I Was a Black Cowgirl, My Tongue Was a Six Shooter and My Fingers Were Guns (A Conversation with Sapphire) by Carl Hancock Rux

I see it over and over, the real people, the people

who show up when the picture come back; and
they are pritty people, girls with little titties like
buttons and legs like long white straws...Why can't
I see myself, feel where I end and begin. I sometimes
look in the pink people in suits eyes', the men from
bizness, and they look way above me,
put me out of their eyes.
My fahver don't see me really. If he did he would know
I was like a white girl, a real person, inside. He would
not climb on me from forever and stick his dick in me
n' get me inside on fire...Can't he see I am a girl for
flowers and thin straw legs and a place in
the picture.

from Push , by Saphire

Act One: A Monday. Astor Place. Rain. Saphire has been waiting. My apologies well rehearsed. Haven't seen her since we were doing that poetry thing- maybe Lincoln Center when she made an uptown audience squirm with her Mickey Mouse Was a Scorpio invective. Tales of shit and semen. Or it might've been that summer we were hitching rides with friendly strangers at the National Black Theater Festival in Atlanta,Georgia -sipping the notes from Abby Lincoln's mouth, promoting the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe anthology with Miguel, and fiercely engaging in a discourse on Black Feminism and Audre Lourde. Haven't seen her since she was standing at the lectern in a peach tree plaza ballroom on a Saturday evening, sharing the platform with the Negro Literati- and yes...Essex...this would be the last time I would ever see Essex Hemphill. In the middle of the rodeo the two of them postured like partners in crime, the outcasts come back to take the booty (sic). Her locks all around her breasts and straight back. She read There's a Window, from her book American Dreams. Window is a narrative of two women having un-casual sex in a prison cell. An interesting choice to render to an upright audience of Nationalists, Afro-fascists, the Christian Right and the Artistic left.

I was sitting on top of her belly pumping my thighs together sending blood to my clitoris...I was riding, like the Lone Ranger on top of Silver.

Using the grandiloquence of dangerous words and brimstone cadence, Saphire transformed in front of her audience. She became the ...river overflowing it's banks, rushing all over the brown mountains. She was not the token dyke poet willing to compromise content and context for the sake of ethics, the struggle, and a Black Baptist readership. With the power of her prose, she revealed herself a black cowgirl, galloping through the audience (that brown mountain), her tongue a six shooter, her fingers, guns.

We find each other in the doorway of Starbucks. Smiles and hugs and no rehearsed apologies. She has cut off all of her locks. I remember when her now closely cropped hair once fell all around her breasts at poetry readings. She runs her fingers through it and says it was "just time to let it go." We walk. We catch a cab. The rain reminds me to tell her of my October spent in Key West, Florida, where I had been invited to read my work. After talking to his agent in New York, a successful white male writer acquaintance of mine queried me about "This Lesbian Black woman with dreadlocks named Saphire who maxed a major first book deal...Six figures!". I relay the story. She laughs. Laughs hard. The newly trimmed bush growing from her scalp frames her face differently than the long tresses. She is younger and older and appears to be traveling light. Makes me think Sampson didn't lose his strength because Delilah cut his locks off. He lost his strength because, unlike Saphire, he was careless enough to restrict it to one place- externally. I'd already read the excerpt of her controversial first novel Push in the controversial Black issue of the New Yorker and subsequently received a complete uncorrected proof from the publisher.

(Scene 1) In an East Village apartment over coffee, muffins, red wine and cigarettes, we exchange a lot of laughter and address the controversies regarding her work. The first being her unconventional writing style.

Carl- You use the protagonists (Precious Jones) voice to tell the story. Her idioms are clear and words are written phonetically. The reader really gets a sense that she is illiterate before she ever admits it. Then, you switch suddenly to a third person omniscience. The third person narrative keeps many of Precious' idioms. It's very interesting that after several pages, you complete the omniscient voice and never return to it. We only hear from Precious for the rest of the book ( and some of the women in her life) via poetry and essays. It was as if, just for a moment- in the beginning of the book, she'd lost her voice- couldn't talk anymore- but in her effort to claim herself, took over again. The ghost of herself was silenced for good.

Saphire-I wasn't trying to write a novel. It started out with this child's voice and my own determination not to let everything I had seen and heard in Harlem escape me. And it went on and kept going from there. I wasn't trying to write a novel, I was trying to tell a story. I definitely wasn't thinking that I had to do it a certain way, that the third person voice had to be (indicating) up here and what have you- it was like Napoleon Ice Cream/ Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry/ you can mix the shit up if you want to! (Laughter) I was thinking of it as an energy and music driven novel. The music of Harlem in the Eighties was hip-hop. I wasn't doing the James Baldwin thing where he was listening to Coleman Hawkins and Bessie Smith. This thing was speeding! I was also trying to show, visually, by the shortness of the novel, that this characters life was going to be short- even though I don't dwell on her death. I wanted to show life as I see it in this AIDS era we're living in. Like putting a video on fast forward - even if you're walking slow- it's fast, because we're dealing with a different sense of time, a different sense of mortality. I wanted the book to be Bap-Bap-Bap-Bap! I wasn't trying to satisfy the reader- I wasn't trying to give them a conclusive ending and fill in all the blanks! Who the fuck- (Pause) I read an excerpt of it on the phone to my step-sister, just the first few pages, and she asked me, "What is going to happen to that girl?" That's what I wanted the reader to do. I didn't want to tell them what was going to happen, I didn't want to fix it, I didn't want a happy ending or a tragic ending or whatever. I wanted to leave a big question mark in America's heart about what's going to happen to these children- I wanted to leave them with that sense of dissatisfaction. I wanted them to wish there was a hundred more pages- WELL THERE AIN'T! You know what I mean? You figure it out! I wanted it to hit hard...to really love her and then have it hit hard/ Asta la vista baby! Because that's what's happening. And I wanted them to think about the author. How do you think I feel having had so many people slip through my fingers? Not knowing what happened...


Carl- (Hesitating) Okay...Second controversy...Cash! (She's laughing at me) People are talking about the money you got for this book, your first novel. Your book deal became the topic of-uh- conversation, I guess, across America. Writers I knew who didn't know you, like the guy in Key West, were asking Who is Saphire, and is she all that?

Saphire- Getting this money, and knowing that I'm going to get it has been both joyous and problematic. It's a two book deal, so that negates that idea that I got it for one- but I've worked hard all my life, so to get this is very rewarding for me. One thing I can say is I have no feelings of unworthiness. I deserve it. A whole lot of other people deserve it! I earned it. This is not an NEA grant, which I've never gotten or anything. I entered the literary marketplace with a product and it sold. This is America, right? This is CAPITALISM-it wasn't like I was taking the tax payers money. I didn't get a NYFA grant and write pussypussypussy and put Christ in piss or anything. I entered into a business situation with my product and we sold it-what's the big deal?

Carl- Of course.

Saphire- I didn't get like Stephen King and them get, so what's the big deal?

Carl- The big deal is "Who is this Black Dyke Bitch and how dare she get as much as I have or could get when I am White or Republican or heterosexual or male- The patriarchy!"

Saphire- Exactly! Right! This is the real issue, isn't it? It's not so much that somebody got the money, it's how dare me get it! How dare a black woman! How dare a sexual outsider! How dare someone who we consider less get more! That's the real issue- who got it. In many ways I have been deemed by this culture as unworthy. As less. As someone who people perceive as less- who is perceived as racially inferior, intellectually inferior, sexually misguided and sick- I'm no Yale graduate. I'm a City College kid... All that, and still got paid! (High five) It was-uh- no miracle I got paid. I had self esteem enough to go get a good agent with this manuscript. I had enough sense to negotiate, so I had something to do with getting paid...



Carl- Earlier, we talked about vague and sometimes not so vague concepts of exploitation. From what I understand, there was immediate excitement from your agent and eventually publishers over your novel. Were you at any point suspicious of that? Did you ever feel like the same Middle America that rejects you also wants to exploit you? To have you exploit your overweight sexually abused protagonist, Precious Jones, and her pathetic incestual family in a contemporary impoverished Harlem? Another kind of family to counterbalance the 1980's Cosby era?

Saphire- No. I'm not afraid of people thinking that I'm being exploitative. I want to bust up the Cosby myth. The day the Cosby show went off the air, I think that was the same day South Central erupted in flames. The Cosby show presented a myth- or I will say a lifestyle I don't know about. This is happening, what's happening in Precious Jones' family is happening- Yesterdays New York Times showed two black women who had murdered their children. Okay? So we know it's happening! What am I doing that the New York Times isn't doing? Except I show you these people as humans and caught in a web that they can't escape from, on some level, without help as opposed to showing fucking monsters over and over and over again. I give them an alternative, I show you a way out- that even in the most desperate situations there is a way out. So I feel fine with the publication of the book and the book being put out in a major way. During the writing of it I had a horrible time...just in getting it done and relationships and what have you- I'd never dealt with big companies before- the one thing that sustained me was the thought that one hundred and sixty thousand copies of this book would be published and of that many many black people would read it...white people are gonna read it, I know that...but specifically young black people and gay people...a lot of people are going to get to see this...listen, the first print run of American Dreams was two thousand copies...I knew as fine a book as I thought that was/ and I had deep respect for my publishers/ I knew that within my lifetime I wanted to reach my genre, if at all possible...this is what I'm living for. I'm an artist. There's nothing else I really care about. If I can get it out to millions, I'll get it out to millions. If the next book I write could sell like a Color Purple, or a Toni Morrison, or a Terry McMillan, that is fine with me. I do not feel exploited or exploitative because I want to reach millions. I would've felt exploited if I had died with that novel in my file cabinet and someone came in my house after I'm dead and started looking through my papers and said "Look what this bitch did here!" -and then the state of New York published it and gets the proceeds. So I've done the right thing. I've done what we all supposed to do. I did what Zora Neale did! I got behind my work and put it out there. I'd like to see everybody- instead of going berserk- do the same thing. Because that is the real exploitation, after you're dead, your parents come in your house and burn your notebooks when they find out you're gay, when they find out you fucked Sammy Sue on the rooftop and they're ashamed of it and all that-

Carl- Sammy Sue?

Saphire- (Big Laugh) Uh-huh...yeah...So I feel good. I feel that my art did not die in shame. My art did not get torn up. I did not cut my wrists. I did not dissolve into drugs and self hate. I'm proud of who I am. I'm proud of my sexuality. I'm proud of my race. I'm proud of my class background, and I've taken my work to the world. And with my class background, working class- we don't publish- I'M NOT THE TALENTED TENTH! You kow what I mean? And my shit is out there, and I'm very proud of that! I was not living in Scarsdale. I lived in Harlem for thirteen years. The building I put Precious in is where I lived! I taught at that (GED Prep ) school (in the novel)! So I was not no voyeur! I have a right to this story. It's my story too! I didn't come out there with no video camera. I was there. I was trying to figure out how are we going to change this? Who are these people coming to me, living life like this? Why is a girl twenty and thirty years younger than me going through what I went through? Why hasn't it stopped? I was raped as a child. Why hasn't it stopped? That's the consciousness I went there with.

Carl- Have you ever read Wallace Thurman's Enfants Of The Spring?

Saphire-No.

Carl- Thurman himself was allegedly part of that talented tenth, or supposed to have been. And he died, on Randall's Island, broke and drunk and young. In Enfants of The Spring, he creates a character based on another writer, Richard Bruce Nugent-

Saphire- Yes, of course.

Carl- And Nugent, was homosexual and proud and an outcast in that Talented Tenth Literary canon- and like his friend Thurman, kind of living in the margins. They were friends and colleagues of Hughes and Cullen and Hurston and Bontemps. But Thurman remained incredibly angry about his personal lack of success- and aside from one short story and a few poems, Nugent never published a book in his lifetime. Yet, Thurman thought of Nugent as one the most brilliant writers of the so called Harlem Renaissance. In the story, Thurman creates a Nugent prototype that has written the most important manifesto of the era. On the night that he completes it, he places the handwritten manuscript on the bathroom floor, runs the bath water, and slits his wrist in the tub so that his work would be discovered and published posthumously. Unfortunately, the water overflows and washes all of the ink off of the pages. What's left is a body. This I think, is a powerful image. It leaves an indelible mark. This is the legacy left for artists who are living in the margins of society. To never produce work during their lifetime that profits them. To-

Saphire- To be a victim. I have great admiration for the literati. I admire Toni Morrisson and all them. But I'm a homosexual. An ex-prostitute. I've been an addict. I'm outside of that. I could never go in. And I'm not gonna spend all my life being mad that I'm not them. Just the fact that I am who I am meant I was able to create this kind of art- and I'm not saying my art is better or worse, it's different. And I probably would not have been able to create it had I been to Howard and Radcliffe and went on- you know what I mean. I wouldn't have been able to write this book had I been living a closeted life. I wouldn't have been able to write this book had I had a good teaching position at Columbia! I was teaching in these types of literacy programs. I think we need to value more of who we are. I think of literature as a pot-luck. Everybody brings something different to the table. No, I'm not bringing what the Talented Tenth brought to the table, but the table would be very empty without what I bring.


Carl- You're bringing ham hocks, greens and pussy to a table of good wine and cheese.

Saphire- (Throwing her head back, laughing) Yeah- Exactly!

Carl-You identify yourself as a homosexual/ a bi-sexual, an ex-prostitute-

Saphire- A sex worker.

Carl- The writer Jewelle Gomez also identifies herself this way, and Dr. Aisha Mae Holland is another acclaimed writer who shares some of these same experiences in interviews and in her work. Perhaps the personal heroics of their overcoming tremendous obstacles to be who they are is part of the acclaim they receive. Bravo for the brevity of making it, and living to talk about it. But when I think about Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, I recognize them as Black women writers identified as heterosexual and middle class/ writers who have become part of a certain canon. Still, I know they produce work with their ears to the ground. Like Mary Helen Washington said, "to know the herstory of black women is to know more than the tragedy and despair, is to recognize the mute and inglorious ways these artists devised to retain their creativity." Shange did come from some privilege and lived in urban communities and went to better schools- but I don't know that any of that mattered. She heard the voices. I don't know that the product is restricted by privilege or determined by disadvantage. Harold Cruse used that as a means of criticizing Lorraine Hansberry for writing about a working class family she didn't personally grow up in. But I think there are many disadvantages even in advantage. In "Women Of Crisis", Dr.Coles and Mrs. Coles make it clear when they question "where does a woman begin with resentment and moral, personal outrage?...to turn on herself and (be willing) to explain her predicament- at once personal, social, and...intellectual."

Saphire- Right. Exactly.

Carl- Ishamel Reed criticized Shange twenty years ago for creating Black men who throw their babies out of tenement windows. Alice walker received a lot of flack from Black Male critics for her portrayal of women-beating Black men in The Color Purple. In your novel Precious Jones has two children by her father who has been sexually abusing her since she was in first grade. What do you think about these criticisms as they may come up in relation to your work and it's potentially large readership?

Saphire- I think that white cultures elevate whatever they want to elevate. Eldridge Cleaver wrote a book about raping white women, and they made it a number one book. I don't think he did that because that's what he was doing, and I don't think he wrote that book to sell-out or anything.

Carl- Do you think he was pleading a Black case?

Saphire- How do you mean?

Carl-When responding to a question about Toni Morrison's work, Henry Louis Gates quotes writer/cultural critic Albert Murray in the New Yorker as saying "I think it's tainted with do- goodism , I think it's redressing wrongs...we don't have to condescend to no Goddamn Jane Austin...we don't need special pleading for anything and the same goes for Blackness."

Saphire- (Unimpressed) Well...I don't know who he (Murray) is...I'm not well versed in who he is...

Carl- (Chuckle) No one is. I think that's the point of Gates' article.

Saphire- I Know Stanley Crouch elevates him...but what can I say? I don't really have a response to all that. When Precious is asked in the book what she thinks about people trying to stop the showing of the Color Purple, her response is "This is men as I know them." She only knows one man, her father and Farrakhan (from a poster), and now her son- she has hope for the son. She loves her son. How does she even get that within her? So every time she can love she does love, but the reality of her experience is rape, abuse and ridicule. Now, I'm sorry- we need to talk about that. That's just like white people asking why are Black people always talking about racism- because it's happening...it's happening...I feel a lot of bitterness and anger in these Black men's comments-but I'm not writing for them. It never crossed my mind- Albert Murray reading my books- I'm writing for somebody like Precious- somebody who could understand her...Precious would be invisible to the invisible man. Ralph Ellison's character would not see her-would step over her. She is the ultimate in invisibility. It's an act of one of the great forces of nature that she can see herself- that she hasn't disintegrated like a Precola Breedlove. and women are perpetrators too. All her father does is fuck the child. The mother hits in the head with a frying pan and fucks her too...so it is not that women are good and men are bad- when people are put in positions of disempowerment and deep poverty, they turn on each other. Rats do that . Women will do it even more because they have more access to helpless people. It's not about one gender being good and the other is bad. Change the condition people live in and they wouldn't act like that anymore...That whole argument is so... I would think men would be thinking about how they can sit down and hold hands, and how to stop following each other home and beating each other on the head, how to stop male rape in prisons...I would think we'd be making quantum leaps by now...

(Lights fade slowly to black on an East Village street. The conversation, un-ended. A Black Cowgirl saddles herself and rides up 9th street- Bullet holes everywhere she walks. Tongue and fingers and closely cropped hair and push- up ninth street. A girl for flowers and a place in the picture. Conversation un-ended.) End of Act One...


Originally published in aRude magazine, 1996

Rich Man Poor Man: New York Times Profiles Fort Greene by Carl Hancock Rux

“The poverty stricken condition of the inhabitants residing in the [Fort Green*/Clinton Hill district] of Brooklyn render it almost an unknown land,” or so claimed an article published in the New York Times titled “Homes of the Poor.” Focusing on a certain section of the east Brooklyn area defined as “between Flushing and Dekalb Avenues, as far east as Classon Avenue and as far west as Ryerson, extending across Fulton Avenue,” the Times item said the real estate boom has resulted in class conflict among a majority of the area’s longtime residents (identified as “renters or squatters”) and its new neighbors—middle to upper income homeowners (identified as out-priced Manhattanites attracted to the spatial wealth of Brooklyn and able to afford the high price of its grand scale Neo-Gothic brownstones.) The paper further explained the conflict as one that had existed for some time, evidenced perhaps by a letter to the editor of a local Brooklyn paper published prior to the Times profile. The author, a new homeowner in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, seemed pleased with his new home and the potential of his new neighborhood when he wrote “Perchance there are but few places about more desirable for residences, or more pleasant for our evening walks,” but made it apparent he was cognizant of (if not terribly sympathetic to) the living conditions of his less privileged neighbors, querying “How long must these nuisances persist? On every side filthy shanties are permitted to be erected from which issue all sorts of offensive smells…It is indeed a fact that many of the inmates of these hovels keep swine, cattle, etc. in their cellars and not an unusual circumstance to witness these animals enjoying side by side with their owners the cheering rays of the sun; whilst offal and filth of the assorted family is suffered to collect about their premises and endanger the lives of those in their neighborhood by its sickening and deadly effluvia.”

In a sharp departure from its usual “best affordable neighborhood” Sunday features, the Times printed the findings of several reporters they’d dispatched throughout the Fort Green/Clinton Hill district to interview its lower income residents, throwing a klieg light on dire poverty, growing crime and infant mortality rates, rampant unemployment, and a potential city wide public health crisis. The report suggested that, despite the increase in property values and recent widespread interest in the neighborhood as a desirable quarter in which to raise middle class families, only a small percentage of the community’s inhabitants were able to afford to own the homes they lived in while the average resident was largely unemployed, without healthcare: “For of the whole number of men who our reporter talked with, there were only about half a dozen who had permanent employment, and very many whose miserable condition as well as that of their families, attested the truth of their statements, declared that they had not made more than one or two days work for weeks and months.” These residents were also living with the constant threat of eviction. This situation was ascribed to landlords charging astronomical rents for substandard dwellings in order to encourage undesirable tenants to relocate so they might sell their properties to the highest bidder. Especially noted were the number of people who illegally occupied space—an emergent community of “squatters.” In one particularly scandalous paragraph, the expose implied that an invisible demarcation line existed in the newly gentrified region, one that segregated the middle class from their economically challenged neighbors, adding “Not one in a thousand of the citizens who live within a gunshot of [Fort Green’s poorer areas] have ever traversed the length of it.” The Times invited its readers on a tour of an area it referred to as a “city of shanties… hemmed in on all sides by a desirable class of houses.”

The profile began by introducing several disparate characters who had “settled on the vacant lots around Fort Green”: an old man who lived in a “hovel” with a seven or eight-year-old girl whom he had raised from infancy, the mother being dead. When interviewed, the old man (his name was not published in the article) was frying meal cakes on a makeshift stove and the Times reported the little girl was “eating them as if very hungry.” The old man claimed he and the little girl (who was not clearly identified as his daughter) subsisted on whatever he is able to make from begging, and the rest he “sends across the water” to his three children. Neighbors (who were not able to give either the old man’s name or the girl’s) admitted seeing him begging for change with the child in tow, but more often they witnessed him “snatching bits of bread or other food from the swell-pails of the neighbors.” Also profiled was a woman described as “having seen better days—now far advanced in years and suffering from disease.” The unnamed Brooklyn woman shared a makeshift dwelling with her widowed daughter and two grandchildren, and made a living for them by “selling small articles from a little store,” but feared she was getting sicker and would be unable to continue to provide for the family.

Some of the interviewees appeared to be “comfortably provided for,” and “would scorn to beg,” but what most of the area’s poorer residents feared was the harsher winter months and lack of heat or hot water. One man who had been “sick for several months,” had no heat or hot water and feared the safety of his wife and children in the bitter cold months. The Times noted that though he was poor, his house was “neat and tidy” and that he “appeared to be deserving of assistance.” The storyalso asserted the reason some of the area’s needy residents received no assistance from the city—citing “the ones who are clamorous at City Hall and obtain assistance are the ones who do not need it…a personal inspection by someone specially appointed for that purpose is the only way to ascertain who are the really needy persons.” Another subject of the article was a construction worker, brought home severely injured after having been buried to his chin by the caving in of an embankment where he was at working. Times journalists were present when his wife met him at the door. Fearing he was dead she burst into tears, while their three children clung to their mother “in mute sorrow.” This particular family had no “bread or other article of food in the house,” the paper ascertained, and when asked if they might get some assistance from relatives or neighbors in the area, the injured worker replied, “We don’t know anything much about the neighbors, an’ don’t visit much, an’ every one must take care of himself.”

“Homes of the Poor” was published in 1858 on the third page of the Feb.24th edition of the New York Times and came as the city of Brooklyn was on the verge of urban development. The acerbic letter to the editor (published nine years earlier in the Brooklyn Eagle) was just an early sign of growing agitation as the rural city of Brooklyn developed into a suburban haven for the wealthy and middle class. As early as 1814, Robert Fulton’s ship Nassau opened a route between New York City and Brooklyn City, and by the mid-1840s, the Brooklyn ferry was a regular service many relied on in order to commute between their home in Brooklyn and their work in Manhattan. At the time, the area (then known as “the Hill”) was predominantly rural. The land along North Portland to St. Edwards Street and along Park Avenue had been a burial ground, described by the poet/Fort Green resident Walt Whitman as “a potter’s field, which is seldom (in summer) without activity going on inside its low paling.” The district was largely undeveloped, except for the massive Raymond St. Jail (now the site of a parking lot across the street from Brooklyn Hospital) and four farms: the Post farm (Washington Park and Carlton Avenue area); the Spader farm (north along Clermont and Vanderbilt); the Ryerson farm (north to south along Carlton and Adelphi); and the Jackson farm area (a strip of land extending from Flushing avenue southward to Dekalb Avenue and bounded by Classon Avenue on the east, and Ryerson Street on the west.) Old Dutch families had owned some of the properties, but as early as the 1840s, these families and their heirs began to sell off their land in small plots.

In the first decade of the 19th century, Brooklyn had about 4,000 citizens—1,432 of them were African American slaves. Even before slavery was abolished in New York State in 1827, many free African Americans had settled in the downtown Brooklyn areas, opening the Brooklyn African Woolman’s Benevolent Society, and forming abolitionist groups at both African Hall (on Nassau Street) and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The City of Brooklyn (which would not join Manhattan until 1898) still had a ways to go: water came from street pumps, no sewage system existed and there was no railroad until 1829. Even so, as early as 1823, Brooklyn properties were highly sought after by developers who intended to make Brooklyn the best alternative to overcrowded Manhattan (which, as late as 1850, extended no further than 23rd Street).

According to legend, the shanty town phenomenon originated in the late 1840s, when a “colored man” built a shanty on the “old Jackson farm,” a patch of land once owned by Long Island native, John Jackson. The Jackson family had come to Brooklyn just after the Revolutionary War, purchasing 30 acres or so in the east Brooklyn quarter (the seventh ward—or as it is now known, the Fort Green/Clinton Hill vicinity). With the exception of a farm and a large plantation house, most of the Jackson land remained uncultivated until 1801, when Mr. Jackson sold part of it to the United States Government to build the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which quickly became a source of employment for people who settled into the area. Well into the middle of the 19th century, east Brooklyn was a rural region of dense forests and grazing hills. By the time the unnamed African American settler was mysteriously “ordered away” (the Times article neglected to say by whom or through what means) because of “numerous visitors to his place,” and “frequent quarrels between himself and wife”— the shanty idea had already caught on.

In 1848, or roughly the dawn of Brooklyn’s urbanity and industrialization, it was reported that the district between Clinton Avenue and as far down as Raymond St. (now Ashland Pl.) was a “dreary waste with but few houses.” The oldest masonry houses, 237 and 239 Carlton Ave. were practically the only ones in existence. As the density of New York City’s neighborhoods became more insufferable, the hills of rural Brooklyn began to take shape as a fashionable brownstone district for middle class families, as its as yet undeveloped areas had become a refuge for new immigrants. By 1850, the population of Brooklyn had swelled to nearly 100,000 people. As real property development in downtown Brooklyn moved further eastward, Brooklyn drastically changed. As the seventh issue of the Brooklyn Eagle (Jan.2nd, 1849) declared, “An immense number of streets have been opened; hills have been removed; long rows of palaces have been builded [sic]; churches, almost without number, have been erected; a public school system has been established; a beautiful City Hall has been nearly completed; a City Hospital has been projected and partially endowed; and…it seems that our citizens are to have the luxury of gas light much earlier than we had anticipated.”

Suddenly the few pre-Civil war frame houses and clapboard shacks were being replaced with handsome brownstones (drawing their architectural inspiration from England and Holland), contributing a certain “respectability” to the area. Developers offered homes with hand carved ashlar masonry, intricate vestibule tile work, detailed marble and alabaster working fireplaces in every room, ground floor kitchens and family dining rooms, parlor floor studies and formal dining rooms with detailed foliate plaster work, master bedrooms, servants quarters, backyards, etc. On the cusp of a real estate boom, many middle class and wealthy inhabitants of Manhattan began to reject the spatial limitations of their island, and opt for the endless farmland, woodland, and rolling hills of Brooklyn.

The open terrains of the seventh ward also became an attractive prospect for many new immigrants who could not find or afford housing in overcrowded Manhattan. Chief among them were the Irish. Settling on unoccupied, as yet unsold land along Myrtle Avenue, the area they occupied became known as “Young Dublin.” According to Whitman, they were “permitted by the owners to live here, until the land should be wanted, rent free.” The Times article described the shanties and their inhabitants thus:

In some places there was no fire, and the children were kept in bed to protect them from the cold. Extending back, or attached to one side, is generally a low shed in which is kept a horse or cow, and the sunny corners are usually fitted with small cubbyholes, which are occupied, by the dogs, the goats or the poultry. There is scarcely a shanty that has not a few hens about the door: occasionally a goat, instead of a cow, is made to supply milk for the family. Of dogs there is a decided falling off in number and size since the hard times and the rise in the price of beef shanks. Pigs are not often visible. In every case where they keep a cow, a hog shed is sunk into the ground at the corner of the shanty, which is filled every morning with warm swill from the distilleries. These cows are the sole means of support for some, the milk being peddled among the neighbors, or sold to milkmen. Nine out of ten of the shanties have only one room, which does not average over twelve feet square, and this serves all the purposes of the family. A bed, a few chairs or benches, a table, a stove and a cradle is seldom empty. In some cases a soapbox with a pair of pine rockers on the bottom, serves for a cradle, in which the baby sleeps as sweetly as it would in mahogany. Around the walls are hung in every house, pictures of the Virgin of Christ and the Apostles or of the Archbishop Hughes. Not a picture of an immoral subject is ever seen, and making the necessary allowance for the poverty of the occupants, the interior of many of those humble shanties are patterns of neatness. There are from two to six children in every house—we speak from actual inspection. From their own confession there are some who have a few dollars in the savings bank, but for every one of this class, there are fifty who are barely able to keep soul and body together. Some of the children look famished and pliable in the extreme, and not a few men and women declared that if they could one meal a day, they would be satisfied. While there many improvident persons in this little community, there are also many industrious, temperate and tidy, who have seen better days, and whose misfortunes are not the results of their own misconduct. A personal inspection by one anxious to relieve suffering would develop many cases, which appeal strongly for assistance.

Not surprisingly, “Young Dublin” became quite controversial. In response to the public outcry against the shanty dwellers and their “animals,” Brooklyn mayor Francis Stryker and the Common Council of Brooklyn toured “the flourishing settlement” along Myrtle and promptly ordered “all the pigs, hogs, goats to be removed,” further prohibiting the rearing of such as endangering the health of the city. Young Dublin, however, stood up for its rights, and for a time defied the city. At length the police made a “general and concerted attack upon pigdom,” and the pens and homes were all demolished and the pigs ran amok in the streets. Brooklyn Eagle editor Walt Whitman demanded that a park be built in the seventh ward area, complaining that east Brooklyn desperately needed a free open space densely populated with trees for the poor community of Fort Green, which, every summer, was plagued with cholera. He further stated in his column, “the inhabitants there are not so wealthy nor so well situated as those on the heights…we have a desire that these, and the generations after them, should have such a place of recreation…descending Fort Green one comes amid a colony of squatters, whose chubby children, and the good natured brightness of the eyes of many Irishwomen, tell plainly enough that you are wending among the shanties of the Emeralders.” The park Whitman wanted built for the citizens received strong support from longtime residents who wanted to prevent developers from building on the only available patch of undisturbed land in the area. The park was erected, complete with shady covered tar-concrete walks overlooking grassy spaces, a vine-covered trellis with iron framed benches beneath it, a formal military saluting ground which ceremoniously looked out over a series of steps and landings leading to the Revolutionary war’s Prison Ship Martyrs monument and vault, a place for public gatherings of up to 30,000 people, a permanent rostrum for public speaking, and two level lawns used for croquet and tennis. Chestnut trees were planted around the periphery of the park, and in off hours, proud iron gates stood locked at every entrance. The squatters had no choice but to abandon the immediate area, returning only to visit the park that had been built for them—when it was open.

Their main stays thus removed, a general hegira of Young Dublin’s inhabitants soon occurred. They sojourned toward a new land where it was assumed they would face neither persecution nor prejudice, never to be uprooted again. Their journey took them no more than a few blocks away. On Grand avenue, north of Myrtle avenue, “230 inmates” were alleged to inhabit 44 shanty houses; on Steuben Street, 57 shanties housed “268 inmates”; between Myrtle and Dekalb Avenues, 94 shanties with “239 inmates”; between Dekalb and Lafayette Avenues, 20 shanties with “90 inmates”; and south of Lafayette avenue an estimated number of 125 shanties, which at the average of the others, contained an aggregate population of 500—making a total of 340 shanties and 1,427 inhabitants in the Hollow.

However, the housing development boom in Brooklyn continued. Only twenty years after the New York Times’ expose, elegant block front brownstones stood corner to corner, prominent residents built their mansions and populated the area—sending their children to area private schools such as Lockwood’s Academy (a co-educational school on South Oxford St.) which advertised “no vacancies in this school for those who find it hard to tell the truth: for boys who use tobacco; nor for those who have any habit of speech or behavior at variance with purity of character.” The exclusive Oxford Club on South Oxford Place (recently torn down to make room for townhouses near Atlantic Ave.) was formed as a social club “distinguished for its literary and scientific character.” The nearby Roanoke apartment building was described by the Brooklyn Eagle as “the first of its kind on the Hill…the building will equal the finest apartment houses in Manhattan.” Cumberland Avenue was known as “millionaire’s row.”

Meanwhile, the former squatter’s area beyond Myrtle Avenue toward the Navy Yard, was described in an 1890 New York Observer article as “principally tenements and small dwellings,” where the Irish and “colored population existed as well.” The Fort Green Poor, now relegated to the other side of the park, didn’t seem to create as much of a threat to the rest of the community. In 1894, Mr. Hiram S. Thomas, a wealthy African American from upstate New York, purchased one of the newly built townhouses on Fort Green Place, then known as an “aristocratic thoroughfare,” for himself and his family. The suddenly formed Fort Green Place Block Association, led by Mrs. Emma Andiron (said to be “the first woman doctor living in Brooklyn”) wrote a letter to the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, warning that if Mr. Thomas were to be permitted to live in the neighborhood, it would “depreciate the value of our property.” According to building records, Mr. Hiram S. Thomas and his family never occupied the building, selling it less than two months after he’d purchased it.

At the end of the 19th century, Fort Green/Clinton Hill was a grand and beautiful neighborhood, albeit one that would endure many changes, and many more conflicts regarding race and class—and even a century later, some things still await resolve.

For the sake of consistency, since the Times article spelled it Fort Green, we did the same throughout the piece.—ed.

EMANCIPATION DAY:
THE HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN FORT GREEN/ CLINTON HILL BROOKLYN

by Carl Hancock Rux

Celebrating Emancipation Day, a picnic was held in Myrtle Avenue park according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The event (Wednesday, Aug. 1st 1883), celebrated “the enfranchisement of the Negro race” and was “one of the jolliest and most rollicking picnics of the season”. Seventeen years after the legal Emancipation of slavery in the United States and fifty years after the Slavery Abolition Act in the majority of the British Empire, as many as two thousand “colored residents of New York, Jersey City, Staten Island, Newark, New Haven, Jamaica and the city of Brooklyn” arrived in Brooklyn on horseback and by foot: both “well to do colored citizens in suits of broadcloth, high hats and showy jewelry”; “colored belles” and “colored mashers” as well as “longshormen with rough suit of clothes, jumper and clay pipe”. Featuring beer and watermelon sold for “one cent a slice and upward” , the Emancipation Proclomation was read aloud, followed by a 100 yard foot race, cornet and trombone solos, fireworks, and dancing continuing long after midnight. One thing “very noticeable” by the Eagle’s reporter were the “number of women who were possessed of good looks, who were either married to or associating with colored men” and the “few white men with colored women”.
Though the arrival of Africans and the “emancipation of slavery” in America is a long and multifarious matter, from it’s earliest, slavery existed in Brooklyn and the other parts of Long Island. From the beginnings of slavery in British North America (around 1607) when English colonists and Dutch settlers first arrived in Virginia with 20 or so African slaves in tow, nearly 240 years would pass with over twelve million Africans shipped to the Americas before the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, legally (if not officially) ending slavery in the United States in 1865. The slave trade became a cornerstone of the New York economy and held the largest colonial slave population north of Maryland. Though slave labor was especially important in the development of New York and Brooklyn, not all pre-Revolutionary war African Americans were slaves. As early as the 17th century, many blacks and whites had coequal standing in the colonial courts, with indentured European laborers, who were cheaper to import to America from England than indigenous Africans. Free blacks were allowed to own property (Jews, free or indentured, were not). Blacks intermarried freely with whites and in some cases owned white indentured servants. Many Africans in New Netherland (as the state was then called) were trusted to serve in the militias, given arms and helped to defend the Dutch and British settlements during the “Indian War” of 1641-44. They were even used to aid in the fight against white tenant farmers and the Anti-Rent Wars of the Rensselaerswyck revolt (the land now known as Albany, NY). By the 18th century, New York had numerous visibly white persons held as slaves. In 1609, a boat’s crew from the Half Moon landed on Coney Island and anchored at the mouth of “the great river of the mountains”. The earliest recorded grant of Brooklyn land dates back to 1636. After 1682, as the number of slaves rose (in many places more rapidly than the white population), by the time of the Revolutionary war there were but 50 residences known in Brooklyn, then an agricultural village of cedar groves, pastures, orchards and market gardens, Dutch farm houses scattered along the shore of the East river. What is known as South Brooklyn was largely swamp land. Individual Dutch slave owners, such as Director General Peter Stuyvesant (who served as the last Dutch Director-General of the colony of New Netherland from 1647 until it was ceded provisionally to the English in 1664 and became New York and after whom Stuyvesant avenue in Brooklyn is named) adopted a system of “half freedom”, allowing slaves to be free during “off-seasons”. The Dutch West India Company (principal trader of African slaves in which Stuyvesant played a pivotal role) relaxed its monopoly and “was willing to forego profit for the sake of spreading slavery in New Netherlands and getting the colony settled”. The British at first handled slaves in New York on the same relatively humane terms the Dutch had set. The population already was racially mixed, and slavery in New York at first was passed down not exactly by race, but by matrilineal inheritance: the child of a male slave and a free woman was free, the child of a female slave and a free man was a slave. Private settlers, however, still faced an acute shortage of agricultural labor that was retarding the colony. A company audit report noted that, "New Netherland would by slave labor be more extensively cultivated than it has hitherto been, because the agricultural laborers, who are conveyed thither at great expense to the colonists sooner or later apply themselves to trade, and neglect agriculture altogether." Slavery provided the necessary labor force which made farming attractive and profitable to the settlers. Most colonists found the Africans "proud and treacherous," and preferred to seek "seasoned" slaves from the West Indies and those seized by privateers from Spanish ships in order to expand its agricultural output.
Though written records of slavery in Brooklyn are scarce, the first written histories of Brooklyn are by General Jeremiah Johnson (a one sheet newspaper published “every Wednesday morning”). An article in 1800 describes all of Brooklyn as having a population of less than 5,000, “chiefly of Dutch extraction”—including “1,439 slaves and 46 free persons not enumerated.” The historian, speaking of the Brooklyn Dutch community, said, “some are attached to their old prejudices” but “liberality and a taste for the fine arts have made considerable progress. The slaves are treated well but the opinion relative to their freedom is yet too much influenced by pecuniary motives.” as early as 1732, slave-owner Edward Willet advertised the sale of “a very good negro woman, aged twenty seven...understanding all sorts of business, in city or country, and speaking very good English and Dutch.” In 1764, an Avis Remsen offered a reward of seventy shillings for the apprehension of a runaway negro named Harry who spoke “English, French and Spanish and a little of other languages.” Nationwide, many slaves, especially young men, tended to gravitate to New York city, rather than Canada. Here, many sought to escape the colony by taking passage on ships, whose captains often were not overly scrupulous about the backgrounds of their sailors. "Others skulked along the waterfront, where they were drawn into gangs of criminal slaves infesting the docks. The most notorious gang was the Geneva Club, named after the Geneva gin its members were fond of imbibing. There were also groups known as the Free Masons, the Smith Fly Boys, the Long Bridge Boys, and many others whose names have not been recorded. Slaves belonging to such gangs were extremely clannish and often engaged in “murderous feuds”. Only rarely, however, did they attack white persons. The very existence of such groups nevertheless caused the whites much anxiety. The authorities regarded them as a “much greater threat to the public safety than the deadlier gangs of white hoodlums on the waterfront”. One such incident, in 1712, involved a rebellion of slaves who decided death was preferable to life in bondage. They managed to collect a cache of muskets and other weapons and hide it in an orchard on the edge of town. On the night of April 6, twenty-four of the conspirators gathered, armed themselves, and set fire to a nearby building in Brooklyn Heights near the waterfront. Hiding among trees, when white citizens rushed to put out the blaze, the slaves opened fire on them, killing five and wounding six. From 1701 to 1726, officially, some 1,570 slaves were imported from the West Indies and another 802 from Africa. As it had under the Dutch, the colony continued to import relatively few slaves from Africa directly, except occasional cargoes of children. In some years illegal shipment of slaves on a single vessel outnumbered the official imports to the whole colony. For the most part, slave importation to the Americas ended by 1770.
During the Revolutionary war and the battle of Brooklyn, the construction of Fort Putnam at the summit (Fort Greene Park) defended General George Washington's retreat across the East River to safety before being left to the British. The British actively recruited slaves belonging to Patriot masters by declaring free “all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels)” that “are able and willing to bear arms” in “His Majesty's Troops”. Many African Americans, like Agrippa Hull and Prince Hall, did side with the Patriot cause. Promising freedom to any slaves owned by Patriot masters who joined the Loyalist forces (runaway slaves belonging to Loyalists were returned to their masters) as many as 5,000 black men served in the Continental Army, and hundreds more served on the sea. When George Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775, he barred the further recruitment of black soldiers, despite the fact that they had fought side by side with their white counterparts at the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. For black people, what mattered most was freedom. As the Revolutionary War spread through every region, those in bondage sided with whichever army promised them personal liberty. As the Revolutionary War ensued, an estimated 100,000 Africans escaped human bondage in America by boat or by death on the battlefield. .
Shortly after the Revolutionary war, a resolution passed in the state Constitutional Convention to abolish domestic slavery altogether, beginning with slaves who had served in the armed forces against the British. In November 1782, Britain and America signed a provisional treaty granting the former colonies their independence. As the British prepared for their final evacuation, the Americans demanded the return of American property, including runaway slaves, under the terms of the peace treaty. With thousands of apprehensive blacks seeking to document their service to the Crown, Brigadier General Samuel Birch, British commandant of the city of New York, created a list of claimants known as The Book of Negroes. 3,000 to 4,000 African Americans Loyalists boarded ships in New York bound for Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and Britain. By 1788, the slave trade in New York was banned outright (with some exception, as some Northern slave holders sold their human property to Southerners for tax purposes) and enforced by The New York Manumission Society, based in the Quaker population of Long Island and headed by the most prominent and wealthy men in the state. By the era of the Civil war (1860) as many as 180,000 African Americans who fought for their freedom as Union soldiers could trace their families to the era of the Pilgrims, predating the ancestries of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and most members of Congress and the U. S. Senate. A cencus report of 1861 gives the “colored population” of at 3,946, a decrease of about 1,000 in ten years, further noting 32 interracial marriages in new York (colored and white) and 6 in Brooklyn, with about 200 “colored” owners of “real estate”. Still, most free blacks lived in New York at risk of enslavement. The colonial courts ruled that if a white person claimed his black employee was a slave, the burden was on the black person to prove he was not. Blacks on the street who could give no plausible account of their movements or proof of their freedom often were picked up by the authorities and jailed on suspicion of being runaway slaves. Local authorities had all but unlimited power in such cases. A black man was arrested in New York City in 1773 simply "because he had curious marks on his back." In such cases the suspected fugitives were held in local jails while advertisements ran in the newspapers seeking their owners. If a claimant arrived, and reimbursed the sheriff for the cost of the detention and the ads, he took the black person away after a few legal formalities. There was little incentive for the sheriff to challenge the claim of ownership in such cases. Even if no claimant came forth, the authorities sometimes then sold the black person into slavery, to cover the cost of detaining and advertising him.
Many communities of free African Americans existed in the city of Manhattan before the development of Brooklyn. In Greenwich Village, for instance, by the 1630s Dutch settlers had cleared pastures and planted crops in an area called Sapokanikan by Native Americans who camped and fished in the meandering trout stream, and referred to by the Dutch as Noortwyck (present day Minetta lane and Minetta street). Freed African slaves brought here by the Dutch also farmed parcels of land in this sparsely populated district and the African American community was large enough to earn the ethnic nickname of Little Africa. By 1865's end of the Civil War, a full quarter of the city's African American population lived within a few blocks of Minetta Street. It was a thriving community, though terribly poor.
Africans and African Americans had for some time predominated in Five Points and Little Africa, both in the 6th Ward, which was near the African Burial Ground, located on Duane and Elks street, as well as in parts of the 5th and 8th wards. But by the 1840s, these had become integrated communities of working people, including many recent Irish immigrants. Areas like Five Points were hustling and bustling with business, commercial, and industrial activity. From 1825 through 1857, Seneca Village, located between 82nd and 89th Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues, was Manhattan's first significant community of African American property owners. By the 1840s, it had become a multi-ethnic community of African Americans, Irish, and German immigrants, and a few indigenous Americans. In 1855, the New York State Census reported approximately 264 individuals living in the village. There were three churches, as well as a school and several cemeteries. Within two years, Seneca Village would be razed and its identity erased by the creation of Central Park. Poor sanitation and crowded housing provided a breeding ground for diseases, and epidemics of cholera and yellow fever swept through in the city and the migration to Brooklyn was imminent.
Brooklyn, largely a rural district which would not see its primary urban development until after the Civil War. The areas now know as Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, once known as the Fourth Ward Brooklyn , were originally dubbed Wallabout by Dutch settlers, meaning “a bend in the harbor.” Walloons (French-speaking Protestants from what is now Belgium) settled here as early as 1624. Though African Americans were longtime Brooklyn residents (the borough had been the slaveholding capital of New York State until slavery was legally abolished in New York State in 1827, almost forty years before the nation wide Emancipation Proclamation of 1863), they were a small and declining proportion of Brooklyn's rapidly growing immigrant population during the 19th century. For the most part, this relatively small number of African Americans remained dispersed throughout the borough, unlike White immigrant groups that were far more concentrated. Through the 18th century, the area remained rural. During the Revolution, dozens of infamous British prison ships docked in the nearby Wallabout Bay. An estimated 11,000 American soldiers died there and were buried in shallow graves along the waterfront. In 1801 the federal government opened the Brooklyn Naval Yard nearby. Over the decades, many of the homes in the district were built for employees of the yards. Residential development of the area in the 1830’s, 40’s, and 50’s coincided with the rapid population increase in the city of Brooklyn. Being part of the flatlands along the East River, Wallabout was not looked upon with the prestige allotted to neighboring Fort Greene or Clinton Hill. As the century progressed, industrialism spread through the East River waterfront including DUMBO, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Wallabout. Before 1850, active shipyards, located just north of the neighborhood on the edge of Wallabout Bay, attracted laborers, including a community of free African American workers and their families. Colored School Number 1 (now known as the Charles A. Dorsey School, Public School 67, located on St. Edwards Ave. just off Myrtle) was built in 1847 for the children of African American shipyard workers. In 1842, in what is now known as Clinton Hill, there was but one house on the south side of Myrtle avenue, from Division avenue to Fort Greene, and that was a large house standing on the corner of Myrtle and Classon avenues. Between Myrtle avenue and the Jamaica Turnpike and Fort Greene to Division avenue, an area of one mile by two, there were in 1842 only thirty houses. There were a number of houses north of Myrtle avenue, but by actual count the population of Wallabout.
In 1838, only eleven years after slavery ended in New York State, free African American James Weeks purchased a modest plot of land from Henry C. Thompson, another free African American. That land in what is now Central Brooklyn became Weeksville, a thriving, self sufficient African American community. Weeksville quickly became a safe haven for southern Blacks fleeing slavery and free northern Blacks fleeing racial hatred and violence, including the deadly Civil War draft riots in lower Manhattan. Weeksville Residents established as a suburban enclave on the outskirts of Brooklyn. By 1850 Weeksville became the second largest known independent African American community in pre-Civil War America. Weeksville was also the only African American community whose residents were distinctive for their urban rather than rural occupations, and the only one that merged into a neighborhood of a major American city after the Civil War. Moreover, Weeksville had a higher rate of African American property ownership than 15 other U.S. cities and more job opportunities than ten other northern cities. By the 1860s, Weeksville had its own schools, churches, an orphanage, an old age home, a variety of Black-owned businesses and one of the country’s first African American newspapers, Freedman’s Torchlight. Almost 500 families headed by ministers, doctors, teachers, tradesmen and other self-reliant citizens lived in Weeksville by the 1900s. Its citizens included Alfred Cornish, a member of the 54th Regiment whose story was told in the film Glory; Moses P. Cobb, the first African American policeman in Brooklyn’s Ninth Ward, and Junius C. Morel, a well-known educator, journalist and activist. Freedmans Torchlight Weeksville covered seven blocks and was a model of African American entrepreneurial success, political freedom and intellectual creativity. Its residents participated in every major national effort against slavery and for equal rights for free people of color, including the black convention movement, voting rights campaigns, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, resistance to the Draft Riots in New York City; Freedman’s schools and African nationalism. According to one historian, Public School 83 in Weeksville became the first public school in the nation to integrate fully its teaching staff. "The community still existed through the 1930s, but by the mid-1950s, Weeksville was all but forgotten, with many of its structures and institutions replaced by new roads and buildings.
Other areas in Brooklyn also boasted some of the nation’s most prominent African Americans, including Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, who became the first African American woman to practice medicine in New York State. Founder of the Brooklyn Women’s Hospital and Dispensary and active in the suffragist movement, Dr. McKinney lived and operated her private practice from her home at 205 DeKalb ave in the “fashionable Hill District”. Other black doctors lived in the Brooklyn area including Dr. Thomas J. White, the first Black member of the Board of Education and Dr. George A. Phillips, a pharmacist and Dr. Gloucester who lived and practiced near what is today the Fulton Mall, on Duffield and Willoughby Streets in downtown Brooklyn. By 1870, more than one-half of Brooklyn's African Americans lived in Fort Greene, but even here African Americans made up only 10.3 percent of the population. By 1900 the area had the only major African American settlement in New York City. Many working-class African Americans and Whites lived in Fort Greene's northern section. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 established that the federal government would help owners looking for runaway slaves, which angered abolitionists in the North. Brooklyn was actively involved in the Abolitionist movement. Henry Ward Beecher, minister at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, mobilized anti-slavery feelings among his parishioners and others in the community. Men and women joined anti-abolitionist movements, contributed money to the cause, and invited such well known abolitionists as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to speak in their community. It is said that Plymouth Church, Bridge St. A.M.E. Church, the Lott House in Flatlands, and possibly a few private homes in downtown Brooklyn, were stops on the Underground Railroad. Frederick Douglass delivered a speech at the African Methodist Episcopal church in 1863 to a crowd of “white citizens” interested in the abolitionist movement.
Between 1850 and 1900, houses for middle- and upper-class Whites were built south and east of Fort Greene Park, drawing business and professional people from Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan. Racial discrimination in housing intensified early in the 20th century, concentrating African Americans along the Fulton Street corridor, with Fort Greene as its western boundary.
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed the slaves in the states in rebellion against the US, but not in areas under Union control (the border states of Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, and parts of Tennessee, Louisiana, and Virginia). African-Americans left the plantations and headed north, and some joined the Union army to fight against the South. Although slavery had been abolished, racial prejudice continued to exist in the North and South, and separate “colored” units were formed. After the war, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution legally ended slavery in America. Former slaves worked to improve the lives of African-Americans and struggled against continuing discrimination, relying on the strength of their families, religious institutions, traditions, and communities. Many riots precipitated the migration of African Americans to Brooklyn, not least of which were the Draft Riots of 1863 (July 11th to the 16th ). Inspired by the initiation of the Civil War draft in the ninth Congressional District, the riots (egregiously misrepresented by Martin Scorcese in his film “Gangs of New York”) began as early as 10 am on the morning of July 11th and did not subside until midnight almost one week later. Besides attacking the Armory, the Mayor’s Residence and various New York City Buildings, race hatred was the current that seemed to propel the most brutal crimes. As the Times reported, what most “indicated (the) political animus” of the draft riots were “the cunningly devised...causeless and inhuman treatment of the negroes of the City”, continuing, “It seemed to be an understood thing that negroes should be attacked wherever found, whether they offered any provocation or not...In the streets running north from Canal Street, where many colored people reside, mobs of foul-looking boys and men (and several women armed with sticks) scoured up and down...in pursuit of negroes”. The Times further reported that a “negro cartman” who resided on Carmine St., was attacked by a crowd of “400 men and boys” as he exited his stable. The nameless victim was beaten to death with “clubs and paving stones”, his corpse then “hung on a tree opposite the burying ground” and “set fire to” as his assailants “danced and yelled and swore their horrid oaths around his burning corpse.” The charred body remained hanging in the tree as an effigy of race hatred for no less than twenty four hours. When more than 300 police officers tried to remove a similarly mangled, charred body from a tree on Clarkson Street, their headquarters were attacked. African Americans, in fear of their lives, fled their lower west side districts in Manhattan for police stations seeking asylum, and in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the walls were manned and mounted with guns and all its vessels were hauled out to stream in order to protect its African American workers. Several companies of Marines were assisted by no less than 300 sailors equipped with cannons, revolvers, ammunition boxes and cutlasses. Though Brooklyn paled in comparison to tragedies amassed in Manhattan during the Draft Riot, it did not escape it. The Brooklyn Eagle reported “ as far as we have evidence, there has been no gathering that could be designated as a mob, or any demonstration that could be called a riot witnessed in Brooklyn”, it was added that “the burning of the colored church the other evening in Williamsburgh have been attributed to ‘rioters’”. By 1880, Brooklyn had a resident population of 599, 549 with 411,295 being natives, 188, 254 described as “foreign”, 590, 278 as “white” and “9,271” being “colored”. The Fourteenth Ward (Fort Green, Clinton Hill) had 25, 579 inhabitants alone. Another race riot ensued on the upper west side of Manhattan in 1900, when John “Lamplighter” Davis, an African American, was accused of shooting and killing John Brennan, a twenty year old white messenger on West 66th St., an area largely populated by African Americans, Irish, Italians and Latino Immigrants. The area, known as “The Tenderloin” or “San Juan Hill”, the New York Times reported two African American gentleman, unrelated to the shooting, were attacked by a mob of whites in their neighborhood of 64th st. and Amsterdam Ave., and beaten until the police could disperse of the mob. In neither case were arrests made. Shortly thereafter, Frank McPyke, described as “a twenty one year old tough” and “leader of a gang”, gathered a number of his friends to demolish tenements occupied by African Americans on the upper west side and to “do his part” in “annihilating the negro population of New York”. McPyke, quoted in the Times as saying “Ain’t got no love for no niggers, and no white man what’s white has”, proceeded to fill his hat with stones and, with his mob, took his stand at 59th st. and Eleventh avenue, to “do a few coons” as they passed by. Riots also ensued on what was known as “Cuckoo Row”, (West 60th St. between West End and Amsterdam Ave., predominately occupied by African Americans) many of its residents were stoned, including an Adam Johnson, accused of “walking too sassy to suit folk”. and from the island of Manhattan”. and quote, “annihilate the negro”. The actions of the New York City police department were also under question, as evidenced in an article in which one reporter wrote, “the police in the riotous attacks on the negroes in their quarter...stood idly by for the most part while the negroes were being beaten, except when they joined savagely in the sport, until the rioting threatened to extend dangerously; then they gradually dispersed the crowds, arresting no whites and many blacks, most of the latter being clubbed unmercifully.”
As large, single-family homes became less popular in the 1920s-some were destroyed to build apartment buildings for the middle class-the neighborhood began to change in ways that the Depression would soon accelerate. Housing values in Fort Greene, as else where, dropped precipitously during the Depression, creating buying opportunities for newcomers. As German, English, and other older homeowners accepted low offers and moved out, large numbers of middle-class Italians moved to the neighborhood. By 1940 the outlines of what was to be central Brooklyn's ghetto were becoming clear and African Americans had the worst housing and health conditions in Brooklyn, regardless of neighborhood. Fort Greene was no exception.

Up From the Mississippi Delta

UP FROM THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA:

A STATE REMEMBERED OR A STATE OF MEMORY?
by Carl Hancock Rux

The brutal 1955 murder of Emmett Till, which helped spark the Civil Rights Movement, casts long, dark shadows on three new theatre works

“Memory takes a lot of poetic license, It omits some details; others are exaggerated according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” —Tom Wingfield from “Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams

Since the days of Mark Twain and Harriette Beecher Stowe, the American literary imagination has long been captivated by the Mississippi Delta: that alluvial plain (technically not a delta) between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers in the northwest section of the state of Mississippi. In the gaze of several contemporary theater artists, the Delta has recently re-emerged as a point of interest. Notably, in the 2007/2008 season, Chicago’s famed Goodman theater produced playwright Ifa Bayeza’s production of The Ballad of Emmett Till, directed by Oz Scott. Developed in The Goodman Theatre’s New Stages Series as well as at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference, Ms. Bayeza’s play is based on the infamous murder of a fifteen-year-old African American boy by a gang of white men. The advent of the Till tragedy (and the speedy acquittal of his accused murderers by an all white jury) more than fifty years ago is well known as a turning point in the Civil Rights movement; one that brought attention not only to the Mississippi Delta but to the brutality of race oppression in the Jim Crow south. Based on countless interviews over the past decade with the victim’s family, teachers, classmates and eye-witnesses to the 1955 slaying, Bayeza describes her play as “part history and part mystery”. Though its case has already spawned several documentaries and books over the years, Robert Falls, the Goodman Theater’s Artistic Director, says the subject of Till in Bayeza’s play is one in which “we examine our own lives and actions through the prism of an epoch-defining moment in history.” In May of 2008, the latest installation of Ping Chong & Co.’s Undesirable Elements/Secret History also focused on the Mississippi Delta. Written and directed by Ping Chong collaborator Talvin Wilkes, and presented in Brooklyn at BRIC Studios by 651 Arts as part of their Delta Heritage Project, the performance narrative—Delta Rising— remained true to the theater company’s process of interviewing several participants and creating a script based on those interviews in an extended residency. The final work was performed by the participants themselves, five natives of Mississippi—three black, one Asian, one white, varying in age from 20 to 71. Also last spring, the fourth Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, directed by Debbie Allen, was the first to be performed by an all African American cast (featuring Tony award winners James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Anika Nani Rose and academy award nominee, Terence Howard.)
What Ms. Bayeza’s play and the Ping Chong/Talvin Wilkes collaboration shared in common with Ms. Allen’s production has perhaps more to do with a complex depiction of the Delta than just the region itself, giving rise to the inclusivity of its expansive history and stirring questions regarding the place the Mississippi Delta still holds in the American psyche.
Perhaps no one American playwright painted images of the Delta as often or as poetically as Tennessee Williams did. Born in Columbus Mississippi and raised in Clarksdale, the Delta served as a primary source of inspiration for the writer throughout his career. In his hands, the American south became a dilapidated, idyllic aristocratic landscape yellowing with antiquity held together by its mythology. A truthful portrayal of the South was less Mr. Williams’ post-modernist agenda than was a poetic elusive depiction of it. What emerges in Mr. Williams’s texts is like his description of Don Quixote’s Aurora in Camino Real “that green country he lived in which was the youth of his heart, before such singing words as Truth!” Perfecting his dramatic craft within the Southern Gothic tradition, a genre owing its oeuvre to deeply flawed, grotesque characters intuitively drawn against a supernatural narrative—the author’s plays, infused with existential symbolism, were written with religious piety and painted broadly with della Robbia blue brushstrokes. Like the preferred interiors of his character Blanche DuBois’, the Delta was cast in nothing brighter than a dim candle, the rude remarks, and vulgar actions of reality softened by its haze. As his semi-autobiographical protagonist Tom declares at the top of The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams had “tricks up his sleeve”, not the tricks of a magician who offers the illusion of truth but rather, “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” One of those illusions is the Delta as the exclusive setting for white Americans, silently occupied by people of color.
The play, first directed by Elia Kazan in 1955 (and adapted for the screen three years later starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor) famously centered around the dysfunction marriage of a young married couple, the alcoholic, brooding Brick and his sexually frustrated, childless wife Maggie—and their interaction with the Brick’s family, gathered on a Mississippi estate for the birthday celebration of its fatally ill patriarch, Big Daddy. In its most controversial version (there were several) Brick alludes to the source of his depression; the homosexual nature of his friendship with a football buddy who, once rejected by him, recently drank himself to death. The theme of the play, as stated by the its troubled protagonist, is mendacity—his disgust with the world and its lies, especially as it relates to the genteel South in which the family lies to Big Daddy about his health, and a scheming brother and his wife are all too eager to inherit his dying father’s estate. The African American characters, Sookey and Lacey, two servants, functioned merely to support the business of the main stage. In both the original stage and film versions, these characters whisked quietly on and off the set, in and out of the frame, like ghosts without dimension or even the minstrelsy or comic relief afforded actors like Hattie McDaniel decades earlier. The original Broadway production also featured two unnamed Blues musicians portrayed by singer guitarist Browns McGhee and blind harmonica player Sonny Terry.
For the most part, in Tennessee Williams plays, African Americans were depicted as the curiously silent other lurking in the sidelines of servitude. With the exception of a few later (and lesser known) works, Mr. Williams characters of color were void of conflict or epiphany; either referenced with derogatory playfulness (as Amanda Wingfield does in Glass Menagerie when, intercepting her daughter’s offer to serve dessert, insists “You be the lady this time and I’ll be the darkey!”) or absent altogether. His half drawn representations of African Americans were perhaps a testament to the time and place in which they were first written. Boasting that he was descended from “famous Indian fighters when the South was being settled,” Tennessee Williams was born in the Delta in 1911. Jim Crow laws were in full effect and Mississippi lead the nation in African American lynching well into the 1930s. When Mr. Williams first cultivated his dramatic voice (with Glass Menagerie) before the close of WWII, America’s reception to his illustration of the South as the wounded sister of an old familial battle (the Civil War) desperately clinging to romantic notions of jonquils in a bygone era, might well be credited not only to his evident talent as a writer but to the nation’s need to reconcile with its past and emerge as a unified front. As far as human drama was concerned, non-whites were not considered human, nor did they share equal status with American humanity. As depicted in Mr. Williams plays, it was largely believed that black Mississippians were voiceless, apolitical, marginalized oppressed people who knew their place and kept their mouths shut—barely existing. Subtracting race as the obvious difference between the silent servants in the background and the troubled, loquacious white family in the foreground creates a recognizable humanity most likely previously unavailable to many audiences. Considering the original text of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof was unedited in its most recent production, the premise of the Pollitts as a wealthy black family was surprisingly believable. In the hands of the indomitable James Earl Jones, Big Daddy as a bodacious, misogynistic wealthy plantation owner who is black is not inconsistent with Delta history,
Writer director Talvin Wilkes, having seen Ms. Allen’s production of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, reflected back on it after conducting interviews with native Mississippians for his Delta Rising project. “The script did work with Big Daddy as an African American overachiever addressing issues of self hatred and assimilation”, Mr. Wilkes observes, “It was not a made up notion of a family and the concept (of a wealthy black family in the Delta) is broader than a Hollywood gimmick. There were and are wealthy blacks in the Delta who owned plantations.”
Shermel Carthan, a participant in Delta Rising project, and an acting student at the California Institute of the Arts, is the descendant of James Carthan, an African American plowshare, and prohibition era moonshine manufacturer who purchased 60 acres of land once belonging to a Choctaw reservation in 1939. According to Shermel Carthan, his grandfather was the only African American to own land in Tchula Mississippi at the time. Though the area was known for its overwhelming poverty, his grandfather’s initial investment grew tenfold and his father, Eddie Carthan, would grow up working his way through law school farming his family’s 600 acres raising cotton, soybeans, and wheat, become an educator at Saints College in Lexington, Mississippi; own and operate a restaurant and hardware businesses, become a business developer for the US Department of Commerce in the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, president of the Mississippi Family Farmers Association and by 1977, mayor of Tchula, Mississippi, serving two terms. Like Brick, Shermel Carthan grew up in a mansion on an old slave plantation (complete with slave quarters) and before entering college, attended private boarding schools in Mississippi: Interlochen Arts Academy and Piney Woods, the latter founded in 1909 by an African American in 1909.
“Laurence Clifton Jones,” Mr. Carthan states proudly with an articulate southern twang, “was an African American with $3.17, a bible and a dream to educate black people.” The school began in the desperately poor section of rural Rankin County, under the shade of a cedar tree, with the students using a fallen log as a desk, despite the murderous threats of Klansmen. The story goes, as told by Mr. Carthan, that the Minister Jones delivered a sermon so powerful, members of the Klan actually “took up a collection” to help establish the school, and by the end of its fifth year, the school received a charter from the governor of Mississippi. Many teachers, black and white, joined the staff and worked for little or no salary as the school endeavored to train teachers for the State Department of Education. In the 1920s, Piney Woods began a separate division for blind students. Following the example of other Black institutions of higher learning such as Fisk, Hampton, and Tuskegee, the school is also where the group, The Blind Boys of Mississippi, would first form in 1931 and begin their professional careers as gospel singers.
Mr. Wilkes, who is working with Ping Chong & Company to produce a tour of Delta Rising in Mississippi, was profoundly impacted by what he learned from its eclectic cast. “You walk away with what you think you know of the Delta”, he reflects, “from the freedom fighter to the revolution of the 60s, and the problems that still remain, like drugs and unemployment.” Though the state is the birthplace of many successful African Americans, including Oprah Winfrey and Academy award winning actor Morgan Freeman, not until the turbulent 1960s would the state see the first black student enrolled at the University of Mississippi (the result of which also cost two people their lives); its public schools desegregate by order of the U.S. Supreme Court; and Charles Evers brother of assassinated politician Medgar Evers, elected the first black mayor in Mississippi since Reconstruction. Still, Mr. Wilkes affirms, “the real history of the Delta seems to have been forgotten and is compounded by our lack of education.”
As the Undesirable Elements project attests, the secret history of the Mississippi Delta is it’s real history—one often overshadowed by images of African American slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and a black white racial divide. The truth is the Mississippi Delta’s has always been much more complicated than anything these stereotypes might suggest. Included in Delta Rising are the inter-related stories of Toni Seawright, the first African American to represent Miss Mississippi in the Miss America beauty pageant, E’dena Le’dair Hines, granddaughter of Academy Award winning actor Morgan Freeman, and Virginia Wing, a Chinese American actress born in Marks Mississippi whose great uncle first came to the Delta at the beginning of the 20th century and became a successful businessman despite the efforts of white Mississippi planters to replace post Civil war Black Labor with “cheap Chinese Labor” and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1869, the first immigrant law to exclude on the basis of race. Gene Dattel, whose grandfather fled Latvia to avoid Eastern European pogroms and being drafted into the Russian Army, was born in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1944. After arriving in the United States via Ellis Island, his family became part of a burgeoning culture of Jewish immigrants. Mr. Dattel tells the story of the first Jewish synagogue built in Clarksdale in 1912. “The building of the first synagogue became a town affair. The lumber company donates lumber. The sheriff’s office donates free prison labor. Citizens who plan to run for office made cash donations. The Torah arrived on the 3:00pm train at the railroad depot and was passed from hand to hand by anyone willing to pay $100 for the honor. The local colored band lead the parade.”
Mr. Wilkes insists, “These forgotten histories are a paradigm for larger issues, and it takes projects (like Delta Rising) to bring attention to them once again. “ of Mr. Wilkes suggests he would have liked the all black production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof to have been “less of a devise or a Hollywood gimmick” and “a way to understand a history.”
Even though Mississippi has a large African American community and the lowest per capita income in the nation, the idea of its poor blacks as a silent minority, even in Mr. Williams’ time, is ironic. As early as 1870, Hiram Revels was the first black politician to represent Mississippi in the U.S. Congress, and five years later, Blanche K. Bruce represented Mississippi as the first black U.S. Senator, which makes Ms. Allen’s all African American production of a Tennessee Williams play all the more ironic.
Less than five months after Cat On A Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway in March of 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen year old African American from Chicago, while vacationing in Money Mississippi, stops at Bryant's Grocery store, owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant, to buy some candy. Till (cousin of Shermel Carthan’s mother) is accused of “whistling” at twenty year old Carolyn Bryant. Several days later, Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, and his half brother J.W. Milam, along with Carolyn Bryant, Roy's half-brother, abduct Emmett Till from his great uncle’s home, beat him, undressed him, shot him and tied a gin fan around his neck with wire, throwing his body into Tallahatchie River near Glendora, Mississippi. When the missing boy’s disappearance was investigated, Bryant and Milam admitted they had taken the boy from his great-uncle's yard but claimed they had let him go. Shortly thereafter, Till’s body was discovered, his features too distorted to positively identify except for a ring on his hand that had belonged to his father. In an open casket funeral, the corpse was photographed by the press; the boy’s right eye missing, a broken nose and a bullet wound to the head. Fifty thousand people attend the funeral in Illinois, and though Bryant and Milam were indicted for the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till, an all white jury deliberated for little more than an hour and found the men not guilty. After photos of the mutilated corpse were published in Jet Magazine, Milan and Bryant confessed to killing Till in a story in Look Magazine (Jan. 1956) for which they were paid $4,000.00. That same month, another Tennessee Williams authored project set in the Mississippi Delta, Baby Doll, opened in movie houses across the country. Also directed by Elia Kazan, the film’s trailer announced it was filmed on location in the Benoit Mississippi, with “real live Mississippi extras.” The residents (with spoken lines) of Benoit, Miss. who appeared in the Carol Baker, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach film, were white. The African American residents were extras and remained silent, sitting beneath a tree, grinning, except to break out in song.
Cat On a Hot Tin Roof closed on Broadway Nov. 17th of 1956, one year and two months after the Till trial. One reporter asked after the acquittal of the accused killers, “Did Emmett Till ever really exist? Or is this little Negro boy only a figment of the imagination? What the State of Mississippi has done, in substance, is twice to deny the existence of Emmett Till (and) until the streets of its cities and the cabins of its sharecroppers are safe for all its children, a large segment of the nation must echo the cry—What kind of a land do we live in?” (Inez Robb, Associated Press, Nov. 16th, 1955).
Though the Till incident occurred in the Mississippi Delta, playwright Ifa Bayeza admits, “I really wasn't drawn to the Delta” for inspiration. Looking at the larger picture, she continues, “ I was drawn to Emmett and he to me. He walked right into a play I was doing on something else, actually the second episode of Homer G.” The first installment of Miss Bayeza’s Homer G. & The Rhapsodies in the Fall of Detroit, titled The Judgment of Paris, was an experimental serial theater work imagining the hip-hop transformation of the fall of Troy to modern-day Detroit, exploring parallels between the fall of the ancient Greek city and the demise of Detroit’s motor car industry. “He (Emmett Till) walked in, planted his feet, took over the lead and took me on a journey.” the playwright explained from Chicago where her play based on Emmett Till premiered in the spring of 2008. Over ten years in the making, The Ballad of Emmett Till began as a one-act and expanded into a full-length play in four movements. Bayeza first presented excerpts of Till at the Arna Bontemps African American Museum in Alexandria, Louisiana, where she was named the 2003 Arna Bontemps Centennial Scholar. In June 2005, Movement One of Till received its first public staged reading at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Directed by Sue Lawless, the play was then presented as part of the Juneteenth Legacy New Plays Festival. In September 2005, Bayeza read Movement One in a solo presentation at the Stillman College conference “The Murder of Emmett Till and the Civil Rights Struggle” in Tuskaloosa, Alabama. In addition, in September, the Fountain Theatre of Los Angeles hosted a staged reading of Movement One directed by John Wesley—who appears as Moses in the Goodman’s production.

Till was then selected by Brown University’s Rites and Reason Theatre and Providence Black Repertory Company as the inaugural project for RPM Mainstage—a new play development partnership established through Brown’s Office of the President. Bayeza began a six-month residency to develop the full-length Till, culminating in the first staged reading of all four movements at Providence Black Repertory Theatre in March 2006, directed by the late Marsha Z. West.
Further explaining where region may fit into her thesis for revisiting the Till tragedy, Ms. Bayeza stated, “I think I was looking at the cross currents of North and South, of that trade-escape-battle route, the geographic umbilical and caesarian of the City of New Orleans Express, Illinois-Mississippi- Mississippi-Illinois. The jolt that started to move the nation came not from Mississippi, but from that critical intersection - two volatile cultures brought together by a catalytic agent in the form of a fourteen year old.”
In his introduction to The Glass Menagerie, Williams wrote “Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.” The author’s statement is best translated as a post-modernist approach to representing life through a subjective, idealized romantic lens. To put it much more succinctly, what Williams championed was not literal interpretation but something closer to what Miss Bayeza’s imagination allows, a re-photographing of time and place that, once removed from the immediacy of history, allows a deeper and more in depth analysis. If the Delta of Mr. Williams literary recollections was like that of Amanda Warfield’s in the Glass Menagerie, one of cotillions where fading debutantes entertained a multitude of Sunday afternoon gentlemen callers in frocks of voile and silk—so many in fact, she had to “send the nigger over to bring in folding chairs from the parish house”, it remains a memory true to a subjective eye. In deference to Tennessee Williams, who left behind the Mississippi Delta for New Orleans and continued to render the Delta without democratic race representation, his own insight remained true to an era of social blindness, with a poet’s prophetic ear. One might imagine that Maggie, when speaking to her husband Brick in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, is speaking to her author as well as to her speechless African American characters when she warns “When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant.”

Originally published in American Theater Magazine Sept. 2008
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