4 - Drama in the Harlem Renaissance

Summary

Drama in the Harlem Renaissance begins with Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1916). As an expression of the impact of lynching on women and families, the play considers the implications of the ghastly practice in terms of black female reproductivity. At the end of the first act, the eponymous protagonist learns that her father and half brother were lynched. She questions her mother about the current state of black people in the South and declares:

Then, everywhere, everywhere, throughout the South, there were hundreds of dark mothers who live in fear, terrible, suffocating fear, whose rest by night is broken, and whose joy by day in their babies on their hearts is three parts—pain. Oh, I know this is true—for this is the way I should feel, if I were little Jimmy’s mother. How horrible! Why—it would be more merciful—to strangle the little things at birth. And so this nation—this white Christian nation—has deliberately set its curse upon the most beautiful—the most holy thing in life—motherhood! Why—it—makes—you doubt—God.”

Rachel’s declaration comingles a belated response to learning that a lynch mob murdered her father and her desperate acknowledgement that there will be no redress, legal, social, or communal, for the traumatic experiences that her adopted son Jimmy suffers when taunted on his way home from school by a group of boys shouting racial slurs and throwing rocks. The melodramatic tone counterbalances the excessive violence used to police black people and calls attention to how blackness functions as a stigma in the first decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the play, based on her familial history of racially motivated violence, Rachel vows not to have children. While a radical stance, Rachel demonstrates a black female character’s attempt to mediate the racial trauma and violence endemic to her world. This chapter offers an overview of significant writers of the Harlem Renaissance by closely reading their plays with the aim of spotlighting how their themes are consonant with New Negro and Harlem Renaissance ideologies.