A soldier's play is one of the celebrated text of the African American literary tapestry which presents Struggle During WWII between whites and black soldiers fighting in the war. Blacks soldiers are always despised by the whites and because of this Leeds to the tension and conflict between whites and blacks.
During World War II, the military finally succumbed to pressure to create black combat battalions. For most
of the war, these units were largely for show and had very little role in the war effort, but near the end of the
war when the need for more men surfaced, a few of these units were finally mobilized and sent to Europe.
Some of these men, who had anticipated they would finally engage in battle, instead helped to liberate
concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, and Lambach. What they saw shocked them. These black
soldiers, who had come from the segregation of 1940s America, were face to face with the effects of Hitler’s
racism. But there are other effects of racism, as Charles Fuller proves.
In A Soldier’s Play, Fuller presents one possible effect of the racism that divides the United States in the
1940s. The black soldiers at this small Louisiana post are anxious to be sent across the ocean to fight Hitler,
whom they are confident they can beat as effectively as any white soldiers can. But, as the war drags on, black
soldiers sit and wait while whites are sent into battle. This is the racism of exclusion, which breeds hatred and
ultimately leads to murder. In his play, Fuller demonstrates that sometimes racism can be turned inward. In A
Soldier’s Play, American racism is juxtaposed against the dark shadow of Hitler’s racism. By the time the
play ends, Fuller leaves the audience questioning their own prejudices and wondering if racism can be
quantitatively judged.
Much of the shock that Americans felt at the end of World War II, derived from Hitler’s ghastly extermination
of more than 11 million people. This outrage is couched in an awareness that American society could never
engage in racism is such an ugly way. But that ignores that effects of systematic racism, which dehumanizes
people and consumes them slowly, over time. Sergeant Waters is an example of how racism can destroy a
man. Waters readily admits that during World War I he participated in the murder of a young black man. The
murder occurred in France when white soldiers took an ‘‘ignorant colored soldier. Paid him to tie a tail to his
ass and parade around naked making monkey sounds.’’ Waters and other blacks slit the black soldier’s throat.
He tells Wilkie that blacks must turn their backs on ‘‘fools like C.J.’’ who would cheat their own race out of
the honor and respect they deserve. Earlier, Waters tells C.J. he has gotten rid of five other soldiers at previous
posts. And Waters explains that he did it because he does not want blacks cheated out of the opportunities that
he thinks they will derive from fighting in World War II.
This proud admission reveals the hatred that Waters has for his fellow blacks. In his eyes, blacks must meet a
higher standard that will help ensure their escape for the oppression of racism. Southern blacks, like C.J.,
recall stereotypes of black minstrels, who sing, dance, and clown around. Men who look like fools and behave
like fools will negate all that a few good blacks can accomplish, according to Waters, who believes that all
blacks must be superior to whites if blacks are to become equal to whites. But then C. J. does the unexpected
and kills himself, and suddenly Waters is forced to question what he has become. He finally understands that
he has willingly destroyed another man and turned his back on his people and has achieved nothing. Whites
still do not like him, and they still refuse to accept him as an equal. And the audience must finally admit that
they are complicit in this tragedy because they too have tolerated racism.
In constructing this play as a detective story, Fuller seeks to involve the audience in the action on the stage.
Suspects are introduced and motives explored in an attempt to keep the audience guessing. In their essay on
the detective elements of A Soldier’s Play, Linda K. Hughes and Howard Faulkner point out that Fuller
manages to implicate the audience in the quest to solve the killer’s identity and that ‘‘to the degree that we
abandon open minds and jump to conclusions about the killer’s identity at the outset, we deduce from
stereotypes instead of inductively seeking the solution.’’ This is because Fuller’s red herrings are white
officers and the Ku Klux Klan. The setting is the south, and the audience expects the killer of a black man to
be whites.
In that sense, the audience participates in racism. Hughes and Faulkner argue that the audience initially
sympathizes with Waters. At the end of the
first act, he appears to be sympathetic, but as the second act
unfolds, the audience learns that ‘‘Waters is, if not a racist himself, one who imposes stereotypes and rigid
codes of behavior on fellow blacks.’’ Waters’ vision of racial progress does not include fools like C.J. This act
of black discriminating against black, just as white can discriminate against black, or white against white is,
according to Hughes and Faulkner, suggested by ‘‘Them Nazis ain’t all crazy,’’ a sentence, they argue, that
‘‘reverberates throughout the fabric of the entire play.’’ This sentence, ‘‘reminds us that World War II was, in
a sense, a racial war, a war to stop Hitler’s dream of the Super Race. But black soldiers drafted to fight Hitler
first had to confront a racial war of their own in the United States.’’ Thus Waters in both victim and
victimizer, according to Hughes and Faulkner, who also point out that the ending of the play tells the
audiences that the entire company was wiped out in that ‘‘other racial war in Germany.’’ Thus, the audience is
again reminded that both racial wars are connected for the black soldier.
It is worth remembering that Waters is not the only black man to kill another black soldier. The play’s
conclusion reveals that Peterson is Waters’s killer. Both, men, as Hughes and Faulkner note, ‘‘double as
victimizers impelled by white racism and their own capitulation to imposed stereotypes of ‘proper’ black
behavior. Both [Peterson and Waters] are willing to kill a fellow black to uphold that code, to ‘purify’ their
race; and insofar as they do so, they are also eerie parallels of Hitler, whom Waters partly admires.’’ But
racism and prejudice are not limited to Peterson and Waters. Davenport initially thinks Byrd and Wilcox are
guilty of the murder. He also assumes, erroneously it turns out, that other white officers are engaged in
covering up a white officer’s involvement. Later, Taylor, who assumes that blacks are neither intelligent
enough nor devious enough to have committed the murder, wants Byrd and Wilcox arrested because he
believes the two white officers must be guilty, since, clearly whites must be guilty. There is enough racism
and prejudice to go around for everyone in the cast to engage in some aspect of this bigotry. Steven Carter’s
analysis of Davenport’s role as detective offers some insight into how Davenport fulfills the traditional role of
detective. The traditional skills of the detective, include being able to,
place reason over emotion, admit past and even current mistakes so that you can find truth in
the present, view a situation as a whole rather than be blinded by a part, rid yourself of
preconceptions so that you can see reality more clearly. And perhaps hardest and most
important of all, acknowledge the destructive elements in your own personality so that you
can better understand the destructive side of others.
Carter states that these skills are also effective in counteracting and eliminating racism. That Davenport is able
to finally solve the case, according to Carter, ‘‘depends largely on his ability to free himself from racist
preconceptions of any type.’’ Davenport is able to stay focused on the issue at hand, but, as Carter points out,
both Waters and Peterson have become so confused and so involved with in-group bickering that they almost
lose sight of their real enemies, white racism at home and Nazi racist imperialism abroad.’’ Self-hatred, the
byproduct of systematic racism, is responsible for the destruction of both these men. As the play ends,
Davenport tells the audience that four men were lost and that ‘‘none of their reasons—nothing anyone said, or
did, would have been worth a life to men with larger hearts-men less split by the madness of race in
America.’’
Fuller asks his audience to question the effects of racism, to question their prejudices. In A Soldier’s Play, the
effects of racial self-hatred lead two men to murder, for Waters murders C.J. just as surely as if he had tied the
noose. The audience is asked to consider that ordinary men are capable of murder when pushed to
extraordinary lengths. William W. Demastes, in an article that questions the role of prejudice in Fuller’s play,
observes that the typical murder mystery looks to the extreme or atypical conditions that lead to murder, such
as the Ku Klux Klan confronting radical blacks. Instead, says Demastes, Fuller ‘‘challenges the standard,
comfortable assumptions that tensions exist only between such radical elements of both races.’’ The racism
that resulted in Nazi concentration camps shocked people, as it should. But Fuller would like his audience to engaged in identifying real culprit.
a soldier's play is one of the known play of the American African literary canopy. Like many of his other works, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play shows the devastating effect racism has both
psychologically and physically on its victims and perpetrators. Fuller’s goal is to expose both overt racist
behaviors and beliefs, and those that are so ingrained in the culture that they are taken for granted.
, Fuller describes how the themes in his work
(and the work of other African American writers in the early 1980’s) were shifting from “focusing on our
problems with whites, to matters involving blacks as human beings.” Instead of depicting simple
confrontations between blacks and whites, Fuller was “concerned about how racism affects blacks in their
dealing with each other rather than as victims of a larger plot by whites. I want to explore the internal
psychological effects of racism.”
Fuller is also concerned about showing black men as complex humans instead of simplistic stereotypes. As
the audience sees from the various interviews with the other characters, Waters is a black man with a Messiah
complex, determined to save blacks from a racist American society; yet he is willing to sacrifice some of them
to accomplish this goal. In the process he denies his own culture and loses his identity. C. J. is a threat to him
because, by maintaining strong connections to his cultural traditions and music, C. J. maintains his identity in
the face of adversity. As C. J. says about Waters, “I feel kinda’ sorry for him myself. Any man ain’t sure
where he belongs, must be in a whole lotta’ of pain. This play reflects a
Conflict between white and black soldiers throughout the play at the both physical and psychological level. Through various action we can assume the conflict between white and black like,
At the level of alienation that black soldiers feel is best demonstrated by the baseball games that are played between
white and blacks. The black soldiers view the baseball games as one area where they can prove superiority
over white soldiers. The blacks are treated as subservient and subordinate underlings. They are not given the
opportunity to be real soldiers; instead they function as little more than servants, handymen, garbage
collectors, and gardeners. When these same black soldiers meet white soldiers on the baseball field, the game
makes them equal, and when the black team wins, they are superior. Black soldiers emerge from the games
knowing that they will be alienated and punished for winning, but their victory makes the alienation more
tolerable.
There is another tools which arise conflict between white and black are Anger and
Hatred. Although he disguises it, Waters really hates what he is—a black man, a black soldier in the army. He is so
consumed with self-hatred that he turns it upon the men in his company. Waters is given power over other
men; it is a power given by whites and largely controlled by whites, but Waters thinks that if he can do the job
well, that he can change the white perception of the black man. So he is harder on his men and crueler than a
white officer would be, and he tries to eliminate those blacks that he thinks would be unable to compete in a
white man’s world. Waters sees black survival in becoming white. He hates his own black race and his
history, and he turns that hatred upon his men, ultimately being responsible for the death of one of them.
There is another event which depict the tension between white and black. Waters betrays his men, especially C.J., when he plants evidence that implicates the young man in a crime.
The sole purpose in framing C.J. is to remove him from the company. But Waters has befriended C.J.,
praising his singing and playing. The reality is that Waters hates all southern blacks, whom he considers fools
who are perpetuating an image of black foolishness with their singing, dancing, and clowning around. C.J. is
guilty of all these actions, and in his innocence, he never suspects Waters of betrayal.
another reason for conflict is the white Prejudice over blacks. Captain Davenport faces prejudice when he arrives at a southern military post to conduct his investigation into
Waters’s death. When Captain Taylor meets Davenport, the latter is told that the white community will not
tolerate a black man investigating whites. But that is not the only reason for Taylor’s concern. Taylor admits
that in a conversation with other white officers, most admitted they did not want to serve with black officers
and could not accept blacks as equals. Indeed, when Davenport finally interviews two white officers, Byrd
and Wilcox, Byrd makes clear his distaste for the black captain. Byrd also admits that he beat Waters because
the sergeant did not treat him with the respect he deserved as an officer and as a white man.
As American african always suffer and have controversy and conflict due to
Racism, this also has been presented at the different level. Racism is the source for the violence that occurs at this army post. Although there are many black soldiers,
they are not welcome in the predominately white community that surrounds the post. When Waters’s murder
is discovered, initial suspicion falls on the local Ku Klux Klan, who have been responsible for attacks on
black soldiers in the past. There is a clear division on the post as well, with the white officers and soldiers
aligned against the blacks. The black soldiers feel that if they can only get overseas and into the war, they can
prove that they are as good at killing Hitler’s men as are the white soldiers. And finally, there is racism within
the black community, also. Waters is guilty of racism when he turns on C.J., whose only crime is that he is
from the south and represents the type of black man who Waters thinks is holding back other blacks.
When the conflict is at the psychological level it can arise hatred, detest but when it turns at the physical level it causes
Violence. Violence was too often the result of confrontations between whites and blacks. When Waters is murdered,
suspicion first falls on white men, notable the Ku Klux Klan. But violence is also Waters primary way of
dealing with difference. Waters identifies rural southern blacks as a hindrance to black advancement. He
thinks that their singing and dancing recalls a period of ignorance and subservience that prevents blacks from
achieving equality with whites. Rather than look for a way to overcome this problem, Waters seeks a solution
in violence. Rather than educate these blacks, Waters has them jailed and placed in a prison population where
violence becomes a means of survival; C.J.’s imprisonment leads to his death.
Conflict between white and black also be analysed at the psychological level through different Characters.
Captain Charles Taylor, a white man in his mid-to late thirties who resents Davenport’s assignment and rank.
Taylor wants Davenport taken off the murder investigation because he does not believe that a black man can
accuse white men or solve the case. After interrogating white soldiers Byrd and Wilcox, Taylor orders that
they be arrested; however, Davenport proves that they are not guilty. When Davenport discovers the truth,
Taylor admits that he was wrong about African Americans being able to be in charge.
Tech/Sergeant Vernon C. Waters, a well-built African American with light brown skin who manages the
baseball team and is disliked by his men. Waters believes that black men must overcome their ignorant status.
Because of the inferiority complex, anger, detest, attitude for whites and white's resentment with blacks and distrust with blacks reflects the conflict between whites and blacks at the psychological label which ultimately leads to the physical level to violence. this manifestation of the anger resentment and dislike very beautifully presented in this play.
