“Jesus is a trick on niggers,” says antihero Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. The title character of Thomas Bradshaw’s hilarious, discomfiting new satire, Mary, says exactly the same thing about the Emancipation Proclamation. Mary is a black, middle-aged domestic servant, and, as she sees it, “Black folks went from one form of slavery to another. They went from being slaves to sharecroppers, couldn’t vote, then the Klan came along with their foolish violence.” The best option, in her opinion, would’ve been a return to Africa.
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Mary’s ancestors must’ve felt the same way, because after the Civil War they chose to keep right on working on the Maryland plantation where they’d slaved for generations. Mary is still there in 1983, living under conditions eerily similar to those prevailing during the antebellum period. Not only does she do all of the cooking and cleaning for the owners, James and Dolores Jennings—she also lives with her husband, Elroy, in a small cabin on the grounds. Neither she nor Elroy can read. The Jenningses “provide them with what they need” in lieu of paying them and blithely refer to Mary as “Nigger Mary,” as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
While David’s parents wish he’d just come out already (“The dang homo hides his homosexuality from us!” says James), Mary is having none of it. She’s a deeply religious woman—the kind of Christian who can put up with all manner of injustice, up to and including her own virtual enslavement, but won’t tolerate the idea of two men loving each other because it’s a sin and that’s that. Believing she’s compelled by God to stop the sodomites, Mary first steals their tube of K-Y then persuades Elroy to shoot Jonathan in the crotch with a BB gun.
