Works in Progress Volume 18:1 Winter 2005 ISSN 1075-0029
From the editor - by Debora Kodish

As the first black woman hired in many workplaces, the lawyer and writer Patricia Williams has often had cause to challenge bias. She observes that her actions have earned her a reputation as someone with remarkable insight and as a radical troublemaker. But she sees her perspectives as far from unique: people who find her surprising are simply hearing, for the first time, some of the everyday insights and common experiences of whole classes of people just like her, but generally excluded from - and unable to speak and be heard in - the contexts of universities and law firms. [1]

Speaking common experiences out loud and in unusual contexts can be a dangerous, lonely, and revolutionary undertaking - especially when such storytelling represents the perspectives of people who are disenfranchised and when it challenges everyday practice. In this issue of Works in Progress, four African American women describe ways that stories can shake things up, challenge the status quo, and keep possibilities alive. They also consider some of the obstacles facing anyone following an oral tradition. It is 40 years since Kathryn L. Morgan first wrote publicly about her family's stories, handed-down tales of resistance and opposition to racism that had sustained generations. Insisting on the importance of African American middle class traditions, family folklore, and women's storytelling, Dr. Morgan challenged a wide range of scholarly and popular conventions. The first African American woman to get a Ph.D in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania, she has inspired many people, including storyteller Linda Goss, who grew up with a heritage of family tales in Alcoa, Tennessee. In the 1970s, Ms. Goss was in the vanguard of what would become a storytelling movement, and her account in these pages of her years at Howard University give a glimpse of what it felt like to balance her attachments both to a legacy of Southern rural oral tradition and to the emerging Black Arts and Black Power movements.

Who has the right to call herself a storyteller, a poet, a dancer? Thelma Shelton Robinson describes how other people were considered the poets when she was young, and how she eventually came to claim the right to define herself. It takes courage to name yourself in terms that feel right, that allow dignity, agency, and justice. But telling stories is about more than self-definition. All the women in this magazine see stories and storytelling as a responsibility. As Kathryn Morgan says about her own storytelling mother: we pass on things that ought to be known. We pass on essential stories, stories that are necessary. Stories about African American tapper Louise Madison are just such essential stories for Germaine Ingram. Madison had a reputation as a great dancer, a solo act, a woman who was anyone's equal. These stories serve as an inspiration, and a point of beginning for Ingram's own dancing, and for her exploration of the hidden and all-but-forgotten histories of earlier African American women tap dancers. And notably, when there is too large a gap in the record, when stories are unknowable, Ingram (and Morgan) refuse to be daunted, turning to imagination, fiction, and art-making, grounded in what they do know, but naming too the tragedies of what is lost.

This spring, PFP will bring all of these people to various stages, and we hope you'll be there. Ingram's essay marks the long-delayed release of our documentary, Plenty of Good Women Dancers, about some of these amazing local African American women hoofers. Plenty will be broadcast on March 28th on WHYY, after a 10-year effort by PFP (itself a story). Germaine is performing her own work on May 22nd, as part of PFP's artists in residence program. Morgan, Goss and Robinson speak as part of a PFP program on self-knowledge and storytelling on February 19th, organized as part of Art Sanctuary's Celebration of Black Writing and in honor of ODUNDE's 30th anniversary. And Goss leads a 3-session round-table storytelling program in the new home that PFP is currently rehabbing. (A great chance to share your own stories.)

-- Debora Kodish

1 Patricia Williams, The Rooster's Egg. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 93.

Last update: June 8, 2005