Scottsboro Boys in a minstrel show

I wasn’t sure what to expect as I sat there Saturday in the Vineyard Theater in New York waiting for the “Scottsboro Boys” production to begin. A minstrel show about one of the most tragic miscarriages of justice in the great state of Alabama?

“That’s a funny story,” one of the minstrel characters said ironically as the play got started.

I didn’t put out much hope that the writers could pull this off, even though it was announced that this would be the “true” story of the saga. The Scottsboro story and minstrelsy are too dichotomous, too antithetical to work smoothly. What happened to the Scottsboro Boys was much too real to be lumped inside the tomfoolery of a minstrel show – all the trials and retrials, the hellholes that were Alabama’s prisons and being black in the South. (The photo above is the boys with National Guard troops and their New York attorney Samuel Leibowitz, from Wikipedia.)

I don’ t think any black writers would have put the two together. I know that I wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

This production was definitely not an auction find, but it had history behind it. The Scottsboro Boys were nine young black men – the youngest 13, the oldest 19 – who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train from Chattanooga to Memphis in 1931. Four of the boys knew each other: Haywood Patterson, brothers Andy and Roy Wright, and Eugene Williams. They were headed to Memphis looking for work. The others had never met before: Olen Montgomery, Clarence Norris, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson and Charlie Weems.

The white women – Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, who have been labeled prostitutes – made up the story to keep from being arrested.

The young men were tried and convicted and retried and convicted for over a decade as the citizen-juries of Alabama could not fathom that they did not rape the women. Several of the youngest were eventually freed in a deal after having been in jail about a half-dozen years. They went on to live lives greatly diminished by the ordeal. One committed suicide. Patterson, the last and most defiant of them, escaped in 1948. None of them was ever acquitted of the crime, even though Bates acknowledged during one of the retrials that the rape never happened.

That was serious. Now imagine it as a minstrel show:

Minstrel shows were meant to mock and degrade black people (even though this one Saturday cast the tomfoolery on the white characters). The shows were performed by white people in blackface, and showed blacks as stupid, ignorant, poor and lazy – all the stereotypes. They began in the 1830s, according to Wikipedia, and stayed around well into the latter part of the century and into the 1930s and beyond. Black actors later performed in blackface.

The juxtaposition of the two seemed to butt heads throughout the performance. The play portrayed the young men as real people and the whites as buffoons. But my aversion to minstrel shows kept bubbling to the surface; minstrelsy is minstrelsy regardless of who plays the fool.

The serious scenes – the quiet jail scenes, the interaction between the young men, Patterson’s solo acts – were often interrupted with over-the-top caricatures of the white sheriff, deputy, jailers and lawyers. Veteran white actor John Cullen, however, was given roles as the dignified but diehard character who was clueless about his native South.

And there were scenes I found totally inappropriate (and unnecessary). In one, it was a silhouette of a lynching with the jerking accompanying the loss of life by hanging. In another, it was a song about Jews and their money (I found later in my research that the Alabama attorney general in one of the retrials told the jury that the young men were being represented with “Jew money”).

With a play set in the 1930s, there were some props that I’d come across at auction: A magic light bulb and harmonica (was it a Hohner?). The light bulb was in a nightmare scene in which one of the younger boys imagined being electrocuted (that spectre actually hung over the boys’ heads for all the years they were in prison). One of the boys played the harmonica when the Cullen character told them to sing an old song about the good life of living in Alabama. The boys changed the lyrics to include the “truth” of life for black people in the state (lynchings, cross-burnings).

Near the end of the minstrel show, the nine actors took to the stage in black face but made a last stand against the show’s owner: They defiantly wiped off the makeup, turning the concept of minstrelsy on its head.

The play, which apparently is quite popular, has been extended until April 18 at the Vineyard. Saturday’s performance got a standing ovation. The photo below is from the Vineyard website.