NF Play "Native Guard" Revived at the Atlanta History Center: Explores Black Civil War Experience

Non-Fiction
According to the Times, the play is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection that:

conjures little-known scenes from the black Civil War experience, and challenges the way the broader story of the war has been told and memorialized.

...Audiences at the play, which runs through Feb. 4, are being encouraged to stay after the performance to take part in what is billed as an Act II, a moderated audience conversation about the work, race and history.

At intermission, they are encouraged to walk through the History Center’s Civil War exhibition and admire its extensive collection of rifles and ordnance, with words from Ms. Trethewey’s imagined monologue by a black Union soldier still fresh in their ears: “Some names shall deck the page of history/as it is written on stone. Some will not.”
 
Natasha Trethewey spoke with the NY Times:

Ms. Trethewey’s celebrated 2006 book is itself a kind of literary monument to her experience growing up in Mississippi as a biracial child, to her African-American mother, and to the Louisiana Native Guards, the black Union soldiers who fought on the Mississippi coast and guarded a prison camp for captured Confederates at Ship Island, south of Biloxi.

“The book is trying, in many ways, to talk about those things that have been forgotten or erased or somehow left out of the historical record, and I’m very concerned with trying to inscribe, or reinscribe, those things,” Ms. Trethewey, an English professor at Northwestern University, said in a recent phone interview.
 
The Alliance Theater, which is putting on the play, decided to approach the Atlanta History Center as the location for the play because its own theater is undergoing renovations. From the NYT:

Producers offered free wine to entice the audience at the first preview to stay for Act II. The racially mixed crowd seemed eager enough to weigh in on what they had seen, and talk about the ways the distortions and elisions of American history have affected their present. One woman, who said she had moved from South Africa, lamented that this country had never engaged in a formal reckoning with its past, the way her homeland did after the fall of apartheid. “The lack of a formal reconciliation process here in the United States,” she said, is “still baffling to me.”
 
From the play:

Southern History

Before the war, they were happy, he said,
quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year

history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,
and better off under a master’s care.


I watched the words blur on the page. No one
raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.

It was late; we still had Reconstruction
to cover before the test, and–luckily–

three hours of watching Gone with the Wind.
History
, the teacher said, of the old South–

a true account of how things were back then.
On screen a slave stood big as life: big mouth,

bucked eyes, our textbook’s grinning proof–a lie
my teacher guarded. Silent, so did I.
 
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