Wearing the Mask: Joseph S. Cotter Sr.'s Caleb, the Degenerate

Abstract

Caleb in Bible got to Promised Land because he did not fear giants in walled cities and wholly followed Lord (Deuteronomy, 1:25-26). Another Caleb, protagonist of a strange, enigmatic four-act verse drama by Afro-American poet Joseph S. Cotter Sr., is called in title the Degenerate. He is given actions and speeches to show degeneracy, but other elements in play strongly suggest militant power of Biblical Caleb. This question of intended thematic effect is explored in following discussion of Cotter's Caleb, Degenerate: A Study of Customs, Types, and Needs of American Negro, first published in 1901, and recently anthologized in 1974 in Black Theater, U.S.A., edited by James Hatch and Ted Shine.1 These editors introduce play with suggestion that there may be a hidden message under surface theme, which is that American blacks of time needed to turn away from degeneracy and devote themselves to Booker T. Washington work ethic. That there should be a play with at least two levels of interpretation, with meanings which contradict each other in itself dramatizes uneasy situation of Black intellectuals at turn of century, especially in South. The Ku Klux Klan was powerful; voting was forbidden to Blacks; Jim Crow laws were stringent-and only way to exist in peace seemed to be way of Booker T. Washington. Yet founder of Tuskegee had set limits on growth of Black freedom in so-called Atlanta Compromise, his address at Atlanta Exposition of 1895: