Mamba's Daughter

by ETHEL WATERS with CHARLES SAMUELS

1

MY THEATRICAL career started when I was seventeen. I sang “St. Louis Blues’ in a vaudeville act at the Lincoln Theater in Baltimore. For twenty years I was a blues singer. I’d never payed in a straight drama. I’d had offers including one from the Theatre Guild to appear in Porgy — but I’d turned them all down. Those plays never seemed quite true to life to me. The characters in them had been created either by white men or by Negro writers who had stopped thinking colored.

But in 1937 the most exciting prospect of my entire career came up the play Mamba’s Daughters. in which I was to prove I was an actress as well as a blues singer. It took two whole years to locate first money, second money, and the other moneys needed to put on that show.

That is a long time to wait for a role, Yet it was not too long to wait for Hagar, my Hngar, the part that made my reputation on the American legitimate stage.

Georgette Harvey, who had a good part in porgy and Bess, had invited me to a big party she was giving for Rouben Mamoulian, the director of that famous Negro folk opera. A while couple were just arriving before the apartment house as I got out of my car. We went up in the elevator together, and the three of us sat down side by side on Georgette’s couch.

The white lady asked if I remembered her. “Yes, I do,’I said. She’d been a guest at a society tea where I’d sung some years before. Afterward she’d come up and complimented me on one of my songs, a take-off number on “ Porgy “ that Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh had written. I could even recall her exact words: “Miss Waters, it’s wonderful how you manage to convey the whole meaning of ‘ Porgy in that one little song.

The white lady seemed pleased that I remembererd her so clearly. “And what do you think of Porgy and Bess, Miss Waters.”’ she asked.

Like the play Borgy. the folk opera had been based on the novel Porgy. I told her I preferred it to the straight drama. “I wouldn’t say. I explained, “that it wasn’t good acting that Frank Wilson did as Borgy in the play. But I knew the original Borgy in real life, and he was a short, stocky man with no legs and enormous strength in his hands and arms. Frank W ilson just hasn’t got Borgy’s build or physical strength. So I couldn’t believe in him when he kills a man with his bare hands.

“But I do believe in Todd Duncan, who plays the same part in the musical version. And there was one other thing about the straight play I didn’t, like. The characters in Porgy kept apologizing for being themselves. Like everyone else. I’ve known a great many bitches and whores in real life. They never apologize for being what they are.

“Watching that play was like seeing some society woman play ing a slut on the stage. She hopes you’ll think she’s wonderful. But at the same time she is worried that you might think she is also a slut in real life. So she tries to tell you in her acting, Rememher. I’m a society woman off the stage. I’m not really like this in private life. I’m just acting here tonight.'

“However, in Porgy and Bess the performers express themselves much more honestly and Ireely. They don’t give a damn what you think they are like off the stage. All they want is you to believe in them. ‘They’re good actors, so you do.”

“But this is very interesting. Miss Waters,”said this lady. “DuBose and I

For the first time I realized I must be talking to Dorothy Heyward, who had dramatized Porgy with her husband from his book. And also that he was the man seated next to her.

“There was a book I read some years ago . . .” And I went on to tell her how and why Mamba’s Daughters had held me spellbound. Yet I didn’t know that DuBose Heyward had also written that novel as I explained that Mamba’s family was just like my own, with Mamba herself almost the image of Sally Anderson, my grandmother; her daughter llagar like Louise, my mother; and Hagar’s daughter Lissa being a girl like myself, illegitimate and going out into the world to become a successful singer. “To everyone else Mamba is the main character in ihe story,”I told Dorothy Heyward, “but not tome, Hagar is the main one. llagar dies in the middle of the book, but for me she lived right on through the Iasi page, and ever afterward.”

Hagar had held me spellbound. In Hagar was all my mothers shock, bewilderment, and insane rage at being hurt and her fierce, primitive religion. But Hagar, fighting on in a world dial had wounded her so deeply, was more than my mother to me. She was all Negro women lost and lonely in the while man’s antagonistic world.

Dorothy’ Heyward listened as I talked all about this. “If we ever decide to dramatize Mamba’s Daughtersshe said, “we’ll see you.

Then I realized that her husband had written the book. But it was quite a long time before the Heywards did make a play of it and sent me the script.

I was thrilled and I was seared as I read that play. I had visualized Hagar as quite a small part. But even if it had been only a walk-on role I would have given anything to play Hagar. However, the Heywards had thrown away the other plots that had been in the book. The play was llagar s, and she had the dominating role throughout. Mamba’s Daughters now was a straight and simple melodramatic story, the story of llagar. a lumbering, half-crazy colored woman with a single passion: seeing that her beautiful Lissa has a better life than she’s known. The climax of the play comes when llagar strangles Lilly Bluton, a sporting man who has raped Lissa and plans to blackmail her.

It was easy for me to visualize the staggering emotional impact Mamba’s Daughters, written by a Southern white man and his wife, would deliver in the theater. In the theater it is the knockout I lint counts, and Mamba’s Daughters was all knockout.

But even more exciting was its being a play ripped out of the life I’d always known and was still living. Even when I read it for the first time I understood instinctively that there could be no greater triumph in my professional career than playing Hagar. All my life I’d burned to tell the story of my mother’s despair and long defeat, of Momweeze, as I called her, being hurt so by a world that then paid her no mind. It was a tragedy and a story of courage, with Hagar, like Momweeze, meeting it all with her heart up, never once doubling her God. and furiously intent on staying a person no matter how tricked and buffeted and besmirched and bruised.

Now always the Heywards, Dorothy and DuBose, were fine people. They played straight and above the board with me. Whim ihe big theatrical firms, including the Thealre Guild (which had cleaned upon their Porgy and their Porgy and Bess), turned down Mamba’s Daughters, they told me about each rejection. For my part f had promised to steer clear of all long-term commitments so I could conic to New York and start rehearsing whenever t hey sent for me. I just went on barnstorming with my unit and Eddie Mallory’s band, barnstorming endlessly for buttons.

One main reason the moneybags men refused to put up the financing for Mamba’s Daughters was because the Heywards insisted I play Hagar. “Ethel Waters, are you kidding?" was what they got whichever way they turned. “Ethel is a good singer, but no actress.”

Mr. Gumm, my lawyer, was handling my bookings, and he didn’t like my turning down all the big movie-house offers, “That is where the big money is for you, Elhel. “he said. I told him he was right, but I still had to play Hagar if I ever got the chance.

2

IT BEGAN to look as if I’d never get the chance. A year passed, then a year and a half, and I slarled to gel discouraged. I couldn’t see how the Heywards would ever find their much needed bank roll. Several $2500 a week offers had come in from England, and I was considering taking them.

Then the big break came. This was a wire from New York telling me to come in and spirt rehearsing for Mambas Daughters, as the money man had been found. The wire came from Liebling and Wood, very reliable Broadway east mg agents.

On my way East I stopped off, as usual, at Columbus to see my friend Ruth Thompson, a medium who had mysterious powers. “It’s interesting that you should come to see me right at this time, Ethel, she told me. “I’ve just been thinking a lot about you. Go upstairs and gel relaxed. You never let me give you any readings. But today, when you come downstairs, I’m going to tell you something important.

When I had freshened up and relaxed I came down and she said, “Don’t lake those offers from England, Ethel. I know you’ve been toying with that idea. You have been unsettled in your domestic affairs and think that might be the best way to pull up stakes.

“And that deal in New York you are going to see about won’t come through. But there is another deal you don’t know about yet that is definitely going through. It is now May, yet your show won’t go on until December. The man who will produce it has to go across the water first, he has to put on two other plays before yours. This man has two names in one. He’s an auburn man, has a mustache, and he is quick and energetic.”

I was taken aback, of course, but I put no stock in her mystic predictions. On reporting to New York I found they were already casting. And who should our money man turn out to be but Maury Greenwald, who had put on the Plantation Revue in Chicago and wanted me to take it to its final death rattles in London.

It was May when I checked in. During the first week of June, Bill Liebling called up to say I had to go to a meeting at the Barbizon-Plaza. Everybody involved in the production, including DuBose, was there when I arrived. They started hinting around, saying, “Now let me tell you this,” and so on, without saying one damn thing.

I looked around and remembered Ruth Thompson’s prophecy. “You are trying to tell me,” I said, “that Mr. Greenwald can’t finance Mamba’s Daughters,”

They were thunderstruck because they had hardly got started beating around the bush. I explained nonchalantly I had got the bad news in advance from a medium-friend and gave Bulb’s description of the producer and how the play would go on in December.

DuBose Heyward —and he has since passed on, much to the sorrow of all who knew him was a man of charm, great talent, absolute integrity, and deep-hearted sympathy for all Negroes. Baffled that he couldn’t get his play on, he next took it to an old friend, Guthrie McClintic, Katharine Cornell’s husband and director. If there was anything wrong with the play, DuBose thought that shrewd, smart showman would surely see what it was. “Please read it, Guthrie,” he said, “and give me your honest opinion. Don’t spare my feelings.”

The next day when DuBose again went to see him, McClintic had read Mamba’s Daughters. “It’s too long, DuBose,” he said, “but what really worries me is, what actress could give life to that stoic creature, Hagar?”

“I already have the Hagar,” said DuBose Heyward. “That woman has given me her word not to make any commitments. Because of that she has been taking a terrible beating for a year and a half. She passed up one big-paying job after another so she’d be free whenever we called her. The actress is Ethel Waters.”

“Ethel Waters!” said McClintic. “She could do it if any actress in fhc world could. All she’d have to do is give it the same underplaying and timing, the same repressed emotion she puts in her songs. I’d like to meet her.”

DuBose arranged an appointment, and I went down with him and had a talk with McClintic.

After that meeting Mr. McClintic told him, “DuBose, I’m going to do your play. But I won’t be able to put if on for some time.”

He explained he was leaving for London to direct, a play there and when he came back he would have to stage his wife’s new show. It was still June, and he said we’d have to wait until that winter to rehearse. “We’ll open on New Year’s Eve.”

On hearing the good news, we told McClintic of Ruth’s amazing prophecy. She had batted 1000 per cent in describing Guthrie McClintic as an auburn man with a mustache, and quick and energetic, She had also said he’d be going over the water, would put on two plays before mine, and Mamba’s Daughters would not get on the stage until December. She even said he would have two names in one, which he had—Me and Clintic.

3

GUTHRIE McCLINTIC didn’t know much about colored actors and never minded my suggestions. I was able to gel many of the performers who were good friends of mine into the show. And he got together a brilliant cast — Georgette Harvey as Mamba, Jose Ferrer as Saint, J. Rosamond Johnson as the Reverend Quintus Whaley, and lovely-looking little Fredi Washington as Lissa. Not to forget Ethel Waters as Hagar. I also got my accompanist, Reggie Beane, in the show as Slim.

But Mac didn’t know who in the world to get for the vital role of Gilly Bluton, a cutie and a bastard if there ever was one. He said, “Now about this Gilly Bluton, Ethel?” and I said I knew the perfect actor, telling him: “’This person is not like Gilly, but he is cocky, egotistical, clever, and with all his faults he’s a likable and lovable chap. I’m talking of a man named Willie Bryant.”

I knew Willie wanted to get in the play because he’d asked me to speak for him. I also knew he would be right. Guthrie McClintic asked where he could see this ideal Gilly Bluton of mine. I said Willie Bryant was working just then in Philadelphia as master of ceremonies on a vaudeville bill which Bill Robinson was headlining. Mac told me he would go down there to catch him.

When Mac got back to New York he told me he had asked Willie to call at his New York office. “He’s wonderful, that Willie Bryant,” he said. “I love him for the part.”

Nobody could have played Gilly Bluton — lowdown, mean, and nasty—better. But all through the rehearsals I worried about the big fight scene in which 1 was supposed to choke Willie Bryant to death. We had rehearsed everything else to Mac’s satisfaction. But each time we got to that scene I’d say: “We’ll just walk through this one.”

Remember, I am a big woman, and a powerhouse, physically. I could tear down, brick by brick, the walls of a thealer. And I was afraid I might kill Willie Bryant when we rehearsed that scene. I was not Ethel Waters, blues singer. I wasn’t even Ethel Waters, actress. I had become Hagar. And Willie Bryant had become Gilly Bluton, the blackhearted sonofabilch who had seduced my daughter and was planning to blackmail and ruin her completely.

So I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t think I d be able to control my hands once they closed around his throat. But naturally, I couldn’t explain that to Guthrie MeC’lintic, though he was the most sympathetic of stage directors. Even though Mac. having been an actor himself, breathed and sweated and suffered with me through every hourof rehearsal.

When he demanded I end my stalling, Willie and I went through the motions. “Oh no, no!" said Mac. “This has to be convincing. The whole play stands or falls on this one climactic, gripping scene. It has to be convincing, Hagar.”As he talked he jumped up on the stage and walked over to me. “Now, Hagar, you choke me. I want to make sure you’ll put everything you’ve got into this scene.”

“Oh no, boss,” I said, “I couldn’t choke you.”

But Guthrie kept telling me I had to. In the end he got me so nervous and excited that 1 grabbed him and shook the living hell out of him. I knocked the boss down. He was gasping and shaking when he got up, but he choked out: “ I hat s what 1 want you to do to (iilly.

Willie Bryant had watched us, his eyes big as basketballs. “You mean I gotta go through that every night!”

“Yep,” said Mae. “She damn near choked me to death.”

“Let me open, whispered Willie. Just let me open in this show. Thai s all I ask.”

Mr. MeClintic, with a grim smile, made us rehearse that scene. After watching us do our knoekdowm-drag-out light just once, he said the one rehearsal of the scene would be quite enough.

Playing opposite Millie was tense and exciting. Sometimes when I knocked him down W illie would get so mad he’d forget himself. He’d get up and keep coming at mo.

Willie often said that when he looked into my eyes during that scene he would gel paralyzed and unable to move. Out ol terror. My eyes have pin-point pupils. Willie told me my eyes, lull ot hatred and rage, held him in such a trance he had to look at my forehead to avoid being hypnotized.

Mambas Daughters had its preview opening on New Year’s Eve and its regular opening on January 3, 1939, which I still remember as the most 1 bribing and important experience of my life as a performer. And my w hole life, too, except for when I found God.

I was the first colored woman, the first actress of my race, ever to be starred on Broadway in a dramatic play. And we opened at the Empire Theatre, which has the richest theatrical history of any showhouse in America. And the Empire’s star dressing room was mine on that opening night. While the carriage trade was arriving outside, I sat at the dressing table where all the great actresses, past and presen-1, had sat as they made up their faces and wondered what the first-night verdict would be— Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne, and all the others who had brought the glitter of talent and beauty and grace to that old stage.

Yes, there I was, the Ethel who had never been coddled or kissed as a child, the Ethel who was too big to fit, but big enough to be scullion and laundress and bus girl while still a kid. And I could have looked back over my shoulder and blown a kiss to all my yesterdays in show business. I had been pushed on the stage and prodded into becoming Sweet Mama Stringbean and the refined singer of risque songs in Edmond’s Cellar, and on and up to best-selling records, Broadway musicals, and being the best-paid woman in all show business.

That was the night of my professional life, sitting there in that old-fashioned dressing room that was a bower of flowers. The night I’d been born for, and God was in t lie room with me. I talked to God, shivered and cried until the call boy came to say: “Five minutes, Miss Waters.”

Five minutes more to get ready to be Hagar and tell the story of my mother in front of the carriage trade. I asked God, “Oh, stay with me! Lord, keep Your hand on my shoulder! Please, God!

Then I got up and started off on that terrifying Iasi mile a performer has to walk every opening night. Into the wings, a pause there for a moment waiting for the cue — and then on, Ethel Maters, to glory or . . .

I was Hagar that night. Hagar and Momweeze and all of us.

Seventeen curtain calls that opening night for me alone. I couldn’t stand it. Half collapsing with joy and humility, I pushed through the kissing mouths and the slaps on the back to my dressing room, where Elida Webb, my secretary, was waiting.

“How do you feel now. Miss Waters: she said. “And what are you thinking?”

“Elida, if I died here and now,”I told her, “it would be all right. For this is the pinnacle, and there will never be anything better or higher or bigger for me. I have fulfillment, Elida. At lust, I have fulfillment.”

And I burst into sobbing as I humbly thanked my God. Because even if no one else knew it, I had been no actress that night. I had only been remembering and all I had done was carry out His orders. And I had shown them all what it is 1o be a colored woman, dumb, ignorant, all boxed up anrl feeling everything with such intenseness that she is half crazy.

Amidst all the opening-night to-do I had fell sorry for one little feller: Willie Bryant. After doing a great job, he stepped up to take his bow only to be hailed by hisses and boos. The bewildered Willie almost burst into tears.

“They only hissed you, Willie, I told bun, because you’re such a good actor, 5ou convinced them you are Gilly Bluton.

“That good?” asked Willie doubtfully.

“It’s terrific. You made them hate you.”

I had to work on Willie Bryant a long time before. I convinced him that those fruit \ catcalls and unseemly Bronx cheers begot at every performance were a supreme tribute.

Poor Willie told me that he fell in constant danger whenever he was up in his own Harlem. Lifelong buddies of his would tell him, 1 Willie, stay away from me! You are a no-good bastard. If i didn’t know you, I’d cut your throat for what you are doing to Ilagar.”

In the end, however, Willie Bryant came to understand that he had established himself as a rat of distinction, and he could take great pride and gloat over that.

The reaction of the women who saw the play was also amazing. In their mind’s eye 1 was transformed into Ilagar. Each night they’d come back to my dressing room and tell me of the similar troubles they’d had with their own men. Always I had to stav in my stage clothes until after ihev were gone. They had come to visit Ilagar and would have resented finding Ethel Waters in her place.

After seeing the play friends would ask, “How can you do it, Ethel? How long can you continue to give out with all that pent-up emotion night after night?”

I could not convince them that the role gave me ihe sorl of release I’d long needed. Being Ilagar softened me, and I was able to make more allowance for the shortcomings of others. Before that I’d always been cursing outside and crying inside. Playing in Mamba’,* Daughter.* enabled me to rid myself of the terrible inward pressure, the flood of tears I’d been storing up ever since my childhood.

4

AFTER a solid run on Broadway we took Mamba’s Daughters out on tour.

Down through the years I’d been visiting my mother regularly. I had rented a little house for her on Catherine Street in Philadelphia, and she lived there with her sister Vi. But her nervousness kept getting worse.

One night during ihe week we played Indianapolis I saw a man in a gray uniform crouching behind a counter on the stage. I got angry, thinking he was a stagehand who’d been caught on stage when the curtain went up. But when 1 walked out he’d disappeared. Later, when I described the apparition to the backstage crew fellers, they told me that my description fitted exactly a man who had fallen to his death from the flies about a year before, lie had not died immediately. lie was an atheist, that man, and he lay on the stage cursing God as he died.

I know that seeing that apparition was a bad omen. And soon I got word that on that very same evening, almost at the same hour, my mother had gol into bad trouble. Some newcomers to ihe neighborhood had sat on her stoop. \\ hen she ordered them away they just laughed at her. Momweeze then threw some hot coffee on them. The people went to the station house and signed an arrest paper.

When we moved to Detroit I was worried sick about Momweeze. And T had another omen there. During my stage light with M illie I fell down in a dead faint. He had to shake mo to make m«' come to. At that very moment in Philadelphia the authorities were taking Momweeze to the hospilal. I tried t; get a plane 1o take mo there the moment I heard about ibis. It was Christmas week, and a bad, bitter night. All passenger flights had been canceled, but I managed to get in a mail plane to New York and wenl on to Philadelphia by train.

The story I got from Genevieve, my half sister, shocked me. My mother had been handled very roughly by the ambulance people. She wasn’t crazv, just eccentric, ‘let they had forced her to go out with 1 hem — without even giving her a chance to get her coat —out into the cold and the biting wind. Vi had gone along in the ambulance to the Philadelphia General Hospital.

“Not the General!” I said. I’or whal good was the money I was making if Momweeze could be hustled off like that, without a coat, to be thrown into some dirty, overcrowded ward.-'

I hurried to the hospital, where a nurse took me to the ward. It was the snake pit. Women who seemed no longer human leered and grinned and chattered all about us. Young women, old women, grimacing and making obscene gestures, women so far gone into mental decay they could no longer keep themselves clean or decently clothed.

And there sat my mol her. She was in a corner, at a window, and looking out, her back straight as a rod and her head up.

“Louise,”said the nurse, “here is your daughter.”

Slow I v Momweeze looked around at me. Her expression didn’t change. “Ethel,”she said. “Who am 1, Et hel t”

“My mother,” I said, my heart bursting.

Momweeze looked triumphantly at that nurse and said, “I told you my daughter would come and get me out of here.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off Momweeze, I’d never seen her looking so thin and undernourished. I learned the reason for that later on. It had been the work of Vi, my always mischievous and troublemaking aunt. She had stayed on with Momweeze in the ward. When their first meal came Vi whispered to my mother, “Don’t eat nothin’, Louise. The food is all doped. It puts you to sleep. If you eat any of it you’ll never get out of here.”

Vi had been eating all the food brought for both of them. After devouring her own portion, she gobbled up Momweeze’s. Unable to reason with my mother, the hospital authorities had been feeding her intravenously,

I had the nurse take me to the doctor in charge of the ward. He proved to be a courteous and friendly man. “Why was my mother taken here?" I asked. “You people must know she isn’t mad. Her conduct may seem a little eccentric at times, but she’s far from crazy.”

“That’s true,” he agreed, “your mother is not demented. But she is very nervous, very highstrung. I’m very sorry to have to tell you that there was no other place we could take her.”

“I take good care of my mother. Doctor —

“We know that, Miss Waters.”he said. “We investigated and learned you send her three hundred dollars each month. In fact, we discovered that three hundred dollars—two semimonthly money orders for one hundred and fifly dollars each — are waiting for her right now. Nevertheless, we will have to send her to Norristown tomorrow.”

“Norristown! Norristown!” Norristown is the state’s mental institution. I tried to be calm. I tried not to cry. Hut the savage irony burned into my soul. Each night for a year many hundreds of white men and women had been acclaiming me for portraying my mother on the stage. These white people had sobbed and suffered with 11 agar, who to me was the replica of my mother, i had broken their hearts and so blinded them to reality that 1 had stopped being Ethel Waters to ihem. And there was the original of my stage portrait, tlun, wasted, unfed. Tomorrow they’d put her in a wagon and cart her off to the state crazy house.

“Your mother had some terrible shock early in life,”the doctor was saying.

“Me!” I thought. “‘The shock came when she brought me into the world.”As a child my mother was religious and at all times had Christian learning. She was always where there was a church meeting, and wanted to be an evangelist. She went to church instead of with the boys. She shut out of her mind everything worldly.

One of the boys who would come around to our rickety home in an alley was John Waters, my father. One day he forced my mother to submit to him. She tried to fight him, but he raped her, holding a knife to her ihroal. She was only twelve and didn’t know what it was all about, but she had to give in to him. And I hat is how I was conceived.

My mother always hated and resented my father and never afterward would have anything to do with him. It was just that one time with them.

Nobody suspicioned anything was wrong at the time. And my mother wouldn’t tell, she being so hurt and bitter and hardly understanding herself what was happening, inside her body. It was Sally, my grandmother, who finally noticed the bulge that was beginning to show under her dress.

“As a young woman,”the doctor was saying, “your mother withdrew from all normal living. She’s always suffered from complete frustration. She’s an infrovert.”

“I understand that, Doctor,” I told him. “But you yourself say she is not crazy. I’ve investigated and I found that in the whole great state of Pennsylvania there is not one place 1 can send my mother as a patient. For one reason only: my mother is a colored woman.

“Can’t I please take her home? You know she doesn’t belong here, or in Norristown, or in any other institution like that. Genevieve, my half sister, would lake good care of her, Doctor.”

Thoughtfully he said, “I can do that, but onlyon one condition: someone must be with her at ail times, night and day.”

“That is something I can guarantee,”I promised him. Then I went back into that ward.

“Are you going to get me out of here, Ethel?” my mother asked.

“Yes, but only when you can walk out on your own two feet. To do that, you must eat. You must forget what Vi told you about (he food here being poisoned. It’s not true, Momweeze.”

My mother promised to eat the hospital’s food. She was not sent to Norristown the next day, or ever, in that locked-up wagon. Within a week I was able to gel her out of the snake pit.

Some people around Philadelphia who knew my mother said she was crazy. But they were wrong. Whatever they thought, they never knew that when they saw Momweeze they were looking at a woman who had endured torment, long sustained, that few human beings could have survived.

Momweeze was always as unhappy as Hagar, and as lonely. Playing that role gave me new insight into the dept bless nature of her loneliness, and also the loneliness I’ve known ever since I was born.

Somehow or other, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism that she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me. I think that through my plays and my pictures I have been able to get across the message she never had the chance to deliver.

That was her destiny — and my own. Our destiny, shared, lay in everything that my mother thought and felt about God in her heart being said — but not by her from a pulpit, but from me on stage and screen; me. her unwanted one, conceived in terror and violence, and against her will.