Fortune’s Bones Are Our Bones

Fortune’s Bones Are Our Bones
November 10, 2011
By Jane Hirshberg

Jane Hirshberg is the Community Engagement Manager at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

It seems that people have one of two reactions to Fortune’s story when they first hear it. They are either blown away or they look at me quizzically, as if to wonder why we would care about this piece of history from Connecticut. I don’t try to convince people they should care. But I do.

I first heard about Fortune’s bones from Marie Galbraith at the Mattatuck Museum, probably in 1996. She was very excited about a group of people in her community who had started working together on projects about their heritage and history. They called themselves the African American History Project (AAHP) and they had collected oral histories and turned them into a play, and now were researching the skeleton in the Museum’s closet to find out more about who Fortune really was. They had not decided, at that point, to commission a poet to write about the story, let alone a composer to set the poet’s work to music.

When I learned that I was to work on the Fortune’s Bones project for the Center, I was amazed that the Waterbury story had made its way to Maryland. When I found out that Dr. Ysaye Barnwell brought the story to our attention, I realized the magnitude of the work that the AAHP had done. When it came time to put together a group of people from our community who’d work with us on this project, I honestly was not sure what kind of response we would get but I began receiving answers to my own apprehension almost immediately.

The first response to an initial email message I sent to about a dozen people in the community came from Steven Newsome, a long-time friend and colleague. His response was quite simple: “YES.”

Steven referred me to several other people, including Rev. Nolan Williams, a musician, composer and religious educator who lives and works in the DC area. Nolan called me as soon as he received my note and agreed to be a part of the working group, but not until telling me how blown away he was by reading about Fortune. He was nearly speechless.

When we had our first meeting, it became clear that to not care about this story was to not care about how we, as humans living together on this planet, have the capacity not only to commit horrible injustices upon one another but to forgive one another for committing them. The people in the room, representing a diverse mix of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, wanted to talk about Fortune. They wanted to talk about his bones and why they have not been buried. They wanted to talk about how we can work together to bring awareness to yet another story in America’s history that brings shame rather than pride, and how that awareness can lead us to forgiveness. They wanted to talk about how Fortune’s bones are our bones. They wanted to create experiences for people of all generations and ages, relating to Fortune’s story. They stayed longer than we planned to meet. They did not want to leave after the meeting ended.

This was the first of many meetings that have happened since then, and the first of many that will happen still as the working group creates an event to conclude the Center’s Fortune’s Bones project. Between now and April 15, 2012 — the date of the closing event — there will be several more opportunities to gather, talk, question and ponder the story of Fortune.