A More Perfect Union

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

That’s what Sutton and his companions witnessed when they traveled to Colquitt in 2000 to see Swamp Gravy and assess the potential for such a project in Union. With the help of Swamp Gravy organizational director Bill Grow, they gathered support from people on the school board and pastors of the black churches. Grow also hooked them up with CPI.

Geer and his co-writer and director, Jules Corriere, each spent 13 weeks in South Carolina over the year and a half it took to produce the play, training a band of story gatherers to mine the narrative gold buried in the region. “They told us we had to have an opening question to start people thinking,” one of the story collectors, retired Union County banker Ola Jean Kelly, told the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. “Most important, we just had to be quiet and listen. Transcribers took down everything verbatim—our language and vernacular. We had to. It’s our oral history.”

The stories in Turn the Washpot Down range from the innocence of preteens accidentally getting drunk on blackberry wine to more serious tales of broken dreams and broken families, racial strife and shocking betrayal. A soldier is accidentally branded a deserter and the town shames his whole family. Two groups of boys, one black and one white, sneak into the “no-man’s-land” beside the river that once racially divided Union to trade a box of peaches for a set of wheels. They are caught and stoned by men who “throw rocks at anyone who doesn’t stay on their side of the river.”

Periodically, a radio announcer interrupts the play with some comic relief, program segments from WBCU featuring country music, commercials for the local drugstore, and a virtual tour of the town on “The Happy Bus.”

Playwright Corriere learned that slaves were forbidden to gather in public, so they met secretly in the woods and carried with them an iron washpot, believing that the pot would dampen the sounds of their whispered stories. The pot was turned upside down to hide each secret “so it don’t get out to people who ain’t ready to hear it yet,” as a black character explains to the audience in the play’s first scene. One by one, over the course of the play, townspeople approach the woods and the pot turns up as they spill out their stories.

The “n word” turns up in a story not about slavery, but about integration. It is told by an actor playing Leroy Worthy, a black man hired in 1964 by the owner of the Lockhart mill to integrate the workforce. But complications later ensue: “I was promoted to manager and I took another man’s job, a white man, and he’s still there, only now he’s under me,” Leroy says. “Sent his wife to tell me he wasn’t gonna work for a nigger. I was prepared to deal with that a long time ago. I was 7 years old, got called that name, and my grandmother says to me, ‘A nigger is somebody low and dirty. If that don’t fit you, then walk on by, it doesn’t apply.’”

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print