The Green Pastures

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In the twenty-first century, “The Green Pastures” is usually encountered as a movie on television. Its first incarnation was as a Pulitzer Prize-winning play in 1931, running on Broadway for 640 performances over eighteen months, before making a highly successful, four-year national and international tour. It went back to Broadway for a second run in 1935 and was revived in 1951. It has been adapted to television as well as film.

The play was written by Marc Connely, a playwright prodigy who wrote his first script at age five.

His parents were actors, but his father died when he was twelve, and he attended a private boarding school until age seventeen when he entered journalism as a cub reporter for the Associated Press. He migrated to New York City, writing theatrical news, a humor column and freelance skits for amateur theater groups. He became a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, rubbing wits with such as Robert Benchley, George F. Kaufman, and Dorothy Parker.

His first successful play came in 1921, a collaboration with Kaufman, ”Dulcy,” and has been revived on Broadway as recently as 1970. He wrote Green Pastures in 1929, based on a short-story collection called, “Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun,” by Roark Bradford. If you'd like to explore the play more fully, see the study guide nearby, courtesy of eNotes, an online study resource for literature. Also nearby is a look at the original Broadway production Playbill.

In 1936 Warner Brothers Pictures released a film version of the play, directed by Connelly and William Keighley. Both the play and the movie were controversial in their time and continue to be for evolved reasons. Both feature an all-black cast depicting the religious vision and convictions of characters speaking in what today sounds like Uncle Remus or Amos and Andy dialect, although historians tell us it is true to the southern black dialect of the time.

During the play’s original run the typical criticism, from both black and white reviewers, centered principally on the religious depictions, especially the portrayal of God Jehovah as black. Nevertheless, the play was highly popular and received favorable reviews from both white and black writers. By the 1951 Broadway revival criticism had switched to concerns about the racially stereotyped language. In more recent years the underlying theology has been analyzed by modern reviewers trying to place it within some human context without disregarding the obvious racial stereotyping. Nearby is what G. S. Morris had to say in 2008. The New York Times did a review in 2010, also nearby.

Aside from the timeless artistic impact of the movie, watching it over ninety-five years since the play’s inception provides a measuring stick through the social strata between that time and this. Reactions are necessarily flavored by the chronological roots of the viewer. Those old enough to understand the movie’s original reception, who lived through the intervening disruption and evolution of racial attitudes in America, will have a different experience than those dropped into the stream later. All will see the movie through the social illumination at the moment of their birth, as scattered by today's social prism.

It is unquestionable that the movie depicts a white man’s imaginings of the black religious experience in the early twentieth century. That the cast is all black doesn’t change this truth. That black reviewers were generally positive about both play and movie tells a revealing tale about the evolving social perceptions since 1930. During its filming the movie was derided by some in the black press for its depiction of black religion rather than its, to modern ears, minstrel-show dialog. In fact, for the movie, the point of view was changed to that of a little girl, apparently to justify the childlike religious understanding.

It was generally, and guardedly, welcomed in the black press of the time as a vehicle of employment for underpaid black actors. Careers were made and enhanced. Hall Johnson’s Negro Choir, organized in 1925, was already famous by the time they appeared in the movie, but the exposure enhanced their fame and fortune.

When Roark Bradford wrote the stories on which the play was based, he was drawing on his personal experiences as a resident of Tennessee and New Orleans. He intended to portray what he considered the childlike religious beliefs of adult black people. No wonder the adult black people who commented on the play objected to its religious portrayals. That white people must also have been troubled by the same thing is attested by Warner Brothers’ decision to depict the vision as coming from the mind of a child.

The movie follows the evolution of Jehovah from God of Wrath to God of Love, tracing the Old Testament into the New, up to the crucifixion. Slavery is an important motif throughout the film, in Egypt and Babylon. We see God amble into the creation of the world, and then mankind as a kind of poorly-thought-out series of spur of the moment decisions. “I’ll rear back and pass a miracle.” Like the protagonist of most three-wishes stories, he discovers unintended consequences. “Trouble with miracles is when you pass one you usually have to rear back and pass another.” He finds his new creation a distraction and goes down for a look, lamenting how things have turned out. He bargains with Noah. He gives Moses some magic tricks. He seems disengaged with the struggling and suffering until things really displease him, when the Israelites are in captivity in Babylon and fall into sin. He disowns them but is finally won over again by their perseverance. He discovers that suffering is the key to faith and that even God must suffer. “De Lawd’s” face is beatific as Christ is led to Golgotha.

How to view this movie today? Is it a worthless throwback to a racially embarrassing time? Does it have a deeper message or at least some valuable artistic merit? White people will see it differently than black people and perhaps become defensive about their appreciation of it. Are they just enjoying a good minstrel show or is something else going on? For insight into current opinions of the movie see below the review by Paghat the Ratgirl, aka, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, daughter of a carnival sword swallower, and instinctive iconoclast.

To modern eyes and ears the most readily available offense given by the movie is its unabashed stereotyping of black language, customs and behavior. Heaven is an ongoing fish fry and Jehovah calls for a little “mo ferment” in the custard. Social interaction among humans is crap games, jiving, and lodge meetings. But aren’t stereotypes used in all kinds of successful writing and art? Aren’t the paintings of Grandma Moses stereotypical? What about most popular, genre fiction and almost all of popular movies and television shows? Don’t they rely on stereotypes for humor, dramatic expression, and off-the-shelf plots? Hasn’t it always been thus for all artistic expression? Didn’t Shakespeare use stereotypes? Yes, Amos and Andy exploited stereotypes, but so did the Lum and Abner radio show. What, you might ask, is the difference?

There is an obvious difference. We all know the difference. The real-life humans beneath the stereotypes of Grandma Moses, Shakespeare and Lum and Abner, were never the subjects of legalized slavery nor the targets of a well-organized, government-sponsored system of terror. For a thoughtful analysis of what it all means, or could mean, to Americans of all societies, see the nearby treatment of Foster Dickson, Deep Southern, Diversified and Re-imagined.

Most of us, white and black, have been on a journey of social-discovery over the last century, not unlike the journey of the movie’s Jehovah from the Old Testament to the New. Even people who holding the best of racial intentions have advance and deepened their understanding of what it means to see through the eyes of “the other.” Prior to “Brown Vs Board of Education” most white people gave insufficient thought to the reasons for the obvious black underclass status. A now surprising portion of white Americans born from 1880 to 1930, considering themselves racially enlightened and sympathetic, raised on Rudyard Kipling’s catch phrase, "the white man's burden," believed God had made black people inferior to the whites and it was the job of the white people to take care of them."

The attitude, so shockingly retrogressive, of the newly discovered Atticus Finch in “Go Set a Watchman,” was once typical of well-intentioned people. During the serious attempts to pass civil rights legislation, when the American people began demanding it in1950s and 60s, there was a shocked awakening to the boundaries of American freedom, and to the disaster that had been fermenting and infecting every American community and institution.

The awakening has been long and fitful and continues still. A movie like “The Green Pastures” is a disquieting reminder of where we used to be. But is it more than that? Does it have now, and did it have then, true artistic merit? If we enjoy the interaction between God and his humans, if we see a glimpse of eternity in Jehovah's evolution, if we recognize the rendering of heaven in human terms, are we playing off the stereotypes of oppression or are we seeing ourselves reflected in a microcosm of the human struggle? We can learn from each other on the subject, and from ourselves, especially the selves we used to be in that strangely near, but long-gone era.

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