SOURCE: An interview in Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, edited by Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, Beech Tree Books, 1987, pp. 62-74.

[In the following excerpt, Childress discusses her works and writing process.]

[Childress]: I wrote my play Wedding Band as a remembrance of the intellectual poor. The poor, genteel and sensitive people who are seamstresses, coal carriers, candy-makers, sharecroppers, bakers, baby caretakers, housewives, foot soldiers, penny-candy sellers, vegetable peelers, who are somehow able to sustain within themselves the poet's heart, sensitivity and appreciation of pure emotion, the ability to freely spend tears and laughter without saving them up for a rainy day. I was raised by and among such people living on the poorest blocks in Harlem and have met many more on the boundary lines of the segregated life—the places where black, white, brown, yellow and red sometimes meet—in bus stations, train and plane waiting...