The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World by Suzan-Lori Parks

First produced: 1990, at the Brooklyn Arts Council Association (BACA) Downtown Theater, Brooklyn, New York

First published: 1990

Type of work: Play

Type of plot: Experimental; surrealistic

Time of work: “The Present”

Locale: United States

Principal Characters:

• Black Man with Watermelon, the protagonist
• Black Woman with Fried Drumstick, his wife and companion
• Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork, who is based on folklore and southern soul food
• Yes and Greens Black-eyed Peas Cornbread, another food-based stereotype
• Queen-then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut, who is based on a historical figure
• Before Columbus, who stands for a time when the world was flat
• Old Man River Jordan, who is based on a song from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
• Ham, a figure from the Bible
• And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger, a parody of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son
• Prunes and Prisms, an image of an African American prom queen, whose name is taken James Joyce’s Ulysses
• Voice on Thuh Tee V, a voice of mass, popular culture

The Play

The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire Worldis divided into six sections: the overture and five panels. The panels comprise three scenes—featuring Black Man with Watermelon and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick—and two choruses that, like the overture, include all the characters. Suzan-Lori Parks has said that these choruses are like the refrains of a song, but their connection to the Greek use of a chorus to illuminate and comment upon the play’s action is also clear. Each section features the sound of a bell, often at the end of the scene or chorus.

The overture begins with Black Man—who is dead and who will die in many ways associated with the historical oppression of black men during the play—announcing he will move his hands, a refrain that he repeats throughout the overture. Black Woman alerts the audience to the play’s fluid, non-linear time frame when she refers to her husband’s death “just uh moment uhgoh in 1317.” Yes and Greens Black-eyed Peas Cornbread urges her to write this piece of history down, a line that will also be repeated. Black Man laments that the world used to be “roun”; Queen-then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut notes the addition of the letter d to “round” after Columbus ended things: His discovery that the world was not flat, as Europeans had thought, caused whites to figure out their own place in the scheme of things and consequently to put blacks in their place—outside of history.

Panel 1, “Thuh Holy Ghost,” opens with Black Man commenting on the watermelon he is carrying: It is not his; who gave birth to it? Black Woman, who has been waiting for his return, tells him of his deaths by jumping off a slave ship, jumping twenty-three stories off a building, and being electrocuted in a portable electric chair. In Panel 2 (the first chorus), all the figures riff on the varied deaths of the last black man, expanding on Black Woman’s list to include Black Man jumping into the river, being chased by dogs.

Panel 3 is titled “Thuh Lonesome Threesome.” Black Man returns from a hard day’s work, unable to breathe. Black Woman notes that he no longer needs to breathe, and it becomes evident why as they describe his “work,” a lynching party. Black Man notes that those who killed him got tired of him; now his question is where he should go. He considers bathing. Black Woman suggests praying to the “lonesome 3some.” Panel 4, the second chorus, begins with the figures listening to Voice on Thuh Tee V announcing the discovery of a sliver of a tree branch that is also a fossilized bone fragment. And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger also feels the rope around his throat. In response to the questions about where Black Man is going, Old Man River Jordan says they must ask Ham. Ham responds with a history lesson that parodies the biblical succession of fathers “begetting” sons. Old Man River Jordan reminds the group that their problems started when Ham saw his father Noah naked. Ham, who has become Ham Bone by the end of the chorus, denies responsibility. Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork announces the death of the last black man.

In Panel 5, “In Thuh Garden of Hoodoo It,” Black Man begins to remember his connection to the watermelon, as well as what he liked to eat and, most important, his place in time—in “uh Now” and “uh Then.” He and Black Woman parody a romantic ending: “Re-member me.”

In the final panel, the figures reprise the Black Man’s “history,” noting that now it has been written down, and Black Man moves his hands.

Critical Context

Parks was born in 1963 in Kentucky. An “Army brat,” she lived in six states and went to high school in Germany before earning degrees from Mount Holyoke College and the Yale School of Drama. In 1989, when Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom was performed at Brooklyn Arts Council Association (BACA) Downtown in Brooklyn, The New York Times named her the year’s most promising new playwright. In 1990, while BACA was producing The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Parks received the Obie for Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. She has continued to write and to win awards, most notably the 1996 Obie for Venus, a MacArthur Fellowship (2001), and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Topdog/Underdog (pr., pb. 2001).

Parks has refused to be predictable, but her plays share a variety of influences. She and others have noted connections to James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, but African and African American influences seem central to her plays, especially to The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Parks herself has referred to that play as a musical in which no one sings, and many note the influence of music, especially jazz and the blues, on her form, including her rhythmic use of language and improvisation. Louise Bernard points to the use of African Kuntu drama with its emphasis on continuum, and the play clearly is reminiscent of the American minstrelsy tradition in its use of African American stereotypes. Moreover, its emphasis on the double consciousness of African Americans relates to W. E. B. Du Bois, and Parks’s forging of connections between folklore and literature is reminiscent of the work of Zora Neale Hurston. A closer influence, perhaps, is the work of contemporary African American female playwrights, especially Adrienne Kennedy’s surreal and fragmented settings and characters and Ntozake Shange’s use of African American speech patterns and stereotypes.

Bibliography

Bernard, Louise. “The Musicality of Language: Redefining History in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” African American Review 31, no. 4 (Winter, 1997): 687-700. Focuses on Parks’s use of language and its connection to African American identity.

Haring-Smith, Tori. “Dramaturging Non-realism: Creating a New Vocabulary.” Theatre Topics 13, no. 1 (2003): 45-54. Discusses the process of working with non-realistic theatrical elements in the plays of Parks and Caryl Churchill.

Rayner, Alice, and Harry J. Elan, Jr. “Unfinished Business: Reconfiguring History in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” Theatre Journal 46, no. 4 (1994): 447-461. Discusses Parks’s use of language to rework African American history.

Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr., and Alicia Smith-Howard. Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2007. The first critical volume on Parks; contains eight articles and an interview with the playwright.

Wood, Jacqueline. “Sambo Subjects: ’Declining the Stereotype’ in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” Studies in the Humanities, June-December, 2001, 109-122. Discusses Parks’s appropriation and subversion of African American stereotypes.