Sacred Encounters

I first heard about Callie Guy House over 20 years ago when invited to participate in a Chicago artist for reparations movement. At the first meeting, Chicago activist Conrad Worrill passionately spoke about Callie Guy House as the “Mother of Reparations”. He added: “The present day Reparations Movement for African people in America is connected to the leadership of Callie House who organized a Black Mass Movement demanding reparations from the 1890s to 1915.”

I was so moved by the story of Callie House that it stayed with me and her commitment to community care continues to inspire me. Over the years I have researched her life. Callie House was a formerly enslaved woman, and a co-leader of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association at the turn of the 20th century. She organized over 300 thousand Black Americans to push for a congressional bill that would grant pensions to formerly enslaved people for their unpaid labor. Most of all she developed strategies of care in communities across the country that supported each other with love and compassion. 

As a performing artist, I wasn’t sure how I would shape a piece about her life. It started to emerge from my participation in a national cohort called Our Ancestral Journey. Through the process of writing prompts, meditations, historical research and theatrical exploration, we were invited to examine an ancestor. I chose to investigate the life of my great grandparents in central Louisiana. During the process, I realized that as minister and wife in a rural area, they may have hosted Callie on her visits to that area. I was curious about their interactions during the 1900’s and what an experience of one of the church gatherings might have felt like.

When granted a 2024 Dark Matters Residency at Elastic Arts, I wanted to use that opportunity to develop the idea. Working with musicians and performance artists, such as Paige Brown, Sojourner Zenobia, Najee-Zaid Searcy, Avreeayl Rah, Fred Jackson, and Adam Zanolini, the residency gave us the opportunity to workshop and present a work in progress. The culminating event that included poetry, storytelling, improvisational music, audience engagement and personal commitments to community care was electric and energizing. The feedback from the audience and performers had us dreaming of reaching larger audiences and imagining what the show could become with further development. My aim is to hire a development editor to help shape the Sacred Encounters script and a director to implement staging for an engaging experience that reflects the continuity of love and compassion and its intention to inspire action toward community care. With assistance from a development editor and a director a polished performance can become an artistic expression worthy of  world wide exposure and touch hearts in ways that build healthy relations.