Two weeks ago, the College of Charleston’s Center Stage theater department performed a play entitled Elephant’s Graveyard. Produced in 2008 and written by George Brant, Graveyard tells the tale of a traveling circus and their star, a beloved five-ton elephant named Mary, on the day in 1916 when they arrive in small, muddy Erwin, Tennessee. On this fateful day, the circus plans an elephant parade for the townspeople that goes terribly awry when Mary ignores the guidance of her trainer, Red, and beelines for a slice of watermelon lying on the ground. Red attempts to reign her in, but in a fit of rage Mary lifts him off her back with her trunk, throws him to the ground, and steps on his head. Horrified, the townspeople demand her execution, a request the circus reluctantly grants them by hanging her from a railroad crane.
Elephant’s Graveyard seems to be the story of an unfortunate elephant that just wanted a bit of watermelon, but a line uttered at the very end of the play puts it in a whole new perspective. The speaker, a character named Hungry Townsperson, is described as “African American male, a steel-trap memory.” He is the only black character in the play. As he walks off the darkening stage he utters the lines that change everything:
“[Elephants] don’t forget nothin’…People got short memories. Memories leave just as soon as you give it to them. But not me. Because I eat peanuts. Stops it all from blurring together. And all those colored boys in the yard must blur together something fierce because no one talks about how they hung colored boys in Erwin. They just talk about how they hung an elephant. Damnedest thing.”
A murmur rippled through the audience at this as everyone realized the truth behind these words. Hungry Townsperson addresses the point that the whole town is worked up and upset about this elephant they lynched but shed no tears over the human beings who suffered the same fate at their hands. This is a common theme in the literature we have read in class. In his slave narrative, Frederick Douglass wrote of how slave owners reduced their slaves to nothing more than animals. Similarly, the townspeople of Erwin felt more guilt and sorrow at killing an elephant than they did killing their black neighbors.
Furthermore, we have discussed the boundaries of the African American literary tradition and what fits into it. In some cases it’s all about perspective, like with Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild. Some say that it’s definitely about the social oppression of blacks in America; others argue it has nothing to do with it. And while Brant is a white man from the Midwest, he still has something to say about racism. So is Elephant’s Graveyard a play about the demise of a circus elephant or the racism and inequality that ran rampant through the United States? It depends on how the audience wants to interpret it.