life was really like on Catfish Row could only be notional and imaginary . George Gershwin was accused of perpetrating “ lampblack Negroisms ” by none other than Duke Ellington when Porgy & Bess came out in 1935 . In the song , Bess pleads with Porgy , a disabled beggar from the Charleston slum , to protect her from her sometime lover Crown . “ Don ’ t let him take me / Don ’ t let him handle me / With his hot hands ”. Bess wants to stay with Porgy forever , but she also knows that Crown ’ s call will compel her , again and again . In the era of # MeToo and Black Lives Matter , the situation will seem both distant and alarmingly familiar . Bess ’ s self-knowledge has often been played down in both dramatic and vocal versions , which makes her apparent submissiveness seem unresisted and self-denying . To be fair to the Gershwins and fellow-lyricist DuBose Heyward , their “ Negroisms ” didn ’ t go quite that far . The triumph of what remains a bleak and unrelieved musical drama , the equal of many a tragic European opera , is that it doesn ’ t offer an easy transcendence of the characters ’ real social situation . Gershwin may have been a cosmopolitan New Yorker but he saw in DuBose Heyward ’ s novel Porgy the lineaments of a universal tale . He approached the Heywards just as DuBose and wife Dorothy were adapting the novel for the stage . The original has been criticised for its profound conservatism . In portraying the Gullah community of his native Charleston , Heyward gives absolutely no hint that he expects or desires anything in that society to change . However , in the gap between the novel ’ s appearance in 1925 and the appearance of Gershwin ’ s folk opera ten years later ( the future Nina Simone was still an infant when it appeared ), America had moved to the left . A spirit of meliorism and of quasi-socialist progressivism had entered public government since the onset of Depression and while the race divide remained stubbornly unclosed , there was a new
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