Flyin’ West by Pearl Cleage (1992)

TW: Domestic Abuse, Racial Slurs, Description of Rape

 

SYNOPSIS

            This play is set in 1898 about 30 years after US slavery was abolished, most of the plays characters being formerly enslaved and chosen to move out on the frontier to tend to their own land. The entirety of the play take place in the all Black farming town of Nicodemus, Kanas. Sophie and Fannie have recently taken in the elderly Miss Leah who can no longer care for her own farm, though she refuses to admit it. The true events of the play start unfolding with the arrival of the youngest sister Minnie and her husband Frank from their London home. While Sophie is determined to protect the integrity of Nicodemus and make into a place Black folk can truly be free and flourish, Frank hardly acknowledges that he’s Black to begin with. Frank is mixed and light enough to pass and believes he’ll receive inheritance from his recently deceased father, despite having been the man’s slave. Needless to say, the White side of his family refuses to acknowledge him, leaving him penniless. Frank takes his frustrations out on recently pregnant Minnie and beats her into giving him control over the third of land Sophie gave her as Minnie’s inheritance. Sophie is ready to shoot him dead but Miss Leah has a better plan. Frank dies after eating Fannie’s pie made using Miss Leah’s recipe and Sophie succeeds in defending the town from White speculators looking to buy up property. Minnie has a healthy baby and stays with her family. Miss Leah ends the play with promises to tell the baby about all of her ancestors as far back as she can remember.

 

CHARACTERS

Sophie Washington – 36, Mixed Black Woman, Born into Slavery

Miss Leah – 73, Black Woman, Born into Slavery

Fannie Dove – 32, Black Woman, Born into Slavery

Wil Parrish – 40, Born into Slavery

Minnie Dove Charles – 21, Black Woman

Frank Charles – 36, White Passing Black Man, Born into Slavery

 

POSSIBLE MONOLOGUES

There are loads and loads of potential monologue in this play. Firstly, Wil has lines that can be strung together to make a comedic monologue about his time in Mexico. It starts with how U.S. hot and Mexican hot are two very different things and then he shares that he likes Mexicans and that not everyone in Mexico does, but that Mexicans are the nicest people.

Fannie has three lines that could be turned into a good length monologue early in the script. She talks about her mother’s love of flowers and how they need to be free which segues into the freedom Sophie found coming out West. Now the flowers and Sophie both have room to grow. Fannie has a true monologue as the end of the first scene of Act II, but I don’t think that it stands alone very well. The monologue is about how their mother endured when their father abused her and Fannie took that experience to mean that women need to be understanding and patient and that there would come a time when angry men’s hearts could be changed. Fannie was a little girl making sense of the world around her at the time and throughout the play she learns that there’s no excusing domestic violence when her sister is beat within an inch of her life by her husband. The whole of the play works against the message of the monologue as a standalone piece.

Miss Leah has a few monologues, but half deal with sensitive material. Her first is about giving birth as a slave and how she’d hold off giving birth until nightfall so she wouldn’t have to squat in the field. She talks about how she strapped her first born to her back and the conversation she had with the overseer, who uses the N word referring to her and her son. Miss Leah’s second monologue is about how she got started having children in the first place and is essentially a story of rape, despite believing that she would have loved James if she had been allowed to find him herself instead of being forced to be bred with him. I don’t recommend using either monologue outside of specific situations where they’re appropriate to the material being auditioned for. Now she does have a dramatic monologue that can work for a general audition in scene four of Act II. James had never been able to see a single one of his children before they were sold off and Miss Leah vowed to change that. She wasn’t able to until after the war when they had both been freed, but one after the other, their children all died of illness, driving James to an early grave. That’s what set her off to move out West somewhere big enough to hold all her grief. Lastly she has a full page monologue right before the last scene where she convinces Sophie that there are easier ways to kill someone without getting caught.

Sophie has a good monologue about Nicodemus’s potential to be a save haven for free Black people. She talks about the mentality of having a choice in what you do as opposed to being confined into thinking you’re only good for menial labor. She has another set of lines about her resolve to murder Frank that connects to her larger need of protecting Nicodemus. The town won’t be safe for Black people if Black women can still be attacked in their own homes.

Frank also has monologues, but they’re mostly in conversation with Minnie where he’s tearing her down and insulting Black people. Again, I don’t recommend them to be used out of context.

 

PERSONAL THOUGHTS

            On the subject of representation, this play really does it for me. There are so many good examples of juxtaposition to keep from making blanket statements about peoples. We never see an actual Indigenous character, but the people come up in conversation from time to time. While we have them referred to as wild Indians that East Coast Black folk are scared to be around, we also hear Wil’s endearing account of growing up with a Seminole tribe that took him in when he escaped a plantation. Wil also spent a good deal of time in Mexico and practically monologues a love letter to the people there. Wil’s past paired with Frank and Minnie’s experience in London paint a picture of Black people being accepted everywhere excepted the United States, which in my opinion, helps to drive Sophie’s passion for protecting Nicodemus as a safe haven where Black people can be accepted without having to cross a border.

            Then there’s Frank. Frank Charles is an objectively horrible man that refuses to acknowledge the worth of the culture that will actually claim him and the continued rejection has made him a cruel wife-beating man. Flyin’ West to me does a good job showing that it’s Frank’s own choice to be corrupted that leads to his downfall as opposed to it just being the way mixed people or Black men are. Sophie is also a light skinned, but not White passing, mixed Black woman. Where Frank detests his Blackness, Sophie revels in it and see it as her life’s mission to protect. Wil Parrish is a great antithesis to Frank as a Black man. He’s sweet and caring in his pursuit of Fannie and makes it very clear how he feels about Frank beating Minnie, even though in 1898 it’s a man’s legal right to do so. Wil goes as far as to offer to kill Frank multiple times and each time making it clear that he would take no joy in the violence, but that protecting Black women would be worth it. When Fannie and Sophie refuse his help, he hears them and listens to them and their need to defend themselves even though it would be arguably easier for Wil to take care of it.