There is an old kind of healing that many Black Americans know, even if nobody ever gave it a clinical name. Some of us met it in a church basement
There is an old kind of healing that many Black Americans know, even if nobody ever gave it a clinical name.
Some of us met it in a church basement.
Some met it underneath hot stage lights in the school auditorium.
Some met it while standing in front of the congregation on Easter Sunday, trying desperately to remember the next line.
There were Christmas plays. Black History Month programs. Dance recitals. School pageants. Choir concerts. Spoken-word performances. Recitation contests. Community theater.
And there was always some teacher, church mother, drama director, auntie or community elder who saw something in a quiet child and said:
“Baby, you’re in the play.”
You might have been terrified. You might have whispered when you were supposed to speak. But you rehearsed. Again. And again.
Until one evening, somebody opened the curtain and you walked out there.
You remembered your words. You projected your voice. People listened.
And something inside you learned:
I can stand here.
I can speak.
I can be seen.
I can tell a story.
We didn’t always call that therapy. But there was healing in it.
The Stage Gave Black People Somewhere to Put the Story
Black Americans have carried stories that the larger society did not always want to hear.
Stories about slavery. Racism. Migration. Family. Faith. Violence. Love. Poverty. Joy. Womanhood. Childhood .Resistance. Survival.
The stage created a place where those experiences could become words, movement, music and memory.
Sometimes you could say something through a character that you weren’t ready to say as yourself.
Sometimes you could watch somebody else perform your pain and realize:
I’m not the only one.
Sometimes a child who struggled to speak for herself could confidently speak for Harriet Tubman.
That distinction may sound small.
It isn’t.
Because every time she practiced Harriet’s courage, she was also practicing what courage sounded like coming out of her own mouth.
Before we called it social-emotional learning, Black teachers were handing quiet children a script and teaching them how to stand in the light.
And three extraordinary Black artists and thinkers help us understand just how deep this tradition runs.
Ntozake Shange: Sometimes the Stage Lets Women Say What Hurts
Ntozake Shange gave Black women’s experiences a theatrical language unlike almost anything audiences had seen before.
Her groundbreaking for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf combined poetry, movement, music and drama in what Shange called a choreopoem.
Black women stood onstage and spoke about things Black women were actually living.
Love. Abandonment. Sexual violence. Intimate partner violence. Loneliness. Desire. Racism. Sisterhood. Survival.
These weren’t women quietly suffering somewhere offstage.
They were standing underneath the lights.
Their experiences were worthy of language.
Their bodies were worthy of occupying space.
Their stories were worthy of an audience.
That is powerful for Survivors.
Because silence can make pain feel strangely private, even when thousands of other people have lived through something similar.
Storytelling interrupts that isolation.
The woman in the audience hears something she recognizes.
The woman onstage speaks something somebody else could not yet say.
And suddenly pain that whispered you are alone has witnesses.
Survivor affirmation:
My story does not become shameful because someone was uncomfortable hearing it.
Katherine Dunham: Sometimes Healing Moves Through the Body
Katherine Dunham understood something else.
Our stories don’t live only in words.
They live in bodies.
Dunham studied dance and culture throughout the African diaspora, especially in the Caribbean, and transformed American dance by bringing African and Caribbean movement traditions onto stages and into classrooms.
Her work connected movement with culture, history, spirituality, community and Black identity.
Think about what that means.
For generations, Black bodies had been stereotyped, controlled, exploited and told how they were permitted to move through the world.
And here comes Black dance saying:
This body carries knowledge. This body carries history. This body remembers. This body creates. This body belongs to me.
Movement can allow human beings to express feelings for which ordinary conversation sometimes feels inadequate.
Grief moves. Joy moves. Anger moves. Freedom moves.
Sometimes healing doesn’t begin with explaining yourself.
Sometimes it begins when the music comes on.
Survivor affirmation:
My body is not merely the place where something happened to me. My body is also the place from which I live, create, move and become.
W.E.B. Du Bois: Sometimes a People Need to See Themselves Differently
W. E. B. Du Bois gives us another piece of the story.
Du Bois understood theater as a battleground over representation.
At a time when racist caricatures of Black people were deeply embedded in American entertainment, Black-controlled theater offered something radically different:
Black people could tell Black stories.
Black people could portray themselves as complicated human beings.
Black children could see intelligence, heroism, tenderness, struggle and beauty associated with people who looked like them.
A community constantly shown distorted images of itself eventually needs somewhere to look and see something true.
Theater could provide that mirror.
And there is healing in a truthful mirror.
Not because every play is therapy.
Not because every actor is a therapist.
But because human beings develop partly through the stories available to us about who we are allowed to become.
Survivor affirmation:
I am allowed to reject every story about me that requires me to become smaller.
And Then There Were Our Teachers
This may be one of the least celebrated pieces of Black educational history.
Teachers understood things about children that didn’t always appear in textbooks.
They knew which child needed a speaking part. They knew who could sing. They knew who could dance. They knew who needed to be responsible for the props.
They knew which quiet little girl needed somebody to say:
“Louder. We can’t hear you.”
Not to embarrass her.
To teach her that the room could hold her voice.
Drama required children to cooperate, remember, imagine, listen, interpret emotion, recover from mistakes, speak clearly and tolerate the terrifying experience of being seen.
Those are life skills.
For some children, especially children living through instability, discrimination, violence or circumstances adults knew little about, the arts may also have provided precious hours in which they could become something besides the child with the problem.
For an afternoon, you were the narrator.
The dancer. The playwright. The singer. Harriet Tubman. Frederick Douglass. Joseph.Mary.
The angel with two lines who practiced them for three weeks.
And everybody was waiting for you to come onstage.
We Should Be Careful About What We Take Away From Children
When arts programs disappear from schools, we don’t merely lose future actors.
We can lose places where children discover themselves.
The child who will never become a professional actress may still become a lawyer who learned to speak before an audience because of drama.
A quiet child may discover leadership.
A grieving child may discover poetry.
A lonely child may discover community.
A frightened child may discover that she can stand underneath a bright light with a hundred people watching and still remember what comes next.
That experience belongs to more than the arts.
It becomes part of her.
Perhaps that is one reason Black communities kept creating stages wherever we could find room for one.
Church basement. School auditorium. Community center. College campus. Front porch.
Somebody moved the chairs.
Somebody made costumes.
Somebody taught the children their lines.
And somebody sitting in the audience said,
“Speak up, baby. We want to hear you.”
Maybe we understood more about healing than we knew.
Survivor Affirmations
My voice deserves practice, not punishment.
Being seen does not require me to perform my pain. I decide what parts of my story belong to me alone.
I can tell my story in words, movement, music, art, silence or whatever language feels like mine.
I am more than what happened to me. I remain a creator.
There are parts of me that survived because somebody gave them somewhere to live.
And perhaps the affirmation we should hand to another generation of Black children is the simplest one:
There is room for you on this stage.
We want to hear you.
We Used to Put the Arts Where the Children Were – Rosa’s Children
