A Soldier's Play
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"A Soldier's Play" was a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama written by Charles Fuller in 1982. This play uses a murder mystery to explore the complicated feelings of anger and resentment that some black Americans have toward one another, and the ways in which many black Americans have absorbed white racist attitudes.
The story takes place at an Army base called Fort Neal in Louisiana, in 1944, when the U.S. Army was still racially segregated. In the opening scene, the audience witnesses the murder of black Sergeant Vernon Waters, by an unseen shooter. Just before his death, Waters utters the enigmatic cry, "They still hate you!"
Captain Richard Davenport, a rare black Army officer, has been sent to investigate the killing. Initially, the primary suspects are local Klansmen. Later, bigoted white soldiers fall under suspicion. Ultimately, Davenport discovers that the killer was one of the black soldiers under Waters' command. Waters' men hated him because Waters himself treated Southern black men in utter disdain and contempt.
As Davenport interviews witnesses and suspects, we see flashbacks showing what Sergeant Waters was like, and how he treated his men. The light-skinned Waters was highly intelligent and extremely ambitious, and loathed black men who conformed to old-fashioned racist stereotypes. Waters dreamed of sending his own children to an elite college where they would associate with white students, rather than with other blacks. In Waters' mind, Uncle Toms and "lazy, shiftless Negroes" reflected poorly on him, and made it harder for other African-Americans to succeed. For that reason, Waters persecuted black soldiers like Private C.J. Memphis, whose broad grin and jive talk made Waters' blood boil. Waters' cruelty and vindictiveness drove Memphis to suicide, which alienated the rest of Waters' men, and turned them hopelessly against him.
Shortly before he was murdered, Waters came to realize how futile and foolish his lifelong attempts to behave like a white man had been. His dying words, "They still hate you," reflected his belated understanding that white hatred and disdain of black men like himself had nothing to do with stereotypical black behavior, and that whites would probably always hate him, no matter how hard he tried to emulate "white" ways.
The play was originally staged by the Negro Ensemble Company. The cast included Adolph Caesar as Sergeant Waters and Denzel Washington as Private Peterson. Both Caesar and Washington reprised their roles in the movie version, A Soldier's Story, which was directed by Norman Jewison.
