You don’t have to go to Haiti to find simmering and sometimes explosive hatred between those light-skinned and those dark. That’s the central concern of Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman, which is getting a powerful presentation at the Providence Black Repertory Company (through March 12).
The two-person play was a 2002 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, that annual search for deeply American problems that have been best delved into on the stage. The irony of racism within the group in this country that has been most devastatingly afflicted by racism is a core problem if there ever was one. The harm done by the brown paper bag test for inclusion in some New Orleans Creole social clubs (place one against the skin —lighter or darker?) represents long-term damage to black culture as a whole.
But for the most part Ms. Orlandersmith is not dealing with consequences to the middle class. The initial setting is rural South Carolina, where we witness the birth of race consciousness of Eugene (Aaron Andrade) and Alma (Tamara Anderson) and follow them up to and past the point where they become lovers.
Their getting together, even as children, is a problem because he is light-skinned and she is dark. When they first meet in school, she is seven and he is nine. They like each other right away, like kids do. But what works against their being friends is more than his living in town and her living on the outskirts, on a farm where she has to slop hogs every morning. Gene makes a schoolyard friend named Weiss, who picks him out because his skin is also light. In the weakest characterization of the play, Weiss is as heavy-handed a racist as any redneck, disliking blue-black blacks with a defensive animosity.
When Gene tells us about his father, from the perspective of a boy, he admires him as being “big, dark, handsome.” The respect wasn’t mutual, we immediately learn, as the Bourbon-swilling man slips into the Gullah patois of his Georgia Sea Island upbringing — unfortunately not reproduced by Andrade — and rails at him for being “high yeller.” (Andrade and Anderson portray all the characters. The playwright has Eugene and Alma speak about rather than to each other even in love scenes, which adds the literary effect of internal monologue to theatrical vividness.)
As for Alma’s training at her mother’s knee, she has a model of self-hatred and passivity. Big black women like her mother dislike themselves, she observes, so they feel they are taking up too much space in the world and deserve any abuse men might deliver. Alma can’t help but see herself as “big, poor, ugly, and dark.” Her only relief is that she wasn’t born even blacker.
We follow these two through adolescence and teen years, with the playwright not neglecting the comic opportunities of those traumatic times. (“A training bra? What am I training for?”) They are growing up in the 1960s, when dramatic progress was being made in civil rights, but the problems they are most aware of are personal rather than civic. Eugene’s first sex is with a pretty girl of his own skin shade, provided by Weiss, but he breaks things off and rushes home to call Alma and tell her his regret. When Alma gets a full scholarship to Hunter College and moves to Manhattan, we are hardly surprised that he ends up making monthly train trips from South Carolina to see her.
