New Play on John Brown & Harriet Tubman
First Two Scenes from "The John Brown Toll Booth"
As a high school history and civics teacher since the late 1990s, I remain dull-struck by how the fascinatingly overlapping stories of John Brown and Harriet Tubman are disturbingly neglected.
American history curricula, often defined by the “Big Five” education publishers, and of course, the antithetical Standardized Testing Industry, still smothers most school districts across the state and nation-wide (not just the Deep South) with safer, top-down authority narratives. Such (barking) dogma typically censors accounts of more profound grass-roots activism (a notable recent exception: Reasoning with Democratic Values 2: Ethical Issues in American History).
Most student inventories will zone out on any preliminary John Brown questions.
“Who was John Brown?”
“Ah, I dunno.”
While the 2020 mini-series The Good Lord Bird popularly expanded on James McBride’s acclaimed 2013 novel, both artistic (mis)adventures repeated the all-too-familiar presentation of Brown as wild eccentric morphing into a foolishly demented terrorist, as if institutionalized slavery itself was not much more horrifically insane by comparison.
Until the Civil War brutally confirmed Brown’s original urgency. . . .
The following initial scenes from “The John Brown Toll Booth,” my yet unproduced stage drama, attempt to theatrically introduce an important argument, how these two controversial icons dramatically altered the fate of this still troubled nation, as much as, say, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, during this most violently divided moment in our history.
While Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth also appears repeatedly as the play’s central antagonist, I write from imagined details between clandestine friends, Brown and Harriet Tubman.
Brown’s daring October 1859 raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal (which Tubman helped fund), in the bloody dress rehearsal for the most costliest American war, deserves to be researched, discussed and even staged, way beyond the dismissiveness still dominating much of secondary education.
“The John Brown Toll Booth”
ACT ONE
Scene 1
OSBORNE PERRY ANDERSON, wearing a Civil War Union overcoat, rises from a seat in the front row of the theater house, to briefly address the audience center house.
An empty chair rests center stage.
OSBORNE
Greetings, visitors, students and friends, on this five-year anniversary of the end of our nation’s most violent Civil War. I, Osborne Perry Anderson, am the only Black survivor of Captain John Brown’s famous 1859 crusade on Harpers Ferry, formerly Virginia, now West Virginia, which unofficially commenced this bloodiest of conflicts.
As your guest lecturer for this astonishing true story, I aim to educate, persuade and inspire, through various forms of recollection. To assess the visionary ambitions of the abolitionists. To divulge acts of selfless self-determination. To reaffirm John Brown’s truth is marching on.
Your professor has asked me to remind you to hold your questions until the end of this unaccustomed program, until after we conclude with a surprise visit from another special visitor, one deservedly much more esteemed than I.
(BLACKOUT)
(END OF SCENE)
Three prominent abolitionists and friends, with somewhat differing views on how to permanently end slavery in the United States.
Family meccas have included this August, 2018 trip to quaint Harpers Ferry and the landmarks of John Brown’s ill-fated final stand against slavery.
Scene 2
JOHN BROWN determinedly helps himself up from a stretcher on the floor, with the aid of a cane. He wears a loose-fitting gown, suggesting institutional confinement.
OSBORNE returns to his front seat of the theater house, sitting silently.
THE VOICE OF JUDGE PARKER rings overhead.
VOICE OF JUDGE PARKER
Order, order. Defendant Brown, is there anything you wish to say before this court passes sentence?
BROWN
I have, may it please the court, a few words to say.
In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted — the design on my part to free the slaves. . . . I have another objection; and that is, it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case) — had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends — either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class — and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.
The lighting fades into sounds of a forest at sunset.
(END OF SCENE)