Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Truth is Ugly to See On Stage - and on the Screen

 

Psychoanalytic/Psychological understanding of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Psychoanalysis of Film, Psychoanalysis of Theater

 

One of the most remarkable things about the famous doll studies of Mamie and Kenneth Clark – the studies that were instrumental in the Supreme Court’s decision to integrate schools in the United States – is that the data suggests that the African American kids taught in the segregated South had a greater sense of being lesser than whites than African American kids taught in integrated Northern schools, but they were more comfortable with this state of affairs.  The African American kids in northern integrated schools were more distressed about their status as second class citizens than those in Southern segregated schools.  And yet the data from this study – which suggested both that African Americans felt themselves to be lesser than whites and that this was exacerbated by being in contact with them in school, was used as pivotal data as the basis for the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court Case that led to laws requiring desegregation of schools.

August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, especially as it is depicted in the recently released film starring Viola Davis as Ma Rainey and with Chadwick Boseman’s final performance as Levee Green dramatizes this split.  Ma Rainey is a successful Black Musician living the high life in the 1920s.  She has established herself in the South through word of mouth as a tremendous performer, moving from town to town and performing in tents.  Levee Green is a northern trumpet player, a performer in Ma Rainey’s band, who is tremendously talented as both a player and a songwriter.  He wants to rise above his station as a simple band member, and he trusts that his talent will allow him to do that.  His band mate’s are not so certain that his talent will sustain him.

We watched the filmed version of this play when it first came out in December on Netflix and, though I started to write on it then, I didn’t really have a sense of how to articulate what was presented on the screen.  But as I began to read a book called Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction, it became clearer to me how I was thinking about what is being depicted in this play/movie.  That said, a lot of time has elapsed, and some of the power of having been immersed in the film has faded – as well as my memory for particular details in the film.

The film opens with a scene of two black men running.  My experience and expectation was that they should be running from something, but, in fact, they were running to a performance of Ma Rainey’s – a performance that was taking place in the middle of a forest, in a tent, at a private, secret place.  The ticket takers, the audience members, the performers, and Ma Rainey herself were all Black – and there was a ritualistic/mystical quality to the space – a space where people who were subjugated outside were free to articulate what they thought and felt and lived and experienced through song and dance – and appreciating the mastery of the performance of Ma Rainey.

Her appearance was shocking.  She was deeply made up.  She was a large woman – and incredibly sensual – and she radiated.  I suppose she radiated all sorts of things – sensuality, self-possession, joy.  If I said she used the stage as a pulpit it would be a metaphor or an analogy – because she was performing something that felt like a religious service.  But it was not service worshiping a God.  It was profane and holy all at the same time, it was, on some level, worshipping Ma Rainey (and her Black Bottom), but it was also the worship of being together and being free to revel in what it means to be one of us, in all the ways that we are members of this shared celebration.

This force of nature is next seen in Chicago, where she arrived late for a recording session.  Her band arrived on time; well, the cornetist, Levee Green, was a little late, but he imagines that he will break out of the band and be the next star.  The rest of the band members, who are deeply engaged with each other and engage in comfortable banter, even with Levee, are doubtful that he will make it.

Ma is seen leaving her segregated hotel with her female lover, Dussie Mae, on one arm and her nephew on the other.  She is dressed in furs and finery and is parading those in front of the other Black folk at this very prestigious and very Black establishment.  She is seems to be both disdainful of the people who look at her, apparently judging her – to openly parade a female lover front of good church going folks is pure folly – and appreciating that she is, despite their disdain for her, a star.  Not the kind of star amongst the people that she was in the south, but a star who shines above these judging northern folk.

When she arrives at the recording studio, she lives up to the recording engineer’s prediction that she will be difficult.  Not only is she late, she insists that her stuttering nephew intone the opening words to the piece.  She also picks a fight with Levee who wants to change the instrumentation to her signature song to be more contemporary.  She finally brings the whole thing to a halt when, after the nephew finally uttered the necessary words stutter free and the band recorded the song, it turned out that the recording machine was not working.  They will have to do the take again, but not until she gets the Coca Cola that was specified in her contract.

It becomes apparent that Ma believes that she needs to NOT play by the rules in order to make the system work for her.  If she plays by the rules – the white man’s rules – she will be eaten by the system and not be given the due that her talent deserves. 

Meanwhile Levee, who is breaking the rules by having sex during the break with Dussie Mae, believes in the system.  He knows that he has talent and he knows that his talent has value.  In a free market, he will profit.  Why does he believe this?  He relates how his family had their property ruthlessly stolen while his mother was ruthlessly attacked by white men in the south.  Is it that he is in the north?  Is it that his talent is different than land – that it is so viscerally attached to him that it can’t be taken from him? 

Whatever his delusion, he is rudely disabused of it when he the recording executive buys his song for next to nothing, but refuses to let him perform it.  We then see his tragic enactment of his prediction that God does not look out for blacks as Levee takes out his anger on the White boss on his lovable bandmate, sealing his own fate.

The rules of the game are different for Blacks than they are for Whites.  The deck has been so badly stacked against African Americans for so long, it is hard to believe that they are still standing, much less working to engage as members of our culture.  That they had faith that the Supreme Court would finally rule in their favor – which, because the rules are different, would cause them even more pain – is hard to imagine.  Levee is acting on this kind of faith.  One that expects the rules of the game to apply to those who bring assets to a capitalist based system.

The insight that I gleaned from the Social Theory book that traces the development of theories during the 20^th Century (and that I am not yet done with) is that the rules are rigged against everyone – especially artists – especially those who have something deeply human to express.  The deal is (and here I am doing violence to the book) a kind of game of distraction.  Society/ culture will impose limits on us all.  Freud traced this to the oedipal deal – I will give up my attraction to my opposite gendered parent in exchange for immediate safety and the promise that I can find a similar model later.  But there are, in fact, a million and one deals that are struck.

One of the deals that is directly related to race is that I will feel better, even if I feel awful, knowing that I am not one of them.  In order for this deal to work, They have to be treated badly.  And I have to squeeze out what little joy I can from lording it over someone who is not as good as me.  Ma can lord it over the ladies at the black hotel because she is Ma Rainey, in all her finery.  They, meanwhile, can take the moral high ground.  Levee, meanwhile, can lord it over his band mates whose talent does not equal his.  And they can know that he will not be able to break out of the traces, because that simply isn’t done.

Ma Rainey knows the rules of this game and she knows how to play it.  She gives nothing away until she is paid for it.  She commands her due from those who would demean her because she knows her value.  The irony is that her value is not just based on her talent, but on much more than that – it is based on being able to create the kind of steamy, hot, intermingled communion that took place in that forest – or was it a swamp? – at the beginning of the film.  She knows that there is a value that trumps the capitalist value – we would call it a feeling and we would not be wrong.  But we could also call it the sense of feeling loved by feeling understood and connected with – with all the power that music brings to that feeling.

In the South, Ma is free to ply her trade out of the reach of the white man and an oppressive system because that system so completely devalues the black experience that it neglects to police it.  It doesn’t care about what happens within the borders of a land that has no value.  In the north, where the capital is now being increasingly generated, all need to play in the system.  And those with the least power will be exploited by that system. 

This rumination may seem to be feeling communist at this point, and that would make sense.  Many of those who are written about in the book that I am drawing from are proposing that a communist economic system (not the communist political systems that are in fact fascist systems) should supersede a capitalist one.  But the argument that I am making is not essentially economic.  It has economic implications, but it is closer to the world of the individual – a psychoanalytic argument.  The argument I am making is that we enter into a social contract at the peril of being torn away from essential aspects of our humanity.  We trade concern and connection for well-being.  And this may be an underlying tragedy that August Wilson is pointing to.  That this is both the plight of the African American, but also our shared plight.  That we have to become who we are to assert our right to be who we are even thought that is no longer who it as that we are because we have distorted ourselves in order to defend ourselves.  This is what Ma Rainey so successfully does.  Failing that, we can make a case for who it is that we would like to be, but we cannot become that, as Levee discovers.

I was struck throughout watching this how the fidelity of the film to the form of the play felt forced.  I wanted Levee to break free from the stage set.  I wanted to see the action across weeks and across miles – not essentially (the opening scene in the tent is the gratifying exception that I was longing for) trapped within the four walls of the theater.  The dialogue felt forced by the format – we didn’t learn about Levee’s family in flashback, but from his words.  But as I am writing about the underlying message of the play and the film, I think that the constriction of the play mirrors the constriction of society.  The story of Levee’s family’s misery becomes a story that he is trying desperately to force us to realize – not something that we resonate with because we can see it and know it.  This filmed play allows for the strain of the characters trying to articulate themselves to shine through, as uncomfortable as seeing that necessarily is.  Bravo!      

     

  

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.