Blind the Slaves, for them not to read

LORRAINE HANSBERRY — THE DRINKING GOURD — 1960

This play was commissioned for the centenary of the Civil War, hence in 1959, and was produced for television in 1960. It deals with a plantation situation in 1859 just before the beginning of the Civil War. We are in the South, in one of the colonies that are going to build the Confederacy. We are in a big plantation and the two sides are represented. On the one side the family of the planter, the Sweets, are absolutely not sweet at all except if compared to the extreme lynching type for whom the selected black man, woman, or child, is sliced up starting with the toes and heading with the head, provided the black individual, who is nothing but a howling animal, is still alive. But a son of this family is definitely sweet in that direction, as soon as he has the power to manage a black man as a piece of living meat. On the other side, the slaves centered on the “family” of Rissa and her children, since the husband, if we can say so, if they were married, which I doubt, was sold away some time ago. Rissa, the cook of the plantation, has her children around her, one being central, Hannibal, and various slaves, among others Coffin who is the main black driver of the slaves. On the white side, an exterior poor white family is added, essential through the husband, Zeb Dudley, who becomes the overseer of the plantation under the secessionist management of the planter’s son.

And that’s where the play sounds strange.

It is not strange that the other son of the planter, Tommy who is very young, accepts to learn some music from one of Rissa’s sons, Hannibal, in exchange for teaching some reading and writing to Hannibal himself. The music side of the exchange is not illegal per se, though too paternalistic to be accepted easily in a plantation of this sort, but the father of the plantation family is slightly weak in his religious conviction that slaves are not human, and this explains that. Luckily, the main son, Everett, compensates for this weakness with extreme viciousness. In the end, to punish Hannibal who learned how to read and write, and no flogging can change this, this Everett decides to have Hannibal blinded in both eyes. This is absurd since then the slave cannot work and cannot be sold. It is pure mismanagement of the chattel…