It’s safe to say that a fist fight changed Kalamazoo playwright Von Washington Sr.’s life. While stationed in Montana with the U.S. Air Force, Washington says he got into a scuffle with a man on the street. When the police arrived, the man lied and said that Washington had a weapon - an offense that could have put him in prison.
“Well I had to go to the hospital to get my hands bandaged because I had hurt my hands beating the boy up. They had made the report that I had beat him with a pipe and that’s why the police arrested me,” he says.
Washington says fortunately Air Force officials believed him and he got the charge reduced to a misdemeanor.
“But I was living in a world that I really realized that was not going to offer me the same opportunities they were offering everybody else.”
That set Washington on a journey to find out about the experiences of other African Americans. Washington’s play In Search of Giants is about that journey. There will be a reading of the play Sunday at 4 p.m. at St. Martin of Tours Episcopal Churchin Kalamazoo.
Specifically the play talks about when Washington met Ali Garrison - a Toronto opera singer whose Quaker ancestors helped slaves escape on the underground railroad. Garrison herself plays her great great great grandmother Pamela Thomas in the play.
Pamela and her husband Dr. Nathan Thomas housed more than a thousand slaves at their home in Schoolcraft - which is now a museum. Michael Ray Helms plays Nathan Thomas. He says the underground railroad went from the south and crossed Michigan into Canada.
“These homes that people were hiding the slaves and helping them get to freedom were generally about 14 miles apart because that’s about as far as you could go in one nighttime,” says Helms.
That’s how the Thomases met abolitionist Henry Bibb. Von Washington Jr. plays him:
“He’s someone that we don’t know very much about and is one of the focuses of this show. Henry spent some time going back and forth to the south trying to free his family out of slavery. He was caught several times but also managed to escape each time to get to Canada, where then he was the first person to start a black newspaper.”
If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of Washingtons in this play. Von Washington Jr. is the playwright’s son and Bianca Washington - who plays Henry Bibb’s wife - is his niece. Bianca Washington says it’s been fun traveling this piece with her family.
“This is extremely special because we get to repeat it with each other over and over again. So we have a good time,” she says.
Von Washington Sr. says the play is performed in the style of a griot. Griots are oral historians for African tribes.
“You can’t even see the chief, the leader of this tribe, until you’ve talked with the griot. And the griot will tell you who’s who, how they work, what they do - fill you in. So when you see the chief, he doesn’t have to do that," Washington Sr. explains. “And the griots use music, dance, change of characters, situations - everything.”
Von Washington Jr. is also the executive director of community relations for the Kalamazoo Promise. He says kids need to hear about the accomplishments of African Americans like Henry Bibb:
“If there’s an absence of these things in our teachings, in our schools and we don’t have an opportunity to know that those that were before us did great things and made wonderful contributions that now even guide our society today. Then you don’t have a real sense of what you might be able to do. So it’s extremely important that people like Henry Bibb and many others like him come to light now.”
This production of In Search of Giants is a fundraiser to help create a blood bank for disadvantaged native tribes in West Bengal, India. You can find out more about the program in the church's recent newsletter.
