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[MUSIC PLAYING] The jungles of America

The jungles of America

The jungles of America

SPEAKER 1: With the help of musician Don Meisner, stage artists Laurie Carlos and Robbie McCauley use stories, poetry, and song to reveal the contradictions of the African-American woman's experience. The piece developed through improvisation, the form with which Carlos and McCauley have worked for over 15 years.

Their friendship began in the late 1960s while both were performing at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York City. Years later, a shared interest in a less structured performance style and in a female perspective on racism brought them back together.

Persimmon Peel is their latest effort. The piece explores the nature of their lives as Black women, lives, which in Carlos's view, are constantly being challenged, lives White America knows little about.

SPEAKER 2: Who we are is a big secret. People have no idea about what we are or what makes us tick or how we really feel about anything, from how we cook grits to Saudi Arabia. No one knows us.

We know each other pretty intimately, but no one else knows us. So Persimmon Peel is created so that you can get inside of who it is we really are without a lot of assumptions.

SPEAKER 1: The way in is through the stories. There's the Strawberry Bubblegum story the Dog-eat-dog story, White Chocolate, Chinese Children. They are vignettes, anecdotes, remembrances from childhood, illustrations of how Black women have survived the discrimination and contradictions in their lives and how they've helped nurture one another. Robbie McCauley.

SPEAKER 2: In Strawberry Bubblegum, there is a dialogue between me and Phukanani, who's the girl from around the corner in the south. And she comes up to me calling my name, telling me how she wants to come out and play with me.

And I don't know how come she want to come play with me now because last time I saw her, she pull out my Shirley Temple curls. Now she want to come up my way to play. I think she just want to pull me out.

I say, "I want some strawberry bubblegum." She says, "Strawberry bubblegum?" I say, "Yeah, strawberry bubblegum." She said, "I know about some strawberry bubblegum. You chew it, it come right down your chin, and juice run down the side of your mouth"

And I say, "Where is it?" And she said, "That way, past the drugstore, past the White movie where the Colored have to go, up the stairs to the balcony where it stank, all the way over to the White folk territory, all the way over to St. Elmo where there wasn't no stores."

And then we was over there. By then, Anne, Lisbon, and Gene them had come with us. And there we was in a whole other kind of place.

SPEAKER 1: In this short excerpt, you can hear McCauley talk first in one dialect, then move to another, then to a third, and then back to the first. Laurie Carlos says this verbal weaving in and out of dialects is a metaphor for how Black women have learned how to move in the world.

SPEAKER 2: That change in dialect, that very, very simple thing is so political. It determines how we are accepted in certain areas, whether or not we can or cannot buy the pearls with a credit card.

It is a very subtle, very political, and very simply schizophrenic way that we deal as Black women, especially in the world. That happens with us a lot on stage.

SPEAKER 1: And so throughout the performance, the curtain is pulled back on Black culture. Secrets are revealed. In this case, the secret is Black communication. This sharing of intimate cultural details puts Carlos and Macaulay at risk.

SPEAKER 2: When you walk on a stage with hair grease and a comb and decide to put some lotion on your legs on a stage where white people are, Black people get angry because they do not want that known in the world.

SPEAKER 1: But Carlos and Macaulay's desire to make sense of their lives overrides any need for approval. It is their own anger at the way things are for Black women, at the continued discrimination and social invisibility that drives them to create Persimmon Peel. And it is their joy in each other that renders it a celebration.

SPEAKER 2: Persimmon is a fruit that is Indigenous to America it is grown here. And as Robbie says to me, it tastes better bruised. It is who we are.

SPEAKER 1: Laurie Carlos, who along with Robbie Macaulay, performs in Persimmon Peel tonight at Walker Art Center. I'm Beth Friend.