Black surrogacy: Refiguring myth, memory, and motherhood in Suzan-Lori Parks' 'The America Play', 'Topdog/Underdog', and 'In the Blood'

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, the First Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama (2002), uses Black Surrogacy in her plays---The American Play, Topdog/Underdog, and In the Blood ---to unwrap the neat packaging of American history and identity while illustrating the social, political, and economic challenges facing contemporary African Americans.; Black Surrogacy is the term I am using to explain Parks' technique of replacing white literary and historical characters in her plays with Black characters. In using surrogate Black characters the playwright scrutinizes an American identity that is based primarily on white notions of itself. Also, she exposes the flaws in the American historical memory about racism during Abraham Lincoln's presidency. Thus, Black Surrogacy counters the conventional narratives that have, as Toni Morrison suggests, traditionally ignored and deflated the shaping presence of Africans in America.; In The America Play, for instance, Parks uses Black Surrogacy to critique postmodernist notions of "what is history" and "who or what is America(n)." She does so using a Black character called the Foundling Father or the Lesser Known. From his perspective as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator in "white-face" paint, a frock, and a top hat, he contemplates both the American historical identity and his own. In Topdog/Underdog, one of the two Black surrogate characters is an imitator of Abraham Lincoln. The other, his brother, is a would-be street card hustler. Satirically named Lincoln and Booth, these Black men reveal what becomes of African Americans who either submit to mimicking white identities or who self-destruct in efforts not to submit. In the Blood, which critics call a revision of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), utilizes a Black surrogate female character named Hester (and her five children) to complicate the tenets of the "Cult of True Womanhood" that are highlighted in Hawthorne's text.; Although Suzan-Lori Parks critiques the myth, historical memory, and shaping of Black motherhood in the American Identity, I argue that the Black Surrogacy trope fails. It fails because Parks' use of Black people to deconstruct white identity reinforces widespread stereotypes and misconceptions about Black people and creates new-age minstrelsies.