When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories

A Rambling Response to the Play Marie Christine

© Donn Young 183 A Rambling Response to the Play Marie Christine Kalamu ya Salaam The following essay was commissioned by the Lincoln Center to appear in their theatre program guide for Marie Christine: A New Musical, words and music by Michael John LaChiusa, starring Audra McDonald and Anthony Crivello, at Lincoln Center, NYC, December 1999–January 2000. The essay did not appear. I Here is my initial reaction: It is difficult, if not impossible, for me to respond to this play, mainly because I am not interested in responding to racist fantasy. Of course, that statement raises the question: What do I mean by “racist”? 184 K a l a m u ya S a l a a m From my perspective, this is a play repeating and reinforcing the notion “it’s in the blood” and the white supremacist thesis that there is a major bio/psychological species difference between black and white. This is a play that ignores history to present fantasy. It is a play that offers decontextualized research masquerading as historical fact. It is a play glorifying the white male penis and its desire for the “color struck” mulatto female vagina. It is a play about the “tragic mulatto,” a figure who was, historically, created in the main by white male rape and extralegal liaisons. It is a play about fantasy and sublimated desire, a dangerously well-crafted artwork that is attractive in its production values but repulsive in its meaning. It is ultimately a play about celebrating racist patriarchal power relationships, rather than human relationships. I could go point by point through the play—the assumptions, the mixing of time periods, the ignoring of historical accuracy—but to argue at length only dignifies an object that does not deserve serious scrutiny. Towards art for life, Kalamu ya Salaam n The above response is pretty standard political rhetoric—standard in that, like all political rhetoric, what I say is absolute rather than relative , abstract rather than concrete, and, ultimately, addresses what I “think” while avoiding how I feel. But I decided not to stop with a rigid position. I decided to enter into conversation with myself, to engage, at an emotional level, an issue which is difficult to grasp. I have decided to talk a bit about this: “As a heterosexual black man, what is my relationship to black women and to white women?” and see where that takes me. But first, a definition. Mulatto can specifically mean the child of biracial parents (one of whom is black and one of whom is white), or mulatto can generally mean anyone of a mixed racial (again, the emphasis is on black and white) background. I use mulatto in the general sense. Mulatto also connotes a person who appears to be closer to “pure” white than to “pure” black. Moreover, in the United States, mulatto is A R a m b l i n g R e s p o n s e t o t h e P l ay M a r i e . . . 185 not about whites mixing with other ethnicities, e.g. Native American or Asian. In the final analysis, when we say mulatto, we are talking about a white-determined American preoccupation with the intersection of race and sexual desire. Once, when I was in my twenties, an elder woman said to me, “I don’t know why a man would need to go outside our race to find a woman because we have any kind of woman he might want among us.” We were in New Orleans, passing a bus stop. The physical variety of skin tones, body types, hair textures, even eye colors among “black” women in the Crescent City requires a computer monitor that can display at least 256 colors to even come close to representing it. (I know somebody is about to ask, “But if she has blond hair and blue eyes, how can she be black?” Well, you see, blackness is color, culture, and consciousness; in very important ways, blackness is not simply nor solely a biological absolute but is also and more importantly a collective experience as well as a personal choice.) My first wife was reared as what some would call a “Creole” because of her light skin and the Catholic/French-speaking heritage of her family. We had five children whose skin tones range from cinnamon to nutmeg, all of them with thick...