"YOU ARE TAXED TO SHOW THEM AS YOU ARE" ALICE CHILDRESS AS WRITER AND DIRECTOR OF WEDDING BAND From “A Woman Playwright Speaks Her Mind,” by Alice Childress. Freedomways, Vol. 6, Issue 1, Winter 1966.1 After the Emancipation, the white South was faced with a dilemma. How could it protect itself against the legal claims of slaveowners' half-black children? Some of them were the only offspring of a white master. Many black women had been purchased to fulfill the role of wives, but most were used as sexual outlets under degrading circumstances and none had the privileges of consent or refusal concerning the use of her body. She was forced to bear children and her offspring belonged legally not to her but to her ownermaster. There were many black men who were resentful of being named father to the white slaveowners' children and eager to escape the additional bondage of an enforced family set-up. There were also some cases of whites who wished to acknowledge their colored children and leave 1 This essay was adapted by Childress from her remarks at the "Negro Writer's Vision of America" conference held April 23-25, 1965 at New York's New School. An audio recording of those remarks can be streamed via the Pacifica Radio Archives, beginning at ~05:25..
property to them. Laws were passed, declaring what percentage of "black blood" made human beings allblack and thus no responsibility to their white parents. To spare white men the responsibility of support claims, and to avoid black men challenging in court the paternity of some faircomplexioned child, the white South took action against the Negro woman. State after state passed legislation declaring that all children born to black women during slavery shall be known as the legitimate children of their mothers only. In the first generation of "freedom," the black woman was abandoned, not only by the white father-owner, but by any black man faced with acknowledging children bred by the slave-master, or by other black men, since women were mated by the owners with various men to bring forth various kinds of offspring—mated for strength, endurance, size, color, and even docility. With one stroke of the pen, she was told that no man, black or white, owed her anything, and her children
Rebecca Haden (Annabelle), Thomas Sadoski (Herman), Veanne Cox (Herman's Mother) and Brittany Bradford (Julia Augistine). Photo by Hollis King.
WEDDING BAND
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