V Efua Prince
RHOBERT
_______
Cast of Characters
SELF 1: a version of herself; dressed in a white slip dress
SELF 2: a version of herself; dressed in a black slip dress
SELF 3: a version of herself; dressed in a pink slip dress
Scene
A spotlight on a middle aged African American woman fragmented
by her love for men whose trauma has turned outward. The woman
might be cast as three African Americans or 1 Black woman, 1
Chinese woman, and 1 Irish woman. The play conveys the tones,
attitude, and rhythms of go go music.
Time
Anytime
ACT 1
SETTING: The audience serves as witness to a deconstructed
monologue of a woman who might be dancing at the edge of a cliff.
AT RISE: The three selves are in spotlight at center stage, appearing
as fragments of a single woman. Their backs are together and holding
hands, forming a triangle union. When they speak, they speak as if
with one voice. They turn slowly as they speak in order for the
one speaking to face the audience.
SELF 1:
(The number 1 appears in light)
And this motherfucka.
SELF 2:
I cannot tell it.
SELF 3:
I know because we are family, living among each other
creates intimacies.
SELF 2:
Family makes its own law.
SELF 3:
I am bound by blood and law to keep the family, but its
jagged edges slice the synapses in my mind.
SELF 1:
I chase them through the fog in my brain.
SELF 3:
When I had finally gathered the pieces together, what I
saw broke my heart and blew my mind.
SELF 2:
These numbered pieces scattered like dried rose petals
as I collapsed, my head hitting hard against the floor.
SELF 1:
I have not been the same since I arose.
SELF 2:
But family is still blood and law.
SELF 3:
(The “you” is a particular spot in the
audience. The same you will be addressed
throughout regardless of the speaker.)
Even now. I am not telling you.
SELF 1:
Who is you
for me to tell
SELF 2:
I am picking up these pieces.
SELF 1:
(The number 2 appears in light. The
transition is underscored by the
percussive rhythms of go go music.)
Rhobert never crawled, his mama always tells the story. He
walked without crawling first and the effort bent his legs.
SELF 3:
He is the most bow-legged motherfucka I ever saw.
SELF 2:
It dont help that he wears a house, like a monstrous ol
school diver’s helmet, on his head. At first I thought it
gave him air to breathe while diving.
SELF 1:
Then you called, yelling into the receiver:
Your husband is a monster!
SELF 2:
Well, now that’s a bad metaphor, I thought. A man might
do monstrous things, but a man is not a monster. It’s
reductive and eliminates the complexities of his very
human existence. Besides which, it assumes your
righteous superiority.
SELF 1:
Our house is a dead thing that weights him down. He is
sinking as a diver would sink if the water be drawn off. He
bought the house soon after I became pregnant with our
first baby. It had a snatch-waist of a yard with mice
running through it most of the year. The week after we
moved in, Rhobert set the first trap. He had opened the
linen closet to get a bath towel and a mouse leapt upon his
head. He dropped the towel, grabbed his car keys, and
headed straight to the hardware store.
SELF 3:
Rhobert is an upright man, despite the fact that his legs
are bowed because as a child he walked too soon.
SELF 1:
If things were as clear as you suggest, you would not be
screaming Your husband is a monster! at me like that. You
would have known that he was a motherfucka and you
would not feel so betrayed.
SELF 3:
Rhobert’s attractive. Well groomed. Talented and smart.
He’s got the wife and kids. House with a snatch-waist yard.
Look n like E. Franklin Fraizer mighta been his great granddaddy.
He made you feel we were together in a special club.
SELF 2:
But he is a bow-legged motherfucka because as a child he
walked too soon with a house like a ol school diver’s helmet
on his head.
SELF 3:
Rhobert does not care. Like most men who wear monstrous
helmets, the pressure it exerts is enough to convince him of
its practical infinity. And he cares not two cents as to whether
or not he will ever see me and our children again. Many times
he has seen us drown in his dreams and has kicked about
joyously in the park for days after. Here you go telling me that
I married a monster like your judgment substitutes for justice.
SELF 2:
Did you even tell him that?
SELF 3:
Did you call him up and yell that at him too?
SELF 1:
Or just me?
SELF 2:
Tell him.
SELF 3:
(The number 3 appears in light. The
transition is underscored by the
percussive rhythms of go go music.)
I won’t tell you what it did to our family when he started
fucking our daughter’s best friend. It began after he made
her into a nude model for a figure drawing class he
invented—for our kids to develop their skills he said.
Saturday mornings. Free to any and all who desired attend.
Our kids did not wish to attend. She was his best model,
his favorite. She, a midnight-skinned, round-faced beauty,
held a pose so well. Naturally. He put her on a pedestal
and showed others how to render her features with charcoal
on paper.
SELF 1:
Telling me she was like our daughter.
SELF 3:
She was troubled, like others among our daughter’s friends
who grow up fatherless in the city. Drinking. Drugs. A
student who had been raped on campus, a fact I learned
later from you, but one that she confided in him. An
intimacy that you, speaking matter-of-factly, revealed to
me because you thought I already knew.
SELF 2:
(The number 4 appears in light. The
transition is underscored by the
percussive rhythms of go go music.)
Rhobert is an upright man whosa bow-legged motherfucka
because as a child he walked too soon.
SELF 1:
Used to hang with this other motherfucka, a school teacher
who was looking out for this girl.
SELF 2:
Helped her with her schoolwork.
SELF 3:
Took her under his wing.
SELF 1:
Took her to the amusement park to ride roller coasters.
SELF 2:
He liked the way she smiled when the sunshine fell directly
on her face, making her close her eyes tightly. He brought
her flavored ice and hot dogs and funnel cake. She was a
positive influence on his son. The boy had a crush on her,
so much less trouble when the girl was around. Although
just a couple of years separated her from his son, she
seemed so much older. She had the opposite effect on him.
Her fawning admiration made his heart leap.
SELF 1:
He felt himself a kid again—not a kid who fumbled for words
like he did when he was in school. Not clumsy like his son,
tripping over too large feet and lapping at her heels. Not
a man-in-waiting whom the girls looked past. He was
finally, after long years, a cool kid. His wife never made
him feel that way. When they met, she had told him that he
was too young. She treated him like that—like he was too
young—even after they had that child together and had
married.
SELF 3:
He never meant to hurt anyone. His parents in their
twilight years having to endure the trial. He would not be
able to teach his son how to tie a tie. How to shave. How
to cut hair. He would not be in the passenger seat when his
son took his first spin around the block. He would not be
able to buy his son his first condom and give him the talk
about how sweet pussy felt and how treacherous. It was too
late for him to give his son the talk about cops—move
slowly and keep your hands in view—because they had already
snatched him out of bed and had the boy face down at gun
point when they came to arrest him.
SELF 2:
He hurts. Old, deep wounds drive him to the brink, but only
in his mind; like his feet pressing the pedals of a stationary
bicycle, whirling but never moving on. There he was,
moving back into that room in his parent’s house after
his wife filed for divorce. Back in the place where, when
he closed his eyes, sometimes he still smelled his own ass
opening. He had tried to close his mind but minds don’t
close as easily as eyelids.
SELF 3:
He was not like that. He was always gentle, even when it
was in her ass. She had such a nice ass. Her titties too,
melons like those of a woman twice her age. That is the way
his lawyer described them after seeing the pictures the
police recovered from his phone. See, his lawyer knew.
SELF 1:
(The number 5 appears in light. The
transition is underscored by the
percussive rhythms of go go music.)
Rhobert’s house is a dead thing that weights him down. He
is sinking as a diver would should the water be drawn off.
I dreamed Rhobert was on a bike, racing away from me, the
woman he had married. He didn’t get far before he fell. A
bad fall. He bandaged himself hastily before climbing back
on the bike and riding off. He fell again. He rewrapped the
blood-soaked bandaging and got on his bike, pedaling as
fast as he could. He fell. Up again. I caught him this time
before he sped away. Stop, I pleaded. You’re hurting
yourself. He looked at me. I have to get away, he explained
as if I were confused. I woke. Feeling pain. And love.
SELF 3:
(The number 6 appears in light. The
transition is underscored by the
percussive rhythms of go go music.)
Then too, there was this other mutherfucka I grew up with.
SELF 2:
A scroll of unutterable mysteries written in invisible ink
wrapped his home like a shroud, while we waited on Jesus
to fix it.
SELF 1:
What happened to him?
(They shrug their shoulders.)
SELF 3:
We do not talk about that.
SELF 2:
I don’t know if Jesus fixed it but he did not die. There
were years when he did not appear at family gatherings. And
times when he appeared looking like the walking dead. And
times when he gathered as if he had not ever gone missing.
The shadow of his addictions darkened his youth and
tainted his college years. His parents watched and waited
to see if any of the others of us headed after him down
that wayward path. They were not carefree times. He had
gone off to an elite liberal arts college and come home
with two big cornbread fed huskers in tow, black nail
polish on his toes, and habits he could not break. He
decried the injustice of penalizing people for victimless
crimes.
SELF 3:
Victimless says the one who borrowed my car to drive a mile
down the road to the 7-11 and couldnt make it home by two
days later when it was time for me to return to school.
That was many years ago, but that shit hangs on like a
bitch bearing pups in the crawlspace of my house.
SELF 2:
(The number 7 appears in light. The
transition is underscored by the
percussive rhythms of go go music.)
There’s no such thing as a self-made man.
SELF 1:
That’s a lie America tells young men before they send them
off to war. Fight, they say, for democracy. Rhobert was
young and could not know it was a lie. He had not lived
enough to sort through all the bullshit. It seemed true
enough once they taught him to make a proper bed and to
spit shine his shoes and fed him well every day that hard
work and stamina is all that is required.
SELF 2:
On his grandfather’s farm, though, yield produced by hard
work and stamina were tempered by rainfall and late frosts
and white folks who could be mean as snakes.
SELF 3:
They would fix the scales, cook the books, and burn your
barn.
SELF 1:
But Uncle Sam was a different kind of white man,
particularly when there was a frontline and bombs to be
dropped. If Rhobert made it out alive and not addicted to
heroin, then he could build a home for himself.
SELF 2:
Have a wife and kids. Maybe a woman on the side, too, for
when shit got too hot at the crib.
SELF 1:
Soon people will be looking at him and calling him a strong
man.
SELF 3:
No doubt he is for one who has been walking for too long.
(The selves move slowly back to center,
with their backs together, holding hands,
and rotating as they speak to face the
audience. The remainder is underscored
by the percussive rhythms of go go music.)
SELF 2:
Lets give it to him.
SELF 1:
Lets call him great when the water shall have been all
drawn off.
SELF 2:
Lets build a monument and set it in the ooze where he goes
down.
SELF 1:
A monument of hewn oak, carved in motherfuckas’s faces.
SELF 3:
Lets open our throats, good people, and sing “Deep River”
when he goes down.
SELF 2:
Brother, Rhobert is sinking.
SELF 1:
Lets open our throats, good people,
SELF 3:
Lets sing Deep River when he goes down.
(Black Out)
(End of Play)
V Efua Prince explores critical aspects of African American women’s historical relationship to home, family, work, and the dynamics of black family life. Crazy As Hell: The Best Little Guide to Black History, co-authored with Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover, III), is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in partnership with Freedom Reads, Juneteenth 2024.