“What’s the point of focusing on slavery and the past?” Anna Deavere Smith’s new play situates us in the historical arc we live in.
Anna Deavere Smith’s new play, This Ghost of Slavery, coils like a river around Maryland’s “apprenticeship system.” Post emanicpation, this system forcibly bound previously enslaved children with their owners from 1864–1866, compelling parents — many of whom couldn’t read or write — to hire lawyers and demonstrate to a judge their capability to care for their children.
Smith skillfully weaves contemporary interviews and scenes with historical reports, a cross pollination that vividly dramatizes the past as present in the systems around us. Despite Smith’s adeptness at humanizing issues such as the separation of Black families, the choice lies with us to either treat it as a mere historical relic or leverage historical context to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves. For example, Smith’s words, “they set the scene for the whole system right there, right after emancipation,” connect Maryland’s apprenticeship history with 10 years of my life working with children and families.
As a child protection caseworker, I have testified in court about a parent’s fitness.
As a therapist, I have advocated for out of home placement or medication.
As a therapist I have worked with youth in the juvenile justice system.
My point isn’t that these systems are never needed. Connecting the contemporary treatment of children facing poverty or deviating from societal expectations to the historical practice of forcing children into apprenticeships doesn’t imply that all intervention is inherently racist or exploitative. The characters in This Ghost of Slavery acknowledge that, as opposed to the enslaved, people in today’s system have done something to get there. But the narrative that shapes today’s system can’t be ignorant to this historical context. The narrative of today’s system must break the precedent of valuing some lives more than others.
Those who have worked within these systems often carry stories that echo with unsettling experiences — stories compartmentalized, stories that rattle the bars. Recently, thoughts of James, an 11 year-old from my social work days, surfaced. James’ eyes were magnetic, intermittently light and dark, attentive and vulnerable. I witnessed his foster mom holding him as he retreated into silent anger. I saw a white woman bracing and cradling the world of this Black youth with her body and soul. He had just learned that he would be leaving his foster home where trust was beginning to take hold. She took on the difficult task of explaining the separation. Despite her own confusion and pain, she rocked him and reassuringly said, “If we all do our job, it will be OK.” The people he could count on would shift — she didn’t try to make the change good, bad or meaningful. It wasn’t about one person, but enough people creating enough support.
Twenty five years have passed and James is still with me. I have searched for him as a “news item,” a process that skews negative. A teenage James ran from police while on probation and in his thirties he was accused of a serious crime. Please don’t draw any conclusions about his parents, about whether foster care made or broke him, or about my casting James’s foster mom as a light in a murky system — that’s not the point.
The point is that my search for information about James is about more than curiosity about James. It is my ongoing attempt to reckon with the professional power I wielded. The play’s introduction states: “The echoes of history reverberate loudly, revealing the power of historical trauma to shape behavior in the present day.” I completely lacked an understanding commensurate with the impact I was having on people’s lives. My power came with “cultural competence” training, but without a trainer or supervisor bold enough to pose the question, “who decided that judgements about forced removal of children from their families should be entrusted to white males?”
Most of my clients were set up to have little agency, just as emancipated enslaved persons had almost no chance to reunite with their children. Whatever empathy or critical thinking I brought to my social work role, “resistance” was never my m.o. and “fairness” was from a white perspective.
“They set the scene for the whole system right there, right after emancipation.”
Clint Smith, a poet and staff writer at The Atlantic, has taught in high schools and in prisons. In an interview with Krista Tippett, he speaks of “situating [our]selves in this … long historical arc that [we] are a part of.”
I want all of us to understand that what our lives look like are only because of people who’ve created the circumstances that have given rise to our lives today in ways that are generative and wonderful, and in ways that we’re grateful for, and in ways that we recognize are profoundly unjust, and in ways that are profoundly unfair, and in ways that should not exist in the way that they do.
Just like Anna Deavere Smith, Clint Smith prompts us to consider the influence of the past on our present actions. Neither of them gives us a blueprint for corrective action, a method to dismantle and rebuild. Yet, through their art we feel what Tracy K. Smith describes as the “presence of an enormous soul.” I believe that there is sacrifice involved for white folks present with the enormous soul; I also believe that we are beginning to understand racism’s ongoing cost, whether that be the forced separation of family members or the forced separation of our values and our actions/practices.
