Penumbra - Quilt Wall

The Penumbra Theatre Company Quilt: Illuminating Our Walls

The Penumbra Theatre Company Quilt
Illuminating Our Walls

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	Textile Pattern The contribution of African American slave women to textile production and patterning is a history that is written largely though the pieces they sewed. Blending African aesthetics around rhythm, color and symbolism with an American experience of enslavement that contested family unity, spirituality and the very humanity of the people bound by it, these incredible artifacts detail a quieter, subtler story. Through expert use of plant dyes such as bark from Hickory, Walnut or Beech nut trees, cedar moss, pine straw and wild indigo, artisans worked with an impressive color palate. The majority of the quilts that were made and are preserved were meant for use in the plantation house by the slave-owning family. Another type of quilt, made with no less care but in precious few hours intended for rest and recuperation after a day’s work, slave women sewed quilts for themselves, their families and the community. After working in the fields or plantation homes, after parenting their own children and those children of the mistress of the house, after tending to the needs of their very basic households including cleaning, cooking, mending, butchering, shucking, nursing, midwifery, and loving, these spectacular women found time to create nothing short of patterned miracles that transcribe the history of a people denied by pain of death access to the written word. We honor their courage, tenacity and ability to keep their hearts open enough to care for others when the world did not take care of them.
	Rondo Neighborhood The community that has housed Penumbra Theatre Company for 30 years. The Minnesota Historical Society explains that until the early 1960s, the area known as Rondo was a predominantly African American neighborhood in St. Paul. Thirty years prior, Rondo Avenue was main artery to the heart of St. Paul's largest black neighborhood. Made up of new migrants from the South and old, established families, Rondo was a proud, vibrant community that existed largely independent of the white society around it. “The construction of I-94 in the 1960s shattered this tightly-knit community, displacing thousands of African-Americans into a racially segregated city and a discriminatory housing market.”
	1119 Sherburne and Burning Cross Founder and Artistic Director Lou Bellamy grew up in St. Paul, raised in the very neighborhood in which Penumbra Theatre is located. As a child, he recalls staying with his grandparents at 1119 Sherburne Avenue, just down the street from the Martin Luther King Center. At four years old, he was awakened one evening by disturbance as his grandparents tried to snuff out a burning cross posted in their front yard. Louis stood on the porch with his grandmother who turned his face away from the image every time he tried to look. His grandfather was able to dowse the flames and destroy the hateful emblem. An intimidation tactic used by the Ku Klux Klan, it sent a message of foreboding and threatened further, escalated abuse.
	Embroidered Quilt Square
	Quilt Star
	Selby Street Sign The Selby Avenue and Dale Street signs included in the quilt are in honor of the community that has housed Penumbra Theatre Company for 30 years. The Minnesota Historical Society explains that until the early 1960s, the area known as Rondo was a predominantly African American neighborhood in St. Paul. Thirty years prior, Rondo Avenue was main artery to the heart of St. Paul's largest black neighborhood. Made up of new migrants from the South and old, established families, Rondo was a proud, vibrant community that existed largely independent of the white society around it. “The construction of I-94 in the 1960s shattered this tightly-knit community, displacing thousands of African-Americans into a racially segregated city and a discriminatory housing market.”
	American Flag Meant to symbolize the patriotism of black America and the pride that our founding tenets instill as ideals if not in practice. It also represents the countless men and women who have given their lives in service of this nation, often returning to be treated as second-class citizens. With this quilt square we honor those who fought against injustice and slavery in the Civil War; the Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry; the valiant Tuskegee Airmen known as the Red Tails who fought in World War II; the women who took up industrial production in arsenals, canneries, and other factories in the U.S. as soldiers went abroad and kept the economy running; the soldiers who lost their lives or their minds to the chaotic violence of Vietnam and the sweeping criticism they faced upon their return; and finally, those men and women abroad at present in Iraq. We salute their courage, dedication and offer our unending gratitude for their sacrifice.
	Axe Pattern Quilt Square Within the Americas and Africa, axes often refer to Ogún, the Yoruban deity associated with iron, war and virility. Metallurgy plays a critical role in the ancestry of black people in the New World; Africans inhabiting the coastal areas were known for their brass, iron, gold and silverwork. Each of these metals corresponds to various aspects of earthly and spiritual life. Ogún is said to inhabit the slashing edge of iron, or rather its capability to powerful render something apart, he is therefore present in anything that pierces or penetrates, including a bullet or even a speeding train as Robert Farris Thompson explains.
	Victorian House The depiction of a Victorian house is meant to symbolize the local architecture surrounding the Martin Luther King Center. In recent years the Selby-Dale neighborhood has seen the renovation of most of its original Victorian homes. A tour of the neighborhood is a colorful taste of various architectural styles and homeowner artistry.
	St. Paul Cathedral Majestic and graceful, the St. Paul Cathedral the defining landmark of the Hill District. Equally spectacular in full daylight and after dark, the cathedral is exemplar of classical Renaissance architecture and has graced the St. Paul skyline for over a century. St. Francis Xavier Church in East Baltimore was the first Catholic Church in the United States officially established for black people. Today there are just shy of two and a half million African American Catholics living in this country. Especially via the charitable efforts of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the oldest order of black nuns in the United States, the Roman Catholic Church provided black people in the New World with sustenance, education, community and faith. It is just one example of the spiritual life of black Americans, wherein members challenged racist or exclusionary social norms based on Catholic ideology and often, since the end of the 19th Century, with the support of the Church itself. For thirty years Penumbra has shared the Hill with this magnificent landmark.
	Confederate Flag Southern pride bespeaks a schism in this country that ultimately came down to the struggle surrounding the abolition of slavery and the Civil War. The regalia celebrating a Southern coalition of states often carries with it a nostalgia for the period at which the confederacy was strongest, also a time wherein slavery was legal, when black people were treated as second class citizens at best, chattel at worst.
	Blackface The mask of minstrelsy. The minstrel show was a combination of music, recycled slave and folk tales and comedy that featured white actors pantomiming black people by painting their faces black, except for a white smattering of paint around the lips in an exaggerated oval. The depiction was degrading and stereotypical and played only to white audiences. Soon, black actors began performing in black face as well, one of the most famous was Bert Williams. For many years, (largely due to the audience expectations created by these white performers) the only work black entertainers could find was to perform in minstrel shows, in blackface. It reinforces the notion that the depictions of blackness and black people on white stages was not real. Even black actors had to “perform” white ideas of blackness by darkening their skin, wearing silly costumes and miming white actors’ depictions of stereotypes.
	Aunt Ester Aunt Ester has a recurring role throughout Penumbra Theatre Company member and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson’s ten decade cycle that chronicles black American life in the last century. She is a spiritualist, a sage, a quirky old lady. She points out irony as she sifts through pain. She rebuilds the broken and brings together the estranged. Through her strong connection to the past, Aunt Ester is both the moral compass and keeper of ancestral wisdom. She knows what is unknowable but is sensed by black folks; her perception leans upon systems of spirituality and tradition established in Africa and reinvented in the New World.
	Embroidered Quilt Square
	Justice This square, inspired from a homemade sign, is a tribute to the civic protest and social activism of the Civil Rights era. It marked a pivotal moment in U.S. history when the term “American” was redefined. It invokes Martin Luther King’s pledge to let freedom ring, Malcolm X’s call to courageous action by any means necessary, the screams of protestors beaten with Billy clubs, the barking and growling of dogs, the spray of firehouses, the burning of churches and crosses and bombs taking the lives of little children. Still the people pushed forward, unified, determined and focused. For their valor and audacity we are forever indebted.
	Cotton Club Logo Established in 1923 by renowned mobster Owney Madden, The Cotton Club quickly became one of New York City’s most famed nightclubs. Located uptown, in Harlem, the club featured both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway as leaders of the house band. The club was designed to evoke nostalgia for the plantation South and deliberately featured light-skinned chorine girls and a darker-skinned male serving staff. The club was segregated. Even though the best and the brightest of black performers including Ellington, Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker and countless others performed and gained notoriety here, only whites could patronize the venue. Having reigned over the jazz age for over a decade, the famous club finally closed its doors permanently in 1936 after race riots erupted in Harlem and the 18th Amendment overturned Prohibition legalizing alcohol once again. We feature the logo here not just to honor the talent that passed through the club, but to remember a time when even the most treasured of American icons and an ambassador abroad, Louis Armstrong, exited the building from the back, into an unassuming alley and the waiting arms of Harlem.
	Noose Undoubtedly the “hangman’s noose” is a foreboding image, but for black Americans it is particularly disquieting. The history of lynching bespeaks a kind of institutionalized terrorism that remains amongst the darkest moments in our nation’s history. The lynch rope has come to symbolize remembrance and survival against all odds, even the threat of unchecked murderous mobs. The poem “Strange Fruit” written by Abel Meeropol (alias Lewis Allen) adequately and eloquently captures the terror and grotesque spectacle of lynching. By linking the theme to a cycle of planting and harvest, Allen deftly illustrates the perpetual cycle of terror and hatred instigated by such incomprehensible carnage. The poem was later set to music and hauntingly captured by Billie Holliday. It expresses how deeply ingrained into American soil it is: Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.
	Jim Crow The formal legalization of segregation became known as Jim Crow. Throughout the South this meant the enforce separation of peoples based on arbitrary conjectures as to race and ethnicity. Jim Crow laws influenced miscegenation (interracial or interethnic marriage or dating), hiring practices, legal representation, voting practices, medical care and housing. Citizens, business owners, state and federal officials, terrorist mob groups and the Ku Klux Klan enforced segregation. Littered throughout the historical record are remnants of its institutionalization: diners that advertise “sweet tea” to “whites only,” public restroom facilities reserved for “colored” and “whites”and so on. The Alabama bus boycott and the Civil Rights Movement were direct social action responses to segregationist rule. The US Supreme Court declared segregation officially unconstitutional in 1954. Its retraction throughout the country proved both slow and very violent.
	Embroidery Square
	Cotton Plant The cotton industry is an American staple, it ushered in enormous wealth for the South and southeastern portions of the country where the plant is grown. Inextricably linked to its cultivation in the United States is the plantation system and racialized slavery, those twin pillars that reaped such monumental riches for the elite, ruling class. For our purposes cotton represents the ceaseless toil of slaves, but also signifies an important connection to the land. As a crop, it ordered life through a cycle of planting and harvesting, measuring days from sun-up to sun-down. Truly a bittersweet symbol for black Americans, it is also important to recognize for the comfort it offers: the warmth of its woven fibers, its use for beds, and for quilting and clothing.
	Vèvè Vèvè are most observable in the religious and artistic tradition of Haiti, though as art historians and specialists in African cultural traditions will attest, the roots of these ground paintings stretch back to the African continent. They are important not just for their spiritual relevance (described below) but because they represent the survival and creativity of culture within the intensely hostile context of Caribbean slave society. African and African American art historian Robert Farris Thompson writes, “[i]n the reduction of historical multiplicity of experience to single New World forms, vèvè constitutes the quintessential form of Afro-Haitian art.” (191) Thompson describes the vèvè as the signature of the gods. In meaning, they often act as a kind of map to the order of the universe, symbolizing the responsibility and particular powers of one or more deities. Thompson writes, “Everywhere in vodun art, one universe abuts another. . .responding to this brilliance through the pillar at the center of the dancing court. Luminous force then radiates, so it is believed, from the bottom of this pillar in the form of blazing chalk-white signatures from the goddesses and gods. These signs, the vèvè, are then erased by the dancing feet of devotees, circling around the pillar, even as, in spirit possession, the figures of these deities are redrawn in their flesh”(ibid.). The vèvè are then an integral element to the reconstitution of, and praise offered to, the gods.
	Embroidered Square
	Wheat Embroidery The wheat shaft of garb as it is sometimes called represents a staple source of nourishment. The staff of life, it represents an enduring pastoral and agricultural link with our past.
	The Color Purple Alice Walker’s famous Pulitzer-prize wining epistolary novel tells the story of Celie, a young black girl the early1900s. Hers is a tragic story, one of abandonment and abuse. Walker, unflinching in her depiction of Celie’s oppression, tells the harrowing tale of one girl’s journey home to herself, finding a voice and love along the way. In 1985 Steven Spielberg made a film out of the slim novel and in 2005 it opened on Broadway as a musical. It represents a powerful testament to the strength and courage of Southern, rural black women to rise up together against the triumvirate oppressive forces of racism, poverty and gender specific violence. A tireless advocate for oppressed women, Walker coined the term “womanism” to counter the disregard of the privilege white women, though oppressed by gender, can exact via their race and often class. Womanism was thus a current that ran alongside feminism, and in Walker’s words, “womanist is to feminist what purple is to lavender,” undoubtedly a reference to the strong bonds between the female characters in her novel. Her contribution to understanding the complexity of oppression via the term womanism is noteworthy; it loves the blackness of feminine bodies, it loves the woman-ness of bodies, it loves both the buck and the quake of movement in pain and pleasure, it seeks to celebrate these bodies, their survival, their revival. This quilt square thus represents the power of women to heal one another in spite of deep scars.
	Ritual Fan This ritual fan, called an “effrigi,” is decorated with ideographs known as nsibidi which Robert Farris Thompson translates literally to mean “cruel letters.” This illustrative system of communication was used amongst the Ejagham peoples inhabiting portions of Cameroon and Nigeria. Nsibidi is an organically African system of symbolic language that runs counter to the assumption that “black traditional Africa was culturally impoverished because it lacked letters to record its central myths, ideals, and aspirations” thus rebuking the “ethnocentrism . . . that would exclude ideographic forms from consideration in the history of literacy.”(228) Thompson locates evidence of the nsibidi system in Cuba in the middle of the 19th century, thereby demonstrating the lasting link between Africa and the lives of black people in the New World.
	Klan Head The Ku Klux Klan is a white supremacist, segregationist, anti-Semitic fraternal terrorist organization originated in the United States created at the end of the Civil War. The group is known particularly for its acts of hate against blacks in the American South that includes lynching (murder), cross-burning, violence against children and bombings. The KKK is particularly outspoken about “racial purity” and the “threat of miscegenation.” In recent years the organization has also expressed anti-homosexual views as well. The head depicted in this square captures the elemental threat that anyone could be underneath the sheet and the fundamental cowardice of the group illustrated by their need to camouflage themselves so.
	*Jitney* August Wilson’s compelling story of a Pittsburgh area gypsy cab company and the men who work there. As the city squeezes the remaining businesses in this depressed area of the Hill District to make way for their urban renewal plans, the way forward requires that owner Becker face a difficult reckoning with the past, including his estranged and incarcerated son. This resonant look at the challenges for black Americans in the 1970s is an intimate portrait of the relationships between men and the fragility of their dreams.
	Watermelon A common prop used in racist illustrations of black people in American graphic history, particularly prevalent in the antebellum South. Often depicted smiling over, eating, or stealing watermelons, the pairing of black people with watermelon has proved a lasting stereotype.
	Iron Machete The machete is a significant tool for black people in the New World. On sugar plantations in the Caribbean a machete was necessary for cutting the long, razor sharp cane, subsequently arming the slave populations with formidable weapons. At the dawn of the 19th century a massive organized effort to overthrow the wealthy plantocracy of Saint Domingue colony was initiated. Fought largely by slaves armed often just with a machete or simple tools, it turned into a full-scale revolution and people of color claimed title to the island colony, christening it Haiti in honor of its original inhabitants, the Taino. In this context the machete is linked both to back breaking toil and momentous rebellion. The machete is also a cardinal tool of Ogún, the Yoruban deity associated with iron, war and virility. This one features an open disk that is meant to elucidate a relationship to the sun and sky. Metallurgy plays a critical role in the ancestry of black people in the New World; Africans inhabiting the coastal areas were known for their brass, iron, gold and silverwork. Each of these metals corresponds to various aspects of earthly and spiritual life. Ogún is said to inhabit the slashing edge of iron, or rather its capability to powerful render something apart, he is therefore present in anything that pierces or penetrates, including a bullet or even a speeding train as Robert Farris Thompson explains.
	Basquiat Painting Born in 1960, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a prolific painter who startlingly combined rhythmic and symbolic elements of Haitian, African, black American and Puerto Rican cultures. He gained immense notoriety in the 1980s for his compelling and primordial canvases. Touted as “the” painter to watch by New York Magazine, Basquiat was largely adored by artist crowds in New York and had a close friendship with Andy Warhol. At twenty-five years old, Jean-Michel Basquiat saw almost sixty of his paintings and drawings on display at the modern art gallery Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover, Germany. Basquiat struggled openly with addiction and died in 1988 at age 27 of a heroin overdose. His work continues to be explored by scholars, art historians and artists, and is regarded as visually exemplar of the creole culture created in the New World by black peoples.
	1921 With Noose On June 15, 1920 three men insubstantially accused of raping a white woman, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Issac McGhie, were pulled from their jail cell in Duluth, Minnesota and lynched by a mob numbering in the thousands. The trauma of this incident reverberated throughout the nation and especially affected black Minnesotans living in the capital city of St. Paul. One member of this large community, Nellie Francis, led a campaign to institutionalize an anti-lynching bill. In the spring of 1921 the bill was passed into law and Minnesota became the first state to formally outlaw lynching. For decades the whereabouts of the remains of the victims was uncertain. Finally, “in 1991, it was learned their bodies lay in unmarked graves at Duluth’s Park Hill Cemetery. In a ceremony on October 26 of that year, the graves were marked with granite headstones bearing their names and the inscription Deterred but not defeated.”
	Street Lamp The street lamp signifies residential streets, a neighborhood; it signifies a community. There was time not too long ago in St. Paul when everyone participated in the parenting of the community’s children. When the streetlamps came on, for example, neighbors knew to send children they saw in the streets home to their parents.
	651 Wiley Reference to August Wilson’s character Aunt Ester, she lived there and her patrons and believers would come to her house, “go around back and knock on the red door.” She would listen to their concerns, their troubles, examine the wounds of their souls and make a bargain—go put twenty dollars in the river and it will come back to you, she’d say. Her wisdom was ancient, timeless, connected to the source from which black Americans had been taken. The pains she healed on the surface were basic, but the basic pains were symptomatic of deep fractures in the souls of black folks living in a hostile environment. Aunt Ester was metaphorically an umbilical cord and literally a keeper of the flame.
	Frog Water and its peaceful properties are associated with the Yoruban deity Yemoja (Yemayá), a river goddess. Robert Farris Thompson explains, “imperially presiding in the palaces beneath the sands at the bottom of the river, the riverain goddesses are peculiarly close to Earth. In the positive breeze of their fans, the ripple of their water, there is coolness. In the darkness of their depths and in the flashing of their swords, there is witchcraft”. As a creature between land and water the frog represents “forces incarnate in amphibian reptiles at the water and grand boundary between worlds of the living and the dead.”
	Billie Holliday Amongst our nation’s most prolific singers, Billie Holliday’s records embody the romance of falling in love and the heartbreak of disappointment. Both warm and aching, Holliday’s voice is instantly recognizable. One of the most popular musicians of her era, Billie Holliday died at age 44 with no more than seventy cents in her bank account and $750.00 in the dressing gown she wore in hospital. She died in 1959 due to cirrhosis of the liver. While she did not survive to see the change ushered in by the Civil Rights Movement, her haunting rendition of Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching in the South that she personally lobbied to record, forever links her to the struggle against injustice and for equality. A powerful commentary on the state of America, it left an indelible mark on the Civil Rights Movement and, more broadly, American cultural history.
	Greyhound Symbol of the Civil Rights bus boycott, one of the major efforts to kick off the Civil Rights Movement. In the winter of 1955 a movement to boycott the buses of Montgomery Alabama was enacted. It was almost a decade earlier that Rosa Parks made her stand against segregated public transportation which privileged white customers over black and required that black people surrender their seats to whites when buses were crowded. It also symbolizes the mass migrations of black people as they disseminated from the South into the rest of the country in search of better jobs and equality.
	African Textile Print One of the easily determinable links between the Old World of Africa and the New World established in the Americas is textile. Rhythmic patterns specific to various regions in Africa (e.g. the Mande from West Africa) have shown up from Brazil to Birmingham by way of quilts, cloths, embroidery, weaving and eventually painting and jazz music. Similar to the composition of African textiles, Robert Farris Thompson describes slave cabins whose walls were papered with various newsprint and magazine pages in randomized, staccato patterns. The lack of linear presentation is deliberate. Such trajectories were traditionally regarded as pathways for negative forces; thus the constant interruption and blockage of straight lines is an attempt to ward off evil.
	Plow Continuing the theme of harvest and elucidating the agricultural roots of black people in this country, we include a traditional plow. The metal of this tool has significance within the diaspora for its spiritual properties as it relates to Ogún, the Yoruban deity associated with war, masculine prowess and the balance between destruction and creation. Such themes interact with agricultural circumstances to create powerful and complex symbols by which early African Americans interpreted and assessed life. For example, when the plow (masculine) stirs the earth (feminine), the fruit of labor is born by way of the crop. The crop is then harvested; thus creation, and the ground is torn asunder once again, destruction, for the planting of seeds, creation. It is a constantly cyclical movement and order. Additionally, the union represents a powerful symbol of balance between humans and nature, men and women.
	Dale Street The Selby Avenue and Dale Street signs included in the quilt are in honor of the community that has housed Penumbra Theatre Company for 30 years. The Minnesota Historical Society explains that until the early 1960s, the area known as Rondo was a predominantly African American neighborhood in St. Paul. Thirty years prior, Rondo Avenue was main artery to the heart of St. Paul's largest black neighborhood. Made up of new migrants from the South and old, established families, Rondo was a proud, vibrant community that existed largely independent of the white society around it. “The construction of I-94 in the 1960s shattered this tightly-knit community, displacing thousands of African-Americans into a racially segregated city and a discriminatory housing market.”
	Shackled Foot To symbolize the bondage in which millions of black Africans came to the Americas via the Middle Passage, and the legacy of slavery in the New World, we include a human foot enchained by a traditional ankle fetter. The shackle also has powerful implications for the many black men sentenced to hard labor on chain gangs in the South, where racism worked to criminalize acts of survival for poor black people. According to data provided by Human Rights Watch, while black people make up just 12.32% of the American populace, the percentage of incarcerated black men in state and federal prisons is 43.91, nearly half.
	Cotton Flowers The cotton industry is an American staple, it ushered in enormous wealth for the South and southeastern portions of the country where the plant is grown. Inextricably linked to its cultivation in the United States is the plantation system and racialized slavery, those twin pillars that reaped such monumental riches for the elite, ruling class. For our purposes cotton represents the ceaseless toil of slaves, but also signifies an important connection to the land. As a crop, it ordered life through a cycle of planting and harvesting, measuring days from sun-up to sun-down. Truly a bittersweet symbol for black Americans, it is also important to recognize for the comfort it offers: the warmth of its woven fibers, its use for beds, and for quilting and clothing.
	Railroad Crossing The railroad is a powerful metaphor within black American history referencing the covert liberation efforts by a network of runaway slaves, freedmen and women, and white abolitionists connected through the Underground Railroad. The railroad is also symbolic of the black American folklore about the crossroads as a place of power and potentiality, the railroad crossing sign also references a legacy of movement, transience, and migration after emancipation. Many former slaves traveled the rails in search of jobs, lost family members, better opportunity, or simply to find a place to put the past behind them. In later years the railroad provided a reliable place where black men could often find work as Pullman porters, waiters, coal loaders, mechanics, and cooks. The railroad and the crossroads would become an integral element to black literature, the poetry of the blues, and our collective history as a people on the move.
	Chicken Foot Part of the conjure act in August Wilson’s first professional play Black Bart and the Sacred Hills; the chicken foot is symbolic of alternate systems of spirituality black people in the New World brought with them and created upon their arrival and commingling with other cultures. One of the most powerfully symbolic is the largely Haitian practice of vodun. Known often as voodoo, its tenets, philosophies and spiritual rites are often misinterpreted. It was such a grounding and connective force for black slaves that the practice was rigorously demonized by Catholic missionaries in the Caribbean. The practice went underground, away from the eyes of nonbelievers and those who would threaten or refute it. It has remained shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding since. We include the chicken foot here as a reference to the place for magic and the supernatural within our culture and our artistry; to acknowledge the process of conjure that black slaves used to effect a sense of control or power over their otherwise owned lives.
	Log Cabin Made to represent a slave cabin and also the cabins built by freed men and women who were pioneers pushed the edges of the U.S. frontier where often they secured alliances with indigenous people inhabiting the area.
	"I'm Standing In My Grandfather's Shoes" When we celebrate our successes within the vacuum of our individual efforts, we practice the erasure of the sacrifices made by those who came before us. We silence our ancestors. Honoring our ancestors challenges the American notion of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps,” a fiction black Americans know as the penultimate tool in erasing their contribution to the development of a sound and prosperous American economy via the project of slavery. This fiction, that we are entirely self-made, influences our self-awareness, tempers our relationships to other people, other cultures and other nations. It is a lonely existence that denies family, culture. It is an angry, frustrated existence because it is a lie. We are none of us alone in this world. We have neither failed nor succeeded on our own. August Wilson articulated this complex notion with the elegant phrase above. Accepting cultural belonging means recognizing both external racial categorization and allowing oneself to be inducted into a legacy rich with cultural knowledge, informed by its own historical archive, its own language, its own music that has run parallel to the dominant American script since before the birth of this nation.
	Eagle Feathers Representative of the detailed nexus of historical connections between Native and African Americans extends as far back as the early 1500s. The eagle feathers are a testament to our investment in healing the bitterness and misunderstanding between two communities of color pitted against one another at the end of the Civil War. Our 2005-2006 season opened with the world premier of Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers by William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Not only did Penumbra’s production of this play receive critical acclaim, it initiated a series of community gatherings, informal conversations and thoughtful commentary by honored elders around the issues the play brought to the fore. The collaboration between Lou Bellamy and William S. Yellow Robe Jr. was powerful and as each found, as deep as the color of the blood in our veins.
	Clenched Fist The clenched fist became a symbol for Black Power after the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. In 1968 at the Summer Olympics in Mexico 200 meter gold and bronze medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and raised their fists into the air while the Star Spangled Banner played in honor of their achievement. The silent protest was greeted by the Olympic committee as a “violent” and “deliberate”disregard for the regulations of the Olympic games. For their silent but searing protest of racial discrimination against black people of the diaspora, Smith and Carlos were subsequently suspended from their national team and barred from entering the Olympic Village where competing athletes are housed during the games. While both men received letters and phone calls threatening their lives and the safety of their loved ones, the enduring image of their prideful and peaceful protest is remembered worldwide. The Black Power Movement was a call to action after the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement petered and change was slow to come. Led most visibly by men—including (philosophically) Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (founders of the Black Panthers)—the BPM was largely criminalized for its male-oriented militancy. On a theoretical and practical level, the BPM promoted self-reliance and racial dignity within the black community.
	Plantation Scene Intended to reference the American infatuation with the idyllic South, the pastoral plantation scene is often used as a tool to disassociate our history, heritage culture and economy from the legacy of slavery in the United States. These images must be read not necessarily in terms of what they depict, but what they do not show. Erased from the image is the literal work, the people who have done it, the color of their skin, and the enforcement of the brutal regime that produced the neat and tidy crop rows, lush gardens and well-appointed homes. It is the myth of the making of this country without the inclusion, neither representative nor fully participatory, of those who built its infrastructure with their bare hands. This quilt square reminds us that what is presented superficially, often endearing and romantic, must be regarded both historically and within its proper cultural context so that multiple stories can be heard.
	*spell #7* The richly textured choreo-poem by written by Obie Award-winning playwright Ntozake Shange examines how artists have and continue to sustain the black community. spell #7 is a salute to their ability to instill pride, challenge and safeguard cultural identity, even while working under the parameters of racist stereotypes. Shange spotlights the minstrel tradition of blackface performance and the domination of the entertainment industry by white production companies and managers who reaped generous rewards from this lucrative market. spell #7 reminds us of the important place the minstrel show plays in American theatre and the subsequent proliferation of its caricatures throughout American popular culture.
	Guitar Meant to symbolize the important of music to the black experience. Not only have we shaped the cultural landscape of this country through gospel, jazz and the blues, black Americans use the rhythms of these modes of communication in various ways beyond music proper. Evident in the slide of a hipster’s walk, the patterns of a slave quilt, the bounce of a young athlete after scoring, in braided hairstyles, or visual and performance art, each of these realms are saturated with and informed by a culturally specific sense of connective rhythm that makes up and binds the black community through the Diaspora but particularly throughout the country. Whether individuals choose to engage it or not, whether they realize their use of it or not, it exists alongside and in what we do. It is the poetry of life, the creativity of survival, the merging of many stories into one, complex, ever-changing song.
	Spotlight What theatre would be complete without a spotlight? The square represents enlightenment through our sharp, determined focus on the black experience to illuminate universal human truths. It also references a traditional mode of theatre that is unfit for articulating our experiences in full—a Eurocentric, univocal, “star-centered” formula for theatre that performs for a passive audience and has a clear beginning, middle and end. At Penumbra, our aesthetic is informed by our ethical responsibility the art and to the community; theatre thus seeps beyond the stage, involves and engages the audience, and requires an ensemble format that includes many voices. Looking at the wall you will see the continuity of pattern as the shaft of light illuminates the Dancer, a commemorative gesture to remember company member Rebecca Rice. The light emphasizes and gives pause to her contribution as an empowered and empowering feminine grassroots force within the community. The spotlight is meant to give us pause to reflect upon the multiple planes of meaning on which every story, each moment, can be read.
	Sunflower The sunflower plant is native to North America and was first cultivated by Native American tribes for cake flour, mush and bread. The seeds were eaten as snacks, pressed for oil and used ceremonially as well. In the late 1900s the sunflower established itself as a reliable and lucrative crop in the South, where many black laborers lived and worked the agricultural fields. The sunflower quilt square is a reminder of our agrarian roots, the history of plants for sustenance, medicine and rites of passage amongst tribal peoples and the development of a notion of the “cash crop” that stimulated large scale agricultural production using the unpaid and enforced labor racialized slavery.
	Uncle Tom's Cabin Abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was first published in 1852. Received as a scathing indictment of slavery in the U.S., the fictional story of Uncle Tom would become the best-selling book of the 19th Century. The depictions of the black characters in the book, while meant to engender sympathy and catalyze outrage, were instead incorporated into the American cultural landscape as tenaciously steadfast and ultimately racist stereotypes of the black experience with slavery. To this day, representations of black people must contend with and are placed inside a comparative framework that includes these stock caricatures.
	Dice Dice date back thousands of years. Made traditionally from stone, animal bones or hardwood, dice are decorated with a series of “pips” that most commonly number from one through six on a single die. Throwing dice is a balance between what we know to be luck and probability when all outcomes of a finite set of possible values are equally probable. Dice have been used within the Diaspora for divination, fortune-telling, gambling, and more. Each of these usages points to acknowledging a system of chance that exists beyond our control. Throwing the dice means testing those waters, it is an attempt to effect control over that which cannot be controlled, or at the very least, an attempt to anticipate the outcome. Investigating the nuance of probability, and the sense of security people find in its parameters is indicative of a search for guidance, for a logical system of order to the universe. Black people in the new world often refer to throwing dice or dominoes as “throwing bones,” a reference to engaging the ancestors and the spirit world in a participatory interpretation of life on earth. There is a plethora of evidence in New World manifestations of rhythms of probability in music, dance and textiles. In the game of craps for example, commonly played by black Americans throughout the ages, there are a total of 36 possible combinations; for example on the first roll there are 8 ways to win, 4 ways to lose and 24 ways to make a point. The rules of the game are clear, the system is accountable via these parameters, but there is room left for chance. This can be read as critical commentary on the illogic and chaotic experience of oppression. King Hedley II raised the game of craps to its highest metaphorical level as produced by Lou Bellamy when King and Elmore play one another in competition over Ruby and control of the realm. Bellamy brought the Yoruban orishas (deities) to bear on the game in reference to divination ceremonies that use dice, and the resultant effect was a multileveled competition between two men, a father and son, the younger generation and the older, and their corresponding, metaphorical orishas.
	Testify The tradition of “testifying” is a powerful one within the black community, especially for black Christians in the United States. A kind of exercise in truth telling, to speak the word before an audience of one’s family, community or church was a powerful means by which black people affirmed one another, their knowledge—which is often contested by the larger, dominant and oppressive society (e.g. someone might say, “there is racism in the world,” and though it is broadly true, it can and has been contested. In the absence of tangible, quantifiable proof, language becomes speculative, reducing the means by which we communicate and name our experiences (a powerful exercise) to indistinct and indefinite terminology, constantly in flux within the context of an irrational, disordered world.) The practice of “testifying” of speaking out, outloud, of naming an experience, “telling it like it is,” becomes critical to preserving a sense of identity, a sense of logic within the chaos of an oppressive society that exhibits manic behavior to protect its most devious, unjustifiable though often financially lucrative institutions. Simply the act of saying, “I have seen,” or “I know,” becomes revolutionary within a context wherein the mission of the controlling or dominant class is, in part, to break down any sense of independence or ownership of self, that would reject or counter the position of slave. There is no “I” within this kind of context, I does not belong to the speaker. “I” denotes a kind of control or freedom. The black community then, in its call and response to the speaker, both encourages the speaking or telling, but also catches the speaker should he or she falter as the voice is used and the silence is broken. Speaking up takes practice, speaking as though one’s experience matters and has relevance takes practice, the more one speaks and explains the world, translates it to make meaning and make it relevant, in their own words, the more that person will want to communicate with others, to talk, to name and order things according to his or her experience and developing worldview. The “amen-corner,” or those who speak back, are there to encourage, like revelers in a carnival they celebrate, but they are also like the patrons of a marathon, who with water and words of encouragement, place themselves strategically at mileposts where they can be close to the runners, offer them a cool drink or a shout to keep going when the path becomes steep or slippery, or even worse, disappears altogether. This, more than anything else, is at the heart of faith; a communal buoying up of its individual members for the greater good.
	Dancer Penumbra Theatre Company member Rebecca Rice was, in Lou Bellamy’s words, “the very best actress to grace Penumbra’s stage.” Impressed by her authenticity, her clear vision and her fierce love for black people, those who knew Rebecca basked gratefully in her warm, caring spirit. She was not traditionally trained in the craft and brought a fresh, new perspective to the Penumbra aesthetic. Based largely in movement, Rebecca’s artistry impacted audiences by communicating story on an alternate plane of reality. She was a loved family member, a teacher, a leader and a spiritual center for Penumbra’s company and our patrons while she was with us. We pay tribute to her spirit with this quilt square and honor her lasting presence in our home.
	Lift Every Voice Written in 1899 by James Weldon Johnson, Lift Every Voice and Sing officially became “the Negro National Anthem” in 1919 when the NAACP recognized the song. Articulated a sense of cohesiveness and cultural specificity that demonstrated perseverance and the determination toward liberation and equality.
	I Want My Ham The moral reprise of August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, a look at the 1960s when black Americans were demanding what was promised: freedom, equality, and peace. Uttered again and again by Hambone, a man gone mad from not being paid his due by a white butcher who promised him a ham in exchange for painting his fence, “I want my ham” becomes synonymous with a demand directed at the hypocrisy of the so-called desegregation of American society. The butcher offered Hambone a chicken, but the situation was simple in Hambone’s head; the man had promised a ham, not a chicken. A chicken would not do. The butcher refused to give up a ham. Day after day Hambone declared that he wanted his ham, wanted what had been promised and what was due him. He died without ever having seen his work and word honored with pay. At the end of the play one of the diner’s frequent young visitors, Sterling, steals a ham from the butcher for Hambone’s casket. It is a powerful metaphor of the next generation, race-conscious and action-oriented, taking the reigns from their ancestors who passed on without seeing their brave efforts toward lasting social change come to fruition.
	Dinah Washington Stamp Born in 1924 in Tuscaloosa Alabama, Dinah Washington would rose to stardom as one of the queens of the blues genre. Her life was fraught with struggles against a racist recording industry who wanted her voice and music but not her heartache or color. She was notoriously feisty, a comedian and penultimate performer. Some of her most famous songs include “What a Difference a Day Makes,” “This Bitter Earth,” and “Baby, You Got What It Takes.” In 1993 she was officially celebrated with a commemorative federal postage stamp. She died of a drug overdose in 1963 and the American music industry mourned the loss of one its most talented, unique voices.
	Black Bart and the Sacred Hills Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright August Wilson had his first professional production in 1983 at Penumbra Theatre. The play, Black Bart and the Sacred Hills is set in the Old West and the title character is a gun-slinging conjure man, not unlike later incarnations of black masculinity in Wilson’s work; most particularly King. Still uncertain of his commitment to alternate systems of both ideological and spiritual knowledge, Wilson drew heavily from the Greek anti-war comedy Lysistrata. Of that first production, August Wilson said, “when I walked through the doors of Penumbra Theatre [sic], I did not know that I would find life-long friends and supporters that would encourage and enable my art. . . . I only knew that I was excited to be in a black theater that had real lights, assigned seats and a set that was not a hodgepodge of found and borrowed props as had been my experience with all the black theater I had known.”
	for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf Staged at Penumbra in 1999, Founder and Artistic Director Lou Bellamy cast the choreo-poem with women representing the diverse cultural matrix that has both fed and challenged the activism of women of color striving to create allegiance through shared experiences of gender oppression, poverty and sexual violence. Bellamy produced the show largely in response to Shange’s assessment of the condition of black art as xenophobic. She challenged and encouraged leaders to embrace the diverse cultural nuance of the Diaspora. for colored girls . . . blends narrative, dance and poetry into a powerfully resonant piece that has been hailed as both thought-provoking and healing.
	Gullah Islands The Gullah people migrated to islands off the shores of Atlantic coast from South Carolina and Georgia as early as the mid-1600s. For centuries, they have live in small, remote farming and fishing communities on the chain of islands along the southeastern seaboard. Their isolation and strong sense of cultural cohesion has enabled the Gullah people to maintain a purity of culture that is unparalleled in the U.S. Their cuisine is based largely on rice, the cultivation of which their ancestors learned as a plantation crop. They speak a creole language thought to be derivative of Sierra Leone Krio, use musical instruments that mirror those found in various regions of Africa (as opposed to American interpretations of the instruments) and follow a complex braided philosophical and spiritual framework largely influenced by African ideology. Today the Gullah make African-style handicrafts such as baskets and carved walking sticks which are imported to the mainland and fetch very high prices at market. As Hilton Head develops, area hotels and resorts push further into the homeland territory of the Gullah people threatening one of the most unique cultural landscapes of the New World.
	Textile Pattern "Crazy Quilt" Reflective of a style that used scraps of found cloth and taught the youngest slave girls to sew quilts. In an economy of enforced poverty, in which human beings who were owned could own nothing in turn; there was nothing discarded, nothing refused. Thus these “Crazy Quilts” were often made of countless, tiny fragments of material collected by the women of a plantation community to teach young slave girls the trade and artistry of quilting and embroidery. But there is proof that slaves created their own textiles as well. Often identifiable by the homespun backing and seeds found in the cotton batting, art historians, anthropologists and enthnographers have been able to decipher which surviving quilts were made for use in the plantation house and which remained amongst the slave population. Largely utilitarian, many of these pieces were put to rigorous use and so did not survive. Surviving examples such as these “Crazy Quilts” signal a generational passing down of knowledge, of induction into symbolic language and womanhood as a rite of passage for young slave girls.
	Horace Bond Horace Bond was the mentor who shaped Lou Bellamy’s early aesthetic by grounding it within an informed cultural aesthetic that linked the art to a civic responsibility toward community action and social change. Bond was a director, playwright, professor and leader. Critical to the stewardship of the theatre in its infancy, the role of the elder or mentor has maintained an integral position since. Bellamy himself has since ushered many young people into the process of creating socially responsible art. Today Penumbra offers a wide range of uniquely tailored programs that rely heavily on mentorship and communal responsibility to inform, educate and empower.
	African Tricolor Flag Adopted in 1920 by the Universal Negro Improvement Association as the symbol of the expansive Diaspora, each of the colors is symbolically relevant. Red signifies the blood that has been shed in the name of liberation and freedom, and the element that links each of us together in a great family; black honors our racial pride and our sense of cultural cohesion, and green represents the earth, its abundant wealth, particularly in reference to the precious raw materials to be found on African soil.
	The Little Tommy Parker’s Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show Produced in 1987, this was the first of a number of plays that Penumbra Theatre premiered by playwright Carlyle Brown. It tells the story of troupe of minstrel performers having to confront the anger of an accusatory white mob chasing one of the players. In order to circumvent the danger of the situation, the performers don the minstrel mask, providing insightful commentary on the power of stereotypes, the complexity of identity and the pressure of a social world governed by racism and oppression. As a contributor to the American theatre canon, Brown does a tremendous amount of historical research; situating black people inside American history with the agency and intelligence to comment upon it as well.

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