Black women as pioneers - Pearl Cleage's play 'Flyin' West' about injustices suffered by African American women

American Visions, Oct-Nov, 1994 by Steve Monroe

Pearl Cleage's vision of society demands that we address the injustices done to women. Her powerful essays give us provocative insights on racism and sexism. Her play Flyin' West embodies her messages with characters who entertain audiences with passion and humor, anger and wit, idealism and dignity.

Flyin' West is the latest contribution by Pearl Cleage, currently play-wright-in-residence at Spelman College, to the dialogue about the African-American woman's struggle for fair treatment. This fall the play opens the 1994-95 season at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., where the production features legendary stage, movie and television actress Ruby Dee. Flyin' West was originally produced at the Alliance Theater in Cleage's home town of Atlanta. The production in Washington is a joint venture (and the beginning of a new relationship) between the Kennedy Center and the Crossroads Theatre Company of New Brunswick, N.J.

Set in 1898 in Nicodemus, Kan.--an actual all-black town named for an African-born slave who bought his independence--Flyin' West is a fact-inspired drama that focuses on a family of women who leave their homes in the racist, male-dominated South and move west in search of freedom. "On the surface it's about homesteaders in the American West, pioneers," says Cleage. "But it's also a way to talk about contemporary issues, like race, gender, class, feminist issues. I'm a poet; I'm not a politician. My play is the form I use to get people to think about things through their emotions, not through their brain. It's easier to get people to think about things that way." Reviews of Flyin' West praise the production as "gripping" and "inspirational."

The idea for the play came to Cleage from reading about the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, whose Memphis newspaper columns of the 1890s urged African Americans to leave their homes in that city and move west in search of freedom. "Historically what we've been taught about what happened in the Old West was from the white man's perspective," says Cleage. "So for us that meant John Wayne and white cowboys. Since then we've done a little digging into history and found out about the Buffalo Soldiers and Bill Pickett, the black cowboys. So now Flyin' West can tell us something about black women in the West and what they went through and how they contributed to that whole pioneer thing."

Cleage, whose other plays include Late Bus to Mecca and Chain, is the artistic director of Just Us Theater Company in Atlanta. "There's a million stories about what went on in this country. It's not about replacing one vision with another, it's about extending our visions."