Anna Deavere Smith: Notes from the Field (Anchor Books, 2019 - HBO film, 2018)

“Rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated.” – Anna Deavere Smith

Notes from the Field is the most recent of about twenty “multi-voiced solo dramas” written and performed by actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith (b. 1950) over nearly four decades.

They include Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (Anchor Books, 1993) on the 1991 riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the city of New York, and its aftermath, told through the voices of African American and Jewish people directly or indirectly involved in the riot.

And Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Anchor Books, 1993) on the major 1992 riots following the brutal beating of Rodney King, a black man, by four white Los Angeles police officers initially acquitted by the court – a 1993 Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Anna Deavere Smith and her plays the recipient of several other nominations and prizes for her innovative theater pieces.  

“The school-to-prison pipeline.” Variously described as ‘living journalism’ or ‘documentary theater’, for Notes from the Field Smith interviewed about 250 people from four different American regions: Maryland, South Carolina, Northern California, Pennsylvania, and Finland, students and parents, counselors, prisoners, preachers and politicians, finally choosing nineteen people to perform onstage, using her own body and voice and using verbatim excerpts from the interviews, the audience standing in for the interviewer (or a crowd addressed by the speaker on the stage).

Part of what Anna Deavere Smith calls “my life’s work: a series of plays I call On the Road: A Search for American Character” documenting particular moments in history, Notes from the Field started as a social justice project to address what has come to be known among social scientists, educators, jurists, politicians, and activists as “the school-to-prison pipeline,” Smith writes.

And to initiate American conversations on education, race relations, inequality, and violence, hoping to improve the lives of black, Native American and poor white children who live in poverty.

Mass incarceration: The new Jim Crow. I borrow my sub-heading from legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010, reissued 2020 with a new preface by the author). 

Because to Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, featured in the play’s prologue, education and mass incarceration are linked: “It is impossible to talk about the criminal justice system, mass incarceration, without talking about education.”    

After the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that the ‘Separate but Equal’ doctrine was unconstitutional, Virginia in 1959 decided to close its public school system for five years, rather than integrate. Massive southern resistance to integration signaling the end of serious investment in public schools.

“We broke our contract with education, and we’ve never been able to get back to where we were.” Investments shifted to prisons: “Mass incarceration has gotten completely out of whack.”

And this is a choice, Ifill argues. “This country is always engaged in big investments, we make big bets,” giving the creation of America’s suburbs in the 1950s by providing tax credits to developers (racially exclusionary, by the way) and the building of the interstate highway system as examples. A choice turning US public schools into a road to incarceration for too many of America’s young.

Denise Dodson: Going to college in prison. Dodson had been an inmate for 23 years at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women when Smith interviewed her. Dodson’s former boyfriend shot and killed a guy who tried to rape her: “I have the same charge as he has … first degree murder.”

Taking college courses while serving prison time, Dodson learned what she had not been taught in school: “I kinda gravitated to my environment versus reaching out past the environment, and I started believing that that was it and that was all … Everything was me, it was never like – the next-door neighbor could be going through the same thing … that we all are connected somehow.”  

Leaning only as a grown woman how the government works, what a governor or mayor do, and what your responsibilities are as a citizen, Denise Dodson ruminates: “I see where I’ve missed out on … a lot of important information that … would’ve helped me make better decisions.”  

(A slide – a devise used throughout the play to set the scene or to comment upon a story – informs us that Ms. Dodson was released from prison in 2018).

The Freddie Gray story: “Breaking the Box.” Early one morning in April 2015, in Baltimore, Maryland, Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American, was arrested by four police officers, handcuffed, leg shackled, severely beaten and thrown into the back of a police van – the whole episode filmed by COPWATCH videographer Kevin Moore and one other witness.  

And somewhere along the line, while in police custody, Gray died from spinal cord injuries. He was eulogized by pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant in a packed AME church on April 27, Anna Deavere Smith using actual video footage from the funeral and Bryant’s sermon: “Breaking the Box.”

Growing up in Baltimore with few prospects for the future, young black men like Freddie Gray suffer quarter-life crises. Bryant compares their situation with being confined in a box: “Living in a box of stereotypes. Other people’s opinion. Sweeping generalizations. And racial profiling.” 

As Jamal Harrison Bryant ends his sermon there is a call-and-response moment. Bryant: “No justice!” Audience: No Peace!” A rallying cry with a long history, recently used by the Black Lives Matter movement, it reminds you of the rhetoric of the Reverend Jesse Jackson – among the dignitaries attending Freddie Gray’s funeral – and his ‘Rainbow Coalition’ back in the 1960s.

On the river: Taos Proctor. Proctor, a former inmate, is a fisherman of the salmon-fishing tribe in the Yurok Tribal Reservation at Klamath, California, where the river joins the Pacific Ocean. While Denise Dodson (see above) will speak for herself, Taos Proctor’s own testimony is supplemented by that of Chief Judge Abby Abinanti of the Yurok Tribal Court in San Francisco and Klamath.

Taos Proctor got to about eighth grade in school. “Well, I didn’t leave; they kicked me out … I got into too many fights and it was always my fault.” At nineteen he went to San Quentin.

Judge Abinanti: “Taos. He’s in out tribe. Part of it is just he’s very big (about six-foot-four or taller, almost three hundred pounds – Smith) and he … acted out. He did things in school that he probably shouldn’t have done and nobody stopped to say: “Taos, what’s wrong? Why are you doing this?”

“The whole thing about kids is they do need … grown-ups,” Abinanti argues, “… grown-ups on their side … who are allies … ones that can deal with the system. Kids just can’t make it alone.”

Abinanti: “US law is justice by strangers … every society needs rules – but the whole thing about having a law or having courts was to ensure fairness and right behavior and justice! It’s not about that anymore. It’s about money … I think the country is broken. I really do.”  

The HBO film. Notes from the Field was produced off-Broadway in its final theatrical form in New York City in 2016. In 2018 it was adopted into a feature film by HBO/Home Box Office, Anna Deavere Smith hoping with the film to reach an audience who do not usually go to the theater.

Above, we have given readers only excerpts from the testimonies of a few of the nineteen people interviewed by Smith. One needs to read all interviews in full, and one needs to watch the HBO film and listen to the testimony of the people brought to life by Smith’s powerfully flexible voice.  

The film shows unforgettable cell phone videos like that of a 14-year-old black girl in a bathing suit being thrown to the ground by a white police officer in Texas on June 5, 2015, screaming: “I want my mama!” Or that of Shakara, a 16-year-old student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, on October 26, 2015, being thrown across the room by a school resource officer for refusing to give up her cell phone, the episode filmed by her classmate Niya Kenny.

Told that she had gotten into something that didn’t involve her, Niya responds: “But he just threw a whole girl across the classroom! … Like, that’s something you need to make your business.” 

“Never Give Up”. The ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, mass incarceration, too many young black men killed by police officers, and a law that is not colorblind – Anne Deavere Smith clearly wanted to end her play on a more positive note. And the last section of her play, Never Give Up, ends with a portrait of civil rights icon and longtime Georgia Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020).

“I ended the play with … John Lewis because he personifies both a violent moment in American history – the civil rights movement – and the promise of what American character is all about.”

On ’Bloody Sunday’, March 7, 1965, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, state troopers attacked an estimated close to 600 non-violent demonstrators protesting segregation and disenfranchisement. One of the leaders was a then 25-year-old John Lewis of the SNCC.

In 2009 a former member of the Klan came to John Lewis’s office in Washington, D.C. “He said: “Mr. Lewis, I’m one of the people who beat you during the Freedom Rides in 1961. Will you forgive me?” I said: “I forgive you.” His son started cryin’. He started cryin’. I started cryin’. He called me “brother.” And I called him “brother.” I seen this guy four times since then.”