Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Greene

Abel Green lives the eastern spiritual idea that we must learn key lessons in order to move onto a higher plane. Until we figure it out, we come back. He appears first as a minstrel performer who offers blackface parodies to please people who, if encountered differently, might lynch him. Next, he's a faith healer who imagines himself an instrument of God while being manipulated for someone's profit. Third, he's fleeing from the Black Panthers after snitching on them to a fatherly black FBI agent who guided him on infiltrating the organization. Fourth, he's a struggling actor whose mentor and best friend is revealed to be secretly homosexual and dying of AIDS. Abel must overcome his shock and prejudice to nurse him in his final days. In the final scene, he's a former seller of subprime mortgages, broken by his guilt over exploiting poor and minority families, reduced to living as a can-and-bottle collector. All in all, Abel is a naïve villain, constantly caught in the conflict of surviving in a racist world by exploiting your own people.