by Jewelle Gomez
(Written in collaboration with Harry Waters Jr. Commissioned and Produced by New Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco)
*August Strindberg wrote that in a dream play the “imagination spins and weaves new patterns, a blending of memories, experiences, free inventions absurdities and improvisations.”
The play takes place in 1956 in the mind of the writer as the Civil Rights Movement ignites.
Dramatis Personae: African American writer JIMMY, who struggles with whether or not to publish his new novel after being told the white homosexual characters at its center might ruin his career. JIMMY’s friends LORRAINE and RICHARD, also Black writers; DAVID, his brother; WILLIAM, his white literary agent; LUC, his white, French lover, whose existence fuels the gossip against the book; and GIOVANNI, white, European, a character in the novel in question. Below are excerpts.
ACT I Scene 2
(LIGHTS UP. Jazz music is heard as guests, with cocktail glasses in hand, enjoy debating literature raucously. Giovanni moves around the edge of the action carefully, ghostly, as if looking for someone but, as always, is unseen by any except JIMMY.)
JIMMY
(With cocktail glass, tipsy.)
When I was a boy, my father dismissed all literature as damnation. (Laughing)
LORRAINE
Preach, Jimmy!
JIMMY
However, I’m not ready to go quite that far. I understand what you’re saying about Mailer, but honestly can we expect…“honestly” from such a masculine poseur?
(David, his brother, enters with decanter and more glasses, refreshing people’s drinks.)
DAVID
Jimmy, did you read Richard’s new…?
JIMMY
Baby, of course! What do I have to do with myself, but read the work of other novelists while I piddle away my talent explaining the plight of the Negro race for the benefit of the white race.
LORRAINE
Richard has that male anger refrain down pat—who needs us? (Laughter)
JIMMY
(Shrugs)
Richard is…quite verily brilliant.
WILLIAM
Where have you seen such darkness, such rage? Ever?
JIMMY
In my house…on the final Thursday of every month when my father got home with
empty pockets.
(All laugh, except JIMMY.)
LORRAINE
Some Negroes have only gall running through us. Does that make us heroes or objects of pity?
JIMMY
I guess Richard is pitiable all the way to the bank. (All laugh. RICHARD enters.) Ah…comrade Richard! (They embrace warmly.) We were just extolling your virtues.
RICHARD
I need it. The critics are like rocks in my shoe.
LORRAINE
Sugar, you know white people don’t know what to do if we get angry.
DAVID
Except call out the sheriff and his dogs.
JIMMY
Don’t worry about critics, Richard. From the first time we talked, I knew you would do it!
WILLIAM
Your book will change the world.
RICHARD
You think that’s possible…a book changing the world?
DAVID
Sure! Look at the Bible!
JIMMY
First the Bible, then you, Richard. I’d better get busy don’t you think, Sweet Lorraine?
LORRAINE
Don’t stress. You’re always busy with some magazine piece or another.
JIMMY
I’m working my way toward something else right now.
RICHARD
I am all ears.
DAVID
Do we have to beg?
JIMMY
This isn’t something for cocktail conversation…yet.
RICHARD
Jimmy’s right…don’t push. The fermentation needs to be tended. Speaking of fermentation….
(RICHARD turns to DAVID for a drink. Cast freezes, except for Giovanni who remains attentive.)
JIMMY
Not drinking tonight, William?
WILLIAM
Can we talk for a minute? (They move downstage.) James, I’m not worried…I know what you’ve got in you. But upstairs, they think maybe the emperor will end up as he often
does—naked. They don’t like naked.
JIMMY
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a nude publishing mogul.
WILLIAM
Not him, James, you.
JIMMY
Ah…the rustle of insecurity. Perhaps the anointed one is simply a clever sinner, not a saint?
WILLIAM
(Laughing carefully.)
Don’t start tossing around literary frippery!
JIMMY
William, I promise I shan’t be much longer with the manuscript. And I won’t be naked.
WILLIAM
This is awkward, but may I be candid with you James?
JIMMY
I always count on you for that.
WILLIAM
They’re nervous about the book. (JIMMY is silent.) The writing is splendid, you know
that! It’s…
JIMMY
Nervous?
WILLIAM
They’re wary of the topic.
JIMMY
Love?
WILLIAM
(Lowers his voice.) Homosexuals.
JIMMY
Homosexuals are not the “topic” of the novel. That’s the psycho-social-emotional identity of my character. Love is the topic!
WILLIAM
I understand. But they have to think about sales, censors…they don’t want a “Well of Loneliness” battle on their hands.
JIMMY
As I recall, that book is still in print.
WILLIAM
That’s not the point.
JIMMY
So, what exactly do they think should be my topic? Huddled masses? Civil war?
WILLIAM
Hyperbole won’t settle anything, James.
JIMMY
Domestic disturbances?
WILLIAM
I realize they tend to reduce things to the simplest shade in their box of crayons.
JIMMY
(Angry) Perhaps a tear-stained memoir about my domineering father?!
WILLIAM
You might…
JIMMY
(Interrupts) The gawddamn question is, what is my topic?
WILLIAM
If we can just give them more to look at…then we’ll see.
(JIMMY pauses, uncertain before deciding how to respond.)
JIMMY
I’ll have something to give them before you blow the subway dust off your suit tonight, my friend.
(Music up and cast springs to life.)
WILLIAM
I don’t see how you can do any work at all with the schedule you keep. When the hell do
you have time to write?
JIMMY
I’m writing William. Right now!
ACT I Scene 4
JIMMY sits at small table, throws the carriage of the typewriter with flair, reads, rips the page out, balls it up and drops it to the floor, unsettled. He adds another sheet of paper, starts typing again tentatively.
The lights come up on GIOVANNI, an innocent, not yet fully formed character in the author’s mind. JIMMY types a bit then reads and edits throughout the scene. These words are meant to be in his novel; a book JIMMY is coming to doubt publishing.
JIMMY
(Tentative, creating.) Everything we need is just here within our reach.
GIOVANNI
Your words…they caress. (Becoming more assured.) They move me.
(JIMMY types but doesn’t respond.)
GIOVANNI
Why are you disturbed? Will you tell me?
JIMMY
Sometimes, our wounds are…are…are too deep.
GIOVANNI
Between us, there should be no secrets.
JIMMY
Between us…I imagine many things.
GIOVANNI
Love is what we imagine most, isn’t it? (Naïve) Why?
JIMMY
There is much you don’t understand.
GIOVANNI
There is much you don’t want to talk about. Je comprend ça.
JIMMY
There is no time to explain.
GIOVANNI
When I hold you, I have time in my arms…all there is in the world.
JIMMY
We’re not the only ones to be considered here.
GIOVANNI
What’s the anger I feel? It rolls off of your skin like a storm we can’t escape.
JIMMY
Anger, yes. And fear. (He types as if he’s just thought of it.) Twin snakes!
GIOVANNI
You mustn’t let them into the room with us.
JIMMY
They are not something we can keep outside on the stoop.
GIOVANNI
Have we no agency in our own lives?
JIMMY
(As if finally recognizing GIOVANNI is there with him.)
The world is bigger than this room and that world is on fire.
GIOVANNI
I know there is danger…
JIMMY
(Impatient) What do you know?!
GIOVANNI
Please don’t speak to me as if I’m a slow child and you are my father!
(JIMMY rips page from the typewriter balls it up. Lights down on GIOVANNI. )
ACT II Scene 3
(JIMMY on stage among the scattered pages he has thrown about in fury with himself as well as sorrow at letting go of the book. Giovanni clutches several of the pages to his chest.)
JIMMY
Of these matters, one critic said, I write with unusual candor. “Of these matters”…what way is that to talk about love…desire? I suppose it’s no surprise that some can’t talk of these matters at all. Somewhere in the muck and mire, before we rose up to stand on our hind legs desire devolved from a bright rose capable of lighting the dense night and became a pus-filled wound to be hidden behind drapes drawn tight.
Desire is a mystery. Bright and dark; damp, slippery, and aridly hot.
When I look at Luc, I see it all. In my hands, he feels like a pulsing sun. His life moves through me like photosynthesis; a complex chemical reaction that sharpens my soul, brings me into focus. Then he’s sweet butter, soft and intimate, making me want to slather him on crusty bread. I suppose that makes me a baguette.
However, I am not fooled by his softness. His body leans in, but he does not. The gossip about his past affairs is no secret on either continent. And he does not successfully act the faithful courtier. But the bond between us is electric and does travel in both directions.
I am puzzled at why my brothers insist on their right to stifle this uncountable treasure. I can’t be sure if it’s simply that they must protest in that Shakespearean way—“too much.” Or have their senses been perverted by the way their manhood was brutalized: Slavery, Jim Crow, night-shift jobs. But haven’t I, too, been beside them?
Apparently not! I must have missed those centuries and arrived, a fully formed flower of desire, disconnected from their struggle, from my manhood…if they are to be believed!
I have been too afraid to write of these matters but I did. I needed to write it. But…publication? What should I care if it ever sees the light of day?
Whether Richard or the New York Times approve or not, the beautiful men I drink with in bars and cafés will always be there. I need them. And I need Luc more than I need that gawdammed novel. (He beseeches GIOVANNI.) Don’t I?
(JIMMY returns to his desk. GIOVANNI clasps the pages and appears to cry as lights fade to black.)
LORRAINE
( ENTERS SR singing, carrying a pen and envelop. At SL, JIMMY, at his desk, silently reads her letter.)
“Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.”
Dear Jimmy, I keep hearing that song in my head. It might seem somewhat incongruous with what we were discussing in our last letter, but believe me, to a woman, nothing is incongruous. You and I sang that song quite a bit, Jimmy. We all used to sing then. As if the singing might wipe the fear and bitterness off people’s faces.
But there you are. Three centuries of hatred need a little more than a four-minute melody. Jimmy, you are on the road so much! I missed singing with you at the memorial…the anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder. Most of the Negroes…the Black people…in the little storefront were so choked with sorrow, Jimmy, they couldn’t get the words out. I was choked with irony.
How closely tied are sex and Blackness in this country? A boy, no more than fifteen years old, beaten mercilessly and killed—by grown white men—because he’s perceived to be a threat to white womanhood.
The vitriol that killed Emmett Till is not too far from what they feel when they look at me. Or at you and Luc. That is why you must write your book! Then if you and Luc can just avoid the barbed wire….
It is 1956, for Gawd sake! How can I or you or Richard write a word and hope it will have a single shred of meaning? It’s as if our dark skin is a symbol of rampaging desire roaring in their ears!
Whatever words Emmett Till may or may not have said to that white girl—that store clerk in Money, Mississippi—are irrelevant. Emmett Till had no voice at all. His skin did all the talking.
ACT II Scene 6
(JIMMY looks around as if not sure where he is. LUC enters.)
LUC
You are all right?
JIMMY
(Nods)
Mmmm.
LUC
Jimmy, I am sorry to be so…resistant when you have much in your mind. We shall face these things together, non? I know these Americans are fussy about sex. It is their obsession in which they try to seal up in the attic like a mad aunt. I know it makes you…uh…comment dit-on…you have anxietè…anxious. I don’t want to add to that. We’ll wait…
JIMMY
No more waiting. I have survived by making difficult decisions every day. I made one before I left New York. You have listened faithfully to my fevered and contradictory ravings about this book too long. So, I had to free you…free you from your anxiety by doing something definitive.
LUC
What have you done mon etoile?
JIMMY
Will you stop calling me that! I told William to put the book…on hold.
LUC
What is this “hold?”
JIMMY
He’ll delay publish…
LUC
(Interrupts)
And this is how you tell me? Please, what is wrong?
JIMMY
Many things are wrong in this world, Luc. I wouldn’t know where to begin.
LUC
You want something from me, Jimmy, but you cannot talk to me when you are making the biggest decision in your career?
JIMMY
I don’t need you to…ah, there’s that word again…need.
LUC
How can I be with you when you are either judging me or hiding things from me? I care for you more than anyone in the world.
JIMMY
You pull me in with one hand and hold me at bay with the other. I can’t ignore the feeling that I float too far from the center of your life.
LUC
We all must have air, Jimmy. Closed in a box, we die.
JIMMY
It is said…
LUC
Who is saying?
JIMMY
The Little Prince. In the book he says something to the effect that we love the desert because it hides the promise of water.
LUC
Oui?
JIMMY
This water is too elusive. I cannot drink a promise.
LUC
I refuse to promise to be someone I am not.
JIMMY
How do you know who you’re not?
LUC
I can never make up for your father’s cruelty or for those angry men who are so afraid of you. I only love you as myself…imperfect; not some mirage in the desert.
JIMMY
Don’t tell me my vision is so poor I don’t perceive the difference between love and hallucination.
LUC
You want those men back in the states to accept our love. Why will you not accept mine…as it is?
JIMMY
Because I imagined so much more.
LUC
Perhaps you just can’t imagine what is real. This is not the novel tragique. This is the life that we have. Don’t wait for someone you’ve constructed in your head!
JIMMY
You hold back, keep me in a little corner of your plate as if I’m a favorite dessert. But only dessert.
LUC
And your book? You throw it aside without fighting. How can you do that?
JIMMY
My heart wasn’t in it.
LUC
But that’s just it—your heart is in it.
JIMMY
Don’t tell me…
LUC
(Interrupts)
Writing is your heart, Jimmy! Not me, not Richard. This is how you breathe.
JIMMY
It is much too easy for you to evade the point and argue with me about a book.
LUC
It is more than a book. C’est ta vie!
JIMMY
I don’t think a book can be my life.
LUC
But neither can I, Jimmy!
JIMMY
Is there someone else?
LUC
Oui. There is myself.
JIMMY
Don’t descend into existentialism with me right now!
LUC
I have been honest at all times. But what about you? Do you think you can trade off one thing for another…your book for our life? Your claims about love ring hollow when you do not hold on to the…the…vrai…the true…thing that gives you air.
JIMMY
I’m not talking about the book; I’m talking about you and me.
LUC
But the book is part of you! Do you not think there is some damage to you and me when you throw it away?
JIMMY
You didn’t answer my question.
LUC
I cannot do this much longer, Jimmy!
JIMMY
Then maybe this is where I liberate you from your yoke!
LUC
I have loved you in my best way.
JIMMY
It seems our planets exist in galaxies much too distant.
LUC
Oh, my little star…
JIMMY
You do realize that by the time we see the light of a star it has been dead for millions of years?!
(Lights down. LUC disappears.)
***
ACT II Scene 10
(JIMMY picks up pages of his novel he’s thrown to the floor.)
JIMMY
It is true that, like air, what is most important to us can be completely invisible. The Little Prince hears this more than once in the desert about friendship, imagination, and certainly of love. But other invisible things are lurking too: shame, betrayal, fear. They can all be equally compelling.
In fact, to some, fear and anger have the most magnetic appeal—the gravity pull of a small planette. How do I prevent becoming either the victim…or the instrument of these gravities? I’m anchored in the words of those who surround me…and their dreams—both found and lost.
The city of my father, Harlem, was a cornucopia of dreams. But, inevitably, as with fruit stacked in a bowl: we who are settled near the bottom—away from the air and light—
begin to decay quickly…as he did. Every day, I heard his shame in my head channeled through the demands of others.
My father’s certainty that he was the holder of all truth made him bitter. And bitterness stunts and scalds. It withers any attempts at new growth.
Even now, some, like my father, expect that closing their eyes to what is alive before them will make the vision of blackness clearer. The sweep of eyelashes as they lower their lids is barbed wire raw on my skin. Still, I can do no more than bind my own wounds and insist I am neither silent nor invisible.
In church, on the television news, I watch Black children holding hands, marching, smiling as if the world will embrace them. And I know it will explode in their faces. The villagers are waiting to ignite a bonfire beneath their feet, too.
This story is one I…need…to tell and he is the one I wish to tell it. (Lights up on GIOVANNI.) Unknown. Loving with the certainty of the tides. In truth, I could never throw love away. My love, my needs, my questions are my own to be examined by me…read by many. But judgment? Well, everyone’s a critic.
(JIMMY and GIOVANNI take deep breaths in and exhale together.)
JIMMY and GIOVANNI
(Together, happy.) C’est vrai.
JIMMY
In the beginning was the word…words made from the breath of life. It is the same breath whether we are singing a praise song or taking in the scent of our beloved who lies naked beside us. This breath is why they burn books. And why I must write them.
Each book is my way of wringing life from death.
No matter how hot the fire burns at our feet. No matter how loud the sound of those who turn away—I am always me…inside here, looking out. Bearing witness. Preaching the word.
(Lights on only JIMMY and GIOVANNI as JIMMY sits at the typewriter. He picks up pencil from beside typewriter, sticks it behind his ear. He begins to type steadily. Then lights out on GIOVANNI who looks more solid than at the open. JIMMY types joyously.)
(Lights to black. End of play.)
Jewelle Gomez (Cabo Verdean/Wampanoag/Ioway; she/her). Her eight books include the first Black Lesbian vampire novel, THE GILDA STORIES, in print for more than 30 years. Her newest collection of poetry is “Still Water” (2022).
Her work has appeared in: “Red Indian Road West,” “Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora,” and “Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler.”
Her plays, “Waiting for Giovanni” about James Baldwin and “Leaving the Blues” about Alberta Hunter, were produced in San Francisco and in New York City. Her newest, “Unpacking in Ptown,” premieres in 2023. TWITTER & Instagram: @VampyreVamp