Whiting Up by Marvin McAllister

Author:Marvin McAllister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 14 Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg terrorize Sarah, the Negro, in a scene from the 2006 Classical Theatre of Harlem production of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. From the New York Times, January 20, 2006.

and the wilderness.”56 The Duchess/Sarah defines her father’s blackness as beyond racial, more like geographic. He embodies the wilderness, an utter lack of civilization, and the yellow Duchess/Sarah is marooned in between Victoria’s palaces and the Negro father’s jungle.

For Jesus, Sarah’s other vulnerable European or biracial self, his yellowness proves devastating. Kennedy introduces a thoroughly unrecognizable and estranged Jesus with this description: “a hunchback, yellow-skinned dwarf, dressed in white rags and sandals.”57 Sarah then starts to explain his unconventional appearance with an alternate history of the messiah’s ancestry, but this is difficult because Sarah no longer trusts the relationships or histories between her selves; she declares them all lies. The “false” connection she finally articulates is that “Jesus is Victoria’s son,” but she leaves the identity of Christ’s father in doubt. Later in a scene where Jesus and the Duchess hide from Sarah’s father, who is constantly pursuing them, the paternity issue is resolved. The two characters speak in unison: “My father isn’t going to let us alone. (knocking.) Our father isn’t going to let us alone, our father is the darkest of us all, my mother was the fairest, I am in between, but my father is the darkest of them all.”58 Notice how the lines begin with “my father” but transition into “our father” after the knocking, which gradually suggests the Duchess and Jesus share a father, and a black one. This Negro father, an untiring assailant who is both returning and abandoning, takes a devastating toll on the already unstable Duchess, pushing her to the brink. One day Jesus visits the Duchess in her chamber, and he “discovers” her body when the swinging and dead Duchess literally falls on him.59

Her suicide foreshadows Sarah’s inevitable death, but more importantly, it enrages Jesus, estranges a Christian icon, and reactivates a white colonial terror. This vengeful, hunchbacked, biracial messiah provides an entirely different perspective on the son of God. Yet at the same time Kennedy’s latest Afro-alienation act, this alternative projection of Christ, functions as an expression and validation of Sarah’s personal history. Infuriated by the loss of his playmate to suicide, the hunchbacked Jesus transforms into a vengeful bounty hunter intent on heading to Africa to track down and kill Lumumba/Sarah’s father. But this merciless Christ has an even more compelling motive: Jesus is also vengeful “because all my life I believed my Holy Father to be God, but now I know that my father is a black man.”60 Jesus is now officially trapped in the same liminal crisis that destroyed the Duchess and will soon exterminate Sarah. He and legions of followers assumed his father was God, but now he realizes his father was nothing more than a black man who abandoned his mother to become a missionary. Christ’s story is now Sarah’s story.

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