Critical Noir: Sambo Must Die
By Mark Anthony Neal
“[T]he lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal,” said Mr. Jell-O. But just who are those people? Pookie? Nay-Nay? Them niggas over there? Our folk go on and on about notions that the black community is not unified today, but here’s the deal: Unity has always been a myth, while solidarity was little more than a strategy — for some. No one understood this phenomenon better than playwright Charles Fuller, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, ‘A Soldier’s Play’ (1981) more than highlighted the class tensions that exist in black America. It fully captured the utter disdain and hatred that many black elites have for “those niggas.” And as we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the screen version, it’s more than obvious that black America is still trying to come to terms with the class pretensions within our community that, in some cases, rival the racial antagonisms found across the color line.
When the film version of Fuller’s drama opened in September 1984 it had much of the original cast intact, including future Academy Award winners Denzel Washington and Adolph Caesar, who reprised their roles as Private First Class Melvin Peterson and Tech Sergeant Vernon C. Waters, respectively. The one notable change was the casting of Howard Rollins as Capt. Richard Davenport, three years after his Academy nomination for his role as Coalhouse Walker in the film version of E.L. Doctrow’s ‘Ragtime.’ Capt. Davenport is dispatched, by the Pentagon, to a military base in Louisiana to investigate the murder of Sergeant Waters, a classic over-achiever who is driven as much by his desire to represent the “best of the race” as he desires the respect of his white peers. The film opens with the drunk Waters lying on the ground yelling, “They still hate you!” — meaning his white peers — before being shot by an unknown assailant.
Though ‘A Soldier’s Story’ delves into lots of issues, the critical tension throughout is the relationship between C.J. Memphis and Waters. Memphis (portrayed by the late Larry Riley) was renowned throughout the base because of his likable, non-threatening personality, his skill as a baseball player (the “colored” platoon’s baseball team was purportedly the best in the armed services), and his propensity for breaking out a blues tune, from time to time. But Waters saw something very different in Memphis. As one character tells Captain Davenport during his investigation, the sergeant “despised [Memphis]…he’d hide it, ’cause everybody in the company liked that boy so much. But underneath — it was a crazy hate.” Waters expressed his hate for Memphis one night at a bar where the latter was performing, rhetorically asking, “Do you know the damage one ignorant Negro can do?” and later recounting his father’s belief that, “We got to turn our back on his kind…close our ranks to the chitlins, the collard greens — the corn bread style.”
Waters’ mouthful said a great deal about the sentiments of generations of black achievers, who simply despise the fact that their desires to be recognized as “fit” for the American and global mainstream are undermined by “those niggas.” Sound familiar?
Adolph Caesar won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1985 for his portrayal of Waters — reward perhaps for bringing to life what was, at the time, one of black America’s “dirty little secrets.” Writing about the film in 1985, Armond White observed that the film’s “issues are inescapably contemporary — one can think nostalgically about anything except identity and suffering.”
Mr. Jello may not have used the words “nigga” or “sambo,” but we all understood who and what he was talking about. At a time when Mr. Jello and the like implore the “niggas” and the “sambos” to “hold up their end of the bargain,” it may be useful to remember exactly who failed to hold up their end of the bargain first.
October 27, 2004