It does-- and that's important, isn't it? Even more shocking
is that the admirable responsible housekeeper cannot be left
any money in the will, because the white townsfolk would murder
her if they found out about it. Life, liberty, property--
the most basic rights were denied with impunity. We have "forgotten"
all this, and it is good to be reminded.
Here's my comment on it from a review of a few years ago:
Ben and Oscar's master plan includes marrying Alexandra and
her fortune to her cousin Leo before she is enough older and
wiser to know better-- though all the decent characters in
the play oppose this.
The decent characters definitely include Addie and Cal, (Carol
Parker and Jensen Auuste) freed slaves now working as household
help. One can only be grateful to the actors willing to take
on these parts, and hope that Mass Bay theatre audiences are
sufficiently intelligent and historically informed to appreciate
that Hellman is using stereotypes to demonstrate how such
stereotypes are created and enforced, and whose interests
they serve.
Household servants are chosen carefully. Just as a house
"boy" would be picked to carry out errands whose purpose is
best left undetected because he seems "simple", combining
personal honesty with a willed blindness to dishonesty in
his "betters", a housekeeper would be appointed to her job
because she combined a strong intelligence and upright character
with a pessimistic resignation to the radical injustices of
the racist system within which she lives and works.
Hellman's play pulls no punches about this: Horace Gibbons
says he would leave money to Addie in his will if he could,
and the audience is to take his word for this -- the two of
them agree that he can not. ADDIE: "Don't you do that, Mr.
Horace. A nigger woman in a white man's will! I'd never get
it nohow."
It is a lesson that needs to be retaught to each new generation,
who would prefer to think that only white bigots used the
N-word, and have difficulty understanding how the Southern
court system would be able to throw out such a bequest, even
after the the Civil War continuing to rule according to the
dictum that "The Negro has no rights which the white man is
bound to respect."
If by a miracle the court refrained from bringing criminal
charges against Addie for inspiring Horace's tabooed attempt
to bestow money and the power that comes with it, the Klan
would punish such an offense against the Supremacy code.
Hellman's working out of her plot illustrates a hypothesis
that was articulated by many writers during the Great Depression:
The Hubbards and the Marshalls of this world have similar
ambitions, and will reduce the rest of us to as near the status
of a black person in the nineteenth century South as they
possibly can.
This rallying cry faded to a quaint memory after the nation
drew together to fight the Second World War and enjoy the
unprecedented widespread prosperity that followed, but it
is good to hear it loud and strong again on the Lyric West
stage.
by 
