A TESTIMONY TO YOUR LOVE
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The image is not accidental. At all social levels, black women are increasingly finding themselves grappling with opportunities–and burdens–traditionally regarded as male. The “Queenie and Joe” stereotype from the musical Show Boat–the good-naturedly domineering mammy and her shiftless, self-pitying man–continues to wield its oppressive influence among both blacks and whites, exacerbated by contemporary social problems such as a drug-fueled crime epidemic that is stuffing prisons beyond the bursting point.
In such circumstances, healthy male-female relationships become difficult to achieve and maintain. This is the situation writer-director Val Ward confronts, in some of the bluntest terms imaginable, in her musical-theater work A Testimony to Your Love. Subtitled “A Praise Peace for Black Men,” the work is a collection of spoken and sung monologues on the theme of black male-female communication. An old woman reminisces about her strong daddy and his bravery in the face of 1920s Jim Crow racism; a welfare mother writes a letter to her imprisoned husband about the trials and joys of raising their teenage boy; a rising young professional unleashes the anger she feels over her boyfriend’s resentment of her success; a sexy preacher raps about the physical and emotional attributes of her man, one “Herbert Hoover Bo Diddley Jones.” The message repeated insistently by these very different women is: I love and respect you, but you must respect me as I move along in my own life too.
