Newspaper ads seeking the return of enslaved people inspires new music for Singing Freedom
The detailed classifieds offered rewards. They are now fueling a new power in song.
Voices of enslaved people — more than 150 years old — are not keeping quiet.
The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society’s Singing Freedom concerts — Jan. 15 and 16 at the Kimmel Center — featuring star singer/fiddler Rhiannon Giddens (among others), sprang from recently discovered published accounts of people who’d escaped from their enslavers and the detailed classified advertisements that promised rewards to people who’d return them.
“Staggering” was the reaction of 25-year-old composer Mason Bynes, who wrote the choral work Three Dialogues for the Singing Freedom concerts, having read accounts of women her age, eluding authorities and living by their wits. “It was difficult emotionally to take in the gravity and depth.”
Collected in the Cornell University database Freedom on the Move, more than 30,000 ads from all over the country are often so descriptive that they give the enslaved person a living face, followed by financial rewards — as much as $100 in 1839, about $3,100 today — for their return. Written by the enslavers, the ads describe what the people who escaped to freedom wore and how they talked and walked.
“He has been branded, by a former master, on one side of his face and commonly ties a small handkerchief under his chin, to cover the brand,” reads one ad. “He formerly worked in the Lebanon swamp.”
Bob “has some beard on his upper lip. His left leg is somewhat shorter than his right, causing him to hobble in his walk. He has straight hair.” Others are identified by their scars — some on their backs from being flogged.
Then there’s the unassuming Lucy: Small, slender, white dress, green shoes, and said to be hiding in the wilds of Bucks County, according to the 1864 Philadelphia Gazette. But wasn’t slavery long abolished in Pennsylvania by then? Is this evidence of loopholes that kept people from other states enslaved?
Nobody knows which or how many escapees were caught. Names are sketchy. Locations are often small towns that have since been subsumed by modern condo projects. Artists accessing the Freedom on the Move database increasingly began talking about these wider glimpses into U.S. slavery. The art song organization Sparks and Wiry Cries was a key source of contacts, one leading to another, resulting in the two-concert series.
The Jan. 15 program opens with Giddens and includes the newly-written 11-song cycle “songs in flight” by Shawn E. Okpebholo performed by leading singers Karen Slack, Reginald Mobley, and Will Liverman. The wide-ranging texts, some by the noted poet Tsitsi Ella Jaji, meditate on some of the stories behind the texts, and also acknowledge the 2012 Florida shooting of Trayvon Martin.
“I come to it as a storyteller, but as an African American, I feel like, ‘Can we move past this?’” said Philadelphia soprano Slack, who has sung at the Metropolitan Opera. Slack says she looks forward to a time when race isn’t an issue.“Then comes [the ads] and it opens old wounds again.”
The Jan. 16 program embraces the Black choral tradition with the Pine Forge Academy Honors Choir singing Bynes’ Three Dialogues that includes texts by Langston Hughes, among others.
What comes out is likely to be buoyant. “It’s important to speak the truth about our strife and resilience,” said Bynes, “but as a Black composer and performer, there has to be joy.” The point is to leave listeners in deep thought.
“Great art can be paradoxical,” writes PCMS artistic director Miles Cohen in the program book, “at once consoling and provocative, calm and teeming with ideas, and raising questions for which there may be no answers.”
“How should audiences come out feeling? That’s always a question when I do new pieces with new stories,” said Slack. “I want people to understand that slavery was about enslaving human beings. And I want people to understand the beauty of who these people were.”
The PCMS Singing Freedom concerts are 3 p.m. Jan. 15 and 7:30 p.m. Jan. 16 at the Kimmel’s Perelman Theater, Broad and Spruce Streets. Tickets are $30 for each concert but are officially sold out. 215-569-8080 or boxoffice@pcmsconcerts.org to join the waiting list.