(soft music) - [Narrator] The Carleton
College Convocation Program is a weekly lecture series
that brings fresh insights and perspectives from experts
in a variety of fields. The program has a rich history
dating back several decades. The selected convocation speakers assist the liberal arts mission of centering thoughtful conversations within education and beyond. (soft music) - [Host] Thank you for coming. And now, it's time for
the official introduction. And for that, let's introduce
Skye Spa
rks, class of 25. (attendees clapping) - [Skye] Hello, everyone. I'm gonna stand a little off the side so you can see me 'cause
I'm vertically-challenged. Good morning, everyone. My name is Skye Sparks. I'm a junior here at Carleton College and I am pursuing a double
major in English and theater and a creative writing minor. Now, you know everything about me, right? Not really. Let me try again, okay? Good morning, my name is Skye Sparks. I'm a storyteller, I enjoy
finding strange trinkets at th
e Northfield thrift shops, and I enjoy eating lemons like oranges. Okay, I hope you're paying a
little bit more attention now. How is everyone doing today? It's Friday, it's also seventh week, which means it's seventh week. To make a short story
shorter, we're all very busy, so thank you for sharing your presence and time with me here today. You know, I feel really
lucky to be standing in front of you guys because you know, there's a lot of things going on. I mean, especially this term,
this ter
m has been really busy and anything that's looked
slightly interesting, I have ran after it. I've been running a lot. And if there's one thing
that happens at Carleton, we know that we all get inspired by things and it's always been a problem for me. I mean, even when I was younger,
I wanted to do everything. I remember I would watch
"The Princess Bride" and I was like, "Oh, I need
to learn how to fence." And I would watch
"Brave" the Disney movie. And I was like, "Guys, you know what I really n
eed to learn how to do? I need to learn how to horseback ride and arch in a forest while
bad guys are chasing me." And then I watched "Criminal Minds" and I was like, "Oh, no, Spencer Reed, he's definitely where it's at. I wanna become a behavioral analysis and write with my left hand." You know, in reality, I wanted a chance to experience everything
in different realities. So the natural order, I guess,
is just to become an actor. So that's where I am. I mean, it's an opportunity
for multiplici
ty, and there's freedom with options, but there's also a necessity
to attend to the responsibility that comes with risk and sacrifice. There are a lot of people
who have sacrificed and supported me to get
to where I am today. And people ask, "How
will you manifest this into a proper career?" And I say, "I'm gonna go to grad school and I'll figure it out from there." You know, I don't know
exactly where I'm headed, but I know that I will arrive. And that is why our speaker
today inspires me treme
ndously. She's an award-winning Harvard University, Moscow Art Theatre graduate,
taking all the forms of an actor, playwright,
director, and voiceover artist. Her performances have
stunned audiences nationally, including our semi-local
and lovely Guthrie theater, and internationally in
Germany, Russia, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, and Belgium. There's so many. The OCS programming
must be really jealous. You know, she's dynamic and expansive and continues to carve
a path for her passions.
Today, we meet her as an honored alum and author of "Returning the Bones." Offer a warm welcome
back to Carleton College and today's convocation
speaker, Gin Hammond. (attendees clapping) - I'm remembering to hit the button. Okay. Hi, everyone. Good morning. It is such an honor to be back here and to be here with you all. Thank you, yeah, for taking the time. Sankofa, if you don't already know it, Sankofa is a verb, it's a concept, it's a whole lot of things and
it's represented by the bird. It
flies back forwards, but
it's not afraid to look back. The concept of Sankofa is said
to have originated in Ghana and it proclaims that it is not taboo to go back for what has been left behind. There is something about the word taboo that feels applicable regarding
my decades-long of Sankofa, which began not long
after I left Carleton, and resulted in the publication of my magical realism meets
historical fiction novel, "Returning the Bones" as well as my latest
semi-comical theatrical work enti
tled, "Living IncogNegro." I wanna share my journey with you, in case you yearn for
connection with your ancestors and need a little inspiration
around how to get started. So yes, after Carleton,
I moved to Minneapolis. I was living with my BFF from Carleton. Hey, Tara. And working 14 hours a day
as an acting apprentice at the Children's Theater of Minneapolis. Yet making so little money that
I qualified for food stamps. Despite the poverty, I
had never been so happy. Still, every now and again,
I would experience what the
Hungarians call Hianyerzet, the feeling that something
you cannot name is missing. It's a good word. Then one day, after another one of my father's older
siblings passed, it hit me, I knew what it was I lacked. I realized that beyond my nuclear family, I didn't know my family's stories. I should mention that when I say family, I mean the Black side of my family. My parents got married
in 1966, a year before the Loving versus Virginia
Supreme Court decision, if you're
familiar with that. Yeah. And my mom, who's white, her parents, well, her whole family disowned her for marrying my dad and they were brutal. For example, after a
few years of no contact, my mom reached out to her parents to announce the birth of my older brother and she sent them a photograph
of her newborn baby, and they sent it back
to her, their daughter, their only child, all torn to bits. This was a taboo topic for years. Still kind of is. But you know what? Now, I'm telling everybody. I
mean, for example, look, look
what they missed out on, this cuteness. I'm telling everybody
because there is no shame in being rejected by idiots. Anyway. So that's why going
forward when I say family, please just assume I mean my dad's side. My grandfather was born in 1889 and my father was the
youngest of his seven children and I was the youngest of my dad's four. I assume that by my mid twenties, my family's stories would've
trickled down to me somehow and just become a part of me. But that w
asn't the case. In fact, it dawned on me how
fragile family stories can be and that mine were on
the verge of being lost. Note that there was no ancestry.com, there was no social media,
there was no texting, and the internet was still pretty new, but there were phone books. So, terrified, I flipped, open my phone and started cold-calling. "Hi, I think I might be a relative." "Hello?" But then I got in touch
with my aunt Carolyn, a.k.a. Auntie Bebe. She was humble and soft-spoken. So it took 10 y
ears of flying and prying. But I kept at it because
A, she had a grace that always made me feel
welcome and accepted and I needed that in my life, and B, every now and again,
she'd mentioned something that would make my jaw drop. It wasn't just about how
she had done some work with Martin Luther King,
or how Lyndon B. Johnson had had a really inappropriate
conversation with her, or how she spent the day
with Eleanor Roosevelt as her escort at Howard University. It was stuff about her own family.
For example. Lucinda Murphy, my
great great grandmother. Where was she? She was in Union, South Carolina,
enslaved on the plantation of William Gist, who is known as the "Father of the Confederacy." He led the secession movement
of the Confederate states. Can you imagine? Or my great grandmother,
Lucinda's daughter, Sarah. Family lore says that her
father was a direct descendant of Alexander Hamilton. Notice how her face is at the same angle as his on the $10 bill. So, you know, if there
are an
y direct descendants in the audience today,
let's just cheek swab so we can put the myth to
rest or plan a family reunion. Then there's Prudence. That would be Sarah's daughter. She was a renegade librarian. There are so many stories about her. One involves her saving the
colored library in San Antonio by joining arms with
people in the community and staring down the
bulldozers that had showed up to bulldoze the place. She won, that library still stands and so does the Prudence Curry Society. An
d then there's her sister,
my direct grandmother, Carolyn, who taught at an HBCU, had seven children, just that by itself. She helped my grandfather at his hospital and she was psychic, especially about when
people were gonna die. And then the star of the
show, my auntie Bebe. That's her studying in London. She kind of looks like you, Skye. That's right, a young
Black woman from the south was studying in Europe during
the height of Jim Crow. There's a lot to that story. But this is what leads to
the
central question of the book, which is how do you choose
between your country, your people, and yourself? Then we have my grandfather's parents. There's Charlie Lee, he was a whole fashioned rootin' tootin' shoot 'em up, gambling,
drinking kinda guy. And then the really excited-looking
woman on the other end is my great-grandmother, Betty, who is said to have been half
Cherokee and a medicine woman. She features prominently
in the book as well. I wanted to give her a
much more exciting life
than what I saw in that photo. I was like, I saw her and I thought, "I have to write about
you and give you more." And this interesting person
is my great Aunt Ella, who was passing and had an attitude. You'll see more of her in a minute. But for you creatives,
she's a great example of how embracing the weird and ridiculous can lead
to some great stories. And then my grandfather. He was one of the first
Black doctors in Texas, and he not only started a hospital, which was the only hospital for
Blacks in the entire county, perhaps beyond, but he started
a wide array of businesses and three schools that I know of. There's just too much
to say about the man. But he inspired legions of people and has been an example in
my life of how one person truly can impact
thousands, generationally. And then we have, I have to
show this picture, Bebe again. So she is sitting at the
right hand of her father. You can see that she was a child nurse. Imagine that. When she was a little older in her teens
, she became a junior veterinarian. Imagine having that on
your college application. Fully trained RN and junior veterinarian. It gets worse, she graduated valedictorian from her high school at age
16, went on to become president of the student body at Howard, played multiple instruments, no pressure. And then lastly, for now, we have the Hammond Memorial Hospital where the first half of the book and the play take place. "Returning the Bones" was first a play and then became a book. So learning
about them was fascinating, but I needed a way to
synthesize all of these stories so that I wouldn't forget them. My friend Kristabell said,
"Girl, just do what you do and make it into a play." And Krista was right. The more scattered bits of
information I wove together, the more clearly I could
see the tapestry as a whole and a world reveal itself. As Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee wrote, "Stories are a technology
that have always allowed us to hold things greater than ourselves." Yes, it was fascinating
, but definitely painful at times too. It's painful, for example, to think about how colorism played out back then and now in my family and in the community. If you come from a multi-hued family, perhaps you've experienced
what I'm talking about. But to look back unflinching into the face of this taboo thing brings me to a place of
greater understanding. And greater understanding is often a path to love and forgiveness. Not always, of course, but
often enough to keep me curious. To not face it m
eans that
where there was potential for evolution, only judgment remains, obdurate and unmoving, like denial. Perhaps because I just launched my show about racial invisibility,
"Living IncogNegro," and saw the powerful
effect it had on audiences, especially the multiracial and interestingly
trans-identifying audience members, today, I'd like to share
passages from the book and the play that relate to passing. And also because passing is a massive part of American history, but we've barely scratc
hed the surface. Passing, if you're
unfamiliar with the term refers to passing for white,
it implies the ability to move without obstruction
as in ticket to ride, as in move smoothly by, as in go along to get along, as in having the option
of choosing one's battles. Paradoxically, the trope
of the tragic mulatto existed in popular culture
for over a century, sort of like minstrelsy. And this trope reinforced the
idea that society is incapable of holding racial complexity without there being an
i
nevitable tragic outcome. What if we created more stories that were the opposite of that? Oh, and for those
unfamiliar with the trope of the tragic mulatto, it typically falls into
one of three categories. One, a woman passes
for white successfully, falls in love with a white man, the truth is revealed and
it all ends tragically. Two, a woman who is passing, presumes she is of Mediterranean
descent, her life is dandy until the big reveal and
it all ends tragically. Or three, a woman who is
passi
ng expresses herself with all the social graces of
an upper class white woman, but then is subjected to
slavery, which is tragic. But most of the time tragic meant that just like a lesbian in an
old 1950s pulp fiction novel, the multiracial person gets killed off in the last scene or chapter. After all, we can't
have them roaming feral through the land. By the way, did you notice that none of the principle characters in those tragic mulatto
scenarios were men? It's not a popular trope anymore. T
hank goodness. Though I was in the first scenario, I was in one of those off Broadway. But as Mary Tyrone in "Long
Day's Journey into Night" says, "The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too. We all try to lie our way out of it, but life won't let us." Anyway. Because plays are painted
on the canvas of time, I had to be ruthless about
which stories would make it from the page to the stage. But I thought this scene, which was true, this actually happened and has to do with the topic
a
t hand, was pretty undeniable and I shall perform it for you. Okay, things to know
about the following scene. A slop jar is another
name for chamber pot. You will meet great Aunt Ella, who if you remember was passing. There's a cousin who
blows Aunt Ella's cover, a lovestruck white sheriff, and of course Bebe, the star of the show. At this point in the story,
she's only eight years old and for reasons you'll find out about, you can picture her in a
mud-covered school dress. You'll just have to
i
magine the light changes, the sound effects and know that we jump back and forth in time. The stairs to the house
are downstage left. And you can see the horse of the sheriff through this window here,
his name is Chestnut. And the horse likes to make, no, the sheriff likes to
make the horse do tricks, 1, 2, 3, for Aunt Ella. It's 1933, Bebe has been
hiding under Aunt Ella's bed for about 24 hours and just woke up. "Can you keep a secret? I hit a white boy. I've been hiding under
this here bed fo
r hours next to Aunt Ella's slop jar. Aunt Ella, oh, Miss Ella, she looks white so she's doing all the talking
to the sheriff downstairs. She is my granddaddy's sister, but whenever we're in public, my brother and I have
to call her Miss Ella. So we just call her Miss
Ella most all the time. Oh. See, what happened was I
was walking home from school and the rain come up. I was wearing new shoes and the rain was really messing
up my side of the street. The white sidewalk had pavement all the way t
o where I needed
to get to so I crossed over. But then that scabby knee-ed
Bo Hatfield comes up to me, starts sassing me, and
then he shoves me hard into a muddy pool of water. Well, I got so mad I
jumped up and popped him and maybe I had a rock in my hand too. And his head started
bleeding and I got so scared. I ran like an old Olympic
hero all the way back home. I just couldn't face mother and daddy and I didn't wanna wake
up grandmother Sarah. So I hid in Miss Ella's room under her bed, next
to her slop jar, making my stomach turn sour. I am no stranger to emptyin'
bedpans at the hospital, but this is hard to take. At first, Miss Ella didn't
know it was under her bed. Then she got mad 'cause she thought I was looking for my trunk
full of Confederate money that my daddy left me. I told her what happened. And then the sheriff! I wonder what Robin Hood would do if the sheriff of Nottingham
was within spitting distance like Sheriff Brewster is to me right now? Well, he probably wouldn't
have fallen asleep like I did, but I couldn't help it. They've been talking since forever. Shucks, you'd think they
were Boone companions. Miss Ella, Miss Ella! What'd the sheriff say? What are they gonna do to me, Miss Ella?" "Oh, hush your mouth now." "But."
"Hush now. The sheriff has known me
since the first day I arrived to this godforsaken place
to open up the school house. "Just wanted to welcome
you to town, ma'am. Miss, Miss Ella. Miss." "Even had tea. Clearly the man had never held a t
ea cup in all his natural born days. Nervous. Yes, Lord, talked for quite a while. Then one of your blacker than midnight under a skillet cousins came to fetch me." "Aunt Ella, Aunt Ella, what's
keeping you, Aunt Ella? It's suppertime. Aunt Ella!" "Aunt Ella? Ma'am, Miss, I don't mean to offend your sensibilities, but you are a white lady, ain't you?" "Well, I sure ain't colored. Well, he left real quickly like, but he tipped his hat on the way out. Knew I'd get by in this town. And do you know,
I said, do you know who benefits from my being here?" "Who, Aunt Ella?" "Miss Ella! It's you, you full pickaninny! Child, what were you thinking,
hitting a white boy!" And that's the end of that scene. (audience clapping) Thank you. I get to explain what she
means by benefiting the family in the book. And I got to show how things
for Aunt Ella were complex. "When the dentist daddy
hired to work in our hospital first came to town, he didn't believe it. Even when townsfolk told Dr. Lafayette what
was what when it
came to mother's visions, he'd shake his fancy tobacco pipe at them and say, 'Please, I am a man of science.' He came all the way from
Hampton University in Virginia and speaks in a highfalutin voice that reminds me of Bing Crosby's. Dr. Lafayette grew up in New Orleans and gets real impatient with
what he calls backwater hoodoo, especially among Black
folks, always talking about how it drags down the race. But shortly after he arrived, the same week I hit Bo Hatfield, mother h
ad a real special dream. It was about fire. She said she could hear sheep and cows and horses in the dream. So she sent word that everyone
should go over to the barn and bring as much water as possible and to just keep on bringing it. This was in the middle of the night, but nobody asked any questions. They just did as she asked. About two hours later, three
Klansmen rode up to the barn dressed in white pointy-headed sheets with the eye holes cut out. One of them was holding a torch. There were
about, I don't
know, maybe 50 of us there, surrounded by buckets and
water troughs in the lake. It was so, so quiet. I glanced over at Dr. Lafayette. His high ball dome was shining with sweat and his manicured hands trembled. Were more of them coming? Was this a start of another
Tulsa or Rosewood massacre? Another Slocum? Nobody budged or said a word. For the first time, I noticed how loud the sound of a single torch can be. That's when Aunt Ella
emerged from the house in her silk dressing gown,
her long curly hair
floating at her shoulders. She slow marched, scarily close
to the Klansman at the front and locked eyes with him. The front horse stamped, 1, 2, 3. It wasn't cold, but
something about watching them gave me the shivers like crazy. Outta nowhere, the Klansmen at
the front signaled the others and then they just up and
rode it away, torch and all. We went back to bed. Later that same week,
Dr. Lafayette came over for Sunday dinner. 'Mrs. Hammond,' he crooned
after swallowing a b
ite of mother's delicious peach cobbler. 'If you ever have any of
those dying dreams about me, I'll just save everyone the trouble, walk on over to the funeral parlor, climb up on the cooling
table and wait it out.'" And that's that chapter. So it turns out not so great Aunt Ella had her role
in a complex ecosystem, sort of like, you know, bats. But she is one of the people
who shaped Bebe's life. And my auntie Bebe has shaped my life, including how I parent. And Sankofa teaches us to face our h
istory and think about it and
making conscious decisions about what to do and what
absolutely not to do, and what to incorporate into
our own lives going forward based on what we've learned, instead of leaving it up to happenstance and familial habits. It is not disrespectful, it is not taboo. Speaking of taboo, I so
want to tell you about the big scandal that happens with Ella and the Sheriff so badly, but it's at the end of
the book, so I can't. All I'll say is that it isn't tragic. Also passi
ng, but far more
kind, was grandmother Sarah. You know, even though she
had been born enslaved on the plantation in
Union, South Carolina, she had a prayer that she said every day that she passed on to my Aunt
Bebe, who passed it on to me. It goes like this. "Take from me the desire to condemn other folk. Give us eyes to see the
good in everyone we meet." And that's it. You could argue that
the prayer is too simple in a Mr. Rogers kind of way. But few can dispute the
power of Mr. Rogers. Honestl
y, with the current
state of the country, reminding myself to cool
my desire for condemnation helps me cope. And that's why I consider my great-grandmother
Sarah's prayer an heirloom, an heirloom that cannot
be taken away from me. When I began, I had no heirlooms aside from a small handful of photos that I didn't fully understand. And now, fully cognizant that
"Returning the Bones" is a mix of verifiable facts with
a dash of mythology, I have a wealth of stories
that have made my life richer and
have deepened my
understanding of human connection. And these are all treasures
that I can pass on to my son and share with the world. It is a treasure that grows. If you yearn for connection
with that which seems lost, I hope hearing about
my odyssey inspires you to find what you seek. If finding that connection
is for whatever reason, legitimately impossible for you, I entreat you to be calm in the knowledge that your ancestors know who you are. Not to be too woo-woo about it, but channeling
my ancestors' spirits through performance has
definitely taught me this. I would love to share more tales
from "Returning the Bones." And there are many, but even more, I would
like to hear your voice and hear how these stories
might resonate with you. Thank you again for
letting me share my Sankofa and "Returning the Bones." (audience clapping) - Thank you very much,
Gin, for being here. And we will open it up to questions and conversation in a second. But there are a couple of
announcements to
make first. Next week, we will have
with us Mayor Jaylen Smith. Jaylen Smith is an American politician who is the mayor of Earle, Arkansas. At age 18, he became one
of the youngest mayors ever elected in the United States. So he'll be with us next week. Next week is also the last convocation for this semester, for this term. Speaking of "Returning the Bones," I wanna mention quickly that
the book, this one is mine, you may not have it, but this
is available at the bookstore. So if you'd like to
get a copy, if you missed the book
sale earlier this morning, this is gonna be available
at the bookstore. And let's see, convo luncheon. We have a couple more
spots open at the luncheon, so if you would like to join, please come up and see me afterwards and we would love to have you. And on that note, let
me set down my treasure and let's begin the Q&A. Who would like to start us off
with a question, a comment, about acting, about writing? - About directing, voiceover. You have someone in the
back there. - Here we go. - [Attendee 1] Thank you for coming. My question is, what was the
biggest challenge you faced when turning a play into a book? - The biggest challenge... So many different ones. A tremendous amount of
research went into it that involved a lot of travel, but in a way, I don't think
of that as a challenge, you know, it just took a lot
of time, effort, and money. Certainly, the most
difficult part of all of that was visiting a variety
of former labor camps and transit camp
s and concentration camps, the main one being Auschwitz,
which features prominently in the book and is directly
associated with the title. But I can't tell you why, that's towards the end of the book. That was a very powerful
experience and difficult. The other difficult thing was, you know, I've always been a homework on the bus kind of girl. And so sitting my behind down and focusing and not
giving myself excuses. You know, I have a spouse, I have a child, I have chickens, I have a cat, I have
things that need to be cleaned, you know, those classic writing barriers. So there were times that I would say, "Hey, I just gotta leave town. I need to go to the hotel
five minutes from the house and just be there and write. But can I come home for
dinner because I can't cook?" So things like that. An unwieldy answer, but I hope that helps. Here's one. - [Attendee 2] It sounds like you had a pretty great resource in your aunt. Can you tell us some more
about your research process and sort of y
our process
of uncovering these stories and the photographs and kind of what else did you delve into?
- [Gin] Yeah. So it started with her
not hanging up on me. She just basically said,
"Sure, come on out, baby." So I went out there and I started going through
albums, albums, albums, you know, writing memoir
from photographs is a thing, so that's a little bit of what it was, but it was great to have her right there. And then I started going through boxes and finding all of
these newspaper articl
es where she was the first
Black woman to do this, the first Black woman to do that. She never talked about that stuff. Jumping ahead. So she had been invited to
Obama's first inauguration, but she didn't go because she
thought it'd be too chilly and all of that. And I asked my cousins,
"Where's the invitation?" And they said, "Oh, she
probably used it as a bookmark." But anyway, so yeah, just
having to go back and forth, back and forth, asking her
questions, asking her questions. She was always
too modest. Digging into boxes, that was
the most interesting thing, and that's when I found the bones. But, again, that has to do
with the end part of the story. And then towards, sort of
towards the end of her life, just before the real onset
of dementia, I got a grant and went out there with a videographer and got 10 hours of video
asking her questions. And I learned that when you
are interviewing an elder, just you might have
your structure prepared, but just let them go, let them go, let t
hem double back on a story, there might be an additional
detail that comes up. And it was so good to have
that after she passed. But in that period in between, so I had subsequently written
the play and I'd call her up and I'd say, "Hi, auntie,
I just did a play about you and got a standing ovation." And she'd always go,
because of the dementia, but it was sweet, she'd say,
"You wrote a play about me?" So that's what it was. And then when I went
back into the materials to write the book, again,
there's so much material that I'd forgotten a lot of
it and got to relearn it. And because I'm at such a
different stage of my life now, especially being a parent, yeah, I'm very conscious in my decisions about sharing things with my son. Yeah. - [Host] I'm gonna pop in, we
have some 40 people on Zoom and we have a few questions via Zoom, so I'm gonna select one right now. - [Gin] Hi, Zoom peoples.
- Oops. And there are more popping up as we go. But this one, we'll pick this one. "I loved how vi
brant
the book's dialogue was. I assume because it started as a play. Awesome. Can you say more about deciding to make the book the
young adult, YA genre?" - [Gin] Yeah, the funny thing
is that in performing it, I've had audience members as young as 11 and as old as 95 and they all liked it. So I was like, "Well,
you know, they're trying to pigeonhole me and
the book, what do I do?" But when I thought about who would I like to pass
these messages on to the most, I thought about the young adult c
rowd. And that's why I included a
glossary of historical terms and translations of different languages in the back of the book because if a younger
person hasn't had someone to mentor them at all in
African American history, by God, I wanted to be the one to do it. Yeah. - [Host] Well, if not,
I've got more via Zoom, so I'm just gonna go
with another one here. - Great. - This person writes,
I loved how, excuse me, "I also love the thorough
glossary at the end. What are your hopes for young peopl
e reading the book?" - [Gin] I think I just answered it. - I was gonna say. - [Gin] But I'm glad
you like the glossary. - [Host] Okay, and then
we have another one. This one has to do with your son, it says, "How has the book, play process changed how you raise your son?" - There is a line in the book that has a female bent to it. It's when Bebe is having
a panic attack in London, you saw that picture of her
in London, I mean, you know, in various journals and
things, she was like, "The only bro
wn face I see anywhere is me in the mirror for days on end." Right? And just being in a place where there's such different
customs and things like that. When she channels grandmother Sarah, or grandmother Sarah sort of comes to her, the line that grandmother Sarah says, "Fundamental to being a lady is kindness. The rest is ornamental." And so I try and skew that for my son in a way that he understands and will
hopefully take to heart. I don't care if he is, I mean, of course I care, and I'll try
help him if he's struggling in a particular class, but that's not his
inherent self-worth, right? If he comes home with his
dyed hair and all this, whatever, I don't care. But kindness, kindness,
kindness, lead with that, that's first, that's the root of becoming a quality
human being, I think. Yeah. - [Attendee 3] Thank you, Gin. My question's about your
heirloom, your prayer. If it's not too personal, when do you find yourself reciting it? And then also, have you passed
it on to others, your
son, or other family members, and why? - [Gin] Just my son and it's usually when I'm watching the news. Yeah, that's mainly it because I, well... I think we all know what it is to just feel ground down by the news and want to put some kind
of a final end to that, which has been wearing
on you day after day, especially if it's based in ignorance, willful ignorance, right? And I do take breaks from the news, but I'm also a news junkie. I check out four outlets
a day in the morning and in the eveni
ng and
this helps me stomach it, move forward and think critically as opposed to just saying, "I wish they would all just," you know. Yeah. - [Attendee 4] Hi, thank you. - Where are you?
- [Attendee 4] Sorry. - [Gin] There you are.
- Hi My question is did you make
any like edits to the play through writing the book or
like through understanding more background about your ancestors or was it pretty much the same throughout? - It was pretty much the same. The play provided a really
good structure
for the book, but it is a different beast. Like I also have worked
on a screenplay for it, which made it through the first round at Sundance in the Episodic Lab. And that's a completely
different beast as well. So I thought I was just going to use that as my show Bible, so to speak. But it just had to keep going
in different directions. I don't know, we'll see
what happens the next time I or some other young
actor performs this show. It is a show that I would like
to pass on for the record. - [A
ttendee 5] Thanks
so much for being here. Just a delight to hear you and see you. I got so stuck on the
first line of your prayer that I missed second line. Would you mind repeating it nice and slow? - [Gin] Sure. Lemme make sure I get it word for word. So, "Take from us the desire
to condemn other folk," which I also like because it doesn't, it's not saying that you can't condemn what is condemnable, right? It's just the desire. "Take from me the desire
to condemn other folk, give us eyes to se
e the
good in everyone we meet." And I think it's so easy to become blind, especially when we've made that obdurate judgment about somebody. But, you know, having grown up when this country was less
divided, I know it's possible, so I try and remember that and kind of pair that
with that second line. Yeah. - So, certainly thank you for coming and look forward to reading your book. My question relates to
the whole idea of passing and what you allude to in
the sense of the benefits of passing, but
also the
burden of passing as well. Can you sort of talk about that as it relates to the story?
- [Gin] Yeah. There are so many stories that go in so many
different directions, so, if someone was passing- Well, let's go back to slavery. So you have those old slavery terms like quadroon and octoroon
that helped human traffickers price their product, right? So if you were passing,
there's a really good chance that you would be put into the sex trade. And if you were passing
and your family though
t, "You know what, this is a chance for one of us to get out and survive," sometimes people would be
put on a train up north and they would say,
"Never contact us again." And so they'd lose their
family, but recreate their lives or in some cases have a really
surreptitious relationship with the family. But of course, because of
colorism, internalized racism, there were plenty of people who internalized the color hierarchy and based their self-worth on that, and then you had things
like the paper
brown, the paper bag test that
was one of those markers of whether or not somebody
could join various fraternities, sororities, social clubs, Jack
and Jill, Alpha Kappa Alpha, all these places, and so it
created also quite a schism in the Black community. But of course there were also people like Mordecai Johnson who was
passing, who was the president of Howard University for
like 50 years or something, and made it, was integral to it being the
powerhouse that it is today. So it's an interestin
g
story of people who passed and decided to use that to
help bring others with them or who decided to cut bait, but also be completely cut
off from their families and have no history and then
that history gets forgotten or something completely
false gets inherited, right, by the subsequent generations, and then they don't find out
until they take a DNA test and they're like, "Well, who am I really?" "What is going on?" So yeah, it was a lot of families, there are many families
where somebody was
passing. If you spend much time in
the southeast, you know, there's always somebody's
auntie who looks like me, you know, but it's also a taboo
topic that is very emotional for everybody on all sides of that. - [Host] I'm gonna hop back- - I could go on for hours, but yeah. - Sorry, I'm gonna hop
back in with another Zoom. The Zoom is lighting up like
never before, just so you know. So thank you, Zoom people. - [Gin] Right on. - This one I selected because,
oh, shoot, here it is. "Hi, Gin, from
your
adoring classmate, Leah." - [Gin] Hi, Leah. - "How did your amazing
vocal training come into play as you captured voices of your relatives?" - Okay, so there are 29
characters in the solo show and it's important to make
all of them different. And if I hadn't had vocal
training, I'm an associate teacher of Fitz Morris's voice work,
which is a voice pedagogy that is taught at Yale
School of Drama, and NYU, and a bunch of other places, there is no way I would've been able to have a voice afte
r the first few shows. So that is really important. But, you know, just as important
as knowing vocal techniques, before each show, I would invite my ancestors to be with me, I would invite them to inhabit me, and I try to be a vessel
as much as possible. And when I'm able to do it that way, I don't feel things here so much. You know, I didn't come to this concept until later when I went to Bali, but there's this idea of Taksu where it's generally applied to art, but you could be a taxi
driver w
ith to Taksu, meaning that you invite the spirits to be with you and you
surrender to their guidance. And that's the thing a lot
of Americans hate to do is like surrender. "No!" But when you can really, really do that and get into the groove, your body will go with that
particular flow, I think. Yeah. - [Skye] Hi, Gin, my name
is Skye, nice to meet you. - [Gin] Nice to meet you. - So I think you were beginning- I think you were beginning to
answer my question at the end of that last one, but I w
anted to say that you have this brilliant
ability to maintain and sustain presence and authenticity within your performance. - [Gin] Thank you. - And that's really hard to do, right? Because it's genuine. You just said that you allow
yourself to be a vessel of that authenticity, but it also takes a lot of vulnerability. So I guess I'm asking
how do you stay open? - [Gin] Exposure therapy. - [Skye] Yeah. - So especially when it
comes to the personal stuff, so it's like oscillation
and titration,
right? Moving back and forth between
physical and emotional states allows one to expand one's threshold. So get out there, perform, but then I need my introverted time and I know if I have
that, I'm gonna be fine, I'll always be able to recover. As I add knowledge, as
I add audience comments, things like that, that's like titration, as in metals when you add
one thing at a time carefully to create a stronger alloy. And then along with all of
that is the love, right? So when I first started
actin
g, I thought about it as a shield and I wanted
something to hide behind. And then the horrible
truth was I had to do this in order to elevate my game. And so I try to breathe
the audience in right away, feel love for the connection,
focus on the light that is within everybody
and connect with that. Some days are harder than others, but I lead with the assumption of love. - [Skye] Love it. - Get those steps in, Noel. - [Attendee 6] Yeah, a little bit veering off of your talk today, but I was just
wondering,
knowing that you're an alum, if you have any general advice for our current students here at Carleton? - [Gin] Yeah, and this
is inspired by Tomkin. Tomkin, theater buddy
if you're there, hey. So he and I were talking last night and he was saying one of
the most valuable things that he learned here, it was
applying to one situation, but it actually applied
to all of his life, and I said, "Me too,
that's what I learned too" is that if you wanna do
something, just do it, right? You kno
w to incorporate
a wide array of thoughts, skills, et cetera, people. And if you wanna do something,
approach it with the attitude of I'm gonna do this, I'm
gonna figure this out. As opposed to waiting for somebody else to be a gatekeeper, right? Even if it means you
gotta get down and dirty and go on food stamps, you know, just let yourself know that you can do it. And you know what, if you
are cool to your mentors, it is being on this side. Now... If there is somebody with dream and focus and
if I have a really good
relationship with them, I love helping them, it is a pleasure. Time doesn't always
allow, but I love that. And having been on the other
side of the audition table too, you know, just so you
know, the auditors want you to succeed, but you
have to be open to that and you have to be open
to that within yourself. But if you do that, it's
sort of like a magic key. - [Will] Hi, my name's
Will and I loved your talk. It was brilliant and so enjoyable. And I have a question about,
I guess, telling stories
about your family. Like, I dunno, I think a lot of people find their families fascinating,
at least I know I do, and I've been trying to
learn more about mine and I really enjoy sharing that, but I find it hard sometimes to know when to share and
to know how much, I guess. - [Gin] Yeah.
- And like, I don't know, it's sort of a half-formed
question, but how do you, or how did you decide
like how much to share and were there some
things that you wanted to, but you just co
uldn't really
find the time or place? - [Gin] Yeah. So having an awareness of why
you want to share something is key to that and key to understanding what your intuition is trying to tell you in different moments. You know, one of the classes I teach is a solo performance class, and one of the things that I always say, and I know I'm not the only one, is, "The story is not about you. Sure, you may be the performer and it may be all about your people, but the story is not about you. Get clear on
your overall objective and your personal objective. The overall objective
is the universal thing in what it is that you're saying." You know, is it... Is it about finding love? There's a word again. Is it about finding acceptance? Is it about breaking a structure? Is it, you know, something else that we all can kind
of sink our teeth into? And then the secondary one is more about what your character or characters want from the world. So when you think about how it will be received, depending on
who you're speaking
with, that will guide you. Does that make sense? And then there are things
that may make you go, "This is such a juicy story and I just wanna blurt it out right now, but maybe I don't know enough
of the context around it." It is worth it to take that extra time 'cause sometimes you just don't know. Like you don't know if
great Aunt Ella is keeping the barn from being burnt up, you know, that there might be more to this story. Yeah. And then the more you look into that, the mo
re interesting it is. And definitely truth ends up being wackier than what we can come up
with most of the time. I hope that helps. - I'm gonna sneak one more
in from Zoom if I may. - Okay. - "The mention of a Cherokee connection in your family really caught my ear. Do you have any stories
about that relationship?" - The stories I have were basically Auntie Bebe talking about going to visit her grandmother, Betty,
on the reservation. And my Auntie Bebe spoke some Cherokee that she learned from h
er grandmother. And she, I don't think
this gives too much away, she did practice some psychiatry
at all kinds of places, so for celebrities, for people in prisons, for people in reservations, and just business execs,
it was kind of remarkable. But she did spend time on reservations where Cherokee
was spoken as an adult and that's how she was able
to maintain a little bit. Unfortunately, that is an area where I had to apply a lot of fiction because I wasn't, you know,
as you can kind of tell fro
m the photo, great grandmother Betty wasn't a loquacious person and I don't think she shared a
lot of stories unfortunately, but that's where I wanted to
like bring in my imagination and just make her more vivid
and just give her a voice because somebody like that,
just, that picture, again, it haunts me that this was a person who just seemed like she was beat down and I wanted her to have some good times, even if it was just fiction. - [Host] Thank you very much, Gin. Unfortunately, on that,
we
have to conclude. Thank you very much
for being here with us. Thank you all for being here
and our friends on Zoom. We'll see you next week. (bright music)
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