Embodying Discourse in Music, Drama, and Literature
by Ben Oglesby-Davis
What sets Shirley Graham Du Bois apart from other African American race women of the 20th century is the wide span of fields she worked in. Brittney Cooper describes a race woman as a woman who embodies discourse, a woman who lives and breathes the issues that are of most importance to her race. Throughout Shirley Graham Du Bois’ 81 year life, she embraced the issues and sought to act in the service of something greater, whether it be her race, or her later communist ideas. Much in the same vein as Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, Shirley Graham Du Bois saw the best use of her mind and body not in the confines of domesticity, but in the public sphere fighting for the interest of black people. Whereas Ida B. Wells' work was largely written pieces on anti-lynching, Shirley Graham Du Bois’ activist media was music, drama, and literature. In addition to being politically active, so far as to become an advisor to Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah, Graham Du Bois frequently used literature, her plays, and her music to articulate her ideas on what it means to be black.
Shirley Graham Du Bois is responsible for an opera—the first to be staged by an African American woman—three novels, seven plays, and a series of biographies. This chapter explores Shirley Graham DuBois’ creative impulses. How did Graham Du Bois' politics and ideologies inform her creative performances and influenced her desire to create. Specifically, this chapter focuses on her opera Tom-Tom, the play Dust to Earth, and her novel Zulu Heart. In each of these pieces, Graham Du Bois' ideas on race, class, gender, and what it means to be black and American are worked out and take the forefront of her artistic vision. It is important to consider why was it important for Graham Du Bois to articulate these “progressive” ideas in her art. The works that highlighted here show Graham Du Bois' ideas at different points in her life, and differ greatly. Tom-Tom is a sort of premature Pan-Africanist call to action that explores the influence African musical traditions have had on Western and American musical traditions; particularly of Africa, it anticipated the “Black Arts” movement of the 1960s. In her play Dust to Earth, Graham Du Bois addresses class issues in mixed-race working communities. In the play Graham Du Bois argues that the racial tensions between American whites and African Americans can be subdued in light of economic disenfranchisement. Finally, Zulu Heart is the product of Graham Du Bois as a fully matured artist, rearticulating many of her previous ideas of freedom, integration, and class combined with the beliefs she developed working as a communist and American expatriate.
Tom-Tom was Graham Du Bois' first major production and it launched her into the forefront of the American public intellectual sphere. Originally written as a musical drama while she was employed as a music teacher at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Tom-Tom is an epic story following the movement of black people from the African Continent across the Atlantic Ocean via the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and through the American South up to then present-day Harlem. In 1932, during her sophomore year at Oberlin College and Conservatory, Graham Du Bois was presented the opportunity to turn her one-act musical into a three-act opera phenomenon. And the word phenomenon is not an overstatement. Tom-Tom was premiered at the Cleveland Summer Opera Festival with 10,000 audience members for the first performance, and 15,000 for the second, in addition to those listening on the NBC radio broadcast of the second performance.
Tom-Tom was one of the first instances in which Graham Du Bois put her political voice as the basis for her creating. It was and still is one of the most progressive, avant-garde works of the early 20th century in that she took aesthetics and values that had been neglected and presented them sincerely. Musically, Graham Du Bois highlights the value in African musical traditions, which to this day are still viewed as less than the Western European Classical musical traditions. The overture differs greatly from any other overture in that it is almost entirely scored for a drum choir. The rhythms played by the drums choir were transcribed by Graham Du Bois from many of the West-African migrants she met in France. Not only does she use West African rhythms, she also presents them in a way similarly to how they would be played on the continent. Also, these are the first sounds the audience hears, which is a strong contrast to the more traditional overture played by string and wind instruments. In a letter to Graham Du Bois, her long time friend and supporter Mary White Ovington admonishes Shirley not to make the first act entirely scored for drums and voice because it may deter the audience.
Despite the success of Tom-Tom, Graham Du Bois' hopes for taking the opera to New York and Chicago were neglected by the oncoming pressures of the Great Depression and flaky partners. Graham Du Bois then withdrew from the music field and entered the world of theater. Coal Dust was written in 1938, while Graham Du Bois was Yale Drama School. It was a three-act drama performed by The Gilpin Players at the Karamu Theater in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1941, the play re-emerged as Dust To Earth for a production done by the Yale Drama Department. In this play, Graham Du Bois aimed to resolve the tensions within American life including interracial issues, worker’s rights, gender dynamics, and of course race relations in the U.S.. The play follows the life of a mixed-race mine worker, Brick, and his unknown white half-sister Leslie as they both deal with the consequences of their white father, Anthony Clayton owner of the mine. Leslie seeks to help the families of the mine workers, much to the disdain of her father. In an attempt to trap his father in the mine, Brick ends up trapping the three of them in the mine, where Brick, Leslie, and Anthony Clayton unite and find reconciliation.
Written at the end of her life, Zulu Heart is a commentary on race relations in the apartheid state of South Africa. The story is about a white Afrikaans doctor, Dr. Vermeer, who receives the heart of a black man during a cardiac transplant surgery. Once he has the new heart, Dr. Vermeer’s own heart begins to beat at the rhythm of that of the black man. The doctor undergoes a metamorphosis in which he begins to think and act like a black man. Vermeer is forced to negotiate his old feelings with his new, intense desire of his new “black” feelings. This dramatic story also deals with Vermeer's inner conflict and love for two women—one black, and one white.
In all three works, Shirley Graham Du Bois used her creative abilities through words and music to address issues she believed to be important. In Tom-Tom, Graham Du Bois worked out ideas of racial uplift, African heritage, and the distinct and influential musical traditions of black people on the continent of Africa as well as the United States. In addition to highlighting the non-traditional Western music forms of arranged spirituals, jazz, work songs, gospel, and West-African drumming, Graham Du Bois also challenged and inspired black people to find salvation in their own traditions. Schmalenberger wrote that “[Graham Du Bois'] opera depicts fractures within black American communities as characters struggle to resolve if, how, or where an "African heart" resides within them. By the end of the opera, a transformed black society emerges to embrace its diverse views and vocations as an empowering force in modern times.” In losing the ability to “return” to Africa, the characters unite in salvation because their blackness is what connects them to Africa, despite their various social, ethnic, and economic backgrounds.
In both Tom-Tom and Dust to Earth, Graham Du Bois made a critique of capitalist practices in the American economy. In the final act of Tom-Tom, the Real Estate Man character disrupts the Voodoo Man’s plans by selling an excess of shares—similar to the way the 1929 Stock Market Crash was caused. On the other hand, class dynamics overcast the entirety of Dust to Earth, as Shirley did not hide the disparaging contrast between the living conditions of coal miners and mine owners.
In all of Graham Du Bois' creative outlets, her intellectual identity is at the core of these plots. Graham Du Bois whole-heartedly embraced her ideas and inculcated them in spite of rough spots in the flow and pacing of these stories. In a letter from a Professor in response to the January 1941 staging of Dust to Earth at Yale, Graham Du Bois is advised to not crowd the plot with so many conflicts. In a letter from February 1941, Graham Du Bois is told “if you intended no patent ideology, no commentary on social conditions, it seemed pointless to lay your production in a coal mine with such powerful implications bulging out of the text, but never faced or resolved.” In another letter, she is told “in the final scenes there was no sense of resolution of the basic problems, admittedly large ones not to be glibly solved in one evening.” In Dust to Earth, Graham Du Bois presented racism, classism, labor issues, and other overwhelming themes that distract from the effectiveness of the plot.
Being a race woman is about embracing the discourse and acting on the tenets by which you align in order to “uplift the race.” Organization, education, and activism are the means by which race women fought the oppressive Jim Crow American social structure. And for Shirley Graham Du Bois, her artistry was a form of activism, education, and organization. Through her art, she sought to navigate the political landscape she found herself parlaying in. We find Graham Du Bois critiquing capitalism, Jim Crow, colonization, and interraciality in these works. Exploring Shirley Graham Du Bois’ work is an interesting way to trace her life and the work she believed needed to be done for black people across the globe.