Wiletta: Sock it to me

Subject: Trouble in Mind
As I was reading I could not stop thinking about a statement made by actress Hattie McDaniel. She was receiving a lot of guff from the African American community about her Academy Award winning performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind and she said, “I’d rather play a maid than be one.” Trouble in Mind addresses the struggle that black actors face in an industry controlled by white males. The character Wiletta is torn between doing what she loves and in a sense being a slave to the man. She advises John that “White folks can’t stand unhappy Negroes…so laugh, laugh when it ain’t funny at all.” He calls her “Uncle Tommish,” which is ironic considering the shift in his character a few scenes later to a puppet on a string. She admits that it is, but makes the point that it has to be that way if you want to keep your job. Given these scenes, I really believed that John (“I couldn’t play anything I didn’t believe in”) was going to be the reformer in this play, but I was dead wrong.
I thoroughly enjoyed witnessing Wiletta’s character shift. However, this shift would not have occurred without the dreadful Manners. It really made me furious when he was pressing her to justify and relate to her character. I thought, These techniques have no place here. This experience is in her blood. She doesn’t need some white dude telling her she is playing it incorrectly. But ultimately, the techniques led to her self-discovery and a greater truth within the play. Wiletta gives Manners a taste of his own medicine by employing his methods to point out the flaws within the script (and society itself). Wiletta takes McDaniel’s famous statement one-step further into action. The trouble in Wiletta’s mind is that it isn’t enough just to recognize that blacks are human beings. Childress is telling the theatre community that they must present African Americans not as “simple, backward people” but as intelligent beings who are driven by their principles and emotions.