Outline for Motion Picture
of Book
by Langston Hughes

PIRATES UNAWARES

Bobby is a wealthy little boy of Park Avenue and Bar Harbor. He has private tutors. He is taught to paint and play and sing. He hates it all. His only fun is in summer when he is sometimes permitted to go sailing with his uncle who owns a sail-boat.

It is winter in New York. Bobby catches a cold. The whole family from his rather elderly parents to the French servants are all excited and upset. The family decides to move <u>en masses</u> for the sake of Bobby's cold to an old mansion left to his mother years before on one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. With dozens of trunks and boxes, they entrain for the South. As warm weather approaches, Bobby's governess takes off his heavy clothing, piece by piece.

They arrive at the Sea Island. A great house in a grove of big trees surrounded by hanging dark forest where there is much palmetto and hanging moss. At the front door, however, is the sea. And all around are the <u>Negro</u> cabins of slave time, still filled with picturesque old <u>Negroes</u>, and young ones, too, who gather outside the big house that first night to inspect the new arrivals. They have a quaint dialect, Gullah, but Bobby wonders if they and the French servants do not speak the same language. When he learns to understand them, however, he finds them fine and amusing friends. The <u>Negro</u> boys try to teach him to buck and wing, to hunt possum and coon, to dive for star-fish.

The French servants are frightened at the owls and the night noises. They are sent back to New York. A nice old Mammy replaces the governor. She tells Bobby tales of ghosts and animals who talk, and of the other even stranger islands just out of sight in the sea. Her grandson, Minnow, (who can swim like a fish) corro-

PIRATES UNAWARES-2

borates these tales. Once he visited some of the strange islands with
his grandfather in a fishing boat, where there are still Indians, alligators,
and Africans, wild ones.

Christmas comes. A great outdoor Christmas tree. The Negroes sing
their own Christmas songs, Spirituals, and come for gifts to the big house,
SAND in the star-lit dusk. Dancing and merriment in the slave-time houses
and on the veranda of the Big House. Suddenly, in the night, lights of a
ship appear. It is a private yatch, Bobby's uncles, and XIX in the
glare of spot-lights, lifted from overside by the pulleys, comes a beauti-
ful little sail boat, the Uncle's present to Bobby.

MINNOW, BOBBY, and the BOAT become like Three Musketeers, always to-
gether, as spring comes on. MARRY THE MYSTERY Sometimes
Bobby lets older Negro boys come along to fish, and they make up fishing
songs out on the blue sea, with Bobby at the helm. He learns to sing a
great many Negro songs, and especially well one song that no one has ever
heard anywhere else except on that island:

Sea waves and sorrow
Calm down tomorrow,
Clear weather's coming ahead.
If I could just find my
Loved one's I'm seeking,
Clear weather's coming ahead.
I know that there's someone
Waiting to meet me.
Eyes shinning with welcome
They're waiting to greet me,
There when I find my loved ones I'm seeking,
Clear weather's coming ahead.

One bright day, Bobby and Minnow decide to run away, to go off in their
sail boat to the Islands Just Out Of Sight. So they keep on sailing straight
out into the sun-bright sea. They sail so long and so far that they
cannot see any land at all, and they have eaten up all their lunch. Bobby
says they are like Columbus seeking another world. But Minnow says he does
not want to be like Columbus. He wants to go home because them sun is going
down. So they decide to turn around---but they do not know which way is
around. They have no compass and they do not know where they are.

PIRATES UNAWARES-3

Back on Sea Island, there is great excitement among both the whites and the Negroes. Bobby's mother is prostrate. His father calls Washington, New York, Charleston. The coast guards keep a look-out. There is prayer in the Negro quarter. The wind rises and the waves are white and lonely in the moonlight, the watchers from the beach see nothing.

In the boat, Bobby and Minnow sing their song of "sea waves and sorrow." But the wind is higher now, the moon dissappears behind angry clouds, the boat rocks and tosses, but the boys are brave. They see ahead bon-fires burning on a beach. They make for shore. Their boat is dashed with such force against the beach that it is wreaked, but they are safe. They have landed among a strange lot of desperate-looking men, frantically reopening and then closing boxes which they will not let the boys approach.

In the morning they see the boxes being taken out in row-boats to a sinester looking tramp steamer at and/or on the horizon. There is talk of South America, revolutions, and much money. Also talk of what to do with the boys. The leader of the gang, who looks like a pirate (and is) says to take them with them to Miami. They boys are not frightened, because it is all like a story-book adventure to them.

There is a long trek across the island. Then into a steam yatch. The boys are put into the hole with the monkeys, the crews' pets, and go to sleep there. Next day in Miami, they are taken ashore and given a sailor's treat, get new clothes, etc. The ship's cook, who is a West Indian Negro, swaps dialect and songs with Minnow. Meanwhile, one of the pirates buys a paper and sees Bobby's picture therein as a lost child, possibly kidnapped. Great excitement, Rapid round-up of the crew. Loading speeded up of great cases of "medecine." Quick sailing with Bobby and Minnow aboard.

A conference of leaders as to what to do with the children. General opinion is that they are a cargo too hot to handle. As Bobby and Minnow listen through a rat-hole, various suggestions to throw them overboard, put them ashore alone in Miami, kill them, send them to Cuba, etc. are

PIRATES UNAWARES-4

heard. Finally the decision is to transfer them with the cargo to the next boat for South America, and let the revolutionaires down there take care of them.

"Oh, Lawd!" says Minnow, "I don't want to be in no revolution."

"I'd rather be in a revolution than tom have a French governess,"
says Bobby. "But I think we'd better go home now."

"How?" says Minnow. "Our boat's gone."

It happens that on the boat is a loud speaker used to give the counter-
sign to the accomplices on the Island where there is no wireless. The cook
shows Minnow, innocently, how this loud speaker is turned on so that the
voice may be heard several miles away across the water, even farther than
the eye can see. Minnow thinks. Bobby thinks. They think if they just
could make their voices heard at home on Sea Island.

"But the pirates would hear us, too," says Minnow.

"We'll just sing," says Bobby. "Mama and Mammy both would know my
voice. When they let us out tonight, we'll entertain them with a lot of
songs, and we'll ask them to let us sing through the loud speaker once."

"Not me, you, cause they won't let me out deck no more since I ate up
the captain's lemon pie this morning," says Minnow.

So that night, Bobby is taken on deck alone. He sings to the pirates.
They are so pleased with his singing that, to amuse him, they permit him to
try the loud-speaker, saying that if anyone on the ocean does hear it, they
will surely think it is a radio on a passing boat.

On Sea Island, deep gloom everywhere. Sadness on the veranda, sadness
in the cabin doors, when suddenly out of the night across the waves very clear
in the moonlight, comes Bobby's voice singing:

Sea waves and sorrow
Calm down tomorrow,
Clear weather's coming ahead.
If I could just find my loved one I'm seeking,
Clear weather's coming ahead...

Sudeen life in the cabin doorways, great excitement on the porch, everyone

PIRATES UNAWARES-5

rushes to the beach to listen. They see only the gentle **WIND** waves in the
moonlight, and hear the voice coming out of the sky. Bobby's uncle steams
up his yatch and takes off toward the voice. Coast guard ships also steam
toward the voice. The pirates, who are drinking, forget all about the loud
speaker being on as they begin to sing chanteys of the sea. Suddenly they
are surrounded by three or four boats. The pirates open fire, attempt to
escape, are captured.

Bobby and Minnow are rescued. The Uncle is given credit for un-
covering a dangerous arms-running gang supplying contrabrand guns and
munitions to whoever can buy them. The Uncle is a hero. The girl who
said she would never marry merely an idle rich man, now sees his true
value and greets him on his return to the island, after the radio has told
the world of the sensational capture of arms pirates and rescue of the two
boys.

The yatch carries them back to Sea Island to the tune of

Sea waves and sorrow
Calm down tomorrow......

A great chorus of Negro voices on the beach lift high the melody as the
mother greets Bobby, taking him in her arms, and Mammy does Minnow the
same, and the Uncle's fiancee does the same.

When I find my love one I'm seeking
Clear weather's coming ahead.

Langston Hughes
Los Angeles,
Dec. 6, 1938.