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Maryland may have been a Union state, but before the Civil War, it certainly had a number of plantations whose owners bought a number of slaves. And those contradictions, and the families involved in them, come to life on a Prince George’s County Community College stage this weekend.
The play, “Out of the Vineyard,” is being put on by Joe’s Movement Emporium, an art house based in Mount Rainier. It was written by an artist named Psalmayene 24, but it takes the words of those who were deeply involved in the fight for freedom centuries ago — including those whose descendants are still alive in Prince George’s County and the D.C. region today.
“It uses the verbatim script of interviews of seven people talking about their family’s history and how they came to understand about freedom suits and freedom making in Maryland and money of it, specifically Prince George’s County,” said Brooke Kidd, the executive director of Joe’s Movement Emporium.
“A lot of this … was inspired by a book of history called ‘A Question of Freedom,’ and in that, there’s all of these names and places that we’re so familiar with that we learn more about these families,” she added.
Some of the families referenced in the book include the Queens, who were enslaved by Jesuits on a plantation in current day Bowie, and who at one point in the late 1700s, had an all-white jury agree with the arguments put forth by her family’s lawyer, Francis Scott Key.
Key claimed that a woman named Mary Queen was born free. Eventually, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Marshall ruled against the Queens.
“Maryland and D.C. had a substantial amount of freedom suits, but you also had quite a large concentration of families that were freed in many other pathways, and there was a strong abolition movement here,” Kidd said.
The show took the stage on Friday night with another showing on Saturday, Feb. 2, at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. The final show runs on Wednesday, Feb. 26, at 3 p.m. It’s about 90 minutes long.
“It brings history forward in a really accessible way,” Kidd said.
“You learn about these family histories on specific events or moments in American history. The way the stories are layered, it reveals some common themes about the importance of our ancestors and our heritage. The strength we learn from hearing the histories of our people that have overcome challenges — there’s a lot of resilience that comes through in these stories.”
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