Bill Gunn Writes “Sojourner” | Ellen Scott

thank you so much for the kind introduction Mark and it's really great to be here at this TV party um I consider myself a film person so I'm probably an interloper um of some sort but I will take any opportunity I can get to go off on Bill Gunn and talk about Bill Gunn um so um it's kind of a contracted period of time because I think I think I have 30 minutes so I'm kind of gonna jump in and just talk a little bit about it so elegant and experimental director Bill Gunn is best remembered for his erratic vampire cult classic ganjan Hess um however guns less explored television work was equally strange and Brilliant including this episode of American parade entitled Sojourner in it the usually experimental gun directly takes on history and social justice but the production and reception histories reveal that rather than monumentalizing Sojourner Truth he sought to use moving images to self-proclaimedly explore her energy and without romanticism thereabout he unsettles rather than reifies the American State's slavery mythology and its tradition of vacantly venerating the images of black Heroes like MLK Rosa Parks as a distraction from its continuing racial oppression so move to this wonderful photograph of Annette Carroll who plays Sojourner in this episode and I'll give a little production background and I don't know if my animations are going to work but that's kind of how PowerPoint is always for me so American parade was a biographical series planned around the U.S Bicentennial that ran over the course of three years from 1974 to 1976. executive producer Joel Heller focused on youth in TV and he was the executive producer of that program producer Lois Bianchi produced several experimental theatrical television projects including one with theater director Robert Wilson given her background in intensely avant-garde and semi-narrative efforts we might read sojourner's kind of Scrappy Aesthetics as deliberate of deliberate bending of the form of the biopic so Bianchi's artistic approach to film and media uh I'm sorry to the film and video medium was met um in the team she put together for the project namely Bill Gunn as writer Vanette Carroll as actor lead actor and um as director the industry safe Peter Levin so Carol was not only an actor but a theater director and a playwright best known for her 1972 Tony award-winning production don't bother me I can't cope the first Broadway show ever directed by a black woman and later for her play arms too short to box with God this was neither guns nor Carroll's first foray into television he had won a Washington area local Emmy in 1972 for the television production of his play Johannes and Carol had won a New York local me4 beyond the blues a dramatic poetry program on WCBS in characterizing truth Gunn does away with the notion of Blackness as a church undivided as well as the ebony saint in one interview Gunn theorized his work in writing Sojourner okay now my animations work but anyway so you get a little closer look at all these folks I just like how well gun actually looks really different in the two pictures so he says I experience what I'm writing in a very sensual way gun says and it comes from the my old days as an actor and then he goes on to say I kept Sojourner from being a romantic um she and I are long past the Horatio Alger thing I really got interested in the woman her energy attracted me where did all that power come from to do all those things and go as far as she got in history it's a survival thing gun stated bluntly you can be a hungry person but it's the energy and the variety of your energy that gets you to food it's the energy of a person that propels him to such a special place in history so guns first had first encountered truth I love this story as a child through his mother who wrote a radio play on truth that aired on a local Philadelphia radio station what was relevant to him about truth when he was a child was retained in his approach to this teleplay so he said I remember I kept asking my mother questions like where was she born was she tall did she have a little boy like me so gun's determination to a shoe sentimentality I think is evident in the teleplays Aesthetics and its advertising so the ad removes the visible nobility of the character and engages with the features of Blackness that some white folks might associate with disgust or recoil from she's not beautiful in any traditional eurocentric sense her teeth are crooked her clothes are seemingly ill-fitting and irrelevant we might even see like a black exploitation aesthetic going on here in some ways in terms of her direct address so anyhow I think they're sort of they're sort of rejecting she was she's rejecting features of being a graceful lady in order to gain power and force and that's really I think typical of the approach we see throughout this piece um so what we get instead of a portrait of a respect of respectable gentility and a historical narrative tightly bound to America's own is sketches of a passionate Christian Christian Mystic whose life appears in snatches from the Mist rather than whole cloth Gunn returns us to a figure who is formed in a time when the notion of African-American Freedom was not yet fully freighted with the baggage and language of the anti-slavery movement where black people could conceive of Freedom more freely if that makes sense and he makes truth a character who feels her way through this gun who deserves to be considered a fixture of black American afrofuturist imaginary here furthers this work by portraying truth as an otherworldly migrant whose power lies in a sense in her abstraction or more specifically her ability to resist the constricting Tendencies of both form and space as was true of the spirit truth sought we get a sense of the Wisps of her life almost as a disjointed tale rather than a building narrative or a climaxing story a fact which was noted in the reviews for example the LA Times reviewer called the program a quote fuzzy outline of an abolitionist lacking in historical or personal context providing sketches of sojourner's life that views slavery as an oddly dress and an oddly I'm sorry an address one more time and oddly dressed rehearsal for the Civil Rights Movement I like to think that Gunn who made um an autorous decision here would have actually taken pride in these negative reviews which accurately capture how his drama differs from the average television docudrama stilted hero's journey and reified narratives of the day instead like its protagonist the story wins so I just wanna um and I want to talk about her a little bit um in terms of the birth birth of intersectional feminism as we've come to really discuss this idea so predating Anna Julia Cooper Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Tubman Truth May well be the first very first black American figure to publicly invoke intersectionality or the overlapping fault lines of race class and gender in the formation of selfhood as historian now painter put it and as her most famous speech arnia woman underlined as an abolitionist and feminist she put her body and mind toward the unique task that of physically representing women who had been enslaved and this at a time when most Americans thought of slaves as male and women as white painter also points out quote no other woman who had been through the ordeal of slavery managed to survive with sufficient strength Poise and self-confidence to be a public figure in the long term especially me my dad as being a public figure in America required working with white people submitting oneself to white eyes white expectation and White Lies we see this dicing and slicing of the self that interlocking identities require in the scenes where the newly reborn truth separates from her son though the first scene here I'll move though the first scene has featured Sojourner literally running cutting Barefoot solidly through the space of a field and the town to the courthouse and telling us an urgent voiceover that she has got to save her son and the second scene has given us the traditional televisual pleasures of their reunion the third scene reveals Peter as a Young Man played by Lawrence Hilton Jacobs who has gotten into trouble with the law perhaps because she's not watching him closely so about this gun stated I kept reading about her relationship with her son a boy she fought um to free from servitude and then abandon to his own devices as an adult no one would really deal with the fact that her drive had a great deal of selfishness to it with Sojourner he said the selfishness and self-determination of Duty to her people came to a peak with that boy Sojourner is a mother in this series but um in that uniquely intersectional way is not only a mother in order to be whole and to live out her purpose she must put motherhood to the side in the same way that she prioritized it initially she must evolve into a Sojourner and while her inability to be both does not please her she is certain of it as she points out motherhood white women's motherhood is by Design at all-encompassing her struggle to be free from slavery is not pictured but her fight to free her son and then free herself from him so that she can free others is deeply telling about the meanings and dynamics of black women's freedom and its costs we can hear the generational struggle to Define freedom and black agendas not only with her son but with her grandson and the last clip we'll see here and in Fred her interactions with Frederick Douglass who chides Truth for washing white babies and singing though the script is punctuated with the expected conversations and speeches with truth pushing for her rights decrying slavery and looking to God for direction this soundtrack in many ways haunt is haunted and out of sync with the narrative turns which compel us to look at the many contradictions and complexities within Blackness and indeed within the woman herself um so let's start with that first clip um which is uh actually her first um instance of giving a speech that we see in the piece um so in sojourner's anti-slavery oration she's able to connect with her audience in part by her awkwardness her humor which disarms and her quick-witted ability to meet people where they are not she left deep memories behind her a little preview there so she listens as well as she speaks the singing is a way in for her not only because her audience knows the song but also it appears because of her voice The Voice Voice of Truth is an incongruence that draws attention due to the apparent mismatch between the low voice and the skirted form with the spirit of the dozens she one-ups the men heckling her and she's genuinely more funny than they are in the process she shows them to be bodies as well making visible their white frames a spectacle at and at the same time she seems to channel James Baldwin with questions like are you sure God isn't black um are you sure you are not are you sure you're not essentially The Gallows humor and the sense of desperation and death produce laughter fit to kill in her audience as when she tells them she's asked God to make her Masters good but if he can't to kill them which produces laughter so there's a moral turn here but it happens through comedy and the air that she leaves them with is not one of Triumph or of having saved Souls but rather of having left people to struggle on with themselves so let's go to the next um scene which I'm talking about in terms of owning the body so the teleplay climaxes with the Cornerstone and stumbling block of her flesh revealed like lightning and beneath the sound of thunder That Rocks the courtroom it's here where the power of Truth to convert not just minds and souls to God but to turn whiteness is horrible spectacular power back on itself is revealed she reveals her breasts and it feels like an act of God the shot ends on a medium shot of a suited white man be holding her breasts and we cut to commercial which reveals a suited white man in medium shot Kenneth Haye argues that television commercials did more than sell products they were designed to interact with the drama itself with the commercial message benefiting from the Peaks that each Act of the program created the commercial's narrator was meant to lend familiarity continuity and trustworthiness but in guns drama the match on action between the white man who would exploit truth's body and the white man who represents the sponsor in the commercial causes the gripping scene to bleed over into the commercial space intentionally or not condemning the sponsor ironically the company that owned Yale locks and called into calling into question the trustworthiness of his direct address worth noting perhaps is the is that the first time breasts were shown in film after the production codes passage was the pawn broker where it was also a black woman who bared her breasts and similar questions of exploitation were raised so gun has a way of making a medium intended for advertising into a medium alive with bodily struggle awkwardness and the aliveness of the precipice from moment to moment we know not where Sojourner or God is leading and the muddled struggle for expression of her vision um and to find clear the clarity of her path is marked and surprising as the profound as is as marked and surprising as the profundity of her words and their effect on her hearers Vanette Carroll's strong and gender fluid form casts doubt on the ascendancy of the gendered body pointing to the fascinating inability of gender to explain the human form as we see it and feel it it's failure to capture categories like energy and presence Sojourner is legible as a narrative this this whole piece as a narrative of bodies in relation a text that also pushes attention towards the multivalent body at every term in one scene truth scrubs the naked bodies of white children and an anti-slavery commune later a primly dressed abolitionist as we saw is hit on the bottom during a stump speech finally there's a graphic discussion in what follows of dysentery and the sexual passions derived from killing white men in the Civil War so gun himself a gay man who died of AIDS in 1989 knew something about being seen as ill-fitting for the body and about struggles with the body so Gunn has a Christian level of fixity I would argue on the Flesh and Blood and the relationship to spiritual things without the investments in the white version of Christianity's narrow way he has a narrow way I would argue himself but it's a different one so let's um end with this final scene which I'm calling our so-called Glory where Sojourner Truth meets with her grandson so similarly powerful is this scene of Sojourner talking with her grandson James his story and his supine body tell yet another tale through the power of the Flesh in it he speaks of black flesh glory in the killing of slave masters black flesh being separated from White flesh at burial pronouncing segregation's final word and flesh of fellow black soldiers splattered on James's own flesh and mind in irreversible ways in this repetition of cruelties we have a prime example of the phenomenon that theorists Hortense Spillers spoke of quote even though the captive body flesh has been liberated it remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history nor historiography and its topics shows movement as the human subject is murdered over and over again by the passions of the bloodless and Anonymous archaism or artifact so unquote this in this case the white image of the black of black Americans whether they are aunties old women or wild fighting Africans is the archaism that continues as a monument to Black activity and mutilation the sequence here as earlier moves to commercial leaving a dangling question has all this moved the hearts of the Northerners that neither Sojourner the program nor the audience dares to answer so guns unresolved screen Epic on Sojourner Truth is an important example of the themes running through his creative projects bringing his media meditation on black bodies at work to a youth-centered national television audience I forgot to mention that this was a youth program um it offers an alternative approach to historical biography to a generation that would soon receive Roots focusing far more on the abstract yet important personal and public moments that make up a life so thanks so much for listening