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chapter six The Pimp and Coward Offering Gendered Revisions Lynching plays by African American women preserve a remarkable diversity of opinion, but considering black men’s contributions to this unique genre reveals additional variety. Black men began writing lynching plays in 1925,1 several years after Angelina Weld Grimké initiated the genre, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mary Burrill began revising it.2 Lynching drama therefore contradicts the expectation that men establish literary traditions and women revise them. Often, modern readers assume that genres expand when women offer “gendered critiques” of the silences in men’s texts, and this understanding often involves a hierarchical view in which authors who address perceived silences occupy a lower position. Earlier writers are treated as “artists” while successors are often interpreted as “activists” whose artistry may go unnoticed. Rather than assume that lynching drama reverses expected patterns, I question the logic of hierarchical approaches, guided by an appreciation for how thoroughly African American literature bears the imprint of the vernacular. In the black vernacular tradition, when a preacher’s sermon launches into rhythmic excitement, it cannot continue without the congregation’s enthusiastic amens.The group’s response proves to be as important as the preacher’s call.3 Black literary revision works the same way, so its traditions take shape through dynamic interaction that troubles the tendency to speak of“leaders” and “followers” or “major” and “minor” voices. Therefore, though black men’s lynching dramas emerged later, their contributions are not secondary. Instead, they illuminate the genre’s reliance on intertextuality—the concept that Henry Louis Gates highlighted with his theory of“signifying,”and that Patricia Liggins Hill usefully re-figured as“call and response.”Acknowledging intertextuality demands considering the possibility that revisions are not supplementary but complementary. We are driven to ask: Must revisions inspired by differing gender identifications be reactionary and therefore secondary? Might revision be a mark of relationship, an egalitarian acknowledgement of linked destiny? Ultimately, men’s lynching dramas confirm the intensity of the turn-ofthe -century community conversation. Male dramatists joined women authors in recording existing discussions about identity and citizenship. In the process, black men’s scripts offer figures that are strikingly different from those featured in women’s plays: the pimp and coward. Especially when compared to the male characters in women’s plays, the pimp and coward may not inspire admiration, yet they spring from much the same impulse that yielded the black soldier, lawyer, and mother/wife.When depicted in their own homes, all of these figures encourage discussions about conceptions of black identity and citizenship, but plays with less traditionally admirable figures also illuminate how differing gender identifications fueled the intertextuality through which this genre developed. As we have seen, in women’s plays, telling the story of those who survive the mob’s attack often means recording the testimony of everyone but the man of the house. Women’s plays typically feature homes from which male adults are missing.Also, because they account only for honorable heads of household, women’s plays suggest that the strength and stability of black homes can be compromised only if men are taken from them. In contrast, lynching plays written by black men present homes that seem to be “castrated” even when male family members survive. In short, black male playwrights altered lynching drama as much as the women who turned away from Grimké’s example of creating genteel black characters for integrated audiences. This chapter examines the two earliest plays by black men that use the home as setting: G. D. Lipscomb’s Frances (1925) and Joseph Mitchell’s Son-Boy (1928). By examining scripts that share women’s concern with domesticity, one can better identify those elements that men revised.4 These scripts place as much emphasis on the black home as women’s plays do, but in Frances, the head of household is a pimp; in Son-Boy, he is a shameless coward. The emergence of these figures registers the community’s understanding that lynching is master/piece theater designed to make white men into masters, even after Emancipation. The scripts suggest that, even without killing every black man, whites solidify their social position; especially because photographs continue the work, the mob’s violent performances need not physically alter the composition of all black households to have the intended effect. The threat of the mob can make some black men lose all desire to become head of household. 176 developing a genre, asserting black...

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