A Soldier's Play

Waters is a noncommissioned officer, which means that he was promoted through the ranks of enlisted men rather than commissioned from an elite military academy or other officer-training programs for college-educated men. Waters served as the sergeant of the Black company until his murder at the hands of one of his men.

Aside from his murder in the opening scene, Waters only appears in the play through flashbacks. This means that his character is presented primarily through the perspectives of the men whom Davenport is questioning. Waters spoke fondly of his family and wanted more for his son than he had himself. He tells Wilkie that the army allowed him to reach the highest position of power that he could as a Black man, and he believes that his son will have better options.

Waters was also extremely hard on his men, and not only through legitimate practices of military discipline. After catching Wilkie drunk on duty, he stripped him of the rank it took 10 years to earn, which was an extreme punishment. He also forced Peterson to fight with him and beat him up. His most egregious unsanctioned form of discipline was when he framed CJ for murder and goaded him into hitting him.

Waters was very concerned about being accepted and empowered by white men, treating Black soldiers harshly when he believed they were an embarrassment to the race. He spouted violent views that endorsed ethnic cleansing, and even murdered a Black soldier in World War I whose conduct he thought shameful. When CJ dies by suicide, Waters seems to feel a level of guilt that causes him to get drunk frequently, although his angry rants as he dies suggests that he has still not overcome The Tragedy of Internalized Racism.

Taylor is a captain, which is a commissioned officer rank, meaning that he was commissioned into his officer status as a graduate from an elite military institution rather than rising through the ranks of enlisted men.

Taylor is also white, and he struggles to accept Davenport’s authority as a Black man of equal rank. He even attempts to have the entire investigation cancelled rather than have Davenport at the helm. Taylor claims that he stands up for the Black soldiers under him, including insisting that Waters’s murder be investigated, to the point where he has ruined his chances for further promotion in his own career. He is ready to arrest Wilcox and Byrd, two white officers, for the crime, and only stands down because Davenport insists that he isn’t convinced that they’re the culprits. However, Taylor also searches the barracks of the Black men for weapons and confines them to their quarters out of fear that the Black soldiers might decide to start a race war over their sergeant’s death at (he assumes) white hands.

At the play’s end, Taylor admits that Davenport has done a good job, adding that he may have to get used to Black officers. Taylor’s conflicted racial views and motivations thus reflect The Endemic Nature of Racism, while also suggesting that, sometimes, people can learn to change their views.

Wilkie acted as Waters’s lackey. He is in his 40s, which is about the same age as Waters, but he is only a private. This is because Waters caught Wilkie drunk while on duty and punished him by taking away his rank as sergeant, sending him to jail for 10 days. Although Wilkie tells Davenport during his first interrogation that the punishment was “fair,” he later admits that it was unduly harsh and unnecessary.

Waters dangled Wilkie’s lost rank to coerce him to do his bidding. Not only did Wilkie run errands, manage the company baseball team, and do legitimate favors for Waters, but he also planted the evidence that framed CJ for murder when Waters told him that he would get his stripes back if he did so. Waters, however, didn’t follow through.

Early in the play, Wilkie gives Davenport the tip that if white supremacists had murdered Waters, they would have most likely removed his rank, providing significant evidence that Waters was likely killed by someone in the company. In the end, Wilkie is arrested by Davenport for his part in framing CJ, but he isn’t the one who murdered Waters.

CJ is an enlisted soldier who only appears in flashbacks because by the time the action of the play takes place, he is already dead. He is a young, good-looking Black man from Mississippi who is the company’s star baseball player. CJ is popular with the other men in the company. He likes to sing and play guitar, and his music often underscores scenes in the play.

The only character who dislikes CJ is Waters, who pretends to like him to gain his trust, and CJ believes that Waters likes him as everyone else does. CJ is not only a Black man from the South—a demographic that Waters despises—but is also a country man with Southern superstitions and a bag of “Farmer’s Dust,” an unknown substance that seems to be some kind of drug or stimulant, around his neck.

CJ is a pacifist, even though he is in the army. When Waters has Wilkie plant the gun in CJ’s bunk and accuses him of murder, CJ insists that he is sickened by even holding a gun. His terror causes him to strike Waters, but he immediately goes limp afterward, complying with the men who take him to the jail and making no attempt to fight or escape.

Although Waters acknowledges later that he knows that CJ wasn’t the shooter, he lets CJ believe that he will be convicted and forced to spend the rest of his life in a cell. CJ is used to being outside in wide country spaces, and the thought of incarceration is too much for him to handle. He dies by suicide, which leaves Waters drinking heavily over his guilty conscience. CJ’s death sets off the chain of events that leads to Waters’s murder.

When Davenport first interviews Peterson, Peterson admits up front that he didn’t like Waters. His dislike began with Waters’s treatment of the baseball team, likening it to the treatment of a chain gang. He saw Waters as a traitor to the race and told him as much, accusing him of using the small amount of power given to him by a white-dominated military to punish his fellow Black men.

Like CJ and Cobb, Peterson is also a Black man from the South, but he inadvertently wins Waters’s respect, which is why his rank has been promoted to private first class. Peterson stood up to Waters and called out his behavior, becoming frustrated with CJ for not standing up and forcing Peterson to do it for him. Waters forces Peterson to go out behind the barracks for a proper fight; Peterson admits good-naturedly to Davenport that Waters beat him thoroughly. While Waters was disgusted by men he saw as weak, he saw strong-willed leaders like Peterson as competition to be knocked down.

Peterson went with Cobb to try and boost CJ’s spirits and clear his name, and he predicted that someone was going to kill Waters. After CJ’s death, Peterson organized a protest in which the Black company, which doubled as a star baseball team, deliberately lost the last game of the season. Had the team won, they would have gotten to play an exhibition game against the Yankees, which Taylor points out would have been a great “morale boost.” At the end of the play, Peterson and Smalls have gone AWOL. They are on the run because Peterson is the killer and Smalls was present at the crime. He is eventually caught in Alabama and convicted.

Smalls is in his 30s, a short Black man and a career soldier. At the beginning of the play, Smalls is the only one in the company who is upset about Waters’s murder, and he doesn’t understand why no one else seems to care very much.

He occasionally speaks up when something is unfair, such as the men being forced to paint a white officer’s club that they aren’t allowed into, or the way the white soldiers on competing baseball teams find ways to punish the Black players for winning. Smalls offers to go and get Taylor to stop the fight between Peterson and Waters, but Peterson declines. Smalls also goes with Cobb and Peterson to see CJ in jail and try to clear his name.

At the end of the play, Smalls is in the stockade himself after going AWOL when he was supposed to be on duty with Peterson, who also went AWOL. Smalls admits that he was present when Peterson killed Waters. Smalls claims that he begged Peterson to stop, and he provides the last piece of the puzzle by explaining how the murder happened.