THE BLOODSTAINED DISTANCE ALISA SOLOMON Kay (like Kennedy’s own mother) is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy white man and a young black woman. She is consumed by the conflicting stories she’s heard about her mother’s death in Cincinnati, a few weeks after Kay was born: sometimes Kay has been told that her mother, Mary, shot herself, sometimes that she’d been found in a freight elevator, stabbed to death. The murderer, relatives elaborated, was her father, Charles. What’s more, they said, Charles (as if fulfilling an order by the evil queen in “Snow White”) put Mary’s heart in a green glass box and brought it back to Montefiore. Did he take the stilled, fist-sized organ as a gruesome trophy? As a twisted keepsake of a love he could not permit himself to express and sustain? As an emblem of his shame? One thing is certain: Kay came into the world in the turbulent slipstream of racial and gender violence. So did Christopher, but from the other side. Inchoately, he is trying to piece together the reach of the structural racism his forebears helped to erect in Montefiore. He knows, for instance, that his grandfather designed their segregated trains: “Jim Crow car here, the straw seats the small toilet and the White car velvet seats,” he indicates, showing Kay items in the storeroom, whose contents glow ominously through the play like shallowly buried radioactive waste. A miniature model of Montefiore shares space with “White” and “Colored” signs, old photographs, books, maps and other markers of the town’s civic identity. Kennedy’s mother came from Montezuma, Georgia—the inspiration for Montefiore—and the playwright visited every summer as a child. “That town has a mythic quality to it,” she once told the playwright SuzanLori Parks in an interview. He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box proposes Montefiore as America in microcosm: sustained by white supremacy, sexual double standards, and the unrestrained license—and violence—of wealthy men. Christopher knows, too, that his father, Harrison Aherne, had children by three different black women, all three of the mothers now dead. Aherne built a Negro cemetery, where he buried them and marked the sites: “They are the only 10
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Nigra women in Montefiore to have tombstones on their graves,” he says. Why his father tends that cemetery perplexes Christopher. Even more unfathomably, he wonders why his father went to Germany, taking Christopher along when he was 10—that is, around 1934. He vaguely recalls going to a parade, and hearing discussions about Montefiore’s library “and how colored were strictly forbidden to enter.” He remembers German visitors to his family’s home in Georgia. What Christopher can’t figure out, Kennedy’s audiences can: Montefiore served as a prototype for Nazi planning. The idea is not farfetched. The historian James Whitman, for one, has shown how in the early 1930s, Nazi lawyers looked to the United States for examples in drafting the Nuremberg laws. They were most inspired by America’s racebased immigration policies and, especially, by antimiscegenation statutes. “America was a beacon of anti-miscegenation law, with thirty different state regimes,” Whitman writes in Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. “There were no other models for miscegenation legislation that the Nazis could find in the world . . .” As Kay trundles in a train toward her tragic fate, one can’t help but hear the relentless clatter of box cars crossing Europe. Kennedy is not drawing an analogy between Jim Crow and genocide; she is laying bare the tracks of brutality that both run on. History seems to have trapped Christopher and Kay inside their narrative legacies, boxing in their beating hearts. How they might make a life together remains their shared and unresolved mystery. And ours.• ALISA SOLOMON is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she directs the MA concentration in Arts & Culture. A longtime theater critic, political journalist, and dramaturg (most recently for Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field), she is the author of Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism) and of Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, an “editor’s choice” in the New York Times Book Review and winner of the Jewish Journal Book Prize, the George Freedley Memorial Award (Theatre Library Association), and the Kurt Weill Prize. Alisa was a theater critic and staff writer at the Village Voice (1983 – 2004), and has written for the New York Times, Nation, newyorker.com, The Forward, Theater, and other publications.