This Ghost of Slavery

Saved Stories

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

Foreword

For her work as an actor and a playwright, Anna Deavere Smith has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a two-time Tony Award nominee, a MacArthur-genius-grant honoree, and a recipient of the 2012 National Humanities Medal. She is known for her performances on popular TV series such as The West Wing and Black-ish, in movies such as Philadelphia and The Human Stain, and in stage plays and one-woman shows, on and off Broadway.

In the 1990s, Smith was credited with advancing a distinctive form of theater: She reports her story out, conducting scores of interviews, and then transforms the transcripts into dramatic art. For her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, about the Rodney King riots, she interviewed more than 300 people, composing the script entirely out of material from those conversations.

With This Ghost of Slavery, Smith once again deploys her signature use of contemporary interviews, including with people who have been absorbed into the criminal-justice system, many of whom she has interviewed for her Pipeline Girls Project, which examines how proximity to the carceral system affects young women. She has also interviewed activists and social-justice workers, many of them associated with a nonprofit organization called Chicago CRED, which seeks to reduce gun violence and help young people ensnared in gangs or the juvenile-justice system. But this time she has also supplemented these interviews with primary-source historical materials. She has mined 19th-century archives, transcripts, and diaries, and woven dialogue from these sources into the play.

For this work, Smith’s decision to blend her contemporary interviews with historical accounts of Maryland in the mid-1860s is apt. The echoes of history reverberate loudly, revealing the power of historical trauma to shape behavior in the present day.

To provide clarity for readers, we have footnoted all material drawn from Smith’s interviews and from historical sources. Unless otherwise specified, any material not footnoted is invented (even when drawing on historical events). All contemporary characters are fictional, even those whose dialogue is drawn from Smith’s interviews. (Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.) Daniel Rattner provided extensive research assistance for this project.


Dramatis Personae

IN ORDER of APPEARANCE

11-Year-Old Slave Girl Our guide

Anas Ali Aide-de-camp, Latitude

Dr. Carolina Nelson, a.k.a. “Doc” Professor at Johns Hopkins; co-founder, Latitude

Tobias Midwinter Co-founder and CEO, Latitude

Lindsay Brooks Tobias’s bodyguard; staff, Latitude

Zel Maxwell Tobias’s bodyguard; staff, Latitude

Dr. Carl Vogel, a.k.a. “Dr. V” Psychiatrist and clinical director, Latitude

Jack Ross Professor at Johns Hopkins

The Dean Johns Hopkins dean of humanities

The Provost Johns Hopkins provost

Jaxon Inmate, New Beginnings Youth Development Center

Frederick Douglass Abolitionist

Salmon Chase Chief justice of the United States, 1864–73

General Lew Wallace Civil War general, VIII Army Corps, Baltimore

Abraham Lincoln United States president

Edwin Stanton Secretary of war, Lincoln administration

Major William Este Assistant to General Wallace

Nkosazana Latitude client

Reverend Robert W. Todd Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864

Archibald Stirling Jr. Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864

Edwin A. Abbott Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864

Ezekiel Forman Chambers Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864

Joseph M. Cushing Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864

Henry Stockbridge Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864; attorney, Freedmen’s Bureau

William T. Purnell Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864

Joseph B. Pugh Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864

James L. Ridgley Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864

Frederick Schley Delegate, Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864

Young Coston Child indentured as an apprentice, 1864–66

Elizabeth Turner 8-year-old slave girl

Philemon Hambleton Owner of Elizabeth Turner

James Nelson Carolina Nelson’s uncle

Desmond Burns Director of the study of slavery, Maryland State Archives

Farley McGibben Research archivist, Maryland State Archives

Betsy Turner Minoky Elizabeth Turner’s mother

Maggy Toogood Slave

Maggy Toogood’s Master Slave owner

Kate Chase Sprague Salmon Chase’s daughter

Charles Minoky Elizabeth Turner’s “next friend”

B. James Nelson’s partner


ACT I

This play will go back and forth in time and have many locations, some in the 1860s and others in the present. An imaginative theater-design team, and a sprinkle of theater magic, will help us move effortlessly from time to time and place to place.

An 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL from the 1860s (mixed race, ill-clothed, bare feet) walks across the stage, pulling open a huge curtain, revealing a robust Black man (30s, T-shirt, black jeans) at a lectern in a modern-­day classroom, mid-speech.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

I didn’t mean to kill him. I was just trying to scare him. He was a drug addict and I got him his drugs, and he was messin’ with my money. But when you kill somebody, that’s a heavy thing. When I went to court to be sentenced, the prosecutor asked to give me more time than I was taking a plea bargain for, and I asked the judge, “Can I speak to the family?” So I turned around, and one thing that stuck out to me was that I couldn’t really identify who was there for him, who was there for me. Because our families looked so much alike. And I told the family that no matter how much time I get, the prosecutor wasn’t there to support them. It was just another body that was dead, and another person being locked up in prison. But I promised the family that whenever I got out of prison, I would try my best to help young men not make the same decisions as I made. I said that at 17 years old, going into prison. Whatever you goin’ through, it’s so much better than being in a prison. When I got out, I was 24 years old, and I was just eager to talk to young guys and tell ’em what’s on the other side and how it’s just not worth it. If I had to walk miles, it’s so much better than bein’ in prison—standing outside in the cold. I shot a man and … it’s a heavy thing. 1

A classroom at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, present day

Ambivalent applause. The STUDENTS are undergrads of different races, predominantly white and Asian. Notably, students of color do most of the talking. There are two BLACK FEMALE students, one BLACK MALE STUDENT, and one MIXED HERITAGE/LATINX NON­BINARY STUDENT. Additionally, there is a WOKE WHITE MALE STUDENT.

In the back of the room stand CAROLINA NELSON, Ph.D. (Black, mid-30s, dressed in a low-key, hip way); TOBIAS MIDWINTER (Black, late 40s, wearing runway-style street fashion—think Isabel Marant, Wales Bonner); his bodyguards, LINDSAY BROOKS (20s, Black, gorgeous) and ZEL MAXWELL (20s, Black, charismatic, a jock); and CARL VOGEL (30s, white, a young Paul Farmer type with a warm demeanor), Latitude’s staff psychiatrist. Nearby are JACK ROSS (white professor, early 30s) and THE DEAN (white, male, late 40s).

JACK:view role ↓

Well. This was a real gift. Thank you, Professor Nelson, for giving us your time in the very hour before your sabbatical begins. Grace us with a few closing words.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I think after hearing from my collaborators—Anas Ali, Tobias, Lindsay, and Zel—you can imagine why I decided to sit down with them and create Latitude. We will support, using a 360-degree approach—with our know-how, resources, and friendship—­incarcerated, newly released, and never-incarcerated-but-vulnerable youth so that they can work toward substantive personal and societal change.

WOKE WHITE MALE STUDENT: Is this “evidence based”? And if so, what evidence do you have that your program works?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

We don’t have hard evidence yet. It’s early days. We are part practice, part experiment, but we have some anecdotes if that’ll be helpful. Tobias, you want to take that?

TOBIAS steps up to answer the first question, but what ensues after that is the Latitude staff members answering questions in a seamless flow, continuing one another’s sentences unbroken; it’s almost athletic, like a basketball team passing the ball around.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

So, for example, I had a young man who came in poppin’ seven, eight percs, oxys a day—whatever he can get his hands on—just trying to numb himself from the demons he has seen, what he has done, what he’s experienced. Um, he’s a shooter, so forth and so on. Well known. He finished his high-school diploma, got accepted into a union that would probably not have taken him had we not had him as part of the program. This is the Brotherhood of the Painters. You get up at 3 o’clock in the morning, 3:30, to get to a job at five. You paint, right? And you then are exposed to all these different cultures and people outside of the block, so forth and so on. Long story short, he has moved away from the neighborhood. He owns a townhome in the suburbs with his fiancée, and he’s making $50 an hour painting.2

BLACK FEMALE STUDENT NO. 1: I’m worried about an assumed pathology of Black teens—

Tobias:view role ↓

Zel, you got that?

Zel:view role ↓

This is not about flaws specific to any race. This is about vulnerability to systemic racism. I think even when you feel ready and safe enough to be vulnerable enough to step outside the box, it’s hard to be able to separate from a group that has been in a four-block radius.

lindsay:view role ↓

It’s just so many things people are scared to let go of.

Carl:view role ↓

We have the push, the cognitive-behavioral-intervention things that we do—you know, the programming that we try to provide, the supports …

CAROLINA:view role ↓

… The ability for us to give them access to resources, to connections to people …

Carl:view role ↓

… Helps them to reintroduce themselves to a different part of themselves that the people in their immediate circle have never met or would have criticized …

tobias:view role ↓

… And/or not been supportive of, because they haven’t been there themselves.3

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

We’re in juvenile hall …

ZEL:view role ↓

… Hospital wards …

CARL:view role ↓

… Emergency rooms …

TOBIAS:view role ↓

… Funeral homes, cemeteries …

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

… High-school graduations …

Carl:view role ↓

… And right nearby the school when we get word somebody’s gettin’ kicked out …

Zel:view role ↓

… And at the basketball courts …

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

… And at Crazy Down Home Chicken and Seafood on Edmonson …

ZEL:view role ↓

… Laundromats …

LINDSAY:view role ↓

… And movin’. I’m the one always movin’. On the streets.

BLACK MALE STUDENT: Carolina, don’t you feel that you are taking advantage of them—appropriating their stories?

BLACK FEMALE STUDENT NO. 2: When you put your work in writing, who will be lead author?

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Does that matter?

MIXED HERITAGE/LATINX NONBINARY STUDENT: We just don’t think she should be exploiting you.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

“She”? Don’t you refer to her as “Professor”?

WOKE WHITE MALE STUDENT: Not all of us believe in hierarchies.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Okay, we gotta roll, so lemme just say this: Y’all tickle me. When I was growin’ up, ’round Pennsylvania Avenue, we were “poor,” then we were “indigent,” then “disenfranchised,” and now, I been checkin’ out the classes with Dr. Nelson, and I have never heard half the words y’all use when you talk about “us” and about how we live. And yeah, Johns Hopkins has always been a part of our lives—

zel:view role ↓

My grandmama used to say, “In Baltimore, the Black women work at Hopkins and the Black men go to jail.”

TOBIAS:view role ↓

And absolutely, Johns Hopkins University and the Hopkins Hospital folks have made a difference on many blocks in Baltimore and have done many good deeds. But Hopkins never happened to come to my block. And, as fate and my good luck would have it, while Dr. Carolina Nelson was in the hood, doing her style of research, she found me. I was left for dead—as in, just about dead physically, spittin’-on-my-grave dead societally, and flatlining-dead spiritually. She found me—

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

They found each other …

TOBIAS:view role ↓

And we have talked and talked and talked—

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

I mean, they really talked! I saw it with my own eyes—

TOBIAS:view role ↓

—And we got this massively insane idea.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Dr. N got resources like—we don’t have what she has. Jus’ sayin’.

Tobias:view role ↓

I have resources she does not have, and before you know it, we’re putting down on paper this outrageous proposition that together we might be able to suggest some ways to save lives.

BLACK FEMALE STUDENT NO. 2: No offense to you, Dr. Nelson, but you need to face the fact that they use you around here, and you need to face the fact that you are therefore being branded by Hopkins. You are part of their brand.

BLACK FEMALE STUDENT NO. 1: And so am I! And so are you!

WOKE white male Student: We all end up represented in the brochure …

Black male Student: Not in the same way.

south asian student studying abroad: Why is everything always related to the American Black-white binary?

All of the students start yelling at one another.

JACK:view role ↓

Civil conversation! Civil conversation!

MIXED HERITAGE/LATINX NONBINARY STUDENT: (Speaking over the tumult.) We just don’t think she should take advantage of you!

TOBIAS:view role ↓

“She”? There’s that “she” again. You talkin’ about Dr. Nelson? And they say in the hood we disrespect teachers. Look. I am from the streets. If I don’t know the difference between a friend and a parasite, well hey. If being friends with one of your professors and her being friends with me is getting taken advantage of and/or being appropriated, don’t worry about me—worry ’bout her, about me taking advantage of her. ’Cause that is exactly what I plan to do while we build out Latitude: take advantage of her knowledge and her belief in us.

STUDENT: Why do you trust her?

ZEL:view role ↓

The question is, why does Dr. Nelson trust us ?

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

It’s mutual! Y’all cool with “mutual”?

Carl:view role ↓

“Mutual-ity”?

Some snap; some glance surreptitiously at one another as if they are about to start their own revolution. JACK steps quickly to the lectern.

JACK:view role ↓

Dr. Nelson, I can’t thank you enough for introducing us to your new cohort. Okay, everybody—we’re flipping the syllabus. Next week, G. Stanley Hall on “Storm and Stress.” Not Genet’s The Criminal Child.

THE STUDENTS split. TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, and CARL, flanked by ZEL and LINDSAY, start to head out. JACK goes to CAROLINA.

JACK:view role ↓

Wish they had been kinder. Wish they were less cynical. Wish they had less to prove. Wish they could spare a little benefit of the doubt! Oh my God, I am so going to miss you! With whom shall I continue to fail in my attempt to subvert the tragic academic-cynical-greed complex?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Come work with us. We need your tireless hope and curiosity.

JACK:view role ↓

It’d be too depressing. I’d be comatose within the first week. (He pauses.) Alas, your biggest fan approaches.

THE PROVOST, a tall, white, imposing man with a twinkle in his eyes, enters and dashes toward CAROLINA with open arms.

THE PROVOST:view role ↓

I’d hug you goodbye, but that’s not appropriate these days. How gracious of you to drop off a thank-you note. You’re one of the few people under 40 who can still write cursive. But I should thank you for being—Oh! Are these your … people, your, uh …

CAROLINA:view role ↓

… Collaborators.

THE PROVOST glances at ANAS ALI, TOBIAS, ZEL, LINDSAY, and CARL—hesitantly, as though they’re cool and he’s the nerd.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

They’re friendly.

THE PROVOST rushes toward the group with open arms. They talk in the background as THE DEAN steps in to talk with CAROLINA.

THE DEAN:view role ↓

I’m worried about you.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

The women with us are armed—Tobias’s bodyguards. I’m safe.

THE DEAN:view role ↓

I’m serious.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

So am I.

THE DEAN:view role ↓

The provost granted you this leave, but by the time you get back here, he might have left and you’ll likely be met with a promotions committee that is tired of genuflecting to the VP of diversity and faculty advancement. As for that big heart of yours, you need to remember that you are an academic, not Mother Teresa. (He pauses.) Sorry, that comment was—I guess—­disrespectful.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

To Mother Teresa, yes.

THE DEAN:view role ↓

You gotta get that second book done. Period, full stop.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Who is the book for? Who’s gonna read it? I went to a double funeral last week for a 12-year-old and a 13-year-old, both gunned down by a 14-year-old. I know you’re masterful at fund­raising, and it’s blasphemous to say this, but … why do we need another building? How about pouring those 10 digits into the community?

THE DEAN:view role ↓

Your arguments usually have more teeth than that.

ZEL slides up.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

(With exasperation; her buttons have been pushed—there’s a history here.) Honestly, I don’t get it. Wow. I’m almost out the door, and we’ve discussed this what? Ten times? Eleven? Twelve?

ZEL:view role ↓

’Scuse me … We gotta jump.

THE DEAN watches as they leave.

ZEL:view role ↓

Necessary distance—never lose your cool with a white dude. That’s like fighting with a cop. You will lose, ’cause they still got the power. (Beat.) He a control-freak, dominating kinda cat?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Not a cat at all. A dog.

Maya Angelou Academy, New Beginnings Youth Development Center, Laurel, Maryland

A room that looks and smells brand new. On the brightly painted walls are inspirational quotations from Maya Angelou. Outside the window, we see what appears to be the manicured grounds of an upscale community-college campus.

CAROLINA, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, ZEL, CARL, and LINDSAY sit in a circle with JAXON (Black, 17, supremely handsome, with a sincere face. He looks like a young Harry Belafonte, wearing not a prison-style jumpsuit but rather khakis and a polo shirt). He listens intently.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

’Cause in your case, you could walk out the door with us—today.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Fast as you got arrested and your life changed? That’s today; your life will change, in less than 40 minutes, with us—out that door.

JAXON:view role ↓

I just feel like—can I tell you how I feel on the … committed thing?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Absolutely.

JAXON:view role ↓

Once you get committed, they provide you with a job, provide you with all the services, but it’s like, once your commitment expires, it’s like they done with you, like Youth Services—they’re not there for you no more. They don’t provide you with no job again or … no tutor, no mentor, and stuff. ’Cause you not—you’re not under government. You’re not a ward of the state anymore. Yeah. I’m worried about that. I mean, sometimes it makes me feel like I wish that I was committed until I was 21. Which is bad because if you get locked up, then you can be sent out, out anywhere they want to send you. They could send you out to Utah, Minnesota, Nebraska. But at the same time, I really feel like, to help me get through life, I need them services that they provide for me, ’cause it actually helps me. You get released from the jail, they not giving you none of these-type services. They not giving you no tutor, no mentor, all that type of stuff they give you right there.4

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

You’re right—the system is flawed. They dump you right outside to make it on your own. But we got you. All those services you have in here? You gonna have all that …

Tobias:view role ↓

… Except you’ll be free. That’s the key word—free.

Carl:view role ↓

Mind, body, soul emancipation.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Out there in the free world, we will provide wraparound services—life coaches, therapists, help with your GED, job placement—

Lindsay:view role ↓

You look like you bodybuild …

Zel:view role ↓

 … You gonna need healthy food and a safe place to work out.

Lindsay:view role ↓

We got all that. Brand-new gym. Nutrition classes.

zel:view role ↓

I’m in charge of strength training. You got any kids?

JAXON:view role ↓

Yeah. A son.

Carl:view role ↓

Have you ever spent a full day with your son?

JAXON:view role ↓

No.

Carl:view role ↓

You’re gonna need parenting classes.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

And this is not a onetime thing. We will commit to you for five years …

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

… If you will commit to us.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

You have a way about you that would make a good leader. You can also move up in our organization, and get a job with us at the top level.

Carl:view role ↓

Leadership training …

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

… And no paperwork. Once we get on the other side of that door—that same door you walked through when you got incarcerated—someone will hand you one piece of paper to sign.

Zel:view role ↓

… One signature …

Lindsay:view role ↓

You look skeptical. What’s up?

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

What’s goin’ on, Jaxon?

Carl:view role ↓

There’s no judgment here.

JAXON:view role ↓

It’s like … now you back in the street, you tryin’ to make money, you doin’ all the things to get you right back in a place like this. Selling drugs, stealing, stealing cars, robbing people—them things that could lead you back into the same predicament, or even worse. I’d rather have a job in here and get money that way than to keep looking over my back, worryin’ ’bout when the police gonna ride up and try to grab me or something like that.5

Lindsay:view role ↓

You need somebody to move with you once you hit the streets. I was known for how I move in the streets. My daddy was a chief. That’s how I learned to move. Movin’ 10 steps behind my daddy—I saw everything …

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

… Ain’t a street from here to Hong Kong where Lindsay can’t move and stay safe and stay legal. Lindsay would hang with you for a good while.

Jaxon:view role ↓

That would be amazing.

A SMALL BOY blasts in, enraged. ANOTHER BOY blasts in, and repeatedly throws the SMALL BOY up against the wall. Both boys are in khakis and polo shirts. (This facility strives to look like a school, not a prison.) The smaller boy breaks loose, gets a chair and starts hammering the other boy. A MALE GUARD in street clothes struts in without any visible urgency. He wordlessly guides CAROLINA, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, LINDSAY, CARL, and ZEL into another room with a glass door and a window. JAXON, still in direct proximity to the violence, watches unfazed as blood explodes from these boys while they fight. A VERY LARGE BLACK FEMALE GUARD enters. She and the MALE GUARD stand by as the fight escalates. In a moment when both boys are down on the ground, the FEMALE GUARD sits on top of them. The MALE GUARD handcuffs them and leads them out.

The door of the room holding CAROLINA, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, ZEL, CARL, and LINDSAY automatically, soundlessly slides open. They return to JAXON and resume as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened.6

TOBIAS:view role ↓

So where were we?

JAXON:view role ↓

The judge talked to me. ’Bout all this y’all speakin’ on.

ZEL:view role ↓

Judge came out here to talk to you?

JAXON:view role ↓

Nah.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Had ’em transpo you into town to her chambers?

JAXON:view role ↓

Nah. We talked on Zoom.

ZEL:view role ↓

On … Zoom?

tobias:view role ↓

Private, though? Just you and her?

JAXON:view role ↓

Nah. The probation dude was there.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Still, that’s an honor, man. Means she’s countin’ on you.

The first long pause in the scene happens here.

JAXON:view role ↓

Yeah. Y’all basically the same type o’ people out on the streets, just sober. ’Cept you. (He nods toward CAROLINA.) You a teacher?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I am.

JAXON:view role ↓

(To TOBIAS.) Tobias. Yeah. I just figured out who you are, man. People say you was underground. You a legend. You used to run the world from Lanvale Street clear to D.C. and up to Wilmington—the racetracks and stuff like that.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

But I wasn’t free. Now I am free. And you can be too.

JAXON:view role ↓

I feel like laughin’ but yet and still, I feel like cryin’. Y’all too good to be true. Anything too good to be true … ain’t true.

JAXON strolls, with a princely gait, to the door. It automatically opens. He leaves. It soundlessly shuts. A beat of deflated silence.

ZEL:view role ↓

The judge was supposed to invite him to her chambers for a personal meeting. Personal. Our whole thing is personal. Our whole thing is the system ain’t personal. And here she meets the dude on Zoom with a probation officer there?

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Maybe there was was a scheduling conflict.

ZEL:view role ↓

Man, this ain’t time for your rose-colored shades. Only reason she signed on is to clean up her bad karma. And has the nerve to do it half-assed with us? I have stood before her. I told y’all she was full of shit. I told y’all we needed a judge with a heart. She ain’t got no heart, and havin’ the nerve to go half-ass with us! She is sabotaging our shit!

Lindsay:view role ↓

Zel. You spinnin’ out.

ZEL:view role ↓

Am I? It’s Friday afternoon, and we endin’ this particular week without a single recruit.

Beat.

CARl:view role ↓

They’ve put so many Maya Angelou quotes on these walls.

carolina:view role ↓

They named the place after her: Maya Angelou Academy.

Zel:view role ↓

Wonder if she would think this an honor. If I were Maya Angelou, I’d rather not have my name on a renovated juvie.

Lindsay:view role ↓

If I were Maya Angelou, I’d rather not have my name on somethin’ that got built with money from that chomo short eyes Jeffrey Epstein.7

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Nobody knew what that dude was up to when they built this …

CAROLINA:view role ↓

What will we do if we learn that any of our funders are dirty?

Zel:view role ↓

If I was Maya Angelou, I would rather have a college named after me than a juvie.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

What’s the point if the kids don’t even believe they can be free? How did we get here?

black-and-white block illustration of 19th-century street scene with silhouettes of man leading horse next to woman holding a tool over her shoulder

TOBIAS’s loft, immediately following

A 2,000-square-foot loft in a converted 19th-century textile mill. Sink, microwave, espresso machine, workout bench, rack of weights, heavy bag, speed bag, gloves, mitts, a towel. A Sub-Zero fridge, but no other furniture except a pallet that serves as a bed in a corner. Sleek new hardwood floor.

ZEL and LINDSAY are by the window, eating takeout, on guard. TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, CARL, and CAROLINA eat around an old factory door on wooden carpenter’s horses—a makeshift table. Chairs don’t match. There’s a whiteboard on wheels nearby. Everyone’s barefoot because TOBIAS is a tyrant about his perfect floor.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

It’s Friday at 4:33, and looks like don’t nobody want to leave jail this week.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Seven meetings this week and not one signed up for Latitude, but this is the first time that happened. Sayin’.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Like I said, how did we get here?

Carl:view role ↓

Good question.

CAROLINA jumps up, pulls over the whiteboard.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

How did we get here? Let’s blast the idea wide open.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Crack cocaine!

CAROLINA writes “Crack cocaine” on the whiteboard.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Crack. When money and bad intentions poured into the hoods like no tomorrow.

ZEL:view role ↓

Crack. Snatched the concept of tomorrow right out of our people’s hands.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

It was a lotta money.

CARL:view role ↓

I’ve read different data about how much actual money there is in the on-the-corner drug trade.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Let’s break it down. Let’s just take cocaine. So if you think about a kilo of cocaine, right? It’s 36 ounces. So we will go through that in a day, at $1,000. So that’s $36,000 a day. And so it cost about 18. So that’s half of that. So we were making about $18,000 in profit a day. I can remember my friend who was killed having his million-dollar party, probably in ’91 or ’92, when I was about 19 years old, making this absurd amount of money. And throwin’ it away.8

LINDSAY:view role ↓

’Magine that, a million-dollar party! In the hood!

ZEL:view role ↓

That was before me and Lin was born. Y’all were crazy.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

And I betchu right up the block from that million-dollar party? Somebody’s house caught on fire ’cause they didn’t have enough money to go to the laundromat, and they had to dry their clothes on a kitchen chair in front of the open oven.9

TOBIAS:view role ↓

And I just think about, like, again, if our Willie Lynch chip had been deactivated, you know, the things that we could have done with all the money that we were making that we didn’t do.10

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Hold on. The what kind of chip?

LINDSAY:view role ↓

The Willie Lynch chip.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

The Willie Lynch letter. History, man, history.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Willie Lynch was coming up with something that would make us be against each other for at least 300 years after slavery.11

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Wait. How to pit Black folks against one another? Are you talking about the so-called speech by a white slave owner named Willie Lynch, from the Caribbean, given to white slave owners in Virginia to tell them how to handle slaves? That was a hoax!12

ZEL:view role ↓

That’s what I been tellin’ them all along. There’s stuff in that letter that wasn’t even invented when it was so-called written.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Look. Before I gave up the study of horror—that would be the study of American history—in favor of studying the horrors of contemporary life by switching to sociology, history was my religion. And I just cannot stand around and have y’all throwing faux facts. I need you to have real facts. Facts. Facts. Facts.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Facts change.

Carl:view role ↓

Facts? Things tend to be relatively true.

Zel:view role ↓

Or relatively false.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I’m talking about real facts. Proven facts.

Zel:view role ↓

Provin’ is false. ’Cause of this fact: Dudes lie. How many times has a dude lied to me?

TOBIAS:view role ↓

The fact is, Brother Jaxon is fine with lingering in prison, and he’s not the only one.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Slavery, man, it has a pull on us, man. Tellin’ you.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

“Slavery, slavery, slavery.” We talk about slavery so much, it loses its horror. We should talk about now. Not then.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

But talk was one of the things that shut slavery down. I often wonder if modern talk is as effective as historical talk, because even though there are more people talking, we talk inside small groups.

Carl:view role ↓

We only talk to people with whom we agree.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Let’s break it open. Name somebody in history who talked a lot and made a difference.

Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL enters the stage and uses an iPad to change the lighting and the mise-en-scène, with the help of an LED wall.

A parlor in the home of SALMON CHASE, 1850

A WHITE MAID is pouring tea for FREDERICK DOUGLASS (played by the same actor who plays the BLACK MALE STUDENT) and SALMON CHASE13 (white, tall, played by the same actor who plays THE PROVOST).

CHASE:view role ↓

My own opinion has been that the Black & White races, adapted to different latitudes & countries by the influences of climate and other circumstances, operating through many generations, would never have been brought together in one community, except under the constraint of force, such as that of slavery. While, therefore, I have been utterly opposed to any discrimination in legislation against our colored population, and have uniformly maintained the equal rights of all men to life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness, I have, always, looked forward to the separation of the races. I shall be pleased to know what you think of these matters.14

The MAID leaves.

DOUGLASS:view role ↓

Are you talking about colonizing? All the gold of California combined, would be insufficient to defray the expenses attending our colonization. We are, as laborers, too essential to the interests of our white fellow-countrymen, to make a very grand effort to drive us from this country among probable events. To imagine that we shall ever be eradicated is absurd and ridiculous.15

CHASE:view role ↓

But in practical terms, how will we ever get on? How shall—

DOUGLASS:view role ↓

The persecuted red man of the forest, the original owner of the soil, has, step by step, retreated from the Atlantic lakes and rivers; escaping, as it were, before the footsteps of the white man, and gradually disappearing from the face of the country. He looks upon the steamboats, the railroads, and canals, cutting and crossing his former hunting grounds; and upon the ploughshare, throwing up the bones of his venerable ancestors, and beholds his glory departing—and his heart sickens at the desolation. He spurns the civilization—he hates the race which has despoiled him, and unable to measure arms with his superior foe, he dies. Not so with the black man. More unlike the European in form, feature, and color—called to endure greater hardships, injuries and insults than those to which the Indians have been subjected, he yet lives and prospers under every disadvantage.

CHASE:view role ↓

I don’t question the resilience of your race.

DOUGLASS:view role ↓

We deem it a settled point that the destiny of the colored man is bound up with that of the white people of this country: be the destiny of the latter what it may. We shall neither die out, nor be driven out; but shall go with this people, either as a testimony against them, or—

Chase:view role ↓

Happy coexistence is unlikely.

DOUGLASS:view role ↓

It is idle—worse than idle, ever to think of our expatriation, or removal. The history of the colonization society must extinguish all such speculations.

CHASE:view role ↓

But we are so very different—

The MAID returns.

MAID: Your oyster tonger is here, sir.

CHASE:view role ↓

And Mr. Douglass loves oysters. You must stay for dinner. Will you?

DOUGLASS:view role ↓

I can’t refuse oysters.

TOBIAS’s loft, present day

As before.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

What’s the guy’s name? Fish?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Salmon.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Fishy name.

ZEL:view role ↓

And how long ago was that?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

About 170 years.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

And we’re still separate.

ZEL:view role ↓

Fish-man is right; we will always be separate.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

“To imagine we shall ever be eradicated is ridiculous”? What was Frederick Douglass talkin’ about? We did go into colonies. Prisons are the colonies we been sent to.

CARL:view role ↓

In fairness to Frederick Douglass, the carceral system as we experience it is not something he could have imagined. Most likely.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

We askin’ “How did we get here?” and talking about slavery. But Baltimore isn’t down South. My people lived here, and my great-grandma tol’ me we wasn’t slaves.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Actually, Maryland was a southern state. They just fought the Civil War as if they were part of the North. Baltimore was part slave and part free, as was all of Maryland.

ZEL:view role ↓

I know my people was slaves down on the Eastern Shore, ’cause my great-granddaddy told me about his great-granddaddy.

Carl:view role ↓

That’s a lot of great s. Doesn’t that put us in the 1700s?

Zel:view role ↓

Carl, I love you but, you live in different mathematics than me. Way my world is, a generation is 15 years, not 30. My mama had me when she was 15. So forth and so on going way back.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Okay, when do you think your ancestors here in Maryland got freedom?

ZEL:view role ↓

January 1, 1863. Emancipation Proclamation.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Hate to break it to you, but the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in Maryland. The Emancipation Proclamation was only for the states that seceded—and Maryland remained a part of the Union. Because it was part of the Union, and strategically important due to its proximity to Washington, Lincoln looked the other way about the slaves here.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Old Abe was basically freeing slaves in territory where he had lost cred anyway.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Slaves here in Maryland were not free ’til 1864.

Carl:view role ↓

Like Juneteenth?

On the whiteboard, CAROLINA writes “1864,” “Emancipation,” and “Mayhem.”

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Different. Maryland: Part slave, part free, but the pot boiled over about this half-and-half situation, and the state’s legislators were pushed to vote on a new state constitution. Slavery was a big part of the debate around the constitution. It was hot. The emotions were high. President Lincoln knew that whichever way the vote went, there was going to be mayhem.

CAROLINA writes “Lew Wallace” on the whiteboard.

Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL walks onstage with the iPad and taps the screen. As CAROLINA continues to talk, the lights and scenog­raphy change to very realistic scenery of …

The War Department, White House grounds, 1864

CAROLINA:view role ↓

(Offstage.) So Lincoln calls in a General Lew Wallace—

Carl:view role ↓

(Offstage.) Lew Wallace? He wrote the novel Ben-Hur.

Carolina:view role ↓

(Offstage.) He did. How do you know that?

Carl:view role ↓

(Offstage.) Random bits of information stick to me like lint.

LindsAy:view role ↓

(Offstage.) One of my great-grandma’s favorite movies. That was the only good thing about the court’s moving us to her house. She loved old-school movies.

Carl:view role ↓

(Offstage.) Long before Charlton Heston starred in that movie, Wallace wrote the novel.

GENERAL LEW WALLACE (played by the same actor who plays JACK ROSS) is presented to President ABRAHAM LINCOLN (played by the same actor who plays THE DEAN). LINCOLN stands, towering over WALLACE, and puts his hand on WALLACE’s shoulder.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

(Voice-over.) Wallace had messed up an important battle, or got blamed for it. He arrives in Washington, eager to fix his reputation. Lincoln knows about the battle he messed up—everybody knows about it—but …16

LINCOLN:view role ↓

I believe it right to give you a second chance, Wallace. I’ve suggested you be assigned to the command of the VIII Army Corps.17

WALLACE:view role ↓

Thank you, Mr. President.

LINCOLN turns away. WALLACE figures out that the brief meeting is over and turns toward the door.

LINCOLN:view role ↓

Ah, Wallace! I came near forgetting; there is an election nearly due over in Maryland, but don’t you forget it. Goodbye.

WALLACE:view role ↓

Yessir. Goodbye, sir.

Office of the secretary of war, March 1864

WALLACE enters the office of Secretary of War EDWIN STANTON (played by the same actor who plays THE PROVOST and SALMON CHASE. He’s got a long beard, and some girth. He’s grim).

STANTON:view role ↓

Well?

WALLACE:view role ↓

I am assigned to the Middle Department—18

STANTON:view role ↓

What do you know of Baltimore and the Middle Department?

WALLACE:view role ↓

Nothing, sir.

STANTON:view role ↓

That department has been a graveyard for commanders. You have seen the president?

WALLACE:view role ↓

Yes, sir.

STANTON:view role ↓

What did he tell you?

WALLACE:view role ↓

To come see you.

STANTON:view role ↓

Was that all?

WALLACE:view role ↓

He also said there was an election nearly at hand in Maryland, and he did not want me to forget it.

STANTON:view role ↓

Nor must you. The last Maryland legislature passed an act for an election, looking to abolish slavery in the state by constitutional amendment.19 The president has set his heart on abolition in that way, and mark, he does not want it to be said by anybody that the bayonet had anything to do with the election. He is a candidate for a second nomination. You understand?

WALLACE:view role ↓

I think so, sir.

STANTON:view role ↓

Have you a plan?

WALLACE:view role ↓

I’ve never heard of the business before.

STANTON:view role ↓

Well, then, it is a kindness saying that it will be your first trial.

STANTON immediately turns away from WALLACE and studies a document. WALLACE waits in vain for further instructions.

WALLACE:view role ↓

Uh. Good day? Sir?

The sound of a modern phone ringing brings us back to the present.

TOBIAS’s loft, present day

It is ZEL’s phone that’s ringing. ZEL jumps up and searches for it. She shows LINDSAY the face of the phone so she can see who’s calling.

ZEL:view role ↓

Latitude, this is Zel.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

(Whispering.) It’s Nkosazana.20

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Is it about the boy again?

ZEL nods, writes on the whiteboard amid the other written words—“Crack Cocaine,” “1864,” “Lew Wallace,” “Emancipation,” etc.—“Nokey sayin’ she’s gonna kill the mfuckr. She’s fixin’ to gun him down at the Crazy Down Home Chicken and Seafood.”

ZEL:view role ↓

(With her eyes on CARL, who is mouthing things to her.) Nokey. Where are you? (She pauses.) Speak slowly. I’m with you.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Nokey found out the guy she was with before she went to juvie, and was with all during juvie, has another girl.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

He had a lot of other girls.

ZEL:view role ↓

Nokey. Stay where you are. I’m coming.

CARL and ZEL grab their shoes, fling open the huge metal door, and run down the stairs, barefoot.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I’d like to go on this one. I have a good relationship with Nokey.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

You can’t.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

If I am never on the streets with you during crisis moments, I won’t be able to refine Latitude’s design.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

It ain’t safe for you out there.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

How can I explain it? It’s all about your LTO—license to operate. We have a lot of relationships because we been in the streets all our lives. I am the daughter of a former gang king. You know how some people, they get left inherited stuff: $200,000, or buildings, or a business? I was left with the streets. My father had different relationships with different gang chiefs, you know, and they watched me grow up. So within different mobs, I have relationships with different people that’s stemming from his relationships, you know, so that kind of put me in a better position than most, you know, because my arms can reach some more places that are kind of, like, underground.21

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Carl has no LTO and he’s out there.

Tobias:view role ↓

Carl was a medic in Afghanistan, okay? He still addicted to adrenaline. I promised your Uncle James I would take care of you at all costs. And I do mean all costs. You not goin’ on any runs. We best head to the office, ’cause who knows what could get kicked off tonight.

They split.

Latitude office, nighttime

CAROLINA and TOBIAS drink coffee. ANAS ALI and LINDSAY come in.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Damn, what’s takin’ Zel and Carl so long? I’m dozin’. It’s 3:21 a.m.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Okay, wake us up, Doc. Finish telling us about this guy who wrote Ben-Hur. I’ll make you one of my special triple espressos.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Toe may not let you go on a run, but now you know you special. ’Cause he never works his espresso machine for nobody but himself.

Carolina:view role ↓

Lew Wallace arrives in Baltimore, doesn’t know a soul, learns about the Maryland Club—a private club wherein “city gentlemen” ate, drank, and made sure power stayed in a circle the size of a pinhead. Took a break from their “hectic” lifestyle of power brokering. Napoleon Bona­parte’s nephew, Jerome “Bo” Bonaparte, was its first president. Johns Hopkins was a member. Maryland was in the Union, but this club became a hangout for Confederate sympathizers. By the way, Johns Hopkins wasn’t a Confederate sympathizer—he was a Unionist—­but the word today is that he did own slaves.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Facts change!

black-and-white block illustration of a black silhouette of man's head and shoulders in profile, with ghostly layered shapes of many people reaching their arms toward each other inside it

The lights fall on a very realistic scene of …

THE MARYLAND CLUB, 1864

A ballroom. An intense gaslit stage. WHITE WOMEN, and one BLACK WOMAN, Confederate bandannas in their bosoms, serve whiskey to the WHITE CLUB MEMBERS, which include no women.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

(Voice-over.) Wallace sends a Major William Este to the Maryland Club to inquire about he and his men getting access while in town, for meals, hospitality, etc.

MAJOR WILLIAM ESTE (white, 20s, energetic) walks in with a MARSHAL. He approaches a club member.

ESTE:view role ↓

Please lead me to the club secretary.

A show-stopping number cuts him off. A burst of banjo, drums, horns, as a WHITE MALE SINGER moves onstage.

WHITE MALE SINGER: Introducing … Lil’—Cotton—Pone!!!!!!!!

Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL, with heavy brothel makeup, dressed in a sparkly, sexualized costume, dances over to a piano with choreographed moves. She plays the minstrel song “Miss Lucy Long” with the ease and energy of a prodigy, and a dazzling smile. LUCY LONG, a white man in drag and blackface, makes a splashy entrance and dances to the song.

WHITE MALE SINGER: Oh! I jist come out afore you,
To sing a little song,
I plays it on de banjo,
And dey calls it Lucy Long.

At first, ESTE and the MARSHAL are enthralled—even some Unionists enjoyed blackface.

The chorus is sung, with the band playing and our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL harmonizing.

Oh! take your time Miss Lucy,
Take your time Miss Lucy Long.
Oh! take your time Miss Lucy
Take your time Miss Lucy Long.

Miss Lucy she is handsome,
And Miss Lucy she is tall,
To see her dance Cachucha
Is death to niggers all.

Oh! Miss Lucy’s teeth is grinning
Just like an ear ob corn,
And her eyes dey look so winning!
Oh! would I’d ne’er been born.

A WHITE WOMAN serving drinks gives the MARSHAL a whiskey. He enjoys a close look at her bosom—and then suddenly notices the Confederate bandanna.

MARSHAL: Major—

ESTE:view role ↓

Shh!

WHITE MALE SINGER: I axed her for to marry
Myself de toder day,
She said she’d rather tarry
So I let her habe her way.

If she makes a scolding wife
As sure as she was born
I’ll tote her down to Georgia …

They reach the finale, again with the band playing and our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL harmonizing.

WHITE MALE SINGER: And … trade … her … off … for … CORN!22

The MARSHAL yanks the bandanna from the WHITE WOMAN’s bosom, thrusting it toward ESTE.

MARSHAL: Copperheads,23 Major!

ESTE:view role ↓

Treason!!!!

WHITE MALE SINGER: Bluebellies!

LUCY LONG: Why, Mercy! Bluebellies ain’t ’lowed! This here Mr. Bo Bonaparte’s clubhouse!

The WHITE MALE SINGER dives off the stage, grabbing ESTE by the collar. The MARSHAL throws the WHITE MALE SINGER to the floor. The BLACK WOMAN inches through the crowd toward our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL.

ESTE:view role ↓

This place is an outpost for the Confederacy! You’re under arrest!

Lucy Long: (Grabbing our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL and holding her like a hostage.) Lawd, Lawd! We’s under ’rest, Lil’ Cotton Pone, we’s under ’rest! Oh, Lawdy!

A fight breaks out. The BLACK WOMAN grabs our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL and splits with her during the escalating violence. The MARSHAL handcuffs the WHITE MALE SINGER and LUCY LONG.

MARYLAND CLUB MEMBER: Major. Pardon us. All this talk about a vote that’s comin’ to end slavery—all of those niggers runnin’ loose? Bucks naked, women chasin’ ignorant pickaninnies in our streets? Little whiskey for medicine is all this means to be. We’re scammered. Don’t take it serious.

ESTE sees that they are outnumbered.

ESTE:view role ↓

Marshal, let ’em go. We’ll be back.

Latitude office, PRESENT DAY, just before dawn

ANAS ALI, CAROLINA, TOBIAS, and LINDSAY are all sipping espresso.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Don’t forget there’s a full-fledged war on, and Maryland is about to vote for or against slavery. Este reports to Wallace that the Maryland Club is a hangout for Confederate sympathizers—

ZEL and CARL return—they look like warriors exhausted after battle.

ZEL:view role ↓

We gotta do something more about these young ladies, and stop thinking of them only as extensions of the young men.

Carl:view role ↓

Noke is out flyin’ on her own. Her beef with Kevin is no joke. She wants to put together her own pack and kill him.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

No matter what we say, our program is male-centered.

Tobias:view role ↓

At the moment, I’m not worried about girls creating packs. We can’t lose focus.

Zel:view role ↓

Toe, straight up: You don’t think a girl could be in the game, full-out, without a man, do you?

Tobias:view role ↓

(Suppressing a giggle.) Uh—I don’t.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Shortsighted, man.

Carolina:view role ↓

Nobody is thinking about the impact that this street violence is having on young women, right? So, like all movements, right? If you grow up in something—

LINDSAY:view role ↓

—And somebody keeps telling you to siddown somewhere and goes to decide that you gonna do dis for us? Then you’re like, “Well, I can do it too. I can do it better. I’ma show you.”

Carolina:view role ↓

Right? ’Cause this—the gang life—is a movement of empowerment.24

A loud doorbell rings. LINDSAY and ZEL are at the security screen in a flash.

ZEL:view role ↓

It’s Nokey.

ANAS ALI pushes a button. Soon, NKOSAZANA, a.k.a. Nokey, enters. She is played by the same actor who plays our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL, whom we just saw in the burlesque. She’s wearing makeup and modern clothes: tight jeans, Louboutins, and a blinged-out, fur-collared jacket. She’s 14, acting like a 16-year-old, but she has the face of a baby.

ZEL and LINDSAY frisk her. LINDSAY takes a Glock out of NKOSAZANA’s jacket. They sit.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Where’d you get the jacket?

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

Same place I got my Loubs: Saks Fifth. My favorite store.

tobias:view role ↓

Stealing is against the rules.

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

That’s why I come to say this program ain’t for me.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

This program is not for you. Yet and still, Zel and Carl were out there just now keeping you from making your second huge mistake—the first one being what you did to get yourself incarcerated in the first place.

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

I’m fixin’ to leave Latitude.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

(Playing the bad cop.) You are not ready to leave Latitude. You are barely ready to be in it.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

(Playing the good cop.) Whoa, whoa, Toe. Ease up.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

You messin’ up, Noke. You messin’ up.

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

I’m the type who mess up. That’s why I’m quittin’. I ain’t got the potential to be one of y’all successes. It ain’t smart of y’all to try to save me. I’m risky. I’ll mess y’all’s numbers up.

Carolina:view role ↓

Numbers? This isn’t about numbers.

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

Then how come in the Sun paper they got the numbers of how many people y’all “servin’ ” so far? Like we a chicken box or a court summons. How come the Sun had a picture of me? … Ain’t nobody been able to change me. Shit, my mama and them barely changed my diapers.

Carl:view role ↓

Are you afraid of—?

Lindsay:view role ↓

What’s your plan, Nokey baby?

Tobias:view role ↓

Considering you are a female without any male structure to work inside of … or—

Carl:view role ↓

Are you working in a male organization?

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

There’s no judgment here.

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

I am a female and I know what my power is. I know what I could have done to somebody, or what I can make happen in the streets … I can set you up. I can use my beauty to get you where I want you to be.25

Lindsay:view role ↓

Now, you are one of those real pretty children, so that is true, you certainly could. Now, I was a pretty chile too. Bein’ pretty is like carryin’ a gun: You really need a license, and some lessons, or you could get yourself in trouble.

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

I could be so sweet that you believe in trusting me and show me where everyone in your houses is at. Females can make a lot of things happen. Females have brothers; they can run and get they brother and start a war. They can be anything … Drive-by shooters …26

Zel:view role ↓

Absolutely. Toe, you know darn well we got shooters that’s females.

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

When they go out, they always got the girls with them. And they girls is either the driver or the shooter. But you really wouldn’t know this if you wasn’t on the concrete with them.27

Tobias:view role ↓

And who exactly are you on the concrete with?

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Seems to me Nkosazana is talking about having her own splinter group. Is that what’s happenin’, Noke?

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

I can be just as much of a shooter as you can. I can roll with you all. I can hold a gun. I can handle the pack. I can … do this and do that. I can … you know, I can have a group of young women following me.28

Lindsay:view role ↓

You fixin’ to get some of your girls workin’ the streets, and takin’ a cut off the top?

Zel:view role ↓

It’s a lot of young ladies, they are going into strippin’, and usin’ Backpage.29

Carl:view role ↓

Is that what you have in mind?

Tobias:view role ↓

I’m just trying to understand how you think you can handle a whole pack. You ain’t tall enough to have your own pack; you still a shorty.

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

I ain’t no shorty. I’m almost 15.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

You look like a shorty. You look like you are not even 12 yet. And you are planning on being a pimp?

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Actually, that could work in her favor. Nobody would suspect a 12-year-old girl to be a pimp.

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

A lot of the females I know don’t even know they’re being pimped; they just think we buddies and we hangin’ out and this what we doing together.30

Lindsay:view role ↓

But then you might have that one smarter girlfriend that’s with you that know how to line us up before we all make it, and she even got her chop off the top before y’all even get started on whatever you doing. And then a friend—still chopping.31

CARL:view role ↓

What’s going on, Nokey? What is really going on? With you.

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

(Fighting tears.) My mama is struggling. It’s bad at home. My mama goin’ through a depression. I just need money. And it’s a lot a money out there, even more than before I went into juvie. I’m talkin’ about money. Y’all talkin’ ’bout freedom, and that ain’t never gonna be.

NKOSAZANA gets up, grabs her gun, throws open the door, and splits.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

She won’t quit. When you fixin’ to quit, you don’t announce it; you just quit.

Lindsay:view role ↓

Most of what she had to say, she’s heard about in juvie. But the way she’s talkin’? She hasn’t done anything. Yet.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Nothing new.

CarolinA:view role ↓

Except the part about her mother.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Shall we call it a night?

Lights down.

TOBIAS’s loft, midday

TOBIAS, ZEL, and LINDSAY are sparring at the far end of the loft. ANAS ALI and CAROLINA are at the worktable. CARL, with shoes on, is at the whiteboard, writing “Hyperarousal.” Everyone else is in socks.

Carolina:view role ↓

To me, this has post-traumatic stress written all over it.

Carl:view role ↓

So soldiers coming back from war with PTSD, they have a very similar symptom picture in terms of extreme explosive anger and aggression. And so, um, you know, other things are sometimes—­they don’t experience positive emotions. But the thing about them is the trauma is not just in the past; the trauma is today and tomorrow, right? It’s not completely the same as post-traumatic stress. Because they’ve got trauma today, trauma tomorrow.32

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

… It ain’t historical, like “historical” trauma; we don’t need historical trauma, right, ’cause we got enough trauma through poverty in the present?33

LINDSAY and ZEL take off sparring equipment, get waters from the fridge.

zel:view role ↓

Why did you save up to buy this expensive Sub-Zero if you never gonna put food in it? I am starved.

tobias:view role ↓

Food’s messy.

zel:view role ↓

Nobody needs this much water.

tobias:view role ↓

One hundred bottles. Y’all took two—that makes 98.

zel:view role ↓

There’s wisdom in feeding your bodyguard, Toe.

carl:view role ↓

Here, Zel, take my pretzel thins.

lindsay:view role ↓

Dr. V, Nokey sayin’ recruits are just numbers for us; the kids don’t trust us.

Carl:view role ↓

It’s the system they don’t trust. To them, we’re the system—they don’t see the nuance.

zel:view role ↓

Dr. N, no offense—you do look like you’re with the system. Your clothes are what I’ma call “charity fashion.” You look … like a teacher.

CARolina:view role ↓

I am a teacher.

Lindsay:view role ↓

Leave my girl alone.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

That’s not charity fashion; that’s “academic chic.”

zel:view role ↓

And yet, we don’t have cred with the judges. Judge Morley—­messin’ with our plan, banking on us failing. She may even be takin’ bets with the rest of them black robes.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Now you soundin’ paranoid.

Carl:view role ↓

She’s catastrophizing.

Tobias:view role ↓

Man, take your shoes off. You’re scuffing my floor.

CARL slips his shoes off.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

We ain’t this, we ain’t that. I feel kinda sad. Could I have stayed involved with my gang more heavily, and worked on peace from inside of there, instead of kind of leaving them behind?34 My daughter still kind of leans on that. She says I was more respected, from social media and her peers, as me being the legend I was—than me now bein’ this anti-violence guy, going into the community, you know, talking about peace, when all they been in is war. I’m not violent anymore, right? What I really want for my brothers and for myself—I want to be alive and free.35 So sometimes I do think that if I had stayed the person with status, in authority, then I may have been able to do a lot more.

ZEL:view role ↓

Remember when our life was all about mayhem? I kind of miss it.

Carl:view role ↓

I sometimes miss the old me, the me who didn’t have to worry about anything but sports, girls, pranks, and extravagant birthday parties. The me who idolized my fuckup brother. I didn’t have to be my parents’ problem. He was. One night he and his buddy got high and climbed the cable on the Golden Gate Bridge. He didn’t even fall. The cops caught him. All they did was drive him home! I kept thinking he’d get kicked out of school. But no. The headmaster of the school came over to our house in Pacific Heights every morning, checked in to see if he got through his homework. Him, my mother, and the headmaster, kinda like a prayer meeting. But the only religion in the school was money. Everyone believed in money. My brother is very rich, a finance guy—on the board of a cathedral, pillar of his community, with what Zel would call a charity wife and three kids. He was so full of mischief and mayhem before. Our mayhem got classified as “mischief.” Y’all got pathologized and incarcerated.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Is that why he made a big donation to us—guilt?

CARL:view role ↓

Yeah.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Speaking of all this mayhem, Doc, you never told us about the “mayhem” that Abraham Lincoln was worried about.

Carolina:view role ↓

Okay, so mayhem in Annapolis, Maryland, the Old Statehouse, 1864.

Loud male shouting. We hear a gavel banging.

Maryland Constitutional Convention, 1864

Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL appears again, back as she was in the beginning, with the iPad, and as soon as the mise-en-scène appears, she leaves.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

(Voice-over.) Slavery did not end in Maryland by proclamation. It ended by vote. People talked for months and months and argued and argued and somewhere in all this a Christian minister entered a very important word into the discussion: apprentice.

The Old Statehouse, Annapolis, Maryland

Lights up on full-out action: WHITE MEN in period clothing, in the midst of an impassioned debate.

Reverend Robert W. TODD:view role ↓

Ordered: That the Committee on the Judicial Department be instructed to inquire into the expediency of incorporating into the constitution a provision making it the duty of the legislature to provide by law for the apprenticeship, by courts of competent jurisdiction, of emancipated Negroes who are minors, so as to better provide for their welfare and preparation for freedom.36

ARCHIBALD STIRLING JR.:view role ↓

(Jumps to his feet.) I am opposed to that article!

TODD:view role ↓

I think it is very desirable that some provision should be made so as to better prepare those emancipated Negroes who may be minors for the enjoyment of the freedom that we shall give them.

EDWIN A. ABBOTT:view role ↓

I would suggest to my friend that we better emancipate them first, and then provide for them afterward.

STIRLING:view role ↓

I do not wish to debate this question! The necessary effect of it will be to perpetuate slavery in Maryland for 10 years longer. This section provides absolutely for the binding out of an entire class of persons, without any reference to the condition of the emancipated parents of these children, without any regard to the age of the children, whether they are 8 or 18 years of age, whether they are competent to earn a livelihood or not. Even if the Orphans’ Court thinks that they are able to support themselves, and will do so, they are a class to be bound out. This section is not so much to provide for the custody of these people as it is to compensate the masters by giving them an additional furlough upon the time of their slaves.

Ezekiel Forman CHAMBERS:view role ↓

This exhibition of apprehension seems to be entertained by gentlemen, lest a dollar of compensation should be given to the masters who are stripped of their property. Is it to be a matter of regret that incidentally you should, to some small extent, remunerate these people? You have, by one fell swoop, manumitted men, women, and children, old and young, firm, infirm, and helpless; those who are as impotent as the child at the breast, and as incapable of maintaining themselves. We are about to turn loose upon the community every minor Negro in the state. Uneducated, unprepared for the condition of freedom, with no employment, no business, no vocation except that in which they must engage under the instruction of the white people, as general laborers, entirely and exclusively accustomed to farming operations—thousands upon thousands are to be turned loose.

Joseph M. CUSHING:view role ↓

The delegation of Baltimore City are all instructed by our constituents and are definitely pledged not to vote for any law for colored apprenticeship. And certainly in other parts of the state, delegates were sent here for the purpose of emancipating the slaves, and it could not have been the will of their constituents that after their emancipation, all persons under 21 years of age should be remanded to slavery.

Henry STOCKBRIDGE:view role ↓

I move to amend by adding to the section the words: “And said court shall bind all masters to whom any such apprentice shall be indentured, to cause said apprentice to be taught to read and write; and any violation of which obligation on the part of any master shall cancel the indenture of apprenticeship.”

William T. PURNELL:view role ↓

The articles of apprenticeship, or the indentures, are not required to express that the Negro shall be educated. Does anyone profess upon this floor that the Negro will ever occupy the status of the white man? Is there any individual who can ever bring his mind to the conclusion that that degraded race will ever be raised to the degree of the white race? That they are inferior to the white race there is no doubt. The God of nature when he created, stamped upon their forehead the mark as broad and lasting as the mark upon Cain. Is there any man who would elevate them to the degree of the white man? The idea that the Negro can ever elevate himself to the condition of the white man is preposterous. But unfortunately, the white man can debase himself to the condition of the Negro. I cannot support a proposition to elevate the Negro to the sphere of the white man.

Joseph B. PUGH:view role ↓

I am astonished this morning! The impression might prevail that probably those of us who take a different view of this subject from what that gentleman does, that we were in favor of elevating the Negro race, were in favor of something like Negro equality; a rehash of that political, wishy-washy, meaningless talk. It is better to have educated labor than uneducated labor. It is perfectly proper to educate a horse …

CHAMBERS:view role ↓

To read and write?

PUGH:view role ↓

You can educate a horse in other ways than to read and write. If you could teach a horse to read and write, it would be a good thing; but you cannot do that. But you can teach the Negro to read and write.

CHAMBERS:view role ↓

Not all of them.

PUGH:view role ↓

Well, some of them, then. You cannot teach some white men to read and write. I am astonished that Mr. Purnell should see in that amendment some evidence that we acknowledge that the Negro is our equal. I have never had any such fear. Take two men, the one 6 feet high, and the other 5 feet high; that is their stature, so designed by the Almighty. Put them upon the same platform, the one by the side of the other; if they stand upright men, there is no way in which their two heads can be upon the same level, unless he who is the taller man should stoop. Now, other gentlemen may do as they please, but we do not intend to stoop.

STIRLING:view role ↓

Will anybody say that any Negro boy 16 years of age, or even 12 years of age, is not able to make his own living now?

James L. RIDGLEY:view role ↓

What is the proposition? That the jurisdiction of the Orphans’ Court touching free Negroes and mulattoes, as now exercised by law, shall be so extended as to authorize them to give the preference in apprenticing such Negroes and mulattoes, to their former masters. That is all it means, nothing more and nothing less. This ghost of slavery that has been invoked has the effect of intimidating those who, from convictions of duty, are seeking to emancipate the enslaved race in this state.

Frederick SCHLEY:view role ↓

The apology for restoring free colored minors to practical slavery, under the guise of benevolence to them, is abominable. Much stress has been laid upon the benevolence of this proposition, Mr. Todd, but I confess my surprise that a minister of the Gospel should never have said, in all his views of that unfortunate race, one word in advocacy of their being educated in this transition state. Not one word!

CUSHING:view role ↓

I submit that it is simply absurd that there should be a law of Maryland that forces a man abundantly able to maintain himself back into the condition of an apprentice, to serve a master and to receive no wages. A hundred thousand free Blacks in Maryland support themselves now. The experience of counties and of the city of Baltimore tells you that there is no more prosperous class of labor in the state of Maryland today than the free Black labor. They are abundantly able to support themselves by their own exertions. There are no more of them in the almshouses than of white people.

TOBIAS’s LOFT, PRESENT DAY

Tobias:view role ↓

So you’re saying that before they even got to determine if they are going to set the slaves free, they were in there arguing about taking children back to the plantations?

ZEL:view role ↓

It’s built in! It’s built in! They do not want us anywhere but plantations. They do not want us in the mix!!! Not then. Not now! It’s built in!

CAROLINA:view role ↓

That’s right. It is built in.

CARL:view role ↓

So did it pass? Did the apprenticeship clause make it into the constitution?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

It did not.

CARL:view role ↓

Good.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

But—

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Did I ever tell y’all how much I hate that word, but ?

Carolina:view role ↓

Shall we stick with the good news first?

Whistles, a brass band, and cheers accompany CAROLINA’s speech.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

(Voice-over.) On October 12 and 13, 1864, the votes were cast, and on October 29 the results were certified—and Maryland went for freeing the slaves! Festoons! Parades! Church choirs! Dancing in the streets!

Emancipation Day in Maryland, November 1, 1864

Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL runs across the stage, unfurling a beautiful banner. Upon it is written “Freedom.” A MASS OF BLACK PEOPLE follows behind her in parade mode.

black-and-white block illustration of barefoot person raising arms overhead with chain broken apart, layered over other silhouettes of people, one looking at a broken chain

A big, choreographed theatrical number. An extravaganza. WHITE PEOPLE dancing, BLACK PEOPLE dancing. Jubilation. PREACHERS OF BOTH RACES are preaching on corners. The scene takes over the entire stage, including where TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, CAROLINA, LINDSAY, ZEL, and CARL are. They are surrounded by this joyous 360-degree “past.”

Suddenly: A five-gun salute goes off. TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, LINDSAY, and ZEL drop to the floor as if they are being shot at.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Oh, the guns weren’t meant to kill anybody. That was a gun salute that Lew Wallace ordered! Everything’s cool!

The party resumes. Church bells go off. Fireworks. Folks of all races are dancing.

Tobias:view role ↓

Hold on!

He signals and stops the music. Like a game of musical chairs, the entire cast freezes.

Tobias:view role ↓

Did white people actually celebrate this?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I assumed they did, but that might be that irritating Pollyanna in me that won’t let go—

CARL:view role ↓

Let’s pretend they did. Let’s imagine the best for once.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Party on!

The party resumes, reaches a height, and then the adults leave. A CHORUS OF CHILD REVELERS—Black children of different ages, from toddlers to 20-year-olds—stays behind as the celebration subsides, playing with scraps from the party. CAROLINA, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, ZEL, LINDSAY, and CARL stand onstage with the children.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Maryland was very proud to have freed its slaves before the passage of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution requiring that. But …

TOBIAS:view role ↓

But.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

… One day after emancipation. One day. One day. November 2, 1864. One day.

The music resumes to full jubilation until a video projection appears on the wall behind the stage with the text: “Black-child-seizure day, Maryland, November 2, 1864.” SLAVE CATCHERS swarm the stage and grab Black children, among them YOUNG COSTON (played by the same actor who plays JAXON).

Lights up on an oxcart full of Black children. An 8-YEAR-OLD GIRL (our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL, when she was three years younger) runs to get away. She is grabbed and thrown onto the oxcart. A WHITE MAN WITH A LIST and a MUSCULAR THUG stand by the cart. CARL watches the 8-YEAR-OLD GIRL. He will become PHILEMON HAMBLETON, a plantation owner.

WHITE MAN WITH A LIST: Coston!

The MUSCULAR THUG grabs YOUNG COSTON.
YOUNG COSTON:view role ↓

Where you takin’ me?

WHITE MAN WITH A LIST: Back to your master … Next, Elizabeth Turner!

TOBIAS:view role ↓

You said that that bullshit amendment or law or stipulation or whatever did not pass.

Carolina:view role ↓

I added “but.”

Carl:view role ↓

This is unbelievable.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Is it? Carl, imagine you have a way to keep your workforce—in fact, your most robust workforce, as you are not as interested in the slaves who are 50, 60, worn out like old cars. And they aren’t like 11-, 12-, 13-year-old kids today, who supposedly have to be watched and have to have organized sports and other activities to fill the day; these are robust preteens who can haul water, dig ditches, take care of babies and will have more capacity in two years to butcher pigs, pick tobacco, and build things. And here’s a girl, 8 years old. She can babysit, clean, and sew. And imagine what use she will be to you at 12, 13—whenever she gets her period—and can bear children. She can increase your slave population. In this case, the young lady in question is your property, one Elizabeth Turner.

Theater magic ensues wherein our cast steps from past to present and present to past.

CARL walks toward ELIZABETH TURNER. He takes her by the elbow and pulls her off the oxcart.

ELIZABETH:view role ↓

Where you taking me?

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓
Home.
ELIZABETH:view role ↓

But, sir, your place ain’t my home no more. My mama lookin’ for a place to be, but she don’t know where to go. We don’t know where to go, but we ain’t comin’ back to you. We free.

CARL/HAMBLETON grabs her. She starts to scream. He deals with her not as though it’s 1864 but as though she were a kid out of control in a mall today with everyone looking on.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

Everything will be okay—

ELIZABETH breaks away.

Present Day

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Carl, man, it’s 1864 and the girl is your property. You ain’t the man now ; you the man then.

CARL/HAMBLETON grabs ELIZABETH and hauls her offstage. The oxcart sweeps around and then off the stage amid threatening lighting, leaving ANAS ALI, TOBIAS, LINDSAY, ZEL, and CAROLINA on what is now a bare stage.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

So, remember the argument about “apprenticeships”? Even though the legislators who were in favor of apprenticeships did not really win that argument on the Maryland House floor, they still forced Black kids into apprenticeships—­girls until they were 18, boys until they were 21. They used a Black Code law written a few years before to do it.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

This is a fact.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Yes.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

A real fact?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I can show you some things.

Music plays.

INTERMISSION


ACT II

black-and-white block illustration of silhouettes of a line of chained people in tattered clothes in front of a city skyline

TOBIAS’s loft, Present Day

Everyone is gathered around the whiteboard.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

So children are snatched up, taken back to the plantations.

Tobias:view role ↓

They set the scene for the whole system right there, right after emancipation.

ZEL:view role ↓

Juvie.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Foster care.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Mental institutions, meds.

ZEL:view role ↓

Basically locked up, taken away from their mamas ’til they were 18?

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Low-down.

ZEL:view role ↓

We all know ’bout gettin’ locked up ’til we’re 18 or 21.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Yeah, but we did stuff to get locked up—these children didn’t do anything but be Black!

CAROLINA:view role ↓

… Taken back into slavery unless their parents could prove to the judge when they went to court that they could take care of them.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Did everybody stand by and just let this go down?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Course not. Everything about our history is about resistance, some of which included white folks. Which takes me back to Lew Wallace …

Lew Wallace’s headquarters, November 1864

MAJOR WILLIAM ESTE is reading letters aloud to GENERAL LEW WALLACE.

Carolina:view role ↓

(Offstage.) There was an absolute groundswell of people actively trying to get their children back. They wrote letters …

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

(Offstage.) But most of us couldn’t read and write …

Carolina:view role ↓

(Offstage.) They paid people to write letters for them …

Carl:view role ↓

(Offstage.) Where’d they get the money for that?

WALLACE:view role ↓

Proceed.

ESTE:view role ↓

Here’s one from a John Dennis. Snow Hill, Worcester County, Maryland. “I came down after my children, and found them bound out, so I went and asked him for them, and he told me I could not have them, and so I left him and went to Dr. Hubble, and he said that I would have to employ a lawyer to prove that the binding of the children were not right. I went then. He thought I could have them, and I asked the lawyer about it, and he said that he could get them for me if I would pay him ten dollars a case, which would be thirty dollars … My two youngest was bound the day before the New Constitution, and the other one was bound on the same day of the New Constitution.”1

WALLACE:view role ↓

Continue.

ESTE:view role ↓

“I write to report to you a case of a little orphan girl now in her twelfth year of age, who formerly belonged to a man by the name of Franklin Newman, and he still holds her as his property refusing to let any one have her. There has been two or three persons who have asked him for the girl. He told them that he would not let any one have her unless I come for her, and if I did he would let me have her, so I happened to be here and heard what he had said. I went over there to get her. But when I got to Mr. Newman’s and told him what my errand was, he became very angry, telling me that I could not have her and for me to get off of his farm as soon as I could, he said the court had bound her and that she was his property. He then went into the house and got his gun and sword and pursued me until I got off of his farm. He then went back to the house and sent word to me at church, that had not he to have been kept at home by some one coming into his house, that he intended to have come there and shot me, and that I had better leave there before the next morning, for the county was not large enough to hold us both, that he would shoot me the first place he came up with me.” Samuel Elbert.

WALLACE:view role ↓

How many of these children are being snatched up?

ESTE:view role ↓

Thousands.

TOBIAS’s loft, present day

As before.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Thousands.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

How do we know this is real?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Okay. I am going to show you just how real it is. My uncle can arrange for us to have a look at the archives—­the Maryland State Archives. And we will look at actual—real—­documents.

Baltimore Inner Harbor, nighttime

ANAS ALI, CAROLINA, LINDSAY, TOBIAS, ZEL, and CARL walk down by the Inner Harbor, Baltimore’s pride, and evidence that the place is a tale of two cities: fancy restaurants, lights reflected on the water, romantic. The group members carry knapsacks and suitcases as they approach a skipjack oyster boat, The Carolina. On it is JAMES NELSON, CAROLINA’s uncle (Black, mid-50s, stately, but warm).

JAMES:view role ↓

Ahoy!

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Yo, James.

JAMES:view role ↓

Come aboard.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Where we goin’?

JAMES:view role ↓

Annapolis.

ZEL:view role ↓

I can’t swim.

JAMES:view role ↓

No need to swim. That’s what this boat is for.

LINDSAY notices the name Carolina on the boat.

Lindsay:view role ↓

Damn, Doc, you got a boat named after you! Check it out, y’all.

ZEL:view role ↓

I’m scared of the water.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

I keep tellin’ you to learn to swim. What if Toe get chased down to this harbor and you can’t jump in and save him if he jump in?

ZEL:view role ↓

Where I’m supposed to learn to swim, huh? The pool around my way closed down right after World War II, I think. Besides, Black people don’t float.

All: That is not a fact!

CARL puts his hand out to ZEL. She automatically takes it.

ZEL:view role ↓

Only ’cause you and me walk these streets together do I trust you with this, Carl.

JAMES:view role ↓

I can’t tell you how tickled I am to take you personally to the Maryland State Archives, where we will have a meeting in the morning. I make a yearly donation. Apparently they are grateful that some people are interested in more than personal genealogy. I have arranged for us to look at original documents from the “Orphans’ Court.”

Inside the Maryland State Archives

ZEL, TOBIAS, LINDSAY, ANAS ALI, CARL, and CAROLINA are in a large conference room. There are carts with several large boxes. They take out crumbling papers and start looking through them.

On another part of the stage is WALLACE’s office, where ESTE and staff are poring over letters.

ZEL:view role ↓

Stuff’s falling apart in my hands.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

How old is this stuff?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

One hundred and seventy years old.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

These aren’t people listed on these bundles. It’s things: a vase, a rocking chair, a cup.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Orphans’ Court referred to where the estates of anyone who died were considered: the items—

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Orphans was items?2

TOBIAS:view role ↓

They were little slaves, right? Property, right?

JAMES walks in with DESMOND BURNS (Black, early 40s) and FARLEY McGIBBEN (a white librarian in his late 30s).

JAMES:view role ↓

Everyone, Desmond Burns and Farley McGibben.

FARLEY hands CAROLINA a large book.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

(Reading.) “The Negro Docket.”

CAROLINA gives the docket to ZEL, who opens it and stares at the first page, mystified by the old cursive.

FARLEY:view role ↓

You’ll see in that docket that in just one day, 27 people, mostly women, came to the court hoping to get their children back.

DESMOND:view role ↓

The “apprenticeships” went on for three full years after emancipation. Black folks started making it their business to fight this thing.

FARLEY:view role ↓

And the Freedmen’s Bureau had radical lawyers who bushwhacked it.

ZEL:view role ↓

(Riffling through pages in the docket, she opens randomly to a page and stops short.) Look here! On this court list I’m lookin’ at! “Elizabeth Turner!” Is this the same Elizabeth we was talkin’ about?

They all crowd around the docket.

FARLEY:view role ↓

Seriously? Is that Elizabeth Turner’s name?

DESMOND:view role ↓

I think it is … That’s her mother’s name.

Carolina:view role ↓

Elizabeth’s mother, sometimes recorded as “Betty,” sometimes as “Betsy”—

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

They never get our names right.

Desmond:view role ↓

This is the same Elizabeth Turner …

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Elizabeth Turner is important because she’s basically the star of the case that puts an end to these so-called apprenticeships. Now, just imagine Elizabeth’s mother going back to the plantation to get her little girl back. We know from Wallace’s diaries and papers that people went directly to the plantations—

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Tryin’ to get your child back? I can imagine it.

Theater magic: LINDSAY and CARL move to another part of the stage. LINDSAY plays BETSY TURNER MINOKY, mother of ELIZABETH TURNER; CARL plays PHILEMON HAMBLETON.

A barn on Hambleton’s plantation, November 1864

CARL as HAMBLETON is working in the barn. LINDSAY as BETSY approaches him.

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

I come to get my girl back.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

In eight years, I will pay you $10 for her … I’ll take care of the girl.

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

No, sir, I can’t sell my baby. No.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

I have to train her. Teach her. That’s what apprenticeship is—

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

I haven’t heard nothin’ about that.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

It’s the law. Can’t have little niggers runnin’ around not knowin’ where to go, how to be, what to do. Law says we gotta train ’em before they get set free.

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

When do I get her?

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

When she’s 18.

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

Eighteen? That’s 10 years—a long time for her to be without her mama. She might birth my grandbabies by then.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

She might. She might.

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

You keepin’ her here just to make more slaves.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

I can’t make more slaves, even if I wanted to. Slavery’s over.

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

How can you take my girl, after I did everything you told me? Everything. Just like you wanted it done. I was one of your best niggers, sir.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

You’ll have to go to court.

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

Court? I can’t read or write. What I’m s’posed to do in court? I want to kiss my baby cheek one more time. Hold her one more time.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

It’s out of my hands. It’s the law. All the children are to be back with their masters to do their apprenticeships. If you want to see her, you will have to come to court.

A courthouse in Talbot County, Maryland, November 3, 1864

There are MANY BLACK PEOPLE with CHILDREN, WHITE PLANTERS, and a JUDGE. It’s a horrible, emotionally charged mess.

JUDGE: Elizabeth Turner!

CARL/HAMBLETON steps forward with ELIZABETH. LINDSAY/BETSY comes up beside them.

JUDGE: How do you plan to care for the child? Have you means?

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

We was just made free three, four days ago. Ain’t no more slaves to do work, so there’s a lotta work to be done, and I ’tend on takin’ in laundry and mendin’.

JUDGE: In the meantime, your girl will have to court mischief to eat or go hungry. Philemon Hambleton, what do you intend?

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

Elizabeth Turner will be taught the art or calling of a house servant.

JUDGE: Mr. Hambleton shall pay to Betsy Turner, her mother, $10 at the end of her 16th year. Will you agree?

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

But, sir, I can’t sell my girl. With emancipation, she belong to the lawd. If’n I sell her then, for her to be rightful, I be havin’ to buy her, but we free and she s’posed to come back to me, for me to care for ’til she care for me and the lawd take me and then take her. She ain’t for sale one way t’ the other.

JUDGE: Girl, this is a court of law, not a philosophical discussion. Will you accept the money? Ten dollars at the end of her 16th year, $12.50 at the end of her 17th, and $15 to the girl at the end of her term of service on October 8, 1874, at the time the child reaches 18. Yes or no?

LINDSAY/BETSY freezes.

JUDGE: You are in a court of law. Answer me or you will be in contempt—

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

Sir, I …

JUDGE: Elizabeth Turner is hereby given to the care and guidance of Philemon Hambleton, who will teach her the art and mystery of the house servant.

The slam of a gavel.

Elizabeth:view role ↓

Mamaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!

“Mama” reverberates as CARL/HAMBLETON lifts ELIZABETH and carries her offstage. LINDSAY/BETSY looks on in horror.

JAMES’s boat, Annapolis Harbor, Present day

CAROLINA, ANAS ALI, ZEL, CARL, and TOBIAS are on the boat, cooling their feet in the water.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Taking us away, putting us in families the courts create. And just imagine what it was like for all those mamas.

Zel:view role ↓

A child can keep a woman alive, you know that? I think that’s how come a lot of my friends had they babies at 14, 15—gives a girl somethin’ to live for, you know what I’m sayin’?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

You really think that?

LINDSAY steps onto the boat.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

That story is hard. Real hard for me. I think I was probably ’round about Elizabeth’s age when they took me from my mother.

ZEL:view role ↓

’Round 8, huh?

LINDSAY:view role ↓

I felt like my mother really tried a lot to build a very special, close connection with me, because I was her only girl. It felt like I had anything I wanted. Then the courts moved us in with my grandmother—actually, my great-grandmother.3

CAROLINA:view role ↓

What happened to your mother?

LINDSAY:view role ↓

She been through her own pain and trauma, stemming first from my father. He got killed in our house. My mom, all of us, was there. So she never really had time to grieve on him.

CARL:view role ↓

Wait, I thought your father was Big Coleman, a chief—

LINDSAY:view role ↓

He wasn’t my biological father.

Zel:view role ↓

How come you never told me this? So what happened to your real father?

Lindsay:view role ↓

He passed before I turned 1, and his death is actually wrote about in The Baltimore Sun. He was just making a way for himself when he got killed. I never knew him, no pictures, no nothin’. I felt like everybody downplayed my mother’s trauma, to make her look crazy. She actually was admitted into a psychiatric unit—she didn’t admit herself; somebody called them on her. But at the time, my mother was fully homeless, and that’s where I wanted to be, with her.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Your mother was homeless, but at 7 years old, you preferred to be with her rather than in a home.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

She needed somebody. She had nobody! Like, we were in, like, literally in shelter, shelter from the streets, everything. Like the whole—whatever you can imagine. But I felt like she should not be alone. The courts, they saw a better fit. But, now, even now, you know, growing up without her for so long, like, I still—I long, that’s something I long for, like …

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

When you look back on history, you don’t think about all those feelings.

Tobias:view role ↓

Yeah, it’s like every character in the story is a piece of information—not a feeling human.

Carl:view role ↓

Like an item—a rocking chair, a teacup, a candlestick.

block illustration with black and white silhouettes of 2 men and a woman talking on left and on right silhouettes of two people under a hanging light bulb

The parlor of 134 Prince B&B, Annapolis

JAMES, ANAS ALI, TOBIAS, CAROLINA, CARL, ZEL, and LINDSAY relax.

JAMES:view role ↓

Do they know about Lew Wallace?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Of course. You can’t tell the story of the apprenticeships without Wallace.

JAMES:view role ↓

Do they know what he did with the Maryland Club?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Some.

JAMES:view role ↓

Carolina is parsimonious in shedding light on those white men who did move things in the right direction. She has an anxiety about celebrating the “white savior.”

CAROLINA:view role ↓

That’s not fair. Carl, don’t I acknowledge you?

A HOUSEMAN of the 134 Prince B&B comes in.

HOUSEMAN: Have y’all taken advantage of our complimentary bourbon tasting?

ZEL:view role ↓

Now you’re talking!

The HOUSEMAN leads ZEL to a cabinet. She proceeds to pour bourbon for everyone but TOBIAS and ANAS ALI, who don’t drink.

JAMES:view role ↓

The archives are closed for the weekend. Let’s go to Baltimore, come back on Monday to the archives. The Maryland Club has a curious and relevant history. I’ll take you there. I’m a member.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Uncle J, please do not embarrass me by insisting that my friends go there.

Tobias:view role ↓

What modern debauchery goes on there?

Carolina:view role ↓

Debauchery would be interesting. There’s a dress code. No jeans, no sneakers, no hats. Forget about your kufi, Anas; gotta wear a jacket.

Zel:view role ↓

We’ll borrow some of your charity-lady clothes.

Outside the Maryland Club, Charles and East Eager Streets, Baltimore

CAROLINA, TOBIAS, ZEL, ANAS ALI, LINDSAY, and CARL approach the building. As they ascend the short, worn, red-carpeted staircase, NKOSAZANA rushes up to them, looking like a shipwreck.

ZEL:view role ↓

Nokey!

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Where have you been?

ZEL:view role ↓

How long you been following us, Noke?

TOBIAS:view role ↓

What happened?

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

You can tell us.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Whatever you did, whatever happened.

NKOSAZANA falls to the ground, sobbing, and presents her cellphone to ZEL, who is horrified by what she sees.

NKOSAzaNA:view role ↓

My mama killed herself online.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

You mean … she hung herself?

NKOSAZANA:view role ↓

My mama killed herself online!!!!

ZEL:view role ↓

Her mother took her own life on Insta. It’s right here.4

TOBIAS:view role ↓

You did the right thing, coming straight here to tell us. We got you.

TOBIAS holds her in his arms as ANAS ALI, CAROLINA, and LINDSAY look at the gruesome Instagram video. TOM, the club doorman (white, 70s, wearing a bow tie), steps out of the door.

TOM: Move along.

James:view role ↓

(Stepping out of the front door.) Tom, these are my guests. And you know Carolina, my niece.

TOM: Yes, yes, of course. You’ve grown.

Carolina:view role ↓

I was here last month.

ANAS ALI sees a police car offstage.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

And here come the Baltimore Police. Black folks on white property …

James:view role ↓

Come inside.

Tom: The girl is not in accordance with the dress code.

NKOSAZANA breaks away from TOBIAS and runs. CARL and ZEL take off after her.

Maryland Club Dining Room

JAMES, LINDSAY, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, and CAROLINA are eating.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

(To JAMES.) Her mom killed herself online, right? So it was just like, what ? She waited on Nokey to come home …5

Tobias:view role ↓

From juvie.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

But I always knew something was wrong with her mother. I just assumed it because her daughter is out here in the streets like this. And I’m trying to help her, but I never met her mom. I would go to the door; her mother would never come. She would send her other daughter.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

The idea of a strong Black woman holding up the hood, holding up the family. That’s an old idea.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Our mamas are suffering from depression …

TOBIAS:view role ↓

The big mamas are gone.

JAMES:view role ↓

Is a big mama the same as a “hood mama”?

TOBIAS:view role ↓

I think about my grandmother, I think about all of my other friends’ grandmothers, like, when we showed up or when my guys showed up on my porch, my grandmother knew that I was involved in some things, right? But there was still a level of respect that when the guys will be seeing her—they’d be hidin’ their big guns. And it’s something else that’s been lost—spirituality. No matter how bad I was, no matter how bad my guys were, we thought we had to come to church on Sunday, and she was like, “Bring all the guys to church on Sunday. And I’m not taking no for an answer.” So we still had some sense of spirituality. Right? They’ve gotten further away from this family aspect, right?6

JAMES:view role ↓

All right, so where are they? Where’d the big mamas, the hood mamas, go?

TOBIAS:view role ↓

The big mamas now want to be at the clubs.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Depression. Our mamas and our big mamas …

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

… Are going through depression.7

JAMES:view role ↓

Nothing from Zel? Let me call my friends.

Carolina:view role ↓

No cops, J.

Tobias:view role ↓

Zel will have outrun her. She will talk her into listening to Carl. Carl will get her to go to the hospital.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Whatever Carl thought he was getting into with us after his residency at Walter Reed—this is not armchair psychiatry he does. It’s street therapy. Battlefield therapy.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Carl been through his own rocky road.

JAMES:view role ↓

A wounded healer.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Like all of us.

ZEL enters, dripping with sweat. JAMES stands immediately.

ZEL:view role ↓

Any place I can wash up?

CAROLINA takes ZEL by the arm.

JAMES:view role ↓

You’re in luck. They finally finished building a women’s locker room. Last week! This club is one of the last in America to admit women. Not ’til 2021. Where’s Carl?

ZEL:view role ↓

He’s with Nokey at Mercy.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Psych?

James:view role ↓

She would be so much better off at Hopkins. The head of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is my—

CarolinA:view role ↓

J. It’s cool. We got this.

A long, carpeted hallway with painting after painting of white men

JAMES, ZEL, LINDSAY, CAROLINA, ANAS ALI, and TOBIAS enter.

JAMES:view role ↓

This used to be the billiards room, where my paternal grandfather—Carolina’s great-grandfather—worked.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Racking up balls for white men, cleaning their spittoons.

JAMES:view role ↓

So back to General Wallace. He had quite the sense of humor. And not a small aptitude for revenge. When he arrived in town, looking for proper hospitality, he had sent his men to …

Wallace’s Headquarters, late 1864

ESTE:view role ↓

We have to get the Negroes off the street. Some are being beaten, killed, and some are causing trouble, and what about women and children? We have to get them somewhere safe to be. Women, sir, and children.

WALLACE:view role ↓

I know the perfect place.

Maryland Club, Late 1864

The MEMBERS are no longer so festive.

MEMBER No. 1: As far as I’m concerned, the vote’s not legal. They didn’t have the votes. They had to go get votes from soldiers in the field.

WALLACE and ESTE walk in with some SOLDIERS.

WALLACE:view role ↓

The city’s under martial law. I’m closing this place down. (To ESTE.) Check the place for weapons. Don’t leave a cabinet unsearched. Clear out or I’ll clear you out.

SOLDIERS push men out of the way and search.

MEMBER No. 2: I’m a Unionist.

MEMBER No. 1: So am I.

WALLACE:view role ↓

But what were you last week?

WALLACE and ESTE move around, checking out the mansion.

WALLACE:view role ↓

Handsomely furnished.

They come upon the kitchen. WALLACE admires the cooking range.

WALLACE:view role ↓

You could cook for lots of people on this range. Major, the Maryland Club will now house emancipated Negro refugees.

ESTE:view role ↓

Negro refugees? Really, sir? Here?

WALLACE:view role ↓

I shall find a sturdy woman to take care of them and the place.

ESTE:view role ↓

But, sir, the town’s aristocratic sort eat and drink here. Napoleon’s nephew started this place. They won’t mix well.

WALLACE:view role ↓

(Helping himself to a handful of peanuts at the bar.) They won’t need to: I’ve shut the place down. The aristocrats will have to find dinner, drink, and camaraderie elsewhere.

ESTE:view role ↓

For how long, sir?

WALLACE:view role ↓

Long as we need to.

Maryland Club, present day

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Whoa. Whoa. He took over the place and turned it into a place for Black women and children?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

In fact, he instructed Este to find an—and I quote—­“excellent lady” to act as a matron. Within a week, at least four or five hundred women and children were refugees in the club.

JAMES:view role ↓

Was called “Freedmen’s Rest.”

Carolina:view role ↓

But …

Tobias:view role ↓

“But …”

Carolina:view role ↓

It only lasted a few months. The governor protested to the War Department and Wallace had to rescind the order. But …

Tobias:view role ↓

“But …”

Carolina:view role ↓

In March of 1865, an official Freedmen’s Bureau was opened in Baltimore, and if you ask me, Wallace’s takeover probably hurried that along. And the Freedmen’s Bureau that opened in March becomes relevant to what happens to Elizabeth Turner in a big way.

TOM arrives.

TOM: Chef says to tell you strawberries are real good now—he made shortcake the way you like it. Wants to know if you want some.

JAMES nods. ZEL is shivering.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Are you cold?

ZEL:view role ↓

I ain’t cold. I feel the ghosts in this place. I feel the badness.

JAMES:view role ↓

There were pockets of goodness, too. Did you tell them the story of Maggy?

They walk to the library and situate themselves there.

Carolina:view role ↓

I’m the lapsed historian; you’re the raconteur.

James:view role ↓

Let’s see if you can sense the goodness even in a place like this, with a fraught history. Here is the story of a comely girl, a mulatto, Margaret Toogood, Maggy. Nineteen years old, who managed to escape to the Maryland Club. Her owner followed her to the city, accused her of larceny—

CAROLINA:view role ↓

This type of thing happened all the time, as you can imagine.

ZEL:view role ↓

I don’t need to ’magine it. I know what they did to us.

She stands.

JAMES:view role ↓

This charge allows him to take her back to the plantation, where he then drops the charge. So now she’s his slave again. He goes to a blacksmith, gets a chain, and puts it around her neck. Locks it. General Lew Wallace heard about this, sent the cavalry to the plantation to bring her to him.

black-and-white illustration of woman's head in black silhouette profile with eye and eyebrow, the profile outlined by the links of a heavy chain

A makeshift office in Freedmen’s Rest/ Maryland Club, 1864

ZEL steps in. An iron collar is around her neck, with a chain and lock. ZEL is now MAGGY TOOGOOD. MAGGY’S MASTER is beside her.

Lights up on WALLACE, ESTE, and a SOLDIER.

WALLACE:view role ↓

Take the collar off her.8

MAGGY’S MASTER:view role ↓

She is my property.

WALLACE:view role ↓

She’s 19 years old. She’s free.

MAGGY’S MASTER:view role ↓

She ran away. That gives me another year.

WALLACE:view role ↓

Take it off her.

MAGGY’S MASTER, with malice, takes the contraption off ZEL/MAGGY and throws it on the floor. WALLACE picks the collar up and tosses it to ESTE, who catches it, responding to the weight.

WALLACE:view role ↓

Este, how much do you suppose that weighs?

ESTE:view role ↓

I’d say four or five pounds, sir.

WALLACE:view role ↓

And how much do you suppose Maggy weighs.

ESTE:view role ↓

Not much more, sir.

WALLACE inspects ZEL/MAGGY, sees large callouses around her neck and collarbone.

WALLACE:view role ↓

How much did she bleed before these callouses formed? How much pus and infection poured out? How much?

MAGGY’S MASTER:view role ↓

I don’t have time to nurse my niggers. I spend time takin’ care of my horses.

WALLACE:view role ↓

Soldier, take her upstairs to be seen by a medic.

The SOLDIER takes ZEL/MAGGY away.

WALLACE:view role ↓

You must pay $500 in trust for this girl. And you are providing the payment now, before you leave my sight.

MAGGY’S MASTER:view role ↓

I will rot before I pay a single dollar!

WALLACE:view role ↓

Este, take him to the city jail and keep him there ’til he changes his mind.

MAGGY’S MASTER:view role ↓

I will rot! You haven’t won this war yet!

WALLACE:view role ↓

Are you with the Confederates? Traitor. Este, see to it that he’s put to hard labor.

MAGGY’S MASTER is pulled away.

Maryland Club library, present day

Our present-day group, except ZEL and CARL, eating strawberry shortcake.

JAMES:view role ↓

Now, Tobias, what is it you say? “How did we get here?”

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Can’t go forward without going back. I’ve learned that in all aspects of my life.

ZEL enters.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

We got a stumbling block right in the present. The judge in some cases has sent us kids who ain’t really ready for our program.

JAMES:view role ↓

Which judge is it?

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Morely.

JAMES takes a fancy note card from his inside pocket. Jots a note.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

(To JAMES.) Are you still using those cards? They bit the dust with the horse and buggy. Save some trees. Start taking notes on your cell.

JAMES:view role ↓

(Mock self-pity.) Allow me one last gasp of my assimilation into patrician ways of old. I’ve had to give up so much. Where will I get these once there are no more proper stationers?

Carolina:view role ↓

You’ll make your own out of cardboard shirt inserts.

ZEL:view role ↓

Why would you join a place like this?

TOBIAS:view role ↓

’Cause that man who worked in the billiards room is looking down from heaven, tickled as can be ’bout this: Carolina and Mr. Nelson bein’ served dessert at the Maryland Club—by a white dude—in the place where he cleaned spittoons.

CARL enters. TOBIAS stands. They hug.

CARL:view role ↓

They’re keeping her for a few days.

Zel:view role ↓

(To CAROLINA.) Hey, when you was fightin’ with the skinny cat in the hallway back at the school, your dean? (She pauses.) You said you didn’t see any value in books.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Nope. I didn’t. I asked who the books are for.

ZEL:view role ↓

I bet there’s not a single book in this room about Maggy Toogood. Maggy’s standin’ there with an iron collar around her neck. We know what her master said and what the general said. What was goin’ through her mind other than “My neck is bleedin’ and pus is runnin’ down my arm”?

JAMES takes cards from his inner jacket pocket and gives them to ZEL.

Zel:view role ↓

(Stroking the stationery.) Ooh, feels nice.

JAMES:view role ↓

The beginning of your diary … What time will you set sail?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

You’re not coming with us?

JAMES:view role ↓

Big meeting tomorrow.

ZEL:view role ↓

(To CAROLINA.) You know how to sail a boat?

JAMES:view role ↓

With the help of my one-man crew, yes. (To ZEL.) She’ll teach you.

Lindsay:view role ↓

She’ll have to learn how to swim first.

TOBIAS walks around surveying the many portraits of old white male members across time.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

So they basically turned this place into a refugee camp, huh? “Freedmen’s Rest,” you say?

CARL:view role ↓

Sometimes I feel like Latitude is a refugee camp.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

You right about that—refugees from violence, bad schools …

ZEL:view role ↓

From bad judges …

CARL:view role ↓

From poverty …

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

From prison, from—

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Childhood. I feel like a refugee from my childhood.

Conference room, Maryland State Archives

FARLEY, DESMOND, CARL, TOBIAS, ANAS ALI, ZEL, LINDSAY, and CAROLINA are assembled, with various documents around them.

FARLEY:view role ↓

Salmon Chase …

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Ah, the guy with the fishy name …

FARLEY:view role ↓

… Becomes governor of Ohio, he runs for president …

DESMOND:view role ↓

Chase seeks the nomination for the presidency four times—1860, 1864, 1868, and 1872 …

FARLEY:view role ↓

… He becomes secretary of the Treasury.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

I knew that fishy name sounded familiar. Now it clicks—he is the dude on the $10,000 bill!

FARLEY:view role ↓

You’ve seen one?!

DESMOND:view role ↓

To many Blacks, he was a hero. He was constantly defending runaway slaves.

FARLEY:view role ↓

Wasn’t usually successful in his attempt to keep ’em up North—

CAROLINA:view role ↓

—But he was always trying to put the wrong of slavery into the consciousness of the nation, not just as a moral matter, but as a political matter.

DESMOND:view role ↓

Moral arguments only go so far.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Long story short, Lincoln appoints Chase.

FARLEY:view role ↓

Even though Chase had tried to run against Lincoln.

DESMOND:view role ↓

Lincoln puts aside whatever feelings he might have had that Chase has surreptitiously tried to get the nomination for what turned out to be his second term—

CAROLINA:view role ↓

As chief justice, he swears Lincoln in on Inauguration Day for his second term, and guess who he invites to have tea at his home the night before inauguration?

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Frederick Douglass.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

How did you know that?

Tobias:view role ↓

I could feel it in my bones.

Washington, D.C., March 4, 1865

Theater magic: TOBIAS steps in as FREDERICK DOUGLASS. SALMON CHASE and CHASE’s daughter KATE CHASE SPRAGUE, elegantly dressed, are in the parlor.

TOBIAS/DOUGLASS:view role ↓

(Turning to address the audience directly.) It was my good fortune to be present at President Lincoln’s inauguration … On the night previous, I took tea with Chief Justice Chase and assisted his beloved daughter, Mrs. Sprague, in placing over her honored father’s shoulders the new robe then being made, in which he was to administer the oath of office to the reelected President. There was a dignity and grandeur about the Chief Justice which marked him as one born great. He had known me in early anti-slavery days and had welcomed me to his home and his table when to do so was a strange thing in Washington, and the fact was by no means an insignificant one.9

KATE:view role ↓

Mr. Douglass, help me with Father’s robe.

KATE holds her father’s judicial robe. TOBIAS/DOUGLASS helps her put the robe on CHASE.

CHASE:view role ↓

Fitting. It’s all so very fitting.

Conference room, Maryland state archives, present day

FARLEY:view role ↓

It’s relevant that Salmon Chase is the chief justice when it comes time to try to shut down the child apprenticeships.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

How many children had been taken back to plantations in these mass arrests?

DESMOND:view role ↓

Numbers range from 2,500 to 10,000.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

When was this?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

1864 to 1867.

FARLEY:view role ↓

In 1864, Elizabeth Turner was only 8 …

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Sometime around then, Elizabeth’s mother meets a man …

DESMOND:view role ↓

 … His name was Charles Minoky. And he has the wherewithal to get two of the best lawyers in the Freedmen’s Bureau to try to get Elizabeth back.

FARLEY pushes a document toward TOBIAS.

FARLEY:view role ↓

He is recorded as the “next friend” of the girl—

Carolina:view role ↓

Someone who appears in court on behalf of someone who is not competent to do so.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Were he and Betsy actually married?

FARLEY:view role ↓

They did marry, yes.

DESMOND:view role ↓

One of the lawyers at the Freedmen’s Bureau—

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Henry Stockbridge. An abolitionist—

DESMOND:view role ↓

Was completely dedicated to bringing down the apprentice system.

Freedmen’s Bureau, office of Stockbridge, Pusey, and Stirling, Baltimore, January 1866

There’s a long line outside the door. ANAS ALI steps in as CHARLES MINOKY; LINDSAY steps in again as BETSY. They enter. HENRY STOCKBRIDGE (late 30s, white, bedraggled, played by the same actor who plays JACK ROSS and GENERAL LEW WALLACE) looks up from the piles and piles of documents everywhere.

STOCKBRIDGE:view role ↓

On behalf of which child are you here?

ANAS ALI/MINOKY:view role ↓

Elizabeth Turner.

STOCKBRIDGE:view role ↓

Are you Elizabeth Turner’s father?

ANAS ALI/MINOKY:view role ↓

No, sir. I’m ’lizabeth’s next friend.

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

He and me’s married.

STOCKBRIDGE:view role ↓

Does the real father know? We have so many cases lined up that we don’t have time right now to take the case if the real father doesn’t know. It causes too many problems later.

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

Mr. Hambleton her real father, sir.

Conference room, Maryland state archives, present day

As before, with LINDSAY and ANAS ALI back in the present.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

It’s been implied but not proven, as far as I know, that Elizabeth was Hambleton’s child.

FARLEY:view role ↓

That Betsy was his mistress.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

I don’t call that “being a mistress.” I call that bein’ a victim of rape. She was his slave.

FARLEY:view role ↓

Point well taken. In 1866, they go to court, they come back empty-handed.

DESMOND:view role ↓

But they don’t give up. And in 1867 …

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Stockbridge has a lot more to work with.

DESMOND:view role ↓

That “lot more” is the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Bill of 1866.

FARLEY:view role ↓

And the Fourteenth Amendment.

DESMOND:view role ↓

Well, the ink for the Fourteenth Amendment was still wet on the page.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

But it was in the air.

FARLEY:view role ↓

And Stockbridge has a Supreme Court justice—

DESMOND:view role ↓

By the way: Did this case actually go to the Supreme Court?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

No. In those days, Supreme Court justices rode circuit. So as part of his circuit, not in his role of chief justice, Chase presided in Baltimore over the trial.

Noise, people, a gavel banging, etc.

Courtroom in Baltimore, October 15, 1867

The place is packed with WHITE ADULTS—farmers, former enslavers, etc.—with Black adolescents and preadolescents, and with BLACK ADULTS, primarily with babies and toddlers. Very noisy: babies crying, toddlers chattering. ANAS ALI/MINOKY and LINDSAY/BETSY are present. STOCKBRIDGE is looking through documents. A CLERK is presiding.

CARL/HAMBLETON enters with ELIZABETH, now 11. (She does resemble HAMBLETON.) Portraying NKOSAZANA has aged ELIZABETH’s countenance.

CLERK: Children and babies must be kept quiet! Quiet!!!! The honorable chief justice of the Supreme Court, Salmon Chase!

SALMON CHASE walks in, stops to correct the CLERK.

CHASE:view role ↓

The honorable chief justice of the United States.

CLERK: But, sir.

CHASE:view role ↓

I had the name changed.

CLERK: The honorable chief justice of the United States!

CHASE climbs to the bench.

Carolina:view role ↓

(Voice-over.) In a move very typical of Chase, he got his title changed, to something he felt was more fitting, and that was the beginning of the Chief Justice being referred to as the Chief Justice of the United States.10

CHASE:view role ↓

(In a kind of regal, fast, but captivating monotone.) The petition alleged that Elizabeth Turner was the daughter of Elizabeth Minoky, formerly Elizabeth Turner; and that she was restrained of her liberty, and held in custody by Philemon T. Hambleton, of Saint Michael’s, Talbot County, Maryland, in violation of the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Mr. Hambleton?11

ELIZABETH is brought forward by CARL/HAMBLETON.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

I hereby produce Elizabeth Turner. The indentures of apprenticeship that I filed said Elizabeth had to be taught to be a house servant, and that I will pay Betsy Turner, her mother, $10 at the end of her 16th year, $12.50 at another period, and $15 to the girl at the end of her term of service on the 8th of October, 1874. She was born October 8, 1856. In the event of the death of her mother, the wages will go to Elizabeth. Her mother consented in court November 3, 1864.

CHASE:view role ↓

And the child and her mother were both formerly held as slaves by you.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

Until November 1, 1864. Emancipation Day.

CHASE:view role ↓

And the child was bound back as an apprentice on November 3, 1864, two days after.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

There was a general law of the state saying it was permissible to apprentice children previously held as slaves.

CHASE:view role ↓

Mr. Stockbridge, state the points upon which you claim a discharge.

STOCKBRIDGE:view role ↓

Under the law of Congress, the Civil Rights Bill of 1866.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

Everybody told me that the law did not interfere with this case!

CHASE:view role ↓

Mr. Hambleton, be still. Mr. Stockbridge?

STOCKBRIDGE:view role ↓

Under the law, there can be no distinction between whites and Blacks. And in this case, Elizabeth Turner was not given the privileges that a white apprentice would have—

CHASE:view role ↓

Mr. Hambleton, you are not represented by counsel.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

No, I’m not.

CHASE:view role ↓

The questions in the case are so important that I should prefer to be advised by the argument of counsel on the part of the claimant.

CARL/HAMBLETON shrugs.

CHASE:view role ↓

Very well then. Mr. Stockbridge, proceed.

STOCKBRIDGE:view role ↓

The sort of apprenticeship adopted in Maryland was an evasion of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, and the Constitution by its own powers executes itself. The Civil Rights Bill was passed to remedy existing wrongs, and was designed to extinguish all existing institutions, and diverse existing rights to hold persons to slavery in any form. Although the indentures were made in 1864, and the law was passed in 1866, it was retroactive to that extent that it would reach this case.

CHASE turns and faces CARL/HAMBLETON directly.

CHASE:view role ↓

Wait a moment, Mr. Stockbridge. Mr. Hambleton, you understand how serious this case is for yourself and for the state of Maryland and for all the colored apprentices and their masters. The decision of this case would affect the condition of thousands of colored minors whose term of slavery had been protracted from five to 10 years by this illegal mode of apprenticing them.

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

I desire simply to submit the case to the judgment of the court.

CHASE:view role ↓

The questions in the case are grave: Is this indenture in conformity with the general law of the state? Is said general law consistent with the act of Congress to protect the colored people in their civil rights? Does said act of Congress apply to this case? Was the passage of said act a constitutional exercise of the power of Congress? Mr. Hambleton, do you desire to retain the girl, and if so, had you not better procure counsel?

CARL/HAMBLETON:view role ↓

I wish to retain the girl, but I do not feel sufficient interest in the case to spend any money on it.

CHASE:view role ↓

Mr. Hambleton, you really must reconsider your position. I will adjourn the court until tomorrow at 9 o’clock, in order to give the claimant or any person interested in the decision of the case an opportunity to appear. If no person appears, I will then dispose of the case. The child shall be retained in the custody of the court until tomorrow.

Conference room, Maryland State Archives, present day

As before. LINDSAY, CARL, and ANAS ALI step from past to present. CARL is very unsettled, emotionally worked up.

CARL:view role ↓

I don’t get it. “I don’t want a lawyer; I don’t want to spend money.” If I don’t care, what’s it to the judge?

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

I do not trust judges who drag things on.

Zel:view role ↓

I hate that shit.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Let the little girl go to her mama!

FARLEY:view role ↓

Self-righteous, punctilious guy.

Carolina:view role ↓

One of his friends famously said, “Splendid man to look upon, but a poor man to lean upon.” In one of his absolutely enraging moves, he is responsible for Jefferson Davis escaping the gallows. Lots of people wanted Davis to be hanged. Chase behaved in that acutely “impartial” way.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

“Impartial” is just plain passive.

Carl:view role ↓

Bottom line, he adjourns the court at a climactic moment. Hambleton might have changed his mind, or some racist lawyer could have stepped up to take the case for free. Pathetic.

JAMES’s boat, Annapolis Harbor, dusk

TOBIAS and CAROLINA are alone, cooling their feet over the side of the boat.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Who are your heroes?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I don’t have any.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Most activists have heroes. (Beat.) No offense, but I think it’s kind of a luxury to go through life without needing a hero. When I was a kid, I had to have heroes to get from one day to the next.

Carolina:view role ↓

Oh, I completely get that. Completely.

Tobias:view role ↓

My mother was always in violent relationships, and then when she met my stepfather, he was this big, massive man, because she met him in the federal penitentiary. He was a bank robber and he was violent toward her, and me as well. And so I can remember probably being about 11 years old, and I saw a man, and he had guys around him that I assumed at that time were his bodyguards, and he was massive, so in my mind, I thought that if I joined his gang, he would be able to protect me and my mom from this violent man who she was with, who eventually killed her. I found my mom in the garage when I was 17.12

CAROLINA:view role ↓

That is … awful.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

It’s cool. There’s so much other violence that was in my life to talk about. But what happened to your heroes?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I have to take that back. I do have heroes. Uncle James is my hero. My mother had me when she was 14.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Really? I thought you was from bourge stock.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I am. Bein’ a bourge did not keep my mother from getting pregnant when she was 14. Today, bourges put their daughters on birth-control pills when they first get their period. But back then, at least in Baltimore, a lot of Black bourges still used only two devices for avoiding pregnancy: fear and shame. My mother’s mother, my grandma, was so deeply, generationally bourge that she had gone to a boarding school in New England. Yes. And Grandma’s roommate from boarding school was a real liberal girl from California. So years later, when my mother got pregnant, Grandma sent my mother not to the South, where most Black bourges sent their knocked-up daughters, but to San Francisco, with the idea that I’d be born out there, be given up for adoption, and my mother would be back in Baltimore in plenty of time to start middle school at Roland Park Country, where she was one of just a few Black students. And she would have two full years to prepare for the Black cotillion when she turned 16. And so I was born in San Francisco. But Grandma’s son, Uncle James—the apple of her eye, 10 years older than my mother—had just graduated from Stanford Law School and was a radical. He had long before defected from Black bourge culture, much to Grandma and Grandpa’s dismay.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

James was a radical?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Very much so. Unbeknownst to Grandma, Uncle James talks my mother out of giving me up for adoption. My mother was only 14, and scared to death. So, long story short, without Grandma knowing, James adopts me. I then lived wherever he and B., his true love—who adored me—lived. And this is why I know that love is real. They raised me. They saved me. And this is why I should never have forgotten that I have heroes. As for my own blood mother? She comes and goes in my life. She never became what Grandma planned for her to become. She’s a lost soul.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Your father in your life in any kind of way?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

My father was Buddy Bells.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Holy shit! Bells? Really? Bells was legendary. Damn! Really? I cannot imagine that. You? And Bells? What was he like?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I never met him. Uncle James adopted me when I was an infant. They told me stuff in stages—“as soon as I was old enough to understand,” that kind of thing. But they never got around to telling me about my father. Or at least telling me the truth about my father.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Well, yeah, Bells was …

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I was 4, at a progressive Sausalito preschool, making sand paintings, when my father was shot down in the Baltimore streets. Didn’t learn about that until I came across it in my own research years later.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Damn, you are just like us.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I hope so.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Raggedy family and stuff. Teenage pregnancy and stuff.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Let’s head back.

They rise. TOBIAS links arms with CAROLINA and pulls her close to his side, walking with her.

Conference room, Maryland State Archives, the next morning

DESMOND:view role ↓

October 16, 1867, the next day, Elizabeth Turner is brought into the courtroom by the bailiff. Her mother and her “next friend,” Minoky, wait anxiously. No Hambleton.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

So Chase …

Courtroom in Baltimore, October 16, 1867

ANAS ALI/MINOKY and LINDSAY/BETSY wait anxiously near STOCKBRIDGE.

CHASE:view role ↓

Counsel? Approach.

STOCKBRIDGE approaches the bench.

CHASE:view role ↓

Mr. Hambleton is not here. I feel fervently that he should be represented by counsel. I shall have him come in so that I can discuss this with him once more and impress upon him the gravity of the matter.

ANAS ALI/MINOKY steps out of the past into the present, bringing LINDSAY/BETSY with him.

Conference room, Maryland State Archives, present day

As before.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Fish-man is about to drive me crazy! Hambleton did not show up in court!

Carl:view role ↓

The more I think about him, the angrier I get. Elizabeth was no more to him than just another farmhand, and having her meant so, so much to her mother—it’s disgusting.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

What’s Fishy gonna do next? Send the cops to get him? Did they have cops then?

Carolina:view role ↓

They’ve had cops in Baltimore since the 1780s.

DESMOND:view role ↓

I believe Chase felt this should go further than the circuit court in Baltimore where he was presiding—that it should go all the way to the Supreme Court. And he believed that having it ruled on by the highest court could have made a considerable difference in how these events would be recorded in history.

Carl:view role ↓

And how he would wind up recorded in history.

LINDSAY/BETSY:view role ↓

All I want is my baby back!

LINDSAY/BETSY steps back into the past, pulling ANAS ALI/MINOKY with her.

Courtroom in Baltimore, October 16, 1867

STOCKBRIDGE faces CHASE.

STOCKBRIDGE:view role ↓

(Impassioned.) Your honor, one doesn’t know how long the Freedmen’s Bureau will last. Once the bureau closes its doors, I won’t be able to help the emancipated Negroes in the same way. No one will be here to help. I beg of you, Your Honor, and out of respect for everything you have done to bring integrity to every office you have held, out of respect for all you did to protect the runaway slave, out of respect for your moral rectitude: This case has the opportunity to rid us of apprenticeships. For the good of the Negro, for the good of this state, for the good of this country, do your part to rid us of these apprenticeships, to dismiss one of the last gasps of that despicable institution which has haunted this nation for centuries. Allow Elizabeth Turner to return to the arms of her mother.

STOCKBRIDGE goes back to his table and sits down. CHASE considers for more than a moment.  

CHASE:view role ↓

Ordered by the court, this 16th day of October, A.D. 1867, that Elizabeth Turner be discharged from the custody of Philemon T. Hambleton, upon the ground that the detention and restraint complained of is in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States, and it is further ordered that the costs of this proceeding be paid by the petitioner.

ELIZABETH runs to LINDSAY/BETSY and ANAS ALI/MINOKY, as does STOCKBRIDGE. Mixed reactions in the courthouse.

STOCKBRIDGE:view role ↓

This smashes every indenture that binds a Negro child other than as a white child should be bound! And you helped! Thank you! Thank you! You are great Americans today!

black-and-white illustration of a Black family in 19th-century dress, a man, woman, boy, and girl holding each other

Conference room, Maryland State Archives, present day

As before.

ZEL:view role ↓

So an 11-year-old mixed-race slave girl brought the system down.

DESMOND:view role ↓

That would have been great, but the apprentice system fell away in dribs and drabs.

Farley:view role ↓

Think of all the people who didn’t know about the decision.

Zel:view role ↓

There wasn’t social media.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Think of the slave owners who felt they were above the law. (To DESMOND and FARLEY.) Did y’all read Barbara Fields13 on this? Her position is that Black parents still had a very hard time getting their kids back, in part because of the complexities of Black families themselves.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

No doubt.

JAMES’s boat, Annapolis Harbor

ANAS ALI, CAROLINA, LINDSAY, and CARL are cooling their feet in the water.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

I feel like I been walkin’ dusty roads. And all we been doin’ is lookin’ at old documents.

CARL sings the song “Thirsty Boots.”14

CARL:view role ↓

“So, take off your thirsty boots and stay for a while / Your feet are hot and weary from a dusty mile / And maybe I can make you laugh, maybe I can try / I’m just lookin’ for the evening, the morning in your eyes.”

CAROLINA:view role ↓

I haven’t heard that song in ages. B. used to sing me to sleep on that.

TOBIAS and ZEL come onto the boat. ZEL has a small shopping bag.

CARL:view role ↓

What’s up with Noke? I’ve been doggin’ ’em over at Mercy and I can’t get a response. The nurses leave me on hold.

ZEL:view role ↓

She’s been released from psych.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

She’s an orphan now, so the courts will decide about custody, and in the meantime, they will put her with her grandmother.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

That’ll be a disaster!

CARL:view role ↓

So then we’re lookin’ at a group home.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Doc, you should see if Judge Morely will consider setting up emancipation for her.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Juvenile emancipations are tough now—but I could try …

ZEL:view role ↓

Are y’all out y’all’s minds? Noke can’t get emancipated! She been talkin’ about havin’ a pack!

TOBIAS:view role ↓

That’s not a realistic concern—

ZEL:view role ↓

You need to step back. I am gettin’ tired of your macho attitude about what these females can and cannot do, man!

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Knowing Noke, she’ll probably form a pack while she’s in the group home—or get some wisdom on how to do it …

ZEL:view role ↓

I’d rather see her in a group home than runnin’ the streets.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

And I was gettin’ used to 1864—

ZEL:view role ↓

I’ll take the present anytime. I woulda been a real bad slave. I wouldna been like Elizabeth Turner. Sittin’ on that plantation, sewin’, babysittin’ master’s other children by his wife who most likely looked just like her—her half sisters and brothers. And I wouldna been all “Yessir” about Hambleton’s dinner guests. If one of ’em put his hands on me, I would have hauled off and slapped the shit out of him. I woulda got lashed.

CARL:view role ↓

Did the story bring up anything for you—any triggers?

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

The part about them grabbin’ the little children the day after Emancipation Day. Made me think about when I was in prison: Every Wednesday or Tuesday, it’s like, a bus that comes into prison, every week—you guarantee 10, 20 guys comin’ into prison. And I just remember looking like, it seem like every Wednesday, if it’s 20 guys, it’s 16 Black guys. Like clockwork.15

CARL:view role ↓

Zel?

ZEL:view role ↓

Me? Shit. My trigger been pulled so much, the striker got wore down. Ain’t nothing gonna fire. Y’all know my tale. Catholic school. Nuns tried to rescue me from the hood. Found out I could run fast, focused me on track. I was a star. A hood star. College scholarship. Off to New Mexico. What is this place? Shit, my roommate owned a wolf and wanted to bring it to spend the weekend in our room.

CARL:view role ↓

Africans Americans are only 2.7 percent of the population of New Mexico.

ZEL:view role ↓

Well, I met one of the 2.7 percent and it was the wrong one. He was from the hood too—in Oklahoma—and he was violent. I pissed him off, ’cause I did not want to help him sell jackpot.16 He threw me off a cliff.17 I could have broke my legs. I didn’t. Just a few bruises and a couple bangs on my head. I didn’t tell nobody what happened. But my mind got messed up. Got kicked off the track team, kicked outta school. Went back home. Hit the streets. Sellin’ dope and guns. Judge Morely threw my ass in prison. I do not like authority. If I had been Maggy Toogood, standin’ there in chains, a steel collar ’round my neck, pus runnin’ down my back? I wouldna just stood there all quiet, like a slavery exhibit in the wax museum. I woulda ran my mouth so loud, they woulda come and found me, free or not, taken me back to the plantation, and shot me in front of everybody, execution style, or by firing squad.

CARL:view role ↓

You were triggered by Maggy.

ZEL:view role ↓

Okay, cool: I was triggered.

A Voice offstage: Ahoy!

It’s JAMES and BENJAMIN, a.k.a. B. (white, 50s), with picnic baskets.

JAMES:view role ↓

It’s about time you had some oysters on this oyster boat! I don’t imagine Carolina’s been feeding you. She is not domestic.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Y’all know Uncle James, and this is his partner, Benjamin. He goes by “B.”

JAMES and B. start organizing the food. ANAS ALI and LINDSAY help.

JAMES:view role ↓

I have been thinking about your situation with Judge Morely. I called her.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

No, J. No.

JAMES:view role ↓

When’s the last time you met with her?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

We’re in constant touch with her.

JAMES:view role ↓

Email or in person?

TOBIAS:view role ↓

Email.

B.:view role ↓

She doesn’t understand what you are doing.

ZEL:view role ↓

That’s why she thinks it is okay to meet with folks we tryin’ to recruit on Zoom when she agreed that she would meet the youngsters in her chambers, away from juvie, human-to-human.

JAMES:view role ↓

Judges love lunch.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

No, J. No lunch.

ZEL:view role ↓

Sitting across from Morely? I won’t have no appetite.

B.:view role ↓

But before you go to lunch, you’ll need to make a detailed list.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

B.! Don’t start with the lists.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

Toe had lists, when he had his organization in the streets—

TOBIAS:view role ↓

You’re right, man! What happened to my lists?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

“You cannot take down the master’s house …”

JAMES:view role ↓

“… With the master’s tools.” My niece is quoting the great poet Audre Lorde, but Ms. Lorde, though prophetic, wasn’t running a nonprofit. She was polishing metaphors.

B.:view role ↓

You need a better board.

JAMES:view role ↓

Right now, you’ve got me, some academic friends, a couple lawyers. Your funders are in California and New York …

B.:view role ↓

Baltimore’s a provincial southern town—you are going to have to make yourselves known to more people with connections.

ZEL:view role ↓

You talkin’ about charity people?

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Yes, that’s exactly what they are talking about. The people who think social change comes from cocktail parties and catered breakfast gatherings at the Four Seasons. Like my grandmother.

B.:view role ↓

You have to work the churches—

JAMES:view role ↓

—The old-time Black churches, and the megachurches.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

What about the mosques?

B.:view role ↓

Exactly! And the synagogues.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

Mr. J is right.

James:view role ↓

Connections: Ka-ching, ka-ching.

Carolina:view role ↓

We have enough money—

B.:view role ↓

There’s no such thing as “enough money.”

James:view role ↓

I’m not asking you to start a hedge fund; I’m asking you to have lunch with Judge Morely.

Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL, looking exactly as she did at the beginning of the play, walks toward them. They cannot see her. As they continue to talk, she climbs onto the boat.

Carolina:view role ↓

J, you are asking us to work with the manners and gestures of a poison-drenched system?

Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL notices ZEL’s shopping bag and looks inside.

TOBIAS:view role ↓

I know more about the darkest parts of this system than you ever will. I been watchin’ how the system works since I was a tot—welfare, foster care, mandatory psychotropic drugs in elementary school. Back in the day, at the beginning of gang culture, some of it was actually tied up with tryin’ to take down the system, like revolution. The Black Panthers got a whole cultural thing kicked off and made folks think the system could fall. And what happened to ’em? They got caught up in their drama, or ended up dead from offin’ each other, or canceled out by the FBI. So yeah, this system is poison, and it is hard to change the system. Lunch is not the system. But if lunch is what it takes to pull in the kinda connections we need to save lives, let’s go to lunch. I agree with B. There’s never enough money.

CARL:view role ↓

We could use a full-fledged clinic—full-time medical staff.

Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL takes a box out of the shopping bag and hands it to ZEL.

Zel:view role ↓

Anyway, we have a present for you. Doc, you are definitely not a charity lady.

LINDSAY:view role ↓

So we can’t have you lookin’ like a charity case.

ZEL hands CAROLINA the box. In it are Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 silver sneakers. CAROLINA looks at the sneakers, moved.

ANAS ALI:view role ↓

I’m down with lunch—

Lindsay:view role ↓

And I have always loved church, just so long as it’s good music.

ZEL:view role ↓

I’ll keep you from gettin’ worked up if one of the officials says somethin’ stupid at lunch. I’m with you 100 percent, Doc.

CAROLINA:view role ↓

Don’t call me Doc. We’re family now.

Our 11-YEAR-OLD SLAVE GIRL sits down beside CAROLINA, as close as possible, and dangles her feet in the water, as if to cool them after a long, dusty walk.

CURTAIN


This play appears in the December 2023 print edition. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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