7 Motherhood, Magical Realism, and the Jazz Aesthetic in Aishah Rahman’s The Mojo and the Sayso

In 1989, when Aishah Rahman published The Mojo and the Sayso—a play written in response to the 1970s police murder of a ten-year-old Black boy named Clifford Glover—there was no way she could have anticipated the world of the early 2020s. These years presented a world in which police shootings of young Black men were prevalent and where not only the news media, but also private citizens widely filmed and photographed these incidents for voyeurs and visionaries alike to view, decode, and contend with. While the prevalence of police shootings is shocking to most people, this prevalence wasn’t limited to just a year or two.

Between 2020 and 2024, numerous unarmed African American boys were killed by police, namely: Michael Brown (age 18); Calvin Cains III (age 18); Cedric Lofton (age 17); Kwame Jones (age 17); Delaneo Martin (age 17); Lawrence McClendon (age 17); Michael Elam Jr. (age 17); Taleak Roberts (age 16); Angelo Crooms (age 16); Brett Rosenau (age 15); Lueth Mo (age 15); Jabril Cheevers (age 14); and Vernard Toney Jr. (age 13), just to name a few.

The most recognized Black men and boys who were murdered some years earlier include: Philando Castile (age 32, 2016); Ahmaud Arbery (age 25, 2020); Freddy Gray (age 25, 2015); Amadou Diallo (age 23, 1999); Oscar Grant III (age 22, 2009); Trayvon Martin (age 17, 2012); and Tamir Rice (age 12, 2014).

Aishah Rahman—an African American female playwright and a mother—expressed her concern for the families and mothers of the slain young men of her era, particularly Clifford Glover, when she wrote the following in the opening pages of The Mojo and the Sayso, “I knew that the family were people who were voiceless. And I had to give voice to them.”^[1] In an interview with Sydné Mahone, Rahman confessed that she identified deeply with the shooting of the Glover boy and couldn’t help but “put [herself] in Mrs. Glover’s place” when she learned that ten-year-old Clifford had been fatally shot by a policeman while walking in Queens, New York, with his father.^[2] The playwright recounted how “profoundly affected” she was by the slaying of the young man, so much so that she “wanted to run out and do something.”^[3] That the murder resulted from a racially motivated case of mistaken identity increased her desire to act. She revealed being alternately “haunted” by the tragedy that befell Clifford Glover and his family and struck by the familiar fact: “they let the officer off.”^[4] The realization that the white officer would remain legally blameless for the crime (combined with the playwright’s empathy toward the mother’s deep grief) urged Rahman to acknowledge the complications of motherhood: “When a woman decides to bring a new life into the world she looks at the world and says, ‘What am I doing? What kind of world awaits this child within me?’”^[5]

By analyzing The Mojo and the Sayso via the Motherhood Aesthetic and this line of questions, readers and playgoers alike will understand that the chief character Awilda Benjamin and her family navigate emotional turmoil and process healing through fantasy, magical realism, jazz, grief, and ultimately unity. The Mojo and the Sayso is a significant example of a play that employs the Motherhood Aesthetic because Awilda, much like Reba in Before It Hits Home, presents as a non-nurturing mother character after tragedy befalls her son.

The Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and International Places

Aishah Rahman (1936–2014)—the Black female playwright who wrote The Mojo and the Sayso—was born in Harlem, New York during the final years of the Harlem Renaissance.^[6] For many years of her life, she was a professor of literary arts at Brown University (1992–2011). She was also a graduate of Howard University (an HBCU in Washington, DC), an author, and graduate of the Goddard College (in Vermont). Perhaps most noted for her involvement in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, Rahman wrote and agitated alongside Larry Neil, Amiri Baraka, and Sonia Sanchez, her contemporaries. She was the author of many plays, including Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage (1977), Only in America (1977), Chiaroscuro (2000), Mingus Takes (3) (2003), and the one that concerns this chapter, The Mojo and the Sayso (1989). Rahman also wrote plays with music, such as Lady Day: a Musical Tragedy (1972), The Tale of Madame Zora (1986), and an opera called Has Anybody Seen Marie Laveau? (1999). To round out her professional involvements, she served as director of playwriting at the New Federal Theater in New York. Her plays have been produced at the Public Theater, the Ensemble Theatre (Houston, TX), and college and university theatres across the country, which mattered to her because of her career as a university professor. Rahman earned many of the highest playwrighting awards, including a Rockefeller Foundation of the Arts award and other prominent national grants and fellowships. In 2001, the University of New England Press published her Chewed Water: A Memoir, which features Rahman’s coming-of-age story in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s. Indicative of her deep love of international places, Rahman, at the time of her passing in 2014, was living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.^[7]

When The Mojo and the Sayso opens, Acts and Awilda Benjamin (husband and wife) are on stage together in the living room of their home. Each is self-absorbed in practicing rituals to cope with the death of their then ten-year-old son, Linus, who was murdered by police before the play begins. Awilda, dressed all in white, is worked up and panicky. She frantically lights candles in the room as she prepares to leave for church. Under the pastor’s care, church is the place where she feels cared for and the safest. Acts, her husband, is inside the frame of an old automobile that he is rebuilding in the living room. Mechanical automotive parts are strewn across the platform on which the car sits. Although Awilda and Acts are in the same room, they appear to speak as if not directly to each other. He mutters about his car parts and his luck in locating a rare Lycomen engine for the vehicle. She rummages through the assortment of car parts, searching for her white gloves to wear to church. There is clearly a disconnect between them—a distance that suggests they have not dealt with their mutual trauma related to the loss of their son at the hands of police.

Awilda

Awilda, the central mother character in The Mojo and the Sayso, offers a powerful exploration of the challenges faced by Black mothers in America, particularly in the wake of her son’s death at the hands of plainclothes police officers. Dressed from head to toe in white during most of the play, Awilda vacillates between manic behavior regarding her missing white gloves, her slain son, and her candles. Her current motherhood experience of dealing with the atrocities against her family has been forged in the context of systemic racism and police brutality.^[8] Her alternating sense of grief and injustice is a common experience for many Black mothers who face insecurities about the safety and prosperity of their families even as they demonstrate remarkable resilience. Awilda’s character embodies the complexities of motherhood in the face of tragedy and societal challenges, particularly in the context of Black motherhood in America. Her experience reflects the realities faced by some Black mothers who seek to protect their families, especially their children, against unpredictable encounters with law enforcement. When she receives the wrongful-death settlement check, she offers these ideas:

UGH. I hate to touch it. It feels . . . funny. It’s got an awful smell too. It must be the paper they use nowadays to print these things. ‘Payment for Wrongful Death.’ Big digits. Now we got lots of money. Lots of money for the life of our boy. How do they figure? How do they know? How do they add up what a ten-year-old boy’s life is worth to his parents? Maybe they have a chart or something. Probably feed it into a computer. Bzzzz. ‘One scrawny brown working-class boy. Enter. No wealthy relatives. Size 4 shoe. A chance of becoming rich in his lifetime if he plays Lotto regularly.’ How many dollars? How many cents?^[9]

For Awilda, there is no quantifiable amount of “Blood money. Payoff. Hush money,” as Acts calls it, to assuage her grief over her slain son.^[10] Her unwavering love for her son transcends his physical absence, underscoring the enduring bond between a mother and child and revealing, through the Motherhood Aesthetic, how that bond can unravel a family’s stability, as we previously saw in Cheryl West’s Before It Hits Home. Awilda’s peregrination through motherhood is passionate and sentimental as the playwright explores loss, resilience, and love through this female character.

Despite their struggles, Black mothers have historically been portrayed as strong and resilient, a perception that both empowers and burdens them.^[11] This dual depiction of motherhood is a departure from the idea of Black activist mothering of past-era plays that emphasized both the strength, courage, and resilience of Black mothers and the intergenerational conversations and relationships that shaped their identity and actions. Awilda is not presented in the play as having a community of women with whom to talk through her concerns. She is judged, misunderstood, and criticized by both her husband and her remaining son. The deterritorialization in the Benjamin family—and Awilda’s subsequent, self- righteous credence—is caused by the murder of her son. But, her husband tells her, “You ain’t no different from any other [woman] something terrible has happened to.”^[12] Because she bears the scars of grief and betrayal in a play set against a fraught political backdrop, she turns both inward toward her own sad emotions and outward toward her church and its pastor.“Because she bears the scars of grief and betrayal in a play set against a fraught political backdrop, she turns both inward toward her own sad emotions and outward toward her church and its pastor.”

Awilda and Her Living Son—He Renames Himself “Blood”

In the same manner that Reba in Before It Hits Home turns away from her second son, Awilda turns away from her surviving son, Walter Acts Benjamin the Second, who renames himself Blood (as does Hester’s son in In the Blood). Awilda’s lack of attention on young Walter renders him virtually motherless, leading him to episodes of violence and aggression as he negotiates his new identity as Blood and the absence of his retreated mother. Knife-wielding and gun-toting, Blood desperately seeks attention, validation, and comfort from his parents, asking: “What about me? You never really talk to me. And when you talk you never really say anything.”^[13] Both parents, however (and particularly his mother), remain distracted by their own guilt, anguish, and coping mechanisms. His attachment to the moniker “Blood” represents his departure from the safety of his adopted father’s name (Walter the Second) and his mother’s care. He tells his parents, “You gotta be hard. Tough. Cold. Ice. Steel. Wolf or be wolfed at. Take no shit. Play with death. Learn to gamble. Learn to win. Learn to kill.”^[14] But this is not Blood’s true nature. The murder of his little brother has left him grieving, broken-hearted, and damaged as evidenced by his pained question, “Do you know what it means to be the surviving brother?”^[15] Behind his tough exterior, there is a boy who needs the love and support of his mother and father. In gentle moments, his monologues often soften to “the voice of a terrified little child” as in,

BLOOD. “Mommy? Daddy? What’s wrong? What happened? You aren’t hurt are you? O God! Ma? Pops?”^[16]

In this scene, just after his youthful connection to his parents, Blood changes back to an aggressive young man who, in the absence of motherly and familial care and nurturing, deals with grief by becoming hardened:

“I DONE WARNED I AIN’T NO PUNK YOU DEALING WITH. THIS IS ME. BLOOD! BETTER COME ON OUT NOW ‘CAUSE YOU FOOLING WITH A MAN WHO IS NOT AFRAID OF DEATH!”^[17]

As a mother character, Awilda could reach her son, especially since he is so concerned about her well-being, obsession with religion, and “wicked trickerations” at the hands of the pastor, whom he calls a “holy hustler.’^[18] She recognizes his violence and hears him say that he “should be the kind of man that pours down hot revenge on his enemies because I had a brother, once. A kid brother. . . . He looked up to me and I liked that.”^[19] Awilda knows that her son Blood is also experiencing the trauma of family loss. She knows that his threats and tough exterior are only a façade to mask his pain. She knows that he, too, resents the “filthy blood money” from the city that arrives in exchange for Linus’s life. And, yet, she remains in a state of cognitive dissonance where she “turns her hands inside out [and] stretch[es] her arms toward the sky as if she were dancing.”^[20] Since Awilda is psychologically and emotionally unable to calm Blood down, Acts reaches out to him to offer some life advice. Acts tells Blood, “Let me give you a very important piece of mojo. . . . The right mojo will give you the sayso. Put you in the driver’s seat.”^[21] In the absence of a nurturing mother character, it is the father—as in Cheryl West’s Before It Hits Home—who ultimately cares for the son.

The portrayal of Awilda as an aloof mother to Blood is complicated by the societal stigma and violence associated with Blackness, which, in this case, is exemplified by the racially motivated police shooting. Her portrayal as an aloof mother is also complicated by the limitations of her maternal power to protect him. The same is true of Hester in In the Blood. She also has a son named Blood that she cannot protect anymore. In The Mojo and the Sayso, Awilda could neither safeguard her deceased son nor safeguard her living son. Given these circumstances, Blood seeks the mojo to assert himself as a gun-toting, would-be protector of himself. Through Awilda’s interactions with her son, she is empowered by the Motherhood Aesthetic to showcase her full humanity—her strengths and vulnerabilities and the richness and sadness of her lived experiences.

Awilda and Acts

Similar to Reba in Before It Hits Home, Awilda is not encouraged by her husband to posit herself as a separate, independent subject because tragedy with their son has suffocated their husband/wife relationship. Consequently, their marital relationship is disrupted, since there is no space for that relationship to be intersubjective. That is to say, there is no interdependence or shared perception of reality between Awilda and her husband across most of the play; she has an impenetrable perspective on Linus’s death, wherein she blames her husband for running from the policemen and abandoning their son in the moments before he was shot by the officers. She tells him, “If Linus could run as fast as you did, he could be here too.”^[22] The exchange between them reveals her mistrust of him and his need to be believed:

AWILDA. You run and run and run and run! (In the voice of Linus) “Daddy, Daddy. Please. . . don’t . . . run.”

ACTS. (Yelling and screaming): You are such a liar! Look at you with your face twisted like a peach pit. You are such a liar! If lies were brains you’d be smart. If lies were mountaintops you’d be way up. If I wasn’t such a calm and gentle man I’d strangle you till you admit that I don’t run away. That I rush to your side. That I put your bodies in mine. I keep telling you that.

AWILDA. I know. Maybe I’ll get it right tonight.

ACTS. If you could only go to sleep thinking, “He could never run away and leave us in danger.”

AWILDA. But when I’m awake, I tell you that I believe you. Besides, what do you care what I think as long as God knows the truth. Isn’t God enough for you?

ACTS. HELL NO! I need people. I need you. There are nights when I see myself all the way to my bones. Check out every corner of myself and feel strong about me. But come the morning . . . I look at you and the doubt I see in you makes me guilty.^[23]

Because Awilda has forgotten that Acts is still the strong, responsible, loving man who married her while she was pregnant with his child (and who gave his name to her existing young son), she cannot recognize her husband’s pain. She only recognizes Acts as a self-absorbed mechanic who rummages through junkyards looking for scrap parts to bring home for a car he is building in their living room. Each spouse has learned to cope with the loss of their son through disparate means. For Acts’s part, he has acquired a rare car engine and is busily installing it as a form of memorialization of his son. Awilda is preoccupied by the upcoming memorial service at church. Neither seems to hear or acknowledge the other person in The Mojo and the Sayso (YouTube). Consider this exchange between them:

ACTS. What a beautiful engine. They don’t come any better.

AWILDA. Don’t forget this Sunday special.

ACTS. A priceless engine. Tossed away in the junkyard.

AWILDA. It happened three years ago today.

ACTS. Been looking for this engine for three years.

AWILDA. And pastor is having a special memorial service today for Linus.

ACTS. And what do you know? Boom! This morning out of all the hundreds of other mornings. This is the morning I find him.

AWILDA. There’s gonna be organ music.

ACTS. Must be some kind of special sign . . . finding this engine this morning.

AWILDA. And flowers. Gladiolas and carnations. Lovely church flowers.^[24]

When Awilda blames her husband for Linus’ death, Acts defends his failed effort to safeguard Linus. He says, “I tried to protect him.”^[25] When Awilda turns to religion and the pastor for sympathy, solace, and condolence, Acts reminds her that their marital relationship would be stronger if her focus were on him rather than on church and the preacher. He tells her,

I was once into that holiness bag and I know that trick. All them jackleg pastors and deacons and elders laughing at you and taking your money. All you women jumping up and down yelling, ‘Come sweet Jesus’ need to stay home and say it to your husbands!^[26]

Acts and Awilda do not share the same family hopes and sorrows until nearly the end of the play. Until that point, Awilda’s abandonment of her husband leaves room for her pastor, a grifter, to pinpoint her as a vulnerable target for financial manipulation.

Awilda and the Preying Preacher

The Black Church has long been the cornerstone of the African American community since its formal founding in 1787. As the primary institutional backbone of the community, the Black Church has been a definitive, dependable source of spiritual guidance, social support, and hope to Black people across the centuries during the celebratory times and the challenging ones. As both a consequence and catalyst of this steadfast longevity, Black preachers and pastors have come to symbolize trustworthiness, honor, and faithfulness. They are, after all, Godly. It is no wonder that Rahman’s character Awilda turns toward the pastor for support and purpose.

In order to save herself, Awilda becomes an archetype for the Black mother who is unable to lean on her family members for support (or her own understanding of tragedy) and instead turns to the Black pastor and the church for comfort and consolation after the family tragedy. Noting that “going to church is like going to a garden where beautiful music grows,”^[27] Awilda feels safe when she transcends the natural world’s protection to rely instead on God and his supernatural proxy (the preacher). At one point in the play, she confirms her loyalties by launching into song:

For God is my true husband

Who keeps me from harm

He is my only one.^[28]

After a discussion wherein Acts pleads with his wife to trust that he wouldn’t abandon his family or her, Awilda tells him, “I guess I just believe in spiritual things. Spiritual things is all.”^[29] Awilda professes this because she believes that her husband ran from the police that day in the park, leaving their young son vulnerable to murder. She puts her faith in the pastor now.

Preachers (and other spiritual leaders), in their role as interpreters and transmitters of sacred text, are often greatly admired—even idolized—by their parishioners. In some cases, this admiration and respect morphs into a desire for intimacy where either individual or both of them seek to advance an unscrupulous relationship involving emotional closeness, sexual desire, sexual intimacy, or financial power—all of which is the case with Reverend D. and Hester in Parks’s In the Blood. In Mojo and the Sayso, Awilda nearly loses herself to her pastor’s financial avarice, materialism, and covetousness.

Although some literary critics focus on the phallocentric themes in the play due to the abundance of its male characters, Awilda’s story—the woman’s story—is primary. Awilda is mourning the loss of her ten-year-old son, Linus. She is detached from the protection and loving care of her husband and ruptured from a maternal connection with her remaining son, Blood. All of this leaves her isolated, seeking comfort, and wanting to memorialize Linus through permanent means, such as through a large financial gift to the church. Pastor Delroy is keen on receiving these funds when he tells her, “Seek you not the vain pleasures of the world, sister. Remember Linus.”^[30] Vulnerable and in possession of a large wrongful death settlement check from the city, Awilda allows herself to be de-subjectified by the preacher, with near complete obedience to his predation. She turns to the pastor for care, support, and purpose. In return, he begins to shape, nurture, and groom her to relinquish the wrongful death check to the church. She begins to sway her family to this position by telling them, “Pastor says we should give Linus a special memorial. Something unusual and unselfish. That’s what Pastor says.”^[31] Although Awilda has near complete obedience to the religious man, Acts recoils from the pastor’s attempts to legitimize domination over Awilda. He tells Pastor Delroy, “I have a line in my mind that divides the killer beast from the gentle man. Be careful. You are stepping awfully near the edge.”^[32]

As long as Awilda remains unabashedly faithful to the religious espousals of the pastor (and obligatorily modest and tame in his presence), she is non-threatening to the patriarchal, religious order that he represents. “As long as Awilda remains unabashedly faithful to the religious espousals of the pastor (and obligatorily modest and tame in his presence), she is non-threatening to the patriarchal, religious order that he represents.”  Within church culture, this is not anomalous behavior for a suffering parishioner regarding her pastor. Spiritual leaders often have power over their parishioners as a consequence of church and/or religious hierarchies that place preachers and spiritual men/women closest to God. This hierarchy has full opportunity to create blind faith in the congregants. In the Motherhood Aesthetic, where Awilda’s values would have strong connections to family and faith, she nearly loses herself under the weight of her grief. When other coping mechanisms fail (or are not available), church becomes the place of solace.

Magical Realism

One of the key attractions/highlights of religion is that it provides an organized means by which to process emotional and physical experiences and find encouragement and guidance toward righteousness. It is logical that Awilda would turn to her pastor for guidance and comfort after Linus’s unexpected murder. It’s not long into the play, however, that the pastor (who is overdressed in a fine suit) presents as logically and emotionally at odds with Acts. As the pastor begins to hanker after the Benjamin family’s wrongful-death settlement money, he quotes scripture to manipulate Awilda’s emotions. He nearly convinces her (against her husband’s better judgment) to cede the settlement money to the church. Opportunistic and self-serving, Pastor Delroy eventually reveals that he is not only a religious and financial exploiter, but also a “dandy man” who eventually exhibits the phenotypical features and physical behaviors of a vulture. The stage note informs us:

As the pastor strips, he begins to take on the movements and rhythms of a vulture. He reveals a feathered body, a hook nose and webbed, claw feet. He makes vulture noises as he begins to execute fraud, swooping circles around a real death, as if stalking his prey.^[33]

Indebted to her fervent, spiritual belief in the pastor and her desperate need to make meaning out of her son’s wrongful death, Awilda nearly succumbs to the influence of his slick, mercenary ways. By taking advantage of Awilda’s emotional and spiritual vulnerability, Pastor Delroy’s vulture-like behaviors prey on her psyche and her weakness, nearly destroying Awilda’s family and her “self” in the process. “By taking advantage of Awilda’s emotional and spiritual vulnerability, Pastor Delroy’s vulture-like behaviors prey on her psyche and her weakness, nearly destroying Awilda’s family and her “self” in the process.”  Beholden to a spirit of resistance and survival, it is Acts—Awilda’s husband—who recognizes and ends the pastor’s predatory tactics of control and influence over his suffering wife. In the end, it is not the pastor or his religiosity that saves Awilda. Instead, it is her husband (and the pastor’s metaphysical departure from traditional religion) that frees Awilda from despair. As with most characters who fall under the tenets of the Motherhood Aesthetic, Awilda’s adversity and tribulation is a direct consequence of her circumstances—in this case the untimely loss of her son. As with most characters who fall under the tenets of the Motherhood Aesthetic, Awilda’s adversity and tribulation is a direct consequence of her circumstances—in this case the untimely loss of her son.

By depicting the pastor as a vulture with a feathered body and claw feet, Rahman blurs the lines between fantasy and actuality. This speculative representation of the pastor’s betrayal (YouTube) presents a realistic view of a suffering mother while incorporating magical elements into the dramatic scene. This function exaggerates for readers and playgoers the influence of the preying preacher over Awilda, causing them to simultaneously wonder and confront both the strange and ordinary. The drift into magical realism is prevalent in other texts and tales where suffering is primary, especially in the African American folktales where Black authors released bondsmen and women from affliction and distress using metaphysical flight, spiritual departure, and psychological egress. Consider, for instance, The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales, wherein the authors reimagine African-American folktales through animal fables, fantastical elements, and the supernatural. The stories within this text, like so many of the enslavement folktales, use magical realism to help people escape, leap for freedom, and cling to messages of hope. Via the Motherhood Aesthetic, Rahman uses magical realism, metaphors, and symbols in much the same way—to delve into identity, suffering, hope, and the depths of the human spirit.

Absurdism

Not all scholars and playgoers are convinced that magical realism is the appropriate term for Rahman’s work. They note the implausibility of a pastor sprouting wings and turning into a vulture-like creature in Awilda’s living room. But these scholars and playgoers must have forgotten that across the centuries Black people have relied on storytelling techniques akin to magical realism to describe the fantastical elements in life. Using the same language that they use to describe Adrienne Kennedy’s plays, these scholars label Rahman’s play as absurdist. Rahman adamantly rejects the classification of her plays as what “might be described in some Eurocentric term [as] ‘absurdist.’”^[34] Instead, she consciously draws attention to the extraordinary challenges that Black people face in America—in their communities, their homes, their jobs, and their churches. “Rahman rejects “absurdist” as a term because it makes the complications of Black people’s lives seem surreal, bizarre, or intentionally ridiculous.”  She rejects “absurdist” as a term because it makes the complications of Black people’s lives seem surreal, bizarre, or intentionally ridiculous. Similar to the themes and ideas of the other playwrights featured in this book, Rahman’s scenes and character portrayals are realist, and they expose the prevailing forms of oppression that abrade the Black community. Through her primary character, Rahman sheds light on the resilience and strength of Black mothers who navigate a world fraught with inequality and violence.

Jazz Aesthetic