Review: The Amen Corner by James Baldwin
“She done gone too far, she done got too high.” –Brother Boxer
“It’s time for her to come down.” –Sister Moore
James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner is a dramatic play that tells the story of a Black Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem in the 1950s, but the story could have been told about any Black Church in any region of the country in 21st Century America. This tragedy unfolds on a Sunday morning when the pastor of the church, Sister Margaret, preaches her fundamentalist sermon on living holy and righteous. She chastises a church member who is considering taking a job driving a liquor truck and tells a young female parishioner with a sick baby to leave her husband because he doesn’t go to church. The church loves their pastor especially the Amen Corner which is made up of three elders of the church, Brother Boxer, Sister Boxer, and Sister Moore.
This all changes when a person from Sister Margaret’s past comes to the forefront and causes a rupture to develop in the church and in Sister Margaret’s own family. The elders of the church do not like these developments and now believe that Sister Margaret herself is not living and did not live the life she is preaching about and as the quotes above suggest, the elders feel compelled to take action.
Baldwin has written a powerful play which I had the pleasure of seeing performed recently. The play teaches us the downsides of fundamentalism. It causes church members not to see their pastors as people with human frailties and it causes pastors to place stringent rules on their congregation who in turn feel it’s impossible to be a Christian in a mostly secular world. As Baldwin’s play closes the reader learns that there are few heroes in this drama but there are definitely antagonists, and it may not be the people you expect.
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