BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE: BOOK REVIEW

There is no introduction to James Baldwin that could encapsulate the genius and brilliance of this man who redefined twentieth-century literature and fundamentally altered the perception of what it means to be Black in the United States. Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin’s third play and the first to make it to Broadway, is dedicated to the memory of Medgar Evers, an American civil rights activist assassinated in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, and was created “to the memory of the dead children of Birmingham.” It is largely however recognized as an allegory to the murder of Emmett Till.

Mister Charlie is a Black-colloquialism for a white man. The play follows the young Black son Richard Henry of the minister, who visits his family and is subsequently murdered for an alleged flirtation with the wife of white store-owner Lyle Britten, with whom the play begins. Beginning at a constructed precipice, the boy’s murder is narrated thusly, “Richard, when he falls, falls out of sight of the audience, like a stone, into the pit. In the darkness we hear a shot.” The stage is built atop the very pit into which Richard falls.

In reading this play, it feels inevitable not to read the country Baldwin allegories through his own bulging, outstretched eyes, where horror and inhumanity are not merely underbellies of existence, but actually compose the atmosphere of the American South and perhaps also the entirety of white consciousness.

Baldwin opens with the following stage direction: “Multiple set, the skeleton of which, in the first two acts, is the Negro church, and, in the third act, the courthouse. The church and the courthouse are on opposite sides of a southern street; the audience should always be aware, during the first two acts, of the dome of the courthouse and the American flag. During the final act, the audience should always be aware of the steeple of the church, and the cross.”

Blues is carefully divided into scenes of “whitetown” and “blacktown” both in the text and in its production at the ANTA Theatre. The only member who escapes this divide is the highly complicated character of white newspaper editor Parnell James, who becomes an axal point through which the play nuances the ethical possibility of white Americans in this racial hell from which they profit. The setup alone is indicative of what is to come and the momentous thought which drew Baldwin back to American theatre—a country rife with uneven dichotomy, messages of alienation and preference embedded into national identity. It is an essential read, which screams in its resonance the final question Richard poses to Lyle, which doubles as one of Richard’s last breaths. Why have you spent so much time trying to kill me?