'The Black Star Line': the de-mystification of Marcus Garvey.

Harrison, Paul Carter

In the American heartland, Chicago's esteemed Goodman Theater has mounted on its stage The Black Star Line, a play by Charles Smith which offers an overstuffed, untutored view of Marcus Garvey's Back-to-Africa Movement in the 1920s. It is, at best, a pedestrian piece of dramatic execution, an episodic series of scenes driven by a much-too-wordy text that takes itself more seriously than the subject, arbitrarily manipulating facts to reconstruct African American history into a disingenuous docu-drama that never achieves dramatic cohesion. Thus it implodes, rather than explodes, with new revelations to validate its pretense of representing an enlightened point of view. Were it not for Garvey's significance to black struggle in America, the play could easily be dismissed, avoiding the risk of too much protestation that might dignify the work and bring, perhaps, unworthy attention to an undistinguished and totally uninspired narrative.

Marcus Garvey's messianic mission to create a homeland for the 400 million black people in Africa was a monumental challenge to the European colonialization of Africa and the oppression of blacks in a racist social system of American apartheid. The strength and unwavering audacity of his uncompromising opposition to white supremacy was viewed by most whites in America as a threat to white privilege, and caused alarm among assimilationist blacks, who viewed the separatist movement as an obstruction of their efforts to achieve a new social order through integration. Responding to pressure from France and England, the United States government unleashed J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to pursue means--any means necessary--to dismantle Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Planting seeds of conspiracy to undermine the leadership of black organizations would become an obsession for Hoover throughout his career, including his harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr., years later.

While it is generally accepted, in the spirit of artistic freedom, that an author should be allowed to have the creative license to reinterpret history from his personal point of reference, the manufacturing of lies is wholly unacceptable. It is imperative that the author aspires to raise his inquiry to at least the level of the historical event, as opposed to bringing history down to the knee-jerk level of personal experience, trivializing the collective experience of African Americans with uninformed distortions. And what could be a greater distortion of facts than to insinuate that the Garvey Movement was compromised by petty thievery within the organization, deceptively ignoring the true fact that Garvey had been left exposed to Hoover's indictment of mail fraud when he was unable to produce a boat purchased with UNIA funds solicited by mail because the ship broker, a certain Mr. Silverstein, had absconded with the $25,000 down payment. Much of what is documented in the play as fact, speciously orchestrated to give the illusion of truth, deals with issues peripheral to the higher aspirations of the Garvey Movement. Rather than identifying the nationalist issues that captured the imagination of more than 2 million African Americans who had been dues-paying members in the UNIA (not to be confused with revisiting the cliched sociology of the downtrodden Negro), the author chose to graft the petty issues of his personal concerns onto Garvey, creating a racial soap opera that assigns critical roles of influence on the demise of the movement to black preoccupation with hair-straightener pomades and skin-lightener creams.

The Black Star Line belongs to a tradition in the American theater, from minstrelsy through the plays of Eugene O'Neill, which routinely subordinates black roles to stereotypic characterizations that correspond with inferior or crudely developed sensibilities--immersed in violence, sexual aggression, and self-deprecation--that preserves for whites a comfortable sense of superiority. It is not uncommon to discover racial ambivalence among some blacks today who seek a reconciliation with white institutions by pandering to the views and social persuasion acceptable to whites. A work that portrays Garvey, the great communicator, as a fatuous, shortsighted buffoon who minces and sashays across the stage (a la Bette Davis) with an unintelligible sense of impotent self-importance sorely undermines the image of Garvey as an august African American icon, and reduces his inspired mission to the bad judgment of a near-lunatic ideologue. Certainly, a cavalier and distorted view of an Israeli icon would be considered intolerable to the survivors of the holocaust and would provoke an unconditional demand for more rigorous standards in the interpretation of Jewish history, if not otherwise vitriolic outrage. Should less be expected from the descendants of the Middle Passage who were forced into oppressive labor in this country for four hundred years?

Charles Smith is not the principal concern here. He is merely a local black dramatist willing to burlesque the black experience for the sake of winning approval and acceptance within a mainstream Chicago cultural institution. The main concern is large institutions and the large monies made available by large foundations to produce palatable representations of black experience for a subscriber-based audience which is largely white. It is a dilemma that is pervasive throughout the entire country, where large regional theaters are funded by foundations such as the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund with dollars in the millions to expand their subscriber bases beyond the traditional white patronage by developing works for what has been euphemistically called "new," audiences, usually blacks or other minorities. Most black theater companies nationally, save one or two, do not have operating budgets large enough to qualify for such large grants. Thus, the limitation of their financial resources often restricts their ability to mount large-scale expressions of authentic black experience, typified by the work of August Wilson. The alarming results, as evidenced throughout the country, are the liberties taken by large institutions in the "black spot" of their seasons--Black History Month--when they trot out onto their stages gratuitous, if not otherwise fraudulent, fabrications of black experience which are served to the "new" audience with impunity.

Often, the black community, like most audiences, finds itself transported by the allure of performance, rather than text--by style over substance. Typical of the national trend to mount plays without the slightest critical estimation of how the works reflect the realities of black audiences is the celebrated production of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation at New York's Lincoln Center Repertory. This work reveals, in spite of its gilded stylization, the transparently racist notion that blacks have a primal urge to be like whites, but when they cross the social plane of white reality, chaos and destruction ensue. Equally obtuse, though benignly offensive, was the Chicago-based Steppenwolf Company's development of Nomathemba, a musical fable concocted by German director Eric Simonson which employed the distinguished voice of ntozake shange to craft dialogue that would legitimize a misguided, romantic vision of "hope" for two young black lovers in apartheid South Africa, whose singular obstacle to survival during their city sojourn is the black community. Similarly, in Atlanta, Kenny Leon, the Alliance Theater's black artistic director, felt compelled to develop Miss Ever's Boys, a work written by a white physician, David Feldshuh, which deceitfully places the onus of forty years of government-sponsored, untreated syphilis experiments performed on black farm labors in Alabama squarely on the shoulders of a black nurse. And shielded under the protections of academic freedom and the privilege of the First Amendment is Peter Grego, a white professor whose research through the massive documentation of painful slave narratives has resulted in his spurious invention of Hating To See Sunrise, a stage adaptation that proffers to the world a point of view that life on the plantation was better, certainly more secure, than the unpredictability of independence found in freedom.

Who, then, is responsible for monitoring the validity of such misrepresentations of African American history? While Charles Smith is the messenger of a misguided denigration of Garvey, the Goodman Theater, as producer, has paternalistically nurtured, endorsed, and delivered the message to its "new" audience. It cannot elude its responsibility for cultivating an uninformed work that is indifferent to the verities of black struggle in America, serving only to alienate the "new" audience even further from traditional white patronage and, ironically, perpetuating a condition that the Lila Wallace/ Reader's Digest Fund has intended to remedy. The black experience is more than an opportunity to titillate the traditionally white patronage of large institutions with annual peeks under the scab covering the yet unhealed wounds of black oppression. So rather than arrogate the freedom of artistic choice in the process of engaging the black experience, it would seem prudent if large white theaters would solicit the counsel of black playwrights with the backbone and will to illuminate the process through their intimacy with the particularities, as opposed to the generalities, of black experience.

Clearly, as the O. J. Simpson verdict and the Million Man March revealed, while blacks and whites in America share a common history, that history is experienced differently and thus viewed from opposite psychic poles of reality. Though packaged neatly in the cosmetics of stage craft, the message of The Black Star Line rings hollow largely because the author finds himself straddling a racial chasm between blacks and whites, uncertain how to reconcile the division without offending either side. As the final scenes mercifully bring closure on the uneventful excursion, it becomes apparent that the play is not really about the character Garvey, who generates little, if any, empathy as he is ushered offstage a broken, defeated shell-of-a-man. This moment is followed by an epilogue which has two men seated next to each other on a crowded train: one black, the other white. The black has purchased a ticket without any particular destination. The white, having purchased a ticket with a specific destination, informs the black that the train is going to California. They mutually agree that, wherever the train is going in this vast land, they at least would be going there together.

In the final analysis, Garvey's monumental vision of black self-reliance had been calculatedly held hostage to the supine inquiry of Rodney King: "Can't we all just get along?" Some may view the author's attempt to bridge the great racial divide by rescuing whites from feelings of guilt about the past and present slings and arrows of outrageous fortune suffered by blacks as a noble assignation. But how can this be if the ending is achieved at the expense of disfiguring history so that Garvey's prodigious opposition to the forces of oppression is reduced to an exotic entertainment?

Paul Carter Harrison is one of the co-editors of this special issue of AAR. He is Playwright-in-Residence and Professor of Theater at Columbia College Chicago.