My Play, Wedding Band by Alice Childress

MY PLAY, WEDDING BAND

ALICE CHILDRESS

Iwrote my play Wedding Band as a remembrance of the intellectual poor. The poor, genteel, sensitive people who are seamstresses, coal carriers, candymakers, sharecroppers, bakers, baby caretakers, housewives, foot soldiers, penny-candy sellers, vegetable peelers, who are somehow able to sustain within themselves the poet’s heart, sensitivity and appreciation of pure emotion, the ability to freely spend tears and laughter without saving them up for a rainy day. I was raised by and among such people living on the poorest blocks in Harlem and have met many more on the boundary lines of the segregated life—the places where black, white, brown, yellow and red sometimes meet—in bus stations, train and plane waiting rooms, on lines where we pay gas, light, and telephone bills.

Wedding Band kept coming at me from hidden, unexpected places, the characters called on my mind while I was trying to write something else, demanding attention, getting together, coming into being. It was a play I did not want to write, about people few others wanted to hear from… I thought. It somehow seemed to be answering back all the stage and screen stories about rich, white landowners and their “octoroon” mistresses.

Such stories meant nothing in my life. I am a black woman of light complexion, have no white relatives except on the other side of slavery, and have experienced the sweetness, joy and bitterness of living almost entirely within the Harlem community. I really did not wish to beat the drum for an interracial couple and yet here they were in front of me, not giving a damn about public opinion of this or that past day. It was like being possessed by rebel spirits, ideas clinging, taking over and starting my day for me. Instead of a joyous experience, writing the play became a trial, a rough journey through reams of paper. Characters know; they won’t be fooled, not even by their medium, the writer. They allow you to write them, pushing you along until they’re satisfied that they’ve done their thing to the utmost of your ability.

From Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, edited by Kathleen Betsko & Rachel Koenig. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987

Brittany Bradford (Julia Augustine) and Rosalyn Coleman (Lula Green) in Theatre for a New Audience's production of Wedding Band, directed by Awoye Timpo. Photo by Hollis King.