Sitting down to write something new, facing the blank journal paper blinking computer screen I often just write. I create a stream of consciousness word dump that may begin to take form and show me what I need to be writing about in that moment. At other times there is something I have been mulling, some questions I want to answer, some history I want to understand.
The piece I am now reworking, Black Classic: Voices of 19th Century African-Americans in San Francisco came about because of a series of historical monographs written in the 1960’s by various members of San Francisco’s African American Historical Society. I had read them when I worked as the untrained librarian and later poet in residence at the institution. I was amazed at the vitality of a pre-Civil War San Francisco Black community I had never known existed. It made me wonder how I and my school mates would have felt about ourselves and others if I had known Blacks in the Bay Area were more than World War II imported workers. How much taller would we have stood? How much more respect might we have engendered.
Woodruff and Alston mural
At various points I thought to write short stories about the characters or a series of poems. The project was given some breadth by a grant from the San Francisco Art Commission which gave me time to research a few of the characters and develop a series of monologues and persona poems which I performed both as a one woman show and accompanied by musicians.
Capturing a voice for some characters was easy, they seemed to almost dictate their stories to me. I had more problems, however, when I decided that some individuals were too intertwined with white people to not add a couple of those voices.
In the last week I have been trying to catch a tale from Joseph Libby Folsom. What interests me is the relationship, and I use the word in its most limited sense, between him and William Leidesdorff’s mother. You see Folsom basically stole over a million dollars (and this was in the 1850’s) from Anna Marie Sparks’ deceased Afro-Caribbean son’s estate. Her voice has been easier:
“Call his self Captain, that white man,
Captain Folsom, in his too warm suit
showing me the daguerreotype of my son
so much older and paler than the man
sailed away so many years ago
but my first born still.
I could still see his father in William’s chin
and round flushed cheeks
and me in his eyes and hair.
Folsom asking do I speak English
can he speak French or Spanish
is the question. Anything but
his milky American split-tongued chatter.”
But Folsom is presenting more of a challenge. The idea is to make him fully human. He was a business partner of William Leidesdorff, and the two were quite successful. He named a major street in the city he founded, Granite (renamed Folsom after his death), after Leidesdorff. He also was greedy and unprincipled. He was admired, if not loved, by nieces and nephews, yet sued for his duplicity by Leidesdorff’s mother. I am sure I will get something that I can stand behind, wrestling with the text, going back to historical records and then pulling back again to imagine his meeting with Anna Marie. This means pressing back my own biases and seeking to see the world thru his eyes, perhaps in his opinion a more enlightened white than most, perhaps, in his eyes more fair than I see him.
Now, with your help, the work is finally going to be produced as I conceived it, with Brian Freeman, an actor who is also a poet, portraying the male characters, with a top director, Ellen Sebastian Chang, and with a jazz trio, Destiny Muhammad on harp bringing her trio to the play, lights, props, and costumes. I am in the beginning of an Indigo campaign trying to raise the final funds I need to launch the piece at the 2015 San Francisco International Arts Festival. I hope you will make a tax deductible contribution to this project.