Ishmael Reed, The Haunting of Lin Manuel Miranda

 From CURRENT AFFAIRS, A Magazine of Politics & Culture, on a new play by Ishmael Reed attacking the Broadway musical Hamilton.

Read the article here. 

It would be a mistake to underestimate Reed, whose 10th and latest play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, had its first reading at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side a few weekends ago. The Haunting rips apart Hamilton, Miranda’s homage to the first Secretary of the Treasury. Reed has been writing literature and non-fiction since the 1960s, and is widely regarded as one of the most important African American authors.
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...Posts about The Haunting circulated all over Facebook and Twitter, touching a nerve among the sizable number of Hamilton-haters across the internet. Despite the lack of production and the sometimes-stilted acting, the crowd at the show I went to seemed enraptured by the performance, breaking out into peals of laughter at each joke and applauding furiously each time Reed, through the proxy of his actors, got in a particularly spicy jab in at Miranda.  

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“How can someone have slaves and be considered an abolitionist?” Reed asks. The evidence points to the actual Hamilton owning slaves. At the very least, there is very strong evidence that Hamilton leased slaves who were owned by other people. And the family Hamilton married into—the much vaunted Schuylers—were celebrated slave owners. “Schuyler was harsh with his slaves,” says Reed. He is thinking about adding a new character to The Haunting. “There was a runaway from the Schuyler plantation named Diana. She was captured, and no one knows what happened to her after that. There’s a possibility she was murdered,” says Reed. (Reed draws on the scholarship of several women historians, citing Michelle Du Ross, Nancy Isenberg, and Lyra Monterio, for his deep understanding of the lesser-known histories of the Hamilton family.)

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Reed recently came in for some harsh mockery from Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!, the beloved (in some quarters) NPR comedy-news quiz show. The host, Peter Sagal, in addition to having no idea who “a writer named Ishmael Reed” was, characterized the plot of The Haunting as Miranda being “visited by ghosts of people from history telling him how wrong he is,” to raucous laughter from the audience. Sagal was incredulous that anyone could dislike “the most beloved musical of modern times,” with a panelist suggesting: “I wonder if his other play is, like, Puppies Suck.” Ghosts “telling Hamilton how wrong he is… that’s the play,” Sagal summarized. It’s disturbing that Reed, a giant in the world of arts and letters, who is making a serious and important critique, can be dismissed as a laughable crank by a white comedian on a show for purported liberals.

Reed had biting words for Sagal and that “NPR nerd show,” as he put it, in an email to me a few days ago. “I realized that not only are those kids at Covington ignorant of American history, but our highly educated [as well],” he wrote. “This is because good old boy historians like Ron Chernow view this history as a series of great god-like men and they have dominated the profession.”