Blues for Mister Charlie: Act 3 Summary & Analysis

Again, the Counsel for the Bereaved points out holes and inconsistencies in Jo’s testimony—but stops short of accusing her of lying, which illustrates how, as a white woman accusing a Black man of sexual assault, Jo is treated far more respectfully than she deserves.

Lyle’s insistence on killing Black people who talk to him the way that Old Bill did indicates that he derives his self-esteem from his whiteness and takes any perceived disrespect from a non-white person as an existential threat to his race and his masculinity. The revelation that Papa D has brought multiple (presumably Black) girls to Lyle’s place before Willa Mae underscores that Lyle’s racism in no way prevents him from preying on Black women sexually.

In a prior scene, Juanita and Pete told Richard that Papa D was a “Tom”—a Black man who is inappropriately deferential toward white people and betrays Black people to white people. Thus, when Papa D argues that Lyle is an “oppressor” unlike most white townspeople, readers are primed to believe that Papa D is simply flattering the white spectators in the courtroom: in fact, most of them are just as racist as Lyle. Papa D’s odd admission that he and Lyle loved each other “in [their] way” suggests that mutual regard can arise even in relationships severely damaged by racism—yet his subsequent claim that he and Lyle both loved money indicates that perhaps their peculiar relationship was merely one of shared economic anxiety and greed.   

In Juanita, Richard has found someone to love who loves him back. This relationship takes him out of the “pain and darkness” of his racist context, which seems him not as an individual person but as a racial type. Tragically, Lyle—who is incapable of seeing Black people as individuals—comes along to pull Richard back into “pain and darkness” just as Richard is about to escape.

Richard’s exchange with Papa D clearly indicates that Richard knew Lyle might kill him. Richard’s calm provides a positive example of masculine bravery to contrast with Lyle’s loud, insecure, and racist masculinity.

“Big Jim Byrd” and his “boys” are presumably a police chief or sheriff and his officers who brutalized and arrested Pete, Lorenzo, Anna Mae Taylor, and other Black people protesting racial injustice. This flashback to racist police brutality in the midst of Lyle’s murder trial cues readers to understand that the U.S. criminal legal system is racist. It thus casts doubt on the possibility that the court will find a white man guilty of a Black man’s murder.

Unlike the Counsel for the Bereaved, Lorenzo explicitly points out that Jo lied about Richard touching her. Here the spectators’ reactions are instructive. The white spectators imply that a Black man doesn’t have standing to question a white woman’s word, whereas the Black spectators urge Lorenzo on, indicating that they all know Jo is lying. Meanwhile, the State, acting as Lyle’s defense attorney, tries to caricature Richard as a drug addict and sexual predator in a racist fashion. By suggesting Richard’s ordinary photos of prior white girlfriends are pornographic, the State reveals how the white-supremacist imagination exaggerates and distorts depictions of Black sexuality.

Again, the State’s questioning of Lorenzo essentially puts Richard on trial, even though Richard is a murder victim and Lyle is supposed to be the one on trial for murder. By bringing up the gun to prejudice the jury against Richard, the State reveals that Black people are considered guilty of something if they bear arms—even though bearing arms is nominally a constitutional right. By bringing up the photos, the State preys on the white jury’s presumed racist anxieties about sexual relationships between white women and Black men. In sum, the State is caricaturing Richard as violent and hyper-sexualized.

When Juanita compares sex with Richard to “life and death,” it suggests that Juanita’s love for Richard helped bring him back from deathly despair after racist white people caricatured him and denied his humanity all his life—until Lyle took Richard’s life away permanently. Juanita’s claim that she wants a human lover, not God, indicates another way the play thinks Christianity may be counterproductive: it turns humans toward God and thus, potentially, away from relationships with each other—including sexual relationships. Juanita’s desire to “raise [her] baby to be a man” suggests that a major function of anti-Black racism is to “emasculate” or even kill Black boys and men, a vicious cycle of violence that Juanita wants to break in her hypothetical son’s case. Finally, Juanita’s claim that all bodies are “bloody” to Parnell suggests that Parnell’s guilt over his whiteness taints all his sexual relationships with the history of white male sexual violence against Black women—and white violence against Black people generally.

When the Black spectators ask why Black people are called upon to be loving to white people, they are suggesting that Christianity supports a double standard: Black Christians are supposed to imitate Christ by loving their white oppressors, whereas white Christians fail to imitate Christ—and, indeed, weaponize Christianity against Black people. Meanwhile, both the white spectators and the State question Juanita’s sexual and romantic history, suggesting that racist stereotypes about hyper-sexual Black women will be used to discredit Juanita’s testimony.

In this scene, the State doubles down on his attempts to turn Juanita into a racist caricature of the promiscuous, hyper-sexual Black woman. Juanita’s response—“I am not responsible for your imagination”—doubles as the play’s response to this phenomenon of white anxiety about Black sexuality: Black people are not responsible for white sexual and racial anxieties about Black people and therefore should not have to respond to them.

Yet again, the State asks about Richard’s use of drugs and alcohol to paint him as a dangerous Black man for the white jury. The flashback to Meridian and Juanita’s conversation makes clear that Richard is not the dangerous one: it is fatal violence from Lyle against Richard that Meridian (rightfully) fears. Thus, the juxtaposition between the trial and the flashback highlights the extreme racism and injustice of essentially putting Richard, the murder victim, on trial.

When Meridian admits that he repressed his feelings about his wife’s death so thoroughly that he ended up repressing all his feelings, it shows the psychic toll of practicing Christian nonviolence when violently oppressed. It also shows the damage that white racist violence does not only to the people who directly suffer it, but also to their families and other loved ones for years afterward.

When Juanita testifies that Richard didn’t want to leave town despite the threat of violence from Lyle because he wanted to live as a man, her testimony poses an implicit question to the audience: given that Richard obviously has a right to live without threat of violence, is it an example of positive masculine bravery or negative masculine pride that Richard refuses to leave town to save his own life? Since Richard was ultimately willing to leave town for Juanita, whom he loved, the play suggests that Richard’s initial unwillingness to leave town was an example of the former: he had the masculine bravery and self-respect not to flee from danger that he shouldn’t have had to face in the first place.

When Mother Henry points out that white people never referred to her respectfully (as “Mrs. Henry”) until her grandson was murdered, she is underscoring the racist cultural context in which Lyle’s trial is taking place. In the same vein, when the State speaks on behalf of every white person in town, it shows that the State thinks of himself as a representative of whiteness—and thus highlights that the State’s defense of Lyle is part and parcel of defending white supremacy. Finally, the audience knows that Mother Henry is lying when she says she never saw a gun. Her lie under oath implies that she’s sure Richard—not Lyle—is on trial here, and that the white jury would become irremediably prejudiced against Richard if they knew he was a gun owner. This double standard shows that, in this white-supremacist context, Black people are not afforded the same right to violent self-defense that white people are. 

Yet again, the State emphasizes Richard’s drug use in attempt to caricature him as a dangerous Black man and prejudice the jury against him. Mother Henry counters the State with a story about how, when Richard was born, Meridian prayed to raise him as “a good strong man”—an anecdote that emphasizes both the family’s Christianity and their investment in positive forms of masculinity.

The Song of Songs, a book in the Old Testament, is a romantic poem often interpreted allegorically as about Christ’s love for the church or God’s love for the Jewish people. Meridian’s wish that the poem were non-allegorical hints that he feels sexually repressed by Christianity and longs for romantic love rather than for Christianity’s general love of mankind. His claim that he had no answer to Richard’s questions about the behavior of racist Christians, meanwhile, points out the hypocrisy of white Christians who claim to imitate Jesus Christ’s universal love yet hate and oppress Black people.  

Meridian, like Mother Henry, lies that he never saw Richard with a gun; these repeated lies emphasize that the Black witnesses know that Richard is the one on trial, despite being the murder victim. They know that Richard’s owning a gun would prejudice the white jury against him because white racists don’t believe Black people have the same right to violent self-defense that white people do. The Black spectators’ sarcastic comment that Richard couldn’t “say how” he would live without a gun implies that Richard might have survived Lyle’s attack if he had had his gun on him. This casts further down on the wisdom of nonviolent Christian protest.

When the State insinuates that Meridian was a bad Christian because he preached “social equality,” it shows how certain strands of Christianity encourage oppressed people to simply endure their oppression rather than fighting back. Meridian’s claim that he wants Black people to become “equal to themselves” emphasizes that his goal in protesting for social equality isn’t to make Black people more like white people—who are not role models—but rather to give Black people a chance to flourish on their own terms.  

Just as the State attempted to discredit Juanita’s testimony by accusing her of sexual promiscuity, so the State here tries to discredit Meridian by asking about Meridian’s sex life. This redirects the white jury’s attention away from Meridian’s actual testimony to white-supremacist anxieties about Black male sexuality. Meanwhile, Meridian announces that he just wanted to help his son become a man, a claim that suggests manhood or masculinity isn’t a default for men—rather, it’s an ideal that men work toward.   

Again, the State claims Richard had pornographic photographs of white women to play on the racist white jury’s fear of Black male sexuality and prejudice the jury against Richard. When Meridian says that he and Richard talked about women as people, not about pornography, he is implicitly asserting that both he and Richard have appropriate and humane respect for women. When Meridian announces that he is “beginning to become” a minister after essentially stating that Richard never tried to rape Jo, he is suggesting that to be a true leader, Christian or otherwise, one must assert the truth against the lies of one’s oppressors. 

Parnell’s ruminations on what he calls his “black fever” indicate that in the aftermath of his relationship with Pearl, he felt so guilty about his whiteness that he wanted to flee it. But as a result, he stopped treating his Black sexual partners like people to be loved and started treating them like temporary escape hatches from the guilt of whiteness. Thus, Parnell’s white guilt actually leads to more racist behavior. 

When Parnell says that Lyle has a capacity for attracting people, he may be indirectly admitting his own sexual attraction to Lyle—but the line is too ambiguous to be clear. Meanwhile, Lyle’s reminiscences about poaching on Parnell’s property make clear that Lyle’s family was much poorer than Parnell’s. Then, Lyle’s desire for a “clean” wife hints that Lyle doesn’t love Jo—he just has a misogynistic and white-supremacist commitment to marrying a sexually “pure” white virgin.  

Lyle’s claim that hunting was “sport” for Parnell but “life” for his family hints once again that Lyle’s family was extremely poor—they relied on the meat they poached to survive. Parnell’s joke that Lyle just killed someone’s child ominously (though accidentally) alludes to Lyle’s later killing of Meridian’s child, Richard. Through the joke, the play suggests that Lyle sees upholding white supremacy as a matter of existential survival—just as he sees hunting as a matter of survival. Meanwhile, Lyle’s comment that Jo is the only “white virgin” left in town make explicit that Lyle wants to marry Jo for her race and her perceived sexual purity, not because he actually loves her.

Throughout the play, conflicts around who gets to own guns have symbolized how white-supremacist societies deny Black people the right to self-defense. When Parnell says that he has served alongside Black soldiers with guns, he is essentially claiming that he has no racist fear of armed Black people—in the past, he has trusted Black people with deadly weapons to use them appropriately. When the State retorts that soldiers have “a common enemy,” the State is suggesting that Black and white Americans are allies during wartime, but during peacetime, Black and white Americans are enemies and thus don’t trust one another with guns.

At this point, it isn’t clear whether Parnell is lying about Richard’s gun or never knew Richard had one. He tells the truth about Richard’s photos, however: they were normal snapshots, not pornography. Parnell’s willingness to tell the truth perhaps displays his naivete about white racism. While Parnell doesn’t believe that Richard possessing normal photos of white women he has known will prejudice the jury against him, the State clearly does believe it—hence the State’s clarifying question about the content of the photos. 

Parnell’s commentary here reveals that he is not so naïve as he previously appeared: he knew that Richard having even normal snapshots of white women might put Richard at risk given the racist white townspeople’s extreme prejudice against any interracial romantic relationships. The State illustrates just how prejudiced against such relationships the white townspeople are when he uses religious language to call white women who have sex with Black women “beneath all human consideration”—subhuman, essentially.

Parnell does seem to be telling the truth here: he never heard about a rape attempt until Jo’s testimony in court, though he did hear about the altercation at the store from Lyle. Yet—as the yells from the spectators suggest—Parnell is not telling the whole truth. In fact, he’s trying to avoid admitting that he thinks Jo lied.

Here Parnell betrays Richard and Meridian: he merely acknowledges that Jo’s story seems “quite explicit” about sexual assault without pointing out the obvious fact that it’s likely she made it up for the trial to prejudice the white jury against Richard and get Lyle exonerated. The reactions of both Black and white spectators—in particular the white spectators’ triumph that Jo told the truth “after all”—suggests that everyone doubted the truth of Jo’s story, but that the white spectators are taking heart from Parnell’s refusal to call out her lie.

These flashbacks seem intended to show that Lyle has some depth of character: he wants to care for his child and on some level respects his wife. However, he’s still a violent racist anxiously fixated on whether he is manlier and better at sex than Black men. In other words, the play is underscoring that a white “family man” can still be a racist murderer.

When Lyle thanks Parnell for “com[ing] through,” it emphasizes that Parnell betrayed Meridian and Richard by failing to call out Jo’s lies about Richard. Meanwhile, Meridian’s refusal to take the jury’s verdict as “good enough” suggests that Meridian never expected justice from a white jury—but he still wants the truth.

Interestingly, Parnell thinks that he has failed not only Meridian, but Lyle himself by allowing Jo’s lie about Richard to stand and so helping to secure Lyle’s acquittal. It seems that Parnell believes a conviction would have forced Lyle to confront the horrific truth of his own behavior and so improved him as an individual—even if it also sent him to prison. By allowing Lyle to dodge the truth, then, Parnell failed Lyle. 

Lyle’s claim that he gave Richard “every chance to live” may be unreliable, but it suggests that Lyle believes he would have left Richard alone—if Richard had bowed to Lyle’s white-supremacist ideology and apologized to Lyle. When Richard asks what he or Lyle is trying to prove, it suggests that Richard sees their fight at the store as racially charged macho posturing—a posturing that Richard has quickly grown out of, but that Lyle is still mired in.

Richard, through his relationships with Meridian and Juanita, has matured enough to be able to offer Lyle grace: despite Lyle’s racism, Richard is willing to respect Lyle’s individuality and allow that he is “a man.” Yet Lyle doesn’t want to be respected in this way. Because he’s insecure in himself and his masculinity, he wants to be privileged and bowed to as a white man specifically. Whiteness, for Lyle, is a kind of psychological security blanket that Richard’s dignified refusal to call him “sir” threatens to take away.

Once again, guns symbolize how white-supremacist culture refuses Black people the right to defend themselves: Richard has given up his gun because his family members were afraid of what white people would do if they knew he had it, and now Richard is unarmed. When Richard asks why white people try to castrate him, he indicates that a major goal of anti-Black racism is to “emasculate” Black men. But when he tells Lyle he and Jo might “get to like it” if they spend too much time around Black people, he is pointing out that white-supremacist ideology cannot account for interracial attraction.

At the play’s end, Lyle only sees himself as a white man, not as an individual, and he believes he must defend his whiteness and masculinity with homicidal violence. This shows how white-supremacist ideology has left Lyle alienated from himself as well as from others. Meridian’s comment that Black people’s story in the U.S. may end with “the Bible and the gun” predicts that both Christian nonviolent resistance and violent self-defense may be necessary to fight for racial justice. The conversation about Richard’s gun reveals that basically all the witnesses knew about Richard’s gun and lied under oath about it—suggesting that they all knew the white jury would be prejudiced against Richard if they knew he had contemplated violent self-defense. Finally, Juanita’s willingness to let Parnell “walk in the same direction” as her shows that she is willing to let Parnell redeem himself despite his betrayal of Meridian and Richard during the trial.