49 pages • 1 hour read
George C. WolfeThe Colored Museum
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Sketch 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Sketch 4 Summary: “A Soldier with a Secret”
The exhibit opens with images of Black soldiers, from the Spanish-American War to the Vietnam War, projected onto the museum walls. The lights come up to reveal Junie Robinson dressed in army fatigues, standing on an onyx plinth. Junie begins recounting his story from the Vietnam War. As he speaks, it is immediately clear he has an intellectual disability.
He recounts that while out on patrol in Vietnam, he triggered a booby trap and caused an explosion, causing blinding light, scalding heat, and the sound of his flesh sizzling. He states that he didn’t feel any pain, so in that moment he realized he had died. He then simply walked out of the flames.
Instead of seeing heaven, however, he saw the members of his squad in front of him, staring. He told them he had died and come back to life. They simply stared back in shock. Junie’s expression then turns to horror and disbelief as he describes another supernatural event. Projected onto his friend’s faces, Junie says he was able to see both the hurt that would be inflicted on them and the hurt they would inflict onto others once they returned home to the United States. He saw soldier J.F. getting shot by the police and Hubert abusing his wife.
Junie then says he heard the voice of God or the Devil speak to him, telling him they would not be the same after the war and “won’t have no kind of happiness” (12). He says he had discovered the secret to their pain and knew what he needed to do next. Junie assassinated all his friends one by one, killing them by injecting air into their veins.
He compares himself to Jesus, who healed the sick. In the same way, he has healed the trauma and “all the hurtin’ all these colored boys wearin’ from the war” (13).
Sketch 4 Analysis
This exhibit subverts classic depictions of heroism in war. The fact that Junie is placed on top of a black onyx plinth echoes classical representations of warrior heroes going back to classical Greek and Roman sculpture.
Once Junie begins speaking, however, it immediately becomes clear that he has an intellectual disability. In the description, Wolfe labels Junie as “dim-witted.” The stereotype of the American soldier in Vietnam with an intellectual disability is a complicated one. In the 1960s, a controversial program was run by the US military known as Project 100,000, or later “McNamara’s Folly.” Caught between negative public reaction to the war and the increasing need for soldiers, McNamara allowed men below previously acceptable mental or medical standards to be enlisted into the army and sent to fight in Vietnam. These men died or were wounded at higher rates during the war and caused greater numbers of casualties to others within their combat units as a result of their disabilities. Furthermore, they earned lower incomes and had higher rates of divorce upon returning home than those who did not serve.
In this sketch, Junie functions as a kind of savant who, due to his inability to see the world as others do, peers beyond the everyday and into the spiritual and collective realm. Here again we see Wolfe’s interplay between the individual Black person and the Black collective experience. In Junie’s world, the wrong done to the individual serves the greater good, preventing the collective trauma of the community.
The fact that the future he sees for his Black comrades is only filled with despair and trauma not only highlights the discrimination faced by Black men in the United States in the 1960s but also examines the irony of these men who served their country valiantly only to return home to ignominy and pain. The fact that the booby-trap-tripping Junie murders his comrades rather than save their lives is the ultimate subversion of the established warrior-hero narrative.
