Cram’s railroad & township map of Mississippi.

• Play Title: This Property is Condemned 
• Author: Tennessee Williams 
• Published:  1946 
• Page count: 11 

Summary

On a perfectly clear-skied Mississippi morning, a young girl plays on a railway track. Her name is Willie. Orphaned, thin as a stick, and soon-to-be homeless – life seems to offer her little more than empty promises. Yet she laughs and dresses up and dreams ahead. Tom, a local boy, watches her and asks a few innocent questions that serve to reveal the full extent of her tragic tale. Willie wants to follow in the footsteps of her party-loving sister Alva, who used to be ‘the main attraction’ at their boarding house. She talks of movies, beaux and ‘choc’lates’ while she balances precariously on the railway line that leads to all sorts of exciting places.

This Property is Condemned is a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. It’s part of his anthology of short works named 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. Southern Gothic best describes the style of the piece, and the sentiment of the work will cloy pleasantly to its reader. Williams uses brief but potent descriptions of the landscape, the girl’s clothing and her memories. The chief themes of the play are hope, parental neglect, precocious sexuality, and death.

Ways to access the text: reading

It is not particularly easy to find any of Williams’ short plays when one searches for them by their individual titles. It’s better to search for the anthology name, in this case, it’s 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. This text is available for free via the Internet Archive and it’s also on Scribd (free trial).

The 1966 movie entitled This Property is Condemned is based on Williams’ play but it’s an adaptation. The screenplay writers used Williams’ work as the inspiration for a full-length movie – that bears only a passing relation to the original text.

Why read This Property is Condemned?

Williams’ one-act plays are a solid introduction to his style. Willie’s story in This Property is Condemned is quite affecting. Less like a full play and more like a finely sketched characterisation, the playwright introduces us to a 13-year-old girl whose life is all kinds of wrong. Her obvious innocence blends awkwardly with a sexual knowingness that promises to doom her very soon. The harsh sounds of the jet-black crows in the background as Willie dreams of starting anew – a clean sheet – these impressions feel almost indelible after first reading the piece.

Post-reading discussion/interpretation
_{A Condemned Childhood}

Tennessee Williams’ short play about a girl named Willie is unexpectedly haunting. The playwright draws upon the well-known phenomenon that young children are usually unfiltered and innocent about what they say. Even when a child is being cautious or reticent, it’s flagged by their facial expressions, pauses and unsophisticated attempts at subterfuge. This is also the case with Willie. When she meets Tom, he is quite curious about this scruffy little girl with a boy’s name. It is through Tom that Williams gradually opens up the story. This inquisitive, slightly cynical, opportunistic boy asks all the right questions for us to see Willie’s predicament. However, she sees only normality. The dilapidated house where Willie lives has already been condemned by the authorities, but she believes “there’s nothing wrong with it” (Williams 257). Willie possesses the unconscious resilience of children who’ve adapted to their circumstances – no matter how bad. She’s blind to the hopelessness of her situation and that’s the secret dynamo inside this dark tale.

For readers, incredulity is one early obstacle to an appreciation of Willie’s story. Williams was a Mississippian himself, so he understood the reality of the crushing poverty that the state had experienced, especially in the rural areas. One learns that Willie has become invisible to the authorities since she dropped out of school, and she has also been abandoned by her parents. Such cases of neglect were not unusual, even though by today’s standards it’s practically obscene. Apart from the poverty and abandonment, another anomaly is that a 13-year-old girl claims to have had romantic relations with grown men. She even boasts of going on dates to venues like the “Moon Lake Casino” (Williams 258). One may flippantly disregard Willie’s idea of romance as a mere childish fantasy. However, the story needs to be assessed based on the historical context. For instance, the world-famous entertainer Jerry Lee Lewis, who came from the neighbouring state of Louisiana, married his 13-year-old cousin when he was 22 (Gelt). That was in 1957. Within the first year, his new wife became a mother. Marriage laws in the southern states did not have the same age restrictions that apply today. If it wasn’t illegal to marry someone so young, then dating young girls was also acceptable. Willie’s story is not so unusual, which makes the play text more complex.

The opening scene is outlined by Williams in quite a minimalist way, yet it’s impactful. It’s a flat, bare landscape under a vast, milky-white sky. Willie plays on the railway tracks and in the background is the broken-windowed, yellow house where she still lives. There’s little else except the telephone poles and a billboard advertising a brand of gin. These are signals of life elsewhere, but not here. Willie appears in the midst of this nothingness – a grotesque figure with rouged cheeks and painted lips who’s wearing a party dress and holding a blond dolly. Tom’s questions allow Willie to come to life – like a marionette in a half-broken music box – “You’re the only star / In my blue hea-ven / And you’re shining just / For me!” (Williams 255). Williams contrasts the sad animation of the little girl against the cold, bleak backdrop. The two competing forces jar against one another and only outsiders see the inequity of the battle.

Willie’s personality remains in its embryonic state, utterly delayed by the lack of proper parental care and guidance. Her biggest and most enduring influence has been Alva, now dead. Williams describes a poisoned inheritance and its vast ramifications. First, Willie’s mother and then her father abandoned the house, but they also abandoned a family including a young child. They silently branded their situation as worthless, and this feeling is absorbed by the little girl. Willie’s quip to Tom about the “Bureau of Missing Persons” (253) indicates the unmendable nature of the loss: the one-sidedness of the cruelty. Older sister Alva experienced further cruelty when her various lovers abandoned her – “like rats from a sinking ship!” (253). Yet Alva stayed living at home and that means everything to Willie. Even though the little girl must sense that her sister’s sexualised example is wholly wrong, that clarity of thought is complicated by her sister’s loyalty and their mutual love. What path can one follow except the path which has always been shown to you?

Willie: “This is her clothes I got on. Inherited from her. Everything Alva’s is mine.” (Williams 255)

The playwright pays particular attention to Willie’s use of language. She expertly parrots phrases that she has heard from adults. Take for example when Tom refers to Alva’s death as “pretty tough” and Willie responds, “You don’t know the half of it, buddy” (Williams 252). Or when she describes the Cannonball Express as “The fastest thing on wheels between St. Louis, New Awleuns an’ Memphis” (253). There’s an amusing incongruity when a child speaks like a grown man, but it’s a sign of her need to self-protect too. The phrases of adults are used to convey a maturity that she doesn’t have, or at least shouldn’t. The line between mimicry and reality suddenly blurs when Tom confronts Willie with the story told by Frank Waters, namely that she took off her clothes and did a special dance for him (256). Here, Willie unexpectedly takes refuge in a more innocent, childish identity and says “Oh. Crazy Doll’s hair needs washing” (256). Nonetheless, the move also indicates a certain guile because she knows how to divert the conversation. The interaction that follows shows that Willie can indeed negotiate tricky situations quite well by mixing defensive tactics with plain honesty – “I was lonely then …” (256). She proceeds to use the fiction that she’s seeing older men (“in responsible jobs” 256) to finally derail young Tom’s prurient interest and desire for a performance.

The language taught to Willie by Alva was mainly the language of etiquette. However, before addressing that issue, one needs to scrutinize a conspicuous element of Willie’s story. This goes to the heart of Willie’s level of credibility as a storyteller. When Williams wrote This Property is Condemned, he would certainly not have shared our concerns regarding the believability of Willie’s situation, namely her extreme poverty, abandoned status, and level of sexual activity. Thus, any possible twist in the story would lie elsewhere in the author’s plans. Williams could be adding a twist when he introduces the topic of an accident. Something simple, a mere passing remark, quickly takes on extra connotations. It could be a clue to solve Willie’s unusual personality. Willie tells Tom about the accident her dolly had.

“She had that compound fracture of the skull. I think that most of her brains spilled out. She’s been acting silly ever since. Saying an’ doing the most outrageous things.” (Williams 256)

First, the use of a specialised medical term by a child indicates solid familiarity. It might refer to the time her father was hit on the head with a bottle, à la Charlie Chaplin (Williams 256). On the other hand, the reference to saying ‘outrageous things’ seems much better suited to a description of Willie herself. For instance, when Willie justifies looking for an undoubtedly fake diamond in the cinders around the railway track, she tells Tom – “I might be peculiar or something” (249). She also seems to lose her train of thought at times, like when she begins retelling the story about her teacher – “Oh, but I told you that, huh?” (258). More suspicious are the stories that Willie tells of dating railroad men since these stories lack credibility. Her sullied, hand-me-down clothing and ill-applied makeup suggest that something else is happening, something more exploitative, if indeed anything at all is happening. Tom doesn’t believe her stories – “I think you’re drawing a lot on your imagination” (260). It’s not possible to fully discount the idea that the doll is a proxy for Willie since a girl who has spent years doing a balancing act on railway lines is likely to have had a serious fall at some point. A head injury may explain why this girl has become so detached from others and why she has partially receded into a fantasy world.

Even though a certain unshakeable doubt hangs over the truthfulness of Willie’s assertions, Alva’s influence is not in question. For young Willie, school was never as important as the skills her sister taught her.

“What a girl needs to get along is social training. I learned all of that from my sister Alva. She had a wonderful popularity with the railroad me.” (Williams 251)

Alva had the dubious title of “The Main Attraction” (257). Willie must already understand the negative undertones of this title because the school principal said that there was “something wrong” (257) in the home’s atmosphere since the railroad men slept with Alva. Nevertheless, Willie doesn’t know any other way to win people over. She can do the “bumps” and even imitate a blues singer with a “simulated rapture” (255). The dance moves are described with the same type of language as sexual relations, for instance, the “spasmodic jerks” (255). Willie’s dance moves even prompt Tom to ask about the incident with Frank Waters. When Willie talks about her dates with Alva’s old boyfriends, she says “I’ve got to be popular now” (255; emphasis added). But shouldn’t she say ‘I’ve gotten to be popular’ – except that it seems more of a personal command than an observation. This is the story of a girl who believes the only way to succeed is to please men. It’s the only effective technique that she’s witnessed.

It does not take a Freudian analysis to decipher the sexual overtones of Williams’ text. The “milky white winter mornings” denote a fervent sexual desire in a place where almost nothing else exists. A young, virginal teen is the only attraction since the death of her older sister. In this light, the harsh caws of the black crows, which sound like the tearing up of material (Williams 247), are symbolic of the loss of innocence, the literal ripping of cumbersome garments that impede sexual urgency. Willie’s replacement of her sister in the role of sex object signals her total loss of self. After all, Willie has a boy’s name and is a tomboy in many respects: self-reliant, skipping school, and playing in the dirt. This could be a subconscious attempt to please parents who had wanted a boy. She’s clearly unsuited to be the new Alva. Without self-confidence and a better example, Willie is sure to become the next victim of predatory males. These same railroad men will disappear once again when things go wrong. It’s the story of a girl’s inheritance enveloping her until she disappears.

The alternate reading of the colour white is provided by Willie herself. For her, white is linked to the idea of a clean, white sky that’s been swept with a broom (Williams 249), or “white as a clean piece of paper” (250) like the ones Miss Preston used to give her to draw upon (256). Willie imagines new starts, a clean slate upon which she can outline her future. Problematically, this future is intertwined with Alva’s past. Yet Williams doesn’t let the story’s hero lose hope. Although all the world would view Willie as a lost cause, she has an energy and defiance that makes her magnetic. Her perpetual game of balancing precariously on the railway line is the story of her future. The rigid, fixed line is either her road to doom or it could equally be the route to escape.

Works Cited

Gelt, Jessica. “Jerry Lee Lewis’ teenage bride speaks out.” Los Angeles Times, 29 Oct. 2022, Myra Williams talks about marriage at age 13 to Jerry Lee Lewis – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com).

Williams, Tennessee. “This Property is Condemned.” 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, New Directions, 1953.