"Free at Last: Images of Emancipation" is an hour-long piece of reader's theater that makes use of some of the most passionate letters ever written by Americans.
Composed in the crucible of fratricidal conflict and wrenching social change, the words are stirring reminders of the extraordinary process by which a war for national preservation became history's bloodiest referendum on the issue of involuntary servitude.
"Free at Last," a production of the Columbia Festival of the Arts, was presented at the Pascal Theater on the Anne Arundel Community College campus Monday afternoon in commemoration of Black History Month.
With only a single desk, a pair of coatracks, and a stump-like stool for props, Denise Diggs, Bill Grimmette and Tony Tsendeas were able to take their viewers back to this cataclysmic time courtesy of the eloquence of these letter writers.
Richly evocative pictures and brief quotations were projected onto a screen behind them in Ken Burns fashion.
It is a tribute to the actors that they gave themselves over to the texts to such an extent that matters of stage technique and style seemed not even of secondary importance by comparison.
What I am left with are so many noble expressions of sadness, indignation, wisdom and triumph that the mind truly boggles at their import.
"A just man must do hard things sometimes that show him to be a great man," wrote one slave to Abraham Lincoln in a simple expression of the essence of moral leadership.
"Pay us equally!" wrote one black soldier pressed into service by an unappreciative but desperate northern army. "All we lack is a paler hue and a better association with the alphabet. Pay us equally!"
"We'd rather die as free men than live to be slaves," wrote one man, summing up the spirit that inspired so many thousands to risk everything in their desperate quest to make it to the Union lines.
The agony of family displacement and separation came alive in the anguished words Spottswood Rice wrote to his children, assuring them that one day he would come to get them. I wonder if he ever did.
The earthly father figure for slaves, of course, was Lincoln himself. They wrote him of their fondest hopes and dreams of true equality and, when feelings dictated, they brooked no nonsense.
"Mr. Lincoln," wrote one woman about slavery, "don't you think you ought to stop this thing?"
One wonders if her letter wasn't echoing in the great president's mind as he traveled to the Gettysburg National Cemetery to redefine America as a land based not on 18th-century notions of property and social balance, but on the proposition that liberty for all citizens is the sum total of American political life.