UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA BAHIA

INSTITUTO DE LETRAS

DEPARTAMENTO DE LETRAS GERMÂNICAS

LET A98

O TEATRO DA LÍNGUA INGLESA

SHEILA PATRICIA BITENCOURT SILVA

SALVADOR

JUNE, 2012
 SHEILA PATRICIA BITENCOURT SILVA

SOUL GONE HOME:

A play made by one single act and some strategies of protest.

Work presented to the Letters and

Arts course in the discipline LET A98
– O Teatro da Língua Inglesa, to
Professor Denise Carrascosa, as a
final evaluation of the semester
2012.1.

SALVADOR

JUNE, 2012
Soul Gone Home: a play made by one single act and some strategies of
protest.

Soul Gone Home is a play made by one single act and it has only four
characters: the mother, her son and two men. The plot is about the complex
relationship between a mother and her dead son, which returns from the death
to claim his life condition and the way he was treated by her mother while he
was alive. The setting is described as a bare, ugly and dirty place with a body of
a negro youth lying.

The one act play was written in 1937 by Langston Hughes, an African-American
playwright that is considered one of the foremost interpreters of racial
relationship in the U.S.A, especially because he depicted realistically the
ordinary lives of black Americans.

Although this play is formed only by one act and has only two main characters
that discuss about their complex relationship, it could represent a big metaphor
where the mother would represent the nation and the son would represent the
all Afro-American sons of the United States that claims for their rights that were
neglected by their mother, the nation.

The beginning of the play portrays the suffering of a mother that lost her son.
She screams and asks God why He took his son from her. She also asks her
dead son to talk to her. The dialog begins when he dead son, Rannie, answer
her mother: “I wish I wasn’t dead, so I could speak to you. You been a hell of a
mamma!”

When the odd dialog between the mother and the son begins, the dead son
starts to offend the mother and blames her for the events that culminated in his
death. In the beginning, the mother acted defensively, but as these characters
are being constructed by dialogs, it is possible to see the transformation of
mother’s discourse through them, since the beginning until the end.

Although the son is dead, the author shows that the words can be more
effective than acts in some cases, and he uses strategically the Black English in
the dialog; a language that is itself a protest and also a language that reinforces
a black identity.
So, the protest begins in the son speaks:

“You been a hell of a mamma!”; “Mamma, you know you ain’t done me right”;
“You been a bad mother to me”; “You never did feed me good”; “I found out you
was a hell of a mamma puttin’ me out in the cold to sell papers soon as I could
walk”; “I had T.B. cause I didn’t have enough to eat never when I were a child.”;
“Who wants to come into this world hongry and go out the same way?”.

These son’s speaks would perfectly represent a claim of Black people to their
American nation, their mother. They claim for their basic rights that were
neglected. They claim food, healthy, protection, they claim love and they claim
their rights to live.

In the beginning the mother denies the charges when she says: “Me that
suffered the pains o’ death to bring you into this world!”; “I love you Rannie”.

But then the masks begin to fall:

“You never was no use to me”; “How could I help havin’ you, you little bastard?”;
“Now, just when you get big enough to work and do me some good, you have to
go and die…”

Through these excepts above, it is possible to see the complaint of the author
that portrayed the feelings and actions from a nation to their black sons. The
nation treated Black people as objects and they served only to work; they were
raised in order to work, to serve to a nation that considered them as bastards.
They had not the right even to death.

In the end of the play, when the two white men that work in City Health
Employees arrives to get the body, the mother said: “Don’t let them white men
see you dead, sitting up here quarrelin’ with your mother.”

These two white men characters represent the white society that would not
admit a black man claiming their rights to the nation. In other words, the son
should keep quiet as a dead body.

The last speak of the mother confirms her real attitude and feelings when she
says: “You was a hell of a no-good son, I swear!”.
Thus, the tale between a mother that loved her son and took care of him was
deconstructed as well as the tale between the American nation and their black
sons.

_______________________________________________________________

References:

 HUGHES, Langston. The Langston Hughes reader: The selected

writings of Langston Hughes. Ed. George Braziller, Inc. New York, 1958.
 HUGHES, Langston. Five Plays by Langston Hughes edited with an
introduction by Webster Smalley. Ed.Indiana University Press.
Bloomington, 1963.