Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Path to River See: Improvisation and ancestry

2022; Wiley; Volume: 110; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tyr.2022.0074

1467-9736

Sharon Bridgforth,

American Environmental and Regional History

The Path to River SeeImprovisation and ancestry Sharon Bridgforth (bio) Ihave always been fascinated by my elders. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, a child of the Great African-American Migration raised among Black Southerners who left home, determined to make better lives for themselves and their families. My mother is from Memphis; my father and stepmother are from New Orleans. Blues is my heartbeat, and jazz is my pulse. Growing up, I spent a lot of time in Memphis with my mother's large family, including my great-grandparents. I started first grade at the age of five in Memphis and then returned every summer until I was about thirteen. My great-aunts were teachers, and they instilled in me an appreciation of reading and writing. In Los Angeles, where my [End Page 70] mom raised me as a single parent, I spent a lot of time alone, lost in a multitude of worlds conjured by books. But it was my family that was my greatest source of discovery and dreaming. Watching my elders, loving them, I could sense their disappointment, grief, sorrow, and displacement. I knew (because they spoke about it) that much of this was in connection with being Black and proud in a country that did not recognize our humanity. My growing-up life was defined by the Civil Rights Movement; the assassinations of King, the Kennedys, and Malcolm; the Black Power movement; and soul music. It was also defined by gatherings, laughter, prayers—spoken in the middle of any given sentence—dancing, and lots of great food. As I got older and grew into my own experiences of disappointment, grief, sorrow, and displacement, I began to write. I was leaning into my longing, my longing to be with my storytelling elders who had passed—to feel, see, dance with them once again. Feeling my way into my mother's laughter, my father's transgressive joy, my stepmom's salty humor. The sounds of finger popping, bid whist, porkchops frying, and Bobby "Blue" Bland. My great-aunt telling me over and over the same stories, which I now understand were our family history. Those multiple realities coexisting—Jesus, cigarettes, and liquor, the names of the dead called every day. Home remedies. Gossip. Call and response. Many stories swirling. Many speaking at the same time. The art of repetition. Altars. Always dancing. The use of humor as medicine. Making beauty out of nothing. Prayer. I aspired—and aspire—to use the page as a family space to hold, heal, and love me. Long before I shared my work publicly, writing felt like breathing—that necessary. In the late '70s—I think I was nineteen—I saw Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in San Francisco. It was the first time I had been to the theater. A college dropout, I was living in the Bay Area, trying to find my way in life. I went to the see the show because of its title and because of a radio spot I had heard. It featured an excerpt that just blew my mind. Sitting in the theater that day, my entire [End Page 71] life shifted and aligned. Seeing those women onstage and witnessing their stories, I saw my mom and her friends; I recognized their resilience, brilliance, and wisdom. That show reflected for me the reality of Black language as a self-determining inventive force for visioning and opening new roads. That show gave me many gifts—most especially, the undeniable proof that stories like ours matter, that there is a way to make words dance and sing and paint the page and stage. Proof that Black women are graceful, glorious warriors. And that we live life artfully. Suddenly, all the ways that I had been shaped, pushed, prayed for, and loved by my family erupted in a bone-deep need to focus with intention on writing. And I wanted to write for the theater. With no planning and not much good sense, I repeatedly ended up in the right place with the right people. In the '90s, I started a touring company called...