390
SUSAN SONTAG
Evers, and his widow and his children, and to the memory of the dead
children of Birmingham." But it is a sermon of a new type.
In
Blues for
Mister Charlie,
Broadway liberalism has been vanquished by Broadway
racism. Liberalism preached politics, that is, solutions. Racism regards
politics as superficial (and seeks some deeper level) ; it emphasizes what
is unalterable. Across a virtually impassable gulf, the new mask of "the
Negro," manly, toughened, but ever vulnerable, faces his antipode,
another new mask, "the white" (sub-genus: "the white liberal") -who
is pasty-faced, graceless, lying, sexually dull, murderous.
No one in his right mind would wish the old masks back. But this
does not make the new masks wholly convincing. And whoever accepts
them should notice that the new mask of "the Negro" has become visible
only at the price of emphasizing the fatality of racial antagonisms.
If
D. W. Griffith could call his famous white supremacist film about the
origins of the Ku Klux Klan
Birth of a NatVon,
then James Baldwin
could, with more justice to the overt political message of his
Blues for
Mister Charlie
("Mister Charlie" is Negro slang for "white man"),
have as well called his play "Death of a Nation." Baldwin's play,
which takes place in a small Southem town, opens with the death of its
brash tormented Negro jazz musician hero, Richard, and ends with the
acquittal of his white murderer, a resentful inarticulate young buck
named Lyle, and the moral collapse of the local liberal, Pamel!. There
is the same insistence on the painful ending, even more starkly presented,
in LeRoi Jones's one act play
Dutchman,
now running off-Broadway.
In
Dutchman,
a young Negro sitting on the subway reading and minding
his own business is first accosted, then elaborately teased and taunted to
the point of rage, then suddenly knifed by a twitchy young hustler;
while his body is being disposed of by the other passengers, whites,
the girl turns her attention to a new young Negro who has just boarded
the train. In the new post-liberal morality plays, it is essential that virtue
be defeated. Both
Blues for Mister Charlie
and
Dutchman
turn on a
shocking murder-even though, in the case of
Dutchman,
the murder is
simply not credible in terms of the more or less realistic action that has
gone before, and seems crude (dramatically), tacked on, willed. Only
murder releases one from the mandate to
be
moderate. It is essential,
dramatically, that the white man win. Murder justifies the author's rage,
and disarms the white audience, who have to learn what's coming
to
them.
For it is indeed an extraordinary sermon that is being preached.
Baldwin is not interested in dramatizing the incontestable fact that white
Americans have brutally mistreated Negro Americans. What is being
