Favorite Characters: Caroline Thibodeaux (Caroline, or Change)

Also known as Caroline, or Why “Lot’s Wife” is Incredible.  Seriously – there’s a lot to admire about this character, and the entire musical provides great food for thought where Caroline is concerned, but “Lot’s Wife” is one of the most profound character-driven eleven o’clock numbers I’ve ever heard, and it will probably get pride of place in this write-up.  Superficially, there have been many “Carolines” in fiction.  She’s a black maid working for a white family in 1960s Louisiana, a single mother doing all she can to provide for her children.  It’s a familiar character template for period dramas with racial themes.  Sometimes she remains a lightly-shaded background presence.  Sometimes her poverty and struggles open the eyes of white people around her to injustice.  Sometimes she resists the call of the civil rights fight, and sometimes she joins the cause with fierce determination and aching feet.  With Caroline, though, this engrossing character explores the themes of race, poverty, and injustice in stunning ways.

Caroline is a strong woman who knows the importance of submission in her world.  Her livelihood, her children’s meals, depends on doing what she’s told.  She’s to hold her tongue, accept her meager pay, and close her eyes to the system that keeps her subservient.  But every day, burying her strength, spending her days in a sweltering basement, and watching her children long for what she can’t afford, she’s filled with anger and frustration that needs release.  It takes all she has to keep her indignation bubbling under the surface, and she can’t always restrain it.  Although her employer is trying to be kind when she tells Caroline to keep the loose change she finds in the laundry, this simple decree is a trial for Caroline.  It’s humiliating, dehumanizing, to root for nickels in other people’s pockets, and since the small boy of the house is the chief provider of coins, it feels like “taking pennies from a baby.”  Caroline wants to refuse the condescending offer, wants to hold her head high and pay her own way, but her head is filled with her children’s longing and all she wants to give them.  Though her employers aren’t rich, they’re much more well-off than Caroline is; over the course of a week, the boy will leave several hours’ worth of Caroline’s salary in his pockets in change.  The money means so little to him that he forgets it’s there, but it’s a world of difference to Caroline.  As she finally starts bringing home the money, “30 dollars (a week) ain’t enough” is the mantra she repeats.

“Lot’s Wife” occurs late in the show, after that loose change has crawled into her heart and infected it.  She does an awful thing because she can’t afford not to, and her hate and anger at life’s rigged deck, and her self-disgust at what she’s done, pour out in this exquisite number.  She vows to “slam an iron” down on everything within her that begs for release, asking “What else God give me an arm for?”  She prays to be made numb to everything around her that makes her hate white folk and fear she can’t provide for her family.  She begs God, “Murder my dreams so I stop wantin’ […] / “Strangle the pride that make me crazy […] / Scour my skin ‘til I stop feelin’. / Take Caroline away ‘cause I can’t be her. / Take her away – I can’t afford her.”  That she recognizes where her hate comes from but still wants to excise it is somehow admirable and heartbreaking at the same time, and the song ends with the quiet request, “Don’t let my sorrow / Make evil of me.”  It’s so complex – it’s wrapped up partly in Caroline’s knowledge that she has to reign in her anger if she wants to survive in her society, partly in her desire to be a better person, and partly in her determination not to let her situation rule her, to keep her hate from being master of her.  The song (and really, the show) doesn’t provide any easy answers for Caroline, but listening to it, what I wouldn’t give to offer her just a shred of peace.