Warning: The play discussed uses the “n” word. I have not edited the language quoted directly from the play.

    I just finished a book of Sartre’s plays. The last play in the book, “The Respectful Prostitute,” really struck me, so I’m writing about it.

    At first, I didn’t know what to think about the story. I could see that it was set in the U.S. in the South involving a character described as “the Negro,” so I figured it was based on something having to do with race relations in America. Once I started reading, it became apparent that it was loosely based on the “Scottsboro Boys” case that happened in the 1930’s. If you have never heard of this, PBS has a pretty good explanation and links to other sources here.

    A quick version of what happened in the Scottsboro case is that there was a scuffle between a group of Caucasian men and African American men. One of the Caucasian men was injured and reported the incident to the police. A mob of armed Caucasians met the train in the next station and the African American men were taken to the police station. It is actually a misnomer to call them men, because they were boys. The youngest was 12. The oldest was 18. Two poor, white women were also found on the train. To avoid being prosecuted for sleeping with the Caucasian men and to avoid any suspicion of having slept with the African American boys, they lied and said they were raped. The boys received a grossly unfair series of trials, and it became quite evident over the course of the trial that the women were lying. Eventually, much later on, one of the women would admit to as much. The publicity of the trial and their virtue as Caucasian women when compared to the lives of African American boys turned them into overnight celebrities, no longer the low class women found on the train that night. In the end, the boys spent many years in prison. Some of them died, and most of them were unable to recover from the trauma after being released. They weren’t all officially pardoned until November of last year. Up until that time only one was pardoned (out of 9), and that didn’t happen until 1976, forty-six years after the false accusation.

    Here the Caucasian men on the train were men of some importance and one of them shoots one of the African American men after getting punched in a scuffle started by the Caucasian men. Furthermore, the shooter had sexually assaulted the woman, Lizzie, in this story. Instead of being found on the train, Lizzie blends in to the town and the play opens on her having finished a one night stand with Fred.

    Fred is the Senator’s son and is the cousin of the shooter. Fred is also a scoundrel. His main objective for sleeping with Lizzie is to get her to sign a false testimony. He is aggressive and disrespectful towards women. He grabs Lizzie violently at various points throughout the play. At one point he puts his hands around her throat and fantasizes about killing her, and after lynching an innocent African American man (after failing to find who they were looking for), he goes back to Lizzie’s house undecided as whether to “kill [her] or rape [her].” He also seems blood thirsty in general. He describes his cousin as a good man even though his cousin is a sexual deviant and a murderer.

    Lizzie is from a low class background, but she has the same characteristics as women in Sartre’s other plays. She is strong and witty, in a way, often bullying the man in the play, but she is easily confused and unsure of her position. For instance, after the threat of force and jail time have proven insufficient to get Lizzie to sign the false confession, it is Senator Clarke who is successful without employing either tactic. He tells Lizzie to imagine him as the embodiment of Uncle Sam and that if Uncle Sam were there, he would say that that although he loves the Negro, he does nothing to pay him back for raising him with his “dawdl[ing], sing[ing], and buy[ing] of pink and green suits….does he live like a man? I would not even notice if he died.” Then he compares him to his other son, who has, admittedly, done something bad by killing a Negro, but who is “one hundred percent American”; who “studied at Harvard”; who “employs two thousand workers in his factor; and who is “a leader, a firm bulwark against the Communists, the labor unions, and the Jews.” Throughout the Senator’s narrative, Lizzie exclaims how well he talks. He then appeals to her vanity. Saying what a hero she will be to the boy’s mother (the Senator’s sister); saying how his sister would cry with joy at her son’s release; and saying she would always think of her and “love [her], from a distance, as her very own child.”

Lizzie later discovers that she has been swindled when the Senator’s sister sends a one hundred dollar bill in payment for Lizzie’s night with Fred, instead of heartfelt note of gratitude, but she is taken in again later on in the story. Fred discovers “the negro” in Lizzie’s apartment and gives chase. She hears two shots ring out from the street. Believing that Fred has shot the man both knew to be innocent, Lizzie takes the revolver and aims it at him as he comes through the door. She intends to shoot him, and Fred says the following,

“The first Clarke cleared the whole forest, just by himself; he killed seventeen Indians with his bare hands before dying in an ambush; his son practically built this town; he was friends with George Washington, and died at Yorktown, for American independence….My father is a Senator. I shall be senator after him…We have made this country, and its history is ours. There have been Clarkes in Alaska, in the Philippines, and in New Mexico. Can you dare shoot all of America?...A girl like you can’t shoot a man like me.”

Lizzie is overcome by Fred who takes the gun. He then offers to put her up in a house where she will have money, where he will meet her three times a week after dark, where she must never leave, and all this subject to the condition that she is never able to leave the house save the gardens surrounding it. She reluctantly acquiesces, and that is where the audience is left.

Obviously, these passages speak to more than just Lizzie’s naivety and its portrayal of women in general. They speak to two other issues: (1) class systems in America and (2) race in America.

Class

    The relationship between Lizzie and the other characters can be viewed as an allegory for class systems in America. Lower class Americans are easily wooed by the elitist talking points that extol the ideas of sacrificing the individual for the greater good of the trickle-down effect. We are awed by “how well they speak” as they cut benefits for the needy, strip away Constitutional protections, and shift the heavy tax burden on to the low and middle classes. We are none the wiser, until, like Lizzie, we receive the cheap offer of a one hundred dollar bill.
Race
    The quoted passages also embody the attitude that has been felt and supported in this country for hundreds of years, namely that this country was built by and for Caucasian men, more specifically the elite Caucasian men. Caucasian men came and stole land from the Native Americans, but they are the real Americans. Slaves were brought over to America and broke their backs working fields and other hard labor, but they are not the real Americans, it is the Caucasian farmers who are. Caucasians came here and took advantage of the American dream, but Mexicans who try to do the same are not allowed to do so. Instead, we should put up a big fence to kick all of them out and we have no qualms over separating families and doing whatever is necessary to make sure they don’t get a piece of the pie.

    History supports this point of view. Consider the Dredd Scott decision, where the Supreme Court refused to acknowledge an African American man as a citizen. Justice Taney wrote, “with the slave, with one devoid of rights or capacities, civil or political, there could be no pact; that one thus situated could be no party to, or actor in, the association of those possessing free will…He could no form no part of the design, no constituent ingredient or portion of a society based upon common, that is, upon equal interests and powers.” The hypocrisy here is baffling, because to say that slaves could form no constituent ingredient completely ignores that the Constitution provides that they were to be counted as 3/5 of man for the purpose of apportioning representatives.

    Further, there are still echoes of this same sentiment today. There is the selective enforcement in the war on drugs, and just yesterday, a Missouri Grand Jury refused to indict the officer responsible for shooting an unarmed black teenager. Every time an unarmed black man is shot and justice is not served, it sends the message that black lives are worthless. It sends the same message that is seen in the Senator’s portrayal of Uncle Sam- the U.S. does not notice when black lives are taken. It is only when the black community cries out for justice that people start to pay attention, and, in response, the media and the responsible party do everything they can to justify the action, so they start to vilify the victim. They note that the person was wearing or hoody, or he shouldn’t have been running away, or he was accused of a crime so that must have meant he was dangerous. This is no different from Fred saying, “[a] nigger has always done something.” We may not be as blunt in our words, but our actions have the same effect.     

    For this reason, black men, in a sense, have been emasculated. This is illustrated through “the Negro” here. He has no control over his destiny whatsoever throughout the play. He cannot rely on the lack of evidence to exonerate him, so he must plead with Lizzie not to lie in court. After she tells the lie, he is on the run from the angry white mob that is on “the nigger hunt.” He trembles with fear as they approach her apartment to look for “the nigger.” He talks of how they will whip his eyes and light him on fire with gasoline. He refuses to take the revolver offered to him, because he is so petrified by “the white folks” that he is unable to act against them for fear of the retaliation were he to be unsuccessful and remain alive. Lizzie calls him a sucker.

    Maybe this is why the unfortunate rioting happened in Ferguson yesterday. Maybe they’re tired of being suckers. So, the people of Ferguson lashed out against the police. Is there no empathy for the plight of these people who were tired of hearing that their lives don’t matter? If the Jews had revolted at the hands of Hitler and burned down buildings, would we say that they were wrong? As a side note, Hitler used America as an example as proof that the success of a nation depends on as little race mixing as possible. Aren’t you so glad that we could make such a great impression?

    Obviously, it is not fair to compare all police officers to one deranged man. There are good officers out there. But the history of our Nation and our current situation suggests that, in certain neighborhoods and to a certain population, the police are more of an oppressor, rather than a protector. Do they do this consciously? I would argue for the most part the answer is no, but they see people of color and the stereotypes that have been fed to all of us are immediately at work. The fact that police departments tend to be majority white, even in majority black neighborhoods, only exacerbates this problem.

    In the end, I feel sad that I can read a play written in the forties and still feel that it is so relevant. But, in the words of my friend Jamila Lee, I will not give up hope.