Of Hurt & Hate

Blues for Mr. Charlie, by James Baldwin, sabotages most of its own good purposes. It means to be an eloquent cry from the heart of the Negro's hurt but spends itself showering rhetorical spleen on the white man. It aims to seize the conscience but grabs the playgoer's lapel instead, like a standing grievance committee. It strives to be fresh, but its story of Southern shotgun justice is overly familiar, and what powers Mr. Charlie is not its topical subject but a contemporary mood, the taut-nerved spirit of violence that seethes through the play's language and characters. When Baldwin finally relates the problem of color to the problem of evil, he shows more childish spite than tragic sense: "If I ever see Him, I'll spit in His face, in God's face."

God's white creatures spit bullets in Mr. Charlie's small Southern town. Baldwin's battle of the races pits Lyle Britten (Rip Torn), a poor-white grocery-store keeper, against Richard Henry (Al Freeman Jr.), an ex-dope addict recently returned from New York and the son of the local Negro pastor. Both men are deformed spirits, the white envenomed by poverty, the Negro by hatred of his father and his father's compromises with oppression. Arrogant, mocking, indefensible in his behavior, Henry humiliates Britten in front of Britten's wife. The white man demands an apology, gets none and murders the Negro. Brought to trial through the zeal of a "renegade white" newspaper owner (Pat Hingle), the killer is automatically acquitted.

The killers behind the killer interest Baldwin most, the racial attitudes that have stunted the Negro's life. Two somewhat contradictory propositions dominate the play. One is that social impotence through the denial of his rights robs the Negro of manhood. The other is that white sexual envy of Negro virility is a major motivation behind race hatred. In the second instance, it is not clear whether Baldwin is indulging himself in a myth-stereotype or deliberately perpetuating it.

The special disappointment of Blues for Mr. Charlie is that Baldwin has a fine intelligence capable of far subtler reflections on the color question and the universal fate of being human. The thaw in race relations permits Negroes to say how much they hate whites. The pity of it is that in the talky span of almost three hours, Baldwin says so little else worth saying.

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