Photo credit: Jenny Plevin
Bronzeville Arts Ensemble’s production of Flyin’ West
Pearl Cleage’s 1992 play Flyin’ West begins as a gentle history lesson about African American woman pioneers in Kansas in 1898, then opens to multiple shocks. Thanks to the Bronzeville Arts Ensemble, director Sheri Williams Pannell and an extraordinary cast for reminding us again how little we know of black history and experience. Thanks to Nancy Backes for program notes that answered questions and assured me that Cleage’s play is well-researched.
The Homestead Act of 1862 gave any American ownership of land west of the Mississippi once they’d worked that land for five years. By 1879, more than 50,000 African Americans had left the former Confederacy. Nicodemus, Kan., the story’s setting, was settled by 30 blacks in 1877. Backes writes that the movement west by former slaves and their descendants was both toward something—the land—and away from something—rampant discrimination, Jim Crow laws and lynching.
As a slave, the play’s 73-year-old matriarch Leah (Tosha Freeman) was forced to marry and to produce children for her owner to sell. She came alone to Nicodemus with the first wave of settlers. Sophie (Malkia Stampley) is the mulatto child of a white owner and slave mother. She fled Memphis, a lynching capitol, for Nicodemus with her friend Fanny (Tasha McCoy). They’re landowners now and have taken their neighbor Leah into their home to attend to her needs. Sophie is an activist working to persuade the settlers from selling their hard-won land to white speculators and instead to attract black business owners. Will (Justin Lee) fled the South for Mexico but wants to make a life in Nicodemus, hopefully with Fanny. Cleage never betrays the play’s period, but these characters are extremely recognizable. They’re people we know; people we are.
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The play turns Shakespearian with the arrival of Fanny’s sister Minnie (Samantha Montgomery), a singer, and her poet husband Frank (J.T. Backes), back from the relative paradise of London. Frank’s father owned Frank’s mother, and Frank, too; but Frank is white-skinned. The women present Minnie with part-ownership of the land. Self-hating and racist, Frank commits brutal violence against Minnie, who is pregnant, to get his name on the deed and sell the land. The women righteously murder him. As an audience member said in the talk back, 150 years is like yesterday; we still don’t know all the ramifications of slavery. I believe he meant both for our culture and our DNA.
