Black Joy as Resistance: Reflections on Blues for an Alabama Sky at Spelman College
- shadyradical
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
This past weekend, October 23-26, I had the pleasure of attending Spelman College’s 2025–26 season opener, Blues for an Alabama Skyby Pearl Cleage, directed by Keith Arthur Bolden. The play opened the Department of Theatre & Performance’s new season themed “Black Joy as Resistance,” and it could not have been a more perfect beginning.
Set in Harlem during the summer of 1930—the beginning of the Great Depression—Cleage’s story draws us into a world pulsing with art, love, struggle, and possibility. Under Professor Bolden’s direction, the production became more than a revival of the Harlem Renaissance; it became a mirror—one that reflected both who we were and who we still are.
From the moment the lights came up on Angel, Guy, Delia, Sam, and Leland, I could feel the room breathing with them. Cleage’s words, Bolden’s direction, and the student actors’ performances offered an embodied conversation about the ways love, faith, and freedom are constantly being negotiated.
Learning Through the Stage: A Conversation with My Daughter
I brought my seven-year-old daughter, Windy Oya Radical, with me to see the play. I didn’t realize how transformative that decision would be.
Windy and I have been talking a lot lately about love, gender, and sexuality—the kind of conversations that don’t always have easy beginnings. She had recently shared some thoughts that surprised me, revealing that despite my efforts to raise her with openness and inclusion, there were still gaps in her understanding of love between same-sex couples and the ways society sometimes polices who we can love.
Watching Blues for an Alabama Sky together shifted everything.
It gave us the chance to move from the abstract to the tangible—from theory to lived emotion. Through Angel’s resilience, Guy’s dreams, and Delia’s faith, Windy could see how our ideas about love, freedom, and morality affect real people in real time. She could feel the weight of judgment, the cost of silence, and the tenderness that survives even in pain.
After the show, our conversation was different. She understood, in a deeper way, that love—every form of it—demands courage and compassion. I left feeling grateful not just for the art, but for the space it created for a kind of intergenerational learning that no textbook or lecture could replicate.
For that, I thank Professor Bolden and the Spelman Theatre & Performance community. They didn’t just stage a play—they staged a dialogue between past and present, between art and life, between parent and child.
Pearl Cleage’s Living Archive
I have been obsessed with Pearl Cleage’s work for years. Her writing captures the tenderness and tension of Black life with a precision that feels both poetic and prophetic. I’ve spent many afternoons at Emory University’s Rose Library, reading through her papers—touching the texture of her drafts, notes, and letters.
Each time I visit, I’m reminded that archives are not just repositories of the past—they’re living, breathing testimonies to how we continue to shape the future. There are still a few restricted boxes in Cleage’s collection that I can’t wait to see in the coming years. I imagine they hold more of the stories and reflections that have shaped the worlds she invites us into—worlds where love, gender, art, and activism are intertwined.
Carrying the Light Forward
As Professor Bolden wrote in his director’s note, “It’s the Renaissance all over again—a convergence of energy, curiosity, and risk.”
That’s what this production felt like: a rebirth.
A reminder that Black theatre is not nostalgia—it’s a practice of remembering ourselves into the future.
In 1930 Harlem, Angel and Guy dreamed of a better tomorrow.
In 2025 Atlanta, Spelman’s students carried that dream forward, and my daughter and I sat together under the same imaginative sky—witnessing what happens when art becomes a bridge between generations.
The Show Program
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