Shakespearian actress Valerie Johnson was on a gurney, blood trickling from a gash on her face onto her corset. After sustaining a backstage injury, she’d waited three hours for a medical professional.
When Dr. Jackson Moore showed up, Johnson assumed he was a nurse — because he was black. Moore, in return, assumed she’d been Johnson had been beaten — because she was black, too.
That exchange took place not at Yale-New Haven Hospital, but at the Stetson branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, where a reading from Lydia Diamond’s Smart People kicked off “Smart People and Superheroes,” a three-hour workshop on inherent bias and personal narrative.
Held Saturday afternoon in the library’s community room, the workshop drew close to 15 people, including neighborhood top cop Sgt. Jackie Hoyte and Branch Manager Diane Brown.
Harris: Is home enough?
The reading was held in conjunction with the opening of Smart People at Long Wharf Theatre this week. It was also part of an ongoing relationship Long Wharf has with the New Haven Free Public Library to make the theater more open and accessible to the community. But it was also an event in itself. Attendees clapped, and then fell into silence. As facilitator Kenn Harris, head of the New Haven Healthy Start program, asked for initial reactions to the scene in the reading, the room thawed and came to life.
“Is home enough?” Harris asked. He specified: was what people learned at home — or what they got from the people at home — enough to make them feel like they had authority outside of it? Beyond that, was home enough in teaching people of color that they didn’t have to stand for the systems of oppression that they’re up against?
“Home is that first opportunity,” Harris said.
Brown: Home is enough.
Brown raised her hand. She said she thought home was enough — at least her home specifically. Every single day, her now 99-year-old mother, one of the first homeowners in the Newhallville neighborhood, told Brown that being black was something to be proud of. When her mom opted to send Brown to a Catholic school, she took her aside to give her a strict message: Brown wouldn’t flip her hair like any of her white female classmates. She wasn’t to forget, for a moment, about the rich lineage she came from. She was Diane from Newhallville, and she needed to hold that for everything it was worth.
Brown said her upbringing helped her through the constant stresses of managing Stetson. She said she took it with her to New York City when receiving an “I Love My Librarian” award last year, and felt her mother’s words to her core when Carnegie Corporation board members shook her hand limply, or didn’t look her squarely in the eye at that event. She said she still used it as a strategy when talking to neighborhood kids about the historical figures they could write about when given an assignment on black history.
“You take it on as a constant struggle every day,” Brown said. “It’s not that I’m anti-white. I’m just pro-black.”
But community-member-turned-actor Ony Obiocha — playing Moore in the above video — had a different take. A first-generation member of a Nigerian family, he said that he’d had to navigate what being both black and American in Connecticut meant. He didn’t think that home was enough for that. It was a double-edged problem, Obiocha said. Within the family, there was no institutional history of racism. His family came from a country where almost everyone looked like they did. So everything within the home’s walls was positive. It just wasn’t enough. Growing up in Windsor and Hartford, he found that every interaction outside the home — school, work, and even navigating friendships — had become about making white people comfortable.
Then Elizabeth Nearing, Long Wharf’s community engagement manager, stepped in. She was caught in the slippery in-between place the ideas of “home” and “enough” offered. Growing up in a suburb of Virginia, she had been in the minority in her elementary school, where the mostly-hispanic student body referred to her as gringa, a white person. She had found it funny at the time. Now, she said, she needed more information before answering whether a single place was enough — or if it took a whole matrix of institutions to teach someone how to hold to their own narrative, and recognize others that might not be the same.
That was a cue for Harris. “We feel a call to our communities,” he said. “How can I serve? How can I make things better?”
He pointed to his family in the back of the room: his wife, “adopted” Puerto Rican son, biological son Kolton, and young godson. Then he noted an extended New Haven family — Brown, a few of her patrons, an intern who had tagged along, actress Malia West, and members of the community who had come out for the event. Home might take multiple forms — including places outside the walls of an actual house.
He used it as a springboard for the next question. “How do we hold other people’s stories?” he asked.
Attendees looked around, a few re-introducing themselves to the people they sat next to. The answer, it seemed, was already there. They just had to open their ears and their minds.
Smart People runs at Long Wharf Theatre until April 9. Click here for more information.