Robert Lewis is the youngest mulatto son of Cora Lewis and Colonel Thomas Norwood; his actions cause the conflict in the play and lead to the murder of Norwood and Robert’s own suicide. Since he was a boy, Robert, who Cora calls ‘‘Bert,’’ has shared both the physical characteristics and the headstrong ways of his father, Norwood. As a child, Robert is Norwood’s favorite mulatto child, until Robert calls him his father in front of an important group of white people. Norwood beats the young Robert, a beating that he never forgets. Norwood also sends Robert away to school for six years, so he does not have to be around him. However, this backfires on Norwood. Since Robert has been heavily educated outside of the plantation, when he returns he finds it impossible to be subservient like the other African Americans who work for Norwood. His reckless behavior is generated from his desire to act more like his white half than his African American half.
William Lewis is the oldest mulatto son of Cora Lewis and Colonel Norwood; he is dark-skinned like his mother. William has no ambition to be anything more than a field hand. He has a family including a boy, Billy, and wants only to live out his life. As a result, he is concerned and angry at the way that Robert provokes Norwood and causes trouble in town.
Among Norwood’s African American servants includes Sam, his personal servant, Livonia, his cook, Mose his elderly chauffeur and the field workers. The racist regime is established and maintained by Colonel Norwood, Fred Higgins, and the various members of the mob including Talbot, the overseer, the undertaker, store keeper and sheriff. The expected social roles of African Americans and whites in the South were especially enforced on cotton plantations, like the one in the play.
Although slavery was technically illegal after the American Civil war, racism and discrimination were still alive in many areas, especially in the Rural South. References to lynching’s (eg Deekin’s lynching), whippings, beatings, sewing, cooking, “yard niggers” and drinking are characteristic of the southern culture at that time. Interracial relationships, like the one between Cora and Colonial Norwood, were socially unacceptable, as was having mulatto children. The cultural climate in this play, one infected by racism, is represented through the relationships of Colonel Norwood and Cora, and Colonel Norwood and Bert. Mulatto dramatizes the tragedy of Southern culture in general at the time. That is, it shows how black and whites were torn apart by the notion that Europeans must remain removed from their African counterparts. It shows also how blacks might internalize racist tenets. Bert, it is clear, even as he defends his blackness and believes in racial equality, believes also that his whiteness somehow makes him better than other blacks. Cora says to Robert when he is getting ready to speak to Norwood, ‘‘Talk like you was colored, cause you ain’t white.’’ Robert responds, ‘‘(Angrily) And I’m not black, either. Look at me, mama. (Rising and throwing up his arms) Don’t I look like my father? Ain’t I as light as he is?’’
Between 1909 and 1935, some conditions and circumstances in America had changed and some had remained agonizingly constant. America’s racial climate had changed little. Blacks in the South were still voteless, powerless, and legally segregated; and blacks in the North lived, in the main, in poverty-stricken ghettos. The political climate in the play can be seen in the strict racial hierarchies that are so firmly set in place. Many southern whites during this time believed that blacks were racially inferior. Intimidation is a tool used by the white characters to maintain superiority. Higgins says, “ “keep calm, keep calm-and then you command. Best plantation manager I ever had never raised his voice to a nigger- and they were scared to death of him.” He also states, “A darkies got to keep in his place down here ” Hughes’ portrays the “white man” as the enforcer with references such as plantation manager, Marshall, sheriff, hounds, jail, police force and lynching. Bert’s struggle to be accepted as equal to a white man, is the basis for the conflict in the play. The setting is extremely important in the play. Although African Americans were discriminated against in the northern American states, too, it was in the South that they faced the most racism and had little recourse against the racist behavior of whites. However, as Robert notes, this is not true everywhere in the South. As Robert says to his brother William, he has ‘‘seen people in Atlanta, and Richmond, and Washington where the football team went—real colored people who don’t have to take off their hats to white folks.’’
In addition to American racism, the play also references the effects of racial relations on a much grander scale as Hitler and his Nazi party attempted to wipe out the Jewish population of Europe. Norwood states, “ Darkies have been getting mighty fresh in this part of the counrty since the war. The damn Germans shoul’ve....”
This play takes place at the same time it was written, in the depression-era 1930’s. This was a volatile economic climate in America, which was undergoing the devastating financial crisis known as the Great Drperssion. Infact, Norwood alludes to the Great Depression in the play when talking about buying a new car, a Ford. Norwood says, “Been thinking about getting a new one myself, but money’s been kinder tight this year, and conditions are none too good yet either. Reckon that’s why everybody’s so restless.” It was a time when most people were glad to have any form of job. This is why most of the African Americans like the ones on Norwoods plantation were content, even if it was working in the hated cotton fields, which represented a living symbol of their ancestor’s slavery.
Mulatto is an extremely emotional play. The drama builds throughout the work, highlighting the race-driven conflicts that took place between African Americans and whites in the American South in the 1930s, and culminating in a tragic end. Ultimately, the dramatic purpos of the play is to demonstrate that whites should accept African Americans as equals, since everybody loses in a race war. In the end, Hughes is not advocating that African Americans commit violent acts against whites. Actually, he intends the opposite. He wants to show that, when it comes to racial conflicts, nobody wins. If whites try to repress African Americans, they will eventually rise up against whites, using their own weapons against them. As Robert’s actions demonstrate, whites are not invincible, and can be killed just as easily as African Americans. In addition, since whites in this time period feel it is okay to sleep with white women, they are inadvertently producing a number of mulatto children. In the case of mulattos like Robert, white America could literally be creating the means of its own destruction. Like Robert, some of these children may share the characteristics of their white fathers. In Norwood’s case, these qualities—including stubbornness and pride—ultimately lead to his own death at the hands of his son, after Norwood denies him.
Norwood’s denial underscores the denial of African Americans and mulattos by most whites in this time. As a result, Hughes’s play has wider implications. As Arnold Rampersad notes in his entry on Hughes for African American Writers, the play uses a tragic drama to illustrate the tragic qualities of race relations, especially ‘‘in the segregated South, with its denial of the humanity of blacks and their essential part in the nation, and the disaster awaiting the republic as a result of that denial.’’ The stage notes at the very end of the play, when the white mob breaks into the house and charges up the stairs after Robert, indicate Hughes’s global view of racial conflict. ‘‘(The roar of the mob fills the house, the whole night, the whole world.)’’ Hughes is saying that both whites and African Americans had better be careful because racial conflicts will inevitably lead to violence and tragedy for both races.
The perception of reality in this play is created by keeping close attention to the economic power of different groups of people. In this sense, it is clear to see the racial tensions in the play as class tensions, as conflicts between the ones who own the land (and give the orders) and the ones who work the land (and are expected to obey the orders). As an attempt to represent the real, spoken language (and other customs) of people rather than the idealized version of language that we're taught in schools, Hughes' play would be realistic in this sense because it uses the true dialect spoken by southern rural blacks.
The perception of reality is only skewed in the conclusion of the play, where Cora enters an External Reality and talks at Norwood’s body. She criticizes Norwood for lying there when he should be helping Robert, his son. She then says that she knows Norwood is faking, that he is not lying there and that he is really out there running after Robert. By her comments, the audience can see that Cora is insane. She says that she will only take orders from Norwood and that she is waiting for him to return. William, her other son, says he is leaving and tries to take his mother with him, but Cora says she is waiting for Robert and Norwood to return. William is frightened at his mother’s crazy talk and leaves. Cora talks to the empty room, remembering how she became Norwood’s mistress when she was fifteen.
Biases stereotypes and prejudices are prevalent throughout this play. It is obvious that this play focuses on the unrelenting abuse that Southern blacks suffered at the hands of whites in the first part of the twentieth century. Continually, grotesque white characters come in and out of the play like ogres, ready to pounce upon nonwhite victims at the slightest provocation, using racist slurs such as “nigger”, “coons” ”darkies” and yellow”. But while such racist abuse is perhaps the most prominent feature of this story of racial mixing in the Deep South, it is certainly not the only concern to which Hughes calls attention. Hughes is also concerned with prejudice within the black race.
Mulatto displays, the peculiar situation of blacks’ harboring prejudices against fellow blacks. While it could be argued that Bert’s indignation arises over the injustice of his particular work assignment as well as the injustices of the entire Southern labor system, Bert’s feelings seem more clearly to be governed by the racial preferences on which he has based his identity. As Bert tells his mother of the labor his father has imposed on him, ‘‘He thinks I ought to be out there in the sun working, with Talbot standing over me like I belonged in the chain gang. Well, he’s got another thought coming! (Stubbornly) I’m a Norwood—not a field-hand rigger.’’ While Bert’s reaction to the work is, in large part, justifiable, considering his intelligence and education, the intense indignation that he feels springs from something deeper than the injustices done to his capabilities. He is in no way sensitive to the indignation that other blacks must feel in being relegated to certain types of demeaning labor and barred from more rewarding forms of work. Bert is enraged over the summer assignment above all because it places him in the role of what he considers to be the lowest of all blacks—the field hand. This reduction in status is especially cloying since Bert not only considers himself not black but a Norwood heir. Bert goes on to assert that he is not going to do the work assigned to him, work which he views as being as much beneath his capabilities and his training as it is beneath his (white) race and his (assumed) name. Thus, Bert’s protest is framed in terms of pride and self-interest, not universal human rights. Clearly, Bert does not come to the resolution that the mulatto narrator of Hughes’s famous poem ‘‘Cross’’ does. Alive when the poem ends, the speaker of ‘‘Cross’’ forgives his white father in the first stanza and his black mother in the second; then, in the third and final stanza, he acknowledges with detached resignation that he himself is ‘‘neither white nor black’’ and does not know where his bloodline will lead him, on the other hand, Robert Lewis of the play Mulatto dies. Bitter to the end, ‘‘resenting his blood and the circumstances of his birth,’’ he hates his white father for not accepting him as a white son and rejects all that the race of his black mother has to offer. Bert has been forced to live in the shack but insists on dying in the big house. He must kill himself for the latter to happen.
There are autobiographical elements of the play, which detail the racial conflict between a white plantation owner, Colonel Thomas Norwood, and the mulatto son Robert, whom he refuses to recognize as his own. Hughes’s own father rejected him, an event that deeply affected the course of his life and the themes in his works. On 24 October 1935, Langston Hughes’s Mulatto opened at Broadway’s Vanderbilt Theater. Hughes’s two-act play and enjoyed a relatively long Broadway run (270 performances) and then successfully toured the nation for eight months. This was considered to be a fairly remarkable achievement for a play in the middle of the depression. Hughes’s play was not published in English until 1963, twenty-eight years after its first Broadway run. Ironically, during this time, the play was translated into three foreign languages—Italian, Japanese, and Spanish—and play proved popular in Italy, Japan, and Argentina. But there was no American publication of Mulatto until Webster Smalley’s Five Plays by Langston Hughes was published by Indiana University Press in 1963.
One interesting item of evidence attesting to this state of affairs was that, in 1935, Hughes was not given complimentary orchestra seats to attend the opening of his play at the Vanderbilt because the theater management had ‘‘reservations’’ about seating blacks in the orchestra section.