Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton by Tennessee Williams

First published: 1945

First produced: 1955, at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Type of plot: Grotesque; tragicomedy

Time of work: The 1940’s

Locale: Blue Mountain, Mississippi

Principal Characters:

• Jake Meighan, a cotton-gin owner
• Flora Meighan, his wife
• Silva Vicarro, the superintendent of the Syndicate Plantation

The Play

Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton, a one-act play in three scenes, begins and ends on that most southern of domestic architectural features, the front porch. The setting is Blue Mountain, Mississippi. Tennessee Williams, through detailed staging, requires enough appurtenances so that “the effect is not unlike a doll’s house.”

The play opens in early evening. The audience first sees Jake Meighan, “a fat man of sixty,” scurrying offstage with a can of coal oil as dogs bark in the distance. As he drives away, his wife, Flora, emerges from the house onto the porch in search of her white kid purse. The bovine Flora cries after her husband as “a cow moos in the distance with the same inflection.” At this point a distant explosion sounds, and various voices speculate about the noise. As Jake returns, Flora learns that the Syndicate Plantation has caught fire.

Flora berates Jake for leaving her with no Coca-Cola in the house, but Jake soon establishes his male dominance by treating his wife roughly. At this point it becomes apparent that theirs is something of a sadomasochistic relationship. He hurts her, and she seems to enjoy it. Jake had departed abruptly in order to blow up the Syndicate’s cotton gin so that he could profit from ginning the extra cotton. With considerable effort Jake fashions his alibi—he never, he repeats to Flora, left the front porch that evening. Flora’s reluctance to absorb Jake’s alibi suggests her stupidity and establishes her childlike innocence.

Scene 2 opens the same afternoon with Silva Vicarro, the superintendent of the Syndicate Plantation, joining Jake and Flora at their residence. Vicarro, a “rather small and wiry man of dark Latin looks,” contrasts with his beefy neighbors; he represents a recurring Williams character, the outsider. Jake, having exploded Vicarro’s cotton gin, assures his Latin neighbor that he will find a way to gin his cotton for him.

He introduces his wife to Vicarro and teases her about her weight while admitting that he prefers “a woman not large but tremendous.” After embarrassing Flora about her corpulence, Jake exits in order to gin Vicarro’s cotton. Jake’s absence allows Flora and Silva the opportunity to become better acquainted. Vicarro immediately begins flirting with Flora while seeking information about his ruined gin. Vicarro knows, or at least senses, that Jake has destroyed his cotton gin; he ironically taunts Flora about Jake’s “good-neighbor policy,” which Jake explains as “you do me a good turn an’ I’ll do you a good one.” Vicarro clearly intends to reciprocate. His suspicions about arson are confirmed when Flora spoils her husband’s alibi. Silva’s knowledge motivates his revenge, which is to abuse and violate his adversary’s wife. Initially Flora resists Silva’s advances but soon succumbs, the scene ending with the two entering the house as “the gin pumps slowly and steadily across the road.”

The final scene takes place that evening about nine o’clock. The front porch is empty but bathed in “a full September moon of almost garish intensity.” Flora emerges; “her appearance is ravaged.” Her eyes contain “a vacant limpidity,” and her lips are set sensually apart. Dark streaks on her shoulders and arms indicate that Vicarro has whipped her with his riding crop. Even though she has been raped and whipped, the stage directions suggest that the experience has not been altogether unpleasant. Jake ambles up, ironically singing to himself, “By the light of the silvery moon.” He then brags about the work he has done, ginning twenty-seven wagons full of cotton, as Flora says, “You’re not the only one’s—done a big day’s—work.” Without stating why, Flora tells Jake what a mistake it was to “fool with th’ Syndicate Plantation.” Their ensuing conversation is characterized by Flora’s double entendres, which never penetrate the oblivious Jake. She says to Jake, “maybe you don’t understand th’ good-neighbor—policy,” and announces that Vicarro is “gonna let you do a-a-lll his ginnin’—fo’ him!” The play ends as Flora, with a “smiling and ravaged face,” sings “Rock-a-bye Baby” while cradling her white kid purse, suggesting that Vicarro has impregnated her.

Dramatic Devices

Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton combines two dominant motifs, psychological regression and sadomasochistic behavior, to produce a strange, haunting portrait of dependence, greed, and deviance. Every image associated with Flora suggests her childishness and stupidity. To begin with, she lives in a cottage that resembles a dollhouse. Most of Jake’s conversation is sprinkled with the word “baby.” A particularly infantile conversation that occurs in the first scene is illustrative of this motif:

Jake: (huskily) Tha’s my swee’ baby girl.

Flora: Mmmmm! Hurt! Hurt!

Jake: Hurt?

Flora: Mmmm! Hurt!

This dialogue continues for several lines, with Jake both caressing and harming Flora. Jake describes Flora as a “baby doll” when talking with Vicarro. In her conversation with Vicarro after her husband leaves, Flora forgets her husband’s alibi and thus reveals his complicity. Several other bits of dialogue illustrate Flora’s dim-wittedness, and additional images, such as her clutching her white kid purse, are designed to reveal her childish dependency. At the end of the play, Flora tells Jake, “I’m not—Baby. Mama! Ma! That’s—me. . . . ” This revelation seems to say more about her prenatal condition than about any intellectual maturation.

Flora’s childish bearing is juxtaposed to her dependence on physical abuse. She finds pleasure in being mistreated by both her husband and neighbor. Jake alternately hurts her and fondles her. Vicarro arrives holding a riding crop and uses it on Flora. All of her denials of finding pleasure in brutality are at best feeble, and her giddy, detached air at the play’s conclusion indicates that she harbors pleasant memories of her afternoon with the Latin disciplinarian. Such behavior presents the theatergoer with the choice of either feeling sorry for Flora or being repulsed by her. Again, Tennessee Williams appears content to let the audience decide.

Another motif is a variation of quid pro quo, what Jake calls the “good-neighbor policy.” The term is loaded with irony whenever it is used to describe good turns. Jake does Vicarro a “favor” by ginning his cotton for him, and Vicarro returns the favor by abusing and impregnating his wife. In this story of lust and greed, Williams perverts neighborly altruism to a game of one-upmanship, and Vicarro is clearly the victor.

Critical Context

Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton is the title play in an edition of thirteen short dramatic pieces, most of which are set in the South. In terms of quality the collection is uneven, but it does contain some of Tennessee Williams’s best one-act plays, such as The Last of My Solid Gold Watches (pb. 1946). Most of his main characters are temporal misfits who dwell in the past to avoid confronting the miserable reality of their present existence. Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton deals with such displacement; it falls into a particular genre of southern writing, the grotesque.

The grotesque synthesizes the comic and the tragic and characterizes by way of exaggeration. Flannery O’Connor said of the grotesque, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” This play presents three “freaks.” Jake is a beefy, bumbling opportunist who deals with problems the only way he knows how—through violence. Vicarro, with dark features, high-laced boots, and a riding crop, is something of a satanic figure bent on sadistic revenge. Flora, of almost cartoon proportions, exists in a state of puerile regression. By living in her fantasy world of the past, she becomes easy prey to abusive men such as Jake and Vicarro. In other words, her defense mechanism (regression) becomes the very tool of her destruction, as is often the case. Rather than confronting the sorry state of their marriage, a relationship in which Flora exists as chattel, she retreats to the more comfortable condition of infancy. Vicarro and Jake both sense her weakness and take full advantage, each in his own sadistic way.

In Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton Williams offers a rather disturbing story of greed, lust, and violence set in familiar territory—the Mississippi Delta. He called this play a comedy. There is much to laugh at in this short drama—Jake’s bumbling entrepreneurial scheme, Vicarro’s cunning retribution, and Flora’s infantile utterings—but given the greed and sexual deviance that motivate the characters, the humor is ultimately black.

Sources for Further Study

Bloom, Harold. Tennessee Williams. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1999.

Boxill, Roger. Tennessee Williams. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Crandele, George W. The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Falk, Signi. Tennessee Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Griffin, Alice. Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.

Gunn, Drewey Wayne. Tennessee Williams: A Bibliography. 2d ed. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991.

Kolin, Philip G. Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985.

Weales, Gerald. Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.