Voices From the Past

An upstairs room in a Hollywood church isn’t usually the kind of place where one finds anything significant going on. All the real business is done in the main room: sermons, songs, collections and the lusty damnation of evil in our midst.

But last week, something important did occur in a room too small for significance and too hot for comfort on the second floor of the Hollywood United Methodist Church. It was the reading of a play, a work in progress, called “Voices” by Les Wieder. It left you hearing voices of your own.

The play is about a mixed relationship (he’s white, she’s black), about racial heritage, about pride and about an awakening to the fact that there are no slaves anymore and no masters, and God help the person who doesn’t realize that.

What makes “Voices” more than just another small production kicking around town is the haunting narratives of real ex-slaves interwoven with the contemporary drama of the black-white love affair.

Voices drawn from historical “slave tapes” whisper like ghosts from the past and, by their juxtaposition, remind us that racial tensions continue to exist. The beating of Rodney King and the subsequent revelation of racist “cop tapes” by the Christopher Commission form an uneasy linkage with that past.

Hatreds still simmer beneath the surface of attitudes smoothed, but not altered, by time.

The slave tapes are the words of black people remembering what it was like in bondage. Their personal stories of indentured servitude were recorded in the 1930s, but lose nothing in the passage of years.

One voice remembers: “They said slaves didn’t have no feelings. That’s why we was slaves. But at the auction block, you could see that wasn’t true. Families were split up. Children sold away from their mammies, and fathers sold away from their families. Lord, how that did hurt. . . .”

Wieder, 48, a drama professor at Moorpark College, relies on reality to set the mood for what’s to come. An actor intones the words of the brilliant ex-slave, author and abolitionist Frederick Douglass:

“The law gave the master absolute power over the slave. He could work him, flog him, hire him out, sell him and, in certain instances, kill him with perfect immunity.

“In law, the slave had no wife, no children, no country and no home. He could own nothing, possess nothing, acquire nothing, have nothing. He was a slave.”

When the action switches to the drama of a woman who’s afraid she’ll lose her “blackness” if she marries a white man, the voices, like a Greek chorus, are always there, aloud and in her head, reminding her of the anguish in which black history is rooted.

“I feel like I’m running out on my people,” the lead character, Lena, says of her impending marriage. She is haunted by the tapes, obsessed by the voices, and eventually tells her white boyfriend, David, “Everything done to them (the slaves) was done by people who look like you.”

“I hate those tapes,” David shouts. “I can’t fight voices!”

“They raised niggers for sale,” a slave says, “like mules.”

“Get rid of those tapes!” David demands.

“The voices are in my mind forever,” Lena says.

A slave voice says: “They thought no more of taking a baby from its mother than a calf from a cow.”

Wieder knows firsthand about mixed relationships. He’s married to a black woman, Tyree Warren, vice president of academic affairs at L.A. Valley College.

He was on a sabbatical from Moorpark College working on another project when he heard portions of the slave tapes on radio. Their impact was stunning.

“When you hear the voice of a real person describing slavery--’You’re nothing but a dog, a dirty, low down dog’--it stays with you.”

Wieder found the tapes through the Library of Congress and tailored his play to include them.

“Voices” is only partly autobiographical. Unlike the battling characters in his drama, Les and Tyree fell in love on their first date and have been together ever since.

Their own problems aren’t important here anyhow, Les says. What matters is the cultural, rather than the personal, conflict involved. What becomes of our heritage, he asks, when we marry out of it?

“There was one time Tyree was hassled about marrying me,” Wieder says, “and it had nothing to do with color. When we were dating, a Christian zealot confronted her and said, ‘How can you take up with a Jew?’ ”

“Voices” addresses all kinds of bigotry. And it tells us while slavery is dead, racism isn’t. The notorious “cop tapes,” an exchange of comments over squad car computers with references to blacks as animals, proves it.

Wieder never intended a connection between the slave tapes and the cop tapes, but it’s there. And it will keep disquieting new voices of racial hatred whispering in our heads for a long, long time.