Ride the Freedom Star was a lavish production. No expense had been spared in costumes, fireworks, lighting, stage work, props, music—he had hired one of Broadway’s near-prominent (and expensive) composers for the score. But as a piece of drama it was miserable, originally running over three hours and forty-five minutes. The director and producer battled for speeches to be cut, for entire sections to be cut, for extraneous characters to be written out, but Philip in his patron/author conviction stood firm over every comma and semicolon. Finally, they settled on a two-and-a-half-hour version with three intermissions; there were sixty characters, thirty speaking roles. There were long static passages of fathers patriotically extolling the virtues of riding off into battle; of mothers enumerating the travails of the Civil War–torn plantation system. The dialogue was clunky and dull, and many of the historical facts were just plain wrong. The director was constantly rewriting parts of the script, only to be met by the protesting Philip invoking what he saw as “literary license” and changing the script back. Though they hired fair-to-middling actors and dancers and singers, not even the most inspired performance could rise above the mishmash of ill-conceived, ill-wrought, cliche-ridden drivel, the doggerel verse and the melodramatic romanticizing of Southern American history.

Ironically, the thing that kept the crowds coming back—aside from the vigorous advertising on the state and local levels about “The new, grand, exciting, funny, glorious family history,” subsidized substantially by the State Commission on Outdoor Drama, largely underwritten by the Cross endowment—was Philip’s concession to his family’s slave-owning past. He had tried to create a picture of domestic bliss for the house slaves and of jolly camaraderie for the field workers. Despite the interjection of a speech here or there that reflected the reality of the hard life of the slaves, the blacks were mainly there for buffoonery and hijinks that brought laughs and chuckles from the audience, for the church scenes with their raw and dynamic singing, and for the minister’s sermon, which was the most passionate, hell-raising moment in the entire play.

The bison stepped closer to Horace, and said: Now I had an Aunt Zelda, who, in her eighty-fifth year, still gave tea parties every Thursday afternoon. They were quite something, those tea parties. Everyone getting together and chatting. Just chat. There was none of this horrible gossip that goes on today. Then, now that I think, I believe we were quite bad, oh yes indeed. We did do a . . . little . . . reputation damage, here and there. But of course the reputations were already . . .

The bison gave a brief tee-hee, her tail popping against her rear like a whip.