Transcriber's Note: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. GOAT ALLEY GOAT ALLEY A TRAGEDY OF NEGRO LIFE _By_ ERNEST HOWARD CULBERTSON [Illustration] CINCINNATI STEWART KIDD COMPANY PUBLISHERS COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY STEWART KIDD COMPANY [Illustration] _All rights reserved_ All acting rights, both amateur and professional, are fully protected under copyright law and are reserved by the author. Application to produce GOAT ALLEY must be made to him, in care of the publishers, Stewart-Kidd Company, Cincinnati. Printed in the United States of America THE CAXTON PRESS TO FREDERIC AND ALICE MULHERN ROBINSON INTRODUCTION In a dingy little hall on a side street Mr. Ernest Howard Culbertson began rehearsals of “Goat Alley,” his tragedy of Negro life in a Washington slum. The actors were, with one exception, amateurs--colored working people who gave their time and services for the sake of what they felt to be an artistic expression of the life of their race. The author had no sociological intention; he had no ambition to be a propagandist. He had not even a special interest in the racial problem. He thought that he had come upon an action that has the quality of tragic inevitableness. He thought, furthermore, that tragedy does not reside in pomp and circumstance, but in the profound realities of human helpfulness and human suffering, and that poor Lucy Belle struggling to maintain her spiritual integrity in Goat Alley was a protagonist worthy of the sternest art and the largest sympathy. He built up his action from within. He saw that the Negro cannot yet hope, like the white man, to transcend common standards. He must first reach them. Hence the Negro girl’s struggle for her own integrity is not yet the struggle of Nora or Magda--the struggle to be true to herself; it is the struggle to remain true to the man of her real choice. To transcend a necessary order one must first have achieved it. The achievement of social order in the moral sense is therefore the right and necessary aim of the Negro proletarian and the right and necessary theme of a drama dealing with his life.