Covenant on the Hertz Stage: A Southern Gothic Reckoning. 11.8.2025
- shadyradical
- Nov 10
- 8 min read
Updated: Nov 14
Written by Dr. shady Radical, Founder of The Radical Archive Project
Field Notes — November 2025
A Weepy Day in the Black Mecca
As a Black queer womanist, memory-working, underemployed mama raising a child in a one-parent household—from the North but now rooted in the South, the so-called Black Mecca—navigating a new friendship turned relationship, I was already having a weepy day. I was in tears before the play even started. Between holding the weight of my work, the precarity of my profession, and the constant balancing act of motherhood and meaning-making, I walked into the theatre open and raw—already feeling the sharp tenderness of emotional connection, the kind that stirs deep emotion, sensitivity, and the unspoken ache that comes with being fully seen by another woman.
Covenant didn’t soothe me—it shook me. It met me exactly where I was: in that in-between space of faith and fatigue, love and longing, fear and fight.
The genre—Southern Gothic—has always fascinated me. Rooted in the grotesque and the macabre, it exposes the buried social ills of the Southern landscape. Think Get Out, Nope, and even 12 Years a Slave. Here, playwright York Walker brings that lineage into the Black home, into the intimacy of women’s lives, and into the quiet power of queer becoming.
In the encore program for the show, Walker noted his desire to explore how Black people and Black queer people show up in different genres. That resonated deeply with me—as someone who has been teaching about the historical context of Black people in America through novels, scholarship, and other creative works. I have always been interested in how writers and artists use narrative and performance to recover what history forgets—and how they stretch genre to make room for Black imagination.
Teaching Context: Re-narrating the Archive
In my classes at Spelman College—whether in African Diaspora and the World or in my Art History courses—I return often to works that challenge the limits of representation and the silence of the archive. These stories help students see how memory work can be both scholarship and survival.
When I watched Covenant, I couldn’t help but notice how the relationship between Ruthie and Avery echoed the one between Celie and Shug in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Set in 1930s Georgia—the same decade and landscape in which Covenant unfolds—Alice Walker’s story, full of violence, Christianity, resistance, and the enduring legacy of slavery, traces the intertwined lives of Celie and Shug Avery in rural Georgia across the early 1900s. In many ways, Covenant exists right in the middle of The Color Purple’s timeline, as if picking up the spiritual and emotional questions Ms. Alice left echoing through the South.
Even their names—Avery and Shug Avery—seem to hum in recognition across time. Both stories root themselves in domestic Southern life and the blues. Both women—Shug and Avery—share a passion for singing that becomes both a source of freedom and a form of possession. Both Shug and Avery return home marked by physical and emotional distress, yet we later learn that Avery is also burdened by a secret—beneath her exhaustion lies a secret and an unspoken negotiation over what must be sacrificed for liberation.
While the relationships in the two stories unfold differently, they share friendship as the foundation of connection. Alice Walker offers love as the road to self-recognition and tenderness; York Walker meditates on how the repression of love—when tenderness must remain hidden within a world that punishes it—can twist desire into desperation, leading to deals with the devil and the ache of damnation. The difference in tone—one redemptive, one horrific—reflects the genre shift. Yet both hold truth. Both show the peril and beauty of Black women striving to be whole in a world that makes that wholeness nearly impossible.
Regardless of the course or context, I often find myself introducing my students to Alice Walker’s definition of “womanist,” first published in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens:
“A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.”
That definition captures how I see both Celie and Shug—and, in a way, Ruthie and Avery. Each of these women fights for emotional flexibility, for a balance between laughter and tears, and for survival that does not abandon tenderness.
I also teach Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem, which pulls Tituba from the colonial archive into a fully realized world. In the forward, Condé describes Tituba as a woman born of trauma—conceived during a violent rape aboard a slave ship bound for Barbados—and made into myth through accusation and fear.
In class, we use Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation to imagine the inner life of Tituba and to ask what it means to be called a witch or devil-maker when you are already living through hell.
For me, these works—The Color Purple, I, Tituba, and now Covenant—create an intellectual and emotional bridge. They all ask: what does faith look like when the world has already betrayed you? What happens when survival demands the uncanny? When the supernatural becomes the only language left for the unspeakable?
Dr. Radical's Spelman College Fall 2025 ADW students with daughter, Windy Radical and artist, Saiel Solehman
Students: Kortney Snead, Grace Walker, Sydney Neschis, Zenaiyah Rubenstein, Riauna Young, Asia Rackley, Basil Mann, and Olivia Ohlson
The Care Around the Spirit
During the post-show talkback, actor Deidrie Henry (Mama) shared how director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden led rituals to spiritually cleanse the stage—a gesture of care and accountability to the ancestors. That testimony affirmed what I already felt watching the play: that Black artmaking is sacred labor.
Kajese-Bolden, who serves as the Jennings Hertz Co-Artistic Director at the Alliance Theatre, brought immense care and precision to this work. Married to Keith Bolden, Theatre and Performance Professor at Spelman College, she understands the local ecosystem of Atlanta’s Black performance intimately. This was my first time seeing her directorial work—and my first encounter with York Walker’s writing—but I imagine that the care, the subtle and loud devilish notes, and the impeccable pacing we witnessed on that stage are due to her timing, attention to detail, and distinct directorial vision.
It requires protection, prayer, and community.
Costume designer Shilla Benning also deserves recognition for her meticulous and deeply felt work. From Honeycomb’s suspenders to the lace ruffles on Avery’s yellow dress, every detail helped situate us in 1930s Georgia. Ruthie’s dark frock, for instance, subtly conveyed class distinction without ever feeling heavy-handed. These period pieces were simple yet elegant, capturing the dignity and texture of Black life with care.
Watching Avery cross an imaginary log, with black leather Mary Janes in hand and white socks tucked neatly inside, followed by a smitten Johnny “Honeycomb,” I felt completely transported. It was a moment of sweet, innocent love—relatable, believable, and tender.
I have had the privilege of working with Ms. Benning during my early years at Tyler Perry Studios in the costume department and know her to be behind much of Atlanta’s theatrical landscape, including work with Ballethnic Dance Company. Her artistry continues to give visual form to the beauty and resilience of Black performance in this city.
Why This Matters
For my work with The Radical Archive Project (t.r.a.p.) and my archival scholarship around Black performance and community memory, productions like Covenant feel like home. They hold everything I care about—Black storytelling, performance, the metaphysical, the maternal, the South, the unseen.
As I continue building The Radical Archive Project, I think often about how to preserve not only the playbills and programs but also the emotional residue of experiences like this one—the laughter, the tears before the lights dim, the ritual of cleansing, the audience sighs. That’s the kind of metadata that doesn’t make it into institutional archives, but it’s what really tells the story of Black performance in Atlanta.
I haven’t yet been able to make all materials accessible through the TRAP Archive Search Tool due to limited resources—but that remains the vision. I hope to collect and curate playbills, programs, and reflections like these so that Atlanta’s Black performance history can be preserved and explored.
“Every performance leaves an archival trace. I’m here to help us find it, hold it, and honor it.”
Help us make this vision real—volunteer or donate to support The Radical Archive Project, in development now as the premiere destination for Black Performance in Atlanta.
About the Play
Cast
Brittany Deneen as Violet
Alaysia Renay Duncan as Ruthie
Deidrie Henry as Mama
Jemarcus Kilgore as Johnny “Honeycomb” James
Jade Payton as Avery
Understudies
Makallen Kelley as Violet
Danielle Montgomery as Ruthie
Anjil Jeter as Mama
Isaiah Cowan as Johnny “Honeycomb” James
Jadé Davis as Avery
Playwright: York Walker
Director: Tinashe Kajese-Bolden
Venue: Alliance Theatre — Hertz Stage
Dates: October 8 – November 9, 2025
“A suspense-filled thriller that delivers one devilish twist after another… Avery is desperate for a way out of her small Georgia town. When her childhood friend Johnny returns after making a name for himself as a blues star, Avery may have found her chance. But Johnny’s sudden fame leads to gossip that he made a deal with the devil … and before long it becomes clear that he’s not the only one in town with a secret.”
— Alliance Theatre
Title: Covenant by York Walker, dir. Tinashe Kajese-Bolden.
Where & When: Alliance Theatre — Hertz Stage, October 8–November 9 2025.
Additional themes highlighted in press: Inspired by the myth of Robert Johnson, steeped in the blues, invoking generational trauma, faith, and the supernatural in a Black Southern context.
Important content note: Audience recommended age 16+. Depicts drinking, gun violence, domestic violence, sex & sexuality.
My Reflections & Takeaways
The setting of a 1930s domestic space (single-parent mother and daughters) made the supernatural feel intimate rather than distant.
The all-Black cast and the choice to centre Black characters in a horror/thriller genre was refreshing and critical.
The talkback and ritual of cleansing the stage reminded me of archival labor—the necessity of care, spiritual accountability, and lineage.
As I taught Tituba and critical fabulation this semester, I kept thinking: What happens when survival demands the uncanny? When the pact with the devil is re-imagined through a Black queer lens? How do belief, rumor, and community co-create the supernatural? Covenant helped me ask those questions anew.
On genre: Southern Gothic often surfaces the grotesque to make visible what is normally hidden—social cruelty, haunted interiors, trauma embedded in place. Covenant employed that beautifully while centring Blackness and queerness in a way that felt good.
Why This Matters
For my work with the Radical Archive Project (TRAP) and my archival scholarship around Black performance and community memory, productions like Covenant are rich sites of inquiry. They express how memory, myth, and performance intersect—how domestic spaces become archives of desire, fear, belief, and refusal. Documenting the cast, the talkback, the audience responses, the staging rituals: all these matter. They offer metadata for future archival work about Black theatre, genre innovation, and the embodied archive of performance.
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