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Books by Tom Dent
Southern
Journey /
Blue Lights and River Songs /
The Free Southern Theater
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Tom Dent
Speaks
On Writing, New Orleans, Umbra, FST & Other
Topics
From an Interview with Kalamu ya Salaam
Umbra Reunion
I wish you could have been at the Umbra
Reunion in November 1991. In Calvin Hernton’s remarks, almost
everyone’s remarks, we talked about what the Umbra-Lower East
Side concentration of artists meant. In addition to writers,
there was the visual artist Arturo Cruz; two great musicians who
were both on the scene then, Archie Shepp and randy Weston,
LaMama Theatre—it was just one of the most extraordinary
confluences of modern artists, for us as Black people. This was
what today might be called counterculture in its thematic
direction, but anyway, after a few years, we all dispersed. What
Hernton pointed out was that, wherever we relocated we tried to
keep alive a sense of what we had been doing in New York.
Need for a Nurturing Community
First of all, I felt a lot of my motivation
came from the realization that I grew up here in New Orleans as
a reading child, and began to do some kind of writing early. In
a more developed society—in terms of literature or, say,
literacy—I would have been encouraged to write seriously. But
at that time there was no nurturing ground.
I was a reading child, but not “bookish”
in the sense that I was overly studious; rather, I was attracted
to books of my own choosing. I felt at home in the library. But
even that was considered an abnormality, for the most part. And
even at Morehouse College I didn’t get any sense of direction.
I continued my literary interests—as editor of the student
newspaper and winner of a short-story prize—and I finished
second in my class academically. However, not once did one of my
teachers say, “Hey, you ought to get interested in writing.”
The whole module of Black success we were programmed toward was
doctor, lawyer, preacher, teacher—that was it. There just was
no concept of doing anything else. They didn’t know anything
else.
I had an anger and bitterness toward
Morehouse for a long time because I felt that that kind of
one-sided education was a deprivation. I realized that even the
teachers of English literature and the humanities did not write,
and they didn’t know anybody who wrote. Gwendolyn Brooks came
to read after she’d won the Pulitzer prize, and that was a
very unusual event. It was Atlanta University, and I was the
only student from Morehouse there.
There was this lack of a nurturing community,
no matter how small even little pieces of suggestions of
direction, I cherished. They came from people like Marcus
Christian, who was working at the library at Dillard when I
started working there as a child during the summers. He would
point out books to me to read. Around the same time there was
Benjamin Quarles, who taught history at Dillard and was then
writing his first book on Frederick Douglass. I could see him
working in the library, and I expected that his book was going
to be a best-seller. Later I learned that working for years on a
book didn’t mean it would make you famous. But Quarles for me
became a model of what the work of writing was like. It was
silent work, lonely work. And you never knew what you were going
to get out of it.
So in coming back here [New Orleans] and
becoming involved with y’all, I felt that, no matter what
happened to me and my career as a writer, at the very least we
could begin to provide a nurturing community. That took the form
of a workshop, and some of our other activities. It expanded
into social activities, relationships, everything—because you
can’t write in social and cultural isolation. Writing goes
with reading, the exchange of ideas, and the excitement that
comes from being part of something that is bigger than you. That
was one of the personal motivations: if I was going to be back
here, I wanted to see something develop so that when interested
younger people came along, they wouldn’t face the same
isolation and alienation I felt that drove me away.
Developing as a Writer
My Umbra experience came from a search to
find other Black writers my age in New York. Most of my reading
in college, in the Army, and even afterwards, was European and
American writing. On the one hand, I realized that it would be
impossible for me to make a statement as a writer without
relating to my reality as a Black American. On the other hand, I
didn’t quite know how to put that together, and I certainly
wasn’t sure where I fit in the racial story. Because there was
no system I could dip into automatically, I tried other things.
Anything.
In the Army, I took a correspondence course
from Writers’ Digest. You write off for lessons and send them
back in the mail, fifteen dollars a lesson. In New York, after I
was there for about a year, I came across an ad in the New
York Post for a writers’ class run by Lagos Egri. I went
down to see him in his little office on 57th Street
and signed up for his weekly course in creative writing. I was
just trying to find a way.
Egri was around 60 years old, an immigrant
from Hungary who’d come over here in the 30s and done some
dramatic writing. He worked with theaters and maybe some movies,
but never anything prominent. Then he wrote a book you can still
find today called The Art of Dramatic Writing. It became a
classic and a kind of textbook. He was giving this course; it
was about $20 a week. We would bring our lessons in prose, or
drama, but never poetry. The class would criticize with a strict
rule I introduced into Umbra, and later used in our workshop.
The rule was that, after you read your work,
you could not argue or try to explain what you had written.
Everyone else had their say first—you had to sit there and
take it. Then, and only then, could you comment. That took much
more discipline than we first thought, because you always wanted
to explain or disclaim—you know, “I’m not finished with
this . . .”—but Egri would not allow any of that. What was
really interesting about this class, which turned out to be
rather small, only about 12 people or so, was that 5 or 6 of the
people were Black. The first Black writers I met in New York who
were relative beginners like me, I met in Egri’s class.
The Blacks became friends. We would go out
after class and talk. I became particularly close to Walter
Myers, who was as serious as I thought I was. He was from New
Jersey and has now published a tremendous amount of excellent
juvenile literature under the name of Walter Dean Myers. It was
probably no accident that so many Blacks were in Egri’s class,
because one of the theaters he had been very involved with was
the old Lafayette in Harlem. He knew a lot of those people, knew
the writers, and, as a Hungarian, his attitude toward Blacks was
distinctly not American.
There was a couple of other things that came
out of that experience that fascinated me. I had never met a
Hungarian before, but with every Hungarian I’ve met since
I’ve been struck by the fact that they cannot speak English.
There’s no way that you can grow up in Hungary and speak
English without an accent because the languages are so
strikingly different. I wondered how in the world Egri wrote
such a lucid book as The Art of Dramatic Writing.
Finally, we found out the truth: he didn’t
write it. I mean, he wrote it in Hungarian, and somebody
translated it into English rewrote it for him. This taught me
something about the process of writing and being published. Here
is a man who comes from Hungary, who can’t speak English, and
he ends up getting a reputation not only for being an expert,
but for also being good at fixing plays, fixing cinema scripts.
And even though he’s generally considered an expert at what he
does, he’s really not wealthy. He’s just eking out a living.
The other thing, which goes back to my
childhood, was that I read Black weeklies, newspapers. In the
40s there were several good papers: the Pittsburgh Courier,
Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American, Norfolk
Journal and Guide, Oklahoma City Black Dispatch. My
father subscribed to all of these papers, along with the Atlanta
Daily World, which was the only Black daily in the country. When
I would pick up the mail for him at Dillard, I would get four or
five papers. At that time White dailies did not cover what could
be considered Black news, unless it was some sensational crime.
Reading these papers exposed me to what was
going on in the Black world, and it was also my first reading of
Black writers, I mean, not just Hughes and Wright, but
columnists, sports writers, political writers, and commentators.
So my sense of what writers wrote was not limited to the
literary. It was also journalistic, on a high level. I learned
that Blacks could perform that role just like Whites. And then
the world of Black papers died, it went the way of the Negro
leagues. I think, however, what my reading of the papers imbued
in me was a sense that you could be a very fine writer, with
fundamental ties to the community, through journalism, affected
you, your community, and the larger society.
I guess I was always looking for that. It
just so happened that, by the time I came of age and was ready
to ply a role in Black journalism, which I would have loved to
do, that world died. It died because of the Civil Rights
Movement. Nevertheless, I tried. The first job I had in New York
was in Harlem with a Black newspaper, the New York Age, a
weekly which was fifty years old and had been founded by Thomas
Fortune.
New York Age & Black
Nationalism
I was a reporter, but the newspaper failed
within one year after I started. I knew about the paper because
when I came out of graduate school at Syracuse University I
lived in New York for about six months. I read the Age.
When I was at fort Knox, I wrote a letter to the editor, Al
Duckett, to tell him I was coming to New York to visit, and I
wanted to talk to him about a job. We had the interview, and he
promised me a job. Very soon after I started in January, 1959,
Al quit. Chuck Stone became the editor. While working at the Age
I met Tom feelings, who was just beginning his career as an
artist.
Calvin Hicks, who became very important in
our subsequent organizational activities, such as On Guard
for Freedom, and to whom I was always very close; a Jamaican
writer, Lancelot Evans, who was familiar with Black Nationalism
and Garveyism; a religion editor who had been there at least a
hundred years and knew the history of all the churches up there;
a society editor who knew Langston Hughes and knew how Harlem
was organized; a city editor, Charlie Hemdon, who had tougher
standards of manuscript propriety than I ever experienced with
any English teacher. I found this whole environment
invigorating. Chuck, in particular, had a tremendous education
at Eastern schools, plus he had a political sense that was
advanced. He became one of the foremost Black journalists of his
time. I met Malcolm X on 125th Street when his career
as an important spokesman was beginning to take off.
At that time Harlem was a vibrant community.
Through contacts such as Calvin Hicks, I got into political
activities which were Black Nationalist. I was part of a group
which produced a journal called On Guard for Freedom. It
was really an early Black Nationalist artists’ group: Max
Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Archie Shepp, LeRoi Jones, old Cruse,
Calvin Hicks, among others, and—well, that’s a story in
itself—several White women. We invited the Africanist, John
Henrik Clarke, to speak to us. We met in Harlem, and we met on
the Lower East Side.
Life on Lower East Side
I had no desire whatsoever to ever come back
to new Orleans. However, in 1965 there was a point when I was
not working and was having a hard time. I was working part-time
at the NAACP Legal defense Fund, where I formerly had been
working full-time. I didn’t know what I was going to do. At
that point I was robbed. Everybody was robbed. The Lower East
Side was becoming the center of drug street sales in New York
City, maybe in America. People were coming from all over to buy
heroin, particularly on Saturdays. People sat nodding and laid
out on the street. Avenue C looked like a horror movie—“The
Neighborhood of the Living Dead.”
There were about forty apartments in my
building. I think everybody’s apartment was broken into at one
time or another. I lived on the first floor, and somebody just
came in one day and took what I had. It wasn’t much—a
typewriter and a couple of other things—but I was hysterical.
I tried to do something which I don’t
advise anybody to ever do. I went out on the street and told
people what had happened in the hope of buying back my
typewriter. This led me to two Black guys who pulled a knife on
me, marched me back to my apartment, and took whatever else they
could find. Really, I thought they might kill me. I finally
talked them out of the apartment, promising I would get them
more money. They had already taken whatever little money I had.
Well, we had just had an Umbra meeting. On 2nd
Avenue there was a big poster with all our names on it,
including mine. One of the robbers looked at the poster and
said, “Is that you?” I said, “Yeah, that’s me. I’m a
writer.” That might have saved my life, because they realized
I was known, and if they did something to me, somebody might
come after them. So we went through a surreal song and dance,
walking through the Lower East Side with them threatening me.
Finally, on 2nd Avenue I just darted through some
traffic and got on the other side, and then they ran. I was able
to get away, but I was terrified. It seemed the entire area was
disintegrating. In fact, the Lower East Side became worse as a
drug area, and still hasn’t recovered. I didn’t know what to
do, but I knew I wanted to get out of there.
At that time my father was in New York for a
meeting. I went down to his hotel and told him what had
happened. He said, “maybe you better come home to new Orleans
for awhile.” I spent a few days giving away everything I
couldn’t carry. I had a Puerto Rican friend who had a pistol,
and he hung around me as my “security.” We were going to
shoot these two guys if we found them—it sounds bizarre, I
know.
Anyway, that’s how I came back to New
Orleans. I decided I would get a job here and just make a go of
it, but it wasn’t so easy to get a job. I wanted to work as a
stringer for Jet or for Ebony, but that didn’t work out. At
the same time, during those first few weeks of April in 1965, I
discovered many things in this city I felt I might like. The
racial climate was changing a little, though not a lot. But it
certainly wasn’t the city I had grown up in and left ten or
twelve years earlier, only returning to visit my parents.
Free Southern Theatre
My most meaningful discovery was the Free
Southern Theatre troupe, which was rehearsing daily in the
horribly misnamed Pentagon Building on London Avenue and Galvez
Street. I had met John O’Neal in New York in February, 1965,
when he’d come up for a fundraiser. One of the FST founders
was Doris Derby, whom I had gone out with in New York. Doris was
an artist who in the early 60s became fascinated with the South,
spending half her time in New York and the other half in
Mississippi.
In the course of her southern sojourn she met
Andrew young, who introduced me to Doris. He actually set up a
blind date—he’s never done anything before or since like
that, I don’t believe—he took us out to an Italian
restaurant. At that time we were really poor, so this dinner was
a three-or four-dollar-per-plate meal at a place with candles in
Chianti bottles. It turned out that Doris lived virtually in
Connecticut, so taking her home usually meant I arrived back on
the lower east Side at daybreak. Although our relationship never
went anywhere, the fact was I knew Doris and had met O’Neal
and thus was somewhat familiar with the concept of the FST.
I fell in love with the FST
people—immediately. I was living in my parents’ house on
Dillard’s campus where my father was the president. After all
I had been through in new York, I was feeling useless, and would
have returned to new York if I could have gotten a job there.
Meanwhile, I had to do something, so I went over to the Pentagon
Building every day. John and I became quick friends. I met
Gilbert Moses, Denise Nichols, Roscoe Oman, and Bob Costley.
After about three weeks I said, wait a minute, they’re doing
the kind of thing that’s desperately needed, and it can mesh
into the experience I just left.
I didn’t know a thing about theater, though
I had several friends in New York who were actors. In New York I
realized right away that the concept of a liberation theater
transcended ideas of “drama” or “theater” as we know
them—or at least it had that potential. Of course the Free
southern Theatre had virtually no money, so there was no
question of my working there—members were making fifteen
dollars a week, if that.
But, at that point, I began seriously looking
for a job in New Orleans. My entire circle of friends—other
than those few people who were still around from when I was
growing up—were FST members, or new Orleans civil rights
activists, who constituted a small social set in themselves.
When I left New Orleans to go to college 15 years earlier, no
group like this had existed.
I think I saw very clearly that the presence
of the FST could be a source of new cultural possibilities in
New Orleans, and I had a sense of how to use theater as an
instrument, despite the fact I knew little about theater
technique per se.
Mastering New Orleans
I came to realize for me New York had played
itself out. It was time for me, at 30, to come to terms with
myself as a Black Southerner and New Orleanian, whatever that
might mean, and to try to understand it. There was a great poet,
I forget whom, who said, “you can really do no important work
until you master your own terrain.’ Having left New Orleans at
15, I hardly knew it., yet there was a tremendous culture here,
there was a complexity here, there was this rich history of
music. I didn’t know it, but I knew I had to learn it—and
that was something to strive for in terms of mastery of both
writing and knowledge of my origins.
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When I left, and even when I returned in
1964, I had a contempt for this place—a contempt voiced by
many people who have lived here all their lives. You know,
we’re backwards, we’re slow, etc.
My whole view of the city, its potential and
its complexities, changed. That goes for the South as a whole,
not just New Orleans. My views changed primarily because of the
opportunities afforded me by Free Southern Theatre experiences.
I don’t find that you lean or produce abstractly or
unrelatedly. There must be some sense of moving forward, even if
you don’t accomplish everything you want to. It’s like a
boat speeding through a lake creating waves; something has to
create waves. That’s an image I associate with the 60s, and
with our projects.
*
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[T]he Lower East Side of New York . . . was
an area of Eastern European immigrants, strong ethnic
constituencies, and later a heavy influx of Puerto Ricans, and
some Blacks. Everybody was there. You could walk down the street
listening to the voices around you and never know you were in
America. This gave me a heightened appreciation for the value of
diversity. I knew that to come back here and try to work in an
atmosphere of conformity would kill us. Also, in terms of
breaking out of the provinciality of New Orleans, it was of
immense value for us to relate to struggles of those involved in
movements for liberation of oppressed peoples, wherever they
were.
For example, I saw Mississippi as being very
different from New Orleans, and I didn’t really know
Mississippi until our Free Southern theatre—and later when I
taught in West point [Mississippi]. The New Orleans Black
community was widely divergent, from “passing” Creoles at
one extreme to people from West Africa, direct, at the other. In
Mississippi most of the Blacks were forged into a unity through
a common culture; background, and history of deprivation. We
could learn a lot from their unity and sacrifice, I thought.
Knowing New Orleans
Let’s go into “knowing more about New
Orleans.” I felt that was really kind of a battle within the
workshop . . . .
The Umbra experience preceded the
canonization of Black Nationalism, I mean, the formalization of
theories of the meanings of Blackness which characterized the
Black Arts Movement. I never liked the rigidity that came from
Black World, and from Hoyt Fuller’s friend Addison Gayle and
the Black Aesthetic movement. For example, knowing personally
and being familiar with the work of the writer LeRoi Jones, who
became Baraka—I felt he was a beautiful writer of his
experience, but his experience wasn’t mine. For one thing, he
wasn’t from the South, whatever that means, but it is a
different feeling from what you get in Newark, or New York. By
the late 60s, I had become convinced that, if we became mere
adjuncts of a national canonization of writing in Baraka’s
style or Don L. lee’s style, we could go but so far, because
really we would only be imitating. There was something right
here, and it was Black. We had to use that, it was ours.
That awareness freed me. A lot of it was
because I couldn’t write in the style invented by some of our
most popular militant poets—it wasn’t that I didn’t try.
So I felt it was necessary for me to discover a style I felt
comfortable with. In the workshops I remember our sitting around
talking about the river, the dance, what they meant to us. The
lake. At the same time we were trying to relate that to what was
happening not only in the national Black literary world but, as
we got a sense of Africa, how Africa and the Caribbean related
to and influenced us. I
remember [Kalamu] got interested in Africa very early in the
game, and went to conferences on the continent.
All of that helped us, especially with the
music. It led us to an understanding of the worth of our music,
how we could use it in our work, where all of that was from. But
I didn’t know any of that when I left New York. I came to a
sense of the cultural and historical strength here only after my
return.
We were ahead of our time because the
national perception was that the music had left New Orleans. But
we could go out on the weekends, every weekend, and hear
brilliant music. I said to myself, “Wait a minute. There’s a
contradiction! If all the music is in New York, what are we
listening to?” Not only that, our suspicions that there was a
tremendous musical survivalist strength here was strengthened
when friends visited us from New York or wherever and we took
them out.
They would say, “This is amazing!” So
when the new generation of musicians appeared, and went out and
made it in New York, it was a proof of what we had already seen.
There was a power in the music as it relates to community and
ritual functions that doesn’t exist in New York. But nobody
here was talking about it. At that time, White New Orleans
critics were not especially interested in our music, and they
gave it no play.
FST Workshops
[The union of the drama workshop and the
writing workshop was] born of necessity—and one of the best
accidents that ever happened. Nineteen sixty-seven was a low
point in the theater’s history. Bob Costley was one of those
people who came here to join the 1965 company and decided to
stay. He was a native of Buffalo. Bob, or “Big Daddy,” as we
called him, was working as news director at radio station WYLD
in 1967. I was commuting to teach in Mississippi.
What little season we had in the summer of
1967 was over, and in the fall we decided to try to get some
workshops going. Actually, that was our second set of community
workshops except you and maybe one or two others. You would come
to Big Daddy’s drama workshop and come to my writing workshop,
and finally we decided that since [Kalamu was] coming to both
workshops, along with just a few others, we should combine the
two. [Kalamu was] beginning to write little sketches. They
weren’t really plays yet, one-act sketches.
What Big Daddy did was to have all of us
present actually walk through your scripts, instead of just
reading them as a piece of literature. This ability to see what
was happening started me writing plays, and also did the same
for several others. From that point, the workshop grew. A lot of
the recruits were younger people [Kalamu] knew, and other people
from Lord knows where found their way to us.
One of the big problems was that even the
colleges weren’t offering courses in creative writing or Black
literature. Before people can write effectively they have to
have some context for what they’re doing. That’s why we were
always using Wright, Ellison, the new poetry, and the new
movements in jazz as reference points. You know, it’s
ignorance if you have an idea for a poem and you think you’re
the only person or the first person to ever think of that.
As the workshops developed, we came up with
some pretty good material—a lot of poetry and a few short
plays. Gilbert Moses, Denise Nicholas, Roscoe Orman, the
original core group—all had returned to new York to pursue
their careers. John O’Neal was doing alternative military
service in New York. The theater had run out of funding. This
was the fall of 1967.
The workshops were the only thing we had
going. So we began to stage readings in the city, presenting our
best poems, and very soon after that I believe Big Daddy
directed one of [Kalamu’s] new plays. This is how some of the
more serious people in the workshops began performing. Since it
was the only performing unit we had, we called it the Free
Southern Theatre, though it was composed entirely of local
people who were very different from the original FST, almost all
of whom were not from the South.
By 1969 we began receiving out-of-town
invitations. We were invited to quite a few towns in
Mississippi. In fact, we did a tour of Mississippi which was
unforgiveable, and we went to two or three towns in Texas. In
Houston we were hosted by a post-Movement community organization
called HOPE. We also performed at a small Black theater in San
Antonio. There was also the Arkansas Arts Center in little Rock.
I don’t believe they’ll forget us there.
[Also, Eutaw Alabama, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference annual convention in Charleston] . .
.thanks to Andy Young. That was a great experience. We performed
for their “cultural night” at the Charleston Municipal
Auditorium. But we stood out like a sore thumb, because our work
was more militant and realistic than that audience was
accustomed to. Andy might have gotten a little flak over
inviting us. As I remember it, generally when we performed in
those situations, the older, settled, respectable Blacks who
thought they were coming to a pleasant “cultural evening”
were shocked and turned off—but the young people were turned
on, and wanted to hang with us afterwards.
In Houston . . . I guess they said, “If
they can do it, why can’t we? They started a group like ours:
Sudan Arts Southwest. Then there was a more structured group,
the urban Theatre, directed by Barbara Marshall. That was a time
of high aspirations for black independent cultural efforts,
right around 1970. I don’t know if we’ll ever see that
again.
Well, almost everything up to then had been
done in cooperation with the strong support of Whites,
particularly in terms of money. I’m saying “White,” but I
mean the gamut of formal structures—community arts centers,
educational institutions—often Whites were crucial
participants behind the scenes in these organizations. Then we
tried to organize from a Black community base, solely. Though a
lot of people rejected our independent efforts and still do, we
felt this was needed, not only in terms of dramatic presentation, but as an example of what
Blacks in theater could do.
The point was brought home to me by Reverend
Milton Upton, who was a key board member of the Free Southern
Theatre. One day I apparently said something critical about Big
Daddy. Milton replied, “You don’t understand. Big Daddy is
more than an actor in a play. Many people in our community have
never seen a Black male on the stage who represents strength in
his presence and voice. He opens up a whole new world for
them.”
We became very aware of that sort of thing.
We wanted our cultural activities to be in the Black community.
These were conscious decisions, not accidents. For instance, we
decided to put our theater in the Desire project area, which was
considered a very bad area, and interact with people and
organizations out there. Today that wouldn’t be considered
“smart,” but we wanted to interact positively with the Black
community. Our critics said we were too militant, too political,
anti-White. We said we were only tiring to accentuate Black
cultural strengths, and there was no such thing as non-political
literature and theater, at least not for us. Those Blacks who
wanted to have “careers” ducked, and started looking for
White folks to line up behind.
Then the funding agencies began to pull out
the money, not just from us but from every independent Black
cultural group in the country that didn’t have Whites
intricately involved with it, if it was the least bit political.
Thus, all those efforts we remember as trying to bring new life
in the late 60s and early 70s—small community theaters, small
Black bookstores, poetry readings, music, nonacademic
lectures—fell into decline, and now they are about dead. In
their place we have endless talk and criticisms of technique.
Southern Black Cultural Alliance (SBCA)
For me personally, SBCA came out of a great
dissatisfaction with the situation in the early 70s, because I
knew that what they were doing in New York was about on the same
level with us, but we just didn’t have any money. I knew that
some of the productions of the Free Southern Theatre were better
than what was being done in New York. But the Black cultural
media establishment, to the extent that it existed, particularly
NegroDigest/Black World, which was very
influential, was as New York, Northern city-based in its
appraisals as were the White critical journals. This came as a
shock to me at first.
No matter how many good short stories or
poems we might publish in our literary magazine Nkombo,
or might be published in offer small, community literary
magazines, that didn’t mean as much as one book published by
Macmillan, which the Black journals reviewed, and then these
writers became known. As far as theater was concerned, anything
we did. That was just a really, without taking anything away
from Douglas Turner-Ward or Bob MacBeth or the value of their
work.
I felt we in the south, no matter how
faithful we were to our community mission or how important the
work we were doing was, would never get any recognition unless
we did something to present ourselves more aggressively. Not
that we wanted to be famous, but we had to have some recognition
if we were going to survive in terms of funding, or whatever
rewards you need to keep going. Otherwise we would very soon be
back to the situation where young actors and writers in new
Orleans felt they had not arrived until they left here.
The idea of trying to have a regional
association of the Southern community groups which had sprung up
between ’69 and ’72 was based, first of all, on a need for a
substantive exchange of ideas which could give a better
definition and assessment of what we were doing, but it was also
based on the hope that we could expose our work more broadly to
the media. I hoped that, through sponsoring a major festival, we
could lure down Hoyt Fuller, or somebody, who would say, “This
work is in the game and worthy of attention.”
But we never reached that point. . . . we
were writing the plays, organizing the tours, and then writing
the criticism. . [Plays came from all over the South; poetry
from Florida, Birmingham, Jackson, Houston—wherever folk could
be found.] The idea was to get him [Hoyt Fuller] down here, or
somebody other than us, to assess what we were doing.
Nkombo & Developing Writers
I made have made a mistake, though. We had a
policy that we would reserve the magazine pretty much for our
writers and others writers from the South. At one point Ishmael
Reed asked if he could submit a piece, and I told him the
magazine was not for him. The other way to have done it would
have been to use some national writers, but when you do that,
there’s always the chance you will choke off beginning
writers. The tendency is to publish more national writers while
publishing less work of developing local writers.
This very conflict came up a few years later
when Charles Rowell, Jerry Ward, and I talked about the concept
of Callaloo. My vision of it was that it would be an
extension of Nkombo, and that we would develop writers. I
think Jerry to some extent agreed with me. But Charles wanted to
develop a national, high quality journal with a heavy emphasis
on scholarly works, which is what he did.
But you know, having done Umbra, which we did
ourselves—all of it dedicated to publishing new, unpublished
writers—and knowing that out of that Umbra experience we
developed writers who produced over forty books in the following
twenty-year period, I always believed that it could be done
again. I believed that if you were going to build writers you
had to provide a publishing vehicle. The objective was not to
build the magazine to a profile which would become nationally
known, but to build writers. Of course, as the magazine
developed, if you had the means to keep the magazine going, then
the magazine might take on more importance. We also encouraged
everybody to publish in other journals, but Nkombo was
reserved for our Southern focus.
Many of the people who started in Nkombo
stopped writing. Others like [Kalamu] kept writing.
[That everybody who participated in the
workshop would have at least one piece in the book] was an
important value for us which we felt encouraged people to write.
If they knew they were going to get published, they would write.
To this day there’s not much writing being done by young
people in the South, because they have no vehicles—not even
the Black newspapers. They’re not going to get published. Who
wants to submit a poem fifty times to the academic literary
journals before you are able to publish one piece? You cannot
develop literature like that.
We may have been romantic about what could
happen. I think in my mind I felt we were on a mission to see
theater, and to some extent literature and journalism, develop
in new Orleans, never equal to, but like, our music. I say
“never equal to’ because the music here is so advanced,
hyper-developed, that it produces geniuses. It’s like
comparing gardens. You have this one garden with a lot of weeds
and just a few flowers, which is literature. And you have this
extensive, varied, and rich garden of music. I felt we were
trying to find a way to make theater work so that it would be
considered useful to the Black community, similar to the way we
regard our music.
Those ideas were behind the concept I tried
to use in Ritual Murder. Your plays were also designed to
impact the audience in a way that would create questions and
suggest a sense of direction. They certainly were not designed
for commercial audiences.
Eventually I became very depressed, though I
felt we were swimming so much against the tide that we
couldn’t get the message to those whom we thought it was
intended for, which is why I gave up the workshop. I felt that,
if what we were doing was not commercial in the sense that it
was not in the bookstores, not on TV, and not in the New York
Times, younger people would look at it and say, “if it’s so
great, why isn’t it getting a lot of play?” By 1980, the
definition of success was back to where it was before the 60s.
We were considered antiquates—or I was.
Source: Kalamu ya Salaam. “Enriching the Paper Trail: An
Interview with Tom Dent.” African American Review, Summer 93
(Vol. 27, Issue 2), p. 327, 18 p.
updated 9 April 2008 |
