“The Children of Caroline Thibodeaux”: Caroline, or Change as a new civil rights story
I happen to think Caroline, or Change is one of the most severely underrated musicals in history. Written by Tony “Angels in America” Kushner with music by Jeanine Tesori – who has recently begun to receive some long-deserved appreciation following the release of the breathtakingly wonderful Fun Home (more on that one later) – the musical follows underpaid, overworked Black maid Caroline in 1963 Louisiana as she struggles with her financial situation and the indignity that comes from being more-or-less a servant in a town still beset by racial segregation.
As with any Kushner work, the show is complex, unapologetically dense, and follows a large cast of characters. We meet Noah, the small Jewish boy whose family employs Caroline; his father Stuart, a widower who has recently remarried the New York City fish-out-of-water Rose; Caroline’s high-spirited daughter Emmie; and most interestingly, the Washing Machine, Dryer, Radio and Bus, all of whom are personified by actors. This feature of the show is probably what is remarked on most about the musical, when anything is remarked on it at all – despite critical praise, it failed to gain audiences and closed after only a few months on Broadway in 2004.
The personified appliances are of course a fascinating theatrical convention, and are an elegant, charming way to theatricalise Caroline’s loneliness and frustration as she works all day, alone in a swelteringly hot basement. However, what I would like to focus on in this essay is the way that the musical masterfully tackles the politics of race and class, in a way that avoids any oversimplification of these issues and honours some of the most forgotten people of the Civil Rights Movement.
Kushner, as a Jewish writer, is remarkably attuned to the complexities of the difficulties that Caroline and her friends and family face; he eschews so many of the cliches that well-meaning non-Black writers often fall into when writing a narrative in this era. The temptation might be to create villains – nasty, racist white employers that keep Caroline down, only for her to rebel and take back her pride in the final act – or to write the Gellmans as white saviours, with their kindness towards Caroline helping her out of poverty and Noah’s love for her helping him overcome the racism of the country in which he is raised. Kushner does neither of those. By choosing a Jewish family instead of a white one, the narrative is already complicated, but he goes even further – the Gellmans are a well-meaning family, left-wing (the old-school Communist Grandpa Gellman deliciously so), who feel guilty about underpaying Caroline but aren’t able to justify raising her salary when they are far from well-off themselves. Instead, Rose decides to let Caroline keep change that forgetful Noah leaves in his pockets in the laundry, killing two birds with one stone; teaching him a lesson about minding his money, and showing Caroline some charity.
Rose is oblivious to the sense of shame that this idea engenders in Caroline. “I don’t want to take pennies from a baby,” she answers her; instead of being grateful for Rose’s charity, as in a white saviour narrative, Caroline feels the sting of being treated like a panhandler, less well-off than an eight year old boy. The thing that hurts her the most is that she really does need the money – Rose’s unthinking act sets off a turbulent inner conflict in Caroline, as she is torn between her need to provide for her young children and her pride as an independent woman, a breadwinner, a fighter, and above all a free Black person, indentured to no one. “I am mean, and I am tough, but thirty dollars ain’t enough,” she repeats, before finally picking up the three quarters Noah has left: “Thirty dollars... and seventy-five cents.”
The small blow to Caroline’s sense of self-worth that occurs every time she takes home Noah’s money is just a microcosm of the sense of shame she feels doing menial labour for another family. “Thirty-nine and still a maid/ I thought for sure by now I’d be/ better off than this/ thirty-nine-year-old/ I should be somewhere being kissed by Nat King Cole,” she remarks drily. Kushner invites comparisons between Caroline and her younger friend Dottie, an upwardly mobile maid who spends her own time at night school, and between Caroline and her teenage daughter Emmie, a budding revolutionary who is eagerly following the progress of Martin Luther King Jr.’s movements against segregation. Caroline brushes off any mention of the coming social revolution, sometimes harshly, and gets in heated arguments with both characters as she warns her daughter to stay in line, or risk the wrath of white society. Emmie cannot understand why her mother seems so opposed to the idea of social change, yelling at her, “I’m a damn sight better and prouder than you!” after berating her for staying a maid for so long. This remark about pride is the thing that cuts closest to the bone for Caroline, earning Emmie a slap in the face from her mother.
Finally, things come to a head when Caroline and Noah fight over a twenty-dollar-bill Noah left behind, both of them punching below the belt in the process – Noah telling Caroline that, “President Johnson has built a bomb to kill all Negroes... I hope he drops his bomb on you,” to which Caroline replies, “Hell’s so hot it makes flesh fry/ And hell’s where Jews go when they die.” Upset, and angry at herself for sinking to an eight-year-old’s level, Caroline leaves work for five days unannounced. Dottie subtly suggests to her that it might be best just to quit; maybe it is time for Caroline to change, after all. But instead, in one of the most powerful songs in the musical, Caroline goes to church, where she pleads with God to, “murder my heart, strangle my soul, turn me to salt... a broken stone.” Her pride and her spirit swallowed, Caroline goes back to work.
This is where Caroline diverges from any other depiction of a Black character in this era that I have ever encountered. There seems to be only two ways that Black people in the mid-20th century are ever portrayed in media – either they are activists, standing up against racism and fighting for the integrationist cause, or they are, as Spike Lee termed them, “house n*****s”: happy servants content to serve white people and white narratives. Caroline is neither. She is an intensely proud person, for whom this low-paid drudgery means a complete loss of dignity, but she is willing to do it anyway even if that comes at the cost of her pride and even her identity. Caroline knows that the only hope she has to survive, and to ensure the survival of her children, is to continue working as a maid, and like so many other real people who have felt degraded by their work, she has made a choice. She has chosen her children over her pride.
Kushner lets us see that in the end, Caroline is not denying that change is coming; she, and the thousands of other people who chose to put food in their children’s mouths instead of directly joining the Civil Rights cause, are unsung agents of change themselves. How could Emmie have grown up so spirited and intelligent without her mother paying for food, clothes and school? By prioritising her job security over political change, Caroline and others like her have allowed that very same change to happen.
It is telling that Kushner gives Emmie the final words of the show, in a song that explains that she was part of a group of non-violent activists that pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier in the town. “I’m the daughter of a maid/ in her uniform, crisp and clean/ Nothing can ever make me afraid... Still, her strong blood flow... down to Larry, and Emmie, and Jackie, and Joe/ the children of Caroline Thibodeaux,” come the final lines. It is a message that resonates deeply with any person of colour living in a world where we have opportunities our grandparents never had. People like Caroline – people who put their own self-respect aside to make sure their children’s mouths were full, to make sure the children who would grow up to be activists and leaders had a stable home to come back to – deserve to be respected, to be honoured, to have their stories told. We are, all of us, the children of Caroline Thibodeaux.
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