“Boys to Men”: Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over

by Pancho Savery

Two men, long-time friends, are together in a bleak existential landscape. They have been there for some significant amount of time. They are waiting, waiting for something that will end their torment and somehow set them free. Despite the fact that they have been here for a long time, they remain optimistic that their fortune will change. In the meantime, while waiting they comically amuse themselves by playing games, reminiscing, talking about religion, and sharing the little food they have. At one point, in despair, they contemplate suicide, but decide that they can’t, or won’t. In a surprise, a stranger arrives who offers them food, and then leaves. Their landscape is barren except for one vertical structure. Their story ends tragically, as their hoped-for relief turns out never to arrive.

If this sounds familiar, and it should, it is a quick synopsis of Waiting for Godot (1953), the tragi-comedy by Ireland’s greatest playwright, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). It is also the exact synopsis of Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over (2017). While there are these similarities between the two plays, there are also defferences, both superficial and significant. Instead of two white men, there are two Black men. Instead of an empty landscape, there is an urban streetcorner. Instead of a turnip to eat, there is a piece of pizza crust. Instead of a tree, there is a streetlamp. Instead of two visits by a man who masters the slave he drags around with a rope, there are two visits by a man whose given name is Master. The final “superficial” similarity is that both playwrights successfully tread the line between tragedy and comedy. On the one hand, there is the comedy of what they do while waiting for their lives for the better; and on the other hand, there is the tragedy that they don’t. As a director, trying to balance these two aspects of the plays is particularly difficult.

A significant aspect of Pass Over is that it essentially attempts to inhabit three places and times simultaneously. The most obvious is the present urban streetcorner where the two main characters are trapped. As much as they want to leave, they cannot, because the police won’t let them. At several moments they are startled, and immediately flinch or dive to the ground. Their streetcorner is essentially a prison from which they cannot escape. And on this point, it is clear that this is not meant to merely be the condition of these two random Black men. It is also clearly meant to be a metaphor for the condition of too much of Black life, trapped in poor living conditions with no alternatives. Not only do the characters have to sleep out on the street, houseless, but they have to take turns sleeping. One is always on guard as a form of protection to make sure they remain “safe.”

The second place and time is during African American enslavement. When those enslaved were attempting to escape, two parts of the natural environment were of the greatest importance. The most important was the Ohio River, which separated slave Kentucky from free Ohio. Many texts about enslaved African Americans feature scenes along the river, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).How did the enslaved manage to get to the Ohio? The answer is that they “followed the drinking gourd.” The drinking gourd is a hollowed-out gourd used to dip water for drinking. Its shape, to the enslaved, resembled that of the Big Dipper constellation, which points to Polaris, the North Star. “Following the drinking gourd” means finding one’s way to the North, and freedom, by following the Big Dipper. There is a song with that title with versions by Pete Seeger, Richie, Havens, and Jefferson Starship; and there are at least five children’s books with that title. The play’s title thus refers to the possibility of passing over the Ohio River to freedom. In this play, however, that is unfortunately merely a dream and a hope. That being said, the streetcorner essentially becomes the slave plantation, controlled by Master and the police. The enslaved main characters are thus trapped on a plantation with little to no hope of escaping to freedom. They can talk about freedom, talk about escape to a better life; but as with the characters in Godot, they are trapped with nowhere to go. They are doomed/condemned to remain where they are, and freedom becomes just another word.

     In some ways, the most obvious reference of the play’s title is an allusion to the plight of the Hebrews in Ancient Egypt. The Hebrew Bible’s book of Exodus tells the story of the Hebrews, enslaved in Pharaoh’s Egypt who become organized under the leadership of Moses. Yahweh instructs Moses to go to Pharaoh and demand that he “Let my people go.” Or else. When Pharaoh refuses, Yahweh sends down a series of plagues to force Pharaoh’s hand, and to prove who is the mightier. It takes ten different plagues, including water turning to blood; frogs; lice; flies; livestock pestilence; boils; hail; locusts; darkness; and finally, the death of the firstborn children before Pharaoh finally relents and agrees to let the Hebrews leave. Each of the plagues probably lasted for months at a time. Yahweh instructs the Hebrews to slaughter and consume a lamb and spread its blood on their doorframes. When the Angel of Death arrives to take the firstborn children, it would “pass over” the doors with blood, and thus the Hebrew firstborns would be saved. As is well-known, Moses leads the Hebrews out, stretches out his arms to part the waters of the Red Sea, the Hebrews pass over, the chasing Egyptians are drowned, and the Hebrews begin their forty years of wandering in the desert until they reach the “Promised Land,” which they have to take from the indigenous population of Canaanites.

We now have three contexts in which to think about the title: the present streetcorner (in Spike Lee’s film version it is clearly in Chicago), the slave plantation, and Egyptian slavery and escape from Egypt in the biblical story in Exodus. For the Hebrews, escape and passing over is possible. For the Black characters, there is, despite the biblical reference, never any escape; and therefore, we must view the play’s title as at least somewhat ironic. Passing over is just a dream destined to never be fulfilled. Another form of irony is that the main character’s name is Moses. It does cause us to pause and wonder what was in the mind of his parents when they chose to name him. Was it arbitrary? (There is a practice in the Black community of picking up the Bible, closing your eyes, randomly opening the text somewhere, and then choosing a name from that page.) Or was it deliberate; if so, what did his parents have in mind in choosing this name. Is it a kind of curse or a burden of expectation for his role in the Black community, or a combination of both?

This mostly takes care of the play’s background. As to the play’s foreground, we have to start with the topic of language, and specifically with the use of more than one form of the word “nigger.” One can recall its perhaps most notorious literary use in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), where the term is used approximately 219 times, and primarily used by white characters in reference to African Americans. Because of this extensive usage, many readers have mistakenly come to the conclusion that Twain is racist. This is far from the truth. What Twain is doing is experimenting by using the precise vernacular language that his racist characters would use. And in that, he is successful. What too many readers miss is that Twain is reporting and reproducing this language, not endorsing it. He is the exact opposite of a racist, and this is made clear by the humanity with which he endows the enslaved figure of Jim. (In 2011, Alan Gribben published a new edition of the novel, and destroyed it by changing the word to “slave.” For a more contemporary updating of Jim’s story, see Percival Everett’s excellent work James: A Novel, published in 2024.) The use of this word in a negative context has a long history that is fully explained in Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy’s Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002), whose title riffs, or signifies, on C. Vann Woodward’s 1955 The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Kennedy notes that the word “is derived from the Latin word for the color black, niger,” that it has been spelled “in a variety of ways, including niggah, nigguh, niggur, and niggar,” and that when John Rolfe recorded in his journal the first shipment of Africans to Virginia in 1619, he listed them as ‘negars,’” but that this was not necessarily intended to be an insult, merely a description; but it didn’t take long for this to change. Much later, the exclusive negative connotation of this word used by whites toward Blacks was repossessed (in the same way other “negative” terms such as “dyke” or “queer” were repossessed) and turned into terms of more specific critique, positive identity, and even endearment. What African Americans have done with the word is to demonstrate their linguistic ingenuity. Whereas white people have used “nigger” to refer to all Black people in a derogatory manner, Black people have used it in multiple ways. When H. Rap Brown wrote his autobiography Die Nigger Die! (1969), for example, he was exclusively referring to non-revolutionary Blacks. Similarly, when The Last Poets sang “Niggers are Scared of Revolution” (1970), they were also only referring to non-revolutionary Blacks. In Pass Over, some form of the word is used at least 259 times, in far fewer pages than Twain, as “nigga,” meaning friend, pal, bestie, or ace, as in “what’s good my nigga?” and also used in the typical derogatory way by white characters towards Blacks, but also by Black characters towards whites, spelled “nigga” in the former case and “nigger” in the latter. As with much, if not most, language use, context determines everything.

In many ways, therefore, this is a play about language and the multiple uses to which it can be put, as well as the collapse of time. The play begins with a startling use of language. In Godot, the games played are mostly innocuous. Here, the play begins with the two main characters playing their first game that begins with Moses saying, “yo kill me now,” and Kitch responds, “bang bang.” While on the one hand this could be seen as just a playful comic game, such as when children used to play “Cowboys and Indians,” here the game takes on a more sinister tone. Given that they are two Black men trapped on a ghetto streetcorner where only one can sleep at a time while the other keeps watch because they are, and need to be, fearful of the police, who could shoot them anytime, this “simple-seeming” game immediately establishes a mood of fear and potential violence, if not death, and an air of the tragic. To offset the tragic, this is immediately followed by their second game, “you know”: man you know//you know/I know// you know/ I know/you know//you know/ I know/you know/I know,” etc. While Godot is also a mix of the tragic and the comic, the tragic is primarily based in the fact that Godot will never arrive, and Didi and Gogo will be waiting forever. Pass Over’s potential tragedy is much more menacing; and therefore, its balancing comedy is more alleviating. But as is the case with Godot, the primary purpose of the games is to pass the time, while waiting; in the one case waiting for Godot; and in the other to find a way to escape the entrapment of their corner and the potential of arrest, beating, and/or death at the hands of the po-po. The potential of violence is not merely theoretical. As in Godot, where Gogo is beaten at night while sleeping alone; here, Kitch asks Moses, “they come at chu,” and Moses responds, “they bess be glad/I ain’t break them.” But in both cases, this is most likely a reference to bad dreams they have had. Life is clearly a constant danger zone, awake or asleep, for which one must constantly be on guard. Immediately after this, we get the stage direction, “Moses and Kitch flinch./ A moment./Silence./ Stillness./ Then, all clear.“ This happens three times during the play. And on the page, what causes this reaction is unclear. Spike Lee’s film version removes the lack of clarity. It is the nearby sound of police gunfire that causes the characters to react this way. Not only do they flinch, but once they dive to the ground in self-defense. Once again, from moment to moment, the lives of the characters are precarious and constantly in danger. The third game consists of asking, “man/what’ chu fixta do today.” It is clear that this is a question that doesn’t really have an answer. Moses and Kitch are trapped with nowhere to go, but the game gives them the opportunity to fantasize about what they could possibly do if their circumstances were different. Moses says, for example, that he “got plans to rise up to my full potential/ be all I could be,” echoing the television slogan to recruit people into the U.S. Army. But when Kitch pseudo-mocks this by responding, “left/left/left right left,” Moses responds with anger, saying that he has real plans “to git my ass up offa dis block.” And when Kitch asks where he’s going to go, Moses responds, “dat promised land.” This introduces the theme of the significance of Moses’s name, the transportation from Ancient Egypt, and Moses’s mission of not just escaping from a ghetto streetcorner, but of being Moses of the Hebrew Bible and having the responsibility (and burden) of saving not just himself and Kitch, but his people. But Kitch immediately undercuts the biblical allusion when he suggests that the Promised Land” is actually personal and somewhat mundane. It consists of “dat penthouse suite” with “champagne on ice,” room service with lobster rolls, and caviar. Even this is humorously undercut when it turns out that Kitch doesn’t know that caviar actually is “tiny ass fish eggs.” 

The next game is “promised land top ten,” which consists of food (“collard greens and pinto beans”), good luck (“brown bunnies”), “a bright red superman kite,” and a drawer “full uh clean socks,” superficial items interspersed with serious ones such as “my little brotha here wit me/ back from the dead,” and moms here too.” Once again, from the perspective of language, the term “Promised Land” has become complicated. It is mundane, referring to personal pleasures; political, referring to getting off the streetcorner; and historical, referring both to the Black enslaved population leaving the plantation, as well as the Hebrews being led out of Egypt. Both primary terms here, “pass over” and “The Promised Land” are linguistically complex, as well as the complex use of the term “nigga.” At one point, Kitch says to Moses, “I know/ we ain’t no kinda family/ man/ I know/ you ain’t my brotha/ but/ but’ choo my nigga tho.” What the play asks us to meditate on here is the difference between “my brotha” and “my nigga.” Is it merely a question of biology, or something else? Later in the play, when Mister appears, he assumes that Kitch and Moses are biological brothers, but Kitch corrects him, “oh naw man/ Moses man/ he ain’t my-/ we ain’t brothas/…I mean/ don’t get me wrong/ he my nigga.” Here again, we are forced to pause and ask ourselves what, in the play, is the difference. And even later in the play, after Moses and Kitch have brought down plagues on the police Ossifer, Moses says, “you gon always be/ my nigga/you hear/ always/ but after all this shit we been thru/ man/ you my brotha too/ you feel me/ you my brotha too/ you feel me/you my brotha too.” “Brotha is clearly a status Kitch has evolved into as opposed to having been born into. What does this linguistic difference mean? Once again, Nwandu is forcing us to look at the play not just in terms of events, but also in terms of the precise use of language to describe both the people and the events. This is important to pause and think about. Yes, this is a play about the oppression of Black men at the hands of whites. But just as interestingly, from a literary and linguistic perspective, it is also a play about how language creates meaning. 

The first time the play’s title is used occurs relatively early when Moses says, “I’m gon lead you/… I’m leadin you off dis block, and he remembers the Sunday school of his youth when “ol reverend missus” says to him, “you fixta live up to dat name too ain ‘tchu/ lead deez boys right off deez streets/ uh violence/ streets uh anger/ lead deez boys on to dat promised land”; and Kitch (gasping) replies “pass ovuh”; and Moses responds, “yeah nigga damn/I feel like I cud do dis shit/ you feel me/ lead you off dis block.” This is an interesting moment because the play gives no indication of what was in the mind of Moses’s parents when they gave him the name. And it seems as though until this moment when he remembers that “ol reverend missus” informs him of the significance of his name that he has no real clue, which reinforces the possibility that he was given the name arbitrarily. It is thus “ol reverend missus” who actually names Moses and inspires him to live up to the responsibility of his name. And when he says to Kitch, “be all I cud be,” he is no longer just spouting an Army recruitment slogan, but actually coming to a true understanding of his religious/political/cultural mission. So at this early point in the play, Moses has accepted the significance of his name and his mission, which is to lead not just himself and Kitch, but all his people to the Promised Land. In true comic fashion, Moses’s words are immediately undercut when Kitch points out that “you ain’t got no river,” and Moses has to explain that it’s a “mega-four my nigga damn/ when one thang be like something else,” and that “you got two feet”; and in true Godot-like fashion Kitch, like Gogo, replies that “man my feet hurt.” But once again, we immediately switch back to the tragic when Kitch says, “you herd they/ picked off ed,” that the “po-pos smoked his ass last night,” and that as Moses says in true biblical fashion, “dem police be da angel death hisself,” immediately taking us back to the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt and the possibility of being, or not being passed over and saved from Pharaoh.

 From here, we get the first significant moment of pre-figuration. Kitch notes that whenever the police come around, they ask the same two questions, “who are you boy/ you goin somewhere,” which leads to the inevitable conclusion that “ain’t nuthin gon rile dem po-pos more/ than a nigga don’t know his place/ and right now/ you and me/ nigga damn/ our place right here.” And not knowing your place is a license for the police to kill you in order to keep you in your place This presents the play’s key dilemma. On the one hand, Moses and Kitch want to and need to leave the streetcorner, not only for themselves, but metaphorically for their people.  On the other hand, to the police, and white people in general, this is an example of not knowing your place. And not knowing your place is a license for the police to kill you in order to keep you in your place. This is reminiscent of the “plantation bullshit” in which the enslaved are held captive against their will and punished if they try to leave.

This premonition is followed by jokes about pizza, weed, and play-fighting, and then they return to seriousness. They note the death of Moses’s brother at the hands of the police, and then there is another significant linguistic moment. Kitch asks, “you think we fixta get up off dis block for real?” Moses then corrects his language with, “not fixta nigga damn/ we iz.” The linguistic difference between “fixta” and “iz” is important. Kitch speaks of possibility, while Moses asserts certainty. This is another example of Moses’s surety about accepting his biblical mission despite the real fear that the presence of the police presents. As an interesting aside, both Freud, in Moses and Monotheism, and Zora Neale Hurston, in Moses, Man of the Mountain assert that Moses was not a Hebrew, but was an Egyptian. Even more interesting is that both books were published in the same year, 1939, and it is highly unlikely that either knew of the other’s work, although the first third of Freud’s text had been published in German in 1937. Later in the play, the simple word “iz” will prove to be of great significance. They then play another game of “Room Service,” followed by the second use of the play’s title. Whereas the first use referred to Reverend Missus’s conferring Moses’s mission on him, and “pass ovuh” referred to leading “deez boys on to dat promised land,” here, chanted six times, it is just part of their imaginary game of ordering caviar and “gold bullion” as a way to forget the reality of their dire circumstances.

Their solitary existence is then suddenly interrupted by the presence of Mister, who begins with, “why salutations/ and good evening to you, fellas!” Like Pozzo in Godot, Mister arrives carrying a picnic basket full of food, which he is supposedly on the way to deliver to his mother; but he has supposedly gotten lost on the way. This seems improbable, and suggests he has gotten lost on purpose. One of the important aspects of this visit is that as a white man, Mister, unlike Moses and Kitch, is free to come and go as he pleases, and doesn’t have to worry about any form of harassment from the police. Kitch and Moses are at first skeptical, and wonder if he is either the police or a Mormon on a mission. After assuring them that he is neither, the tension lessens. And in sharing his food with Moses and Kitch, Mister seems to be a friendly and non-threatening white man, as opposed to the, for now, invisible presence and constant threat from the police. Slowly, however, things begin to become a bit unravelled. It’s interesting that Kitch refers him as “nigga” with the same spelling that Moses and Kitch use with each other. Despite the similarity of the spelling, it is clear that the context changes the word’s meaning. Here, it means something like “stranger.” And as another interesting linguistic usage, when Moses uses the term “po-pos,” Kitch has to explain to him that it means “police.” And later, when Kitch says to him, “you feel me,” meaning, “do you understand what I’m saying,” Mister takes it literally and thinks Kitch wants to be touched and felt. While these two instances are clearly humorous, they also speak to something more serious, that Blacks and whites are often speaking different languages; and that the ability of whites to understand Blacks is limited. This humorous difference becomes much more significant when Mister reveals that his actual given name is “Master.” To Moses and Kitch, this immediately raises the plantation issue of slavery, where Black men were allowed to only address the slave owner as “Master,” or “Massa,” or “Mister,” and Black men were either called “boy,” or some generic name such as “George” or “Uncle” (Ben). When Moses and Kitch are startled to hear his name, Mister doesn’t get it; and when he does, he tries to defend himself by saying that it is merely a passed-down family name with no political implications. He has previously tried to ingratiate to Moses and Kitch by saying that he knows how to properly prepare collard greens (also sometimes referred to as “Negro greens,” Moses’s favorite, but then remembers that it was his “mother’s favorite hired woman” who actually cooked them. And most certainly, this “hired woman” was Black and a descendant of those who had ben enslaved. When Mister learns Moses’s name, he again tries to be ingratiating by singing, sotto voce, “LET MY PEOPLE GOOOOOOOO,” but the fishes for a compliment, as if he has just proved that he is cool. That also doesn’t work. This issue of language becomes particularly charged when Mister inquires why Moses and Kitch constantly use the “n-word,” a word he never uses because “my mother told me not to.” It is clear, however, that he has, in fact, used it. He even goes so far as to complain that if white people can’t use it, then Blacks shouldn’t be able to either. Moses has to then school him by saying, “iss not’ chors.” This is a profound and important linguistic moment. What Moses is asserting is that the word doesn’t belong to Mister, or by extension, white people in general. Blacks have both reclaimed it and changed its meaning. Up until this moment, Mister has been an ambiguous presence at best, but not clearly evil or overly racist. His response to Moses, “EVERYTHING’S MINE,” in his assertion of white privilege, completely undercuts any neutrality he might have seemed to possess, and he quickly exits.

Although this moment occurs only slightly past the halfway point of the play, it is the moment that begins the progress towards the play’s conclusion. In response to Mister’s querry about the use of the “n-word,” Moses and Kitch come up with a completely new strategy. They decide to completely change their language use. Their theory is that if they stop saying “nigga,” the white world in general, and the police in particular, will treat them in a completely different manner, and they will therefore be able to escape the Egypt/plantation/ghetto streetcorner in which they are entrapped and enslaved. As Moses suggests, “so maybe/ maybe/ we stop sayin dat shit/ dem po-pos do come thru/ nigga/ they ain’t gon know iss us/… we gon be men/ like they ain’t neva seen.” They then begin to humorously practice imitating the language used by Mister, “salutations and good evening/ to you fellas,” and, “gosh golly gee.” And surprisingly, it works at first when the police, in the person of Ossifer, arrives, and clearly not for the first time. 

He is indeed fooled by their language into thinking that they are, from his perspective, not “dangerous fellas,” and that he’ll “protect you both.” But when he asks Moses’s name, Kitch replies, “he masta nigga.” And as the stage directions indicate, “The jig is up.” Moses and Kitch are forced to “assume the position”; and when asked who he is, Moses must recite a typical litany: stupid/ lazy/ violent/ thug” who is going “nowhere.” Ossifer’s response is “what’s that nigger,” to which Moses has to respond, “nowhere/ sir.” Ossifer responds with, “alright boys/ let’s keep it that way.” Notice what has happened here linguistically. First, Moses and Kitch change their language use. At first it works; but when Kitch slips up, Ossifer realizes “who they really are,” and forces Moses into a linguistic rite of humiliation. This is followed by Ossifer’s using both “nigger” (spelled this way for the first time in the play and clearly meaning something different from Moses and Kitch’s “nigga”), and referring to them as “boys.” This is, of course, meant to be seen in contrast to their assuming that by changing their language use, they will be seen as “men.” This raises the issue brought up by Audre Lorde, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Despite this negative encounter with Ossifer, Kitch still wants to believe in possibilities. He intones that “it cud be worse/ we cud be dead,” but he has to convince Moses to believe him that there is still the possibility that they can “passOVuh!” and change the material conditions of their lives. Having been convinced, the first act ends. Kitch is about to go to sleep while Moses keeps watch, and Moses essentially sings a lullaby to Kitch to help him go to sleep. In many ways, this is the most interesting and lyrical passage in the play. Moses assures Kitch that things are going to get better by invoking all three of their physical spaces. He asserts that “we gon git off dis here plantation,” that “den dat river man/ iss gon part,” and that there “ain’t gon be no ghetto.”

It is too often said that Godot is a play in which the same thing, or nothing, happens twice, that the second act is essentially a repeat of the first. And while there are similarities between the two acts of Pass Over, there is no way in which they can be said to be identical. The second act does begin the same way as the first, with Moses saying, “yo kill me now,” and Kitch responding with “bang bang,” and then going into “man/ you know”; but everything is shortened here. Moses is no longer interested in indulging in the “promised land/ top ten,” and he has to be convinced to play it. Once again, Kitch’s list includes material goods: ‘new air jordans,” “tickets/ to da most expensive concert/ dis summer,” “a fish tank/ wit two sharks in it,” and a “bright yellow ferrari” (a la Miles Davis). But this time, his list expands to “me and you/ seein dat sunrise/ wit’ out dem po-pos/ messin our shit up first.” He further fantasizes that biblical plagues will come down on them, that “dey guns don’t work no more,” and “like dey get fucked up/ by god and shit.” This is a foreshadowing of what will actually happen towards the end of the play, and extends the on-going mega-phor of connecting the plight of Moses and Kitch to the plight of the Hebrews in Egypt. As in the first act, the seriousness of the situation vis a vis the police lightened again with references to weed that doesn’t exist and the memory of the picnic with Mister, and the fact that they still have a piece of pie, but this quickly becomes a reflection on someone they know who was sent to prison for multiple years for stealing “two loaves uh bread/ and some nasty ass cheese.” Once again, this discussion makes clear that the position Moses and Kitch find themselves in is not a story of individuals, but a more general statement about the fate of an entire community.

When Kitch goes to retrieve the piece of pie saved from the food left by Mister, it is gone. Unknown to them, it was taken by Ossifer. When Moses says, “maybe/ it wuz jess a dream/ the American dream,” and Kitch responds, “nightmare/ most likely,” we again have to pause. On the one hand, the piece of pie is just a piece of pie stolen by the police. On the other hand, the pie is symbolic. Part of the idea of the American Dream is for everyone to be able to get their piece of the pie and be able to be successful, to “be all they can be.” Moses and Kitch understand this symbolism; and when they realize the pie is gone, and that their piece of the American pie is no longer an option for them, they go into emotional temper tantrums in which each one shouts/cries/wonders “why” six times each. This is where the play’s final transition begins. Despite the loss of the symbolic pie, it is crucial for Kitch to continue to believe that there is hope. As he says to Moses, “yo moses/ we still gittin off dis block tho/ ain’t we/ live up to our full potential/ get dat milk and honey.” And here is where Moses’s seeming descent into darkness and despair begins. He starts by rejecting the metaphor of the land of milk and honey by talking about being lactose intolerant, and how honey “fuck wit’ cho glycemic index.” When Kitch reminds him that “you still got heart/ you moses man/ you moses,” Moses responds that “Moses” “iss jess a name,” and that “dat shit don’t mean a thang,” reminding us when Mister said that “Master” was only a name. Remember how in the early pages he is defiant about accepting his name and its symbolic importance. When Kisch tries to remind him of this and the prophecy of reverend missus, his response is, “but now she dead, along with “my brotha/ dat nigga got kilt last night/ nigga dat’s gon get kilt tonight.” It is clear that unlike Kitch, Moses has gone through a significant transformation, and that his hopes of leaving the prison that is their corner have dwindled significantly. When Kitch tries to remind him that his brother had hope, that “dis shit right here/ ain’t fixta hold us back,” Moses’s devastating response is, “we iz held back.” Remember how earlier in the play, the word “iz” has so much importance. Kitch wonders if they are going to get off the block, and Moses rejects the if and asserts “we iz.” But now, he rejects that possibility, and insists that Kitch recite a list of all the Black men they personally know who have been killed by the police. Kitch’s list, a kind of symphony of death, names twenty-six people, and then asserts, “there’s more my nigga damn/ I know they is.” It is after this that Moses clearly understands his fate and makes a new choice for his life. He asks Kitch to consider the possibility that the police will keep coming back and that the two of them will never be able to leave. Kitch assumes that if this happens, he will just have to continue to take it. But Moses is no longer willing to go along with this death-in-life strategy anymore. He asks Kitch, “you my nigga right.” Here, the word “nigga” takes on a new meaning. Rather than meaning some form of “friend,” as in earlier iterations, here it means something beyond that. Now, it means something more like, “we’re in this together, right?” Moses then announces, “one mo try” to “pass ovuh.” As with “nigga,” the meaning of “pass ovuh” has now completely changed. It no longer means merely getting off the corner and escaping into some form of the urban promised land. Now, Moses has come to the realization that the only hope of escape is through death, specifically suicide. This creates a new definition of the Promised Land. It is now heaven on earth through death. This raises the issue of suicide, especially in the Black community, where the topic is generally taboo, not only to do, but even to talk about. This is one of the many reasons for the significant success of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (1975), in which despite all their hardships, the women of the text reject the idea of suicide and “find god in myself/ & I loved her/ I loved her fiercely. The text concludes, “& this is for colored girls who have considered/suicide/ but are movin to the ends of their own/ rainbows.” Moses has come to this new recognition of what “pass over” means, but Kitch is slow to get it, and Moses has to say “pass ovuh” five times, with different intonations, before Kitch finally gets it. After Kitch finally does get it, Moses says, “I want dat good life now.” This is an incredibly ironic moment. The good life now means death in the present. There will be no more talk of “pass ovuh” in the biblical sense. Moses makes this clear when he says, “dat river don’t part for niggas like us/ dat river crash on us/ drown us whole/ we ain’t chosen nigga damn/ we Egypt.” The biblical imagery of the play has been entirely turned on its head. Moses and Kitch are no longer Hebrews about to be saved by Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea. Now, they have become Egyptians about to be drowned in it. After this serious moment of recognition, we go back to a Godot-like comic series of moments. Once they decide to hit each other in the head with a rock, they go back and forth passing the rock the way Didi and Gogo trade hats. Before the actual moment, Kitch implores reverend missus to “get them fish eggs ready,” followed by Kitch’s beginning to sing the theme song from The Jeffersons (“Movin On Up”), and they both announce that “we finally got uh piece/ uh the pie.” Before they can complete the deed, Ossifer returns; but this time, Moses is defiant and refuses to follow orders. This act of defiance causes a complete inability of Ossifer to complete his “duty”; and as Kitch had fantasized before, a series of biblical plagues comes down: his gun won’t shoot, his baton won’t hit, he can’t say “nigger,” and black bile flows from his mouth, forcing him to admit, “YOU’RE MEN.” Moses has made clear that the solution to the problem is to “STOP KILLING US/ and get’ cho goddam house in order.”

     We are told that “Moses purges the evil from Ossifer’s body” before he leaves, and the play seems destined for a positive solution. Moses has even changed his opinion from the beginning of the play, and now says to Kitch, “you my brotha too,” and they even celebrate by singing a song from Mr. Rogers. Master then returns, beginning with his characteristic “why salutations/ and good morning to you/ fellas.” But then his rhetoric changes to, “you fellas going somewhere” and “who are you.” This is the exact rhetoric of Ossifer from earlier, and then he draws a gun and shoots Moses, followed by his speech of justification that ends the play. How are we to take this, and what is the ultimate meaning of the play? At the beginning, we seemed to have two images of whites, the relatively, or somewhat, innocent Mister juxtaposed against the evil Ossifer. But by having Mister adopt the exact language of Ossifer and be the one who kills Moses, Nwando appears to be making a blanket indictment of whites. Master and Ossifer are merely two sides of the same coin; and to use the biblical language, they are together two forms of the Angel of Death. And for Moses, there is blood on his chest from a bullet hole, not the blood of protection over his door. There is, it appears, no such thing as a good white. In appearing to be making this argument, Nwandu seems to suggest that nothing has changed since Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), in which a white person murders a young Black man because he refuses to accept his place. If this is the argument, Nwandu’s vision is indeed bleak. It must be because of this that she made the momentous decision to completely change the ending for the play’s Broadway production. In that production, both Moses and Kitch ultimately survive, the streetcorner becomes a form of Paradise, and the lamp post is replaced by a grove of trees. Nwandu has said that the original ending was dedicated to white people and inspired by Trayvon Martin’s murder at the hands of George Zimmerman on 26 February 2012. The point was to make white people wake up to the constancy of police brutality. She has also said that she didn’t want to perpetuate a stereotype in white minds of Black lives always being connected to violence. My reading is different. Rather than viewing the play through the eyes of Trayvon, I would prefer to look at it through the eyes of Black Lives Matter, as a resistance movement to white police domestic terrorism. For me, the way to read the play is not to focus solely on the murder of Moses as an indictment of white people. Instead, my reading is to focus on Moses ultimately living up to his name, confronting the white police, forcing that white police ossifer to not only completely back down, but to acknowledge the manhood of Moses and Kitch, after which, Moses can help him rise, and in a way forgive him. Once again, this is a play primarily about language. It is about the evolution of Moses and Kitch from boys to men.