Hana S. Sharif: “The institutions that will survive and thrive in the next 10-to-15 years are the ones that are able to be adaptive, to be nimble, to reimagine, to hold on to the core while building a bridge to the future. … So that’s my work, right?” – MSN (The Washington Post)
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Eight years ago, Qui Nguyen was at a low point. “I decided that my writing life had not amounted to much, and I felt I needed to concentrate on my family and my kids,” he said during a recent video conversation. “I was going to hang it up.” The new play he was working on, he added, was “a sort of swan song.”
That play, “Vietgone,” was indeed a turning point for Nguyen. Because — plot twist! — it was a hit.
Inspired by Nguyen’s parents, Quang and Tong, and their burgeoning relationship as Vietnamese immigrants in Arkansas in the mid-1970s, the play premiered at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., in October 2015 and ran at Manhattan Theater Club the next fall. Since then, “Vietgone” has been produced all over North America.
Around the time of the show’s early success, Nguyen moved to Los Angeles from New York, landing jobs at Marvel Studios and Disney, for which he co-wrote “Raya and the Last Dragon,” and wrote and co-directed “Strange World.” (He still works as a screenwriter and director for Disney in Los Angeles.)
He has since revisited the story of his parents, and his irrepressible grandmother Huong, in “Poor Yella Rednecks,” which is running through Dec. 3 at Manhattan Theater Club. (It premiered at South Coast in 2019.) “Everyone’s like, ‘It’s a follow-up,’ but I own the fact that it’s a sequel,” Nguyen said, laughing.
Set in 1980, the family saga picks up with Tong and Quang (played by Maureen Sebastian and Ben Levin) hitting a rough patch. “It’s their second love story, kind of something I had to go through with my own wife,” Nguyen said, adding that he has been commissioned to write a third installment, and that he hopes to eventually have five plays in the cycle.
“I was convinced to not put ‘Vietgone 2’ on this one because people would be intimidated that they didn’t see the first one,” he said. “But in all honesty it’s ‘Vietgone 1,’ ‘Vietgone 2,’ ‘Vietgone 3,’ ‘4’ and ‘5.’” (Newcomers can rest assured that “Poor Yella Rednecks” works perfectly fine as a stand-alone.)
“He’s taken probably the darkest moments of his parents’ marriage and turned them into beautifully comic scenes,” the director May Adrales said on the phone. “And I know he’s taken some from his own personal life and his own relationships,” she continued, adding that he “took some of those scenarios and would write a romantic-comedy version. That is why it’s so personal, but also it just demonstrates his own genius of craft to create that distance.”
Nguyen’s distinctive style is marked by fluency in various emotional tones and pop-cultural vernaculars. As Adrales sees it, Nguyen is “taking a genre that’s very American, the immigrant story, and I feel like he’s completely renewed it.”
In his review for The New York Times, Naveen Kumar described “Poor Yella Rednecks” as an “expletive-filled fusion of hip-hop and martial arts with the soapy twists and turns of addictive serial television.” (This summer Nguyen was featured in the PBS documentary series “Southern Storytellers” alongside the likes of Jesmyn Ward, Mary Steenburgen, Lyle Lovett and Jericho Brown.)
“I think that often when people think of Asian American artists, you expect everyone to wear a lot of red and talk about dragons and pray to Buddha statues,” Nguyen said. “When I grew up, it was also about ‘Spider-Man’ and hip-hop, and those things that grew out of the ’80s and ’90s that were part of my childhood.” (Nguyen, who is 47, gives his age as “old enough to remember a time before cellphones.”)
All of those influences were evident in the kapow-boom-blam! spectacles Nguyen wrote throughout the 2000s for the New York-based company Vampire Cowboys. (It’s the rare, if not only, theater group to have had a booth at Comic Con.)
“He writes these insane fever dreams,” said Sebastian, whose previous Nguyen roles include a badass Shakespearean heroine in “Living Dead in Denmark” (2006), a space pilot in “Fight Girl Battle World” (2008) and a postapocalyptic warrior in “Soul Samurai” (2009). “You’re reading it on the page and you’re like, ‘There’s no possibility that this is stageable.’”
She continued: “It’s such a testament to his belief in the ability of theater and in all of these people he is collecting as his artistic family and community.”
If one thing ties together Nguyen’s life and work, it’s a predilection for natural and chosen families. For starters, he remains loyal to his collaborators, working regularly with the same actors. Not only have Sebastian, Quan, Jon Hoche and Paco Tolson appeared in both “Vietgone” and “Poor Yella Rednecks,” but Adrales has also directed both stagings.
When asked for an example that she felt illustrated her relationship with Nguyen, Sebastian recalled the time when she had to pull out of the New York production of “Vietgone” for personal and professional reasons. Nguyen was supportive. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about me or this show,’” Sebastian wrote me in a follow-up text message. “‘All I want is for you to have the life that makes you happy, to have your career and your family grow, for all your dreams to come true.’ And here we are today, still making art, still full of love and respect and admiration for one another. Still each other’s ride or die.”
This loyalty and generosity of spirit are also reflected in the diversity found in his work, in which he allocates powerhouse leading roles to those too often relegated to supporting or sidekick status in the theater, be they women, people of color, queer folks or Dungeons & Dragons-loving geeks. All of them drive his play “She Kills Monsters,” which has become a perennial favorite in high schools and colleges in the years since its premiere in 2011.
That popularity did not prevent “She Kills Monsters” from getting caught up in the culture wars roiling schools, with a planned production in Tennessee canceled because of its gay content. Nguyen sounded a little baffled by the kerfuffle. “It’s a play about connection and finding connection, and yet people are trying to create ways to create division out of it,” he said. “It’s definitely a weird time.”
The need to connect continues to inspire him, including with the very people who gave him the prime material for the “Vietgone” project: his parents — who still haven’t seen or read the plays. “They don’t know if they were emotionally ready to tackle those things again,” Nguyen said. “But they’re so happy that those stories are out there, because they know that the reason I wrote them is for my kids, my nieces, and for kids that are like them.”
Now that his parents are too old to easily leave Arkansas, where they still live, Nguyen has thought of a way to return the stories where they started, via a documentary, “The Family Vietgone,” that he and his younger brother have been working on. “I can make a movie,” he said, “and bring it to them and go, ‘Look — this is what I made.’”
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Actors Kerry Butler, Chester Gregory, Darlene Love, Matthew Morrison and Marissa Jaret Winokur began the truncated, much-delayed ceremony with a performance of “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from the smash musical “Hairspray.”
It was a fitting song choice. When “Hairspray” opened in 2002, it was interpreted as a celebratory rebound for Broadway following the Sept. 11 attacks, after which performances were suspended for two days.
Nineteen years later, all 41 of the Great White Way’s theaters are once again reopening ― this time after an unprecedented 18-month closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Tonys, held at New York’s Winter Garden Theater, looked considerably different than last week’s Emmy Awards and other recent ceremonies.
Not only were all of the night’s attendees required to be fully vaccinated, they also had to wear face masks during the ceremony unless they were performing or presenting.
In her opening remarks, host Audra McDonald quipped that it was wonderful to see “half of everyone’s faces.”
McDonald, a six-time Tony winner, said she hoped to see Broadway artists work to make live theater more equitable after being knocked out by COVID-19 for 560 nights ― a reference to the ongoing push to feature more creators and performers of color on New York’s stages.
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For her work as an actor and a playwright, Anna Deavere Smith has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a two-time Tony Award nominee, a MacArthur-genius-grant honoree, and a recipient of the 2012 National Humanities Medal. She is known for her performances on popular TV series such as The West Wing and Black-ish, in movies such as Philadelphia and The Human Stain, and in stage plays and one-woman shows, on and off Broadway.
In the 1990s, Smith was credited with advancing a distinctive form of theater: She reports her story out, conducting scores of interviews, and then transforms the transcripts into dramatic art. For her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, about the Rodney King riots, she interviewed more than 300 people, composing the script entirely out of material from those conversations.
With This Ghost of Slavery, Smith once again deploys her signature use of contemporary interviews, including with people who have been absorbed into the criminal-justice system, many of whom she has interviewed for her Pipeline Girls Project, which examines how proximity to the carceral system affects young women. She has also interviewed activists and social-justice workers, many of them associated with a nonprofit organization called Chicago CRED, which seeks to reduce gun violence and help young people ensnared in gangs or the juvenile-justice system. But this time she has also supplemented these interviews with primary-source historical materials. She has mined 19th-century archives, transcripts, and diaries, and woven dialogue from these sources into the play.
For this work, Smith’s decision to blend her contemporary interviews with historical accounts of Maryland in the mid-1860s is apt. The echoes of history reverberate loudly, revealing the power of historical trauma to shape behavior in the present day.
To provide clarity for readers, we have footnoted all material drawn from Smith’s interviews and from historical sources. Unless otherwise specified, any material not footnoted is invented (even when drawing on historical events). All contemporary characters are fictional, even those whose dialogue is drawn from Smith’s interviews. (Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.) Daniel Rattner provided extensive research assistance for this project.
IN ORDER of APPEARANCE
11-Year-Old Slave Girl Our guide
Anas Ali Aide-de-camp, Latitude
Dr. Carolina Nelson, a.k.a. “Doc” Professor at Johns Hopkins; co-founder, Latitude
Tobias Midwinter Co-founder and CEO, Latitude
Lindsay Brooks Tobias’s bodyguard; staff, Latitude
Zel Maxwell Tobias’s bodyguard; staff, Latitude
Dr. Carl Vogel, a.k.a. “Dr. V” Psychiatrist and clinical director, Latitude
Jack Ross Professor at Johns Hopkins
The Dean Johns Hopkins dean of humanities
The Provost Johns Hopkins provost
Jaxon Inmate, New Beginnings Youth Development Center
Frederick Douglass Abolitionist
Salmon Chase Chief justice of the United States, 1864–73
General Lew Wallace Civil War general, VIII Army Corps, Baltimore
Abraham Lincoln United States president
Edwin Stanton Secretary of war, Lincoln administration
Major William Este Assistant to General Wallace
Nkosazana Latitude client
Reverend Robert W. Todd Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864
Archibald Stirling Jr. Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864
Edwin A. Abbott Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864
Ezekiel Forman Chambers Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864
Joseph M. Cushing Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864
Henry Stockbridge Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864; attorney, Freedmen’s Bureau
William T. Purnell Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864
Joseph B. Pugh Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864
James L. Ridgley Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864
Frederick Schley Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864
Young Coston Child indentured as an apprentice, 1864–66
Elizabeth Turner 8-year-old slave girl
Philemon Hambleton Owner of Elizabeth Turner
James Nelson Carolina Nelson’s uncle
Desmond Burns Director of the study of slavery, Maryland State Archives
Farley McGibben Research archivist, Maryland State Archives
Betsy Turner Minoky Elizabeth Turner’s mother
Maggy Toogood’s Master Slave owner
Kate Chase Sprague Salmon Chase’s daughter
Charles Minoky Elizabeth Turner’s “next friend”
B. James Nelson’s partner
This play will go back and forth in time and have many locations, some in the 1860s and others in the present. An imaginative theater-design team, and a sprinkle of theater magic, will help us move effortlessly from time to time and place to place.
An 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL from the 1860s (mixed race, ill-clothed, bare feet) walks across the stage, pulling open a huge curtain, revealing a robust Black man (30s, T-shirt, black jeans) at a lectern in a modern-day classroom, mid-speech.
ANAS ALI:
I didn’t mean to kill him. I was just trying to scare him. He was a drug addict and I got him his drugs, and he was messin’ with my money. But when you kill somebody, that’s a heavy thing. When I went to court to be sentenced, the prosecutor asked to give me more time than I was taking a plea bargain for, and I asked the judge, “Can I speak to the family?” So I turned around, and one thing that stuck out to me was that I couldn’t really identify who was there for him, who was there for me. Because our families looked so much alike. And I told the family that no matter how much time I get, the prosecutor wasn’t there to support them. It was just another body that was dead, and another person being locked up in prison. But I promised the family that whenever I got out of prison, I would try my best to help young men not make the same decisions as I made. I said that at 17 years old, going into prison. Whatever you goin’ through, it’s so much better than being in a prison. When I got out, I was 24 years old, and I was just eager to talk to young guys and tell ’em what’s on the other side and how it’s just not worth it. If I had to walk miles, it’s so much better than bein’ in prison—standing outside in the cold. I shot a man and … it’s a heavy thing. 1
A classroom at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, present day
Ambivalent applause. The STUDENTS are undergrads of different races, predominantly white and Asian. Notably, students of color do most of the talking. There are two BLACK FEMALE students, one BLACK MALE STUDENT, and one MIXED HERITAGE/LATINX NONBINARY STUDENT. Additionally, there is a WOKE WHITE MALE STUDENT.
In the back of the room stand CAROLINA NELSON, Ph.D. (Black, mid-30s, dressed in a low-key, hip way); TOBIAS MIDWINTER (Black, late 40s, wearing runway-style street fashion—think Isabel Marant, Wales Bonner); his bodyguards, LINDSAY BROOKS (20s, Black, gorgeous) and ZEL MAXWELL (20s, Black, charismatic, a jock); and CARL VOGEL (30s, white, a young Paul Farmer type with a warm demeanor), Latitude’s staff psychiatrist. Nearby are JACK ROSS (white professor, early 30s) and THE DEAN (white, male, late 40s).
JACK:
Well. This was a real gift. Thank you, Professor Nelson, for giving us your time in the very hour before your sabbatical begins. Grace us with a few closing words.
CAROLINA:
I think after hearing from my collaborators—Anas Ali, Tobias, Lindsay, and Zel—you can imagine why I decided to sit down with them and create Latitude. We will support, using a 360-degree approach—with our know-how, resources, and friendship—incarcerated, newly released, and never-incarcerated-but-vulnerable youth so that they can work toward substantive personal and societal change.
WOKE WHITE MALE STUDENT: Is this “evidence based”? And if so, what evidence do you have that your program works?
CAROLINA:
We don’t have hard evidence yet. It’s early days. We are part practice, part experiment, but we have some anecdotes if that’ll be helpful. Tobias, you want to take that?
TOBIAS steps up to answer the first question, but what ensues after that is the Latitude staff members answering questions in a seamless flow, continuing one another’s sentences unbroken; it’s almost athletic, like a basketball team passing the ball around.
TOBIAS:
So, for example, I had a young man who came in poppin’ seven, eight percs, oxys a day—whatever he can get his hands on—just trying to numb himself from the demons he has seen, what he has done, what he’s experienced. Um, he’s a shooter, so forth and so on. Well known. He finished his high-school diploma, got accepted into a union that would probably not have taken him had we not had him as part of the program. This is the Brotherhood of the Painters. You get up at 3 o’clock in the morning, 3:30, to get to a job at five. You paint, right? And you then are exposed to all these different cultures and people outside of the block, so forth and so on. Long story short, he has moved away from the neighborhood. He owns a townhome in the suburbs with his fiancée, and he’s making $50 an hour painting.2
BLACK FEMALE STUDENT NO. 1: I’m worried about an assumed pathology of Black teens—
Tobias:
Zel:
This is not about flaws specific to any race. This is about vulnerability to systemic racism. I think even when you feel ready and safe enough to be vulnerable enough to step outside the box, it’s hard to be able to separate from a group that has been in a four-block radius.
lindsay:
It’s just so many things people are scared to let go of.
Carl:
We have the push, the cognitive-behavioral-intervention things that we do—you know, the programming that we try to provide, the supports …
CAROLINA:
… The ability for us to give them access to resources, to connections to people …
Carl:
… Helps them to reintroduce themselves to a different part of themselves that the people in their immediate circle have never met or would have criticized …
tobias:
… And/or not been supportive of, because they haven’t been there themselves.3
ANAS ALI:
We’re in juvenile hall …
ZEL:
CARL:
TOBIAS:
… Funeral homes, cemeteries …
ANAS ALI:
… High-school graduations …
Carl:
… And right nearby the school when we get word somebody’s gettin’ kicked out …
Zel:
… And at the basketball courts …
ANAS ALI:
… And at Crazy Down Home Chicken and Seafood on Edmonson …
ZEL:
LINDSAY:
… And movin’. I’m the one always movin’. On the streets.
BLACK MALE STUDENT: Carolina, don’t you feel that you are taking advantage of them—appropriating their stories?
BLACK FEMALE STUDENT NO. 2: When you put your work in writing, who will be lead author?
TOBIAS:
MIXED HERITAGE/LATINX NONBINARY STUDENT: We just don’t think she should be exploiting you.
TOBIAS:
“She”? Don’t you refer to her as “Professor”?
WOKE WHITE MALE STUDENT: Not all of us believe in hierarchies.
TOBIAS:
Okay, we gotta roll, so lemme just say this: Y’all tickle me. When I was growin’ up, ’round Pennsylvania Avenue, we were “poor,” then we were “indigent,” then “disenfranchised,” and now, I been checkin’ out the classes with Dr. Nelson, and I have never heard half the words y’all use when you talk about “us” and about how we live. And yeah, Johns Hopkins has always been a part of our lives—
zel:
My grandmama used to say, “In Baltimore, the Black women work at Hopkins and the Black men go to jail.”
TOBIAS:
And absolutely, Johns Hopkins University and the Hopkins Hospital folks have made a difference on many blocks in Baltimore and have done many good deeds. But Hopkins never happened to come to my block. And, as fate and my good luck would have it, while Dr. Carolina Nelson was in the hood, doing her style of research, she found me. I was left for dead—as in, just about dead physically, spittin’-on-my-grave dead societally, and flatlining-dead spiritually. She found me—
ANAS ALI:
They found each other …
TOBIAS:
And we have talked and talked and talked—
ANAS ALI:
I mean, they really talked! I saw it with my own eyes—
TOBIAS:
—And we got this massively insane idea.
ANAS ALI:
Dr. N got resources like—we don’t have what she has. Jus’ sayin’.
Tobias:
I have resources she does not have, and before you know it, we’re putting down on paper this outrageous proposition that together we might be able to suggest some ways to save lives.
BLACK FEMALE STUDENT NO. 2: No offense to you, Dr. Nelson, but you need to face the fact that they use you around here, and you need to face the fact that you are therefore being branded by Hopkins. You are part of their brand.
BLACK FEMALE STUDENT NO. 1: And so am I! And so are you!
WOKE white male Student: We all end up represented in the brochure …
Black male Student: Not in the same way.
south asian student studying abroad: Why is everything always related to the American Black-white binary?
All of the students start yelling at one another.
JACK:
Civil conversation! Civil conversation!
MIXED HERITAGE/LATINX NONBINARY STUDENT: (Speaking over the tumult.) We just don’t think she should take advantage of you!
TOBIAS:
“She”? There’s that “she” again. You talkin’ about Dr. Nelson? And they say in the hood we disrespect teachers. Look. I am from the streets. If I don’t know the difference between a friend and a parasite, well hey. If being friends with one of your professors and her being friends with me is getting taken advantage of and/or being appropriated, don’t worry about me—worry ’bout her, about me taking advantage of her. ’Cause that is exactly what I plan to do while we build out Latitude: take advantage of her knowledge and her belief in us.
STUDENT: Why do you trust her?
ZEL:
The question is, why does Dr. Nelson trust us ?
ANAS ALI:
It’s mutual! Y’all cool with “mutual”?
Carl:
Some snap; some glance surreptitiously at one another as if they are about to start their own revolution. JACK steps quickly to the lectern.
JACK:
Dr. Nelson, I can’t thank you enough for introducing us to your new cohort. Okay, everybody—we’re flipping the syllabus. Next week, G. Stanley Hall on “Storm and Stress.” Not Genet’s The Criminal Child.
THE STUDENTS split. TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, and CARL, flanked by ZEL and LINDSAY, start to head out. JACK goes to CAROLINA.
JACK:
Wish they had been kinder. Wish they were less cynical. Wish they had less to prove. Wish they could spare a little benefit of the doubt! Oh my God, I am so going to miss you! With whom shall I continue to fail in my attempt to subvert the tragic academic-cynical-greed complex?
CAROLINA:
Come work with us. We need your tireless hope and curiosity.
JACK:
It’d be too depressing. I’d be comatose within the first week. (He pauses.) Alas, your biggest fan approaches.
THE PROVOST, a tall, white, imposing man with a twinkle in his eyes, enters and dashes toward CAROLINA with open arms.
THE PROVOST:
I’d hug you goodbye, but that’s not appropriate these days. How gracious of you to drop off a thank-you note. You’re one of the few people under 40 who can still write cursive. But I should thank you for being—Oh! Are these your … people, your, uh …
CAROLINA:
THE PROVOST glances at ANAS ALI, TOBIAS, ZEL, LINDSAY, and CARL—hesitantly, as though they’re cool and he’s the nerd.
CAROLINA:
THE PROVOST rushes toward the group with open arms. They talk in the background as THE DEAN steps in to talk with CAROLINA.
THE DEAN:
CAROLINA:
The women with us are armed—Tobias’s bodyguards. I’m safe.
THE DEAN:
CAROLINA:
THE DEAN:
The provost granted you this leave, but by the time you get back here, he might have left and you’ll likely be met with a promotions committee that is tired of genuflecting to the VP of diversity and faculty advancement. As for that big heart of yours, you need to remember that you are an academic, not Mother Teresa. (He pauses.) Sorry, that comment was—I guess—disrespectful.
CAROLINA:
THE DEAN:
You gotta get that second book done. Period, full stop.
CAROLINA:
Who is the book for? Who’s gonna read it? I went to a double funeral last week for a 12-year-old and a 13-year-old, both gunned down by a 14-year-old. I know you’re masterful at fundraising, and it’s blasphemous to say this, but … why do we need another building? How about pouring those 10 digits into the community?
THE DEAN:
Your arguments usually have more teeth than that.
CAROLINA:
(With exasperation; her buttons have been pushed—there’s a history here.) Honestly, I don’t get it. Wow. I’m almost out the door, and we’ve discussed this what? Ten times? Eleven? Twelve?
ZEL:
’Scuse me … We gotta jump.
THE DEAN watches as they leave.
ZEL:
Necessary distance—never lose your cool with a white dude. That’s like fighting with a cop. You will lose, ’cause they still got the power. (Beat.) He a control-freak, dominating kinda cat?
CAROLINA:
Maya Angelou Academy, New Beginnings Youth Development Center, Laurel, Maryland
A room that looks and smells brand new. On the brightly painted walls are inspirational quotations from Maya Angelou. Outside the window, we see what appears to be the manicured grounds of an upscale community-college campus.
CAROLINA, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, ZEL, CARL, and LINDSAY sit in a circle with JAXON (Black, 17, supremely handsome, with a sincere face. He looks like a young Harry Belafonte, wearing not a prison-style jumpsuit but rather khakis and a polo shirt). He listens intently.
TOBIAS:
’Cause in your case, you could walk out the door with us—today.
ANAS ALI:
Fast as you got arrested and your life changed? That’s today; your life will change, in less than 40 minutes, with us—out that door.
JAXON:
I just feel like—can I tell you how I feel on the … committed thing?
CAROLINA:
JAXON:
Once you get committed, they provide you with a job, provide you with all the services, but it’s like, once your commitment expires, it’s like they done with you, like Youth Services—they’re not there for you no more. They don’t provide you with no job again or … no tutor, no mentor, and stuff. ’Cause you not—you’re not under government. You’re not a ward of the state anymore. Yeah. I’m worried about that. I mean, sometimes it makes me feel like I wish that I was committed until I was 21. Which is bad because if you get locked up, then you can be sent out, out anywhere they want to send you. They could send you out to Utah, Minnesota, Nebraska. But at the same time, I really feel like, to help me get through life, I need them services that they provide for me, ’cause it actually helps me. You get released from the jail, they not giving you none of these-type services. They not giving you no tutor, no mentor, all that type of stuff they give you right there.4
ANAS ALI:
You’re right—the system is flawed. They dump you right outside to make it on your own. But we got you. All those services you have in here? You gonna have all that …
Tobias:
… Except you’ll be free. That’s the key word—free.
Carl:
Mind, body, soul emancipation.
ANAS ALI:
Out there in the free world, we will provide wraparound services—life coaches, therapists, help with your GED, job placement—
Lindsay:
You look like you bodybuild …
Zel:
… You gonna need healthy food and a safe place to work out.
Lindsay:
We got all that. Brand-new gym. Nutrition classes.
zel:
I’m in charge of strength training. You got any kids?
JAXON:
Carl:
Have you ever spent a full day with your son?
JAXON:
Carl:
You’re gonna need parenting classes.
CAROLINA:
And this is not a onetime thing. We will commit to you for five years …
ANAS ALI:
… If you will commit to us.
TOBIAS:
You have a way about you that would make a good leader. You can also move up in our organization, and get a job with us at the top level.
Carl:
ANAS ALI:
… And no paperwork. Once we get on the other side of that door—that same door you walked through when you got incarcerated—someone will hand you one piece of paper to sign.
Zel:
Lindsay:
You look skeptical. What’s up?
ANAS ALI:
What’s goin’ on, Jaxon?
Carl:
There’s no judgment here.
JAXON:
It’s like … now you back in the street, you tryin’ to make money, you doin’ all the things to get you right back in a place like this. Selling drugs, stealing, stealing cars, robbing people—them things that could lead you back into the same predicament, or even worse. I’d rather have a job in here and get money that way than to keep looking over my back, worryin’ ’bout when the police gonna ride up and try to grab me or something like that.5
Lindsay:
You need somebody to move with you once you hit the streets. I was known for how I move in the streets. My daddy was a chief. That’s how I learned to move. Movin’ 10 steps behind my daddy—I saw everything …
ANAS ALI:
… Ain’t a street from here to Hong Kong where Lindsay can’t move and stay safe and stay legal. Lindsay would hang with you for a good while.
Jaxon:
A SMALL BOY blasts in, enraged. ANOTHER BOY blasts in, and repeatedly throws the SMALL BOY up against the wall. Both boys are in khakis and polo shirts. (This facility strives to look like a school, not a prison.) The smaller boy breaks loose, gets a chair and starts hammering the other boy. A MALE GUARD in street clothes struts in without any visible urgency. He wordlessly guides CAROLINA, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, LINDSAY, CARL, and ZEL into another room with a glass door and a window. JAXON, still in direct proximity to the violence, watches unfazed as blood explodes from these boys while they fight. A VERY LARGE BLACK FEMALE GUARD enters. She and the MALE GUARD stand by as the fight escalates. In a moment when both boys are down on the ground, the FEMALE GUARD sits on top of them. The MALE GUARD handcuffs them and leads them out.
The door of the room holding CAROLINA, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, ZEL, CARL, and LINDSAY automatically, soundlessly slides open. They return to JAXON and resume as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened.6
TOBIAS:
JAXON:
The judge talked to me. ’Bout all this y’all speakin’ on.
ZEL:
Judge came out here to talk to you?
JAXON:
ANAS ALI:
Had ’em transpo you into town to her chambers?
JAXON:
ZEL:
tobias:
Private, though? Just you and her?
JAXON:
Nah. The probation dude was there.
ANAS ALI:
Still, that’s an honor, man. Means she’s countin’ on you.
The first long pause in the scene happens here.
JAXON:
Yeah. Y’all basically the same type o’ people out on the streets, just sober. ’Cept you. (He nods toward CAROLINA.) You a teacher?
CAROLINA:
JAXON:
(To TOBIAS.) Tobias. Yeah. I just figured out who you are, man. People say you was underground. You a legend. You used to run the world from Lanvale Street clear to D.C. and up to Wilmington—the racetracks and stuff like that.
TOBIAS:
But I wasn’t free. Now I am free. And you can be too.
JAXON:
I feel like laughin’ but yet and still, I feel like cryin’. Y’all too good to be true. Anything too good to be true … ain’t true.
JAXON strolls, with a princely gait, to the door. It automatically opens. He leaves. It soundlessly shuts. A beat of deflated silence.
ZEL:
The judge was supposed to invite him to her chambers for a personal meeting. Personal. Our whole thing is personal. Our whole thing is the system ain’t personal. And here she meets the dude on Zoom with a probation officer there?
ANAS ALI:
Maybe there was was a scheduling conflict.
ZEL:
Man, this ain’t time for your rose-colored shades. Only reason she signed on is to clean up her bad karma. And has the nerve to do it half-assed with us? I have stood before her. I told y’all she was full of shit. I told y’all we needed a judge with a heart. She ain’t got no heart, and havin’ the nerve to go half-ass with us! She is sabotaging our shit!
Lindsay:
ZEL:
Am I? It’s Friday afternoon, and we endin’ this particular week without a single recruit.
CARl:
They’ve put so many Maya Angelou quotes on these walls.
carolina:
They named the place after her: Maya Angelou Academy.
Zel:
Wonder if she would think this an honor. If I were Maya Angelou, I’d rather not have my name on a renovated juvie.
Lindsay:
If I were Maya Angelou, I’d rather not have my name on somethin’ that got built with money from that chomo short eyes Jeffrey Epstein.7
ANAS ALI:
Nobody knew what that dude was up to when they built this …
CAROLINA:
What will we do if we learn that any of our funders are dirty?
Zel:
If I was Maya Angelou, I would rather have a college named after me than a juvie.
TOBIAS:
What’s the point if the kids don’t even believe they can be free? How did we get here?
TOBIAS’s loft, immediately following
A 2,000-square-foot loft in a converted 19th-century textile mill. Sink, microwave, espresso machine, workout bench, rack of weights, heavy bag, speed bag, gloves, mitts, a towel. A Sub-Zero fridge, but no other furniture except a pallet that serves as a bed in a corner. Sleek new hardwood floor.
ZEL and LINDSAY are by the window, eating takeout, on guard. TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, CARL, and CAROLINA eat around an old factory door on wooden carpenter’s horses—a makeshift table. Chairs don’t match. There’s a whiteboard on wheels nearby. Everyone’s barefoot because TOBIAS is a tyrant about his perfect floor.
LINDSAY:
It’s Friday at 4:33, and looks like don’t nobody want to leave jail this week.
ANAS ALI:
Seven meetings this week and not one signed up for Latitude, but this is the first time that happened. Sayin’.
TOBIAS:
Like I said, how did we get here?
Carl:
CAROLINA jumps up, pulls over the whiteboard.
CAROLINA:
How did we get here? Let’s blast the idea wide open.
LINDSAY:
CAROLINA writes “Crack cocaine” on the whiteboard.
ANAS ALI:
Crack. When money and bad intentions poured into the hoods like no tomorrow.
ZEL:
Crack. Snatched the concept of tomorrow right out of our people’s hands.
ANAS ALI:
CARL:
I’ve read different data about how much actual money there is in the on-the-corner drug trade.
TOBIAS:
Let’s break it down. Let’s just take cocaine. So if you think about a kilo of cocaine, right? It’s 36 ounces. So we will go through that in a day, at $1,000. So that’s $36,000 a day. And so it cost about 18. So that’s half of that. So we were making about $18,000 in profit a day. I can remember my friend who was killed having his million-dollar party, probably in ’91 or ’92, when I was about 19 years old, making this absurd amount of money. And throwin’ it away.8
LINDSAY:
’Magine that, a million-dollar party! In the hood!
ZEL:
That was before me and Lin was born. Y’all were crazy.
ANAS ALI:
And I betchu right up the block from that million-dollar party? Somebody’s house caught on fire ’cause they didn’t have enough money to go to the laundromat, and they had to dry their clothes on a kitchen chair in front of the open oven.9
TOBIAS:
And I just think about, like, again, if our Willie Lynch chip had been deactivated, you know, the things that we could have done with all the money that we were making that we didn’t do.10
CAROLINA:
Hold on. The what kind of chip?
LINDSAY:
ANAS ALI:
The Willie Lynch letter. History, man, history.
TOBIAS:
Willie Lynch was coming up with something that would make us be against each other for at least 300 years after slavery.11
CAROLINA:
Wait. How to pit Black folks against one another? Are you talking about the so-called speech by a white slave owner named Willie Lynch, from the Caribbean, given to white slave owners in Virginia to tell them how to handle slaves? That was a hoax!12
ZEL:
That’s what I been tellin’ them all along. There’s stuff in that letter that wasn’t even invented when it was so-called written.
CAROLINA:
Look. Before I gave up the study of horror—that would be the study of American history—in favor of studying the horrors of contemporary life by switching to sociology, history was my religion. And I just cannot stand around and have y’all throwing faux facts. I need you to have real facts. Facts. Facts. Facts.
ANAS ALI:
Carl:
Facts? Things tend to be relatively true.
Zel:
CAROLINA:
I’m talking about real facts. Proven facts.
Zel:
Provin’ is false. ’Cause of this fact: Dudes lie. How many times has a dude lied to me?
TOBIAS:
The fact is, Brother Jaxon is fine with lingering in prison, and he’s not the only one.
ANAS ALI:
Slavery, man, it has a pull on us, man. Tellin’ you.
TOBIAS:
“Slavery, slavery, slavery.” We talk about slavery so much, it loses its horror. We should talk about now. Not then.
CAROLINA:
But talk was one of the things that shut slavery down. I often wonder if modern talk is as effective as historical talk, because even though there are more people talking, we talk inside small groups.
Carl:
We only talk to people with whom we agree.
CAROLINA:
Let’s break it open. Name somebody in history who talked a lot and made a difference.
Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL enters the stage and uses an iPad to change the lighting and the mise-en-scène, with the help of an LED wall.
A parlor in the home of SALMON CHASE, 1850
A WHITE MAID is pouring tea for FREDERICK DOUGLASS (played by the same actor who plays the BLACK MALE STUDENT) and SALMON CHASE13 (white, tall, played by the same actor who plays THE PROVOST).
CHASE:
My own opinion has been that the Black & White races, adapted to different latitudes & countries by the influences of climate and other circumstances, operating through many generations, would never have been brought together in one community, except under the constraint of force, such as that of slavery. While, therefore, I have been utterly opposed to any discrimination in legislation against our colored population, and have uniformly maintained the equal rights of all men to life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness, I have, always, looked forward to the separation of the races. I shall be pleased to know what you think of these matters.14
DOUGLASS:
Are you talking about colonizing? All the gold of California combined, would be insufficient to defray the expenses attending our colonization. We are, as laborers, too essential to the interests of our white fellow-countrymen, to make a very grand effort to drive us from this country among probable events. To imagine that we shall ever be eradicated is absurd and ridiculous.15
CHASE:
But in practical terms, how will we ever get on? How shall—
DOUGLASS:
The persecuted red man of the forest, the original owner of the soil, has, step by step, retreated from the Atlantic lakes and rivers; escaping, as it were, before the footsteps of the white man, and gradually disappearing from the face of the country. He looks upon the steamboats, the railroads, and canals, cutting and crossing his former hunting grounds; and upon the ploughshare, throwing up the bones of his venerable ancestors, and beholds his glory departing—and his heart sickens at the desolation. He spurns the civilization—he hates the race which has despoiled him, and unable to measure arms with his superior foe, he dies. Not so with the black man. More unlike the European in form, feature, and color—called to endure greater hardships, injuries and insults than those to which the Indians have been subjected, he yet lives and prospers under every disadvantage.
CHASE:
I don’t question the resilience of your race.
DOUGLASS:
We deem it a settled point that the destiny of the colored man is bound up with that of the white people of this country: be the destiny of the latter what it may. We shall neither die out, nor be driven out; but shall go with this people, either as a testimony against them, or—
Chase:
Happy coexistence is unlikely.
DOUGLASS:
It is idle—worse than idle, ever to think of our expatriation, or removal. The history of the colonization society must extinguish all such speculations.
CHASE:
But we are so very different—
MAID: Your oyster tonger is here, sir.
CHASE:
And Mr. Douglass loves oysters. You must stay for dinner. Will you?
DOUGLASS:
I can’t refuse oysters.
TOBIAS’s loft, present day
TOBIAS:
What’s the guy’s name? Fish?
CAROLINA:
TOBIAS:
ZEL:
And how long ago was that?
CAROLINA:
TOBIAS:
And we’re still separate.
ZEL:
Fish-man is right; we will always be separate.
ANAS ALI:
“To imagine we shall ever be eradicated is ridiculous”? What was Frederick Douglass talkin’ about? We did go into colonies. Prisons are the colonies we been sent to.
CARL:
In fairness to Frederick Douglass, the carceral system as we experience it is not something he could have imagined. Most likely.
LINDSAY:
We askin’ “How did we get here?” and talking about slavery. But Baltimore isn’t down South. My people lived here, and my great-grandma tol’ me we wasn’t slaves.
CAROLINA:
Actually, Maryland was a southern state. They just fought the Civil War as if they were part of the North. Baltimore was part slave and part free, as was all of Maryland.
ZEL:
I know my people was slaves down on the Eastern Shore, ’cause my great-granddaddy told me about his great-granddaddy.
Carl:
That’s a lot of great s. Doesn’t that put us in the 1700s?
Zel:
Carl, I love you but, you live in different mathematics than me. Way my world is, a generation is 15 years, not 30. My mama had me when she was 15. So forth and so on going way back.
CAROLINA:
Okay, when do you think your ancestors here in Maryland got freedom?
ZEL:
January 1, 1863. Emancipation Proclamation.
CAROLINA:
Hate to break it to you, but the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in Maryland. The Emancipation Proclamation was only for the states that seceded—and Maryland remained a part of the Union. Because it was part of the Union, and strategically important due to its proximity to Washington, Lincoln looked the other way about the slaves here.
TOBIAS:
Old Abe was basically freeing slaves in territory where he had lost cred anyway.
CAROLINA:
Slaves here in Maryland were not free ’til 1864.
Carl:
On the whiteboard, CAROLINA writes “1864,” “Emancipation,” and “Mayhem.”
CAROLINA:
Different. Maryland: Part slave, part free, but the pot boiled over about this half-and-half situation, and the state’s legislators were pushed to vote on a new state constitution. Slavery was a big part of the debate around the constitution. It was hot. The emotions were high. President Lincoln knew that whichever way the vote went, there was going to be mayhem.
CAROLINA writes “Lew Wallace” on the whiteboard.
Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL walks onstage with the iPad and taps the screen. As CAROLINA continues to talk, the lights and scenography change to very realistic scenery of …
The War Department, White House grounds, 1864
CAROLINA:
(Offstage.) So Lincoln calls in a General Lew Wallace—
Carl:
(Offstage.) Lew Wallace? He wrote the novel Ben-Hur.
Carolina:
(Offstage.) He did. How do you know that?
Carl:
(Offstage.) Random bits of information stick to me like lint.
LindsAy:
(Offstage.) One of my great-grandma’s favorite movies. That was the only good thing about the court’s moving us to her house. She loved old-school movies.
Carl:
(Offstage.) Long before Charlton Heston starred in that movie, Wallace wrote the novel.
GENERAL LEW WALLACE (played by the same actor who plays JACK ROSS) is presented to President ABRAHAM LINCOLN (played by the same actor who plays THE DEAN). LINCOLN stands, towering over WALLACE, and puts his hand on WALLACE’s shoulder.
CAROLINA:
(Voice-over.) Wallace had messed up an important battle, or got blamed for it. He arrives in Washington, eager to fix his reputation. Lincoln knows about the battle he messed up—everybody knows about it—but …16
LINCOLN:
I believe it right to give you a second chance, Wallace. I’ve suggested you be assigned to the command of the VIII Army Corps.17
WALLACE:
Thank you, Mr. President.
LINCOLN turns away. WALLACE figures out that the brief meeting is over and turns toward the door.
LINCOLN:
Ah, Wallace! I came near forgetting; there is an election nearly due over in Maryland, but don’t you forget it. Goodbye.
WALLACE:
Office of the secretary of war, March 1864
WALLACE enters the office of Secretary of War EDWIN STANTON (played by the same actor who plays THE PROVOST and SALMON CHASE. He’s got a long beard, and some girth. He’s grim).
STANTON:
WALLACE:
I am assigned to the Middle Department—18
STANTON:
What do you know of Baltimore and the Middle Department?
WALLACE:
STANTON:
That department has been a graveyard for commanders. You have seen the president?
WALLACE:
STANTON:
WALLACE:
STANTON:
WALLACE:
He also said there was an election nearly at hand in Maryland, and he did not want me to forget it.
STANTON:
Nor must you. The last Maryland legislature passed an act for an election, looking to abolish slavery in the state by constitutional amendment.19 The president has set his heart on abolition in that way, and mark, he does not want it to be said by anybody that the bayonet had anything to do with the election. He is a candidate for a second nomination. You understand?
WALLACE:
STANTON:
WALLACE:
I’ve never heard of the business before.
STANTON:
Well, then, it is a kindness saying that it will be your first trial.
STANTON immediately turns away from WALLACE and studies a document. WALLACE waits in vain for further instructions.
WALLACE:
The sound of a modern phone ringing brings us back to the present.
TOBIAS’s loft, present day
It is ZEL’s phone that’s ringing. ZEL jumps up and searches for it. She shows LINDSAY the face of the phone so she can see who’s calling.
ZEL:
LINDSAY:
(Whispering.) It’s Nkosazana.20
ANAS ALI:
Is it about the boy again?
ZEL nods, writes on the whiteboard amid the other written words—“Crack Cocaine,” “1864,” “Lew Wallace,” “Emancipation,” etc.—“Nokey sayin’ she’s gonna kill the mfuckr. She’s fixin’ to gun him down at the Crazy Down Home Chicken and Seafood.”
ZEL:
(With her eyes on CARL, who is mouthing things to her.) Nokey. Where are you? (She pauses.) Speak slowly. I’m with you.
LINDSAY:
Nokey found out the guy she was with before she went to juvie, and was with all during juvie, has another girl.
ANAS ALI:
He had a lot of other girls.
ZEL:
Nokey. Stay where you are. I’m coming.
CARL and ZEL grab their shoes, fling open the huge metal door, and run down the stairs, barefoot.
CAROLINA:
I’d like to go on this one. I have a good relationship with Nokey.
TOBIAS:
CAROLINA:
If I am never on the streets with you during crisis moments, I won’t be able to refine Latitude’s design.
ANAS ALI:
It ain’t safe for you out there.
LINDSAY:
How can I explain it? It’s all about your LTO—license to operate. We have a lot of relationships because we been in the streets all our lives. I am the daughter of a former gang king. You know how some people, they get left inherited stuff: $200,000, or buildings, or a business? I was left with the streets. My father had different relationships with different gang chiefs, you know, and they watched me grow up. So within different mobs, I have relationships with different people that’s stemming from his relationships, you know, so that kind of put me in a better position than most, you know, because my arms can reach some more places that are kind of, like, underground.21
CAROLINA:
Carl has no LTO and he’s out there.
Tobias:
Carl was a medic in Afghanistan, okay? He still addicted to adrenaline. I promised your Uncle James I would take care of you at all costs. And I do mean all costs. You not goin’ on any runs. We best head to the office, ’cause who knows what could get kicked off tonight.
Latitude office, nighttime
CAROLINA and TOBIAS drink coffee. ANAS ALI and LINDSAY come in.
ANAS ALI:
Damn, what’s takin’ Zel and Carl so long? I’m dozin’. It’s 3:21 a.m.
TOBIAS:
Okay, wake us up, Doc. Finish telling us about this guy who wrote Ben-Hur. I’ll make you one of my special triple espressos.
ANAS ALI:
Toe may not let you go on a run, but now you know you special. ’Cause he never works his espresso machine for nobody but himself.
Carolina:
Lew Wallace arrives in Baltimore, doesn’t know a soul, learns about the Maryland Club—a private club wherein “city gentlemen” ate, drank, and made sure power stayed in a circle the size of a pinhead. Took a break from their “hectic” lifestyle of power brokering. Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Jerome “Bo” Bonaparte, was its first president. Johns Hopkins was a member. Maryland was in the Union, but this club became a hangout for Confederate sympathizers. By the way, Johns Hopkins wasn’t a Confederate sympathizer—he was a Unionist—but the word today is that he did own slaves.
ANAS ALI:
The lights fall on a very realistic scene of …
A ballroom. An intense gaslit stage. WHITE WOMEN, and one BLACK WOMAN, Confederate bandannas in their bosoms, serve whiskey to the WHITE CLUB MEMBERS, which include no women.
CAROLINA:
(Voice-over.) Wallace sends a Major William Este to the Maryland Club to inquire about he and his men getting access while in town, for meals, hospitality, etc.
MAJOR WILLIAM ESTE (white, 20s, energetic) walks in with a MARSHAL. He approaches a club member.
ESTE:
Please lead me to the club secretary.
A show-stopping number cuts him off. A burst of banjo, drums, horns, as a WHITE MALE SINGER moves onstage.
WHITE MALE SINGER: Introducing … Lil’—Cotton—Pone!!!!!!!!
Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL, with heavy brothel makeup, dressed in a sparkly, sexualized costume, dances over to a piano with choreographed moves. She plays the minstrel song “Miss Lucy Long” with the ease and energy of a prodigy, and a dazzling smile. LUCY LONG, a white man in drag and blackface, makes a splashy entrance and dances to the song.
WHITE MALE SINGER: Oh! I jist come out afore you,
To sing a little song,
I plays it on de banjo,
And dey calls it Lucy Long.
At first, ESTE and the MARSHAL are enthralled—even some Unionists enjoyed blackface.
The chorus is sung, with the band playing and our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL harmonizing.
Oh! take your time Miss Lucy,
Take your time Miss Lucy Long.
Oh! take your time Miss Lucy
Take your time Miss Lucy Long.
Miss Lucy she is handsome,
And Miss Lucy she is tall,
To see her dance Cachucha
Is death to niggers all.
Oh! Miss Lucy’s teeth is grinning
Just like an ear ob corn,
And her eyes dey look so winning!
Oh! would I’d ne’er been born.
A WHITE WOMAN serving drinks gives the MARSHAL a whiskey. He enjoys a close look at her bosom—and then suddenly notices the Confederate bandanna.
ESTE:
WHITE MALE SINGER: I axed her for to marry
Myself de toder day,
She said she’d rather tarry
So I let her habe her way.
If she makes a scolding wife
As sure as she was born
I’ll tote her down to Georgia …
They reach the finale, again with the band playing and our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL harmonizing.
WHITE MALE SINGER: And … trade … her … off … for … CORN!22
The MARSHAL yanks the bandanna from the WHITE WOMAN’s bosom, thrusting it toward ESTE.
MARSHAL: Copperheads,23 Major!
ESTE:
WHITE MALE SINGER: Bluebellies!
LUCY LONG: Why, Mercy! Bluebellies ain’t ’lowed! This here Mr. Bo Bonaparte’s clubhouse!
The WHITE MALE SINGER dives off the stage, grabbing ESTE by the collar. The MARSHAL throws the WHITE MALE SINGER to the floor. The BLACK WOMAN inches through the crowd toward our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL.
ESTE:
This place is an outpost for the Confederacy! You’re under arrest!
Lucy Long: (Grabbing our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL and holding her like a hostage.) Lawd, Lawd! We’s under ’rest, Lil’ Cotton Pone, we’s under ’rest! Oh, Lawdy!
A fight breaks out. The BLACK WOMAN grabs our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL and splits with her during the escalating violence. The MARSHAL handcuffs the WHITE MALE SINGER and LUCY LONG.
MARYLAND CLUB MEMBER: Major. Pardon us. All this talk about a vote that’s comin’ to end slavery—all of those niggers runnin’ loose? Bucks naked, women chasin’ ignorant pickaninnies in our streets? Little whiskey for medicine is all this means to be. We’re scammered. Don’t take it serious.
ESTE sees that they are outnumbered.
ESTE:
Marshal, let ’em go. We’ll be back.
Latitude office, PRESENT DAY, just before dawn
ANAS ALI, CAROLINA, TOBIAS, and LINDSAY are all sipping espresso.
CAROLINA:
Don’t forget there’s a full-fledged war on, and Maryland is about to vote for or against slavery. Este reports to Wallace that the Maryland Club is a hangout for Confederate sympathizers—
ZEL and CARL return—they look like warriors exhausted after battle.
ZEL:
We gotta do something more about these young ladies, and stop thinking of them only as extensions of the young men.
Carl:
Noke is out flyin’ on her own. Her beef with Kevin is no joke. She wants to put together her own pack and kill him.
LINDSAY:
No matter what we say, our program is male-centered.
Tobias:
At the moment, I’m not worried about girls creating packs. We can’t lose focus.
Zel:
Toe, straight up: You don’t think a girl could be in the game, full-out, without a man, do you?
Tobias:
(Suppressing a giggle.) Uh—I don’t.
ANAS ALI:
Carolina:
Nobody is thinking about the impact that this street violence is having on young women, right? So, like all movements, right? If you grow up in something—
LINDSAY:
—And somebody keeps telling you to siddown somewhere and goes to decide that you gonna do dis for us? Then you’re like, “Well, I can do it too. I can do it better. I’ma show you.”
Carolina:
Right? ’Cause this—the gang life—is a movement of empowerment.24
A loud doorbell rings. LINDSAY and ZEL are at the security screen in a flash.
ZEL:
ANAS ALI pushes a button. Soon, NKOSAZANA, a.k.a. Nokey, enters. She is played by the same actor who plays our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL, whom we just saw in the burlesque. She’s wearing makeup and modern clothes: tight jeans, Louboutins, and a blinged-out, fur-collared jacket. She’s 14, acting like a 16-year-old, but she has the face of a baby.
ZEL and LINDSAY frisk her. LINDSAY takes a Glock out of NKOSAZANA’s jacket. They sit.
ANAS ALI:
Where’d you get the jacket?
NKOSAZANA:
Same place I got my Loubs: Saks Fifth. My favorite store.
tobias:
Stealing is against the rules.
NKOSAZANA:
That’s why I come to say this program ain’t for me.
TOBIAS:
This program is not for you. Yet and still, Zel and Carl were out there just now keeping you from making your second huge mistake—the first one being what you did to get yourself incarcerated in the first place.
NKOSAZANA:
I’m fixin’ to leave Latitude.
TOBIAS:
(Playing the bad cop.) You are not ready to leave Latitude. You are barely ready to be in it.
ANAS ALI:
(Playing the good cop.) Whoa, whoa, Toe. Ease up.
TOBIAS:
You messin’ up, Noke. You messin’ up.
NKOSAZANA:
I’m the type who mess up. That’s why I’m quittin’. I ain’t got the potential to be one of y’all successes. It ain’t smart of y’all to try to save me. I’m risky. I’ll mess y’all’s numbers up.
Carolina:
Numbers? This isn’t about numbers.
NKOSAZANA:
Then how come in the Sun paper they got the numbers of how many people y’all “servin’ ” so far? Like we a chicken box or a court summons. How come the Sun had a picture of me? … Ain’t nobody been able to change me. Shit, my mama and them barely changed my diapers.
Carl:
Lindsay:
What’s your plan, Nokey baby?
Tobias:
Considering you are a female without any male structure to work inside of … or—
Carl:
Are you working in a male organization?
ANAS ALI:
There’s no judgment here.
NKOSAZANA:
I am a female and I know what my power is. I know what I could have done to somebody, or what I can make happen in the streets … I can set you up. I can use my beauty to get you where I want you to be.25
Lindsay:
Now, you are one of those real pretty children, so that is true, you certainly could. Now, I was a pretty chile too. Bein’ pretty is like carryin’ a gun: You really need a license, and some lessons, or you could get yourself in trouble.
NKOSAZANA:
I could be so sweet that you believe in trusting me and show me where everyone in your houses is at. Females can make a lot of things happen. Females have brothers; they can run and get they brother and start a war. They can be anything … Drive-by shooters …26
Zel:
Absolutely. Toe, you know darn well we got shooters that’s females.
NKOSAZANA:
When they go out, they always got the girls with them. And they girls is either the driver or the shooter. But you really wouldn’t know this if you wasn’t on the concrete with them.27
Tobias:
And who exactly are you on the concrete with?
ANAS ALI:
Seems to me Nkosazana is talking about having her own splinter group. Is that what’s happenin’, Noke?
NKOSAZANA:
I can be just as much of a shooter as you can. I can roll with you all. I can hold a gun. I can handle the pack. I can … do this and do that. I can … you know, I can have a group of young women following me.28
Lindsay:
You fixin’ to get some of your girls workin’ the streets, and takin’ a cut off the top?
Zel:
It’s a lot of young ladies, they are going into strippin’, and usin’ Backpage.29
Carl:
Is that what you have in mind?
Tobias:
I’m just trying to understand how you think you can handle a whole pack. You ain’t tall enough to have your own pack; you still a shorty.
NKOSAZANA:
I ain’t no shorty. I’m almost 15.
TOBIAS:
You look like a shorty. You look like you are not even 12 yet. And you are planning on being a pimp?
ANAS ALI:
Actually, that could work in her favor. Nobody would suspect a 12-year-old girl to be a pimp.
NKOSAZANA:
A lot of the females I know don’t even know they’re being pimped; they just think we buddies and we hangin’ out and this what we doing together.30
Lindsay:
But then you might have that one smarter girlfriend that’s with you that know how to line us up before we all make it, and she even got her chop off the top before y’all even get started on whatever you doing. And then a friend—still chopping.31
CARL:
What’s going on, Nokey? What is really going on? With you.
NKOSAZANA:
(Fighting tears.) My mama is struggling. It’s bad at home. My mama goin’ through a depression. I just need money. And it’s a lot a money out there, even more than before I went into juvie. I’m talkin’ about money. Y’all talkin’ ’bout freedom, and that ain’t never gonna be.
NKOSAZANA gets up, grabs her gun, throws open the door, and splits.
ANAS ALI:
She won’t quit. When you fixin’ to quit, you don’t announce it; you just quit.
Lindsay:
Most of what she had to say, she’s heard about in juvie. But the way she’s talkin’? She hasn’t done anything. Yet.
TOBIAS:
CarolinA:
Except the part about her mother.
TOBIAS:
Shall we call it a night?
TOBIAS, ZEL, and LINDSAY are sparring at the far end of the loft. ANAS ALI and CAROLINA are at the worktable. CARL, with shoes on, is at the whiteboard, writing “Hyperarousal.” Everyone else is in socks.
Carolina:
To me, this has post-traumatic stress written all over it.
Carl:
So soldiers coming back from war with PTSD, they have a very similar symptom picture in terms of extreme explosive anger and aggression. And so, um, you know, other things are sometimes—they don’t experience positive emotions. But the thing about them is the trauma is not just in the past; the trauma is today and tomorrow, right? It’s not completely the same as post-traumatic stress. Because they’ve got trauma today, trauma tomorrow.32
ANAS ALI:
… It ain’t historical, like “historical” trauma; we don’t need historical trauma, right, ’cause we got enough trauma through poverty in the present?33
LINDSAY and ZEL take off sparring equipment, get waters from the fridge.
zel:
Why did you save up to buy this expensive Sub-Zero if you never gonna put food in it? I am starved.
tobias:
zel:
Nobody needs this much water.
tobias:
One hundred bottles. Y’all took two—that makes 98.
zel:
There’s wisdom in feeding your bodyguard, Toe.
carl:
Here, Zel, take my pretzel thins.
lindsay:
Dr. V, Nokey sayin’ recruits are just numbers for us; the kids don’t trust us.
Carl:
It’s the system they don’t trust. To them, we’re the system—they don’t see the nuance.
zel:
Dr. N, no offense—you do look like you’re with the system. Your clothes are what I’ma call “charity fashion.” You look … like a teacher.
CARolina:
Lindsay:
ANAS ALI:
That’s not charity fashion; that’s “academic chic.”
zel:
And yet, we don’t have cred with the judges. Judge Morley—messin’ with our plan, banking on us failing. She may even be takin’ bets with the rest of them black robes.
ANAS ALI:
Now you soundin’ paranoid.
Carl:
Tobias:
Man, take your shoes off. You’re scuffing my floor.
CARL slips his shoes off.
TOBIAS:
We ain’t this, we ain’t that. I feel kinda sad. Could I have stayed involved with my gang more heavily, and worked on peace from inside of there, instead of kind of leaving them behind?34 My daughter still kind of leans on that. She says I was more respected, from social media and her peers, as me being the legend I was—than me now bein’ this anti-violence guy, going into the community, you know, talking about peace, when all they been in is war. I’m not violent anymore, right? What I really want for my brothers and for myself—I want to be alive and free.35 So sometimes I do think that if I had stayed the person with status, in authority, then I may have been able to do a lot more.
ZEL:
Remember when our life was all about mayhem? I kind of miss it.
Carl:
I sometimes miss the old me, the me who didn’t have to worry about anything but sports, girls, pranks, and extravagant birthday parties. The me who idolized my fuckup brother. I didn’t have to be my parents’ problem. He was. One night he and his buddy got high and climbed the cable on the Golden Gate Bridge. He didn’t even fall. The cops caught him. All they did was drive him home! I kept thinking he’d get kicked out of school. But no. The headmaster of the school came over to our house in Pacific Heights every morning, checked in to see if he got through his homework. Him, my mother, and the headmaster, kinda like a prayer meeting. But the only religion in the school was money. Everyone believed in money. My brother is very rich, a finance guy—on the board of a cathedral, pillar of his community, with what Zel would call a charity wife and three kids. He was so full of mischief and mayhem before. Our mayhem got classified as “mischief.” Y’all got pathologized and incarcerated.
TOBIAS:
Is that why he made a big donation to us—guilt?
CARL:
ANAS ALI:
Speaking of all this mayhem, Doc, you never told us about the “mayhem” that Abraham Lincoln was worried about.
Carolina:
Okay, so mayhem in Annapolis, Maryland, the Old Statehouse, 1864.
Loud male shouting. We hear a gavel banging.
Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864
Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL appears again, back as she was in the beginning, with the iPad, and as soon as the mise-en-scène appears, she leaves.
CAROLINA:
(Voice-over.) Slavery did not end in Maryland by proclamation. It ended by vote. People talked for months and months and argued and argued and somewhere in all this a Christian minister entered a very important word into the discussion: apprentice.
The Old Statehouse, Annapolis, Maryland
Lights up on full-out action: WHITE MEN in period clothing, in the midst of an impassioned debate.
Reverend Robert W. TODD:
Ordered: That the Committee on the Judicial Department be instructed to inquire into the expediency of incorporating into the constitution a provision making it the duty of the legislature to provide by law for the apprenticeship, by courts of competent jurisdiction, of emancipated Negroes who are minors, so as to better provide for their welfare and preparation for freedom.36
ARCHIBALD STIRLING JR.:
(Jumps to his feet.) I am opposed to that article!
TODD:
I think it is very desirable that some provision should be made so as to better prepare those emancipated Negroes who may be minors for the enjoyment of the freedom that we shall give them.
EDWIN A. ABBOTT:
I would suggest to my friend that we better emancipate them first, and then provide for them afterward.
STIRLING:
I do not wish to debate this question! The necessary effect of it will be to perpetuate slavery in Maryland for 10 years longer. This section provides absolutely for the binding out of an entire class of persons, without any reference to the condition of the emancipated parents of these children, without any regard to the age of the children, whether they are 8 or 18 years of age, whether they are competent to earn a livelihood or not. Even if the Orphans’ Court thinks that they are able to support themselves, and will do so, they are a class to be bound out. This section is not so much to provide for the custody of these people as it is to compensate the masters by giving them an additional furlough upon the time of their slaves.
Ezekiel Forman CHAMBERS:
This exhibition of apprehension seems to be entertained by gentlemen, lest a dollar of compensation should be given to the masters who are stripped of their property. Is it to be a matter of regret that incidentally you should, to some small extent, remunerate these people? You have, by one fell swoop, manumitted men, women, and children, old and young, firm, infirm, and helpless; those who are as impotent as the child at the breast, and as incapable of maintaining themselves. We are about to turn loose upon the community every minor Negro in the state. Uneducated, unprepared for the condition of freedom, with no employment, no business, no vocation except that in which they must engage under the instruction of the white people, as general laborers, entirely and exclusively accustomed to farming operations—thousands upon thousands are to be turned loose.
Joseph M. CUSHING:
The delegation of Baltimore City are all instructed by our constituents and are definitely pledged not to vote for any law for colored apprenticeship. And certainly in other parts of the state, delegates were sent here for the purpose of emancipating the slaves, and it could not have been the will of their constituents that after their emancipation, all persons under 21 years of age should be remanded to slavery.
Henry STOCKBRIDGE:
I move to amend by adding to the section the words: “And said court shall bind all masters to whom any such apprentice shall be indentured, to cause said apprentice to be taught to read and write; and any violation of which obligation on the part of any master shall cancel the indenture of apprenticeship.”
William T. PURNELL:
The articles of apprenticeship, or the indentures, are not required to express that the Negro shall be educated. Does anyone profess upon this floor that the Negro will ever occupy the status of the white man? Is there any individual who can ever bring his mind to the conclusion that that degraded race will ever be raised to the degree of the white race? That they are inferior to the white race there is no doubt. The God of nature when he created, stamped upon their forehead the mark as broad and lasting as the mark upon Cain. Is there any man who would elevate them to the degree of the white man? The idea that the Negro can ever elevate himself to the condition of the white man is preposterous. But unfortunately, the white man can debase himself to the condition of the Negro. I cannot support a proposition to elevate the Negro to the sphere of the white man.
Joseph B. PUGH:
I am astonished this morning! The impression might prevail that probably those of us who take a different view of this subject from what that gentleman does, that we were in favor of elevating the Negro race, were in favor of something like Negro equality; a rehash of that political, wishy-washy, meaningless talk. It is better to have educated labor than uneducated labor. It is perfectly proper to educate a horse …
CHAMBERS:
PUGH:
You can educate a horse in other ways than to read and write. If you could teach a horse to read and write, it would be a good thing; but you cannot do that. But you can teach the Negro to read and write.
CHAMBERS:
PUGH:
Well, some of them, then. You cannot teach some white men to read and write. I am astonished that Mr. Purnell should see in that amendment some evidence that we acknowledge that the Negro is our equal. I have never had any such fear. Take two men, the one 6 feet high, and the other 5 feet high; that is their stature, so designed by the Almighty. Put them upon the same platform, the one by the side of the other; if they stand upright men, there is no way in which their two heads can be upon the same level, unless he who is the taller man should stoop. Now, other gentlemen may do as they please, but we do not intend to stoop.
STIRLING:
Will anybody say that any Negro boy 16 years of age, or even 12 years of age, is not able to make his own living now?
James L. RIDGLEY:
What is the proposition? That the jurisdiction of the Orphans’ Court touching free Negroes and mulattoes, as now exercised by law, shall be so extended as to authorize them to give the preference in apprenticing such Negroes and mulattoes, to their former masters. That is all it means, nothing more and nothing less. This ghost of slavery that has been invoked has the effect of intimidating those who, from convictions of duty, are seeking to emancipate the enslaved race in this state.
Frederick SCHLEY:
The apology for restoring free colored minors to practical slavery, under the guise of benevolence to them, is abominable. Much stress has been laid upon the benevolence of this proposition, Mr. Todd, but I confess my surprise that a minister of the Gospel should never have said, in all his views of that unfortunate race, one word in advocacy of their being educated in this transition state. Not one word!
CUSHING:
I submit that it is simply absurd that there should be a law of Maryland that forces a man abundantly able to maintain himself back into the condition of an apprentice, to serve a master and to receive no wages. A hundred thousand free Blacks in Maryland support themselves now. The experience of counties and of the city of Baltimore tells you that there is no more prosperous class of labor in the state of Maryland today than the free Black labor. They are abundantly able to support themselves by their own exertions. There are no more of them in the almshouses than of white people.
TOBIAS’s LOFT, PRESENT DAY
Tobias:
So you’re saying that before they even got to determine if they are going to set the slaves free, they were in there arguing about taking children back to the plantations?
ZEL:
It’s built in! It’s built in! They do not want us anywhere but plantations. They do not want us in the mix!!! Not then. Not now! It’s built in!
CAROLINA:
That’s right. It is built in.
CARL:
So did it pass? Did the apprenticeship clause make it into the constitution?
CAROLINA:
CARL:
CAROLINA:
TOBIAS:
Did I ever tell y’all how much I hate that word, but ?
Carolina:
Shall we stick with the good news first?
Whistles, a brass band, and cheers accompany CAROLINA’s speech.
CAROLINA:
(Voice-over.) On October 12 and 13, 1864, the votes were cast, and on October 29 the results were certified—and Maryland went for freeing the slaves! Festoons! Parades! Church choirs! Dancing in the streets!
Emancipation Day in Maryland, November 1, 1864
Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL runs across the stage, unfurling a beautiful banner. Upon it is written “Freedom.” A MASS OF BLACK PEOPLE follows behind her in parade mode.
A big, choreographed theatrical number. An extravaganza. WHITE PEOPLE dancing, BLACK PEOPLE dancing. Jubilation. PREACHERS OF BOTH RACES are preaching on corners. The scene takes over the entire stage, including where TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, CAROLINA, LINDSAY, ZEL, and CARL are. They are surrounded by this joyous 360-degree “past.”
Suddenly: A five-gun salute goes off. TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, LINDSAY, and ZEL drop to the floor as if they are being shot at.
CAROLINA:
Oh, the guns weren’t meant to kill anybody. That was a gun salute that Lew Wallace ordered! Everything’s cool!
The party resumes. Church bells go off. Fireworks. Folks of all races are dancing.
Tobias:
He signals and stops the music. Like a game of musical chairs, the entire cast freezes.
Tobias:
Did white people actually celebrate this?
CAROLINA:
I assumed they did, but that might be that irritating Pollyanna in me that won’t let go—
CARL:
Let’s pretend they did. Let’s imagine the best for once.
TOBIAS:
The party resumes, reaches a height, and then the adults leave. A CHORUS OF CHILD REVELERS—Black children of different ages, from toddlers to 20-year-olds—stays behind as the celebration subsides, playing with scraps from the party. CAROLINA, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, ZEL, LINDSAY, and CARL stand onstage with the children.
CAROLINA:
Maryland was very proud to have freed its slaves before the passage of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution requiring that. But …
TOBIAS:
CAROLINA:
… One day after emancipation. One day. One day. November 2, 1864. One day.
The music resumes to full jubilation until a video projection appears on the wall behind the stage with the text: “Black-child-seizure day, Maryland, November 2, 1864.” SLAVE CATCHERS swarm the stage and grab Black children, among them YOUNG COSTON (played by the same actor who plays JAXON).
Lights up on an oxcart full of Black children. An 8-YEAR-OLD GIRL (our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL, when she was three years younger) runs to get away. She is grabbed and thrown onto the oxcart. A WHITE MAN WITH A LIST and a MUSCULAR THUG stand by the cart. CARL watches the 8-YEAR-OLD GIRL. He will become PHILEMON HAMBLETON, a plantation owner.
WHITE MAN WITH A LIST: Coston!
The MUSCULAR THUG grabs YOUNG COSTON.
YOUNG COSTON:
WHITE MAN WITH A LIST: Back to your master … Next, Elizabeth Turner!
TOBIAS:
You said that that bullshit amendment or law or stipulation or whatever did not pass.
Carolina:
Carl:
CAROLINA:
Is it? Carl, imagine you have a way to keep your workforce—in fact, your most robust workforce, as you are not as interested in the slaves who are 50, 60, worn out like old cars. And they aren’t like 11-, 12-, 13-year-old kids today, who supposedly have to be watched and have to have organized sports and other activities to fill the day; these are robust preteens who can haul water, dig ditches, take care of babies and will have more capacity in two years to butcher pigs, pick tobacco, and build things. And here’s a girl, 8 years old. She can babysit, clean, and sew. And imagine what use she will be to you at 12, 13—whenever she gets her period—and can bear children. She can increase your slave population. In this case, the young lady in question is your property, one Elizabeth Turner.
Theater magic ensues wherein our cast steps from past to present and present to past.
CARL walks toward ELIZABETH TURNER. He takes her by the elbow and pulls her off the oxcart.
ELIZABETH:
CARL/HAMBLETON:
Home.
ELIZABETH:
But, sir, your place ain’t my home no more. My mama lookin’ for a place to be, but she don’t know where to go. We don’t know where to go, but we ain’t comin’ back to you. We free.
CARL/HAMBLETON grabs her. She starts to scream. He deals with her not as though it’s 1864 but as though she were a kid out of control in a mall today with everyone looking on.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
Everything will be okay—
ANAS ALI:
Carl, man, it’s 1864 and the girl is your property. You ain’t the man now ; you the man then.
CARL/HAMBLETON grabs ELIZABETH and hauls her offstage. The oxcart sweeps around and then off the stage amid threatening lighting, leaving ANAS ALI, TOBIAS, LINDSAY, ZEL, and CAROLINA on what is now a bare stage.
CAROLINA:
So, remember the argument about “apprenticeships”? Even though the legislators who were in favor of apprenticeships did not really win that argument on the Maryland House floor, they still forced Black kids into apprenticeships—girls until they were 18, boys until they were 21. They used a Black Code law written a few years before to do it.
ANAS ALI:
CAROLINA:
TOBIAS:
CAROLINA:
I can show you some things.
TOBIAS’s loft, Present Day
Everyone is gathered around the whiteboard.
CAROLINA:
So children are snatched up, taken back to the plantations.
Tobias:
They set the scene for the whole system right there, right after emancipation.
ZEL:
TOBIAS:
ANAS ALI:
Mental institutions, meds.
ZEL:
Basically locked up, taken away from their mamas ’til they were 18?
ANAS ALI:
ZEL:
We all know ’bout gettin’ locked up ’til we’re 18 or 21.
TOBIAS:
Yeah, but we did stuff to get locked up—these children didn’t do anything but be Black!
CAROLINA:
… Taken back into slavery unless their parents could prove to the judge when they went to court that they could take care of them.
TOBIAS:
Did everybody stand by and just let this go down?
CAROLINA:
Course not. Everything about our history is about resistance, some of which included white folks. Which takes me back to Lew Wallace …
Lew Wallace’s headquarters, November 1864
MAJOR WILLIAM ESTE is reading letters aloud to GENERAL LEW WALLACE.
Carolina:
(Offstage.) There was an absolute groundswell of people actively trying to get their children back. They wrote letters …
ANAS ALI:
(Offstage.) But most of us couldn’t read and write …
Carolina:
(Offstage.) They paid people to write letters for them …
Carl:
(Offstage.) Where’d they get the money for that?
WALLACE:
ESTE:
Here’s one from a John Dennis. Snow Hill, Worcester County, Maryland. “I came down after my children, and found them bound out, so I went and asked him for them, and he told me I could not have them, and so I left him and went to Dr. Hubble, and he said that I would have to employ a lawyer to prove that the binding of the children were not right. I went then. He thought I could have them, and I asked the lawyer about it, and he said that he could get them for me if I would pay him ten dollars a case, which would be thirty dollars … My two youngest was bound the day before the New Constitution, and the other one was bound on the same day of the New Constitution.”1
WALLACE:
ESTE:
“I write to report to you a case of a little orphan girl now in her twelfth year of age, who formerly belonged to a man by the name of Franklin Newman, and he still holds her as his property refusing to let any one have her. There has been two or three persons who have asked him for the girl. He told them that he would not let any one have her unless I come for her, and if I did he would let me have her, so I happened to be here and heard what he had said. I went over there to get her. But when I got to Mr. Newman’s and told him what my errand was, he became very angry, telling me that I could not have her and for me to get off of his farm as soon as I could, he said the court had bound her and that she was his property. He then went into the house and got his gun and sword and pursued me until I got off of his farm. He then went back to the house and sent word to me at church, that had not he to have been kept at home by some one coming into his house, that he intended to have come there and shot me, and that I had better leave there before the next morning, for the county was not large enough to hold us both, that he would shoot me the first place he came up with me.” Samuel Elbert.
WALLACE:
How many of these children are being snatched up?
ESTE:
TOBIAS’s loft, present day
CAROLINA:
TOBIAS:
How do we know this is real?
CAROLINA:
Okay. I am going to show you just how real it is. My uncle can arrange for us to have a look at the archives—the Maryland State Archives. And we will look at actual—real—documents.
Baltimore Inner Harbor, nighttime
ANAS ALI, CAROLINA, LINDSAY, TOBIAS, ZEL, and CARL walk down by the Inner Harbor, Baltimore’s pride, and evidence that the place is a tale of two cities: fancy restaurants, lights reflected on the water, romantic. The group members carry knapsacks and suitcases as they approach a skipjack oyster boat, The Carolina. On it is JAMES NELSON, CAROLINA’s uncle (Black, mid-50s, stately, but warm).
JAMES:
TOBIAS:
JAMES:
ANAS ALI:
JAMES:
ZEL:
JAMES:
No need to swim. That’s what this boat is for.
LINDSAY notices the name Carolina on the boat.
Lindsay:
Damn, Doc, you got a boat named after you! Check it out, y’all.
ZEL:
I’m scared of the water.
LINDSAY:
I keep tellin’ you to learn to swim. What if Toe get chased down to this harbor and you can’t jump in and save him if he jump in?
ZEL:
Where I’m supposed to learn to swim, huh? The pool around my way closed down right after World War II, I think. Besides, Black people don’t float.
CARL puts his hand out to ZEL. She automatically takes it.
ZEL:
Only ’cause you and me walk these streets together do I trust you with this, Carl.
JAMES:
I can’t tell you how tickled I am to take you personally to the Maryland State Archives, where we will have a meeting in the morning. I make a yearly donation. Apparently they are grateful that some people are interested in more than personal genealogy. I have arranged for us to look at original documents from the “Orphans’ Court.”
Inside the Maryland State Archives
ZEL, TOBIAS, LINDSAY, ANAS ALI, CARL, and CAROLINA are in a large conference room. There are carts with several large boxes. They take out crumbling papers and start looking through them.
On another part of the stage is WALLACE’s office, where ESTE and staff are poring over letters.
ZEL:
Stuff’s falling apart in my hands.
LINDSAY:
CAROLINA:
One hundred and seventy years old.
TOBIAS:
These aren’t people listed on these bundles. It’s things: a vase, a rocking chair, a cup.
CAROLINA:
Orphans’ Court referred to where the estates of anyone who died were considered: the items—
LINDSAY:
TOBIAS:
They were little slaves, right? Property, right?
JAMES walks in with DESMOND BURNS (Black, early 40s) and FARLEY McGIBBEN (a white librarian in his late 30s).
JAMES:
Everyone, Desmond Burns and Farley McGibben.
FARLEY hands CAROLINA a large book.
CAROLINA:
(Reading.) “The Negro Docket.”
CAROLINA gives the docket to ZEL, who opens it and stares at the first page, mystified by the old cursive.
FARLEY:
You’ll see in that docket that in just one day, 27 people, mostly women, came to the court hoping to get their children back.
DESMOND:
The “apprenticeships” went on for three full years after emancipation. Black folks started making it their business to fight this thing.
FARLEY:
And the Freedmen’s Bureau had radical lawyers who bushwhacked it.
ZEL:
(Riffling through pages in the docket, she opens randomly to a page and stops short.) Look here! On this court list I’m lookin’ at! “Elizabeth Turner!” Is this the same Elizabeth we was talkin’ about?
They all crowd around the docket.
FARLEY:
Seriously? Is that Elizabeth Turner’s name?
DESMOND:
I think it is … That’s her mother’s name.
Carolina:
Elizabeth’s mother, sometimes recorded as “Betty,” sometimes as “Betsy”—
ANAS ALI:
They never get our names right.
Desmond:
This is the same Elizabeth Turner …
CAROLINA:
Elizabeth Turner is important because she’s basically the star of the case that puts an end to these so-called apprenticeships. Now, just imagine Elizabeth’s mother going back to the plantation to get her little girl back. We know from Wallace’s diaries and papers that people went directly to the plantations—
LINDSAY:
Tryin’ to get your child back? I can imagine it.
Theater magic: LINDSAY and CARL move to another part of the stage. LINDSAY plays BETSY TURNER MINOKY, mother of ELIZABETH TURNER; CARL plays PHILEMON HAMBLETON.
A barn on Hambleton’s plantation, November 1864
CARL as HAMBLETON is working in the barn. LINDSAY as BETSY approaches him.
LINDSAY/BETSY:
I come to get my girl back.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
In eight years, I will pay you $10 for her … I’ll take care of the girl.
LINDSAY/BETSY:
No, sir, I can’t sell my baby. No.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
I have to train her. Teach her. That’s what apprenticeship is—
LINDSAY/BETSY:
I haven’t heard nothin’ about that.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
It’s the law. Can’t have little niggers runnin’ around not knowin’ where to go, how to be, what to do. Law says we gotta train ’em before they get set free.
LINDSAY/BETSY:
CARL/HAMBLETON:
LINDSAY/BETSY:
Eighteen? That’s 10 years—a long time for her to be without her mama. She might birth my grandbabies by then.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
LINDSAY/BETSY:
You keepin’ her here just to make more slaves.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
I can’t make more slaves, even if I wanted to. Slavery’s over.
LINDSAY/BETSY:
How can you take my girl, after I did everything you told me? Everything. Just like you wanted it done. I was one of your best niggers, sir.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
You’ll have to go to court.
LINDSAY/BETSY:
Court? I can’t read or write. What I’m s’posed to do in court? I want to kiss my baby cheek one more time. Hold her one more time.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
It’s out of my hands. It’s the law. All the children are to be back with their masters to do their apprenticeships. If you want to see her, you will have to come to court.
A courthouse in Talbot County, Maryland, November 3, 1864
There are MANY BLACK PEOPLE with CHILDREN, WHITE PLANTERS, and a JUDGE. It’s a horrible, emotionally charged mess.
CARL/HAMBLETON steps forward with ELIZABETH. LINDSAY/BETSY comes up beside them.
JUDGE: How do you plan to care for the child? Have you means?
LINDSAY/BETSY:
We was just made free three, four days ago. Ain’t no more slaves to do work, so there’s a lotta work to be done, and I ’tend on takin’ in laundry and mendin’.
JUDGE: In the meantime, your girl will have to court mischief to eat or go hungry. Philemon Hambleton, what do you intend?
CARL/HAMBLETON:
Elizabeth Turner will be taught the art or calling of a house servant.
JUDGE: Mr. Hambleton shall pay to Betsy Turner, her mother, $10 at the end of her 16th year. Will you agree?
LINDSAY/BETSY:
But, sir, I can’t sell my girl. With emancipation, she belong to the lawd. If’n I sell her then, for her to be rightful, I be havin’ to buy her, but we free and she s’posed to come back to me, for me to care for ’til she care for me and the lawd take me and then take her. She ain’t for sale one way t’ the other.
JUDGE: Girl, this is a court of law, not a philosophical discussion. Will you accept the money? Ten dollars at the end of her 16th year, $12.50 at the end of her 17th, and $15 to the girl at the end of her term of service on October 8, 1874, at the time the child reaches 18. Yes or no?
JUDGE: You are in a court of law. Answer me or you will be in contempt—
LINDSAY/BETSY:
JUDGE: Elizabeth Turner is hereby given to the care and guidance of Philemon Hambleton, who will teach her the art and mystery of the house servant.
Elizabeth:
“Mama” reverberates as CARL/HAMBLETON lifts ELIZABETH and carries her offstage. LINDSAY/BETSY looks on in horror.
JAMES’s boat, Annapolis Harbor, Present day
CAROLINA, ANAS ALI, ZEL, CARL, and TOBIAS are on the boat, cooling their feet in the water.
ANAS ALI:
Taking us away, putting us in families the courts create. And just imagine what it was like for all those mamas.
Zel:
A child can keep a woman alive, you know that? I think that’s how come a lot of my friends had they babies at 14, 15—gives a girl somethin’ to live for, you know what I’m sayin’?
CAROLINA:
LINDSAY steps onto the boat.
LINDSAY:
That story is hard. Real hard for me. I think I was probably ’round about Elizabeth’s age when they took me from my mother.
ZEL:
LINDSAY:
I felt like my mother really tried a lot to build a very special, close connection with me, because I was her only girl. It felt like I had anything I wanted. Then the courts moved us in with my grandmother—actually, my great-grandmother.3
CAROLINA:
What happened to your mother?
LINDSAY:
She been through her own pain and trauma, stemming first from my father. He got killed in our house. My mom, all of us, was there. So she never really had time to grieve on him.
CARL:
Wait, I thought your father was Big Coleman, a chief—
LINDSAY:
He wasn’t my biological father.
Zel:
How come you never told me this? So what happened to your real father?
Lindsay:
He passed before I turned 1, and his death is actually wrote about in The Baltimore Sun. He was just making a way for himself when he got killed. I never knew him, no pictures, no nothin’. I felt like everybody downplayed my mother’s trauma, to make her look crazy. She actually was admitted into a psychiatric unit—she didn’t admit herself; somebody called them on her. But at the time, my mother was fully homeless, and that’s where I wanted to be, with her.
CAROLINA:
Your mother was homeless, but at 7 years old, you preferred to be with her rather than in a home.
LINDSAY:
She needed somebody. She had nobody! Like, we were in, like, literally in shelter, shelter from the streets, everything. Like the whole—whatever you can imagine. But I felt like she should not be alone. The courts, they saw a better fit. But, now, even now, you know, growing up without her for so long, like, I still—I long, that’s something I long for, like …
ANAS ALI:
When you look back on history, you don’t think about all those feelings.
Tobias:
Yeah, it’s like every character in the story is a piece of information—not a feeling human.
Carl:
Like an item—a rocking chair, a teacup, a candlestick.
The parlor of 134 Prince B&B, Annapolis
JAMES, ANAS ALI, TOBIAS, CAROLINA, CARL, ZEL, and LINDSAY relax.
JAMES:
Do they know about Lew Wallace?
CAROLINA:
Of course. You can’t tell the story of the apprenticeships without Wallace.
JAMES:
Do they know what he did with the Maryland Club?
CAROLINA:
JAMES:
Carolina is parsimonious in shedding light on those white men who did move things in the right direction. She has an anxiety about celebrating the “white savior.”
CAROLINA:
That’s not fair. Carl, don’t I acknowledge you?
A HOUSEMAN of the 134 Prince B&B comes in.
HOUSEMAN: Have y’all taken advantage of our complimentary bourbon tasting?
ZEL:
The HOUSEMAN leads ZEL to a cabinet. She proceeds to pour bourbon for everyone but TOBIAS and ANAS ALI, who don’t drink.
JAMES:
The archives are closed for the weekend. Let’s go to Baltimore, come back on Monday to the archives. The Maryland Club has a curious and relevant history. I’ll take you there. I’m a member.
CAROLINA:
Uncle J, please do not embarrass me by insisting that my friends go there.
Tobias:
What modern debauchery goes on there?
Carolina:
Debauchery would be interesting. There’s a dress code. No jeans, no sneakers, no hats. Forget about your kufi, Anas; gotta wear a jacket.
Zel:
We’ll borrow some of your charity-lady clothes.
Outside the Maryland Club, Charles and East Eager Streets, Baltimore
CAROLINA, TOBIAS, ZEL, ANAS ALI, LINDSAY, and CARL approach the building. As they ascend the short, worn, red-carpeted staircase, NKOSAZANA rushes up to them, looking like a shipwreck.
ZEL:
LINDSAY:
ZEL:
How long you been following us, Noke?
TOBIAS:
ANAS ALI:
CAROLINA:
Whatever you did, whatever happened.
NKOSAZANA falls to the ground, sobbing, and presents her cellphone to ZEL, who is horrified by what she sees.
NKOSAzaNA:
My mama killed herself online.
ANAS ALI:
You mean … she hung herself?
NKOSAZANA:
My mama killed herself online!!!!
ZEL:
Her mother took her own life on Insta. It’s right here.4
TOBIAS:
You did the right thing, coming straight here to tell us. We got you.
TOBIAS holds her in his arms as ANAS ALI, CAROLINA, and LINDSAY look at the gruesome Instagram video. TOM, the club doorman (white, 70s, wearing a bow tie), steps out of the door.
James:
(Stepping out of the front door.) Tom, these are my guests. And you know Carolina, my niece.
TOM: Yes, yes, of course. You’ve grown.
Carolina:
ANAS ALI sees a police car offstage.
ANAS ALI:
And here come the Baltimore Police. Black folks on white property …
James:
Tom: The girl is not in accordance with the dress code.
NKOSAZANA breaks away from TOBIAS and runs. CARL and ZEL take off after her.
Maryland Club Dining Room
JAMES, LINDSAY, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, and CAROLINA are eating.
LINDSAY:
(To JAMES.) Her mom killed herself online, right? So it was just like, what ? She waited on Nokey to come home …5
Tobias:
LINDSAY:
But I always knew something was wrong with her mother. I just assumed it because her daughter is out here in the streets like this. And I’m trying to help her, but I never met her mom. I would go to the door; her mother would never come. She would send her other daughter.
TOBIAS:
The idea of a strong Black woman holding up the hood, holding up the family. That’s an old idea.
ANAS ALI:
Our mamas are suffering from depression …
TOBIAS:
JAMES:
Is a big mama the same as a “hood mama”?
TOBIAS:
I think about my grandmother, I think about all of my other friends’ grandmothers, like, when we showed up or when my guys showed up on my porch, my grandmother knew that I was involved in some things, right? But there was still a level of respect that when the guys will be seeing her—they’d be hidin’ their big guns. And it’s something else that’s been lost—spirituality. No matter how bad I was, no matter how bad my guys were, we thought we had to come to church on Sunday, and she was like, “Bring all the guys to church on Sunday. And I’m not taking no for an answer.” So we still had some sense of spirituality. Right? They’ve gotten further away from this family aspect, right?6
JAMES:
All right, so where are they? Where’d the big mamas, the hood mamas, go?
TOBIAS:
The big mamas now want to be at the clubs.
LINDSAY:
Depression. Our mamas and our big mamas …
ANAS ALI:
… Are going through depression.7
JAMES:
Nothing from Zel? Let me call my friends.
Carolina:
Tobias:
Zel will have outrun her. She will talk her into listening to Carl. Carl will get her to go to the hospital.
CAROLINA:
Whatever Carl thought he was getting into with us after his residency at Walter Reed—this is not armchair psychiatry he does. It’s street therapy. Battlefield therapy.
ANAS ALI:
Carl been through his own rocky road.
JAMES:
ANAS ALI:
ZEL enters, dripping with sweat. JAMES stands immediately.
ZEL:
CAROLINA takes ZEL by the arm.
JAMES:
You’re in luck. They finally finished building a women’s locker room. Last week! This club is one of the last in America to admit women. Not ’til 2021. Where’s Carl?
ZEL:
He’s with Nokey at Mercy.
TOBIAS:
James:
She would be so much better off at Hopkins. The head of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is my—
CarolinA:
J. It’s cool. We got this.
A long, carpeted hallway with painting after painting of white men
JAMES, ZEL, LINDSAY, CAROLINA, ANAS ALI, and TOBIAS enter.
JAMES:
This used to be the billiards room, where my paternal grandfather—Carolina’s great-grandfather—worked.
CAROLINA:
Racking up balls for white men, cleaning their spittoons.
JAMES:
So back to General Wallace. He had quite the sense of humor. And not a small aptitude for revenge. When he arrived in town, looking for proper hospitality, he had sent his men to …
Wallace’s Headquarters, late 1864
ESTE:
We have to get the Negroes off the street. Some are being beaten, killed, and some are causing trouble, and what about women and children? We have to get them somewhere safe to be. Women, sir, and children.
WALLACE:
I know the perfect place.
The MEMBERS are no longer so festive.
MEMBER No. 1: As far as I’m concerned, the vote’s not legal. They didn’t have the votes. They had to go get votes from soldiers in the field.
WALLACE and ESTE walk in with some SOLDIERS.
WALLACE:
The city’s under martial law. I’m closing this place down. (To ESTE.) Check the place for weapons. Don’t leave a cabinet unsearched. Clear out or I’ll clear you out.
SOLDIERS push men out of the way and search.
MEMBER No. 2: I’m a Unionist.
WALLACE:
But what were you last week?
WALLACE and ESTE move around, checking out the mansion.
WALLACE:
They come upon the kitchen. WALLACE admires the cooking range.
WALLACE:
You could cook for lots of people on this range. Major, the Maryland Club will now house emancipated Negro refugees.
ESTE:
Negro refugees? Really, sir? Here?
WALLACE:
I shall find a sturdy woman to take care of them and the place.
ESTE:
But, sir, the town’s aristocratic sort eat and drink here. Napoleon’s nephew started this place. They won’t mix well.
WALLACE:
(Helping himself to a handful of peanuts at the bar.) They won’t need to: I’ve shut the place down. The aristocrats will have to find dinner, drink, and camaraderie elsewhere.
ESTE:
WALLACE:
Maryland Club, present day
TOBIAS:
Whoa. Whoa. He took over the place and turned it into a place for Black women and children?
CAROLINA:
In fact, he instructed Este to find an—and I quote—“excellent lady” to act as a matron. Within a week, at least four or five hundred women and children were refugees in the club.
JAMES:
Was called “Freedmen’s Rest.”
Carolina:
Tobias:
Carolina:
It only lasted a few months. The governor protested to the War Department and Wallace had to rescind the order. But …
Tobias:
Carolina:
In March of 1865, an official Freedmen’s Bureau was opened in Baltimore, and if you ask me, Wallace’s takeover probably hurried that along. And the Freedmen’s Bureau that opened in March becomes relevant to what happens to Elizabeth Turner in a big way.
TOM: Chef says to tell you strawberries are real good now—he made shortcake the way you like it. Wants to know if you want some.
JAMES nods. ZEL is shivering.
CAROLINA:
ZEL:
I ain’t cold. I feel the ghosts in this place. I feel the badness.
JAMES:
There were pockets of goodness, too. Did you tell them the story of Maggy?
They walk to the library and situate themselves there.
Carolina:
I’m the lapsed historian; you’re the raconteur.
James:
Let’s see if you can sense the goodness even in a place like this, with a fraught history. Here is the story of a comely girl, a mulatto, Margaret Toogood, Maggy. Nineteen years old, who managed to escape to the Maryland Club. Her owner followed her to the city, accused her of larceny—
CAROLINA:
This type of thing happened all the time, as you can imagine.
ZEL:
I don’t need to ’magine it. I know what they did to us.
JAMES:
This charge allows him to take her back to the plantation, where he then drops the charge. So now she’s his slave again. He goes to a blacksmith, gets a chain, and puts it around her neck. Locks it. General Lew Wallace heard about this, sent the cavalry to the plantation to bring her to him.
A makeshift office in Freedmen’s Rest/ Maryland Club, 1864
ZEL steps in. An iron collar is around her neck, with a chain and lock. ZEL is now MAGGY TOOGOOD. MAGGY’S MASTER is beside her.
Lights up on WALLACE, ESTE, and a SOLDIER.
WALLACE:
Take the collar off her.8
MAGGY’S MASTER:
WALLACE:
She’s 19 years old. She’s free.
MAGGY’S MASTER:
She ran away. That gives me another year.
WALLACE:
MAGGY’S MASTER, with malice, takes the contraption off ZEL/MAGGY and throws it on the floor. WALLACE picks the collar up and tosses it to ESTE, who catches it, responding to the weight.
WALLACE:
Este, how much do you suppose that weighs?
ESTE:
I’d say four or five pounds, sir.
WALLACE:
And how much do you suppose Maggy weighs.
ESTE:
WALLACE inspects ZEL/MAGGY, sees large callouses around her neck and collarbone.
WALLACE:
How much did she bleed before these callouses formed? How much pus and infection poured out? How much?
MAGGY’S MASTER:
I don’t have time to nurse my niggers. I spend time takin’ care of my horses.
WALLACE:
Soldier, take her upstairs to be seen by a medic.
The SOLDIER takes ZEL/MAGGY away.
WALLACE:
You must pay $500 in trust for this girl. And you are providing the payment now, before you leave my sight.
MAGGY’S MASTER:
I will rot before I pay a single dollar!
WALLACE:
Este, take him to the city jail and keep him there ’til he changes his mind.
MAGGY’S MASTER:
I will rot! You haven’t won this war yet!
WALLACE:
Are you with the Confederates? Traitor. Este, see to it that he’s put to hard labor.
MAGGY’S MASTER is pulled away.
Maryland Club library, present day
Our present-day group, except ZEL and CARL, eating strawberry shortcake.
JAMES:
Now, Tobias, what is it you say? “How did we get here?”
TOBIAS:
Can’t go forward without going back. I’ve learned that in all aspects of my life.
ANAS ALI:
We got a stumbling block right in the present. The judge in some cases has sent us kids who ain’t really ready for our program.
JAMES:
TOBIAS:
JAMES takes a fancy note card from his inside pocket. Jots a note.
CAROLINA:
(To JAMES.) Are you still using those cards? They bit the dust with the horse and buggy. Save some trees. Start taking notes on your cell.
JAMES:
(Mock self-pity.) Allow me one last gasp of my assimilation into patrician ways of old. I’ve had to give up so much. Where will I get these once there are no more proper stationers?
Carolina:
You’ll make your own out of cardboard shirt inserts.
ZEL:
Why would you join a place like this?
TOBIAS:
’Cause that man who worked in the billiards room is looking down from heaven, tickled as can be ’bout this: Carolina and Mr. Nelson bein’ served dessert at the Maryland Club—by a white dude—in the place where he cleaned spittoons.
CARL enters. TOBIAS stands. They hug.
CARL:
They’re keeping her for a few days.
Zel:
(To CAROLINA.) Hey, when you was fightin’ with the skinny cat in the hallway back at the school, your dean? (She pauses.) You said you didn’t see any value in books.
CAROLINA:
Nope. I didn’t. I asked who the books are for.
ZEL:
I bet there’s not a single book in this room about Maggy Toogood. Maggy’s standin’ there with an iron collar around her neck. We know what her master said and what the general said. What was goin’ through her mind other than “My neck is bleedin’ and pus is runnin’ down my arm”?
JAMES takes cards from his inner jacket pocket and gives them to ZEL.
Zel:
(Stroking the stationery.) Ooh, feels nice.
JAMES:
The beginning of your diary … What time will you set sail?
CAROLINA:
You’re not coming with us?
JAMES:
ZEL:
(To CAROLINA.) You know how to sail a boat?
JAMES:
With the help of my one-man crew, yes. (To ZEL.) She’ll teach you.
Lindsay:
She’ll have to learn how to swim first.
TOBIAS walks around surveying the many portraits of old white male members across time.
TOBIAS:
So they basically turned this place into a refugee camp, huh? “Freedmen’s Rest,” you say?
CARL:
Sometimes I feel like Latitude is a refugee camp.
TOBIAS:
You right about that—refugees from violence, bad schools …
ZEL:
CARL:
ANAS ALI:
LINDSAY:
Childhood. I feel like a refugee from my childhood.
Conference room, Maryland State Archives
FARLEY, DESMOND, CARL, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, ZEL, LINDSAY, and CAROLINA are assembled, with various documents around them.
FARLEY:
TOBIAS:
Ah, the guy with the fishy name …
FARLEY:
… Becomes governor of Ohio, he runs for president …
DESMOND:
Chase seeks the nomination for the presidency four times—1860, 1864, 1868, and 1872 …
FARLEY:
… He becomes secretary of the Treasury.
TOBIAS:
I knew that fishy name sounded familiar. Now it clicks—he is the dude on the $10,000 bill!
FARLEY:
DESMOND:
To many Blacks, he was a hero. He was constantly defending runaway slaves.
FARLEY:
Wasn’t usually successful in his attempt to keep ’em up North—
CAROLINA:
—But he was always trying to put the wrong of slavery into the consciousness of the nation, not just as a moral matter, but as a political matter.
DESMOND:
Moral arguments only go so far.
CAROLINA:
Long story short, Lincoln appoints Chase.
FARLEY:
Even though Chase had tried to run against Lincoln.
DESMOND:
Lincoln puts aside whatever feelings he might have had that Chase has surreptitiously tried to get the nomination for what turned out to be his second term—
CAROLINA:
As chief justice, he swears Lincoln in on Inauguration Day for his second term, and guess who he invites to have tea at his home the night before inauguration?
TOBIAS:
ANAS ALI:
Tobias:
I could feel it in my bones.
Washington, D.C., March 4, 1865
Theater magic: TOBIAS steps in as FREDERICK DOUGLASS. SALMON CHASE and CHASE’s daughter KATE CHASE SPRAGUE, elegantly dressed, are in the parlor.
TOBIAS/DOUGLASS:
(Turning to address the audience directly.) It was my good fortune to be present at President Lincoln’s inauguration … On the night previous, I took tea with Chief Justice Chase and assisted his beloved daughter, Mrs. Sprague, in placing over her honored father’s shoulders the new robe then being made, in which he was to administer the oath of office to the reelected President. There was a dignity and grandeur about the Chief Justice which marked him as one born great. He had known me in early anti-slavery days and had welcomed me to his home and his table when to do so was a strange thing in Washington, and the fact was by no means an insignificant one.9
KATE:
Mr. Douglass, help me with Father’s robe.
KATE holds her father’s judicial robe. TOBIAS/DOUGLASS helps her put the robe on CHASE.
CHASE:
Fitting. It’s all so very fitting.
Conference room, Maryland state archives, present day
FARLEY:
It’s relevant that Salmon Chase is the chief justice when it comes time to try to shut down the child apprenticeships.
TOBIAS:
How many children had been taken back to plantations in these mass arrests?
DESMOND:
Numbers range from 2,500 to 10,000.
TOBIAS:
CAROLINA:
FARLEY:
In 1864, Elizabeth Turner was only 8 …
CAROLINA:
Sometime around then, Elizabeth’s mother meets a man …
DESMOND:
… His name was Charles Minoky. And he has the wherewithal to get two of the best lawyers in the Freedmen’s Bureau to try to get Elizabeth back.
FARLEY pushes a document toward TOBIAS.
FARLEY:
He is recorded as the “next friend” of the girl—
Carolina:
Someone who appears in court on behalf of someone who is not competent to do so.
LINDSAY:
Were he and Betsy actually married?
FARLEY:
DESMOND:
One of the lawyers at the Freedmen’s Bureau—
CAROLINA:
Henry Stockbridge. An abolitionist—
DESMOND:
Was completely dedicated to bringing down the apprentice system.
Freedmen’s Bureau, office of Stockbridge, Pusey, and Stirling, Baltimore, January 1866
There’s a long line outside the door. ANAS ALI steps in as CHARLES MINOKY; LINDSAY steps in again as BETSY. They enter. HENRY STOCKBRIDGE (late 30s, white, bedraggled, played by the same actor who plays JACK ROSS and GENERAL LEW WALLACE) looks up from the piles and piles of documents everywhere.
STOCKBRIDGE:
On behalf of which child are you here?
ANAS ALI/MINOKY:
STOCKBRIDGE:
Are you Elizabeth Turner’s father?
ANAS ALI/MINOKY:
No, sir. I’m ’lizabeth’s next friend.
LINDSAY/BETSY:
STOCKBRIDGE:
Does the real father know? We have so many cases lined up that we don’t have time right now to take the case if the real father doesn’t know. It causes too many problems later.
LINDSAY/BETSY:
Mr. Hambleton her real father, sir.
Conference room, Maryland state archives, present day
As before, with LINDSAY and ANAS ALI back in the present.
CAROLINA:
It’s been implied but not proven, as far as I know, that Elizabeth was Hambleton’s child.
FARLEY:
That Betsy was his mistress.
LINDSAY:
I don’t call that “being a mistress.” I call that bein’ a victim of rape. She was his slave.
FARLEY:
Point well taken. In 1866, they go to court, they come back empty-handed.
DESMOND:
But they don’t give up. And in 1867 …
CAROLINA:
Stockbridge has a lot more to work with.
DESMOND:
That “lot more” is the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Bill of 1866.
FARLEY:
And the Fourteenth Amendment.
DESMOND:
Well, the ink for the Fourteenth Amendment was still wet on the page.
CAROLINA:
FARLEY:
And Stockbridge has a Supreme Court justice—
DESMOND:
By the way: Did this case actually go to the Supreme Court?
CAROLINA:
No. In those days, Supreme Court justices rode circuit. So as part of his circuit, not in his role of chief justice, Chase presided in Baltimore over the trial.
Noise, people, a gavel banging, etc.
Courtroom in Baltimore, October 15, 1867
The place is packed with WHITE ADULTS—farmers, former enslavers, etc.—with Black adolescents and preadolescents, and with BLACK ADULTS, primarily with babies and toddlers. Very noisy: babies crying, toddlers chattering. ANAS ALI/MINOKY and LINDSAY/BETSY are present. STOCKBRIDGE is looking through documents. A CLERK is presiding.
CARL/HAMBLETON enters with ELIZABETH, now 11. (She does resemble HAMBLETON.) Portraying NKOSAZANA has aged ELIZABETH’s countenance.
CLERK: Children and babies must be kept quiet! Quiet!!!! The honorable chief justice of the Supreme Court, Salmon Chase!
SALMON CHASE walks in, stops to correct the CLERK.
CHASE:
The honorable chief justice of the United States.
CHASE:
CLERK: The honorable chief justice of the United States!
CHASE climbs to the bench.
Carolina:
(Voice-over.) In a move very typical of Chase, he got his title changed, to something he felt was more fitting, and that was the beginning of the Chief Justice being referred to as the Chief Justice of the United States.10
CHASE:
(In a kind of regal, fast, but captivating monotone.) The petition alleged that Elizabeth Turner was the daughter of Elizabeth Minoky, formerly Elizabeth Turner; and that she was restrained of her liberty, and held in custody by Philemon T. Hambleton, of Saint Michael’s, Talbot County, Maryland, in violation of the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Mr. Hambleton?11
ELIZABETH is brought forward by CARL/HAMBLETON.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
I hereby produce Elizabeth Turner. The indentures of apprenticeship that I filed said Elizabeth had to be taught to be a house servant, and that I will pay Betsy Turner, her mother, $10 at the end of her 16th year, $12.50 at another period, and $15 to the girl at the end of her term of service on the 8th of October, 1874. She was born October 8, 1856. In the event of the death of her mother, the wages will go to Elizabeth. Her mother consented in court November 3, 1864.
CHASE:
And the child and her mother were both formerly held as slaves by you.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
Until November 1, 1864. Emancipation Day.
CHASE:
And the child was bound back as an apprentice on November 3, 1864, two days after.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
There was a general law of the state saying it was permissible to apprentice children previously held as slaves.
CHASE:
Mr. Stockbridge, state the points upon which you claim a discharge.
STOCKBRIDGE:
Under the law of Congress, the Civil Rights Bill of 1866.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
Everybody told me that the law did not interfere with this case!
CHASE:
Mr. Hambleton, be still. Mr. Stockbridge?
STOCKBRIDGE:
Under the law, there can be no distinction between whites and Blacks. And in this case, Elizabeth Turner was not given the privileges that a white apprentice would have—
CHASE:
Mr. Hambleton, you are not represented by counsel.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
CHASE:
The questions in the case are so important that I should prefer to be advised by the argument of counsel on the part of the claimant.
CHASE:
Very well then. Mr. Stockbridge, proceed.
STOCKBRIDGE:
The sort of apprenticeship adopted in Maryland was an evasion of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, and the Constitution by its own powers executes itself. The Civil Rights Bill was passed to remedy existing wrongs, and was designed to extinguish all existing institutions, and diverse existing rights to hold persons to slavery in any form. Although the indentures were made in 1864, and the law was passed in 1866, it was retroactive to that extent that it would reach this case.
CHASE turns and faces CARL/HAMBLETON directly.
CHASE:
Wait a moment, Mr. Stockbridge. Mr. Hambleton, you understand how serious this case is for yourself and for the state of Maryland and for all the colored apprentices and their masters. The decision of this case would affect the condition of thousands of colored minors whose term of slavery had been protracted from five to 10 years by this illegal mode of apprenticing them.
CARL/HAMBLETON:
I desire simply to submit the case to the judgment of the court.
CHASE:
The questions in the case are grave: Is this indenture in conformity with the general law of the state? Is said general law consistent with the act of Congress to protect the colored people in their civil rights? Does said act of Congress apply to this case? Was the passage of said act a constitutional exercise of the power of Congress? Mr. Hambleton, do you desire to retain the girl, and if so, had you not better procure counsel?
CARL/HAMBLETON:
I wish to retain the girl, but I do not feel sufficient interest in the case to spend any money on it.
CHASE:
Mr. Hambleton, you really must reconsider your position. I will adjourn the court until tomorrow at 9 o’clock, in order to give the claimant or any person interested in the decision of the case an opportunity to appear. If no person appears, I will then dispose of the case. The child shall be retained in the custody of the court until tomorrow.
Conference room, Maryland State Archives, present day
As before. LINDSAY, CARL, and ANAS ALI step from past to present. CARL is very unsettled, emotionally worked up.
CARL:
I don’t get it. “I don’t want a lawyer; I don’t want to spend money.” If I don’t care, what’s it to the judge?
ANAS ALI:
I do not trust judges who drag things on.
Zel:
LINDSAY:
Let the little girl go to her mama!
FARLEY:
Self-righteous, punctilious guy.
Carolina:
One of his friends famously said, “Splendid man to look upon, but a poor man to lean upon.” In one of his absolutely enraging moves, he is responsible for Jefferson Davis escaping the gallows. Lots of people wanted Davis to be hanged. Chase behaved in that acutely “impartial” way.
TOBIAS:
“Impartial” is just plain passive.
Carl:
Bottom line, he adjourns the court at a climactic moment. Hambleton might have changed his mind, or some racist lawyer could have stepped up to take the case for free. Pathetic.
JAMES’s boat, Annapolis Harbor, dusk
TOBIAS and CAROLINA are alone, cooling their feet over the side of the boat.
TOBIAS:
CAROLINA:
TOBIAS:
Most activists have heroes. (Beat.) No offense, but I think it’s kind of a luxury to go through life without needing a hero. When I was a kid, I had to have heroes to get from one day to the next.
Carolina:
Oh, I completely get that. Completely.
Tobias:
My mother was always in violent relationships, and then when she met my stepfather, he was this big, massive man, because she met him in the federal penitentiary. He was a bank robber and he was violent toward her, and me as well. And so I can remember probably being about 11 years old, and I saw a man, and he had guys around him that I assumed at that time were his bodyguards, and he was massive, so in my mind, I thought that if I joined his gang, he would be able to protect me and my mom from this violent man who she was with, who eventually killed her. I found my mom in the garage when I was 17.12
CAROLINA:
TOBIAS:
It’s cool. There’s so much other violence that was in my life to talk about. But what happened to your heroes?
CAROLINA:
I have to take that back. I do have heroes. Uncle James is my hero. My mother had me when she was 14.
TOBIAS:
Really? I thought you was from bourge stock.
CAROLINA:
I am. Bein’ a bourge did not keep my mother from getting pregnant when she was 14. Today, bourges put their daughters on birth-control pills when they first get their period. But back then, at least in Baltimore, a lot of Black bourges still used only two devices for avoiding pregnancy: fear and shame. My mother’s mother, my grandma, was so deeply, generationally bourge that she had gone to a boarding school in New England. Yes. And Grandma’s roommate from boarding school was a real liberal girl from California. So years later, when my mother got pregnant, Grandma sent my mother not to the South, where most Black bourges sent their knocked-up daughters, but to San Francisco, with the idea that I’d be born out there, be given up for adoption, and my mother would be back in Baltimore in plenty of time to start middle school at Roland Park Country, where she was one of just a few Black students. And she would have two full years to prepare for the Black cotillion when she turned 16. And so I was born in San Francisco. But Grandma’s son, Uncle James—the apple of her eye, 10 years older than my mother—had just graduated from Stanford Law School and was a radical. He had long before defected from Black bourge culture, much to Grandma and Grandpa’s dismay.
TOBIAS:
CAROLINA:
Very much so. Unbeknownst to Grandma, Uncle James talks my mother out of giving me up for adoption. My mother was only 14, and scared to death. So, long story short, without Grandma knowing, James adopts me. I then lived wherever he and B., his true love—who adored me—lived. And this is why I know that love is real. They raised me. They saved me. And this is why I should never have forgotten that I have heroes. As for my own blood mother? She comes and goes in my life. She never became what Grandma planned for her to become. She’s a lost soul.
TOBIAS:
Your father in your life in any kind of way?
CAROLINA:
My father was Buddy Bells.
TOBIAS:
Holy shit! Bells? Really? Bells was legendary. Damn! Really? I cannot imagine that. You? And Bells? What was he like?
CAROLINA:
I never met him. Uncle James adopted me when I was an infant. They told me stuff in stages—“as soon as I was old enough to understand,” that kind of thing. But they never got around to telling me about my father. Or at least telling me the truth about my father.
TOBIAS:
Well, yeah, Bells was …
CAROLINA:
I was 4, at a progressive Sausalito preschool, making sand paintings, when my father was shot down in the Baltimore streets. Didn’t learn about that until I came across it in my own research years later.
TOBIAS:
Damn, you are just like us.
CAROLINA:
TOBIAS:
Raggedy family and stuff. Teenage pregnancy and stuff.
CAROLINA:
They rise. TOBIAS links arms with CAROLINA and pulls her close to his side, walking with her.
Conference room, Maryland State Archives, the next morning
DESMOND:
October 16, 1867, the next day, Elizabeth Turner is brought into the courtroom by the bailiff. Her mother and her “next friend,” Minoky, wait anxiously. No Hambleton.
CAROLINA:
Courtroom in Baltimore, October 16, 1867
ANAS ALI/MINOKY and LINDSAY/BETSY wait anxiously near STOCKBRIDGE.
CHASE:
STOCKBRIDGE approaches the bench.
CHASE:
Mr. Hambleton is not here. I feel fervently that he should be represented by counsel. I shall have him come in so that I can discuss this with him once more and impress upon him the gravity of the matter.
ANAS ALI/MINOKY steps out of the past into the present, bringing LINDSAY/BETSY with him.
Conference room, Maryland State Archives, present day
ANAS ALI:
Fish-man is about to drive me crazy! Hambleton did not show up in court!
Carl:
The more I think about him, the angrier I get. Elizabeth was no more to him than just another farmhand, and having her meant so, so much to her mother—it’s disgusting.
ANAS ALI:
What’s Fishy gonna do next? Send the cops to get him? Did they have cops then?
Carolina:
They’ve had cops in Baltimore since the 1780s.
DESMOND:
I believe Chase felt this should go further than the circuit court in Baltimore where he was presiding—that it should go all the way to the Supreme Court. And he believed that having it ruled on by the highest court could have made a considerable difference in how these events would be recorded in history.
Carl:
And how he would wind up recorded in history.
LINDSAY/BETSY:
All I want is my baby back!
LINDSAY/BETSY steps back into the past, pulling ANAS ALI/MINOKY with her.
Courtroom in Baltimore, October 16, 1867
STOCKBRIDGE:
(Impassioned.) Your honor, one doesn’t know how long the Freedmen’s Bureau will last. Once the bureau closes its doors, I won’t be able to help the emancipated Negroes in the same way. No one will be here to help. I beg of you, Your Honor, and out of respect for everything you have done to bring integrity to every office you have held, out of respect for all you did to protect the runaway slave, out of respect for your moral rectitude: This case has the opportunity to rid us of apprenticeships. For the good of the Negro, for the good of this state, for the good of this country, do your part to rid us of these apprenticeships, to dismiss one of the last gasps of that despicable institution which has haunted this nation for centuries. Allow Elizabeth Turner to return to the arms of her mother.
STOCKBRIDGE goes back to his table and sits down. CHASE considers for more than a moment.
CHASE:
Ordered by the court, this 16th day of October, A.D. 1867, that Elizabeth Turner be discharged from the custody of Philemon T. Hambleton, upon the ground that the detention and restraint complained of is in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States, and it is further ordered that the costs of this proceeding be paid by the petitioner.
ELIZABETH runs to LINDSAY/BETSY and ANAS ALI/MINOKY, as does STOCKBRIDGE. Mixed reactions in the courthouse.
STOCKBRIDGE:
This smashes every indenture that binds a Negro child other than as a white child should be bound! And you helped! Thank you! Thank you! You are great Americans today!
Conference room, Maryland State Archives, present day
ZEL:
So an 11-year-old mixed-race slave girl brought the system down.
DESMOND:
That would have been great, but the apprentice system fell away in dribs and drabs.
Farley:
Think of all the people who didn’t know about the decision.
Zel:
There wasn’t social media.
CAROLINA:
Think of the slave owners who felt they were above the law. (To DESMOND and FARLEY.) Did y’all read Barbara Fields13 on this? Her position is that Black parents still had a very hard time getting their kids back, in part because of the complexities of Black families themselves.
TOBIAS:
JAMES’s boat, Annapolis Harbor
ANAS ALI, CAROLINA, LINDSAY, and CARL are cooling their feet in the water.
ANAS ALI:
I feel like I been walkin’ dusty roads. And all we been doin’ is lookin’ at old documents.
CARL sings the song “Thirsty Boots.”14
CARL:
“So, take off your thirsty boots and stay for a while / Your feet are hot and weary from a dusty mile / And maybe I can make you laugh, maybe I can try / I’m just lookin’ for the evening, the morning in your eyes.”
CAROLINA:
I haven’t heard that song in ages. B. used to sing me to sleep on that.
TOBIAS and ZEL come onto the boat. ZEL has a small shopping bag.
CARL:
What’s up with Noke? I’ve been doggin’ ’em over at Mercy and I can’t get a response. The nurses leave me on hold.
ZEL:
She’s been released from psych.
TOBIAS:
She’s an orphan now, so the courts will decide about custody, and in the meantime, they will put her with her grandmother.
LINDSAY:
CARL:
So then we’re lookin’ at a group home.
LINDSAY:
Doc, you should see if Judge Morely will consider setting up emancipation for her.
CAROLINA:
Juvenile emancipations are tough now—but I could try …
ZEL:
Are y’all out y’all’s minds? Noke can’t get emancipated! She been talkin’ about havin’ a pack!
TOBIAS:
That’s not a realistic concern—
ZEL:
You need to step back. I am gettin’ tired of your macho attitude about what these females can and cannot do, man!
LINDSAY:
Knowing Noke, she’ll probably form a pack while she’s in the group home—or get some wisdom on how to do it …
ZEL:
I’d rather see her in a group home than runnin’ the streets.
ANAS ALI:
And I was gettin’ used to 1864—
ZEL:
I’ll take the present anytime. I woulda been a real bad slave. I wouldna been like Elizabeth Turner. Sittin’ on that plantation, sewin’, babysittin’ master’s other children by his wife who most likely looked just like her—her half sisters and brothers. And I wouldna been all “Yessir” about Hambleton’s dinner guests. If one of ’em put his hands on me, I would have hauled off and slapped the shit out of him. I woulda got lashed.
CARL:
Did the story bring up anything for you—any triggers?
ANAS ALI:
The part about them grabbin’ the little children the day after Emancipation Day. Made me think about when I was in prison: Every Wednesday or Tuesday, it’s like, a bus that comes into prison, every week—you guarantee 10, 20 guys comin’ into prison. And I just remember looking like, it seem like every Wednesday, if it’s 20 guys, it’s 16 Black guys. Like clockwork.15
CARL:
ZEL:
Me? Shit. My trigger been pulled so much, the striker got wore down. Ain’t nothing gonna fire. Y’all know my tale. Catholic school. Nuns tried to rescue me from the hood. Found out I could run fast, focused me on track. I was a star. A hood star. College scholarship. Off to New Mexico. What is this place? Shit, my roommate owned a wolf and wanted to bring it to spend the weekend in our room.
CARL:
Africans Americans are only 2.7 percent of the population of New Mexico.
ZEL:
Well, I met one of the 2.7 percent and it was the wrong one. He was from the hood too—in Oklahoma—and he was violent. I pissed him off, ’cause I did not want to help him sell jackpot.16 He threw me off a cliff.17 I could have broke my legs. I didn’t. Just a few bruises and a couple bangs on my head. I didn’t tell nobody what happened. But my mind got messed up. Got kicked off the track team, kicked outta school. Went back home. Hit the streets. Sellin’ dope and guns. Judge Morely threw my ass in prison. I do not like authority. If I had been Maggy Toogood, standin’ there in chains, a steel collar ’round my neck, pus runnin’ down my back? I wouldna just stood there all quiet, like a slavery exhibit in the wax museum. I woulda ran my mouth so loud, they woulda come and found me, free or not, taken me back to the plantation, and shot me in front of everybody, execution style, or by firing squad.
CARL:
You were triggered by Maggy.
ZEL:
Okay, cool: I was triggered.
It’s JAMES and BENJAMIN, a.k.a. B. (white, 50s), with picnic baskets.
JAMES:
It’s about time you had some oysters on this oyster boat! I don’t imagine Carolina’s been feeding you. She is not domestic.
CAROLINA:
Y’all know Uncle James, and this is his partner, Benjamin. He goes by “B.”
JAMES and B. start organizing the food. ANAS ALI and LINDSAY help.
JAMES:
I have been thinking about your situation with Judge Morely. I called her.
CAROLINA:
JAMES:
When’s the last time you met with her?
CAROLINA:
We’re in constant touch with her.
JAMES:
TOBIAS:
B.:
She doesn’t understand what you are doing.
ZEL:
That’s why she thinks it is okay to meet with folks we tryin’ to recruit on Zoom when she agreed that she would meet the youngsters in her chambers, away from juvie, human-to-human.
JAMES:
CAROLINA:
ZEL:
Sitting across from Morely? I won’t have no appetite.
B.:
But before you go to lunch, you’ll need to make a detailed list.
CAROLINA:
B.! Don’t start with the lists.
ANAS ALI:
Toe had lists, when he had his organization in the streets—
TOBIAS:
You’re right, man! What happened to my lists?
CAROLINA:
“You cannot take down the master’s house …”
JAMES:
“… With the master’s tools.” My niece is quoting the great poet Audre Lorde, but Ms. Lorde, though prophetic, wasn’t running a nonprofit. She was polishing metaphors.
B.:
JAMES:
Right now, you’ve got me, some academic friends, a couple lawyers. Your funders are in California and New York …
B.:
Baltimore’s a provincial southern town—you are going to have to make yourselves known to more people with connections.
ZEL:
You talkin’ about charity people?
CAROLINA:
Yes, that’s exactly what they are talking about. The people who think social change comes from cocktail parties and catered breakfast gatherings at the Four Seasons. Like my grandmother.
B.:
You have to work the churches—
JAMES:
—The old-time Black churches, and the megachurches.
ANAS ALI:
B.:
Exactly! And the synagogues.
LINDSAY:
James:
Connections: Ka-ching, ka-ching.
Carolina:
B.:
There’s no such thing as “enough money.”
James:
I’m not asking you to start a hedge fund; I’m asking you to have lunch with Judge Morely.
Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL, looking exactly as she did at the beginning of the play, walks toward them. They cannot see her. As they continue to talk, she climbs onto the boat.
Carolina:
J, you are asking us to work with the manners and gestures of a poison-drenched system?
Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL notices ZEL’s shopping bag and looks inside.
TOBIAS:
I know more about the darkest parts of this system than you ever will. I been watchin’ how the system works since I was a tot—welfare, foster care, mandatory psychotropic drugs in elementary school. Back in the day, at the beginning of gang culture, some of it was actually tied up with tryin’ to take down the system, like revolution. The Black Panthers got a whole cultural thing kicked off and made folks think the system could fall. And what happened to ’em? They got caught up in their drama, or ended up dead from offin’ each other, or canceled out by the FBI. So yeah, this system is poison, and it is hard to change the system. Lunch is not the system. But if lunch is what it takes to pull in the kinda connections we need to save lives, let’s go to lunch. I agree with B. There’s never enough money.
CARL:
We could use a full-fledged clinic—full-time medical staff.
Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL takes a box out of the shopping bag and hands it to ZEL.
Zel:
Anyway, we have a present for you. Doc, you are definitely not a charity lady.
LINDSAY:
So we can’t have you lookin’ like a charity case.
ZEL hands CAROLINA the box. In it are Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 silver sneakers. CAROLINA looks at the sneakers, moved.
ANAS ALI:
Lindsay:
And I have always loved church, just so long as it’s good music.
ZEL:
I’ll keep you from gettin’ worked up if one of the officials says somethin’ stupid at lunch. I’m with you 100 percent, Doc.
CAROLINA:
Don’t call me Doc. We’re family now.
Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL sits down beside CAROLINA, as close as possible, and dangles her feet in the water, as if to cool them after a long, dusty walk.
This play appears in the December 2023 print edition. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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“I read it, and I went, ‘Oh, this is my life,’” she said in a 2017 interview featured on the website of the Center Theater Group, home to the Taper, Kirk Douglas and Ahmanson Theaters in Los Angeles. “Citizen,” she said reminded her of “walking through and navigating those torrential waters of mainstream America when you are a person of color or ‘other,’ and what you have to swallow in order to survive.”
When the Fountain observed its 25th anniversary in 2015, Charles McNulty, The Los Angeles Times’s theater critic, wrote that Ms. Finney had infused “Citizen” with “the spirit of public reckoning” and added, “Her cast didn’t so much portray characters as stand in solidarity with the nameless voices reflecting, mourning and expressing outrage over the micro and micro aggressions (from a careless bigoted remark to police abuse) confronting Black people on a daily basis.”
Shirley Jo Finney was born on July 14, 1949, in Merced, Calif., about 55 miles northwest of Fresno. Her mother, Ricetta (Amey) Finney, was a teacher and counselor. Her father, Nathaniel, sold auto parts. In 1959 she moved to Sacramento with her mother, her sister, her stepfather, Charles James, a municipal court judge, and her stepbrother, also Charles James.
In high school, she was in the drama club. She then attended Sacramento City College for one semester before transferring to Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento). At a party, she met Wilma Rudolph, the sprinter who had won three gold medals at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and was teaching at the school. They became friends, and Ms. Finney became a babysitter for Ms. Rudolph’s children.
“I told her, ‘One day, I’m going to make a film about you,’” Ms. Finney recalled in an interview with The Sacramento Bee in 2000.
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At a time when a new coronavirus variant threatens to undo any modicum of progress that New York City made during the pandemic, it seems almost preposterous that live theater ever even happened this year. But it was not only restored; it was exuberant.
Following necessary and long-overdue action to further diversify the Broadway stage, Black playwrights wrote every new play on the so-called Great White Way, The Grio reported in July.
With that came a plethora of rich, deeply human stories about Black and other people of color, illuminating a variety of lives that defy all moral, sexual or gender binaries.
From two Black men contemplating their lives at a crossroads to six disregarded Tudor-period women taking center stage, to Broadway confronting its own demons in a more than 60-year-old play, these productions show more than what’s possible. They show what’s actually already here — if we only choose to look.
Along with those are the outside-of-the-box plays and musicals, including one helmed by a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee and another that challenges the very limits of what a single talent can personify in one story. In spite of everything, it was an overflow of genius.
OK, this one wasn’t exactly on Broadway, but “Merry Wives” helped welcome the return of live theater farther uptown last summer at Shakespeare in the Park after it went dark throughout the harrowing first leg of the pandemic. Awkwardly described as a Shakespearan “Real Housewives,” “Merry Wives” is more about two idle ladies of the house (the hilarious Pascale Armand and Susan Kelechi Watson) who decide to band together and give swindler Falstaff (Jacob Ming-Trent) a taste of his own medicine.
Ghanaian American playwright Jocelyn Bioh remarkably adapted “Merry Wives” from Shakespeare’s 1602 comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Bioh seamlessly thrusts an already timeless tale into present-day South Harlem where West African immigrants uproariously play the game of love — often set to an electrifying drum beat. It is pure bliss.
Who knew that the stories of the ill-fated wives of Henry VIII could look as cool as a female sextet donning kinked-up versions of their medieval wardrobes while belting out irreverent songs about how they were done wrong? “Divorced!” “Beheaded!” “Died!” “Divorced!” “Beheaded!” “Survived!”
Yes, not one but two of his former spouses were decapitated, so obviously, they have some residual feelings about that as they join the other women in a musical battle for the audience’s sympathy.
The multicultural cast featuring Adrianna Hicks, Andrea Macasaet, Abby Mueller, Brittney Mack, Courtney Mack and Anna Uzele is such a riot to watch as they bring to life writers-directors Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow’s thrilling and poignant retelling of the ultimate jilted brides. Yes, there are themes of despair and heartbreak, but “Six” is most profoundly about reclaiming their narratives, together.
David Byrne’s “American Utopia” is a bit hard to describe. Its title suggests that it is an attempt by a white guy — albeit the illustrious lead singer of The Talking Heads — to paint a broad image of what American paradise could look like. But it’s not that at all.
Using the rock band’s poignant tunes, including “Burning Down the House” and “Once in a Lifetime,” Byrne grapples with the idea of hope and promise of revival in the midst of turmoil. Collaborating with musicians from around the globe who often serve as parallel characters onstage with him the whole time, Byrne creates a singular theatrical experience that could only come from one of the most visionary minds.
In short, playwright Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over” is one of the most fascinating plays to hit Broadway this year. That’s because it dares to reach far beyond what you might look for in a play that deals with faith and hopelessness in equal measure through lengthy riffs between two Black friends (the incredible Jon Michael Hill and Namir Smallwood) sitting on a corner waiting for…something.
The mystery surrounding what’s next is met with bleak impossibility as the two men ponder their mortality and what is real. It seems like they will never leave this literal and metaphorical corner until another presence enters their realm and disrupts their daydream. Questions about this person (Gabriel Ebert) and the Promised Land he represents linger with you long after you’ve seen the play. But one thing is clear: “Pass Over” is a gem.
Photo by Joan Marcus, 2021
It only takes Broadway legend LaChanze’s name on a Playbill for audiences to come out in droves to watch her perform. Add Alice Childress — who was known for four decades as the only Black woman to have written, produced and published plays — to the list of credits and you have a bonafide hit without knowing anything else about it.
Still, “Trouble in Mind,” which was supposed to debut on Broadway in 1955 but was canceled when Childress refused to tone down its messaging, is so riveting that you forget that you’re actually watching a performance. That’s because it dares to confront the real-life racism in the theater world through the eyes of Black artists, most deeply felt with Willetta Mayer’s (LaChanze) story as a Black female thespian who must rely on playing one stereotype after the next to survive.
Despite its heaviness at times, Childress’ play within a play is infused with humor and sarcasm, as well as beautifully paced dialogue that shows the dexterity of a Black female voice that is as resonant as ever.
Bioh’s “Nollywood Dreams” was such a delight. The play, which premiered off-Broadway in November after being delayed by the pandemic, is laugh-out-loud funny as it explores the Nollywood film industry in the ’90s. Centered on Ayamma (Sandra Okuboyejo), a young woman who works at a travel agency with her sister Dede (Nana Mensah) but lands an audition with an up-and-coming Nigerian director as he gets ready to shoot his new film.
The production takes a fun look at the early days of what is now a booming film industry in Lagos, Nigeria, and is full of fun, vibrant costumes that take you straight to the ’90s. And best of all, in the final moments of the play, we get a look at the wacky final production of the film at the center of the story. A fun time, indeed.
If you’ve only watched the 2005 HBO film of the same name, it might take you a second to realize that the exceptional playwright Ruben Santiago-Hudson is playing all 20-plus characters in “Lackawanna Blues.”
That includes Miss Rachel, or “Nanny,” as she is affectionately called, a character inspired by the real-life woman who raised Santiago-Hudson in a 1950s boarding house in Buffalo, New York. Marvelously unburdened by the many different souls he embodies throughout the play, sometimes even picking up a harmonica and joining onstage guitarist Junior Mack in song, the Tony Award winner totally vanishes on stage as the audience is immersed in the story. A truly uncanny feat.
You don’t really know what to expect at the start of playwright Keenan Scott II’s Broadway debut, even though it is exactly what the title suggests and yet so much more. Seven Black men (portrayed by a cast that includes Luke James, Tristan Mack Wilds, and Dyllón Burnside) shoot the breeze about life, love, sexuality and the struggle everywhere from the barbershop to waiting in line for the newest sneakers on the market.
Everything about Scott’s play, under the direction of Steve H. Broadnax III, feels so lived-in as the audience eavesdrops on the mean’s uninhibited conversations with each other as well as their most personal conflicts and musings. The two storytellers give these men permission to be uncertain, powerful, funny, and even embrace failure. As an audience member, all you ever want to see is a reflection of the human experience, and “Thoughts of a Colored Man” is exactly that.
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Brooklyn-based comedian Matt Koff is an Emmy Award-winning writer for “The Daily Show.” Despite his comedic success, he misses the days when the only goal was to get laughs in the room.
Now, he said, he feels pressure to get laughs and go viral on social media. He posts sporadically on Instagram, but said he can’t keep up with “posting like a million TikToks a week.”
“As somebody who's been doing it for a while, I'm just kind of annoyed by it, but I know that's probably not the right attitude,” Koff said.
He's among 10 comedians from across the United States and abroad who are vying for the title of “New York’s Funniest Stand Up” on Saturday, Nov. 11, at the New York Comedy Festival.
Matt Koff
Courtesy New York Comedy Festival
Many of the comedians are relatively established but not household names. Each will perform a 10-minute set in front of industry insiders, including agents, club owners and managers. The winner will get bragging rights, plus a cash prize of undisclosed value.
At the competition, the comedians will be judged by their act in the room. But the New York-based comics interviewed for this article say they feel pressure to perform on social media, too.
It’s a change that’s been happening in the industry since the creation of YouTube in 2005 and has been exacerbated by sites like Instagram and TikTok, said Caroline Hirsch, who founded the New York Comedy Festival and owned the legendary standup comedy club Caroline’s, which closed in December after 40 years of business.
The New York Comedy Festival runs through Nov. 12. Here, nine comedians competing to be "New York's Funniest Stand-Up" pose with Caroline Hirsch, pictured far-right.
Courtesy New York Comedy Festival
Hirsch said that social media has become a vital part of many comedians' acts.
She said that decades ago, standups like Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling – who all appeared at Caroline’s – only had to work a room in real life.
A big break back then, she said, was to get a gig on “The Tonight Show,” then maybe “The Late Show with David Letterman.”
Each appearance was an opportunity to prove yourself to the gatekeepers who could launch your career.
But now, she said, making a name for oneself begins on social media.
“It's created a way for comedians to put out their own specials just taping themselves and putting it out there,” she said.
Still, according to Hirsch, going viral or building a following online is just a start, and doesn't necessarily guarantee a career.
“The trick is to then stay focused and stay talented,” she said. “A few people are able to obtain a little bit of that, but never really go on to do very much after that.”
Julio Diaz
Courtesy of New York Comedy Festival
Koff, the writer from “The Daily Show,” isn’t the only one who feels pressure to post online.
Comedian Julio Diaz, also from Brooklyn, is also vying to be “New York’s Funniest Stand Up.”
Diaz, who has 30,000 followers on Instagram and 21,000 on TikTok, said comedians need an online presence to show they can attract audiences and, by extension, dollars.
“You have to be a small business first, not just somebody asking for business,” he said. “You have to be your own PR person. You got to be your own manager. You have to learn how to edit, too.”
“There's a saying 'I'll help you push your car if I already see you pushing it,' Diaz added. "So these industry people want to see you pushing your car already.”
Jake Velazquez
Courtesy of New York Comedy Festival
Jake Velazquez, who was born and raised in the Bronx, is another contestant.
He's been doing stand-up comedy since 2017, performing at clubs around the city, including Eastville Comedy Club, The Comedy Shop and The Tiny Cupboard.
Last year, he was part of the festival’s “Comics to Watch” series, the annual showcase for comedians from around the country.
Although he has 23,000 followers on Instagram and a YouTube page, he lacks a TikTok account. He said he just hasn’t gotten around to making one.
“If you want to be a national headliner then you have to be on social media, because it's just how you get your audience now,” he said.
Velazquez said he appreciates how online platforms have given people a chance to promote their material and bypass gatekeepers.
But he said people who rely on online platforms for their comedy fix may be missing out on his favorite style, longform, which doesn’t fit into the short time constraints of social media.
Comedian Pat Burtscher
Courtesy of New York Comedy Festival
“It warps people's perceptions of what a comedy show is,” Velazquez said. “Because it’s a lot of crowd work or just 30-second to one-minute clips.”
Still, not everyone is convinced that social media is the only way to make a name for yourself.
New York-based comedian Pat Burtscher said becoming a comedian isn't like becoming a doctor or lawyer, because there’s no obvious career path.
To him, this means using social media is a case-by-case decision based on the merits of each platform.
He’s posted consistently on Instagram, where he has almost 33,000 followers. But for now, he’s not very active on other sites, including TikTok and YouTube. He said all the options are “confusing.”
“By the time it settles and you're like, 'Oh, this is what you have to do,' there'll be another app or whatever people are going to be using to get their entertainment," he said. “And then you always have to figure out how do I get there? So they'll come to live shows.”
The New York Comedy Festival runs through Sunday, Nov. 12, at various locations across the city. “New York’s Funniest Stand-Up” competition is Saturday, Nov. 11, at 3:30 p.m. at the Hard Rock Hotel New York. You can learn more about the festival here.
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Falling in love came as a surprise to Pat Farnon — a late-life development he hadn’t been looking for any more than he’d been looking for the marriage proposal that set that romance in motion. When a whirlwind of a woman named Kitsy Rainey asked him to marry her even though they’d never so much as dated, he acquiesced.
“The most beautiful woman that ever water washed,” Pat called her, and Kitsy cherished him right back. But how well did she allow her husband to know her?
In “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey,” the bittersweet final installment of Mikel Murfi’s trilogy of solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved, it is 1987 and Kitsy has been dead two years. Holed up at home in their small Irish town, avoiding company, Pat gathers his courage to open a suitcase that Kitsy had forbidden him to look inside while she was alive.
What he finds changes his understanding of her, and not just from the newspaper clipping suggesting her involvement in a long-ago crime, in the place where she was born and came of age. Or as their good friend Huby says, comically, after he reads the article: “It might be best, Pat, if we don’t try to put two and two together here.”
Pat, though, has always had a quick and busy mind. The narrator of this play and its boisterously funny predecessors, “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (all currently running at Irish Arts Center, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan), Pat can speak to us, the audience, inside his head, but he cannot speak in life, nor can he read.
He is, however, an accomplished listener, and Murfi, the plays’ author, director and shape-shifting star, is a marvel of characterization and vocalization, his repertoire including uncanny instrumentals and animal sounds. This is what allows him to populate Pat’s world so richly.
It is risky, then, for “The Mysterious Case” to spend as much time as it does with Pat in solitude, contemplating his own deterioration and intermittently listening to a cassette tape that Kitsy made for him and left in that suitcase.
And as emotionally honest as it is to let us feel Kitsy’s absence, dramatically it is far less interesting to hear her recorded voice than to watch Murfi become her. When he embodies Kitsy in a memory, even fleetingly, the show zings with life.
Irish Arts Center advises that each play works as a stand-alone, but that isn’t true of “The Mysterious Case,” which seems to know that, opening with a verbal montage of standout lines from the first two shows: a kind of “Previously on ‘Kitsy Rainey’” nudge to our recollection.
It would be a mistake to come to this play without an existing affection for and curiosity about Kitsy. But if you have those, Murfi has answers to sate you — even as you watch Pat, in his anger and pain, try to reconcile her love with her tenacious secrecy.
The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey
Through Nov. 18 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.
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Brian Cox has plum gigs on the HBO hit “Succession” and as a pitchman for McDonald’s. But he’s known tough times in live theater, where there are no do-overs. (Watch the video below.)
Asked on “The Late Show” Tuesday about moments that went awry, Cox recalled playing King Lear. He threw his crown off and it hit a woman in the audience, cutting her across the forehead
“She turned to her boyfriend and he suddenly said, ‘Are you all right?’ and all the blood was on his shirt,” Cox told host Stephen Colbert.
The Scottish actor, who was promoting his memoir “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat,” then described an unfortunate experience as Captain Ahab in a stage version of “Moby Dick.”
Stick around for a whale of a tale.
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“After complaints from students and faculty … , growing murmurs of protests at performances and an anonymous vote by student participants in the production, By the River Rivanna was canceled hours before its opening night.” – MSN (Los Angeles Times)
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