Modern Drama

SIGNIFYING FUTURITY

In Parks’s other works involving the myth of Lincoln, money-making ventures frequently drive a wedge between family members even as they promise “to convert the trauma of abandonment into a genuine form of possession” (Saal 69). In The America Play (1993) and Topdog/Underdog (1999), Black men work impersonating Abraham Lincoln in life and in death, allowing paying customers to “assassinate” them. In The America Play, Brazil inherits the “family business”: he takes up his dad’s “fakin” but, lacking intimacy with his father, he experiences a loss that no memorabilia exhumed from the (replica of the) [End Page 27] Great Hole of History can ameliorate. Never quite whole, Brazil also inherits his father’s identity as a Foundling. In Topdog/Underdog, when Booth kills his brother Lincoln for trying to steal the $500 his mother supposedly gave him, it is unclear whether this is an inevitable but mistaken outcome of their banter or Booth coming into his own as a hustler (see LeMahieu). What is clear is that Booth retains his inheritance at the cost of social isolation, thereby reproducing his parents’ dysfunction and supplanting Lincoln in the three-card monte act. Both plays thus juxtapose financial gain with lost intimacy through intergenerational familial relationships. These dynamics emphasize that “home” can refer to a financial asset, a sanctuary, the setting for police brutality, and/or a symbol of citizenship and American identity (Hill xi–xiii, 9–12; Oppel and Taylor; Wyly et al. 598).

Through “rep and rev” (repetition and revision), Wars dramatizes how financial processes affect social bonds and collectivity outside the strict boundaries of economic transactions (see Haiven 189). Parks’s signature technique is a form of signifying that repeats scenarios, words, and gestures to revise them within one work and across her oeuvre (“From Elements” 8–10). Generally, well-documented aspects of the Civil War remain on the play’s periphery. Its plot revolves around the choices the members of a community of Black adults enslaved on a Texas plantation make in relation to each other and to their enslavers, Boss-Master and Missus. When Hero agrees to accompany Boss-Master into battle in exchange for his freedom, he also gambles that acting heroically will repair his relationships with his beloved, Penny, and his surrogate father, Old Man. But Boss-Master dies without freeing Hero; Old Man dies without making amends; and Hero, aspiring toward patriarchal land-ownership, ruins his relationship with Penny. She joins a self-emancipating community already headed to the North. Unaware of the Proclamation, the community decides to pool their diverse skillsets to create “Freedomville” wherever they relocate rather than remain exploited. Now calling himself Ulysses, curtains close on the one-time favourite accompanied only by his dog, Oddsee, staring at the Big House where he once proudly served as valet and awaiting his new life. The diverging groups endorse different views on what living freely means and what community entails under Freedom’s conditions.

Rep and rev-ing speculation layers the drama’s sense of futurity. Wars is structured as a triple triptych, but only Parts One, Two, and Three have been both published and regularly produced. Parks has forecasted the saga’s arc: Ulysses and Homer will both have descendants named Smith who re-engage their past upon encountering one another (Garrett 189). We will eventually learn whether Ulysses realized the future for whose sake he sacrificed his most intimate relationships in Part Three. However, even if it unfolds differently, the extant sections of Wars contain numerous doubles and permutations [End Page 28] (biological and surrogate fathers, rival suitors, a bifurcated chorus, two different choruses, paired Black men at either end of the colourist spectrum, etc.) whose discrepancies allow repetition to explore revision and its consequences. Moreover, by implanting doubles within different ecosystems of the dramatic world, Parks resists linear plot development (“From Elements” 8–11). Moving forward in Wars involves reconsiderations if not restagings of the multiple pivot points along the way and reuniting figures whose paths seemed definitively to diverge scenes or simply moments prior. The audience thus witnesses material forms whose seemingly objective “meaning” and fixed-value, naturalized, hierarchical social relations, like precious metal and organic flesh, at one moment become less fixed across these various temporalities. Denaturalized and rematerialized, their meaning and value becomes more apparently a matter of cultural performance.

Similarly, the technique functions as a mechanism for exposing Black ingenuity in speculative and practical world-making. Lincoln’s mythologization as the Great Emancipator (and the Great Shepherd) has historically overshadowed the work done by Black people to bring about their own freedom and transformed them into passive recipients of white beneficence in popular American thinking (Kendi 227). The paradigmatic Great Man of history, Lincoln, becomes integral to multiracial liberalism’s manufacturing of faith in racial justice’s inevitability – a faith that obscures the necessity of actively naming and systematically dismantling racism and that celebrates hybridity as racism’s undoing (Nyong’o 5). But emancipation can also be conceptualized as a(n ongoing) movement instead of a Man (Reidy 32). In Wars, speculations that frame a Union victory as a radical rejoinder to systemic racism ignore the insidious persistence of white supremacy and often reinstantiate its practices, however unwittingly. Recurrent language, tropes, or institutional encounters dramatize this persistence. But the technique works both ways; repetitiveness can also illuminate the persistence and variety of Black tactics for resisting anti-Black racism and reorient audiences to pay attention to the active strategizing elided by the Great Man model of historiography (see Parks, “Equation”). Given the play’s thematic interest in homes, rep and rev bears upon the history of American finance and real estate: housing discrimination recurs in new forms during Reconstruction and Jim Crow, in racial covenants, and with redlining, predatory microfinancing, and subprime mortgages.²

REMARKING FREEDOM

Divergent approaches to form and value bifurcate the chorus’s speculating in the opening scene of Wars. Admitting “[t]here is a kind of sport to be had / In the consideration of someone else’s fate” (Wars 11), the chorus gambles on what decision Hero will make at sunrise. The recurring imperative “mark [End Page 29] it” underscores the accountability one bears for a speech act, suggests targeted quarry, and anticipates the play’s interest in the racialized technology of literacy (see Dietrick, “Making It” 62). Uttered repeatedly and by nearly every character in this act, mark it increasingly sounds like market. This homophonic pun is actualized when the figures specify which of their most precious possessions will serve as collateral for their wager. The figures who believe Hero will choose to join Boss-Master, named Second and Third, put up a brass button and a spoon, respectively. Reckoning that Hero will turn Boss-Master down, Leader bets his shoes and Fourth, his banjo. The spoon and brass button are small, decorative objects that also possess use value, but the material of their manufacture makes them more precious than their size or purpose suggests. In contrast, the banjo and pair of shoes derive more value from facilitating autonomy than from the materials of their manufacture. In Part Two, the banjo will become a tool of Black resistance to exclusionary norms of artistic production, rationality, and literacy through its connection to improvisational musical genres like jazz; within Part One, the shoes metonymically recall the freedom of mobility that plantation-based slavery severely restricted. Unlike the autonomy these objects index, Second and Third treasure the metal spoon and the brass button because possessing them grants virtual proximity to whiteness. As objects from the dining room and the dressing room, this group’s collateral supposes an intimacy between enslavers and the enslaved that can confer prestige.

Futurity is implicated in these divergent logics of value. The faction led by Leader imagines that Hero’s duties on the battlefront will be identical to or worse than those on the plantation. Even if Hero should gain a measure of respect in exchange for it, his activities will see him constantly reperforming his subservience to Boss-Master. Leader thus reasons that the offer will be turned down since it doesn’t guarantee Hero will improve his station and could very well cause him to lose what he already has in Penny and Old Man. In keeping with the logic of his collateral, First extends technologies of white superiority into the future, highlighting the risks that will come from forfeiting the bonds that have helped Hero persevere thus far and escape some of slavery’s psychological damage. Envisioning that war offers Hero a chance to be valued in the ways that white men are valued, Second speculates that Hero will demonstrate that he has overcome the privations of Blackness enough to “prove up” to subjecthood, even if his duties remain the same. Second latches onto the possibility of Hero receiving medals and wearing the same uniform as Boss-Master, and specifies that his name, “Hero,” could be “wrote up in one of them great Histories” instead of in the bookkeeper’s “counting-book” (Wars 8).

The chorus’s well-being is much more directly tied to Hero’s fate than even they had assumed. On the one hand, each faction speculates about [End Page 30] Hero’s decision to convince the other to change their bets. In this way, to use financial terms, they can invest in his decision without being invested in it. Because they try to financialize Hero’s decision, Old Man will deprecate them as scavengers. But we learn eventually that this market in Hero’s decision about the war is tied to another transaction: Boss-Master has promised each of them a gold coin for waving goodbye when he sets out. The initial market thus sees the chorus trying to compound what they count on earning from the war’s encroachment on the plantation. Since we learn that Boss-Master is prone to making deals in bad faith, the chorus’s gamble includes a greater measure of risk than assumed at the play’s outset. If Hero’s decision displeases Boss-Master, instead of earning a gold coin for performing an action that can be interpreted as signifying affection, the chorus could be subject to violence when Boss-Master tries to reassert his dominance and punish Hero’s disobedience. As far as this chorus goes, the doubleness of speculation reveals more than divergent attitudes about the future of racial (in)equality: it personalizes and reanimates otherwise abstract processes.

Similar dynamics operate when the chorus evaluates Hero and Homer. Linking bodily and moral integrity to rank, Second describes Hero as “[b]ig, brave, smart, honest, and strong,” emphasizing that Hero is “as he was born: […] He ain’t missing nothing” (Wars 9). Hero accrues value by appearing to possess intrinsic advantages unchanged by time or circumstance. Though he is about Hero’s age and height, Homer limps, having recently “lost” his foot. Second introduces this fact through a warning to Leader about choosing his shoes as collateral; if he were to lose them, come winter, his foot will need amputation to stave off frostbite, leaving Leader “walking around like Homer do / But worse” (9). To those unacquainted with these figures’ backstory, this suggests that Homer lost his foot because of poor decision making. When Hero appears on stage for the first time, he boasts about his promotion to domestic work and caring for Boss-Master’s horse, adding fodder to Second’s implied critique. His speech implies Homer has been given the assignments best suited to his (dis)abilities, relegated to working outside with the disfavoured equid instead of performing the duties of a valet inside the Big House (16). To Second and Hero, the change in Homer’s body only makes apparent his inherent mental limitations and justifies his unequal treatment.³

Homer’s narrative about the day Hero mutilated his foot reveals how specious this logic is. Homer learned the truth from Boss-Master, who drunk-enly mistook him for Hero. Since the pair were initially self-emancipating together, Boss-Master promised Hero freedom in exchange for betraying Homer’s whereabouts. Changing the terms of trade, he then coerced Hero into cutting off Homer’s foot in exchange for his life. Rather than freeing him, Boss-Master used Hero as a tool and object of domination. In addition [End Page 31] to the verbal contract between Boss-Master and Hero, Homer’s story reveals that he can substitute for Hero as valet adequately enough to go unnoticed, despite the fact that they do not look alike. With regard to Hero’s assumed intrinsic value, honesty – if not also bravery – must be removed from the list of qualities Second claimed he possessed unchanged from birth. In one sense, Hero’s unmaimed and therefore unchanged body could be considered symptomatic of his cowardly fickleness. Repeating and revising its selection of collateral, the chorus attaches specific futures to particular bodily forms based on incomplete information and assumptions.

As foils for each other, Hero and Homer are not just interpreted differently by others – they attach different logics of value to the material objects around them as well. Figuring self-emancipation as stealing and the self-emancipated as stolen objects, Hero associates Homer with lack: how Homer chooses to escape his status as chattel indicates the absence of other material property – that is, maps, contracts, and real estate. Hero can only see self-emancipation leading to continued inferiority and thereby ignores the significance of Homer’s exercise of choice and the paradoxes of the social and economic value of the enslaved. Homer reckons himself otherwise: ignoring how others evaluate him using ableist, racist, or colourist criteria, he has continued to “invest” in himself. Reclaiming the time spent outside the house, he has learned to read the stars and tracks on the ground. Essentialist norms devalue Homer’s ability to read the landscape because it allows him to acquire intangible, un-surveillable intellectual property.

Moreover, this exercise of intellectual autonomy gives him new skills eerily similar to those the play has associated with a dog, Oddsee. Hero, perhaps unsurprisingly, animalizes his former friend as a “wild thing” for wanting to “[g]o running here go running there” (Wars 47) a label that recalls both Oddsee and Hero’s “wild thing” father, lynched for trying to escape the plantation prior to the drama’s action. When “mild thing” Hero counters with a claim that Boss-Master, a rational being by virtue of gender and property, will have to recognize Hero’s humanity through his performance of docility, Homer responds by narrating his mutilation, focusing on how Hero’s racial performance then mimicked Boss-Master’s canines: Hero tracked Homer down and pointed him out alongside Boss-Master’s hunting dogs then and happily carried the scraps of Colonel’s old uniform like a table-fed pet now. Because it revises the accepted account of the day, Homer’s ability to effectively narrate the story complements the information it conveys to confound the essentializing that made Hero his superior. In terms of futurity, his narrative also suggests that any investment in Boss-Master’s truthfulness is risky, unlikely to pay off in terms of legal emancipation.

When Homer refers to metal, his choice of idiom emphasizes the advantages and disadvantages of speculation’s doubleness. Homer construes [End Page 32] all of Hero’s options as “[n]othing more than the same coin / Flipped over and over” (Wars 42). In one sense, Homer’s comments allude to Boss-Master’s propensity to forge pacts in bad faith. In another sense, his comments allude to the duplex nature of physical coins and other types of money: though they have different images on their obverse and reverse, coins have a single monetary value, and this “face” or economic value can differ from the object’s physical or “melt” value. As a result of the idiom’s multiple resonances, when Homer adds that the coin “ain’t even in [Hero’s] pocket” (42), he likens the fiction of possession that applies to Hero’s trust in Boss-Master to the fictions inherent to all transactions involving money. The comment actually contains a kernel of optimism. If Hero can harness the collectivity of economic fictions, there is still hope that he can adjust to whatever the future of living under Boss-Master might bring for the purpose of liberation.

In fact, Hero’s relationship to Old Man has already operationalized a collective fiction. As Hero is Homer’s foil, Old Man is a double of Hero’s father. Reassessing the absent “luxury of blood” between the two, he figures their relationship as a “double blessing” through an arithmetic of elective kinship, which adds the sum of Hero’s existence to an imagined liaison with a woman who, he figures, would have had to be a goddess to produce such a son. Old Man transforms Hero into a demigod and a “real son through and through” (Wars 20) via a pluperfect counterfactual act of sexual reproduction. He applies financial metaphors to Hero and Homer’s relationship too, reminding them that their “words are their bonds” and that “[w]ords and deeds both” form part of their record to be checked by a supernatural accountant, “Boss-Master-Boss” (48). While he constantly bemoans Boss-Master’s coercion, his speculative vision of justice simply moves the power further up the Great Chain of Being to a Boss-Master-Boss at the apex, who, upon consulting his holy record book, will liberate the unfairly enslaved and punish others on Judgement Day. Indeed, uttering “through and through,” he reps and revs the chorus’s ableist, essentializing, and ill-informed praise of Hero. Old Man’s reliance on this essentializing logic thus extends beyond the Homer–Hero binary to naturalize the subordination of the chorus and to demean Penny as too full of “superstitious nonsense” (30) to grow out of enslavement, too female to understand the inherently male desire for war, and too independent-minded for liberation. While Hero’s biological father was, like Homer, labelled a wild thing for defying Boss-Master, Old Man is a particularly conservative “fake-father” (20) (cf., “faux-father” [Parks, America 184]).

Old Man’s reference to metal reveals a disquieting approach to community. Despite the importance he places on sexual reproduction, of Hero’s being a “real son through and through,” Old Man likens ejaculating semen to shooting out sons “into life through [one’s] own balls” (Wars 20). [End Page 33] Anticipating Hero’s admitted fear of cannon fire, Old Man conceptualizes fatherhood and familial intimacy as violence à la Topdog/Underdog (23; see also Tucker-Abramson 92). This imagery suggests that the family unit is not necessarily an exception to the prevailing norms of the social order but instead a technology for its reproduction. Old Man’s imagined sexual tryst with a Divine Woman obscures his choices under the cloud of immutability and infallibility that derives from godhead. Being even a simulacral father makes him the arbiter of what counts – pun intended – as “liberating” (Wars 30). Dismissing Penny and the chorus repeatedly, this imagined liaison up the ladder of power trumps most of his actual relationships. When he refuses to call Hero his son after learning about Hero’s dishonesty, Old Man’s rejection underscores the fictions that subtend normative families: these fictions naturalize affection, acceptance, and loyalty as matters of “blood” instead of as matters of choice and practice.⁴

Hero’s relationship with Penny offers a more flexible mode of being. The intimacy between them is most evident in their shared secrets, a morning ritual that has them waking together “[i]n the same breath” (28), and an onstage greeting where they manipulate each other’s bodies so that Hero dances and Penny flies like a bird. Yet in Old Man’s presence, Hero tries to stifle Penny and addresses her as “girl” (28–29). Whereas Old Man still trusts Boss-Master’s ability to weigh Hero’s service as worthy of freedom, Penny sees honour in the life they currently lead. They may not be legally married, since they are both enslaved, but Penny values a future in which they continue to live life by working together.⁵ Throughout the first act, Hero changes his mind about what he will do come sunrise, and nodding to both Odyssean hyper-mobility and the permutations of doubleness, he goes back and forth between fulfilling Old Man’s wishes and keeping true to his partnership with Penny.

When he espouses Old Man’s views, Hero refers to metals to commodify those closest to him as items of negligible worth. When Old Man and Hero both dismiss Penny as “woman” and “girl,” in turn, their evaluation draws on gendered power relations to activate one extradiegetic referent for her name, the penny, the US coin with the smallest monetary value currently in circulation. Similarly, Hero wonders if Oddsee “ain’t nothing,” just a “dime a dozen,” after he refuses to return home when called (17). Absent for the first two acts, Oddsee is repeatedly referred to as missing, having run away after Hero kicked him. Though Hero spent most of his waking hours with Oddsee, once his companion exerts physical autonomy, he refuses to call him anything besides “dog,” thus robbing Oddsee of the individuality that ownership bestowed upon him. It was, ultimately, an individuality offered in exchange for his obedience, and Hero’s un-naming of Oddsee grasps for the security Adamic domination offers. Reminded of the vulnerabilities of [End Page 34] intimacy, Hero retreats to the hierarchies that he believes empower him as a man and a human being through the discourse of metals.

FUTURE LESS VIVID

Parks revises all these issues in Part Two. Set in the wilderness, the stage no longer includes a cabin, and the notion of home becomes more abstract. The market in Hero’s decision in Part One anticipated not just two futures – one on the plantation and one at war – but also two types of future conditions. The first could be considered, using philological parlance, the future more vivid: will Hero accept Boss-Master’s offer to go to war, or will he reject it and stay on the plantation? The other kind of condition, the future less vivid, includes more potentiality: if Hero goes to war and the war ends in a particular way, will he be emancipated? Homer’s narrative about the night Hero mutilated his foot introduces further potentiality into the first condition. Because it costs Hero status amid the community, choosing war involves the community as much as it involves Boss-Master: leaving presents Hero with the opportunity to regain the respect of the community, and that respect might derive from being emancipated or any other action that could render Hero the man the group assumed he had been all along. Similarly, in Part Two, as every figure on stage speculates about the consequences of the war’s outcome, social bonds factor into each man’s consideration of the future.

Although only three figures are on stage in Part Two, the Yankee captive, Smith – a Black soldier passing as a white captain – functions as a double for both Hero and Colonel. In the first half of Part Two, Smith reveals essentializing beliefs in Yankeeness that mimics the Colonel’s white supremacist views. But he too changes his mind, worrying that the persistence of anti-Black racism will make it impossible for those who had been enslaved to be fully incorporated into society even if the Union were to win the war. His final speculation posits a solution of hybrid self-making that reps and revs a doubly Odyssean ruse and redeploys the discourse of metal. His experience confounding the visual regimes of white supremacy through passing has influenced the form of resistance he imagines. Because of his complexion, Hero cannot simply duplicate Smith’s example and needs to heed Smith’s careful hedging: he must rep and rev if he is to avoid the pitfalls of a hybrid futurity, remaining attentive to the normative ruses that prolong his subjugation.

Part Two begins with Colonel attempting to bond with his Union captive by offering Smith alcohol, letting him walk freely outside of the cage, and teaching him song lyrics as he plays the banjo. But Smith refuses to reciprocate and, when forced to sing along, extemporizes, saying that he will decapitate Colonel when he is free. Animalizing Smith as a “[d]irty-wounded-flea-bitten-pus-oozing Yankee” (58), Colonel decries his [End Page 35] insubordination. Eventually forcing him into the cage, attaching him to a leash, and demanding that he follow orders, Colonel dominates Smith as if he were a pet, offering him good will in exchange for obedience and docility, just as we saw with Hero. Eventually, we learn Hero actually taught Boss-Master how to be “musical” (80). Colonel’s fixation on performing this song exactly as he learned it effectively institutionalizes the ditty, attempting to standardize this co-opted practice and thereby re-value it for the purpose of whiteness. Colonel’s willingness to teach Smith, a white(-looking) man, this institutionalized version of the song reprises the play’s consideration of literacy as a technology of exclusion and not as self-evident proof of human intelligence. Smith’s knowing improvisation can be understood as a technology of Black resistance to literacy’s monopoly on meaning in turn; it is, after all, improvising that allowed him to don the jacket of his dying captain on the battlefield, thereby preserving his life upon capture (92). Refusing to ratify Colonel’s version of whiteness on principle and not because, as remains unknown to Colonel, he is not white, Colonel ties their lack of homosociality to his anxieties about being a “self-made” man without much education (65). He surmises that Smith must have been raised with a “silver spoon in his mouth” (65) using the discourse of metal to adumbrate intraracial class antagonism.

Similarly, his speculations on/about a future where Hero has a measure of autonomy reveal deep paternalistic anxieties. Smith’s proclaimed disinterest in enslaving Black people for profit rebuffs the terms of white solidarity with Colonel. In response, Colonel prods Smith into guessing how much Hero is worth in Confederate “dollars and cents” (71) to demonstrate that there is “fun” (72) to be had in speculating on the life of a Black man. By promising Hero to him if he were to guess accurately, Colonel intends to prove that, despite presumed class differences, the two men are actually racially and affectively united. Colonel makes Hero stand on a tree stump and inspects him as if he were on the auction block. With his “[c]ounting-book” in mind, Colonel discloses that, while Hero has “[n]o skills in reading and writing” (75), he can play music and faithfully obey. But when Colonel reaches for Hero’s genitals, Hero resists him, and Colonel responds by striking him with a riding crop. The moment of violence breaks the illusion of total control operating throughout the whole scene. As Hero falls from the tree stump, Boss-Master’s lynching of Hero’s father haunts this “weighing” (20), referenced earlier by Hero. Colonel recognizes that Hero would leave the plantation, given the opportunity:

Much of this scene’s bookkeeping and racialized speculation occurs in the subjunctive mode: counting how Hero should now be worth more than his purchase price; presuming community between Smith and Colonel based on racial classification; imagining the possibility of Confederate defeat leading to Hero’s departure; and voicing the uncertainty about where Hero would go and what he would choose to do after leaving the plantation. Moreover, the Colonel here exposes his dependence on Hero as a labourer, a confidante, and a better version of his now-deceased son and thus recounts Hero’s priceless-ness. Price’s inability to perfectly capture value and meaning pushes the paradoxes inherent in the monetization of the enslaved to their most sentimental breaking point. Amid all the accounting in the subjunctive, Parks emphasizes that the actor portraying Colonel should shed “real” tears, once more opening up the meaning of matter and performance to interpretation.

As a double for Boss-Master, Smith first characterizes Yankeeness as improvisation. Smith knows how colourism reveals the permeability of racial boundaries well enough. Rather than identifying racially, Smith identifies as “Yankee through and through,” with “Yankee blood […] ways and notions” (64), materializing and essentializing social bonds in the ways already discussed. His conversation with Colonel suggests that this essential Yankeeness does not preclude the owning of slaves but instead prohibits egregious displays of wealth and power. Later, Smith tells Hero how Ulysses S. Grant removed his medals and his golden aiguillette to become more familiar with his men. The story emphasizes Ulysses’ off-the-cuff cunning – a characteristic befitting his name – and gives the distaste for ostentation a practical merit that further distinguishes the Union from the Confederacy. Because Smith is also [End Page 37] in disguise, wiliness unites these two under the Union banner. But General Grant could become anonymous because the army was racially segregated, and so he was not hypervisible. Moreover, by describing General Grant’s desire to pass as a soldier, the story communicates the persistence of hierarchies within the Union. Indeed, Smith’s spontaneous donning of his deceased captain’s coat works as a racial disguise because Black men can only be privates in his regiment. Since the Confederacy did not allow Black men to enlist, that rank does distinguish one side from the other. Nevertheless, as rank has been somewhat racialized, Smith’s story discounts the stark juxtaposition of the South and North on which his speculative future depended. The North and South merely prized different performances of whiteness (see Reidy 51–55).

Hero’s conservatism probes Smith’s idealized vision of the future. Initially, Union victory seems to inaugurate radical equality, and Smith promises Hero he could own a farm or anything else he wants (Wars 94). When Hero further speculates that “[f ]reedom might be coming soon,” he specifies it will bring bodily autonomy and wages that level the playing field between landowners and others. Hero cites the vast number of poor soldiers of both races in response. When Smith extols no longer being someone else’s property, Hero asks what will happen when patrolmen try to harass him. Smith’s optimistic answer about belonging to oneself falls flat against Hero holding up his hands. Parks’s stage direction specifies that the gesture should be “[r]eminiscent of: ‘Hands up! Don’t shoot!’” (96), pointing to the ongoing history of racist police brutality against Black citizens. Smith eventually admits his fear that Black people will never be fully enfranchised in the United States.

In light of this uncertainty, Smith dispenses with essential Yankeeness to espouse hybrid self-making:

Smith’s language is multivalent. By stating that he and Hero could steel themselves and make themselves like metal on the inside in order to survive whatever future anti-Black racism might bring, he recalls Homer’s attempts at self-emancipation both through homophony (“stealing” himself [67]) and through a shared approach to autonomous choices that evade white surveil-lance. Rather than a superficial change, like donning a different jacket, Smith insinuates a semi-permanent transformation. Instead of privileging the human body as a unitary entity, by steeling themselves, they would not strictly be flesh “through and through.” An iron alloy that superficially resembles silver, steel is significantly less costly than the precious metals referred to in currency debates: its low production cost, coupled with its strength, made it indispensable for the construction of American cities. In another sense, Smith’s multiple “maybes” and his cautious addition of “starts” hedges his bets on this ruse. Finally, Smith’s wording makes apparent the doubleness of his speculations by punning on “broke.” If in the present, Hero and Smith exist in poverty, then given the persistent “stamp of the marketplace,” Smith speculates that they will become even more economically precarious when Freedom comes. Instead of creating despair, this fear motivates Smith to invent a more radical strategy. This hybridity “burns something down” insofar as it goes beyond the parameters of subjecthood Smith first imagined his future operating within to start anew.

ONCE AND FUTURE KING

The end of Part Two and the beginning of Part Three rep and rev on Smith’s suggested hybridity. Part Two concludes with Hero secretly unleashing Smith from captivity. But before Smith departs, he gives Hero his Union jacket and swears him in as a private in the First Kansas Colored Regiment. Wearing the Union jacket beneath his Confederate “scraps,” Hero thus reperforms the trick Smith once improvised to save his life. But since Smith imposes the jacket on him, the trick does not, in itself, attest to Hero’s willingness to challenge authority. Similarly, when Hero’s dog Oddsee returns to the plantation, he is hybrid in form and manner. A human character in a dog suit delivering lines in English in between tail-wagging, panting, and licking, Oddsee first seems to confound human norms of propriety. Moreover, because he has enjoyed the very autonomy that enslavement has denied his human companions, he fills in plot points between scenes by narrating just as oddly. Through him we learn about Hero’s adventures during the war and how Boss-Master died. However, Oddsee’s performance of hybridity and autonomy eventually conforms to human ideals about canine loyalty. It realizes the hybridity Smith imagines as a deferral rather than a revolution.

Of course, Oddsee’s model of hybridity is not the only one in the scene. It develops alongside the formation of a new collective on the plantation. At [End Page 39] some point after the events dramatized in Part Two, Old Man has also died and the old chorus of the enslaved Black people has disbanded. Parks’s Brechtian casting in the play’s original production made the actor from that chorus perform as Oddsee while the others made up a fugitive community using the Texas plantation as a momentary safe haven. This chorus operationalizes a different set of ethics. Once seen as Hero’s devalued alter ego, this chorus appreciates Homer’s wherewithal. Early in the scene, Homer laments that he was not born a lizard since humans do not have the natural ability to regenerate lost limbs. But the chorus reminds Homer of the skills he has acquired through hard work on and for himself, insisting that he could reframe this aspect of his character as his nature as well. Though they are literate enough to counterfeit proof of their emancipation, they view Homer’s literacy of the ground and the sky as crucial for their journey northward.

This chorus likewise appreciates Penny. Just like her Odyssean analogue, she has vivid dreams. Rather than belittle these dreams as “superstitious nonsense” as Old Man once did, the chorus recognizes that her oneiromancy undoes literacy’s monopoly on meaning (“You’re reading a page that ain’t wrote yet”) and explains that her “value that would be better spent in a better place” (119). Penny’s literacy can escape white surveillance and does not depend on fixed forms for its performance. In addition to making writing’s belatedness more apparent, equating her talents with literacy elevates Penny and the ephemerality of dreams without resting the authority of interpretation in a patriarch or his substitute.⁶

When Hero returns calling himself Ulysses, after the general, he tries to re-establish the hierarchies that privilege male landowners and thus fails to incorporate improvisation into his mode of living. Ulysses feels empowered both by the objects he has to give and the copy of the Emancipation Proclamation he intends to present to the group, freeing them in the process. “[L]ike a king graciously holding forth” (144), the stage directions tell us, he commands everyone to gather around and stalls as he “savors his power […] and their expectant looks” (147), a delay that disturbingly recalls the circumstances of the first June-teenth in Texas. After announcing his new name, Ulysses relishes his ostensible ability to decide for himself – but every change he makes recreates things he and the audience have already seen within the play and thus “feels right” (129). If, in Part One, Hero claimed Boss-Master dangled freedom before him “like a beautiful carrot” for his horse (21), in the final scene, he reperforms this trick with the Proclamation in his pocket as the carrot. A string of brass buttons multiplies Third’s wagered button from Part One. The alabaster shoe mould for Homer is no doubt costly, but – white and in the shape of a foot – it is a constant reminder of Ulysses’ betrayal and the racism that prompted it. The silver-tipped spade given to Penny is an enlarged, horticultural version of [End Page 40] Second’s spoon in Part One, the silver spoon Colonel refers to in Part Two, and the new shiny spoon Ulysses takes from his satchel. But with it comes rules: Ulysses tells Penny he wants flowers as well as vegetables sown and that she will have help to realize his dream. Blaming Penny for their childlessness, Ulysses married a woman named Alberta before returning to the plantation. He gifts Alberta to Penny as a helpmeet in the garden and for the production of children, insensitive to Penny’s refusal to be so easily replaced. Knowing that he has been legally emancipated, Ulysses begins his emancipated life by duplicating the plantation economy and confounding business relationships with other kinds of intimacy. He claims land, sources unremunerated labour, hoards precious objects, makes way for heirs, and devalues his beloved’s utility to his self-making. In so doing, Ulysses assumes both Boss-Master’s role and his insecurities about fertility. His speculating plots locate heteropatriarchal norms so firmly in the future that he undermines the most important relationship he has in the present. In this light, he is unsurprisingly less moved by Old Man’s death than Boss-Master’s.

The self-emancipating chorus uses the discourse of metal to think more creatively about its next moves. The members of the chorus know the “old stories” that complicate what freedom implies (151). They cautiously speculate that the streets elsewhere might be “paved with gold” (Parks, Venus 15). The group recognizes it ought to continue speculating about where freedom is even after arriving in the North. The oral tradition becomes their “North Star,” replacing a geographic telos with a shared mode of enquiry capable of sustaining an intergenerational quest and building something different, more beneficial to their well-being. These stories – and the social supports that facilitate their continued transmission – constitute their wealth in common.

Consoling Ulysses after Penny chooses to join them, Oddsee explains that fidelity is as unnatural to human beings as speech is to dogs, that what you are “born to do” can’t be “broke” (Wars 153). Once a model for being otherwise, the dog now chooses to stay by Ulysses’ side, even after being kicked for speaking out of turn. Echoing Smith’s words while materializing what he imagined, Oddsee’s essentialist understanding of caninity and humanity ignores the decisions that pushed Penny to leave. He locks himself into the abusive subjugation-cum-domestication that necessitated his disappearance before the drama’s plot began and thus undercuts hybridity as self-evident proof of equality. Metal reappears: Oddsee is holding onto an object that is also hybrid in form, the silver-tipped spade.

The play’s ending highlights the cost of Hero / Ulysses’ overinvestment in material property. Though literate, he has failed to notice a theme that recurs in almost every story he has heard. The Grant legend, Smith’s plans, Old Man’s imagined liaisons, and Boss-Master’s breakdown all express a deep desire for [End Page 41] community. Grant wants to be among, not above, his soldiers; Smith does not mind losing his feet so long as he can embrace his family; Old Man relishes surrogacy; and Boss-Master can’t fathom life without Hero. Trying to secure a physical house and heirs, Hero’s conservative speculations have cost him Penny’s love and membership in a collective whose practical skills he already values (e.g., literacy) or could benefit from learning (e.g., community-building). At the end of the play, with the Emancipation Proclamation in his pocket still unannounced, Hero is therefore, as Smith foresaw, “without a penny to [his] name” (99).

CODA – FUTURES MARKET

Part Three’s final stage directions specify that the play concludes with “Ulysses look[ing] toward Boss-Master’s house, ready to undertake his new life” (Wars 159). Since the house is off stage and unrepresented, Ulysses’ glance also looks beyond a specific structure and the plantation economy it symbolizes to a more amorphous future.

When Parts One, Two, and Three of Wars premiered in 2014, Barack Obama was in his second presidential term, and the United States had not fully recovered from the Great Recession precipitated by the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. Through its role in that crisis, speculative finance had continued to racialize homeownership. Obama’s election to the presidency connected the cultural meaning of metal to hybrid futurity’s limitations. Through the coincidence of the first Black president in the White House and the racially disproportionate impact of that crisis, Black experiences had once again revealed the paradoxes of capitalism.

The subprime mortgage crisis depended on the racialization of the American dream. Racial covenants and redlining once excluded Black Americans from homeownership and the long-term security it promised (see Edwards; Garrett-Scott). This crisis grew from their “predatory inclusion” into the promised land of real estate (Taylor 5). Decades of deregulation counteracted civil rights legislation in the 1960s and 1970s, allowing lending schemes to despoil borrowers without breaking the law (see Wyly). Many borrowers were women of colour who qualified for standard loans but were systematically steered toward subprime mortgages, which were then divvied up into tranches and sold as securities (Hill 134–37). Eventually, “securities based on the sub-prime market ceased overnight to be convertible into ready cash or other assets,” having lost “credible claims to real-world value” (Haiven 171). Fictions were uncovered. Crisis ensued. As policy-makers and stakeholders accounted for the crisis’s differential impact, borrowers were often blamed for living “beyond their means” and financial illiteracy. Crumbling infrastructure, educational inequities, or incentivized customer profiling was often left uncritiqued (Hill 134–37). Normative frameworks for subjecthood as economic agents, as [End Page 42] citizens, and as adults reproduced racial subjugation. The crisis’s roots in securities tied to financialized subprime mortgages prompted many to reconsider what kind of future homeownership actually realized and for whom.

At the same time, Obama’s historic presidency had deflated dreams of racial justice based on notions of hybrid futurity. Tavia Nyong’o has analyzed how Obama’s campaign attempted to capitalize on his “hybrid background” to suggest that America could “transcend” race by electing him to the highest office in the land (1–5). Instead of transcendence, his relocation to the White House led to a “surge of interest in gold among right-wing activists,” many of whom conceptualized gold as more reliable and real than this inflated leader and his economy (O’Malley, Face 213). Correlations between Obama’s election and the far right’s marketization of gold could suggest, as O’Malley has argued, that “[t]he gold standard offers not just stable prices but the moral purity of the founding fathers and a fantasy of ‘natural’ hierarchies” (Face 213).

Counter to (neo-)liberal multiculturalism’s logic, which assumes that Black Americans could “prove up” sufficiently to “earn” their equality, President Obama’s presidency did not resolve anti-Black racism, in principle or in practice. He was, due to his own experiences in office as well as the duty the office placed upon him to respond to the financial collapse, at the centre of what Anita Hill labelled “the crisis of home” (116) – a crisis of a simultaneously gendered and racialized dislocation, disinvestment, and disenfranchisement (see also Hill 166–67; Skockpol and Jacobs; Reidy 267–71). Hill repeatedly speculates about how various networks, communities, and coalitions necessary could cooperate to overcome the longstanding discrepancy between the promise of America and its reality for racialized citizens and thus “radically unfurl,” as Aimee Bahng puts it (14), the systems that birthed it. As with emancipation, the crisis of home was one that Obama, even with his “hybrid background,” was never going to solve alone. No Great Man ever could have.