The story is entirely enclosed in a black community that lives on the coast of South Carolina next to a fishing harbour. They are fishermen and they till some land for cotton. They live in some kind of a fort that is closed by a metal and monumental gate and that is entirely turned inward onto its own courtyard. The only outside people are the police that comes when a crime is discovered and that is only to make a token arrest since they never get any testimony about who committed the crime. There will be two murders in the "fort". The other visitors are peddlers. The strawberry lady, the honey man or the crab man do not represent a danger in any way. But the drug peddler known as Sportin' Life is another can of worms. He is dangerous and his role will be dramatic in the story.
The drug peddler has it right when he says that two men for one woman always end up with one man dead and the other in prison, and the woman having no one at all. Porgy kills Crown, is arrested with no testimony against him but under the pretext that he is supposed to identify Crown's dead body, which he refuses to do, even when in front of the body. He is sent to prison for contempt of court. Hence Bess ends up alone, an easy prey to Sportin' Life who manages her so that she goes back to drugs and then goes away with him to New York. When Porgy comes back with presents for everyone, since he played dice in prison and made a little fortune, the community is friendly with him but does not want to tell him where Bess is. He finally gets it out of them and he decides to drop his two crutches and go to New York after Bess.
But this opera is a lot more interesting than this dramatic love affair and this surprisingly effective love quartet, one woman and three men. As long as the black community lives closed up on itself it can survive more or less decently though poor but proud of what they can make on the very edge of the white society outside, the society of the buckras. When you get out of this cocoon, you run all kinds of dangers: fishermen are killed by hurricanes when they go fishing. Women are exploited into selling themselves to anyone, into drug addiction and even slavery of some kind when they get out and follow a man out of their community. And it is from outside that the drug peddler comes to bring into the community what may destroy that community. And yet this community is totally pervaded by gambling with dice, alcoholism with whisky and moonshine alcohol, and even common brutality among the members. What saves them is their solidarity in front of the outside white society. They even have a fringe of black exploiters like the undertaker, the divorce dealer, the drug peddler and some others that ransom their own black community for any mostly illegal reason.
Solidarity cannot do anything against that kind of easy exploitation.
The opera was composed in 1935 and represented a revolution in itself. The action concerned a black community that was depicted as containing normal human feelings and passions and that was under the perversion imposed onto them by the white society outside that both victimized the community with systematic suspicion and made that community close up onto itself into some autarchic functioning that made them accept to be exploited by some black crooks and accept the violence of some of their members even when it became criminal. In other words their minds are totally colonized, under the domination from an outside, surrounding and seen and felt as superior group that dominates them. In 1935 there was yet no way out of this colonized situation except hard work to make a better living in that system but that did not change it, no matter whether they were fishing or growing cotton. Their lot was to be fishermen or sharecroppers. We were at the time still a long way from the education and then civil rights transformation, the main two ways for these communities to open up on the world, for the individuals in these communities to find their way up in society by conquering an equal, or at least as equal as possible position in the surrounding white society. But this opera showed that the situation was becoming highly explosive inside and in the relations with the outside world. It could not last very long indeed because presents, beautiful dresses, new hats were wanted and there would come a time when these people would say: we want them and they will finally do what they can to get them without selling their bodies, drugs or fake divorces, not to speak of coffins and funerals.
And yet the composer is not black which means the Blacks are not in 1935, though they are some of the greatest musicians in America already at the time, accepted on Broadway yet. It will take a long time before the Blacks are accepted as equal in showbiz as composers, authors and artists. But this quasi-all-black opera is a very important precursor of "Guess who's coming to dinner" that was only to come out in 1967, thirty two years and one World War later.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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