The room was suddenly blanketed in darkness, and the girls fell quiet. Then the lights rose, a dim blue now, and seven black women appeared on the stage dressed in flowing skirts and scarves, their bodies frozen in awkward contortions. One of them, a big woman dressed in brown, began to cry out:
...half-notes scattered
without rhythm / no tune
distraught laughter fallin'
over a black girl's shoulder
it's funny / it's hysterical
the melody-less-ness of her dance
don't tell a soul
she's dancing on beer cans and shingles ...
As she spoke, the other women slowly came to life, a chorus of many shades and shapes, mahogany and cream, round and slender, young and not so young, stretching their limbs across the stage.
somebody / anybody
sing a black girl's song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you
but sing her rhythms
carin' / struggle / hard times
sing her song of life ...
For the next hour, the women took turns telling their stories, singing their songs. They sang about lost time and discarded fantasies and what might have been. They sang of the men who loved them, betrayed them, raped them, embraced them; they sang of the hurt inside these men, hurt that was understood and sometimes forgiven. They showed each other their stretch marks and the calluses on their feet; they revealed their beauty in the lilt of their voice, the flutter of a hand, beauty waning, ascendant, elusive. They wept over the aborted children, the murdered children, the children they once were. And through all of their songs, violent, angry, sweet, unflinching, the women danced, each of them, double-dutch and rhumba and bump and solitary waltz; sweat-breaking, heart-breaking dances. They danced until they all seemed one spirit. At the end of the play, that spirit began to sing a single, simple verse:
I found god in myself
and I loved her / I loved her fiercely
Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama
