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    Oil and Water
    Oil and Water
    Oil and Water
    Ebook99 pages54 minutes

    Oil and Water

    By Robert Chafe

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    About this ebook

    In 1942 the USS Truxtun, a ship carrying over a hundred sailors, ran aground on the Burin Peninsula in Newfoundland, killing most of its men. Oil and Water is the incredible true story of the sole African American survivor of the wreck, Lanier Phillips, the first black man to be seen by some of the residents of the town of St. Lawrence. A haunting and hopeful tale of two cultures, Oil and Water is an honest legend that still resonates with power seventy years later.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateOct 13, 2016
    ISBN9781770915602
    Oil and Water
    Author

    Robert Chafe

    Robert Chafe is a writer, educator, actor, and arts administrator based in St. John’s, Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). He has worked in theatre, dance, opera, radio, fiction, and film. His stage plays have been seen in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and in the United States, and include Oil and Water, Tempting Providence, Afterimage, Under Wraps, Between Breaths, Everybody Just C@lm the F#ck Down, and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (adapted from the novel by Wayne Johnston). He has been shortlisted three times for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama and he won the award for Afterimage in 2010. He has been a guest instructor at Memorial University, Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, and the National Theatre School of Canada. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Memorial University. He is the playwright and artistic director of Artistic Fraud.

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      Book preview

      Oil and Water - Robert Chafe

      Also by Robert Chafe:

      Robert Chafe: Two Plays (Tempting Providence and Butler’s Marsh)

      Afterimage

      Under Wraps

      Oil and Water

      Robert Chafe

      Playwrights Canada Press

      Toronto

      Copyright

      Oil and Water © Copyright 2012, 2016 by Robert Chafe

      First edition: May 2012.

      Second edition: October 2016.

      Printed and bound in Canada by Imprimerie Gauvin, Gatineau

      Cover photograph of Petrina Bromley and Xavier Campbell by Paul Daly, courtesy of Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland

      Playwrights Canada Press

      202-269 Richmond St. W. | Toronto, ON | M5V 1X1

      416.703.0013 | [email protected] | playwrightscanada.com

      No part of this book may be reproduced, downloaded, or used in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for excerpts in a review or by a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca.

      For professional or amateur production rights, please contact:

      Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland

      PO Box 23193, Churchill Square, St. John’s, NL A1B 4J9

      [email protected]

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Chafe, Robert

      Oil and water / Robert Chafe. -- Second edition.

      A play.

      Issued in print and electronic formats.

      ISBN 978-1-77091-558-9 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-77091-559-6 (pdf).--ISBN 978-1-77091-560-2 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-77091-561-9 (mobi)

      1. Phillips, Lanier, 1923-2012--Drama. 2. Truxtun (Ship)--Drama. 3. St. Lawrence (N.L.)--Drama. I. Title.PS8555.H2655O34 2016 C812’.54 C2016-905118-8

      C2016-905119-6

      We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Nous remercions l’appui financier du Conseil des Arts du Canada, le Conseil arts de l’Ontario (CAO), la Société de développement de l’industrie des médias de l’Ontario, et le Gouvernement du Canada par l’entremise du Fonds du livre du Canada pour nos activités d’édition.

      Logo: Canada Council for the Arts.Logo: Government of Canada.Logo: Ontario Media Development Corporation.Logo: Ontario Arts Council.

      Dedication

      For my grandmother,

      Hazel Chafe

      And for Lanier

      Foreword

      I first became aware of this story—or rather, of what I thought was the story—in the late 1970s, while reading Standing Into Danger, Cassie Brown’s book about the shipwreck of the USS Truxtun and USS Pollux near St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. The book recounts the tragedy of the two American warships, which struck the rocks during a fierce winter storm in 1942, and the heroic efforts of the people of St. Lawrence to rescue the survivors. Rappelling down the cliffs on ropes, rescuers dragged from the waves half-drowned sailors covered in thick bunker C fuel oil spilled from the ships’ broken hulls. The oil represented an additional threat, suffocating and clogging the pores of those men who were not already dead by the time they washed ashore, and the women of St. Lawrence set up emergency clinics to clean it from the survivors’ skin before it poisoned them.

      Cassie’s book made brief mention of a startling image in one of those improvised clinic rooms: a woman cleaning crude oil from one of the unconscious survivors, and never having seen a black man, trying to scrub his skin white. He was the only non-white survivor of the disaster that claimed the lives of 203 men.

      As I read this account in the 1970s, the era when Newfie jokes were a Canadian fetish, I remember praying that mainlanders wouldn’t encounter Cassie’s book. I could imagine thick-necked yahoos gleefully spreading yet another story about how stunned Newfoundlanders were supposed to be. Did you hear the one about the Newfie who tried to scrub the black off a black man? Har, har. Since Newfie jokes involved white Canadians telling offensive jokes about other white Canadians, I suppose they didn’t technically qualify as racist speech. But they certainly relegated Newfoundlanders to the realm of Jim Crow. Little did I realize that, in fact, racism—and the struggle against racism—would be central to the real story of that black survivor.

      That’s how the episode sat in my memory, until decades later that man happened to return to St. Lawrence, and I learned the real story. His telling of it is the very opposite of a joke. It’s a story of how one man’s life was changed by the kindness of strangers, and how it galvanized him to battle injustice and racial discrimination for the rest of his life. It brought him first to challenge the US Navy’s discriminatory policies, then to walk at Martin Luther King’s side in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, and, until his death in March 2012, fired him to speak about civil rights at public gatherings throughout the United States.

      I was privileged to meet this remarkable man when I travelled to Georgia to make a documentary about his life. Lanier Phillips was one of

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