A Soldier’s Play

The story takes place at Fort Neal in Louisiana in 1944, when the United States Army was racially segregated. In the opening scene, the audience witnesses the murder of black Sergeant Vernon Waters by an unseen shooter. Just before his death, Waters utters the enigmatic cry, “They still hate you!”Captain Richard Davenport, a rare black Army officer, has been sent to investigate the killing. Initially, the primary suspects are local Ku Klux Klansmen. Later, bigoted white soldiers fall under suspicion. As Davenport interviews witnesses and suspects, we see flashbacks showing what Sergeant Waters was like, and how he treated his men. Waters was highly intelligent and extremely ambitious, and loathed black men who conformed to old-fashioned racist stereotypes. In Waters’ mind, Uncle Toms and “lazy, shiftless Negroes” reflected poorly on him, and made it harder for other African-Americans to succeed. For that reason, Waters persecuted black soldiers like Private C.J. Memphis, whose broad grin and jive talk made Waters’ blood boil. Waters came to realize how futile and foolish his lifelong attempts to behave like a white man had been. His dying words, “They still hate you,” reflected his belated understanding that white hatred and disdain of black men like himself had nothing to do with stereotypical black behavior, and that whites would probably always hate him, no matter how hard he tried to emulate “white” ways.