Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson; and coeditor of African American Performance and The- ater History: A Critical Reader; Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance

Harry J. Elam Jr. is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. He is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson; and coeditor of African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader; Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, and Text and Performance Quarterly, as well as journals in Israel, Belgium, Poland, and Taiwan and also in several critical anthologies.

I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty and for Beauty to set the world right. That somehow, somewhere eternal and perfect beauty sits above Truth and Right I can conceive, but here and now and in the world in which I work they are for me unseparated and inseparable.
-W. E. B. Du Bois, "Criteria of Negro Art" (1926) 1 In a November 2000 Harper's Magazine article on reparations for slavery, Alexander Pires Jr. speaks to the legal power of narrative: [Y]ou have to remember that the judiciary is the only branch of our government that has nothing to do. It sits there, waiting. The legislature writes laws, and the executive carries them out. But our judges sit and wait for us to come with a complaint, which is a kind of prayer. It says, "Judge, I have this story to tell. It's a story of an injustice. It's a new story-a new way of understanding an old injustice. And I ask you today to hear this case, to listen to my story." 2 Pires, one of the lawyers who won an unprecedented multimillion dollar class-action suit against the federal government for black farmers in the 1990s, understood well how dramatic storytelling can function as a strategy for restitution. Pires's characterization of storytelling as redressive action may seem counterintuitive; after all, the roles of the humanistic arts of literature, theatre, and performance in relation to the legal discourses of redress, reparations, and restitution have been, historically, antagonistic. In the expedient rhetoric of the courtroom, "stories" are often opposed to fact, narrative opposed to evidence, and fiction opposed to truth. But as Pires describes it, at its best, the prayerful bid for justice is part of an almost ritualistic ceremony in an orderly world in which telling the right story in the right way and in the right time and right place to the divinely ordained authorities can effect change. Storytelling calls for what anthropologist Victor Turner describes as the "redressive action" necessary to resolve the "social drama" of conflict. In Turner's four-phase framework, an injustice-such as slavery-creates a "breach" and "crisis" in the social fabric that can only be healed through "reintegration" or, if it cannot be healed, will lead to an "irreparable schism." 3 As Pires describes it, in fact, telling "my story"-testifying to one's own realities and truths-is a political speech act that not only calls for, but enacts, a form of redressive action. It calls for an acknowledgment of, accounting for, and a response to a social wrong for the social good. As E. Tammy Kim explains, speaking up and out can be reparative-and not only at the personal level: telling one's story is equally as important to the formation of history at a general, social level, for it can prevent national amnesia and governmental revisionism of the historical record; 4 that is, narrative can play a pivotal role in making wrongs right.
Pires's description of storytelling as fundamental to, rather than a distraction from, the processes of social justice is useful in analyzing the work of the most influential and prolific of African American writers, Langston Hughes . Poet, essayist, biographer, children's author, and dramatist, Hughes held faith in the legal leverage of narrative. This does not mean he used art as merely a crude tool in a propagandist's arsenal. For Hughes, art's salience lay neither in its use as propaganda nor, conversely, in the modernist notion that "true" art somehow rose above politics, the "art for art's sake" ideal. That ideal is vigorously and cogently critiqued in W. E. B. Du Bois's "Criteria of Negro Art," published in 1926, the same year as Hughes's manifesto, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." 5 Although their aesthetics differed in many ways, both Du Bois and Hughes in these manifestos took for granted the relevance of racial particularity and class location without requiring that art serve the prescriptions of social realism or social class. That said, Hughes well understood the significance of art's claims on social reality, as Pires suggests, its ability to be constitutive as well as reflective of the world, its power to transform as well as to testify to realities. To that end, he enjoined African American artists to produce art that resisted the "urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible." 6 Risking displeasure from both whites and "colored people," Hughes felt that this kind of art would necessarily be an act of both liberating self-expression and social critique, especially of the dismissiveness and silencing of various kinds of black experience.
One kind of black experience to which he paid special attention was that of the mulatto, and his complex treatment of this subject illustrates the possibilities he saw in political-artistic gestures. Radically revising the century-old "tragic mulatto" typethe angst-ridden figure internally torn over a drop of "black blood"-Hughes uses the "cross of blood" to launch a politicized indictment of white America's emasculization of black men. Staging volatile black-male confrontations with the white father, Hughes's poems "The Cross" (1925) and"Mulatto" (1927), his story "Father and Son" (1934), his Broadway play Mulatto (written in 1930 and first produced in 1935), and his libretto "The Barrier" (1950) all invoke interraciality as a trope for the relationship between race, masculinity, and nation. With only slight variations of the plot across genre, the "little yellow bastard boy," as he is called in the poem, story, play, and libretto, insists on white paternal obligation and rightful blood inheritance. This essay focuses on the play Mulatto, which perhaps most fully realizes that relationship. Much contemporary literary analysis of the "mulatto" takes the mixed-race figure as an icon of private neurosis rather than a trope for political inequity. Critics such as Germain Bienvenu, for instance, maintain that Hughes's representations of mixed race suggest an intraracial pathology, pointing to "prejudice within the black race," 7 reiterating the view that the white father, Colonel Norwood himself, cynically proposes, when in the last act he asks his son, "Are you rejecting your race?" 8 Arthur Davis argues that the crisis of the central figure in Mulatto, Robert, as a young man of mixed race, is only, as he puts it, a "personal problem." Hughes, Davis insists, is "not interested in larger sociological aspects of divided inheritance," 9 but is more likely working out his own troubled relationship with his father. Arnold Rampersad suggests that Hughes's obsession with the theme of miscegenation is less the result of "the youth's mulatto sense of racial ambivalence than his rage for full acceptance by his father"; 10 Our claim, however, is that Hughes's preoccupation with mulattos demands critical supplement to the autobiographical and psychological; we argue that the father and son conflicts in these works are not only personal or familial, but, rather, they engage a larger agonistic struggle over black masculine enfranchisement within the national citizenry. This is to rub against the grain of much literary and theatre criticism that has consistently de-racialized Mulatto. The cultural bleaching has been, ironically, often in the name of praise: critics have touted, to the exclusion of other interpretations, its "universal" formal or psychological characteristics-focusing on the father-son conflict as an instance of Greek or Shakespearean drama in which the conflict plays out in epic dimensions. 11 Susan Duffy, analyzing Hughes's "political plays," recognizes him as the "Proletarian Playwright" (extending Margaret Larkin's 1927 well-known praise of Hughes as a "Proletarian Poet," the "people's poet") but interprets the dramatic strategies of his labor scripts solely in the context of Brecht, communist agit-prop, and Greek epideictic oratory (involving the articulation of praise and blame though also display and entertainment). 12 Surely, Hughes signifies on both theatrical antecedents and the technical experimentation of his Euro-American contemporaries, but to focus solely on such themes risks making them the ends, rather than the means, of his social critique. Hughes's play is more productively understood as a cultural intervention specific to the politics of his day rather than an ahistorical meditation on the theme of alienation, and, as we suggest, the mulatto as a vehicle for social and sexual critique and not as an instance of narcissistic implosion. Taking up the motto of the John Reed Club, Hughes came to believe in "as a Class Weapon." 13 Our argument is that Mulatto's kinship narrative becomes, as C. K. Doreski terms it, a "surrogate historical text" for reparations due, in which blood debt forms a metaphorical basis for legal debt. 14 So why and how is the mulatto used in Mulatto to make the claim for restitution? For Hughes, mixed race foregrounds what James Baldwin notes in The Fire Next Time: both black, the theme of a marginalized mulatto was compelling because: 1) he felt neglected by his mother and rejected by his father; 2) of stories that his great-grandfather Captain Ralph Quarles of Virginia had putatively shared a "loving" relationship with Lucy Langston and his mulatto children; and 3) Hughes felt fury and despair over his rejection by Mason, who called him, condescendingly, her "dear child": "Mulatto ventilates a rage Langston could not acknowledge in his desire to be reconciled with Mrs. Mason, who clearly dominated his thought and feelings during the weeks the work was written" (192). We do not disagree with Rampersad but wish to suggest that biography does not offer full explanatory force for Hughes's use of the trope. 11 Plum, "Accounting for the Audience," 5-6. 12 Susan Duffy, ed., The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 11, 12. Duffy examines, in particular, Scottsboro Limited: A One-Act Play (1933), Harvest (also known as Blood on the Tracks) (1935), Angelo Herndon Jones (1936), and De Organizer: A Blues Opera in One Act (1939). 13 Ibid., 7. The phrase, "Art as a Class Weapon" was a slogan from the communist John Reed Club. 14 C. K. Doreski argues that "kinship rituals and imbedded genealogies serve as surrogate historical texts," and discusses the "current critical concern of kinship and history as the twin axes of African American literature"; see Writing America Black: Rhetoric in the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xxii. As Michael G. Cooke explains in Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986): "It is not kinship in the sense of consanguinity or descent, with all its formal systems and restrictions. Rather kinship means a social bonding, a recognition of likeness in context, concern, need, liability, value" (148). Similarly, kinship represented in Hughes's work has social and political, not merely personal, value. that "Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality." 15 Indeed, as Eva Sacks notes, the national anxiety about miscegenation is less about taboo sexual relations than it is about establishing patriarchal lines of property, about the transmission of material goods within the white community, and the corresponding disinheritance of the black mother and any children born of an interracial union. 16 In focusing on a male mulatto rather than a mulatta, Hughes flips the racialized gender conventions that make the black child follow the condition of the mother, and calls on another convention that lays claim to the tradition that the white son follow the condition of the father-that he has a right to the family wealth. The male child of mixed descent is positioned to show up the arbitrariness of the disinheritance of black people by invoking other competing paradigms of inheritance. Furthermore, the mulatto as a sign of race-mixing threatens the economic and social order not simply because he marks difference, but because he can lay claim to sameness. As Anna Stoler points out, most of the anxiety about race-mixing was its evidence "of affective ties, affective kinship, confusions and transfusions of blood and milk, sentiments of cultural belonging . . . as dangerous as carnal knowledge." 17 According to Stoler, the social discomfort with mixed race cannot simply be dismissed as fear of "cultural contagion"; rather, the mulatto's claim to belonging depends not on the polluting fluids transferred between consenting parties (which presumes a difference between), but on consanguinity (which presumes a sameness within). Consanguinity threatens the "carefully marked . . . boundaries of class and race" and cuts across "the dichotomies of ruler and ruled" (191). In that sense, the mulatto, as both insider and outsider, is an ideal petitioner for redress. This is an important distinction, because the mulatto often figures in anti-reparations discourse as an excuse to deny the practicality of reparations. As DeWayne Wickham notes, it is a common but specious point to claim that reparations are impossible because many of those calling for it have a "bloodline, and claim to such payments . . . diluted by race mixing." Wickham further points out that none are arguably more deserving than mixed-race people: "Miscegenation was a spoil of slavery. White slave owners routinely had their way with slave women. The linear successors of these offspring are the most obvious proof of the cruelty inflicted upon slave families." 18 The mulatto figure, therefore, stands both as a signpost of white transgression-what Hortense Spillers calls the "will to sin"-and of white larceny. Race-mixing should not be invoked to confuse the question of who counts as a descendent or who is entitled; to do so would be, ironically, to both warp and repeat the legal disenfranchisements of those who followed the condition of the black mother. Furthermore, using mixed-race people as the reason to deny recompense seems at best a devious and disingenuous return to false arguments about racial purity. In Mulatto, Hughes turns such specious logic on its head by invoking the mixed-race figure as evidentiary grounds for his theatrical petition for civil rights.
To explain how Hughes artistically engages the issues of debt, grievance, and compensation in the play, our analysis owes much to the work of the Redress Project, in which scholars Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman examine the kinds of political claims that can be mobilized on behalf of the slave (the stateless, the socially dead, and the disposable) in the political present. In posing the question of slavery in terms of the incomplete nature of abolition, we are concerned neither with "what happened then" nor with "what is owed because of what happened then," but rather with the contemporary predicament of freedom, with the melancholy recognition of foreseeable futures still tethered to this past. 19 Hughes's Mulatto, set in a vague though enduring present of a post-World War I Southern town that is still very obviously informed by slavery, similarly asks the question: "What is the time of slavery?" (Mulatto, 1,3). 20 At issue with these ongoing injuries in the play is not whether reparations should assume the form of financial compensation or a presidential apology. Earlier legal bids for reparations have failed because of the government's sovereign immunity: "the government, unlike an individual dependent, cannot be sued without its consent," meaning that "redress could only obtain when the state recognizes itself as negligent, when it acknowledged its unjust enrichment," and furthermore, acknowledged the historical continuity between itself and its predecessor and between the "slave past and emancipated present" (Mulatto, I.4). 21 The timeless present in which Mulatto occurs elides this artificial barrier between then and now and makes the state, through the figure of the father, fully accountable. This is crucial, because Robert's father, Norwood, twice refuses to acknowledge his son-once before his white neighbors and colleagues, and again just before his son kills him. His first public refusal is not just personal betrayal; it reflects the refusal of the state's culpability. Owning his son before his colleagues would be to waive sovereign immunity, to dismantle the very basis for power relations underwriting the government's disenfranchisement of black people. To acknowledge his wrong would be the first step in granting a claimant's right to petition for reparations. His second refusal, though spoken in a private moment between Robert and his father, makes clear that there is no separate sphere for Norwood, no personal realm in which he can admit his parentage to Robert. He resorts to a statement about the general order versus the particular, uttering the pathetic bluster of a commonplace-"Nigger women don't know their fathers. You're a bastard" (Mulatto, I. 17)-that both recognize as a transparently weak defense. To Norwood, this public naming of his paternity breaches Southern protocols of silence surrounding miscegenation, and makes clear that what may seem to be Robert's family affair (the son's psychic trauma resulting from the father's abandonment) goes well beyond domestic grievance. For it is not simply parental betrayal at stake, but the call for social responsibility, as we suggested earlier; after all, Norwood has never acknowledged his son before, so what makes this moment pivotal is not the lack of acknowledgment, but the pointed acknowledgment that this lack is unacceptable. It is the public naming-not just the recognition that the private is always and already public, but that revelation of the putatively private (a little boy's complaint) that can challenge the public status quo (nothing less than the "Southern way")-that leads the father to disown and disassociate himself from Robert, previously his favorite. His mother Cora explains: "But he [Norwood] never liked him [Robert] no more. That's why he sent him off to school so soon to stay all these years" (Mulatto, 1.14).

No Will to Whiteness
The father's refusal, as both public and private, is intolerable to Robert because the conditions for reparations seem revoked: he is granted neither official acknowledgment nor private apology. Robert gives up trying to please his father-what bell hooks refers to as "doing it for daddy," 22 in which black masculinity functions in service of the white patriarch and the power, privilege, and access historically associated with this figure. Instead, Robert does in daddy. Patricide figures as the climax of this play, as Robert returns from schooling in the North to challenge the household's status quo. Robert, or "Bert" as he is called by his family, is both attracted to and repulsed by the privileges of whiteness associated with his white daddy. Frustrated by the segregated black codes that he finds in place upon his return to his father's plantation, the prodigal Robert confronts his father for what he believes is his just due as "his son and heir" (Mulatto, 1.15). In their final struggle, Robert and his father stand toe-to-toe, each refusing to give ground. The father again denies his paternity, and the son stands up to white masculine hegemony, refusing black second-class citizenship. Drawing a gun, in an ultimately ineffective assertion of his white, masculine authority, Colonel Norwood demands Robert's submission to his position: "You black bastard!" Norwood cries (Mulatto, 2.1:24). Determined, Robert wrestles the gun from his father's hand and then, overwhelmed by the intensity of the moment, strangles him to death.
Robert's impulsive murder of his father serves as the climactic act in his complex and contradictory desire to set right an injury that he sees as both a private and public wrong. When Robert was a young boy, Colonel Norwood punished him for the cardinal sin of "outing" his father in front of other white men, severely beating him for this transgression. For both Norwood and his son, this incident served as a defining moment in their relationship. Robert, through this beating, comes of age racially. It is in this moment that he recognizes racial difference as parental betrayal, and it is this betrayal that he seeks to redress. As E. Tammy Kim notes, the motivation stemming from such anger creates a complex and continual dynamic: "Reparation on this account is restorative but impure; it is intermixed with aggression and hostility," evincing "the constant interaction of love and hate." 23 Animated by both this love and hate, Robert seeks to restore the privileges that should have accrued to him from birth as his father's son. Robert desperately wants something beyond the imposed Southern racist limitations: "I got the right to everything everybody else has" (Mulatto, 1.16). As a means of social and psychic reparation, Robert aggressively acts out against white authority upon his return from school to the Norwood plantation. Despite the stares, jeers, and consternation of whites, he drives his father's Ford automobile through the town; and in defiance of his father's orders, he enters the plantation house through the front door.
As Hughes explains, "The front door stands as a kind of symbol of equality in my drama." 24 Through such small though potent acts, Robert proclaims his opposition to an unequal system of racial stratification, and stakes his claims for reparation of his familial rights and entitlement to be seated at the national table.
For Robert, this exercise in social reparation is inherently connected to his perceptions of masculinity. Early in the play, Robert's nascent rebellion is evidenced by a heated exchange with a white female desk clerk in the post office, where he has tried to return radio tubes that arrive broken and damaged in the mail. The radio tubes function as a vital sign of Robert's desire to be part of new world order, for the radio represents an open, free space of communication, in contrast to the hermetically sealed world of the Southern plantation. When Robert challenges the clerk for refusing to give him back his money for the damaged goods, the clerk calls a male colleague and other white men to come to throw him out. Upon hearing about it, Cora thinks that this confrontation in the post office demonstrates Robert's reckless insolence. But, pleased that the white mail clerk could not throw him out on his own, Robert celebrates it as a redressive assertion of his own masculine authority, boasting, "He didn't do it himself. Had to call all the white loafers out in the square to get me through that door" (Mulatto, 1.17). His ability to determine his own entrance and exit through the front door is not just about physical strength-his struggle is for social power. The white clerk's brute force only proves that he, Robert, is the better man.
And yet, caught within the social paradigms of his time, the emotional dynamics of family inheritance, and the strange politics of race, Robert troubles the very notion of the revolutionary. It is true that he intends to fight the status quo, proclaiming, "Nobody's gonna fix a place for me." Yet his approach to fixing his own "place" is read as ill-formed or even naïve by not only whites, but, as Cora's response to the post office scene suggests, by some of his own family. 25 On the one hand, Robert demands equal rights and better treatment for his family. He seeks to protect his mulatta sister Sallie from the desire of the white "Higgins boy," who asks Robert "what night his sister comin' to town" (Mulatto, 1.16). On the other hand, Robert threatens the very safety of his family through acts of resistance that might bring down white ire upon them-by boldly riding around town in his father's Ford, for instance, and not giving any deference to white drivers on the road. Robert's brother William fears that Robert's individual acts may threaten the safety of them all , including his niece and nephew: "He comes down to my shack tellin' Billy and Marybell they got a white man for grandpa. He's gonna get my chilluns in trouble sho'" (Mulatto, 1.13). To be sure, Robert's actions do pose a threat, as his mother Cora suggests, not only to himself, but "I 'spects we's all gwine to pay fo' it, every colored soul on this place" (Mulatto, 1.18). Their fears are well-founded, because his actions have in fact unsettled both the Colonel and other whites, and, by play's end, an angry lynch mob has gathered in direct response to his social violations.
And yet, the complaint that Robert, as a messenger of change, is a threat to the community is a cynical charge often levied at radical insurgencies in an effort to negate their social force. For instance, Nat Turner's slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, which aimed at liberating blacks from slavery and ending white domination, caused a powerful backlash against blacks as new radically restrictive laws were passed in the South. The story that arose from this backlash held Turner, not whites, culpable for the white-on-black violence and legal repression that followed in the wake of his revolt. Thus Turner's revolt was held up as an unequivocal failure, an act of resistance that came to represent not possibility, but prohibition. As a result, many blacks as well as whites distanced themselves from not only Turner, but from any acts of resistance that could be similarly characterized. Needless to say, the climate of fear produced by this account principally served the interests of those most opposed to social and political change. Robert's defiance is similarly denigrated as having the potential to create social havoc. Turner's revolt and Robert's uprising both hold dangerous ramifications-but also great liberatory potential-for those around them.
The potential lies as much in the storytelling about the act, as the act itself: if Robert's actions are cast as selfish and dangerous to others, that narrative can work conservatively to preempt other insurrections in the making; if his actions are characterized and circulated as heroic and in the service of a larger social good, then the account can work, alternatively, to inspire resistance, providing a narrative precedent for others to draw upon. Both can function in cultural memory as touchstones that can be invoked for, or against, certain kinds of social action and change. So in the case of Turner, for instance, the 1831 transcription by the white lawyer, Thomas Gray, and the sensationalized stories about his bloodlust and divinely inspired madness that followed, capitalized on already-extant fears about widespread black revolt and irrational bestiality. The stories about the revolt, more than the revolt itself (or at least as a constitutive element of its social meaning), functioned as cautionary tales that were often served up as shorthand warnings to the black population. In Insurrection: Holding History (1999), contemporary black playwright Robert O'Hara satirically depicts the Turner revolt and critiques these kinds of inflammatory texts, as he questions not only who has the right to tell history, but what kinds of stories become history. 26 Much earlier, Frederick Douglass, invoking Patrick Henry and the American Revolution in his abolitionist arguments, tried also to reconsider the narrative scene-the metaphors, the allusions, the roles in which historical actors are cast, the plots in which they emerge-in which revolt is understood. Thus we should place these competing accounts of Robert's resistance within the larger context of black efforts to legitimize revolt by challenging the stories that make white resistance noble and patriotic, and black resistance merely anarchy.
But if we read Robert's action as redressive, then, as Hartman observes, we can understand that his actions are "poised between breach and mounting crisis." 27 His seemingly misguided resistance contains "liminal characteristics," which Hartman and Harry Elam, both following sociologist Victor Turner, cite as a fundamental aspect of redressive action. 28 And it is this liminality that, in this critical moment, gives Robert's acts unique potential-both constructive and destructive. Betwixt and between the original breach between father and son and the mounting crisis of the son's increasing demand for familial rights, Robert's defiant behaviors-driving past whites on the street, arguing with whites at the post office, talking back and up to white folks and white family-ironically both repeat and critique the belligerence and arrogance of his white father (a similarity that does not go unnoticed by his mother). Ultimately, like Nat Turner who was publicly executed, Robert dies because of his defiance. But the play invites us to challenge the idea that insurrectionists deserve death or that Robert's murder is in any way justifiable.
Mulatto also challenges the scripts about racial identity that underwrite revolution. Robert's "betwixt and between" status puts pressure not only on the ways in which race itself is imagined, but also on how social resistance is recognized. Thus, for instance, Robert's otherness is the subject of gossip and discussion even before he appears on the stage. His sister views his difference as a mark of his intelligence and ability, and wants to protect that difference as a step toward change, pleading with her father not to punish Robert: "Please sir, don't put the overseer on Bert, Colonel Tom. He was the smartest boy at school, Bert was. On the football team, too" (Mulatto, 1.1:7). Bert's exceptional achievement in education and sports would conventionally make a father proud; however, for Norwood, they only speak to Robert's desire to overstep the traditional expectations of his black servants. Robert's brother William perceives his otherness as a sign of hubris, believing that Robert has transgressed his racial place: "Bert thinks he's a real white man hisself now. Look at the first thing he did when he come home, he ain't seen the Colonel in six years-and Bert sticks out his hands for to shake hands with him!" (Mulatto, 1.14). In William's racially indoctrinated mind, shaking a white man's hand and entering through the front door are behaviors associated solely with whiteness. Robert, however, who has been away from the Deep South and experienced a different set of racial contexts and behaviors, brings an alternative political coding to these acts. The stories that his siblings tell are insufficient explanations for his resistance: he resists not just because he is smart or because he is cocky; his experience in moving between and participating in both racial and geopolitical worlds-schooling in the North, father's plantation in the South-has galvanized his commitment to an alternative to black subservience: "I've learned something, seen people in Atlanta and Richmond and Washington where the football team went-real colored people who don't have to take their hats off to white folks or let 'em go to bed with their sisters" (Mulatto, 1.16). Since African American males were represented as either animalistic brutes or neutered uncles, a "real colored man" would seem a historical oxymoron; nevertheless, for Robert, the notion of real colored manhood counters the equation of black men with "Niggers" (Mulatto, 23) that he finds back at his father's plantation, where he is told to act and talk "like a nigger should to a white man" (ibid.). His mixed status is not a way out of blackness, but out of niggerdom-which is to say, a way toward colored manhood.
Robert's designation of "real colored men" here stands in direct contrast to his brother's earlier assertion that Robert "thinks he's a real white man" (Mulatto, 1.14). Hughes's repetition of "real" within the brothers' dialogues on race underscores the performative nature of realness and racial authenticity. For Robert as well as William, racial realness connotes a privilege constructed through action. In William's case, real whiteness is about what white men can do; in Robert's case, realness concerns what real colored men do not have to do: "take off their hats to white folks or let 'em go to bed with their sisters." In each of their citations, racialized masculinity is articulated through behavior, and behavioral agency is constrained by social and political conventions, dynamics, and expectations. Real whiteness or real coloredness is about enactment and doing-and it is the doing that makes them real. Robert desires not the "being" of whiteness-he does not want to be white as William suspects-but the "realness" of whiteness.
Although in Mulatto the son insists on white paternal recognition, in no way is this akin to what Hughes critiques in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926) as "the urge within the race toward whiteness." 29 Robert's is not a bid for whiteness, but for manhood. Based on his observance of "real colored men," he informs his older brother William that he might "stay here awhile and teach some o' you darkies to think like men" (Mulatto, 16). Significantly, Robert uses neither the prefix "real" nor the prefix "colored." Here, then, is the suggestion that the freedom and agency of masculinity can operate without racial indexation. Yet, within the world of the plantation, Robert knows only too well that the privileges of masculinity he desires are available only to white men. Hughes uses Robert with his pale skin, his likeness to his white father, and his proximity to whiteness, to make the injustice of unequal racialized masculinity appear all the more acute. Hughes returns again and again in his writing to this "problem of mixed blood," because he found it a "very dramatic one-one parent in the pale of the black ghetto and the other able to take advantage of all the opportunities of American democracy." 30 In Mulatto, these opportunities are simply not available to black men.
These possibilities are eclipsed, in part, because of the white father's dominance. The patricide at the end of the play foregrounds the desire of the son not simply to kill off his white father, but to make the black father's unmarked presence visible. This emerges most vividly when Robert and the colonel engage in a deadly, subversive game of "the dozens." a black vernacular game of one-upmanship generally involving jokes about someone else's mother. In this instance, the ritual dissing of the opponent's mother quickly becomes an indictment of the father: As in the dozens, the sexuality of the mother and, by implication, the authority of the father over it, is the source of conflict. Robert demands that Norwood accept his fatherhood. The white father's potency is from the outset stolen, for, in effect, he has wrongfully assumed the head of the home. The black father exists only in potentia in this scenario, because he has been absented, criminally displaced, by the white man. Consequently, Robert sounds not unlike the protagonists in black revolutionary plays of the 1960s and 1970s who want to "kill all the white men in the world." The fall of the white man therefore is necessarily indexed to the rise of black masculinity, for it is the former who is, in fact, illegitimate, illegal, and illicit. Representing an alternative perspective on black masculinity to the one embraced by the white patriarchy, Robert rejects the status of "field nigger." Hughes's mulatto is not tragic, he is anarchic: he does not want to be white, he wants to indict the white status quo.

Racial Performance and Artistic Payback
Significantly, despite being the apotheosis of white power in the play, Colonel Norwood is threatened and anxious about the loss of his authority. 31 Hughes sets Mulatto at a time when the South and its landed "aristocracy" are in decline. The Norwood plantation house that Hughes describes at the outset of the play is "out-dated," "shabby," and "rather depressing" (Mulatto, 1.3). Given the outward decline of white patriarchy as symbolized by this setting, Norwood's demonstrations of white authority and privilege depend on blackness-namely, the servants and family members that live and work on his plantation. His control of Sam, Cora, and the others establishes his hegemony, but, of course, this also makes their obedience requisite for his power. Norwood himself anxiously recognizes both his economic and social dependence on blacks: "Everything turns on niggers, niggers, niggers! No wonder Yankees call this the Black Belt" (Mulatto, 1.10). If the "belt" of African Americans hold up the pants of white men, then Norwood's son's efforts to hitch up his own trousers, to assert his own manhood rather than enable another's, can only dress down his father.
This backdrop of white vulnerability is translated into Norwood's sense that, ironically, it is he who is oppressed, an opinion expressed also by other white figures within the play who imply that he is weak for letting himself be oppressed. Norwood's friend Tom Higgins, for instance, intimates that Norwood lost the nomination for county committeeman because his white neighbors feared he was being "too decent to your darkies Norwood" (ibid.). Black culpability is also a focal point in the play's reception by certain white viewers and reviewers attending the original 1935 production who, despite Norwood's denial of his black offspring, found the Colonel a sympathetic figure fighting to restore and maintain his manhood. Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times that Mulatto seems like a moral retribution drama about the misery of a white man plagued by the social misdemeanor of having illegitimate mulatto children. For Colonel Norwood is always in trouble with his neighbors and the members of his household, and is finally killed by a boy so cocky and impudent that he seems more like an ungrateful son than a martyr to race prejudice. 32 Atkinson's comments mimic Norwood's, who also reports that his mulatto offspring, not his racism, are the cause of his problems.
And yet, Norwood also needs these children; they are the most evident symbols of his exercise of white privilege at a time when property values and his own prestige are deteriorating. Higgins explains that coupling and procreation with black women is the right and expectation of white gentlemen: "I didn't know you could make use of a white girl till I was past twenty. Thought too much o' white women for that-but I've given many a yellow gal a baby in my time" (Mulatto, 1.17). His heterosexuality, his masculine identity, is established through interracial relations with black women. What Atkinson terms "the social misdemeanor of having illegitimate mulatto children" is actually not a crime, but a social norm deeply embedded, Higgins suggests, in white men's coming of age.
The evolution of Mulatto on Broadway proved an ironic example of the very racial and sexual conflicts it was staging. Dissatisfied with Hughes's treatment of interracial sexuality, the white producer, Martin Jones, rewrote the third act (without permission) to include a rape scene and a lynching, insisting to the novice playwright that he (Jones) better understood Broadway commercialism. According to Hughes, he did not even realize, until being informed by "an acquaintance," that Mulatto was in rehearsal and would be performed on Broadway. Then, after telephoning his agent and eventually signing a contract, Hughes attended a rehearsal and found there "a group of white and Negro actors reading lines I [Hughes] had never written. But eventually a scene came up that I recognized as my own." 33 Hughes relates an ensuing patronizing exchange as Jones instructed him: "Well your play's not box office as it stands. We're trying to make it box office. Just sit down, keep quiet and listen to the rehearsal." 34 Despite lukewarm-to-negative reviews, Jones's salacious marketing appeals to the play's sexuality and racial violence did contribute to Mulatto's box-office success and longevity. Jones, who had previously produced a successful race play on Broadway-Leon Gordon's White Cargo-sought to exercise his authority over Hughes, to the latter's 32 Brooks Atkinson, quoted in Plum, "Accounting for the Audience," 12. 33 Hughes, I Wonder As I Wander, 310. 34 Ibid. humiliation. Seeking to control every aspect of Mulatto's presentation on Broadway, Jones even assumed the role of director and attempted unsuccessfully to have his name placed alongside Hughes's on the theatrical marquee as playwright. 35 Both Jones's behavior as producer and his theatrical sensibility reflected a racial paternalism that sought to keep the "upstart" black Hughes in his place. Hughes, well versed in other forms of representation, wanted to manage the image of his characters by including detailed stage directions about how the darker-skinned William and the near-white though clearly "Negroid," as he put it, mulatto actors who portrayed Robert and Sallie should look. Yet Jones, following the conventions of the time, replaced Robert and Sallie with white actors in the Broadway production. In 1935, interracial productions on Broadway were rare. 36 Blacks were still traditionally relegated to minor roles as servants or supplicants. In Jones's production, only the submissive servant Sam, the wary elder brother William, and the mother Cora, were played by black actors. The conflict between Jones and Hughes escalated when Jones resisted paying Hughes the required royalties, and Hughes, like Robert in the play, demanded his legitimate due. He had to enlist NAACP legal counsel Arthur Spingarn to sue on his behalf. Hughes later complained that he did not know why he was so invested in theatre when "drama was nothing but trial and tribulation to him." 37 Throughout this process, Jones refused to talk with Hughes-even when they passed each other in the theatre's hallways.
To add insult to injury, Jones, who was perfectly willing to blur the color line in his cast selection, nonetheless imposed segregated house seating for all performances. In protest, Hughes boycotted the opening night of his own play 38 -a haunting echo of Robert's own desires for both literal recompense and symbolic retribution.
This struggle with Jones was for Hughes but one in a series of such battles for artistic control. Hughes's attempts at creative and financial independence symbolically resurrect the black authority figure lying interred and the white father-black son dramas he scripted. Hughes had written Mulatto, for example, just after a nasty breakup with one of his most powerful patrons, Charlotte Osgood Mason; he had grown mightily disillusioned with white patronage well before his conflict with Jones. Rampersad notes that during his subsequent trip to Haiti where he visited the Citadel La Ferrière, the magnificent nineteenth-century fortress of the black king Henri Christophe, Hughes replaces Mason's influence and image with "the mightiest symbol of black power in the Americas, the Citadel." 39 Significantly, Hughes returned to the States bent on asserting that reclaimed sense of black authority and agency by starting his own Harlem Suitcase Theatre in 1937, independent even of the Federal Theatre Project funding which underwrote many contemporaneous black productions between 1935 and 1939. 35 Ibid.,314. 36 The 1935 Federal Theatre Project Boston production of George Sklars's Stevedore created quite a stir, for example, because it gave equal billing to its interracial cast of white actors and black actors. 37 Quoted in Duffy, Political Plays of Langston Hughes, 138. 38 Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, 1:313-15. Interestingly, Du Bois makes a special point of criticizing Jones's sensational production of White Cargo: A Play of the Primitive in "Criteria of Negro Art": "In New York, we have two plays: 'White Cargo' and 'Congo.' In 'White Cargo' there is a fallen woman. She is black. In 'Congo' the fallen woman is white. In 'White Cargo' the black woman goes down further and further and in 'Congo' the white woman begins with degradation but in the end is one of the angels of the Lord. . . . In such cases, it is not the positive propaganda of people who believe white blood divine, infallible and holy to which I object. It is the denial of a similar right of propaganda to those who believe black blood human, lovable and inspired with new ideals for the world." 39 Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, 1:206.
Thus on the one hand, Hughes sought to manage the complex cultural politics of performance through legal intervention, boycotting, and the development of black-run theatres, while on the other, the wayward unpredictability of performance itself yields some retributive satisfactions that perhaps challenge Jones's control as much, or more, than Hughes's legal suits or boycotts. For even though Jones cast white actors for roles that Hughes had designated for light-skinned blacks, he could not fully control their racial meanings nor how they signified in performance-in fact, the mulatto's racial identity operates on a continuum within the play that is as much determined by the welter of reception and performance, as by directorial or authorial designation. Within the moments of racial and sexual violence in the play that Jones added, the white actors become-ironically-most particularly racialized as black. 40 For instance, Robert's sister Sallie-the rape victim-assumes the role of Sapphire, the black temptress, who once was headed for a Northern school but now confesses she was just "made for loving" after all. 41 And when Robert's father dies, Robert becomes racialized for white audiences as the black brute, the stereotypical image of black masculinity as predator, the representation seen in filmic images and media representations starting with the film "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) onward. Robert comes to represent not just a black man, but the kind "hung from trees" (Mulatto, 2.1.23).
The sexual politics of Jones's revision of Mulatto-the play was even banned in Philadelphia for its overt sexuality-further structures divisions between positions of black and white racialized masculinity. The sex depicted in Jones's production is not black desire (what is notably missing is any reference to the usual racial canard of the mixed-race Robert wishing to marry white), but of the overseer Talbot's desire for the daughter and his eventual rape of her. In I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes relates a conversation with Jones about the inclusion of this racialized sexual assault: "But what happens to her [Sallie] in the end?" I [Hughes] asked. "According to the revised script, she gets raped by the white overseer. That's part of the finale" [Jones replied]. "But isn't that adding horror on top of horror?" I said. "I've already got a murder, a suicide, a mob and a mad scene in the play." "'Rape is for sex,' he said. 'You have to have sex in a Broadway show. '" 42 This rape scene is only the climax in a long list of references to white men's desire for "yellow women"-from Higgins's "stable" of them, to Norwood's own oddly incestuous pinching of his daughter's flesh and saying she is too "womanly" (Mulatto, 1. 15-16) to have around (an unmistakable mirroring of his own handling of Cora's breasts when she was of the same age).
If "black" for Jones is clearly marked as violent, this notion is inadvertently undercut by the white violence he also adds: the rape and the lynching are both historical signs not of sexual avarice, but of violence. Unlike the way rape of white women by black men was characterized as a sign of sexual excess and atavism, the white rape of black women is understood quite self-consciously within the play as a war crime, a way to put people in their place. Jones has Sally, the rape victim and mulatta daughter, indict herself for the crime by repeating the pernicious stereotype of the black female, that she is only made for work and-using an intentionally excruciating euphemism for rape in the play-for "loving." Jones even has Robert hanging from a tree at the crossroads as a warning to other blacks, thus realizing his father's prediction that he will be lynched. But despite such over-determinations on Jones's part, Hughes's vision emerges. To black audiences, Robert's racialization in performance potentially carries a different hue than it does for whites: rather than victimizer, he is victim-the black man who can be lynched, the image of black masculinity as always and already threatened. The irony here is, of course, that by attempting to reinscribe the stereotypes of black bestiality, Jones has whites assume and embody the racial type he sets up as antithetical to the "white" characters. Equally significant, the extant published version of the play is that of Hughes, not Jones's; in fact, one of the few spaces where Jones's revision finds continued life is in Hughes's recounting of the events around the Broadway production of Mulatto in his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander.
The play, in both Jones's and Hughes's versions, may be a "harrowing orchestration of Hughes's prophetic fear that the great house of America would be brought down by racial bigotry," 43 but the apocalypse also envisions the possibility of a black manhood rising phoenix-like from the ashes. After all, in both versions, Robert takes his own life in an act of self-determination more than desperation. His suicide is posed as the preemptive claiming of his life: taking his life "into his own hands" through the very act of taking his life "by his own hand." If the sacrificial communal rite of lynching that occurs after Robert's suicide in Jones's version was meant to "deny any hint of manhood and independence to Afro-American males," 44 then his suicide undercuts this desire, because it seems instead to affirm black manhood. In a way, art effects the end-run around the limitations of bids for reparations: if traditional forms of redress require acknowledgment by, and apologies from, the powers that abuse, then performance stages both the conflict and the resolution. So even as Robert's father refuses to acknowledge his son, even as Martin Jones refuses to give Hughes his due, the play performs a different kind of payback that does not require their consent. In order to grasp the radical nature of this artistic retribution, one might consider the fact that by the play's end-regardless of what Jones's meddling tries to do-Robert has attained his father's position, and in death becomes his heir. 45 Robert, the prodigal mulatto son, dies in his mother's bed in perverse actualization of the Oedipal triangle. After killing his father, he supplants him, and in this way, death legitimizes Robert even as it negates him.

Cora's Comeback
Rather than Robert or his white father Colonel Norwood, Cora, the black mother, has the last word. Hughes's kinship plots, with their direct engagement of national civil rights for African Americans, are not simply about the sins of the father-that is, about retribution-but about the setting aright of history, accomplished in part through the 43 Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, 1: 315. 44 Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 174. 45 Mulatto is in one sense an answer to Hughes's poem "The Cross," which asks, "I wonder where I'm gonna die / Being neither white or black." The play suggests you die in your mother's bed, but with your father's power. re-placement (or proper placement) of black people. This struggle is illumined best not if we view the play solely as a struggle between father and son, but if we understand the agonistic construction of masculinity as triangulation, a function of Robert, Colonel Norwood, and Cora. Importantly, Cora's long soliloquy that follows the death of the Colonel explains how she came to be Norwood's mistress: I'm just poor Cora Lewis, Colonel Norwood. Little black Cora Lewis, Colonel Norwood. I'm just fifteen years old. Thirty years ago, you put your hands on me to feel my breasts, and you say, "You a pretty piece of flesh, ain't you? Black and sweet, ain't you?" And I lift up my face, and you pull me to you, and we laid down under the trees that night, and I wonder if your wife will know when you go back up the road into the big house. (Mulatto,32) Reinforcing earlier reviews of the poems and story, which emphasize her lack of culpability, Cora's account of him taking her at age fifteen, calling her a "pretty little piece of flesh . . . [b]lack and sweet," and her mother's explanation that "it was better than 'workin' all your life in de cotton and cane'" reminds us of Linda Brent in Harriet Jacob's well known slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Brent argues that slave women ought not to be judged by the same standards as white women, and that the moral economy surrounding sexual virtue assumes a personal sovereignty denied women of color. 46 Thus Cora's choices must always be understood within the context of institutional constraints preemptively determining the range and possibilities of choice: hence Brent's sexual options and "choices"-like Cora's choice to become the de facto lady of the house after Norwood's barren wife dies-are arguably exercises in the very limited agency allowed them within a world of severely constricted options.
Once in the house, Cora is still excluded from the inner sanctum of Norwood's library-"nearly thirty years in this house and I ain't been in there myself, not once, 'mongst de Colonel's papers" (Mulatto, 2.1.21)-but she is also a gatekeeper, arbitrating who comes in and out of the front and back doors, and finally barring the door and then the stairway to the bedroom where Robert hides when the mob comes to lynch him. More provocatively, she also holds the key to both Norwood's and her son's masculinity. As she delivers the last rites over the father (really a postmortem indictment), she reminds him that she "was already ready for you when you come to me in de night" (Mulatto, 2.2.33), never denying him. In this requiem, Cora utters the previously unspeakable: the four were "your chilluns and mine," and Bert especially was "always yo' child." His paternity is asserted even as his potency is challenged: she knows about his infidelity with the servant Livonia (Mulatto, 2.2.30), but she is the one who bears him children, she insists-a point of pride asserted also in relation to his deceased wife. In both cases, her plentitude and fertility are emphasized against his inability to reproduce without her. She is in control of the facts of paternity and the racial "condition" of her children: her point about "mixtries" makes clear that miscegenation (and therefore the living legacy testifying to it) is not about "identity crises," but social mysteries. She directly challenges the "mixes" and mixings up that derive from the unacknowledged ways of the Old South-immaculate conceptions in which, putatively, "black women do not know the fathers of their children" (Mulatto, 2.1.23). explain more fully: on the one hand, Hughes's play suggests that drama offers uneven political leverage, let alone remuneration. Remuneration seems especially difficult, because Hughes's dramatic narrative is at once personal and communal. The blood debt is not simply what is owed Robert and Cora, but what is owed to the family as whole, and, by extension, to African Americans. Direct recompense for black people through the art of storytelling is hard to come by (certainly the off-and onstage politics of Jones's production of Mulatto makes this clear). Reparation-if we understand it as an acknowledgment of wrongs, a gesture of contrition, an effort to make right a wrong-is not the same as recompense, the reimbursement for services rendered. But Hughes is not after payment, not even back-pay, but payback: payback in the form of the symbolic reordering of the social and political hierarchy.
To say that the payback is symbolic is not to suggest that because it happens in fiction or drama, it has no political potency or is circumscribed in the realm of the imagination. History, Baldwin suggests, like fiction, is a form of storytelling-not just a dead collection of facts and past deeds, but the living force of ideas, embodied in and daily enacted by, people. Thus social change can potentially occur through history itself, warns Baldwin in his jeremiad; for him, history operates as a form of fate, a "force" that "controls" those who think themselves in control. Hughes's Mulatto functions like Baldwin's admonition to white men that they must "listen," both implying that racial justice will be had whether or not whites are willing participants. The fact that we "carry" our history "within us" has potential liberatory force, because it can effect social change without depending on the goodwill of those in power or the success of the disenfranchised; it is also empowering, because Baldwin-and Hughes-understand history as a function of the symbolic, as a matter of the way people think-and thus how they will in turn act. The symbolic, according to both Baldwin and Hughes in our reading of Mulatto, therefore, is intimately tied to political action. As Alexander Pires says in our opening epigraph, telling the story not only influences politics; storytelling is a political act in and of itself. As Hughes's poem "Mulatto" both requests and insists: I am your son, white man! Georgia dusk And the turpentine woods. One of the pillars of the temple fell. You are my son! Like hell! 49