8 Age-Associated Power Dynamics in Velina Hasu Houston’s Alabama Rain

Velina Hasu Houston’s Alabama Rain (1992) represents the contemporary Black female Motherhood Aesthetic through its emphasis on the powerlessness of a tormented wife and her incapability to protect her children against threats within the home. Houston’s commentary on the absence of safety in the home aligns with Black feminist rhetoric on the challenges associated with motherhood when a woman’s trauma remains unhealed. As in Orlandersmith’s Monster, the physical and psychological abuses of girls in Alabama Rain highlight mothers who fail to develop nurturing traits or the courage to confront pedophilia, particularly in the home. Alabama Rain differs, however, in the absence of self-destructive behaviors like alcoholism that contribute to this failure to mother healthily. The inclusion of multicultural characters also distinguishes Alabama Rain from the other plays in this book and expands the contemporary Black female Motherhood Aesthetic to draw connections between Black women and other women of color.

Houston and three siblings were reared by a Japanese mother and Native American / Black / Cuban father in Junction City, Kansas. The majority of Houston’s works are influenced by her Japanese heritage, situating her firmly in the study of Asian American women’s drama. Her first critically acclaimed play, Tea (1985), gives voice to Japanese wives of ethnically diverse soldiers who settled in the middle of rural America. Waiting for Tadashi (2002), Kokoro (2004), The House of Chaos (2007), and Empress Lily (2016) are some of her more than forty commissioned plays. Houston’s national and global recognitions include a Japan Foundation “Currently, Houston is the USC Distinguished Professor of Theatre in Dramatic Writing and USC Resident Playwright.”Fellowship; the Pinter Review Prize for Drama, silver medal; a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship; the Lee Melville Award for Outstanding Contributions to Los Angeles Theatre; and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Fellowship.^[1] Currently, Houston is the USC Distinguished Professor of Theatre in Dramatic Writing and USC Resident Playwright. She founded the graduate playwriting program and continues to play an instrumental role in undergraduate studies. Her lectures and workshops at higher education institutions across the United States and Japan indicate a global acknowledgement of her contributions to expanding dramatic commentary (YouTube) on racial and cultural identities.

In her autoethnographic essay titled “Rising Sun, Rising Soul: On Mixed Race Asian Identity That Includes Blackness” (2017), Houston utilizes personal experiences to engage anti-Blackness as a significant factor in how mixed-race Asians of African descent are perceived and treated in the United States. She describes the deep-rooted prejudices associated with race and a privileging of whiteness that leads to questions of “fit” and “place” for persons whose outward appearance indicates Black parentage: “Mixed race people are the Other. Mixed race people of African descent are the Other’s Other.”^[2] Houston chisels away at “an obsession with the presentation of race as monorace—which has its foundations in the entrenched Black White binary created during slavery” and argues for a broadened perspective of race that is not steeped in whiteness.^[3] Written more than twenty years prior, Alabama Rain reads as Houston’s attempt to assemble fragmented components of a mixed-race identity while grappling with deviancies associated with her Blackness (i.e., alcoholic father).

Houston’s works and awards solidify her as a significant contemporary playwright of color who intentionally investigates race and culture in a gender context. Alabama Rain expands Houston’s canon through featuring characters who are Blackfoot Native American, Black American, or a combination of both. Deceased Black father Townsend Blue and his Blackfoot wife Rain reared four daughters—Crystal, Lavender, Violet, and Indigo—who identify as Black women. The daughters embrace some aspects of their mother’s culture, but express embarrassment at their community’s ridicule of the unfamiliar, as no other Native Americans live in their community. In her depiction of the sexual deviancies within the Blue home, Houston avoids couching the discussion in a long history of framing Black men as predators who are incapable of controlling their sexual urges. Instead, the age difference between Townsend and his wife and children emphasizes a dominant reason for Townsend’s terrorizing of his family. Townsend was a pedophile who preyed on his wife and children until his unexpected death.

To date, Velina Hasu Houston has been excluded from studies and anthologies of African American women’s drama. An obvious reason is her play’s relative obscurity, with one staged reading by the Circle Repertory Company in 1992. A digital version can be accessed through the Black Drama database by Alexander Street, and a print copy is housed with Houston’s other works at the Huntington Library Archives.^[4] Another reason Alabama Rain has not been studied as African American women’s drama may lie in the title character’s Native American identity and the other characters’ mixed-race heritage. As noted in “Rising Sun, Rising Soul,” a “plantation-era race theory [. . .] dictates that what is White is White, and everything else is Black, that whenever the majority of the United States talks about race, it talks about Black versus White as if no other races of people existed on the continent or at least they do not matter in the large scheme of things.”^[5] Typically, plays written by Black women that feature mixed-race characters castigate the power dynamics that exist between white and Black Americans. Early examples include Georgia Douglas Johnson’s anti-lynching play Blue-Eyed Black Boy (1930) and Shirley Graham Du Bois’s It’s Morning (1934/1940). These works feature whiteness as a threat to the lives of Black people and present mixed-race persons as the embodiment of this long-sustained battle. Houston interchanges this dichotomy by layering the lives of Native American women and Black women through the inclusion of multicultural characters with shared experiences, similar to what Ntozake Shange achieves with Black and Hispanic characters in for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1975). Houston’s inclusion of a Native American mother and her mixed-race daughters juxtaposes experiences of Native American women and Black women to comment on a shared victimhood with social and cultural roots.

Alabama Rain shares themes and techniques with other early- and mid-century plays written by Black women. For instance, like the title character in Angelina Grimké’s Rachel (1916), three of Houston’s characters refuse to birth children with the intent to protect other children from trauma. As with Eulalie Spence’s Her (1927), Houston’s use of magical realism allows for a layered observation of the supernatural in non-white spaces. Also, Houston depicts her Black characters as connecting to their pain and making intentional efforts to heal, similar to the concluding poem in Shange’s play. Finally, LaVinia Delois Jennings’s essay on Alice Childress’s Florence (1949) and Wedding Band (1966) describes characters who “use anger and defiance as means of exorcising psychic hostilities that American’s history of white racism, as unseen signifier, breeds between white and black [. . .] to resist the conventions of motherhood and to renounce other-imposed images and definitions of themselves.”^[6] While white racism is not applicable to Alabama Rain, the power dynamics between an adult and a child take its place as the “unseen signifier” that results in responses steeped in defiance. Collectively, these examples represent the canon of Black women’s plays that illuminate the strengths and shortfalls of Black women by putting difficult and sometimes unique challenges at the forefront.

Alabama Rain is set in the days following Rain’s death. Crystal, Lavender, Violet, and Indigo have gathered to finalize Rain’s funeral arrangements but find themselves confronting childhood memories that continue to haunt them into adulthood. The entire play centers around Rain’s desire for her daughters to face their past, make peace with their parents’ actions, and heal from their pain. Yet, Houston undermines this desire by highlighting the impact of power dynamics, the complexity of mixed-race identity, and the refusal of motherhood when childhood trauma remains unresolved.

Age-Associated Power Dynamics

Early in the play, Houston establishes physical and mental isolation as consequential to the age-associated power dynamics between Townsend and Rain. Rain is sixteen years old when she leaves her home to marry thirty-nine-year-old Townsend. There is no explanation for how the two encounter one another in Montana or why they settle in Alabama. Is Townsend a traveller or is he part of Montana’s thriving Black population that emerged in the mid-1800s? In flashbacks, Rain remembers the early days of her relationship as ones of defiance. She rejects her Blackfoot tribe’s tradition of arranged marriages: “I do not wish to marry Henry Hawk Feather! I do not wish to share the bed of my sister’s husband. [. . .] Just because it is the way of our people, does it have to be my way?”^[7] Instead of marrying her brother-in-law, she chooses the unexpected with Townsend, also referred to as Elk-of-the-Night: “You love me like no other. [. . .] I am Doe-Who-Runs-In-The-Rain. And I run from what exists into the eye of new creation. Make a world with me, grandson of Africa.”^[8] For young Rain, her union with Townsend represents a new romanticized beginning, free from the dismissal of a woman’s autonomy and right to choose her own path. However, it is more plausible that other shared details lean toward a courtship wrapped in secrecy and loss.

Rain describes her secret rendezvouses with Townsend in the woods and the subsequent abandonment of her tribe and family. Her recounting of lessons on developing into womanhood contrast with what she witnesses in the men she encounters: “Men wild; only women make tame, teach how to sit down, how to eat gently, hold baby, make peace.”^[9] Here, Rain critiques her (and Townsend’s) community’s failure to equip men for an adult life suitable for fatherhood. Her recounting also reads like Rain is failing to shape Townsend into a mate with ideal traits and behaviors that align with what she envisions for herself. When she describes men as “wild” beings that “wander country like lost animal,” Rain recognizes that her new husband may experience difficulty with settling into what she considers an ideal marriage.^[10] What she cannot anticipate is the loss of the strength that fueled her departure from her Blackfoot family.

Through flashbacks and Rain’s ghost, Houston highlights a deterioration of defiance reinforced by the aforementioned lessons. From the moment Rain leaves her family, she is left with no support or sustained guidance in marriage or motherhood, particularly as a young girl married to an older man. Based on memories shared by her daughters, Rain was not fully accepted into her new Alabama community and formed no relationships in the community. She was viewed as an anomaly because she chose to maintain her Blackfoot indigenous practices. Also, there is no connection to family members left behind in Montana, as none are mentioned while the sisters discuss their mother’s arrangements.

Cultural Identity

In “Rising Sun, Rising Soul,” Houston writes about the importance of seeing mixed-race persons for themselves: “The mixed race individual exists in a multitude of racial, ethnic, cultural, and/or national consciousnesses that she attempts to meld together organically into an authentic hybrid identity that may transcend the limitations of racial concept and code, and extend into a racially noncategorical humanity.”^[11] This “authentic hybrid identity” should depend on a non-hierarchical categorization of one’s “multiple consciousnesses,”^[12] as penned by Houston. As seen with the Blue sisters, they struggle to develop a healthy and balanced racial identity when the examples presented to them are deemed flawed:

Crystal: To me, she might as well’ve been speaking Chinese because she sure didn’t know how to put together the words to say the things she should have. Which is why it’s a miracle we didn’t end up fucking middle class white men for a living.

Lavender: And even though we didn’t, there’s still a crack in the middle of every forehead I’m looking at right now and, before this night is over, I want them to mend, disappear without a scar.

Violet: Then you’re dreaming, sister, because what you’re looking at is nothing but a bunch of shattered mulatto mess and Crystal’s right: we’re lucky to have our sense intact.^[13]

Through Rain’s ghost, it is revealed that she wants her mixed-race daughters to honor both of their cultures, but the sisters experience challenges with a sense of belonging that may attribute to missing references to their Black culture: “I wish you were black, Mama, black as a starless night. God made half-breeds at the end of the sixth day when he was tired.”^[14] While the sisters share memories of Native American food dishes, attire, etc., they never do the same for Black culture. Beyond a mention of Indigo’s attendance at Howard University, no distinct instances of Blackness are present in the play.

It is questionable why the sisters shun their mother’s culture but seem to hold no qualms about the culture of a father who sexually abused them until his death. As the youngest daughter, Indigo suffered for the least amount of time during Townsend’s reign of terror. Her constant denial of her father’s transgressions raises the question of whether forgetting as a coping mechanism has worked to her benefit since her father’s death: “None of you are making sense to me. What are you talking about? We have a wonderful family. So Mama was Indian. That’s not our fault.”^[15]

For the other sisters, their perspectives on racial identity contradict their experiences in the home. They identify with their tormentor racially and minimize their alignment with the Native American culture held by a mother who suffers as her children do. Crystal, Lavender, and Violet remember Townsend as a sexual predator who viewed his wife and daughters as pleasure providers and confirmations of his power in the home. As teens, the sisters suffered a voicelessness similar to their mother’s. They did not fight off their father’s advances or offer any protection to each other. However, it is Violet who attempts to save Rain during a particularly severe beating inside her parents’ bedroom:

I come out of my room in the middle of the night and hear Mama crying. Oh god, Mama. I run down the hall to her room and Papa’s hurting her something terrible. She’s naked, struggling to get away from him as he wrestles her to the bed like an animal. “Mama” I cry out as I jump on the bed to save her. “Mama!” And Mama screams and Papa grabs me tightly by my flailing fist [. . .]. Papa releases me and I roll onto the floor staring up at the trap of panic and pain in the middle of blankets and dreams. Last night I think Papa devoured Mama and the woman who gave me breakfast today isn’t real. She just looks like Mama, but her eyes are dead, made of mirrors that shine me away. Mama’s eyes used to take me in.^[16]

Mimicking her mother’s own description of men as animals, Violet’s tale characterizes Townsend as an uncontrollable beast with violent demands for sex from women. It becomes clear, then, that Rain is incapable of helping her children because she cannot protect herself. Violet recognizes Rain’s powerlessness against Townsend but falls short of recognizing her mother as succumbing to years of abuse and becoming incapable of caring for her children any longer.

As teens, Crystal and Lavender mimic their parents’ tumultuous relationship. They establish a codependence in which Crystal behaves as Lavender’s salvation from abusive men. However, Crystal reestablishes her power by molesting Lavender, making her a double victim in the home. After acknowledging her “female rage,” adult Lavender confronts Crystal in a way she could never accomplish with her father. She chastises Crystal for mirroring their father’s behavior and for contributing to her long-term suffering. Initially, Crystal refuses to acknowledge the role she played in Lavender’s life. Yet, she finally admits, “But I’m no better than he is. I turned around and did it to you.”^[17] Lavender avoids sexual relationships with Black people—men and women—and chooses white men as her romantic interests. She identifies her German lover Klaus as a man whose race is irrelevant. Yet, she indicates that Klaus is a real man, implying that Townsend and other Black males are performing perceived roles of manhood but fail miserably. This sentiment is shared by Rain, who pleads for Black men to “say it for your family. You must say you will fight for us and take no prisoners.”^[18]

Refusal of Motherhood

The absence of maternal strength influences the sisters’ initial and long-term responses to their childhood trauma. For three of the sisters, the prospect of motherhood does not hold much importance. After a disappointing childhood void of the maternal connection they desire, Crystal, Violet, and Indigo assert their right to refuse motherhood as a means of protection and resistance. Crystal shuns all men and lives as a lesbian. Violet undergoes a hysterectomy, though she is twenty years of age. Indigo desexualizes herself to a point of invisibility and the absence of femininity. This refusal of motherhood as resistance has its dramatic beginnings in Angelina Grimké’s Rachel (1915), in which the title character abandons her dreams of motherhood after recognizing the inevitable racism her future children were sure to experience. Written a few years later, Shirley Graham Du Bois’s It’s Morning (1934/1940) recounts the story of an enslaved mother “who refuse[s] motherhood and/or child rearing because [she] cannot bear the alternative of birthing and rearing a child in a culture that discriminates on the basis of race, gender, and class,” as described in Joyce Meier’s “The Refusal of Motherhood in African American Women’s Drama.”^[19] Enslaved mothers such as Du Bois’s felt compelled to save their female children from the horrendous fates that left them susceptible to rape, as they were essential to maintaining the economic stronghold of the antebellum South.

Violet resists motherhood by undertaking drastic measures to break the cycle of rape in her family. Echoing Rachel, Violet expresses fear of the moment when childhood innocence is lost: “I wasn’t interested in bringing children into this world. [. . .] I won’t be sorry. Because this is a horrific world full of cowardice and unkindness. The human race deserves to become extinct and I just wanted to do my small part. Coming home only makes me realize what a good decision I made.”^[20] Later, Violet reveals that doctors already suspected she could not bear children because the rapes caused too much physical damage to her reproductive system: “I was ten. That’s why I can’t have babies. The doctor says it may even have happened earlier, like at four or five, but I can’t remember it.”^[21]

Attempts to Reclaim Control

As is the case with each of the Blue sisters, Violet reclaims control of her sexuality in a profound manner. In addition to having the hysterectomy, she engages in sexual acts with countless men to restore the sexual control that Townsend ripped from his daughter’s body. She jokingly states, “[Rain] tied some dried roots ‘round my ankles when I was in the cradle. It was s’posed to get the devil out of my koochie. I think it just made it plenty mad and hungry.”^[22] Both reactions demonstrate Violet’s need to feel in control of her sexual experiences and her body. Yet, she acknowledges that this control could only be attained once her father was deceased.

Violet’s most profound expression of control occurs when she murders her father. To rid her family of its most dangerous pestilence, she “just closed the door” that led to Townsend’s death.^[23] Knowing his fear of staircases from several drunken falls in the past, Violet closes the basement door, causing her father to lose his footing and fall to his death: “There was a thud and the sound of rumbling. It was like thunder. Just like what I heard in my head whenever he trudged down the hallway toward my room.”^[24] For Violet, her father’s death translates into a freedom that she, her sisters, and her mother were incapable of experiencing prior to that moment. For Violet, her father’s death translates into a freedom that she, her sisters, and her mother were incapable of experiencing prior to that moment. His death also functions as a means for saving her father from himself. Subconsciously, Violet rationalizes his demise as a pseudo-rebirth that will benefit her entire family: “He was curled up like a baby going back to the womb.”^[25] Townsend must return to a space in which he exists but has no interaction with the outside world. His retreat to the womb is punishment for his family’s sustained suffering. Begging for love from Lavender, the only sister who knows the real circumstances surrounding Townsend’s death, Violet seeks forgiveness for killing the “animal” that imprisoned her family for so long.^[26] Because they “remember” the numerous rapes, Crystal and Lavender accept their sister’s deed as justifiable. Indigo, on the other hand, finds Violet’s actions to be deplorable and without merit.

It is difficult to determine whether or not Indigo clearly distinguishes between reality and imagination. While her three sisters share memories of fear and hatred, Indigo states, “I don’t remember anything. That’s the trouble. When I think of Papa, every memory is perfect.”^[27] This safe space that Indigo creates for herself indicates a suppression of memories in exchange for the belief that “it was only after Papa died that [the sisters] became crazyquilt.”^[28] Indigo’s refusal to acknowledge her father’s deviant behaviors compels Violet, in particular, to question what may have shaped her sister’s sociopolitical point of view:

Violet: Why are you so angry, Indigo?

Indigo: I’m not.

Violet: You are. You were never political when you were real little. You started getting angry when you got your first period.

Indigo: How dare you suggest that the fervor of my politics is merely the result of a hormonal dysfunction?

Violet: If it isn’t then I want you to tell me a better reason. Or at least tell yourself.^[29]

This exchange signals the sisters’ frustration with Indigo’s denial of rape as well as her refusal to channel her anger toward its source. By highlighting Indigo’s misguided anger, Violet sets the stage for her sister to remember her tragic childhood:

Indigo: Everybody in this family’s crazy, but me.

Violet: From the first time he said good-night to me, I wanted to see him tumble.

Indigo: But he loved us. He told us stories every night. (Violet looks at Indigo with anger.)

Violet: Wake up, Baby Sister.^[30]

After much coaxing, Indigo admits to remembering her father’s indiscretions, yet she fails to identify Townsend as the motivation for her asexual identity. Instead, she blames Rain and questions why her mother did not “say something, do something” to protect her daughters.^[31] Like Crystal and Violet, Indigo finds it difficult to forgive Rain for what she considers to be an abomination of motherhood. Once claiming that her father “was the only thing that kept [the family] going,”^[32] Indigo still refuses to see her mother as a woman victimized by the same man who abused his own children. “Indigo still refuses to see her mother as a woman victimized by the same man who abused his own children.”Despite Indigo’s feelings about her mother, her subconscious response to her upbringing is more injurious than she will admit. Described as wearing “layers of dark oversized clothing,” Indigo subconsciously reconstructs herself as a sexless being who must tolerate such natural occurrences as a monthly cycle, the only connection to womanhood she cannot dispose of.^[33]

Lavender is the only sister who has chosen motherhood as part of her gendered role. Nonetheless, she is selective about her approach to childbirth. Lavender, who is expecting a son with her partner Klaus, implies that her mixed-race child will face a different fate than the Black men she views as violent and dangerous. Like Lavender, Crystal shuns sexual relationships with Black men. The difference lies in Crystal’s absolute refusal of Black men by engaging in same-sex relationships only: “I was eleven when Papa kissed what became my breasts. The touch of a man has repulsed me ever since.”^[34] As a teenager, Crystal convinces herself that she functions as the heroic lover who protects Lavender from other potential attackers. This point is illustrated best in a tale of attempted rape involving Lavender, who accepts a ride from a stranger who promises to drive her home. After fondling and sodomizing the teen, the man drives her home as if his actions are appropriate. Suddenly, “Crystal appears out of the darkness holding an imaginary gun and stands in front of the unseen car which comes to a sudden halt as Lavender is whiplashed. Crystal comes around to Lavender’s door and opens it, keeping the gun on the unseen man.”^[35]

Contrary to her reaction to incest, she is willing to use violence to retaliate against this particular rapist. Crystal’s adoptive phallus, the gun, protects Lavender from further harm at the hands of her victimizer: “Around these parts, colored women don’t take too kindly to crackers with big cars and big noses borrowing our women. We call that actin’ an ass and, if you’re gonna act like an ass, I’m gonna damn sure treat you like one.”^[36] Crystal uses her phallus to gain control over the tormentor and then humiliates and emasculates him by insulting his manhood:

Take off your clothes, mister. Show it to me. I SAID TAKE ‘EM OFF. Well, well. Seems your lollipop is more like a pipe cleaner. Didn’t your mama ever tell you not to lie to a woman the week before her period? Now take your hands and plant ‘em on that tree. Now. Sister, give me your hat pin. [. . .] Just give it to me. We’re gonna play pin the tail on the donkey with the man who’s actin’ an ass. (Trembling, Lavender hands her the “pin.” Using a second phallus, Crystal forcefully punches the pin in the unseen man’s buttock and Lavender screams as it occurs.)^[37]

Notably, Crystal’s attack is invasive and aggressive like the ones she experienced from her father. Wounded and angry, she transfers her pain to others as she slowly makes the transformation from victim to victimizer. She also appears to take pleasure in inflicting pain upon men, other than her father, who pose a threat to Black girls. Her reaction to Lavender’s attacker signifies the physical reaction that Crystal is unable to have with Townsend. Thus, stabbing the attacker with her other phallus, the pin, allows a subconscious revenge on her father. Overall, the sexual attitudes developed by the sisters are related directly to Townsend’s sexual deviancy and to their mother’s choice to refrain from protecting her children from their father. Lavender’s encounters are unique because she is the victim of two rapists—her father and her older sister Crystal. Lavender refers to herself as being “hunted by two wolves” because Crystal was “eaten by the wolf and became the wolf” herself.^[38] Although Lavender shares many tender moments with her older sister, there are times when Crystal demonstrates sexual behaviors similar to her father’s:

When I was a child, Big Sister here came to read me stories in bed. She snuggled in real close, told me the Bogey Man was coming and she’d keep me safe. And the Bogey Man came and left and Big Sister was still there, breathing against my breasts, playing doctor, teaching me the anatomy of a pre-teenager.^[39]

With Alabama Rain, Velina Hasu Houston succeeds in contributing to the canon of African American women’s drama that puts forth the “bad” mother as flawed, often through little fault of her own. In this case, age-associated power dynamics initiate a troubled display of motherhood that leads to the children’s struggles with identity as well as the difficult choice to resist motherhood. Houston highlights the permanency of unresolved trauma, particularly in the lives of children. With such conscious or subconscious awareness of trauma’s impact, Houston suggests that Black women must protect themselves in a culture where the lines between morality/immorality, control, and sexuality are misconstrued.