The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World

American playwright Suzan Lori-Parks’s play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World: The Negro Book of the Dead (1990) is an abstract exploration of black trauma populated by Biblical characters, historical figures, and racial stereotypes. TimeOut New York called the play "a jazzy, poetic fever dream about the wounds left by erasure on the book of history."

At the beginning of the play, a group of characters from history, literature, and the Bible gather around the ancestral burial site of an individual named Black Man with Watermelon. The group includes the biblical figure of Ham, Noah's son who invites a curse on the Canaanite people after he accidentally sees his father naked. Over the centuries, some Christians, Muslims, and Jews interpreted the story of Ham as an explanation for the existence of darker skin and, in turn, a justification for chattel slavery. Also, in attendance is Hatshepsut, only the second-confirmed female pharaoh of Egypt. Having been deliberately erased from Egyptian history by her successors, Hatshepsut symbolizes the historical erasure of people of African descent. Ham and Hatshepsut are joined by Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright's landmark novel Native Son. In Native Son, Bigger Thomas commits a horrifying act of murder which is viewed through the lens of the systemic hopelessness and poverty experienced by many African Americans in Chicago in the 1930s.

Ham, Hatshepsut, and Bigger Thomas resurrect Black Man with Watermelon. Throughout the play, however, Black Man with Watermelon will die and be resurrected again and again, each time in a way that recalls the types of deaths visited upon black men in American, including lynching and electrocution for a crime he did not commit. Black Man with Watermelon is frequently seen in conversation with his wife, Black Woman with Fried Drumstick. Each time Black Man with Watermelon dies, a member of the chorus named Yes and Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread emerges to remind the audience to write down what they see so that the atrocities committed against the play's protagonist are not erased from history.



Another character who emerges betweens scenes of Black Man with Watermelon's deaths is Before Columbus. Before Columbus says that for much of human history, white men believed that the Earth was flat and dragons lived in the sea. But when Christopher Columbus discovered what he believed to be a Western route to India, Europeans were immensely humbled by the realization of the Earth's true shape. Angry at having been put in their place, Before Columbus says, white Europeans sought to put an entire race of people in their place as their revenge on the world.

The proceedings are also frequently interrupted by a character called Voice of Thuh Tee V. This character announces the death of "the absolutely last living negro man in the whole entire known world," adding that the man was born a slave but became self-educated and went on to become a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. The Voice of Thuh Tee V also says that the death of the last black man is greeted with "controlled displays of jubilation in all corners of the world." Elsewhere, one character named And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger spends the entire play pleading, "Would someone take these straps off uh me please? I would like tuh move my hands."

At the end of the play, Black Man with Watermelon and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick reach out to one another across time and dimensions. Both born of slavery and both on the verge of death, the husband and wife exchange pleas of "Remember me," and "Miss me." Though already doomed to die, Black Man with Watermelon and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick fight simply to be remembered, by each other and by history. Yes and Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread also gives a final plea to the audience to write down what they see, saying, "You will carve it all out of a rock so that in the future when they come along we will know that the rock did yes exist."



The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World is a harrowing work of theater that communicates injustice in a way that is at once abstract and gut-wrenching.