excerpt from
Advice to the Players
from
The Best American Short Plays 1986
ROBERT No, Oliver. She’s right. It’s still up to us, no matter what she does. . . . You know, in my last year in prison I was most of the time alone. But once, for a while, I had a man with me. I never knew who he was. He couldn’t tell me his name because when they first threw him into my cell his jaw was already so badly broken he couldn’t speak. And it never healed. They made sure they beat him often enough so it wouldn’t.
[Pause.]
One night they brought him back, and I listened to him die. It took hours.
[Pause.]
In the morning, when they brought that shit they fed us, I ate his too. When they came for him again, I dared them to take me instead. They were happy to oblige. Anyway, I kept them from finding out for a few days. I even dragged his body around the cell so when they looked in they’d think he was moving.
[Pause.]
But then he started to smell, and . . .
[Shrugs.]
They thought I’d gone crazy when I refused to give him up. They stood in the door with their guns on me, cursing and shouting their lungs out . . . faces all red. I pulled him with me back against the wall, and I waited for them to shoot.
[Pause.]
And nothing happened.
[Laughs ]
I started to laugh at them standing there, watching me holding this dead man in my arms. The thing was . . . they were waiting, waiting for me, waiting to see what I would do. I still had choices, Oliver.
[Pause.]
I could come to my senses, be a good Kaffir, and say “Ja . . . baas,” and give him up. Or I could hold on to him until they came in and beat me. Or . . . I could walk straight into their guns. I could make them be the monsters they were threatening to be.
[Pause.]
Whatever happened would be because of the choice I made. Whatever they did would be in reaction to me. They were as bound by me as I by them because we were men in confrontation.
[Pause.]
I was still a human being, and that was something all their laws and prisons and guns and power could not take away. Could never take away.
[A pause.]
And I knew this was something our people needed to sec. Something that would help them live, whether they got this . . . freedom they wanted or not.