Finding My Place

About Finding My Place

Finding My Place is an evolving, evening-length work of puppetry, object performance, projected imagery, sound, oral history, and archival research that traces my family’s journey across more than two centuries of American history. The project begins not in the twentieth-century South, but in Colonial Virginia and North Carolina, where my ancestry encompasses both Black people held in bondage and white ancestors connected to families credited with helping shape the emerging United States. These histories are not separate. My family tree includes complicated blood relationships between enslaved people and the people who enslaved them, making the story of Finding My Place one in which race, kinship, power, inheritance, and American identity have been entangled from the beginning.

My earliest known Black ancestor is Richmond Maclin, born a.1787, the patriarch of my Maclin line. His extraordinarily long life creates a remarkable human bridge across generations. Born during the early years of the United States, Richmond lived through slavery, westward migration, the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the rise of a new generation of Maclins in Tennessee. By 1900, he still lived in Keeling, Tennessee, among a community that included Phil McBride and the Maclin descendants whose lives make up much of this project. Through Richmond, history stops feeling abstract: a man born in the eighteenth century was still alive in the same community as family members whose lives carry the narrative into the twentieth century.

The family's movement west is central to the work. Black ancestors were taken from Virginia and North Carolina into Tennessee alongside the white families who enslaved them. In and around Keeling, formerly associated with Oak Hill Plantation, the descendants of enslaved people eventually built lives, families, churches, businesses, farms, professions, and property of their own. The historic Greenleaf Presbyterian Church became an important center of this community and provides a throughline connecting several of the stories in Finding My Place. This geographic continuity allows the work to follow a single Black community across the transformation from enslavement into freedom and then into the increasingly restrictive world of Jim Crow.

One of the earliest stories in this continuum is “Praiseworthy.” In its current standalone form, I initially withhold my relationship to its central figure and reveal our connection only near the end. As the work becomes part of the larger Finding My Place, that structure may evolve. The piece is rooted in Keeling and Greenleaf, and its sound world now incorporates railroad spikes I collected from the Tennessee landscape itself. These objects let the story's physical place enter the performance, turning historical research into something tactile and audible.

That same Keeling community leads into “The Maclins: An American Family,” a developing section examining an extraordinary generation of Maclin siblings and relatives whose lives demonstrate the possibilities Black families created for themselves in the decades following emancipation. Among them are Albert Cameron “A.C.” Maclin, an educator, writer, institution builder, and civic leader; Dr. R. B. Maclin; Dr. Gustava B. Maclin Vance; Zenobia Maclin; and other family members whose achievements in education, medicine, property ownership, civic life, and professional advancement complicate assumptions about Black life in the post-emancipation South.

But The Maclins is not intended as a simple celebration of exceptional achievement. The story also includes Harvey Maclin, whose life appears in newspaper accounts involving conflict and trouble in the 1910s. His presence allows the work to hold accomplishment and difficulty within the same family rather than constructing a mythology of uninterrupted progress. Together, Praiseworthy, The Maclins, and Harvey's story create a historical sequence extending from enslavement into the early twentieth century, centered on the same land, church community, and extended family.

Another developing work, tentatively titled “Running in Both Directions,” follows Sloan Reid. His story begins with trouble in Tennessee that may have led him to leave for Fulton, Kentucky. There, in 1915, he was killed by James Rogers, his foreman in his "Gandy Dancer" crew. After the killing, Rogers himself fled toward the Cincinnati area, was later captured, returned to Fulton for trial, and ultimately acquitted of the murder. The title reflects this reversal of movement: first Sloan runs from one circumstance into another, and then the man responsible for his death becomes the person running. The story expands the project's examination of mobility by asking when migration represents freedom, when it represents survival, and when a Black person's ability to safely occupy a place becomes precarious.

Other stories move the family into the twentieth century and reveal both the prosperity Black families built and the forces that gradually destabilized portions of that progress. “He Worked Hard” tells the story of my paternal grandfather, who, despite racial barriers in the South, created a prosperous blacksmithing business that served both Black and white customers. His is one of the least documented lives in the project, so the piece relies heavily upon oral history. One essential source is Royal “Sonny” Smith, who remembered helping keep the fire burning in my grandfather's blacksmith shop when he was only three years old. In this story, memory itself becomes an archive. When official documents cannot adequately preserve a Black man's life, the recollections of people who knew him, the tools of his trade, the community he served, and the business he created become evidence of his existence and accomplishment.

The family story then moves north through the Great Migration. I am developing another section centered on a cousin who migrated to Chicago, probably in the late 1930s, and lived in Woodlawn during an important period in the neighborhood's Black cultural life. He worked at the notorious 606 Club at 606 S. Wabash, a burlesque establishment that catered to a white, politically connected clientele and may also have intersected with Chicago's gangster world. He later welcomed my uncle George James “GJ” Lewis to Chicago. I am still discovering the narrative form and title of this piece, but I want it to evoke the sound and energy of the jazz era while examining the Great Migration as another attempt by Black Southerners to create new places for themselves in northern cities.

The maternal side of my family enters the project most fully through “Between Two Tornadoes: The Destruction of Two Black St. Louis Communities.” This developing work begins with the displacement of Black residents, including members of my family, from Mill Creek Valley during the urban-removal policies of the late 1950s. That displacement coincided with the 1959 St. Louis tornado, which also affected members of my family. The piece then follows Black St. Louis across the sixty-six years between that disaster and the 2025 tornado, examining the consequences of redlining, urban renewal, institutional abandonment, the closure of Homer G. Phillips Hospital, the destabilization of The Ville, the proliferation of drugs, and decades of disinvestment. When the 2025 tornado struck The Ville and surrounding Black communities, it encountered neighborhoods already weakened by generations of policy decisions. The two tornadoes therefore become both literal historical events and a framing device for asking the difference between destruction caused by nature and destruction produced by human policy.

“Black Episcopalian” brings these larger histories directly into my own life. The work began as an investigation into my paternal family's long relationship with the Episcopal Church, stretching back to Tennessee during slavery and emancipation. Its meaning changed profoundly while I was developing the piece as a member of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival's Puppet Lab: my mother died. She had been raised Baptist, and after separating from my father and moving with us to St. Louis, she could easily have returned to the Baptist tradition. Instead, she remained in the Episcopal Church. In doing so, she preserved a piece of my paternal family's history within me, even after her marriage to my father ended. What began as historical research therefore became a work about grief, gratitude, inheritance, and the unexpected ways family history survives. My mother's choice bridged my paternal Southern Episcopal history and my own childhood in St. Louis.

Research for Finding My Place combines genealogy, census records, church records, newspapers, court documents, property and land records, institutional histories, oral testimony, family photographs, site visits, historical maps, material culture, and direct engagement with the places where these events occurred. Increasingly, I am also bringing physical traces of those locations into the performances themselves. Railroad spikes become sound objects. Blacksmithing becomes both family history and visual metaphor. Churches, plantations, neighborhoods, courtrooms, businesses, and demolished communities become environments that can be reconstructed through puppetry, projection, shadow, multi-plane imagery, and objects.

Across the project, the family passes through a recurring historical cycle: enslavement, emancipation, institution-building, land ownership, education, entrepreneurship, migration, racial restriction, displacement, family disruption, and survival. The gains made by earlier generations did not simply continue upward. As Jim Crow hardened and as discriminatory policies narrowed possibilities for Black communities, portions of the family's stability began to erode. Later generations also experienced crime, addiction, alcoholism, and personal instability, stories I am only beginning to incorporate into the work. Those experiences exist in conversation with, rather than in opposition to, the accomplishments of the generations that came before them.

Eventually, all of these histories arrive at me.

Finding My Place is therefore not simply an attempt to document my ancestors. It is an investigation into what reached me from them: what survived slavery, what survived Jim Crow, what survived migration, what survived demolished neighborhoods, family rupture, addiction, death, and forgetting. It asks how a family can build a place, lose a place, be forced from a place, remember a place, and build again.

My own research, creation, and performance of these stories have become part of that continuum. I am trying to recover the positive legacy my family created, not by erasing its contradictions or painful chapters, but by placing them within the much longer history that produced them.

In that sense, the title Finding My Place is both genealogical and personal. I am finding my place within a family whose American story begins before the nation itself was fully formed, passes through enslavement and freedom, prosperity and loss, South and North, Tennessee, Chicago, and St. Louis, and ultimately reaches the life I am living now.

The performance is my attempt to understand what they built, what they lost, what they carried forward, and what I choose to carry next.

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