"Fasten Your Shackles": Remembering Slavery and Laughing about it in George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum

'Cause I'm not what I was ten years ago or ten minutes ago. I'm all of that and then some. And whereas I can't live inside yesterday's pain, I can't live without it.--Topsy Washington, in George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum (1986) In his 1986 play, The Colored Museum, George C. Wolfe offers audiences a humorous, and at times deeply poignant engagement with the complexities of black life. In the eleven loosely connected scenes (or "exhibits," in the playwright's lexicon), Wolfe explicitly engages with the injuries, or "wounds," that set blacks apart from other Americans. For example, the play begins by referencing the atrocities of the slave trade, which the playwright uses to frame and contextualize the exhibits that follow. By structuring his play about black modern life in relationship to the legacy of slavery, Wolfe engages in a debate about what role that historical wound should play in the ways that contemporary blacks conceive of themselves: he ponders whether slavery constitutes a necessary means for assessing subsequent black disfranchisement, or whether it weighs blacks down, making their racial identity tantamount to victim status. In The Colored Museum, Wolfe argues for the importance of "claiming" historical injury for blacks. Yet at the same time that the playwright suggests the necessity of confronting that legacy, he also explores the difficulty and psychic pain involved in bearing it. One strategy that Wolfe employs in order to reflect on the black past is in casting the play as a "museum," a place where objects and historical phenomena are presented for contemporary reflection. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett reminds us that in museums, "objects are ... set in context by means of other objects, often in relation to a classification or schematic arrangement of some kind, based on typologies of form or proposed historical relationships" (21). That is, like all classification systems, museums have an underlying logic and ideological charge. In the case of The Colored Museum, by beginning with an evocation of the slave trade, Wolfe suggests that all black life is indexed by a relationship to the trauma of forced migration and enslavement. However, without the curatorial notes or guides that help contextualize museum spaces, Wolfe's audience must themselves make connections across the scenes. Wolfe thus encourages an active, even contested approach to the interpretation of slavery's legacy across the exhibits. Additionally, throughout the play, Wolfe employs humor to undercut a message that might otherwise seem hopeless and overdetermined. Indeed, the play's premiere in 1986 at the Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick, New Jersey, upset some theatergoers and critics because of its bracingly satirical tone. Each of the eleven vignettes touches on a different element or experience peculiar to black American life, and the play draws in equal parts from Brechtian-style alienation technique and variety-show dynamism. Each exhibit features a different set of characters, and the scenes are connected in only a loosely thematic way. In addition to slavery, other revered elements of black life are treated with both scrutiny and scathing humor; these include black-owned publications like Ebony magazine, the politics of black hair, and most shockingly, black playwrights Ntozake Shange and Lorraine Hansberry in the play's most talked-about exhibit, "The Last Mama on the Couch Play." By engaging the history of slavery through humor in the play's first scene, "Celebrity Slaveship," Wolfe joins a long line of black writers and artists who have employed satire to political ends, beginning in the nineteenth century and extending through the contemporary moment. In her book, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, Glenda Carpio argues that abolitionist writers such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs employed satire to lampoon racists. However, the clearest predecessor of Wolfe's work in the nineteenth century is performer William Wells Brown, who both directly addressed the difficult topic of slavery and, as Wolfe does, employed stereotypes to do so. …