The Long Goodbye

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REVIEW

BROADWAY WORLD

The Long Goodbye​ is a unique yet universal story that involves, to varying degrees, the lingering effects of slavery on African-American families, child abuse, racism, sexism, religion, racial identity, and the crushing effects of Alzheimer’s Disease.

The damaging mental and psychological consequences that the institution of slavery has had on the African-American psyche is profound. The two characters in the story, a mother and daughter, are unconsciously shadow-boxing history. My mother abused me throughout my childhood, continuing a tradition ingrained into African-Americans during slavery – disobedience required physical punishment.

Perhaps even worse than the physical abuse were her words. My mother had an understandably dark view of the world, at least in regards to how it treated women and African-Americans. She grew up in the Jim Crow South amid lynchings and constant harassment. Her mother was nearly killed by the KKK while pregnant with her. And at a time when few African-Americans earned a degree, even fewer that were female, she overcame many struggles and ultimately received her doctorate. My mother believed she had to prepare me for a world that did not want me. And her methods were harsh, to say the least. She could be unbelievably mean. As if she wanted to break me down before society had a chance.

As my mother labored to teach me to live in a white world, I got push-back from others about not being black​enough.​ Growing up in an upper middle-class environment, I had to prove my blackness. I was called an Oreo - black on the outside but white on the inside. Within every minority group there exists another minority, marginalized by the marginalized. In the African-American community, being progressive and educated can be seen as giving in to ‘the Man.’ I would get criticized for speaking too ​eloquently​, as if you can’t be black unless you’re talking in Ebonics. My mother and my community were pulling me in different directions. This is the umbrella under which the main character in ​The Long Goodbye​ must navigate.

In an America where seemingly half the country seems to think white people are the oppressed ones, and that a black president meant racism was dead, it’s important to remember that even if the struggles of African-Americans are not as visible as they once were, that does not mean they are gone. They have just become more institutional, more insidious. And there are after-effects most people do not see. Like the cycle of abuse handed down from generations of slavery. And African-Americans held back by the stigma of ‘giving in’ to a society that mistreated them for centuries. The frequent talk that slavery is just something hundreds of years ago that black people should ‘get over’ is small-minded. It’s hard to get over something that is still reverberating.

The journey of the show is how I got from point A to point B – learning that society was as much if not more to blame than my mother. And the key element in this was her being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s (shortly after my father succumbed to the same disease). I was stuck in the righteousness of how wrong my mother’s methods were, but as the person I knew slowly began to fade away, I found it hard to maintain my high ground. The show deals at length with the struggles of Alzheimer’s sufferers and their loved ones - a situation that, with people living longer, is growing to epidemic proportions. And specifically it shows the view of Alzheimer’s in the black community, where symptoms are often ignored too long and sufferers are generally kept with relatives unprepared to rather than sent to facilities where they can get proper care.

There is also a melancholy silver lining to the tragedy, as I finally see my mother as a person and not ‘mommy dearest.’ I learn to respect her hard journey and why she did what she did. And as her disease slowly makes her forget her resentments and anger, my mother becomes, if only briefly, the happy person she might have been had society not shaped her as it did.