My intention, in revisiting history as backdrop for THE GAMBLER'S EARRINGS, was to target hegemonic [1] assumptions on “Vodou” [2] and “conjure” [3] as practiced by women in New Orleans, Louisiana and Charleston, South Carolina in the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century. I wanted to give voice in dramatic form to female characters who sought alternative means of healing, creative expression, and empowerment through secretive and forbidden rites at a time when women were, by law, second-class citizens. I soon found my characters having minds and tales of their own. Their definitive ideas as to the secrets they guarded became the story I had to unravel.

FIRST BRUSH STROKES: Creative Choice in Two Time Periods
The primal voices of my characters spoke to their individual sexual and spiritual choices. Early on, I entered dark chambers of hushed silences and old mysteries that whispered women’s power as an ancient rite of blood & water - and a voice said, “this far and no further.” I guarded the sacred in that voice and a woman appeared in an old Cypress tree, her feet dangling in mid-air, singing a song to the howling witch of South Carolina, Molly Means.

This was the first clear vision of character and place. The character was a troubled woman and the place I knew (intuitively) as Cowpens, SC, the other end of the state from Charleston. I forced my hand to envision this character, a troubled and mysterious woman, in Charleston or New Orleans, to no avail; all I could hear was the song she was singing to Molly Means. To further frustrate my preconceived ideas on 1904 (setting & time), this troubled woman was in a timeframe that seemed to be the 1970s. My first creative decision was already at the crossroads - should I force the hand and ignore this 1974 setting or allow the characters to lead the direction of the piece?

I was on page one of my script with a crucial creative decision to make - I decided to let the troubled woman tell her story. The play would begin in Cowpens, SC, 1974. I hadn’t the faintest idea of how we were going to get to Charleston or New Orleans of 1904.

The troubled woman was singing a song to Molly Means, who I first discovered in a book of poetry based on folklore of enslaved African women in a Greenville (near Cowpens), SC library in 1976. I distinctly remember sitting on the floor of that library (very radical in those days) and opening the book to a poem titled, “Molly Means by anonymous slave woman”. It sent a chill through me as it began, “Old Molly Means was a hag ‘n a witch, child of the devil, dark ‘n stitch.” I can’t remember the rest of the poem, only what Molly did: appear in trees, ride young brides to their deaths, and take a husband for every day.

I knew the troubled woman sitting in the old Cypress tree was not Molly as soon as her song sang through me, “Old Molly Means come for my soul, down in the swamps of Waccamaw, them alligator teeth sunk in my back, on a big red bed inside of Nelly’s shack.” The original poem had stuck in my subconscious as a haunt demanding to enter human terrain and came out as an original song I was singing back to her through this woman. The whole play was right there in that opening song, I just had to find it. Miss Cally provided the first clue to who the girl in the tree was when she called out her granddaughter’s name, Creadell.

APPLYING PRIMARY COLORS: Remembering Discarded Women
The physical image of Miss Cally is a sketch of Miss Laura White, an elderly African American woman in her early seventies, who opened her home to me in the last days of her life (as if I were her own), sharing stories from a mouth that had been diagnosed with oral cancer. She died on a day I forgot to go and see her. Life can be mean like that. They took her body away, no family - no funeral. For a long time I kept seeing her shining eyes and two strands of hair, falling from her heavily worn head wrap. She was a tall, sinewy Southern woman, and provided me with a distinct image for Miss Cally.

The name, Creadell, comes from a woman who used to share a one room/one bed apartment with me in South Carolina. Creadell worked 3rd shift at the hospital in Spartanburg; I had to be out of the bed by 8:00 AM. Creadell was a highly intelligent woman who had been on the run since 1956, when her husband of four months tried to strangle her in a bathtub in Cleveland, Ohio. Frightened, she had been traveling across the country for twenty years, doing odd jobs and never finishing college. She died in her car, somewhere in California, in the early 1990s.

Images of long hands that knew the power in water and herbs, a child in a woman’s body, and the terror of a young girl on the run were aspects of these natural women that began to layer my text.

As Miss Cally shaped her own voice, I listened as she told Caroline she had come to a house where the blood was bad (cursed). To curse the bloodline was to curse the womb and so a map began to take shape into this guarded woman’s history that would allow past and present to exist simultaneously. Caroline was the character I had the most trouble with because she mirrored aspects of my life as a VISTA (Volunteers In Service to America) volunteer and community activist in the South. I never sought to write an autobiographical story; yet, it becomes clear that our past effects our creative expression as artists.

MIXING THE MEDIUM: Employing Historical Research As Back Story
Turning in time, I made an informed decision: The famed red light district of Storyville, New Orleans in 1904 would be used as the back story to the troubled woman (Creadell) sitting in the Cypress tree in Cowpens, SC. This back-story allowed my research into the daily business operations of some of America’s first female entrepreneurs, madams of famed houses of legalized prostitution (1898-1917) in New Orleans, to bear fruit. I had been fortunate to come across My Life As A Madam, one of the only primary sources hand written by a woman who was engaged in the Storyville sex trade (under the pseudonym Julia Dean). It proved to be a treasure of gifts; Julia discards masculine hegemonic assumptions of romanticized sensual, sexual activity to record the daily activities in a top Sporting House in a language criminal-friendly, yet distinctly feminine, practical, and without apology. Miss Julia mentions that many women left New Orleans to develop their trade in other cities. Charleston, SC is known for the famed “Rainbow Row,” adjacent to the wharf, still featured on the horse driven carriage tours of the city. I now had an authentic link for the back story of my characters in New Orleans and the 1904 Charleston setting.

No sooner had the gaslights of Julia Dean’s Sporting House dimmed, than another New Orleans house lit up -- the St. Anne’s residence of the famed Voodooiene, Marie Laveaux. Old Marie sat in her rocking chair smiling and I knew the girl sitting in the tree in South Carolina singing a song to Molly Means was also connected to Marie Laveaux.

A growing body of literary work and scholarly articles by women present Marie Laveaux as a model of female empowerment in the nineteenth century. Dr. Ina Franlich’s dissertation Marie Laveaux (1995), Jewel Rhodes' novel, Voodoo Dreams (1995), and Susheel Bibbs’ Heritage of Power (1998), construct a woman endowed with natural mystical gifts who used elements of traditional African cultural practices to serve her community in antebellum New Orleans. Today, feminist scholars and artists reject the banana colored witch of Robert Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans (1974).

The Widow Paris (the first Marie Laveaux) and her daughter (the second Marie Laveaux) were known as practitioners of Vodou. I wanted to explore the positive and negative use of the power by women. In THE GAMBLER'S EARRINGS, Corrachiba uses her knowledge of the power to heal. Dessie bastardizes the power into hoodoo. Through these women, I was able to explore assumptions on Vodou and consider the sacred and profane nature of the mythical and legendary Marie Laveaux. The guarded mystery began to channel the drum, as images of magic, healing, and forbidden rites surfaced in the voices of my characters. Having spent time in Togo/Benin, West Africa researching and attending traditional ceremonies,the spirit of Vodou stands as central to retrieving memory and honoring the ancestors. This is not a power to play with -- as Dessie must come to terms with.

COLOR SCHEMES: Sound and Sight/Artistic Influence
For me, playwriting moves into pure creative expression when sight and sound interact into a fusion. This singular vision summons a world of heightened realism to the stage. The artist has to tear away the veils, find the vein, and let the blood flow.

The major influence on this piece was Zora Neale Hurston. Zora, in true trickster fashion, at the very moment Harlem was the cultural capitol of Black America, kneeled at the feet of the “Godmother,” picked up the traveling money, and headed back to her own briar patch. Zora knew from where the culture had taken root and recorded the sound of Black folk in the Deep South. She taught me to listen to the sounds lilting in the varied cadences of Creole Patois, Deep Southern, Mid-Southern, Gullah [4], and individual mixtures thereof.

The integral relationships between drama/history/myth/spirit widened the perspective from which I retrieved and re/imagined the landscape of her/story. Fashioning characters of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds interwoven with themes of feminine sexuality, magic, and spirit transcended racial and cultural barriers to afford exploration of a channel from which ancestral memory and magic could gain access to the dramatic landscape. One can only wait for the characters to come through, with their own songs, on their own feet, in their own time.

[1] hegemonic - control or dominating influence by one person or group, especially by one political group over society or one nation over others.
[2] Vodou - a religion practiced throughout Caribbean countries, especially Haiti, that is a combination of Roman Catholic rituals and animistic beliefs, involving magic and communication with ancestors.
[3] conjure (also known as hoodoo) - a form of predominantly African-American traditional folk magic that developed from the syncretism of a number of separate cultures and magical traditions.
[4] Gullah - a creole language spoken by the Gullah people , an African American population living on the Sea Islands and the coastal region of the U.S. states.

[June 2010]

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