Director and all-around theater maven Terrence Spivey came to Cleveland 20 years ago and revived a moribund Karamu Theater from its community-theater level. Since leaving Karamu in 2016 he’s been in demand here and elsewhere as his reputation has spread around the country.
It spread to Mobile, Alabama, where leaders of the Clotilda Descendants Association reached out to him to help them tell their unique story onstage. The result was An Ocean in My Bones, first produced in Mobile as a one-act play in February 2022 and expanded in 2023, with two sold-out shows in February at the Mobile County Training School with ordinary citizens performing the roles under Spivey’s direction.
The ball started its long roll in 2011 when Mobile resident Greg Cyprian, hoping to start a theater in Mobile, came up to Karamu to see Spivey’s production of God’s Trombones. That eventually became Mobile’s first Black theater the Imani Theatre Company. Meanwhile, the two kept in touch —Spivey will talk theater with anyone interested for hours on end, a valuable resource for anyone wanting to launch a theater.
Then just a couple of years ago, Jocelyn Davis one of the co-founders of the Clotilda Descendants Association reached out to Spivey again to get some serious plans underway. Spivey credits her and her CDA co-founder Pat Frazier as key players in making the production a reality.
It seemed like the right time: the scuttled remains of the illegal slave ship were discovered in 2019 at the bottom of the Mobile River. Two other projects were in the works based on the story: Margaret Brown’s film Descendant(which debuted in Netflix in the fall of 2022) and Ben Raines’ book The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning, published in 2022.
Both told the extraordinary story of how a shipload of kidnapped Africans was brought to Mobile on a bet, decades after the slave trade was banned and just a few years before slavery was abolished. That left to captives stranded; they were free but couldn’t afford to return to Africa. So they founded a colony called Africatown in Mobile.
Davis felt that the story also needed to come to life onstage and connected with Spivey as someone who could make that happen. Always game for a new challenge, he was already familiar with the story from his talks with Cyprian. He researched the story and toured the remains of Africatown prior to writing the play.
Frazier and Davis relate how the Clotilda Descendants Association grew out of an earlier group called The Africatown Direct Descendants of the Clotilda Inc, which grew inactive as members aged and others moved away.
“There were no longer laws to keep [Black people] out of urban communities, so they just started moving to other communities,” says Davis, explaining the demise of Africatown as a hub of the Clotilda descendants population. “Paper mills were encroaching more. The high school was closed by Mobile Public Schools in 1970. There’s nowhere in Africatown to buy food. There’s a city line bus but I’m not even sure where it goes. There’s no medical doctors. There’s so so much that’s not there.”
So part of their goal with An Ocean in my Bones in to tell the story of the colony’s origins and the impact of neglect on it.
“We’re trying to go global about this,” says Davis. “Tell the complete story of Africatown. I just want people to be educated on the other ancestors. I thought it was time to bring the Africatown story to life.”
And she says, she feels the play has started to do that.
“Even though we had all of these wonderful scholars, people writing books who went on talk circuit, I didn’t always see a positive response from audience,” she says. “But my goodness, from the play, a totally different story. The play not only entertained people but educated people beyond what all those dollars were able to do. The story from the play was far more complete. The whole way Terrence approached it, it was not one of those kinds of dramas where you had multiple characters talking back and forth, acting melodramatic. And the women have gained prominence with this play.”
As for the future, Davis says they’re putting out grant proposals and would love to see it tour Historically Black College and Universities. They hope to perform it annually at their Clotilda Descendants Festival. And someone like Spivey will be spreading the word across the country.
“I don’t think anyone could appreciate story more than black college students,” she says. “They would be enamored of it. I really would like to see it go to public schools, at least high schools and middle schools. It introduces kids to performing arts. We don’t have too many programs in arts. Someone like [a future] Terrence is going to see that and go, I might be able to write a play, I might be able to produce a play. We had custodian at Mobile training school, maybe in his 40s, he told Terrence he had never seen a live performance of a play. It has so much potential to introduce people to live theater, to introduce them to the story, to show young kids he can be an actor or dancer, or maybe he can write.”
For more information on the Clotilda story go here.