know what they’re gonna say? ‘‘Hey, don’t she look like somebody we know?’’

Tommy is ‘‘somebody we know,’’ an individual whose spirit triumphs over matter, making the play an idealistic, feminist drama.

Conclusion

Because Wine in the Wilderness depicts a female protagonist asserting her autonomy in opposition to an unjust socio-sexual hierarchy, it is a feminist drama. The associational clusters in the play show a false ideal of subservient black womanhood, a negative cluster describing the supposed black matriarch, and a cluster describing the truly autonomous, individual black woman seeking equality. The pattern of symbolic action is one of Tommy’s repeated assertions of her autonomy, at first unconscious and made from an assumption of inferiority. At the turning point in the play’s motivation, Tommy becomes aware of her own self-worth, and converts the society of the play to her values. Agent dominates in this drama, in which Tommy’s individual spirit transcends the false ideal of a patriarchal socio-sexual hierarchy. The play is an idealistic, optimistic statement of the feminist impulse.

Source: Janet Brown, ‘‘Wine in the Wilderness,’’ in Feminist Drama, Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1979, pp. 56–70.