Ossie Davis, Purlie Victorious, and Memories of Waycross, GA
This past Saturday, Jewel and I took our niece Phoebe, visiting us after graduating from college in Michigan, to see a preview of Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch at The Music Box theater on Broadway in the Big Apple. Directed by Kenny Leon, and starring Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young, the play initially ran in the early 1960s and remains an uproarious satirical farce set in the deep South during the Jim Crow period.
On several occasions Waycross, Georgia was mentioned; Davis lived in and attended primary and secondary school in Waycross from the 1920s through the Depression years. Waycross is where my paternal family hails from; in fact, my father, Horace Thomas Jr., exercised civic and cultural leadership several years ago by successfully advocating for a major roadway in Waycross to be named Ossie Davis Parkway. As part of the effort, my dad commissioned a local artist to paint a portrait of Davis, which currently hangs in our guest room.
Odom, best known for his performance in the hit play Hamilton, plays the lead protagonist, Rev. Purlie Victorious Judson, a black American man with a strong vision and steadfast intention to buy a building and convert it into a church via a long-lost relative’s inheritance, and thereby liberating his family from sharecropping servitude to the antagonist, Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee, played by veteran actor Jay O. Sanders. Ol’ Cap’n is a Caucasian land and property owner who lives (and dies) through his belief in the folklore of white supremacy. Kara Young is marvelous as Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, a role originally played by Ruby Dee, Davis’s beloved wife and partner for over fifty years.
As I laughed through the performance, I thought of the characters through the prism of my own experience visiting and living in Waycross, first going every summer between school semesters and then living with Grandaddy Horace Sr. and Grandma Mary
"Tina Mae” Thomas during fourth and fifth grades from 1973 to 1974.
I thought of working at Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation as a director in 1999, and meeting the head of Small Business Services, a coal-black-skinned woman with a short black Afro, streaked with grey hair. My skin started to tingle. This wasn’t the kind of butterfly-in-the-stomach experience as when I first met Jewel a decade or so earlier; this was a strange connector whose fractal source was a mystery. All became clear once she told me she was from Waycross, where red clay dirt roads and pecan, date, and peach trees were as ever-present as the spyglass views from the chinaberry trees in Albert Murray’s memories of Mobile Bay, Alabama.
I thought of the seeming coincidence of moving from Harlem in 2008 to New Rochelle in Westchester, NY with Jewel and our combined families and discovering that Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee also lived there. Then I thought of Jewel and I collaborating in 2002 for a tribute to Clark Terry at Riverside Church in the Riverside Theatre, where Jewel served as artistic and executive director. I wrote the event’s script. On that special night, Clark was feted with onstage performances by Jon Faddis, Warren Vache, Nicholas Payton, Randy Brecker, Danny Moore, Arturo Sandoval, Jimmy Owens, Dianne Reeves, and Marian McPartland, with a surprise appearance by Bill Cosby.
I was deeply honored that Ossie Davis read my words as the emcee for the evening.
These memories and associations were but fleeting moments in an afternoon of rollicking laughter, with occasional notes evoking the horror of life for Afro-Americans in those days of de facto segregation and casual denial of dignity. In a joint memoir, With Ossie & Ruby: In This Life Together, Davis wrote of his inner struggle to compose a comedic play in a time of serious battle against the dark forces of injustice.
The 1960s were a time of revolution. Black folk were determined to change the image by which we were perceived, to put folk humor aside and put on war paint, so that white folks should be under no illusion that we were joking. We had to present them with our sternest face. And that’s the kind of play I had tried so long to write; but I had end up with laughter instead of revenge. Was Purlie Victorious, with all its laughter, its gags, its schtick and one-liners, and act of betrayal?
—Ossie Davis
Hell no. Ralph Ellison had to face the same questions, he recalled in a 30th anniversary introduction to Invisible Man: “. . . given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter? And could it be that there was a subtle triumph hidden in such laughter that I had missed, but one which still was more affirmative than raw anger? A secret, hard-earned strategy through which a floundering Afro-American novelist could convey his vision?”
In an interview about Davis’s profound influence on his career, Odom puts it all in perspective:
He wanted to honor the truth of that experience, the people that raised him, and the truth of what it meant to grow up in the segregated South, but he didn’t want it to be too hard for you and I to sit through. So he made it a romp. But yes, we do earn moments where we give voice to that pain. The more fun we have, the more satisfying those moments are.
—Leslie Odom
The opening night of Purlie Victorious is Sept. 27th.
ANNOUNCEMENT!
Look out for the debut of Straight Ahead: The Omni-American Podcast on Sept. 28th! My co-host is fellow co-director of the Omni-American Future Project, Dr. Aryeh Tepper.
We’ve been quietly working in pre-production over the summer. A few of our guests for season one include Wynton Marsalis, recipient of the 2021 Albert Murray Award for Omni-American Excellence; podcast host and musical artist Coleman Hughes, winner of the 2022 Omni-American Young Leaders Award; best-selling author and thought-leader Seth Godin; and economist and public intellectual Glenn Loury.
Check out the trailer and follow us on your favorite podcast platform.