A play inspired by the story of Emmett Till, I knew this would be a rough read but underestimated by just how much. For majority of the play, Baldwin had me convinced that the story wouldn’t play out the way Till’s story did but in the end, it shook me completely to realize just how indifferent the world really is.In his introduction, Baldwin tells us: The plague is race, the plague is our concept of Christianity: and this raging plague has the power to destroy every human relationship.The play opens with the death of Richard Henry, a Southern-born, African-American man, the son of Reverend Henry, who had just returned from the North with a colorful past of his own. At first, the list of characters is overwhelming but Baldwin does an excellent job of setting the characters apart fairly early on. Each character is easily established with individual personalities and despite the numerous characters, it is incredibly easy to keep track of everyone without getting lost.Parnell and Meridian were probably my favorite characters of this play. Parnell, a white journalist, is trying to be fair and just but is torn between the white and black town. He wants to believe that Lyle has not killed the black minister's son and yet, he has a history. He clearly fights more for equality then he does for justice, even though he seems to say he wants justice as it is rightly served. Justice requires reparations, equality requires letting go of centuries worth of oppression—a hard thing to ask of from any race. You cannot have equality without serving justice where it is due first. One cannot expect a black man/woman to forget the treatment of their ancestors until whites have acknowledge the centuries worth of torture, rape, murder, suppression, and absolute and utter humiliation their ancestors have caused.Meridian, a black Christian minister, is another character that is torn between his faith and the reality. By the end of the play, he sees the light which has blinded him for long. My favorite passages comes from his character: I’m a Christian. I’ve been a Christian all my life, like my Mama and Daddy before me and like their Mama and Daddy before them. Of course, if you go back far enough, you get to a point before Christ, if you see what I mean, B.C.— and at that point, I’ve been thinking, black people weren’t raised to turn the other cheek, and in the hope of heaven. No, then they didn’t have to take low. Before Christ. They walked around just as good as anybody else, and when they died, they didn’t go to heaven, they went to join their ancestors. My son’s dead, but he’s not gone to join his ancestors. He was a sinner, so he must have gone to hell— if we’re going to believe what the Bible says. Is that such an improvement, such a mighty advance over B.C.? I’ve been thinking, I’ve had to think— would I have been such a Christian if I hadn’t been born black? Maybe I had to become a Christian in order to have any dignity at all. Since I wasn’t a man in men’s eyes, then I could be a man in the eyes of God. But that didn’t protect my wife. She’s dead, too soon, we don’t really know how. That didn’t protect my son— he’s dead, we know how too well. That hasn’t changed this town— this town, where you couldn’t find a white Christian at high noon on Sunday! The eyes of God— maybe those eyes are blind— I never let myself think of that before.Brilliant and the most potent description of African-American Christianity I have ever read. Christianity has always attempted to be the “savior” of people but it has brought more misery to the black population of America than anything else. It is also clear to establish that these are words from Baldwin’s own mouth.Over fifty years later and not a damn thing has changed (look up Tamir Rice or Michael Brown or numerous other cases if you somehow live in a hole and have no idea what I’m talking about).I am still not sure of the connections between Juanita and Parnell, Juanita and Meridian, Juanita and Richard, and Juanita and Pete. It seems like Baldwin wanted to do something important with Juanita’s character but he might have been confused as to what. But still, overall, this was an intense and thoroughly satisfying play.
It's been a very long time since I've read a play - despite my interest in many forms of storytelling, my familiarity with the format is pretty minimal beyond the high school standards. But in reading a good steady diet of James Baldwin since about March of this year, I inevitably had to cross into his playwriting.This is a fine play, and I would love to see a production of it. My general impression of theater is a kind of over-the-top-ness - emotions getting over-emphasized, actors making too large of choices for the moment. This of course could lend to the types of plays I've seen, but the trend continues sometimes in the surrealist/thematic explorations (definitely an awesome facet of the stage as a medium), which sometimes get utilized in heavyhanded ways thanks to indications in lighting, sound and stage direction found in the script.So, I can see the first two acts being extraordinary. They jump around in time, in ways that would seem to demand a lot of certain actors, playing themselves both before, in flashbacks, and after a traumatic act of racist violence. they feature some excellent characterization through dialogue and monologue, and while occasionally a little mouthpiece-y, they have a nice flow to them and occasional spinnings off into poetic imagery. The end of the third act returns to this in top form. It is the courtroom sequence, occupying most of the third act, that seems to fall prey to this heavy-handed use of symbolism in the stage setup and flow of the spoken text. The assortment ranges from actual courtroom proceedings, flashbacks in questionings, commentaries from black and white townspeople, and random other surrealist interjections to break up the pace of this segment. It's an interesting bit to contemplate, anyhow, and is an ambitious way of presenting the climactic segment of the narrative.Moving onto his poetry next.
What do You think about Blues For Mister Charlie (1995)?
First published and produced in 1964, this is James Baldwin's second play. It takes place in a rural town in the American South, where a young black student, Richard, has been murdered. The story focuses on Richard, his friends and family in the town's black community, as well as the white community, including the murder suspect, a young shop owner named Lyle. One of the more interesting characters is Parnell, a white journalist who acts as sort of a bridge between the two communities, with friends on both sides. He is more progressive than the other white townspeople and speaks out against their racism, while at the same time sympathizing with the black struggle for equality and attempting to bring about justice.Written at the height of the Civil Rights movement, this must have been an incendiary play when it came out. However, I believe many of the issues are still relevant and important. Although the South has come a long way, living here you can't look around without being confronted with the racial question and a general notion of white supremacy is still all too prevalent. The play deals very well with a heavy and complicated topic, one on which Baldwin could speak with authority. He holds an unflinching microscope up to the human condition but ultimately inspires hope.
—Darren Willis
Like most of Baldwin's work I find his anti-intolerance stance admirable. The book did not catch my attention either as a play or a statement. Unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, which felt a bit more universal, this book doesn't escape the world it was set in.I can respect the historical significance of this book, but to a twenty-first century whippersnapper for whom racial coexistance is not an opption but implied in existence, the issues it deals with are disrespectfully and --yes, naively-- discarded as an anachronism in my experienced world. Even when forced to admit its acceptance, the nature of racism has changed such this book may not shine enough light on the issues we today grapple.
—Gaelan D'costa
Anyone who has lived in a small town has met characters similar to those in this book: People you can talk to for days and yet find yourself still repeating the same points because they refuse to meet you halfway, instead opting to defend their worldview not through superior reasoning, but simply by writing off what you are saying. People familiar with this kind of person will also note that in Blues for Mister Charlie James Baldwin manages to perfectly capture the voice of these people, a remarkable feat that ultimately does more harm to the story than good.Fiction can be used to study complex issues, including racism and sex, but at some point one will have to write an engaging story otherwise the reader will begin to question why the fictional elements are present when the author could just as easily have written a nonfiction book to analyze his desired topics, and perhaps have delved deeper into the themes that way.Blues for Mister Charlie is an intelligent book. It examines its themes well and offers a few interesting insights-though as one reviewer pointed out racism has changed its image since James Baldwin's time, making the book less useful for understanding racism in the modern day-but it's not a very engaging book. Many of the central characters are so fundamentally ignorant, resistant to change, and totally incapable of introspection that it was hard to become invested in the story. The only character that develops to any significant extent ended up being shown as no different from the white supremacist and ignorant townspeople. This was a deliberate choice by the author, and he pulled it off well, but I don't know if writing a story where exacerbation and improvement are both equally impossible is good from a dramatic perspective. I wish the book had been an essay rather than a play, in part because I enjoyed Baldwin's introduction more than the rest of the story. Though he could have kept the third act's trial structure intact and I wouldn't have complained.
—Harold Smithson (Suicide punishable by Death)
