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Roark Bradford (1896-1948) |
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American writer, whose works of fiction and folklore were based on his
childhood's contacts with African-American preachers, musicians, and
storytellers in his father's plantations. Roark Bradford's first book, Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun (1928)
was adapted by Marc Connelly for the stage as The Green Pastures in 1930. The novel John Henry (1931), which Bradford
himself adapted into a play, received harsh reviews and was closed
after seven performances. "The night John Henry was born the moon was copper-colored and the sky was black. The stars wouldn't shine and the rain fell hard. Forked lightning cleaved the air and the earth trembled like a leaf. The panthers squalled in the brake like a baby and the Mississippi River ran upstream a thousand miles. John Henry weighted forty-four pounds." (from John Henry) Roark Whitney Wickliffe Bradford was born in Lauderdale
county, Tennessee. He was the eighth of eleven children of Richard
Clarence Bradford and Patricia Adelaide (Tillman) Bradford, both of
whom were descended from families prominent in colonial and Southern
history. Both of his grandfathers served in the Confederate Army. Bradford grew up on a cotton plantation situated in the
Nankipoo-Knob Creek area, near the Mississippi River. Many of his
childhood friends were black, their parents worked on the
plantation. Bradford also attended sermons delivered by
Uncle Wes Henning. Thus he became a part of a mixture of two cultures,
one was white, the other black. Early in life Bradford
was educated at home, he then attended public schools, and the
University of California, where he played football. As a lightweight
boxer, known as "Nig" Bradford, he sparred in Galveston, Texas, and New
Orleans. During World War
I Bradford served as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Artillery Reserve,
stationed in the Panama Canal Zone. The war ended before he was shipped to France. For a period, Bradford was an instructor of
military science and tactics at Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical
College. From 1920 to 1922 he worked as
a reporter for the Atlanta Georgian and the Macaon
Telegraph. According to the playwright Marc Connelly, Bradford was inadvertently
involved in the hazing of a black football player, his own teammate at the
University of California. This experience left him forever an advocate
of equal treatment of blacks. (Black Stereotypes in Popular Series Fiction, 1851-1955: Jim Crow Era Authors and Their Characters by Bernard A. Drew, 2015, p. 184) In 1924 Bradford moved to New Orleans, where he made his living as a staff member for the Times-Picayune. From 1926, after quitting his newspaper job, Bradford devoted himself to literature. He spent a lot of time in the waterfront, gathering stories. 'Child of God,' which appeared in Harper's magazine in April 1927, won an O. Henry Award. However, fiction was not Bradford's passion, but something he was good at and enabled him to support his family. Later in life he owned Little Bee Bend Plantation in Benton, Louisiana, where some of his stories were set. In his spare time, Bradford liked to fish and to sail – he had a gaff-rigged 36-foot sloop built – and
he played the
guitar well. Bradford's friend David Cohn said, that he "was of the
small band of the pure in heart. In him were the simplicity, the
directness of insight, the sense of wonder that belongs to the child
and are so often lost in the man." (Roark Bradford and John Henry by Ferris Sands Hetherington III, thesis, 1974, p. 3) Lydia Sehorn, Bradford's first wife, was his high-school English teacher. In 1933 Bradford married Mary Rose Sciarra Himler, in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The couple lived in a Creole cottage at 719 Toulouse Street, in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Their son, Richard, became a writer, too. Lydia Sehorn struggled with tuberculosis in Arizona. During the separation process in 1932, she made a charge of abandonment. Red Sky at Morning (1968), Richard Bradford's novel, was about a young man named Josh Arnold, who is growing up without his father in New Mexico. Bradford's stories
appeared in the New York World and in other magazines. His literary friends included John McClure and William Faulkner,
with whom he often met at a small café in Franklin Street,
listening the talented jazz clarinetist George ("Georgia Boy") Boyd.
Bradford considered Faulkner the greatest writer in America. Another
café which they visited was said to have been the owner's business
headquarters in directing much of the section's prostitution. ('Introduction' by Carvel Collins, in William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches, edited by Carvel Collins, 1958, pp. xxv-xxvi) William
Spratling drew a cartoon portrait of Bradford for Faulkner's Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles (1926). In 1942-46 Bradford served as a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve, with assignment to the Bureau of Aeronautics Training, Navy Department. In 1946 he accepted a visiting lectureship in the English Department of Tulane University. While serving in French West Africa with the Navy in 1943, Bradford contracted amebiasis. He died in New Orleans on November 13, 1948. Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillum, issued by Harper & Brothers, was collected from stories first published in the World. Later the book was loosely adapted by Marc Connelly into the musical The Green Pastures, which had 640 performances in New York and five national tours. W.E.B. Du Bois praised Connelly's stage version as "an
extraordinary appealing and beautiful play based on the folk religion
of Negroes." Langston Hughes noted in his story 'Trouble with the Angels' (New Theatre,
July 1935), that "although the white producer and his backers made more
than half a million dollars, the colored troupers on tour lived in
cheap hotels and often slept in beds that were full of bugs." (The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Volume 15: The Short Stories, edited by R. Baxter Miller, 2002, p. 267)
The production won in 1930 a Pulitzer Prize
for Connelly, and lead actor Richard B. Harrison received the NAACP's
1931 Spingarn Medal for making the year's most significant contribution
to his race. The play was banned by Lord Chamberlain in Great Britain
on religious grounds. Connelly, an agnostic, is reported to have remarked, "I am
mildly surprised to find the Lord Chamberlain's office unable to
distinguish the difference between orthodox sacrilige and a simple
miracle play." ('Notes on the Corpus Christi Plays and "The Green Pastures"' by Robert Withington, in The Shakespeare Association Bulletin, Vol. 9, No. 4, October 1934) As was usual with Broadway hits, the musical was made into a movie in 1936, directed by William Keighley and Marc Connelly. It was banned in some Southern cities in the United States. "Mr. Marc Connelly's black Biblical pageant has come to us with the best possible advertisement: the Lord Chamberlain's ban," wrote Graham Greene in his review, when The Green Pastures arrived in England. ('Can You Imagine "Kings Row" Without Music? Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Classic Film Scores' by Chaplain (LTC) Ignatius W. Butler, in Military Chaplains' Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter 1987) This first all-black film since King Vidor's Hallelujah! (1929) begins with the sounds of a black choir singing the traditional spiritual 'City Called Heaven.' Rex Ingram played three roles. A white actor from Louisiana was imported to coach the cast in bayou accents. All the scenes were shot in studio sets, but originally Connelly wanted to shoot on location in the South. Warner Bros. reissued the film on DVD in 2006, with commentary by black filmmakers. Brandford also wrote novels which depicted the plight of
African-Americans in its historical perspective, such as This Side of Jordan (1929), set on a Louisiana plantation. The
majority of Bradford's work was lighthearted and humorous. John Henry (1931) was based on the
legend of the "steel-driving man" who died after beating in a contest a
steam-powered drill. Between 1924 and 1931, there were nineteen
versions of songs dealing with "John Henry" and over thirty versions of
jazz, blues, and old-time versions of the song had been recorded.
Possibly Bradford had heard some of them. In his story the protagonist
is a steamboat roustabout who travels up and down the Mississippi
river. The novel was made into a play in 1939. Paul Robeson played in
1940 John Henry in a Broadway musical production, which closed after
seven performances. In the wake of the Civil-Rights Movement,
Bradford's stories were re-evaluated, especially his stereotypical
images of African-Americans and patronizing attitudes came under
criticism. "Mr. Bradford's stories remain highly amusing," said the
black Harvard professor and literary critic Sterling A. Brown in 1968,
"his generalizations about the Negro remain a far better analysis of a white man that of the Negro." ('Negro Character as Seen by White Authors' by Sterling A. Brown, in Dark Symphony, edited by James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross, 1968, p. 139) According to Sterling, Bradford argued in Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun that
there are three types of Negroes, "the nigger, the 'colored person,'
and the Negro – upper case N." The Negro is the race leader, not too
militant, concerned more with economic indepencence that with civil
equality. The colored person, "frequently of mixed blood, lothes the
blacks and despises the whites . . . Generally he inherits the
weaknesses lof both races and seldom inherits the strength of
either." "The nigger" is indolent, entirely irresponsible, shiftless,
the bugaboo of Anglo-Saxon ideals, a poor fighter and a poor hater,
primitively emotional and uproariously funny. (Ibid., p. 139) In an article published in Collier's
('Make Mine the Human Race,' 1945) Bradford said: "The only actual
difference between members of the Negro race and members of any other
human race in the degree of pigmentation under the skin. The other
so-called 'racial characteristics' one hears so much about . . . are
pure hogwash." For further reading: Black Stereotypes in Popular Series Fiction, 1851-1955: Jim Crow Era Authors and Their Characters by Bernard A. Drew (2015); 'Roark Bradford,' in New Orleans Memories: One Writer's City by Carolyn Kolb (2013); 'Introduction' by Steven C. Tracy, in John Henry: Roark Bradford's Novel and Play (2008); 'Bradford, Roark,' in World Authors 1900-1950, Volume 1, edited by Martin Seymour-Smith & Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); "De Lawd": Richard B. Harrison and the Green Pastures by Walter C. Daniel (1986); The History of Southern Literature, edited by L.D. Rubin, et al. (1985); Roark Bradford and John Henry by Ferris Sands Hetherington III (thesis, 1974); The Smiling Phoenix by W. Hall (1965); John Henry: A Negro Folk Play Based on the Novel by Roark Bradford by Eileen J. Burrer (1951) - The Green Pastures (play), first produced in New York, Mansfield Theatre, February 26, 1930. All-black cast. "Altough Marc Connelly's new play, "The Green Pastures," is acted entirely by negroes and is primarily concerned with their imaginative religion, it is much more than a negro play. It is a masterpiece." (J. Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times, March 9, 1930) The Green Pastures (film 1936), dir. by William Keighley, Marc Connelly, starring Rex Ingram (De Lawd / Adam / Hezdrel), Oscar Polk (Gabriel), Eddie Anderson (Noah), Frank H. Wilson (Moses), George Reed (Mr. Deshee). Music by: Hall Johnson Choir, 'The Creation' and 'The Flood' composed by Erich Korngold. Humorous folk version of Old Testament stories as seen through the eyes of blacks of the southern United States. The film has been attacked for perpetuating unacceptable stereotypes; cunningly adapted for the screen in a series of dramatic scenes from Bradford's tales. Rex Ingram went on to play supporting roles in many films, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as Jim, the runaway slave, and in The Thief of Bagdad, as the giant genie. "A racist film, it nevertheless marked a sympathetic if patronizing appreciation of black culture and folk traditions at the time it was made, and as such represented an advance for Hollywood." (Retakes by John Eastman, 1989, p. 138). Note: Marc Connelly (1890-1980), an American director, producer, and playwright, won the Pulitzer Prize for the fantasy The Green Pastures. In the film he was given co-director status. Connelly's collaboration with George S. Kaufman resulted in a series of successful comedies, among them Dulcy (1921), To the Ladies (1922), Merton of the Movies (1922), and Beggar on Horseback (1924). Selected works:
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