3 The Scar of Shame

Social drama has been the popular art form most often embraced by an audience at odds with its circumstances. As a vehicle for Afro-American sentiments, the social drama has allowed full range to the black film genre. Built on sensitivity to the black plight in America, narrowly focused on segregated circles, using the details of plot andincident as the basis of an anatomy of black social life, the social drama serves as the medium for expressing black aspiration. If the drama is set forth in an appropriate repertoire of symbols, the result conveys a strong sense of group consciousness. And in its optimistic forms, such as Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, social drama can become almost a ritual of the eventual redemption of Afro-America.

The middle-class social drama has long been a staple of the American cinema. D.W. Griffith's earliest explorations from primitivefilm into edited narratives were neat little social dramas; The Romance of a Jewess (1908),for example, depicted familial conflict over the pain of assimilation brought on by a mixed marriage. In the most recent unfolding of television genres, social drama has grown into a new form thatruns for entire evenings and even weeks. It should then be no surprise that a team of silent moviemakers, black and white, should have turned the social drama into a sub-genre of black film. Indeed, the work of the Colored Players in 1927 was not only in the tradition of social drama of middle-class life, but at the height of a resurgence of social themes in the silent cinema. It seemed the most natural mode for conveying the dense in-group point of view, the sense of urgent advocacy, the rich detail of good anatomy, the cool hero, the mythic rituals of aspiration and success, and the symbolic repertoire of black genre.

The Colored Players competed with a host of rivals, black and white, who saw similar possibilities. As early as the teens, the Ebony Motion Picture Company of Chicago and its black frontman, J. Luther Pollard, tried to reach aninterracial audience by enlarging the inventory of black social roles. If their goal of universality proved false, it was not the fault of the medium; rather, filmmakers and producers were limitedby their own narrow view that white audiences could tolerate only traditional Negro roles.

Toward the end of the silent era, a few Hollywood studios intended to make comedy out of anatomies of black society drawn from the stories of Hugh Wiley and Octavus Roy Cohen. Through the same period, black companies had similar goals, several of them adapting the novels and stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and even T.S. Stribling for the screen. Unfortunately, few of the resulting films survive. More than fifty years ago, for example, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company released The Realization of a Negro's Ambition, of which but a tiny fragment survives. Thus, we cannot study what may have been the earliest instance of a black success myth on film. Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul, as we have noted, survives only in a form beset by censor-imposed ambiguities. Save for a fragmentincluded in Post-Newsweek's television documentary, Black Shadows on the Silver Screen (1975), the movie remains inaccessible. Thus, the young, intense Paul Robeson's earliest, and in some ways, most complete genre film performance, the role that demonstrated aspectsof social melodrama in the service of social criticism, is not available for analysis. Late in the1920s another genre film, Richard D. Maurice's Eleven P.M. (ca. 1928), which survives in its entirety(although its origins remain a matter of discussion among historians) attempted to present a faithful visual record of Detroit's ghetto. But the authentic texture of the streetscape is soon discarded in favor of a curious, garbled reincarnation talethat seems foreign to its black theme.

No one has indisputably sorted out the clouded beginnings of the Colored Players, the most successful of these early groups. We know that in the mid-1920s, Sherman "Uncle Dud" Dudley, a veteran black vaudevillian, felt that Negro vaudeville was dying. We also know that a few white entrepreneurs, among them, Robert Levy (owner of the Reol studio where Dudley had made a race movie), were willing to invest in race films asa possible successor to black stage entertainment.

David Starkman, a white Philadelphian with a financial interest in movie theaters that were slowly turning to black clienteles began searching for films to schedule. Starkman offered to merge with Dudley, thereby opening the opportunity to create the "black Hollywood" in Philadelphia's Tempo Studio that Dudley had once dreamed of in Washington.

They first rummaged for an angle that would touch their black audience. The resulting film, A Prince of His Race (1926), now lost, taught the lesson that the black social ladder was both short and shaky, and those who reached the pinnacle might fall the farthest. In the same year, Charles Gilpin starred in their version of the old road show melodrama, Ten Nights in a Bar Room, a temperance tract to which Gilpin gave a double turn of the screw, because ofhis own reputation as a drinker, and because so many black migrants from Southern pietism feared that their people would fall victim to saloons, the demoralizing social forces pressing upon Northern black neighborhoods.

Then, together with the technical talents of Frank Perugini and AI Liguori, two white journeymen who directed and shot the film, Dudley and Starkman shared the social and technical knowledge that resulted in The Scar of Shame. Like many black creations in America, thisfilm owed much of its substance to forces intruding from the white world.

The Scar of Shame, of all the black silent films, then provides the best example of the genre by virtue of its survival, its consistent point of view from within a black bourgeois subculture, its accurate anatomy ofblack social mores, its closely worked myth of black aspiration for "the finer things," and its arresting vocabulary of plausible supporting symbols.

This is not to say that The Scar of Shame was, as some of its advocates claimed, "a new standard of excellence," or the equal of Von Sternberg's early films, as another enthusiastic observer insisted. Nor was it, as a black critic observed, "possibly the finest product[of a] black-owned company" that therefore was somehow more "interested in true depictions of black culture." Instead of these artistic and political standards, The Scar of Shame took the measure of its rivals by virtue of its accomplishment as a genre film true to its point of view, segregated roots, narrative treatment of black aspiration, repertoire of black symbols, schematic anatomy of black life, and cool hero for whom styleis more important than action. In short, by the end of the silent era, The Scar of Shame stood as the brightest spot in race movie making, measured by the specific standard of fidelity to a black genre, rather than by some purely aesthetic one.

"A child could have done it," is the way its star, Lucia Lynn Moses, recalled her role in the film. "They just told me what sceneit was and we just acted it out," she said of herwhite bosses at the Philadelphia studio, to whichshe commuted from her chorus-line slot at the Cotton Club. Yet the film became more than the scheme of a handful of white exploiters to make a few dollars. The chemistry of black cast, white crew,and interracial production team created a remarkable document.

The Scar of Shame servesits theme so well that to isolate its parts for the sake of analysis begs the question of integrity to genre and audience. Its clearly sympathetic point of view, mythic quest for a better lot, careful use of contrasting symbols of power and poverty, and larding of melodrama with a detailed anatomy of the conflicting strata of black urban life, hold together the film as a strong exemplar of the genre. Out of these elements unfolds a theme rooted in the tension between street life and the black bourgeoisie. To rise above the one while avoiding the hypocrisy of the other should be the goal of the ambitious Negro. This, the messageof The Scar of Shame, is asserted with firmer conviction than its intended sermon against color-caste snobbery. The message took on added sophistication because of the audience's familiarity with the reality of black life: the ghetto Negro who seeks the main chance brings to it a weighty burden of poverty, casual brutality, and the guilt that results from stepping over the fallen.

The film's dichotomy leaps fromthe screen from the first establishing shots. Theflat gray world of the streets, with it hustlers and grifters, is set against the prim, neat rented room of a black composer. These symbols foreshadow the characters who will represent these opposites in a dramatic conflict. The composer, Alvin Hilliard (Harry Henderson), is dangerously close to betraying the less fortunate of the race. Through his mastery of white music that will carry him to a life of "the finer things," he is coolly escaping the ghetto. Outside his window are the darkened doorways and foreboding fenced backyards of black Philadelphia. The American success myth rules in his room; the urge to survive on the street. Hilliard's landlady expresses the middle-class code. He will become "the leading composer of our race," she predicts.

One day Hilliard, alone with his music, is drawn to the window by screams, whichforeshadows a descent into the ghetto. In the yard below he sees Louise, a beautiful light-brown girl, being beaten by her brutal father. Plot and ambience quickly fuse. Hilliard, stiff in his neat clothes, clambers down the fire escape to the rescue. A short bitter scrap follows, and the loser is Louise's father, who, in contrast to Hilliard, wears a workingman's cloth cap and smokes his cigarettes down to ragged, pinched ends.

Louise and Hilliard enjoy a brief, chaste romance and plan a marriage of convenience that will rescue her from her father's roughdiscipline, and by implication, from the squalor of the ghetto. With each cutaway to life outside their neat cubicle—the gray exteriors, paper-strewn streets, and vacant, staring storefronts—the audience is reminded of the fate from which the marriage will saveher. On the street, Eddie, a hustler and saloonkeeper, rules by a hard code. He leads Louise's brooding, drunken father into a plot to ruin her marriage and bring her back into his ghetto sphere.

These rivals for Louise's life struggle at the center of a black bourgeois myth of success. On the one hand the striving Hilliardand the passive Louise express an urge to escape the harsh life of the street. On the other, Eddie, knowing he cannot rise out of the ghetto, seeksto impose a Pax Negro upon it, to control that which he cannot escape. Here are the two sides of black ambition: the urge to flee the ghetto or to control it.

The filmmakers speak with conviction, an authentic black point of view, and a tragic sense by revealing the frailty of both blackgoals: escape cannot be complete nor dominance absolute. Eddie's hegemony extends only to those shattered by the ghetto experience. Hilliard's marriage to Louise is strained by his mother's furtive reluctance to accept the bride because she is "beneath our set."

These polar opposites of black life—middle-class aspiration and the life of the street, the "respectables" and the "riffraff," in the terms of historian David Gordon Nielson—are seen throughout the film in densely packed syntagmatic inventories of symbols that reinforce, illustrate, and allegorize the theme of conflict between the two sets of black social values. To cite only one example, Eddie contrives a ruse to draw Louise away from the security of her newly insular bourgeois life by diverting Hilliard to hismother's suburban home by a false emergency. The episode seems dramaturgically contrived and improbable; Eddie is too beastly and lacking in motive; Louise is too gullible; Hilliard's response is too mindless. But the visual statement is striking. The suburban houses are flat and stark; a similar though less powerful image than an Edward Hopper streetscape, they are as perversely empty of humanity as a child's Christmas-garden suburb. In contrast, Louise remains in the cluttered, vibrant city, in Eddie's hands. If this visual metaphor fails, it is only on the level of conveying the gradations of skin color that presumably form the basis for the Afro-American caste system. Lights and darks are muddled rather than divided into light bourgeoisie and dark proletariat, thereby giving greater weight to class striving symbols over those of color line. The dramatic conflict then is between those who seek "the finer things" and those who do not.

21. In The Scar of Shame, the room where Louise (Lucia Lynn Moses) dies symbolizes the life she relinquished by compromising. (© Post Newsweek Television)

The rest of the plot unfolds out of the class conflict. The uneasy alliance between Hilliard and Louise eventually deteriorates; in a confrontation he wounds her and scars her neck, which she thereafter covers with a gossamer scarf. Hilliard is convicted, jailed, escapes, andbecomes a piano teacher, while Louise begins a scarlet career as a singer in Eddie's cabaret. Years later, Hilliard falls in love with a pupil from his own class. When her roguish father has a liaison with Louise, Hilliard and Louise meet. More properthan ever, he refuses to be blackmailed into resuming their old relationship. Louise, realizing she is a "victim of caste," poisons herself, allowing Hilliard to step over her corpse and marry into his own class.

The cluster of visual symbols serves as an opening to an anatomy of a black world, made necessary because black society, like American white society, is multi-faceted. As in manyliterary anatomies from Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler to Arthur Hailey's Airport, the intention is to transmit information. But in recent times the function of literary anatomy has enlarged to include melodramatic entertainment often cast in the mode of social drama. The Scar of Shame was both good social drama and good anatomy in this sense. In the form of a drama of manners it taught the audience details of its own less-known lifestyle, challenged one of itsvalue systems, and illuminated the possible flawsin one black bourgeois strategy in its struggle against racism. As a cautionary tale warning Afro-Americans of the awful price to be paid by those who too casually abandon the question of race solidarity, or who uncritically adopt the white world's segregated system, The Scar of Shame derived a sense of conviction and power from the dense authenticity of its social details and symbols. The black audience was reminded sharply of what it already knew: moving to the suburbs, forsaking urban roots, adopting white norms, cannot erase responsibility to the darker brothers who can never escape.

If The Scar of Shame suffers from a theme which is not clear, it is possibly the fault of title cards which informed the audience that the film's dramatic tension was between light and dark. Recent critics, too, have found it to be a cautionary tale about the evils of color caste. But in fact, light skin appears in both high and low castes, and the issue is more correctly one of aspiration. Every single incident of plot and action depicts a question of upward mobility. In the opening scenes in Hilliard's respectable boarding house, Eddie's bad manners spoil the decorum, and Hilliard literally drives him from the dining room. In another scene, Hilliard,who aspires to greatness as a composer, fights—and defeats—Louise's brutal lower-class father. In still another example, Louise's lower-class room is ironically dark and hopeless, while Hilliard's is brightened by a portrait of Frederick Douglass, the bourgeois black Republican hero.

Eventually it is Louise who symbolically abandons respectable black values. Whenshe embraces Eddie's way of life, her childhood doll is crushed underfoot. "You too had to be a victim of caste," she says to her doll as she surrenders to life as it is and gives up the ideals Hilliard pursues. Moreover, Eddie sees the difference between their respective lives. He asks Louiseto give up Hilliard for a life in his cabaret andcalls Hilliard "that dicty sap." In 1927, "dicty"was the term used pejoratively to describe Negro social climbers, West Indians, and others whose manners set them apart from Negro folk style. As afinal sign that Louise's decision to join Eddie spoiled her chance to aim for higher values, she becomes a shill in his cafe, itself corrupt because it masquerades in high-class style without the necessary substance. Hilliard, on the other hand,succeeds because his new life as a piano teacher is the result of solid "race ambition."

Hilliard and Louise continue tocontrast: Hilliard offers Alice, one of his pupils, both love and aspiration; Louise is resigned to a dandy, who, in return for an introductory date, offers the news that he "hit the numbers today." Again, the point is hammered home. In contrastto Hilliard's substance and genuine ambition, thedandy offers the ephemeral goal of hitting the long shot in the gambling game played by the urban proletariat.

The iris-out ending of books and a candle symbolize, according to one character,a summation of Louise's wasted life. She failed to aspire for "the finer things," he says, not because of racism or color caste, but because she was a "child of her environment," and as such, failed to transcend squalor to embrace black bourgeois life. Hilliard, who aspires to success, lives, while Louise, whose vision never rises sufficiently to lift her above the low-life, must die.

But an ambiguity extends even to the sets, for much of the power of the last sequence springs from richly clustered symbols of class set in an ambience of cloying air, feather boas, antimacassars, and fringed tablecloths. Thesesyntagmas signal both admiration and contempt, similar to that with which New York Negroes described Harlem's poshest street as "Striver's Row." Onthe one hand we see Hilliard rise through drivingambition. But on the other, we are reminded that although he personally avoids its consequences, his social climbing is anti-social, a desertion ofthe less fortunate of his race.

In conventional melodrama, Hilliard's course of action and its denouement would stand as a flaw in the plot because convention would not permit a romantic hero to be responsible for a death. But The Scar of Shame cannot be judged as an ordinary melodrama. The incidentsof plot, setting, and character are dense with social meanings that provide visual signals throughwhich a sensitive viewer perceives an anatomy of black social life and the social message beneath the contrived plot. That is, striving for the topof the black world has its price. On the way up, the striver may merely assimilate white tastes, as Hilliard seems to compose white music; but as Louise is scarred by the struggle, other blacks may be hurt by the individual's drive for success.

In The Scar of Shame, the surface indicators, the title cards, the apparent intentions of the filmmakers all pointed toward a conventional story about color caste. But themovie was transformed by visual imagery from a melodrama about caste into a film that turned in onitself, and discarded its surface message in favor of looking at the ambiguous lives of the dicty blacks on Striver's Row.