Wine in the Wilderness
In high school, I read Alice Chidress' Rainbow Jordan and thought I had really found a great novelist for young adults. The title character is one who is poor, proud, and open-minded. While these qualities appear the cliche of so many other works, Childress takes the character to a new level. The young adult Rainbow gets little attention at home, but she gains wisdom through another provider and from a Quaker woman, the latter of which teaches her to "center down." Eventually, Rainbow has to make a decision about allowing a boy to have her so she can feel loved, or denying him and saving her self-respect.
When I researched articles on this book way back then, I read a reviewer who said that Childress has an abiltity to treat the poor and uneducated with dignity. I believe Childress' greatness is in her ability to put educated and wealthy people in situations with their opposite and, in much the same way as Zola does with Germinal, to show differences in human beings and to laud humanity as the ultimate winner.
Many years later, as a high school teacher this time, I found that Childress is not a great novelist but a great writer in general. As good as her more popular young adult books have become, her plays are even better. Of those, my favorite is Wine in the Wilderness. Here, an educated artist (Bill) is looking for a subject for his triptych. He has the innocent school girl and the great model of mother Africa, but he needs the opposite of the great mother Africa, "Wine in the Wilderness" woman. He wants to find a model of what American society has done to the black woman. He wants to find, as he says, "a poor, dumb chick that's had her behind kicked until it's numb" (9).
Now if I tell you that this story has a benevolent and peaceful ending, you may guess, as I did the first time, that Bill will educate this poor victim of society. Instead, they teach each other. They find the model, who is listed as Tommy in the script. Her full name is Tomorrow Marie, which "sound[s] like a promise that can never happen" (23). As soon as Tommy walks in, she asks the Oldtimer what his real name is. The educated artist and his friends are immediately embarrassed that they do not know his real name (12-13).
Latest Articles