SHOW MOMENTS

SYNOPSIS

Tamika L. Johnson, a middle-aged corporate manager, unaware of her family’s trauma and very aware of her sick mother’s need for healthcare, benevolently yet willfully exploits her job’s resources to keep her entrepreneurial dreams alive.

When Tamika’s mother Claire prods her to vie for a VP position, and then her coworker and competition for the position Dan, discovers her thievery, blackmails her and tries to sexually assault her, Tamika violently harms him and is on the run from her actions, her mother, and herself.
 
Tamika’s attempt at an alibi finds her driving down I95 as she remotely joins a previously scheduled interview with a YouTube podcast featuring Black Women in successful corporate careers. She ends up exhausted in a motel as her hero, real life 20th century business woman, Maggie L. Walker, appears to her in a dream Maggie encourages Tamika to face the family trauma.  When Tamika does, Claire divulges that her grandfather’s lynching pushed Claire, and in turn Tamika, to always ‘stay safe’. Claire insists Tamika return to the job to make amends. When Tamika does, she discovers her attacker, Dan is the new VP and despite the repercussions resolves to pursue her dream and quit her job.

AUDIENCE FEEDBACK

ABOUT

Bronx, NY native Tamika L. Johnson struggles to embrace positive self-perception, which holds her back from her entrepreneurial dreams. She is led by negative influences that reach back to her ancestry until the history that is running through her veins and resting in her bones moves her to do the unthinkable. On the run from her actions and herself, she fights to break free of the ties that bind her greatness and leave the plantation in her mind. This extraordinary new play was written by Paula Ralph Birkett. 

This project was supported by the Bronx Council on the Arts' Bronx Cultural Visions Fund 2023, a Howard Gilman Foundation award.

BACKGROUND

Playwright Paula Ralph Birkett received a 2023 Bronx Cultural Vision Fund (BCVF) grant from Bronx Council on the Arts to develop a play regarding the labor contributions of African American women. July 27, 2023 is Black Women’s Equal Pay Day and a clear illustration why this work is so important. That date represents the number of days a black woman worked in 2023 to make the same pay her male counterpart made in 2022. As Zora Neale Hurston wrote in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” She aimed to explore this concept in contemporary dramatic themes.

This one-act stage play invites us to journey with Tamika as she breaks free of negative self-perception to find her greatness. In addition, there are four fictional characters attempting to survive the same negative self-perception called vacant esteem. As Dr. Joy DeGruy describes in her book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome “Vacant esteem is a [negative] belief about one’s worth, not a measure of one’s actual worth. [It] is transmitted from generation to generation through the family, community, and society.” After studying that book, and bell hooks’ book Rock My Soul: Black People and Self Esteem, Paula realized the belief of not having or being enough and having that idea confirmed in your environment, can develop an apathetic mindset. Not an aspirational spirit. This is the premise of Black American Working Woman.

The sixth and final character, Mrs. Maggie L. Walker, embodies this aspiration. Maggie, the story’s sage, was a non-fiction real life person who lived at the turn of the 20th century. Being the first African American and first female bank president in American history, Maggie founded businesses when laws were established to relegate her community to second-class citizenry. Despite those laws, Maggie built businesses that elevated her community and made her a millionaire. In the play, Maggie’s determination and grit transform Tamika which ultimately shifts her life and her community.

The excerpts of poetry and speech by Maggie L. Walker included in this play are used with permission of Richmond National Battlefield Park & Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site.
These include the following:
Scene 1 & 10 Benaiah’s Valour – An Address for Men Only;
Scenes 3 and 5 Traps for Women;
Scenes 4 Traps for Women and Race for Unity.
For further information visit, www.nps.gov/MAWA.

PAST SHOWCASE(S)

Black American Working Women was in collaboration with Bronx creative team Good Light Productions, LLC. for their mid-summer showcase at the Episcopal Actors’ Guild July - August, 2024. See audience feedback in the photo gallery above.

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RESOURCES: Materials used in the play’s development.