Background
Ward was born in Louisiana in 1902, the sixth of eleven children. His father had been a slave. When Ward was seven years old he wrote a short play and showed it to his father, who threw it in a fire and said it was "the work of the devil". Ward's mother secretly educated him until her death some time around 1915 during childbirth. His family soon after broke apart, and Ward traveled on trains heading north. He performed various odd jobs, including bell hop, shoe-shine boy and barber-shop porter. He was arrested in Salt Lake City, Utah for selling gin (which was outlawed at the time because of prohibition). There Ward began writing again, mostly short stories and poems. In 1934 he moved to Chicago and wrote a one act play titled Sick 'n Tiahd. The play won second place in a writing competition for a magazine, and Ward was encouraged by the winner of the competition, Richard Wright, to write a full length play. Ward subsequently wrote Big White Fog. He went on to write over thirty plays including the Broadway-produced Our Lan'.
Big White Fog received a public reading in New York some time before Ward's death in 1983. For the occasion, Ward wrote about his inspiration for the play. Discussing a beautiful view he had seen in the Rocky Mountains while riding on freight trains during his youth, he said:
But suddenly I found my spirit sickened as I realised the truth: "I'm a Negro and all this beauty and majesty does not belong to me." With a fallen heart, I acknowledged that I had nothing to boast of. I was a descendant of the slaves who had built this country, yet I was still deprived of the patriotic joy felt by those who claimed the land as their own. In my bewilderment that late afternoon, it suddenly occurred to me that we as a people were engulfed by a pack of lies, surrounded, in fact, by one big white fog through which we could see no light anywhere. Disheartened, as the sun sank behind the mountains west of the pass, I crawled back into a darkened corner of the boxcar and there I lay down, convinced that my life would be that of a 'floater', sans hope, sans purpose. —Theodore Ward,Read more about this topic: Big White Fog
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)