The River Niger by Joseph A. Walker

First produced: 1972, by the Negro Ensemble Company, at St. Mark’s Playhouse, New York, New York

First published: 1973

Type of work: Play

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: Early 1970’s

Locale: A brownstone on 133rd Street, Harlem, New York

Principal Characters:

• John Williams, a house painter and poet
• Mattie Williams, John’s wife
• Grandma Wilhemina Brown, Mattie’s eighty-two-year-old mother
• Dr. Dudley Stanton, the Williamses’ family physician and John’s close friend
• Jeff Williams, the twenty-five-year-old son of John and Mattie
• Ann Vanderguild, Jeff’s South African girlfriend
• Mo, a young African American leader
• Gail, Mo’s girlfriend
• Chips,
• Al, and
• Skeeter, Mo’s men

The Play

The River Niger opens with Grandma Wilhemina alone in the kitchen, sneaking a drink. Hearing a noise, she hurries out of the kitchen. John Williams, slightly drunk but self-possessed, enters reading aloud from a poem he is working on: “I am the River Niger—hear my waters.” Dissatisfied, John crumples the draft. This vignette sounds the play’s major theme: the conflict between John’s search for personal fulfillment and the genuine, but sometimes distorted, needs of other humans that hinder his quest.

Dr. Dudley Stanton enters. Lifelong friends, John and Dudley demonstrate a deep mutual affection, though it generally manifests in playful racial insults. Dudley also provides a cynical foil to John’s tremendous pride over his son’s impending success in the white man’s world. John, however, reveals his own aspiration to be an “African warrior,” though at present he is “a fighter who ain’t got no battlefield . But I’m gonna find it one day—you watch.”

John and his wife, Mattie, are awaiting the triumphant return of their son, Jeff, who is to graduate from Air Force navigation school. Jeff’s girlfriend, Ann, also arrives at the Williamses’ house to wait for Jeff. Mattie confides to Ann that her husband is a brilliant man, once an aspiring lawyer, who dropped out of college to support her, her mother, and several other relatives. She feels responsible for his lack of fulfillment and his heavy drinking.

Before Jeff appears, Chips, a member of Mo’s gang, comes to the door. With a menacing air, he leaves word for Jeff to meet Mo at “headquarters.” Jeff, before leaving for navigation school, had led the group in constructive community action, but now, with Mo in charge, the gang is mired in dysfunction and violence.

When Jeff arrives, Mo asks for his help in exposing a police informer in his group and avoiding arrest for the earlier killing of a corrupt police officer. At first, Jeff refuses out of concern for his family and disillusionment with black revolutionist ideology. Ann offers to help, however, explaining that her father in South Africa is serving a prison term because he shouldered the blame for her brothers’ antigovernment activity. Jeff then gets involved in Mo’s scheme in order to protect Ann.

Meanwhile, terrible news greets John: His son, as cynical about success on white terms as he is about black revolution, admits that he has dropped out of Air Force navigation school. Mattie, moreover, is diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Devastated by both revelations, John disappears from home for six days, returning drunken and disheveled. He reads the poem he has finally finished as a tribute to his wife.

At this point, Mo’s gang returns, and the police—egged on by the double agent—attempt to raid the Williams home. Jeff holds them off, while, inside, Al is revealed as the informer, and he and John exchange gunfire. Al is killed instantly, but John is mortally wounded as well. Before dying, John instructs Jeff to tell the police that he, John, was responsible for murdering the police officer.

John dies believing that he has found his “battlefield.” The play concludes as Jeff, following John’s instructions, prepares to explain his father’s death and the officer’s earlier death to the police. It is Mattie who enforces John’s dying wish, ordering Jeff and the others to adhere strictly to the plan John laid out.

Critical Context

An immediate popular success, The River Niger won numerous honors, including an Obie Award and a Tony Award. Most critics regard it as Walker’s best work, noting its increased maturity over the playwright’s previous productions. While critic Stanley Kauffman criticized The River Niger as “clumsily built,” he praised its “spirit of affection.”

Like all of Walker’s other plays, though, The Riger Niger was faulted as presenting unrealistic, flat portraits of women. Some critics have charged that Walker’s female characters exist either to serve men or to thwart men’s goals. Walker has also been described as having a “conservative, traditionally male political and social agenda. Stated quite simply, The River Niger valorizes male dominance and female submission.” Another critic cited the play’s “historical limitations,” suggesting that it celebrated the heterosexual African American man at the expense of African American women in a way that is “dated and troubling decades later.”

However, the thought and action of The River Niger are far more complex than this criticism implies. Walker, after all, dedicated the play to both his parents, and his own personal history contributed greatly to its story, making it a candid statement of truth drawn from experience. The play can stand as a positive testimonial for African American men without being an antifeminist screed that has passed out of fashion.

Bibliography

Andrews, Laura. “Harlem Classic Revived at NBT.” Review of The River Niger, by Joseph A. Walker. New York Amsterdam News 92, no. 19 (May 10, 2001). This highly favorable review of the revived The River Niger is unusual in its avoidance of judgment on ideological grounds.

Barthelemy, Anthony. “Mother, Sister, Wife: A Dramatic Perspective.” Southern Review 21, no. 3 (Summer, 1985): 770. Contends that in defending “highly underrated black daddies,” The River Niger is a rebuttal to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which in turn is a “feminist revision” of Theodore Ward’s Marxist play Big White Fog (1938), which was perceived as antifeminist. Barthelemy concludes that The River Niger is not misogynistic but represents Walker’s celebration of both men and women.

Kauffmann, Stanley. Review of The River Niger, by Joseph A. Walker. The New Republic 169, no. 12 (September 29, 1973): 22. Views the play as a “clumsily built” piece of dramatic craftsmanship, but concedes that Walker is at his best when evoking the love and friendship among the characters. Notes that African American audiences responded warmly to this evocation and felt validated by it.

Lee, Dorothy. “Three Black Plays: Alienation and Paths to Recovery.” Modern Drama 19, no. 4 (December, 1975): 397. Examines the ways in which the main characters struggle with and overcome a sense of alienation. The poem John completes before dying, “The River Niger,” affirms life, and that affirmation unifies the dramatic action. It symbolizes the characters’ African heritage and, beyond it, the life force and energy of life. The poem’s ending calls for communal effort and self-acceptance.