We recently connected with C Niambi Steele and have shared our conversation below.
C Niambi, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
I was born into life as the great-great-granddaughter of a slave on my mother’s side … My introduction to her side of the family came about as the result my being placed in the care of her parents,
my grandparents, as my mother became a part of the pre-and post-WWII migration of Blacks from the South … So,in one way, even though I’m a post-WWII baby, emerging into the boom of the 1950’s and the modernity of it , the foundation of my life began in the traditions of a people only one generation from that vile institution of humans owning humans … I was raised by survivors who survived brutality with practicality and keen insight; along with the wisdom of being able to find the most exquisite beauty in the purely ordinary … Being able to say at the end of a day “I did my very best” … Using divine wisdom to study stars, planets, their movements and affectations … and never giving too much praise to people … rather savoring that heartfelt, devout and very personal worship on Sundays as being the only path to the difficult Mondays that were sure to follow … Life follows dependable and unshakable realities: All one has to do is learn the basics and you’ll never be sorry …
I grew up in the 1950’s in a little town called Lagrange GA …. I suppose I learned to perform from my grandmother … She was always making up some kind of sing-song rhyme or another … She was an accomplished seamstress and made my beautiful costume when I was cast as a butterfly in my 2nd grade class … I even had wings, beautifully crafted from wire hangers, covered in the same wispy yellow material as the dress with rhinestones all over the dress and the wings … I had the perfect bow tied at my back and rhinestones were scattered on the tails of of that luscious bow … I knew then that I was destined for the stage to be a star …
My grandmother loved to watch a program called The Lawrence Welk Show … The master of ceremony was Lawrence Welk, himself … He also had many acts that sang in different segments of his program … My grandmother always had me watch the Lennon Sisters on his show …. There were also the Maguire Sisters …
Patti Page and Dinah Shore were the prominent female entertainers of the 1950’s … we didn’t see a lot a Black female performers … Mahalia Jackson was a very well-known, popular, Black gospel singer who sang on The Ed Sullivan Show … There was also Miss Pearl Bailey, Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne …. Later there came Ruth Brown, Dinah Washington & Sarah Vaughn ….
When I was a little girl, I would wrap the big bath towel around my chest and with my hairbrush as a microphone, I became the star of The Bathroom Showcase where I ruled the make-believe stage until I got yelled at to hurry up and come out of that bathroom …
When my living arrangement changed from living in the south with my grandmother to living in the north with my mother, my musical exposure changed also … Up North there was Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers … Chubby Checker brought a new dance craze, called The Twist … Soon there was Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and Dionne Warwick came on the scene …. Everyone wanted to be The Supremes or Martha and the Vandellas or the Marvellettes … When 12 year old Stevie Wonder came on the hit record scene, we all lived vicariously through his stage performances … By the time i was 18 it was 1966 and I had the opportunity to sing with a local girl group … The only problem was that I was engaged to my 1st husband and he didn’t want me to sing … We married later that year and by the time I was 19, I was pregnant with my 1st child … By the time I was 22, I was having my 2nd child and getting a divorce …
As a divorced mom of 2, I really didn’t agree with what my mother told me one day … She said, “Well, it’s settled; you’re nothing but a mother now.”
I was quite taken aback … It was right then and there that I decided I was going to do something else AND be a mother too … why not? It was the 1970’s— Women’s Liberation was catching on like wildfire …
I first wanted to be a professional bowler … It was a hobby that cost money, the one thing I had very little of … Next, I investigated a local theater held at a church … It was there that I fell in love with the stage because I could become someone else entirely on stage …. I was a single mother, on welfare, living in the newly-built projects on the Eastside of Indianapolis, Indiana; but when I was on stage — it was time for the character to show up …
Theater chose me 17 years after I was a 2nd grade butterfly …. The thrill of the stage has never waned in the intervening years … Now that I’ve been at it for over 40 plus years, the theater is still as captivating as it was all those years ago … Performing is Life for me and gives me everything I need to live this life productively and purposefully.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My career started because my mother said something to me that really made me suffer inside … I thought to myself, “How dare she say that to me!” … I understand her words better now because it’s 55 years later; but back then, when she uttered those words to me — I was mad, hurt, insulted, furious, and very much determined to prove her wrong …
I’d been raised by my grandmother in the small town of Lagrange, Georgia. My mother and all her family came from this Troup County enclave of Georgia traditions: Her maternal grandmother was the daughter of a slave from the Lee plantation … Paternally, she weren’t that much better … Her grandfather, Columbus Ford, was said to have a strange accent, and was known to beat his wife Nancy, for whistling in the house … Conversely, he was also a good son to his own mother, named Mariah; taking care of her, his wife and at least six children as a mere sharecropper in Troup County, Lagrange, Georgia … It is also rumored that his bad temper went from the beating his wife to the killing of a white man …
Nonetheless, my mother, having escaped the limitations of her humble birth in 1917, in that Southern hamlet of west Georgia, south of the Mason Dixon Line and only 20 or so miles from Tuskeegee Alabama —well, she escaped by graduating from East Depot High School, Lagrange, Georgia, class of 1935-36. She then attended Spelman College for Colored Women in Atlanta on the scholarship she garnered after her spring 1936 high school graduation…
Surely then, she expected more of me in 1971, seeing that I was raised by her God-fearing parents (just one generation from slavery), to read, write, and calculate enough that I started school in the 2nd grade, guaranteeing that I would graduate high school at the age of 16 … I was admitted to the Tennessee State University at Nashville, Tennessee, as a freshman honor student right after my 17th birthday in 1965 …
I did not have any college degree by 1971; instead I was an about-to-be-divorced, single-mother-of-two, from two different fathers, living under my mother’s roof, when she said THIS to me: “Well, this is it — this is all you’re going to be now — a mother.”
That proclamation didn’t quite sit well with me … As I went about my life of laundry, little kids and lucid daydreams … I had to think of what I really wanted to be …
I thought I had wanted to be a wife … when I was in college all the girls were trying to find “good” husbands … So with my 17-year-old mind, I asked myself, why did I have to go to college to do that? I could marry any one of the two guys I was seeing already … I didn’t have to go to college to have a husband … However, after the husband I thought I married came back from Vietnam … I was not gonna let him beat me and be mean to our son while I made brown-bag-lunches to go to a job making only $60 a week for him to take away from me (even after I hid it in the back of our kitchen cabinet) in the apartment that I had acquired simply because I’d faithfully saved almost all of my Naval spousal allotment checks so we’d have our own place when he got discharged late in 1969 …
And as I write this now in 2025, I can see that my mother and I were so much alike; each of us marrying during a war –hers being WWII; mine being the Vietnam conflict— both of us marrying Navy service men; both of us left with a child to raise … Only I’d gone and got me another child from another man … and here I am, being told something that I didn’t want to hear or believe …
The pickings were slim as to what I would choose to be — other than the single-mother-of-two —which I already was …
Folding laundry on an ordinary Saturday afternoon … nobody home but me and the two baby boys — them playing in the background, TV droning on when something piqued my interest … BOWLING FOR DOLLARS the TV announced loudly …
Why hadn’t I noticed this before? I could become a contestant on BOWLING FOR DOLLARS … The more laundry I folded, the bigger the idea grew in my head … That’s it — I had decided what my future would surely be … The three thousand dollars the contestant won that day just bowling? I could do that easy-peasy …
I’d learned bowling when I first came to live with my mother at 9 years old …
In the summer of 1957 my grandmother and I visited my mother just like we always did ever since I could remember … There was this woman who always sent presents like beautiful, unusual toys, pretty, fancy dresses and those gorgeous pale blue Mary Jane’s with little pearls and rhinestones on the rounded toe of the shoes … Somehow, the shoes she sent were almost always too small but I’d wear them anyway until my grandmother figured out my ruse …
Well, my grandmother and I always visited this woman every summer … This woman, was my mother they told me … They always told me how “She got hired during WWII because the men were fighting and the government recruited smart, upwardly mobile, colored college girls to work in Washington DC…” “…and your mother misses you and wants to see you every chance she gets …” which was every Christmas, (when she came to Lagrange) and every summer when I went ‘up North’ to visit her …
Well, what’s a child to do?
So, the summer of 1957 when I was 9 … was no different than the summers when I was 8 or 7, 6 or 5 and 4: Not that I remembered all of them … Something about this year was going to be different …
While I was getting my hair braided, I had heard my grandmother say something to the effect of … Yes she wants her daughter to come up there and live … then another time we were at the Kresge’s Five and Dime where I always got to drink the “White Only” water because my grandmother carried a collapsible cup in her purse and she always could get one of the white sales ladies to get me “some a that white water” because my grandmother was a very well-known seamstress in Lagrange Ga and the white sales lady then said something like “How long she’s been with you now?”
I didn’t hear it all because I was too busy watching … I was watching her giving me the “white water” … then I watched myself drinking the “white water” … rolling its sweet nectar-like quality around in my mouth … sipping the water between my brown-skinned lips was like sucking honey from the honeysuckle blooms in our yard …
I loved every second of the life that was life when I lived with my grandmother … in the state of Georgia … in the 1950’s ..
At the end of summer vacation that year, 1957 … the only mother I’d ever known … went back to Georgia by herself … and now just 13 years later after being thrown headfirst into the Northern United States of America style of racism, sexism, and politicism, I was finding that I’d rather be bowling for dollars than to be a part of the myths fed to me by this woman who says she is my mother …
However, when that woman who called herself my mother, came back from her sorority, civic club and church meetings on that same Saturday I was folding clothes and watching BOWLING FOR DOLLARS with my two children in her house, she brought home the latest edition of the Indianapolis Recorder — the newspaper that printed everything that was going on in the Black side of the metropolis of Indianapolis Indiana … Where, BTW, I had toiled through being called a “heathen” in the Catholic school I first attended that first school year of 1957 — on up to the suburban high school I’d graduated from in 1965 where the only 8 Blacks in the junior class of 900 plus, had the first “North Central High School Library Sit-In” to protest the way us Black kids were treated on our school busses when school was dismissed November 22, 1963: The day President John F Kennedy was killed and I was in Coach Billy Walker’s Algebra class when the classroom loudspeaker came on with no warning and the sage-old veteran newscaster announced the unthinkable, the untenable truth about what had just happened in Dallas Texas …
Anyway, I got the Indianapolis Recorder to peruse its general fare of news in the Black community of Indianapolis that fateful Saturday I’d been home alone with my kids folding laundry while i dreamed I was on BOWLING FOR DOLLARS …
And there it was … somewhere in the middle of that newspaper was a small box announcing that the Reverend Mose Laderson Sr., of Hillside Baptist Church was looking for actors to become part of his ministry of theater …
I forgot all about BOWLING FOR DOLLARS because somehow in my soul I knew that I was supposed to do that — go to that church and join the Ministry of Theater …
I started going to the meetings at the church … We began to study Black plays and playwrights … Leroy Jones had just become Africanized by changing his name to Amiri Baraka … Then there were the undiscovered dazzling words and thoughts of the Black poetess, Sonia Sanchez … Mari Evans wrote I AM A BLACK WOMAN … Shirley Chisholm was running for president of the United States … Nikki Giovanni was selling albums with poetry extolling our fierce, feminine Black Pride … The Black Panthers were feeding children before school … When the government started funding learning about Blackness with money they called CETA FUNDS, churches and other organizations under the President-Johnson-led government program CETA allowed me to finally understand and develop a deep love of theater and stage acting which did not compromise the love I had for my Black roots …
Because of the political climate of the times, dreams and realities often met head to head causing a new reality that had once been a dream to develop very fast …
One day I was working in the church on plays by Black writers from Amiri Baraka to Langston Hughes … and the next thing you know, I’m on a committee that’s preparing to bring Nikki Giovanni and Shirley Chisholm to town, with the legendary STAX RECORDS providing the after-dinner dance band … it was now 1972 …
I was still living with my mother and needed her desperately … Once again our individual narratives were becoming more and more inseparable from the other’s … I was asking my mother to keep my children while I sought my end game in the entertainment business … I promised myself that I never wanted to leave my children like I’d been left in my childhood; but somehow it was happening in spite of my oaths of allegiance to the sacred duties of my Motherhood …
All the Black theater I’d absorbed; all the Black dance I’d perfected would now be put to the test as the newest member of Stax Records recording artists The 24-Carat Black …
The epic of my storied journey with 24-Carat Black has been forever immortalized on the internet and in a published book …
In 2018, after the death of that woman who proved herself to be even more than a mother to me, my sons, and my grandchildren, a former Newsweek journalist, by the name of Zach Schonfeld, wrote an article for the internet magazine called Pitchfork … The article was titled “24-Carat Black Were Sampled by Pusha-T, Kendrick Lamar, Nas, JAY-Z — And They’re Still Broke”.
It was sad but true … I’d left my children in the care of the woman I’d tried so hard not to be like way back in 1972 … She died in the summer of 2018 … 100 years and a million miles away from that humble southern hamlet in West Georgia, 20 or so miles from Tuskeegee Alabama where she’d been born in 1917 … 46 years after she granted me the freedom to chase the evasive dragon of fame in the recording industry, my band’s story was that we made millions of dollars for others but unfortunately none for ourselves …
24-Carat Black put the icing on the cake to my development as a consummate artist/performer, a solid, creative, entertainment professional … Under the direction of musical genius, Mr Dale O Warren, who grew the 24-Carat Black Band into a well-oiled machine of vocal mastery with musicians of unquestionable uniqueness and unparalleled technique … and even though the 24-Carat Black Band was duly recognized by The Stax Museum of American Soul Music in 2022 to honor the 50th Anniversary of the release of one of the most sampled albums of all times, 1972’s “24-Carat Black Ghetto: Misfortunes Wealth”, this accolade occurred 50 years after the poverty, despair, decline and death of so many of our band members, that only three of us were alive and well enough to be finally recognized for our contribution to other people’s wealth to the detriment of our own health and well-being …
As a for instance, let’s look at Digable Planets big hit “Cool Like That” … Per Butterfly’s own words, his father had the 1972 24-Carat Black album, “Ghetto: Misfortunes Wealth” … So Butterfly, needing a great hook for their music, used the drum riff from our album cut “Foodstamps” to get that hit … It wouldn’t be the last time our beloved drummer, Tyrone Steels, was sampled … “Infrared”, one of the biggest hits ever, is sampled from 24-Carat Black’s 2nd album “Gone: The Promises of Yesterday” — another multi-million dollar payday for Kanye West and Pusha-T, but not for the 24-Carat Black …
God rest the soul of The Soul of The 24-Carat Black Band, Mr Tyrone Steels — drummer and vocalist supremely extraordinaire — who died unpaid, unrecognized, unsung for the great contributions he made to others who sampled his voice and musical prowess without remuneration … Now, there’s his musical widow, Mrs Theresa Steels, drowning in the medical bills as a result of her husband’s longer-than-a-decade illness … While the samples of his music and voice made others millions, she suffers still, battling her own insidious ailments all alone while the unparalleled successes of a number of hip-hop artists continues … Artists that blatantly be blinged out bestowing a Benz to a Baby Mama but didn’t even give The Musical Widow their respects upon the death of the guy who provided them the secret to their successes … SMDH 💔
Thank God I had the theater to go back to … I barely got home in time enough for my youngest son’s fourth birthday in 1975 … I came back after a grueling 3 year road tour humbled — humbled and confused about the outcome of my choices to go out and test my talent with the recording industry … I hadn’t lost but I hadn’t won either … What I’d really learned couldn’t be measured by the amount of money I’d earned because I had none to show for the three years I spent touring and recording with 24-Carat Black …
Fortunately, loss and hard luck make for tough love and hard work once you evaluate the loss/gains measurements with the realities of really living and being true to oneself …
I was able to come back to Indianapolis and resume acting as if I’d never left … My three years away had done nothing to dilute the passion I felt when I chose acting over BOWLING FOR DOLLARS …
By 1980 I’d set the Indianapolis stages on fire having been nominated for awards for several supporting roles and finally winning “Best Actor In A Musical: Female” for inhibiting the character, ‘Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins’ in the musical “Purlie!”
Packing up my children and my trophy, I took off to New York City to take a bite of that Big Apple in 1981 …
I’m happy to say the Apple is still feeding me and my spirit in many fulfilling ways ….
When I returned to the New York stage after the deaths of both my husband and mother in 2018, just three months apart … I didn’t know just how many blessings would follow and uplift my ever-evolving assessment of just what is possible to do in one’s life …
The last stage play I did ran in the fall of 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic shut down New York and the world in 2020 … Even though every business, including show business, pivoted to using the internet, it didn’t stop our stage play, “Sassy Mamas”, from winning the prestigious 2020 Audelco Award for OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE …
Coming from winning the Indiana Encore Award in 1980 to 2020’s Audelco Award on YouTube in New York City, my dedication and fervor for being a stage performer has never waned— whether it be triumph or trials and tribulations … I remain anchored in the faith of my original decision to choose theater over BOWLING FOR DOLLARS …
Speaking of dollars, New York City Artist Corps, realizing the financial devastation to our artist community due to the Covid-19 pandemic, offered grants to encourage the creation of projects that would involve bringing together and engaging community in strong creative ways …
In remembering the struggles of the family from which I was privileged to have my evolution, I created an interactive, intergenerational, interracial, community oriented program called “History In Da Key of G” …
“History In Da Key of G” calls upon participants to delve deeply into the archeological structure of the inner parts of their beings’ evolution … By giving seven or eight prompts which elicit carefully structured answers that are truly individualized, they are then equipped to write a poem or short story to illustrate a feeling or conclusion using this tool of self-examination to remember forgotten parts of themselves … Sharing with others encourages empathy, understanding, and support ….
To emphasize the importance of this experience, I lead the exercise by performing the “Grandma Rap” which was created when I answered the prompts that delved into my own lifetime of existence … I took a page from the Book of Rap and became Grandma G-Thang, The Rapping Grandma of Harlem
My career has taken on new meaning since becoming The Rapping Grandma of Harlem and my presentation of “History In Da Key of G” …
I never saw myself as a public speaker but here I am at 76 … 60 years from high school graduation, leading a new class of future heroes and sheroes to a new paradigm about life and living …
Living life to the fullest is my mantra for these times and being prepared for any and every thing is the main thing I’d like my life to illustrate …
I’d like to, one day, gather all the artists that sampled the 24-Carat Black albums in one space … Without lawyers or judges, I’d like to tell them how much it would mean to a septuagenarian to receive compensation for music created over 50 years ago but is still relevant enough to make them the millions they spend on jewelry that eventually makes them robbery victims … The music we made 50 years ago gives them the hundreds of thousands they spend in automobiles that end up jacked or wrecked or filled with bullet holes from jealous rivals … The music we made 50 years ago gives them the ability to stand in front of millions thanking God publicly while in their private moments they unapologetically don’t give a damn about the samples they’ve not given proper remuneration or credits for … Why cant they see in us, the elders of music, the debts of gratitude they need to pay with cash not empty promises … If one of their grandparents were treated in the manner they’ve treated us … there’d be hell for somebody to pay … how do they really expect to live good lives without giving credit where credit’s due …
I wrote a song called “This Lifetime” and in it I say, “When I think of this lifetime … I think of all the places, the people I might have been …”
“Compliments of this lifetime but sort of in between the story that might have been …that might have been … ”
My life is a little of a lot of things … things … that might have been … However, the things that really did happen are priceless and much better than anything that never was … period. … AMEN.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
The most drastic pivot in my life is, of course, when Covid-19 caused New York City to close down completely … It was the silent death of inactivity swallowing every single aspect of home life, school life, and business life …
The Covid-19 pandemic was also very pivotal in my life because of my age … there are no industries, that I know of expounding about how many 70-year-olds they’ve hired with their ultimate goal being the replacing of their entire staff with septuagenarians … That ain’t never happening unless the industry is in the sleep business … we real good at sleeping … IJS
Prior to Covid-19, there was that other pivotal event in 1973 that forever changed my life … It was the bankruptcy of Stax Records …
Stax Records, Memphis Tennessee was a record label that I was so fortunate to be a part of because I was in the 1970’s band, The 24-Carat Black ….
“Ours is not to wonder why; ours is just to do or die” — somebody said and it was strictly “do or die” when I was just 23 years old and full of the urgencies of my generation … I had made a promise to myself to be fearless and courageous in achieving my goals pertaining to show business and creative performance …
I met 24-Carat Black at a large community organized banquet where Shirley Chisholm and Nikki Giovanni were the keynote speakers … After the formal banquet dinner and the speakers had spoken, dance music would be provided by Stax recording artists, 24-Carat Black …
I was given some status at that banquet because I had written the introduction to one of the notable speakers, none other than, Nikki Giovanni ….
I did not deliver the speech; that job fell to a Miss Wilma Greene, who’d asked our Saturday morning African dance class, Black Arts, who would be willing to help her with with writing this introduction speech for and about Nikki Giovanni …. I immediately volunteered and was rewarded with a ticket to the banquet ….
After the reception to my speech was met with so much praise by the poet/author, herself, and many others, I was on cloud 9 … I floated my way past the dignitaries and celebrities and found where the band was setting up … I more or less figured out who was in charge and introduced myself to the one and only, Mr Dale O Warren …
Mr Warren was a nephew to Berry Gordy, founder-in-chief of the Motown sound on Motown Records, Detroit Michigan ….
I eventually got to meet some of The 24-Carat Black Band members before they started to play … Their sound was incredible … simply amazing, funky but sophisticated soul … I partied the night away … By the time I left, I had an invitation to come to Chicago, Illinois to audition for a vacancy that had recently occurred in the female section of the band … The rest, as they say, is history … In fact, there is a book written about The 24-Carat Black Band and its history in this business of music … The book is a deeper dive by the original author of a 2018 Pitchfork article written by former Newsweek senior contributor, Zach Schonfeld, entitled, “24-Carat Black Were Sampled by Pusha-T, Kendrick Lamar, Nas, JAY-Z–And They’re Still Broke”. His follow-up book, “24-CARAT BLACK’S GHETTO MISFORTUNES WEALTH” released November 12, 2020 is written specifically as part of the 33⅓ book series …
I was ecstatic for three straight years while touring with the band; singing and learning the routines to each and every song on their already released album on the Stax label, “24-Carat Black: Ghetto: Misfortunes Wealth” … In the midst of that, we were also learning new materials for our 2nd album, “24-Carat Black: Gone: The Promises of Yesterday” … I was also being groomed to become my own star in my on universe as well as being a highly significant, well-oiled part of an indestructible entity known as The 24 Carat — the bonds we managed to establish were reinforced by the constant mantra of Mr Warren that our music was so important, so mind-blowing, that our grandchildren’s grandchildren would be listening to it and benefitting from our contributions to the generational wealth that we, ourselves, were creating with pure audacity … We believed whole heartedly in our mission to succeed at this thing called the music business …
However, behind the scenes, much was going on that we just didn’t know …. Mr Warren was eventually commissioned to do the soundtrack for the movie, “The Klansman” (1974) .. it required him and his new wife, our lead singer, Princess Hearn, to leave us on the road, staying in hotel after hotel, continuing to do gig after gig, while he went out to Los Angeles, writing and scoring the film’s soundtrack, conducting the orchestra, then recording the final mix for the film’s release … Only then, did he fabulously come back to oversee the recording of our second album ….
Recording “Gone The Promises of Yesterday” was so amazing … Mr Warren put a lot of time into each of us as individual artists as well as solidifying our already, so-far unbeatable, indefatiguable devotion to the group … The 24-Carat Black was indescribable and indestructible … We all were ‘ride or die’ for each other; Sticking together no matter what .
We’d been through the fire together while Mr Warren had been away …
We’d heard some rumblings in those months that followed his return; rumblings about the state of Stax Records; rumblings that if or when Clive Davis got fired that it would be curtains for The 24-Carat … Some of our members had already begun making phone calls to cronies in the music business who were in other bands … The scramble to survive was on …
And then one day, it happened …
We were persona non grata to all the hotels we’d usually been welcomed to … In fact, the last night we all stayed together in a hotel was in Benton Harbor, Michigan, 1975, early spring — there was still a chill in the air …. No … It was cold —and cold-blooded what we had to do next …
We had been instructed to be casual but to move our belongings out of the hotel surreptitiously … I decided to move mine to a large locker at the Trailways bus station … I had some really beautiful outfits; some shimmering gowns, with matching platform shoes for the stage … I wanted to preserve them as best I could … A lot of memorabilia like sheet music, run of show or set lists, napkins and menus from various exotic places and restaurants we’d splurged on; as well as, mementoes from the broken down hole-in-the-wall motels we’d been forced to call home as of late, where a dirty doorkey was a potent reminder of some temporary misery we’d experienced — all that kind of stuff was in a bag I always kept with me ….
Finally, on a particular day, in the Spring of 1975— we got the word: Leave the premises; get out of the hotel; get on a bus headed back to Chicago– we’re outta here … All the rumblings had opened up and finally swallowed The 24-Carat Black Band…
Our secretary in Chicago … a beautiful lady by the name of Gwen Broyls … became responsible for housing only 2 out of our 14-member, now a motley crew of a band; me and my sometimes road manager/fellow performer, aka Mr Warren’s partner, the one, the only — The Mighty Manchurian … I slept on the couch in her ultra modern, Chicago, 50th & The Lake, penthouse; while he slept on the floor of her sprawling apartment in the sky ….
I had only what I managed to carry out of the hotel in Benton Harbor … All that trouble I took to take load after load of my beautiful stage outfits to the locker at the bus station was for naught … Unbeknownst to me, after a specific time had passed, the bus station administrator could assume anything left in their lockers was abandoned … I missed the deadline and all my belonging were confiscated by the terminal …
This was definitely a pivotal moment in my career … eventually I got back home just in time for my youngest son’s fourth birthday … which was July 13, 1975 …. between that cold spring day in Benton Harbor and the sweltering heat of July in the Midwest…. I’d lived a whole lifetime and relived the 3 year experience of touring with The 24-Carat Black Band as THE defining moment of my life where I found out what I was truly made of ….
I stayed in the Midwest using the skills I’d honed from touring to enhance my acting career …. I was featured in play after play from my hometown of Indianapolis Indiana … however, my turning point was when I did the musical “Purlie!” in 1980 … I was nominated for and won the Encore Award for Outstanding Actor In A Musical Female” …
Someone whispered in my elated ears “Isn’t it time for you to go to New York?” I’m not one to argue so I showed up here in New York City in 1981 …. just in time to be cast in an 80 character spectacle of a play called “The Hotel Play” by Wallace Shawn, featuring Dominick and Griffin Dunne, Elizabeth McGovern, Linda Hunt, Mark Linn Baker, Maura Moynihan, Ed Bullins Wendy Wasserstein and then there was me — in my first New York City play … My name was in the New York Times along with my other 79 castmates but Ididn’t care… I had made a name for myself in NewYork City ….
From 1981 until 2020, I have never had to worry about getting cast in theatrical productions in New York … In fact I left the city in 2014 to take care of my mom until she passed in 2018; came back and was cast in the play “Sassy Mamas” in 2019 at The Black Spectrum Theater in Queens, NY, winning my first Audelco Award in 2020 at the age of 72 …
The Covid-19 pandemic was in full effect so the Audelco Award ceremony was held virtually … The whole virtual award ceremony, all 3 plus hours of it, is on YouTube … I can watch being awarded that seriouly auspicious, in absentia trophy on repeat every day of the week … The traditional ceremony is one night in a Manhattan theater, a blur of memories, people, and endless toasts with some alcoholic beverage or another, plus a bonus fuzzy head in the morning after, wondering how exactly did you get home … But because of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have a permanent record of that erstwhile tribute to actors … It’s one of the only good things I can say about the pandemic ….
The pivotal moment in my career during Covid-19 was when the New York City Artist Corps put a call out in early 2021 where artists that had been struggling during the pandemic could create something that could inspire a collective mentality in our communities and win a 5k grant ….
I need to explain that at an earlier decade of my 40 + years’ stay in New York City … I was hit by a car, crossing the street near my home in the historic Sugar Hill sectionof Harlem, coming from my “day job” of being a nurse in an OB/GYN clinic run by Montefiore Hospital in the nearby Washington Heights neighborhood … This accident led to my being homeless and living in a homeless shelter … I found myself in a homeless shelter — a very nice one for the ELDERLY — because by this time I’d aged from my 33-year-old 1981 self, to my 58-year-old 2006 self …
I was just like most of my acting peers …. We auditioned constantly and had “day jobs” to pay bills, eat, and get the necessities —taking voice, acting and other classes to hone our acting skills to an even more finessed point …
I was lucky that I went back to school for nursing in the 1990’s back in Indianapolis … As fate would have it, I was taking care of a patient who was a retired doctor from Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City and whose home was on Central Park West, Manhattan … His fashion-designer wife hired me so that he could be taken care of in their Alpine New Jersey mansion … She hired me out of the hospital he was admitted to in Indianapolis, flew him on a medically-staffed plane from Indianapolis to NewYork on September 11, 2002 … I got my affairs together in short order then flew to New York to begin my private duty nursing … By the time I had the job with the Montefiore Hospital OB/GYN Clinic in 2006, the dear doctor had died but his wife and I were still friends …
So, it’s 2006 now and I just got my “dream day job”; a doctors practice with 9 to 4 weekday hours, no late nights, no shift changing, no weekends — the best career enhancing job in nursing EVER …
I could keep this job another 10- 13-15 years, I thought to myself, in order to build up my retirement at Social Security … I was quite pleased with my 2006 self …
Of course, lurking in the back of my head, was booking a plum role on a New York theatrical stage … Theater was still my Numero Uno joy … I was truly dedicated to the eternal stage in my head: Nothing would ever stop the dream of eventually being on a legitimate Off-Broadway or even (gasp!) Broadway stage …
So while I was in the homeless shelter I had time to reflect on my journey … I wasn’t on drugs or alcohol … I was educated and motivated … I always had great jobs and paid my bills … I contributed to my mother in another state knowing that one day she’d more than likely need to live with me …. I asked God why? Why am I in a shelter? So many times … Why did this happen to me?
Slowly but surely I realized that it could happen to anyone …. Then I started to think about my ancestral home … My mother’s family was very important to me because I was raised by my grandmother, my mother’s mother, for a little over 6 years in the small rural town of Lagrange, in the very southern state of Georgia …
As I pondered my homelessness and compared it to my childhood memories, I began to realize that I was very much connected to a disconnect … One day, I sat down and wrote: “I’m Still Connected To The Disconnect” ….
The words poured out of me like a faucet I couldn’t stop …
Here I was in a homeless shelter writing as if my life depended on it … I wrote on the backs of envelopes and the backside of notices from AARP … I could barely keep up with my own mind … When finally it stopped, I’d written about my great-grandmother who was the daughter of a slave; my grandmother the granddaughter of a slave … My mother, just three generations from slavery, had graduated high school as Salutatorian, was then accepted to the all Black, all women, Spelman College in Atlanta in 1936 … And when the 1940’s climate predicted USA’s involvement in WWII, she got hired to work in Washington DC, then was transferred to Newark New Jersey; volunteering at the New York City Colored USO, she met and then married my father— eventually being transferred to St Louis Missouri where I was born after my father’s honorable discharge from the Navy at the end of his deployment in 1947 … Her final civilian transfer was to Indianapolis, Indiana in 1952 where she worked tirelessly for 30 more years until she retired with a total of 43 years of civillian service in 1985 …
When The New York Artists Corps called for submissions in 2021, I had developed that poem, “I’m Still Connected To The Disconnect”, into a performance piece/work shop by showcasing it in 2012 at the first Atlanta Black Theatre Festival … It went through several iterations until I finally finessed it into the 2021, New York City Artist Corps, award-winning, interactive, intergenerational, interracial community oriented workshop called “History In Da Key of G” ….
I use music and writing prompts to help participants create a personal memory of themselves which they share at the end of the writing session ….
Why is it called “History In Da Key of G”? My writing prompts all have answers with the first letter of the prompts’ answer being the letter “G” …
As of this moment, February 2025, my “History In Da Key of G” has allowed me another pivotal moment as I step into the role of motivational speaker: Telling my story as an inspiration to others is one of the most fulfilling roles EVER …
I cherish the moments in my life where I was forced to begin again … without any warning or motive … I’ve weathered a few storms and through it all still kept myself relevant and not too far removed from original intentions bred into me by the hardships of a family just trying to have an ordinary day … one generation removed from slavery.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
After I got hit by a car in May 2006, it was about the month of August or September of that same year, that I realized that I was totally depressed about everything in my life so far …. I had to do something … I decided that I needed a play or at least to get back to auditioning to bring me out of the doldrums …
I did a few auditions with no positive responses but at least I’d broken through my fears to approach living my authentic life again … And then it happened … I got cast in a Christmas play that was going to do a short three state tour starting right before Thanksgiving right up to Christmas Eve … The tour would start in New York City then we’d go to New Jersey and Connecticut … It was going to be performed mostly in Christian school auditoriums and in small local theaters in small towns that normally don’t get good entertainment … The play was a musical and all the music was pre-recorded … Each member of the cast was given a CD delineated by vocal status i.e., soprano, alto, baritone, etc. Many of the cast members were repeaters who returned year after year with kids and grandkids …. There were minimal scene changes with the POV of the play being the market days of old Jerusalem, where the love story of Mary and Joseph is revealed … Most of the cast portrayed sellers of goods in this make-believe musical love story where Roman soldiers keep their eyes on Jerusalem’s open air market where sellers gossip and children frolic while Mary and Joseph navigate their new love and her Immaculate Conception … I believe I was a seller vegetables and loaves of bread … There was much singing and merriment in this play with children playing, some helping others … There were the Roman soldiers and the Jewish pharisees in their elegant regal robes … We market sellers mostly wore costumes of peasants and common residents of the era before Jesus …
As part of the play, the Romans made the announcement that the people must report to their designated city to pay proper taxes and to be counted …
Time has passed and Mary and Joseph are no longer a young, flirty, unmarried couple … They are now married with Mary being heavily pregnant and having to travel to Bethlehem, no less …
We, (the common people), have now turned from happy vendors of fruits, vegetables, and freshly baked bread to unhappy Jews who decry the unjust practices of the Romans … We sing our song of woe, protesting the unjustified treatment by Rome; we end the song in a defiant pose with fists raised then a blackout as the audience applauds our defiant stance that the song we just finished indicates ….
The next scene is the manger with an angel sitting on the roof of the manger and the three Kings and shepherds are all gathered around Mary and the new baby … After our Jewish song of woe and defiance during the blackout we’re supposed to exit stage left or right really fast because of the importance of the angel on the manger scene ….
Well, for some reason on a particular night’s performance, I was too far center stage to exit quickly … We had a counting step that would take us off stage but after I’d done my count and my steps — somehow, I was still on the stage! Not wanting to be caught in the bright lights of the next scene, I moved quickly to what I thought was stage right: In reality I’d only moved further down the stage falling quite unexpectedly into the deepest darkness I’d ever experienced in my life …
I hit my head in a freefall and every thing was blacker than the black of the blackout … I don’t know how long it was before I was talking in my head about how I was now dead … I was saying “I can’t believe this is the way I died!” … Then I said, “My mother is gonna be so mad that she has to pay for my funeral …” “Oh my God” , I continued to say, “My kids don’t know I’m not coming home!” Then I paused and wondered , “If I’m dead, then who am I talking to?” I could not feel anything; nor did I have a feeling of left, right, up, down, or that I had arms, legs, hands or feet …. I wasn’t a body at all anymore; somehow I was just some type of ethereal non-being trying to figure out my death—then it came to me: “What if I’m not dead? Maybe I should try to move? What if I can move?”
Then it seemed as if somehow I figured out that I still had a neck with a head attached to it but that it was stuck, somehow, in this untenable position where I couldn’t figure out where my mouth was …
I wanted to know if I had a mouth whether it could speak– and if I did have a mouth — what would it say? The next thing I know something said, “Help I fell and I can’t get up!”
While I was in this existential state of believing I had died … the play had not progressed as planned …
Remember after the blackout following the song of the lamenting /defiant Jews …. all had exited the stage so the lights could reveal the angel sitting on the roof of the manger blowing his horn to announce to heaven and earth, the birth of Jesus … None of that happened … For some reason the lights did not come on and the pre-recorded trumpet of the angel never happened either … While I was discussing whether I was dead or not, in my delusional mental state —nothing was happening in real time … Someone from the cast had crept behind the theater curtains, heard me declare that I’d fallen and couldn’t get up, stepped onto the still darkened stage and said, “Turn on the house lights somebody fell off the stage!”
I heard the shuffling of feet and I could see that lights were coming on … I eventually discovered that I had eyes and could see glimpses of people’s faces all in a blur, murmuring, peering down on me and then their quick inhalation of breath as I asked, being thankful that I really wasn’t dead– I said “What??What’s the matter … get me out of here please!” To which several voices were murmuring no … who’s gonna do it … wow … no way they whispered … By this time, the director’s wife, I believe her name was Karen … Karen said “Nobody’s touching you until the EMT’S get here … they’ve been called!” I said can somebody please call my son … Somebody put a phone up to my ear, I heard ringing and then my oldest son’s voice … “Hey sweetheart are you ok … well I fell off the stage into a hole …. I can’t get out and nobody wants to get me out … they’re waiting on the ambulance baby but I’m okay and I’m not dead!” I couldn’t hold back my emotions at this point … I was still wondering why— why can’t I feel anything? I can’t feel my legs … I can’t feel my arms … why can’t you guys get me out of this hole?
It turns out that I’d fallen between the railings of the delivery pit staircase … my head was lodged in the corner at the base of the stairs while my arms were up under my chest … My torso was splayed onto the stairs themselves while my legs were bent at the knees over my back which is why no one would touch me … it was like I was part pretzel, part contortionist gone horribly awry; my body’s position was askew and scary … The good thing was that I had not landed on the railing; it was all iron work and I surely would have had at the least some broken teeth and facial bones …
The town that we were performing in that night was God knows where in New Jersey … The ambulance took over 30 minutes to get to the small private Christian school where the performances were being held … It is ironic that earlier that day, I’d asked a stage hand for glow tape to be placed on the stage so that even in the blackouts we’d still be able to see how to exit and some entrances were in a blackout as well … needless to say … that was my last non-union play ….
The EMT’S and ambulance finally arrived …. Mind you; the audience never left the theater … They stayed during this whole ordeal … The EMT that got down in the hole with me was very large … I could only see his feet at first; but surely he was the right one to be there … He assured me every time he did anything … He was so gentle placing the cervical collar around my neck which was still face down in the pit … Then he had to turn my twisted body from face-down to face-up so that the gurney could go under me … I really don’t remember feeling anything because I still had no sense of my body at all …. Somehow I was finally on my back, on a gurney that was being lifted up and out of that pit …
The audience — who, BTW had never left, started clapping and cheering as the gurney I was finally on, seemed to float above the pit … I was obligated to respond to my faithful fans by trying to see if my hand and arm worked …. I did get to give them a weak little wave as the gurney floated out to the waiting ambulance …
Well this long story started in the fall of 2006 … I was 58 years old …It is now 2025 and I am approaching my 77th year … I believe that this achievement in and of itself is quite enough to illustrate my resillience and the blessings that God has bestowed on my journey in this Life …
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