I’m Free Because I’m a Fugitive—I’m a Fugitive Because I’m Not Free

Abstract

Dragonfly/Robin Laverne Wilson (all pronouns) is a multidisciplinary artist who leads performance rituals for collective liberation. For the past three decades, Dragonfly has collaborated with other media-makers in radio, video, live performance, grassroots organizing, and electoral politics to push forward social change. Known for their powerful embodiment of unique performance personas, Sister Deacon Dragonfly emerged as a force to be reckoned with as a leader alongside Reverend Billy in the Church of Stop Shopping Choir. The first Black Lives Matter uprising birthed her tambourine-wielding alter-ego “Miss Justice Jester,” a hybrid of the irreverent court jester and the West African Griot. As Miss Justice Jester, she has facilitated vigils and workshops and supported direct actions for racial, economic and environmental justice. In this and other personas, Wilson performs regularly with Border Brujo Guillermo Gomez-Peña and the ecosexual innovators Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. Her current project Absconded is a recurring abolitionist media performance intervention featuring the historical figure Ona Maria Judge Staines, who liberated herself at age twenty-two from the family of George and Martha Washington and was never caught. The work premiered with two promenade street performances in Manhattan in 2020 and an online exhibition in 2021, all crafted under severe pandemic conditions, during a contested presidential election, and in the wake of a season of Black Liberation organizing that popularized notions of police and prison abolition. This interview was recorded in three sessions in September 2020, November 2020, and February 2021.■ Multimedia performance ritual for collective liberation is a necessary but niche creative form. How did you find your way to this kind of work?I had the serendipitous luck of studying with Linda Montano as an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin. I wasn’t even an art major—I was just defecting from the College of Communications after having so many negative experiences there. I took her three-dimensional design class, but I don’t think we learned anything about traditional design. We had assignments like “Find a cure for AIDS” and “Make your power stick.” She pushed me towards ritualized abstraction and, of course, “life as art,” since she was in the midst of her durational piece 14 Years of Living Art. Her work, as well as the work of my now-friends Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, inspired me to create my own structures designed ritualistically around my own purposes. What are those?My performance purposes are always two-fold: the internal impetus is to heal or purge something within me that I am carrying as a result of unresolved intergenerational traumas. Then the external motivation is to educate in the process. I found out before my father died that he always wanted to be a history teacher. That seems like a simple dream, but not when you’re a Black man born in 1935. My father is a big part of the reason why I am the Pan-African, Black Liberation-oriented, culture-minded person that I am. Through my performances, I can become the history teacher my father wanted to be. While I’m not a trained historian, I consider myself an intuitive archivist, and my art practice reflects that. Your current piece Absconded Project both emerges from historical archives and is generating its own multimedia performance archive. Could you describe it?Absconded Project is a recurring performance with both embodied and virtual presence. The first iteration was livestreamed on Instagram, and the second is still viewable online through the Hemispheric Institute’s HemiTV YouTube channel. It is a site-specific and context-based moving monument in dedication to Ona Maria Judge Staines, known sometimes as Ony Judge. Ona wears a dress and a bonnet evocative of the post-American Revolution Antebellum South, fabricated in such a way that it resembles a statue. The body makeup has also been applied with that aesthetic. I even added little jewels to my cheeks to represent her freckles, which were one of her distinguishing features mentioned in the advertisement posted to retrieve her.Since Ona is a statue, she doesn’t speak. She moves, but words don’t actually come out of my mouth. Instead, a prerecorded sonic score guides the performance: a combination of music, found sound, and extemporaneous narration that I record as Ona, channeling her and speaking about the things that I learned, remembered, and have internalized from reading Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught. That book is my foundational text in addition to other research. An overarching theme of the piece is the notion of fugitivity. When Ona escaped, she was never fully free. The Washingtons tried at least twice to bring her back. The first time they tried to convince her. Then they tried to have her and her infant firstborn captured by force. She was a fugitive for the rest of her life. That is the paradox of Blackness in this country: I’m free because I’m a fugitive and I’m a fugitive because I’m NOT free. Why Ona? Why now?In the U.S., we are currently questioning to whom we build monuments. So many of those people in the United States honored that way—by the names of streets, the names of important buildings, landmarks and what not—are slave owners. So many are confederates—an identity that is literally an act of treason. And so many are colonizers from other countries, like Christopher Columbus. As we move towards collective decolonization, we are challenging all of that. This performance offers up Ona as someone worthy of being honored—to replace the slave owners and specifically George Washington, who is honored ubiquitously in this country. Concerning the monuments that still exist, what if we were to challenge them with other monuments? Why don’t we honor Ona as one of our forgotten founding mothers, coming back from the past to share wisdom from her experience as a fugitive? I think she’s an important counterpoint to Harriet Tubman. Can you talk about the structure of the various performance iterations?My Black Southern Baptist upbringing always seems to be a default, especially the use of repetition. Repetition in the sermon, repetition in the music, repetition as a part of the improvisational flow. Those cultural structures remain a huge part of my worldview, and probably explain my long tenure with the Church of Stop Shopping Choir. I’m also inspired by the lineage of the Gullah/Geechee, South Carolina/Georgia cultural corridor with its link to West African traditions. The cyclical, call-and-response structure of so many religious ceremonies appeals to me.For Absconded Project, I use the familiar repetition of U.S. national holidays as a structure and an impetus. The occasions upon which I bring her to life, the holidays, or what I’ve called “hella days,” are always a linguistic inversion, a play on words, because the Black experience is often the inverse of the mainstream white experience. Labor Day, which in 2020 was the inaugural occasion for Absconded, is #UnpaidLaborDay2020. The second iteration, on Election Day 2020, was called #EjectionDay2020. In 2021, our planned live event for January 20 was called #UnalteredNationDay, was canceled due to the attack on the capital but manifested through livetweets with that hashtag. In February, Ona and I celebrated #PrecedentsDay2021 with the opening of a multimedia online exhibition. The route for #UnpaidLaborDay2020 specifically confronted the legacy of exploitation of Black labor in the founding of the country and in New York City. Can you say more about your choices of location and how you engaged with them?The route frames the question: who are we honoring with this holiday, when there’s still the extreme debt of unpaid labor in this country to the Black people who literally built it? We begin at Federal Hall, under the George Washington statue that commemorates where he took his first oath of office as president. Then we processed to the New York Stock Exchange, crossing Wall Street, where, just a few blocks down, enslaved people were once sold in an open-air market. In that transition, from Federal Hall to the NYSE, there’s this huge American flag looming ominously over you, conflating capitalism with democracy. Ona’s response to that—my response to that—was a track called “The Blood Splattered Banner,” which is the national anthem with a series of blood curdling screams overlaid. It felt good to play it right there, on behalf of all the men, women, and children who probably screamed while being separated from the people that they loved.At the New York Stock Exchange, Ona interacted with the statue of the Fearless Girl as if she were Nelly Custus—Martha’s granddaughter to whom she was to be given, which was the catalyst for her to abscond. Ona was oblivious to the tourists who were trying to interact with the statue on a superficial level but acknowledged the group of police cars parked right there.This was followed by a promenade up Broadway, going past St. Paul’s Chapel, where George Washington went after his inauguration, ending at the African Burial Ground National Monument. As we turned onto Broadway, the sonic score invokes two more ancestors: the voices of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, narrators of a documentary on the history of the African Burial Ground. There’s this little snippet where Ruby Dee, with that beautiful, luscious husky voice of hers, says: “Broadway—one of America’s most famous avenues.” I looped it, over and over: “Broadway—one of America’s most famous avenues, Broadway—one of America’s most famous avenues, Broadway—Broadway—Broadway”—on and on. The repetition was trancelike. We also know that the broadening of Broadway was done primarily by enslaved Black laborers under Dutch rule. Again, unpaid labor. I appreciate the way this piece brings attention to the African Burial Ground. It was ignored for so long, even though it had been marked on maps. Can you talk about what it was like to end the performance there?The closer we got to the burial ground, the more we could feel its presence. At this point, I was going back and forth in my mind between being Ona, as well as being Dragonfly observing me as Ona. The musical underbed of the sonic score is loops of the first two bars of Nina Simone’s “Blackbird” underneath audio clips from the documentary. Repetition is trancelike. The repetition is to hit people in the head. To put them in a trance, yes, but also to demand, do you hear me now? When I crossed the street at the end of City Hall, I really felt them. I crossed the street with that kind of reverence like: Yo, this is holy land. Understand that the burial ground is not constricted to that spot where they’ve made the memorial. It is blocks wide. They believe that there’s tens of thousands of corpses in the ground all around there. I can’t even come up with a metaphor because it’s not a metaphor. Federal buildings literally built on top of Black bodies.The penultimate moment of the performance was the only time that Ona actually uttered sound. It was a song that I grew up on, one of my father’s favorite songs on one of his favorite Ray Charles albums—it’s a cover of a Randy Newman song called “Sail Away.” When George Floyd was murdered, I needed that song. That song was medicine. So I sang along.As the procession was about to begin, I had been putting out all these little fires, coordinating the livestream and everything. There was very little time to get into my performance headspace. All I did was say, “Daddy, are you with me?” And I felt him say, “Go do it.” At the end, singing along with that Ray Charles song, I felt him again. The piece honors Ona, but it’s also honoring closer ancestors: my father, Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. I brought a lot of ancestors with me into this divine spectacle.A big part of this is asking the ancestors for their permission to tell their story, and through that permission, the guidance to do so with the reverence, respect, and integrity that it demands and deserves. What happened on #UnpaidLaborDay would not have happened the way it did without Ona’s consent. She was within me that whole time, looking around in wonderment of how much things have changed, but haven’t at the same time. We still have slave owners running this country. Despite being in conversation with his statues, the piece is not about George Washington. Your own communion with ancestors seems much more central as well as the work of bringing people’s attention to the realities of our country’s foundation. Specifically the foundation of our economy, built on the literal graves of Black and indigenous people.Yeah, George Washington is just the catalyst for her to show up and speak her truth. It’s her I’m listening to. I was inspired by a colleague of mine, mayfield brooks, who does an amazing series of performances in honor of trans activist Marsha P. Johnson, who died in 1992. One of brooks’s practices is to journal daily to Marsha as a way of being in conversation with her. So I started a journal to Ona, and every time I write, I get deeper into understanding her. I see the ritual of journaling to Ona as a way to open a portal of conversation with her. Are there any other artists who’ve inspired this work?I was also inspired by Ebony Noelle Golden’s epic performance piece called 125th and Freedom. It is a four-hour long processional from the East River to the Hudson River across 125th Street, stopping along the journey for contemplation, meditation, interaction, public ritual, and spectacle. The overarching narrative represents oppression starting at the East River and liberation by the time they make it to the Hudson. That piece activates different spaces, bringing awareness to things that people need to see or think about in those particular places. I’d like to hear about the #EjectionDay2020 performance on November 3, 2020.It definitely felt very different. This second time felt less about Ona’s personal narrative, but rather, Ona coming back to bear witness to what we are experiencing now, and how the present connects to the things that she lived through. The costume was designed to look like a marble statue rather than a bronze one, partially in conversation with the monument at Columbus Circle. This color shift to a lighter palette felt appropriate because the whole experience was very ghostly.It was also more personal, because it was my way of dealing with this election cycle. I was able to keep calm because I knew I was putting on the public record the observation that none of this is new, and that we should not be surprised. The nation is split in half because it’s always been split in half, and U.S. American presidents have always looked for loopholes for their own benefit. The name of the piece was a manifestation to eject this tyrant from office, but also a way to honor the people and communities who have been ejected from their homes and their land for the sake of these hollow concepts of America, of capitalism, of the economy. How did you determine the route for this performance?I let the geography tell the story. The procession started at the historic site of Seneca Village, founded in 1825 by free Black Americans as the first such settlement in the city. It was razed in 1857 to build Central Park, in one of the first cases of eminent domain. Over 1,600 people were displaced! Then Ona went to confront a statue of Teddy Roosevelt, who was one of the prominent U.S. colonizers causing trouble in Latin America. This statue, which is about to come down, thanks to the long work of organizers, has Roosevelt on a horse flanked by a Black man and an Indigenous man, both partially naked. The design emphasizes white dominance.Then a procession down Columbus Avenue, passing through an area once known as San Juan Hill, a predominantly Black, brown and Irish immigrant commu­nity that apparently had a cultural scene that ranked up there with Harlem until it was torn down in 1959 to create Lincoln Center. They used the name of the so-called “Great Emancipator” to invoke liberation but it was just more internal colonialism—gentrification, displacement, and breaking up communities. The piece ended with an infinity loop, a figure eight, traced around Tr*mp International Hotel and the marble statue of Columbus.I was arrested at Lincoln Center in 2011 for doing an anti-Koch Brothers sing-along, and I was arrested again in 2017 at the Columbus Circle globe outside Tr*mp International Hotel for doing a banner drop that said, “Love No Borders. Stop the Deportations.” For “Ejection Day,” I reclaimed Lincoln Center and that area around Trump International Hotel on my terms, despite the acts of violence that occurred against me there. What were some of the highlights of #EjectionDay2020 for you?I had a profound moment with the Frederick Douglass statue in front of the New York Historical Society. At once, I was Ona communing with Douglass, this fellow abolitionist, but I was also Robin communing with her father from the other side. I couldn’t help but weep. It felt like I was holding my father and thanking him for imbuing me with the knowledge of my history and my culture. He had a simple dream of being a history teacher, and here I am in my own way working with history. That was my personal highlight of the performance.Another highlight was Ona’s keen eye for recognizing people who would be considered of her caste. At one point she’s going down Columbus Avenue and she has a full entourage: there’s the three Hemispheric Institute camera people, other photographers, spectators, the passersby that have been pulled in. Then Ona looks, and on the street is a Black man in uniform. He’s got a box. He’s clearly about to deliver something, but he sees that there’s this big procession that’s happening, so he stops. Ona sees him, and she pauses. She invites him to please take the right of way. The way that he smiled, with a thank you, meant the world to me. Because I’ve waited tables. I’ve worked in retail. I’ve worked in catering. I’ve worked as an administrative assistant. I’ve worked in all of those service types of jobs where you are invisible. So just giving him the right of way so he can do his work, that was a highlight. He’s working, and what are we doing? We’re just walking down the street with fancy cameras. Your performance score is a live conversation, a deepening of relation with other people in space.I also enjoyed taking my sweet time making eye contact with people in these fancy restaurants on Columbus Avenue and seeing how uncomfortable they were. It reminded me of that moment with the security guard at the African Burial Ground in the first iteration. He wouldn’t make eye contact with me through the window despite my attempts and the obvious spectacle I carried with me. He wasn’t necessarily doing anything wrong, and yes, the facility is in need of protection, but at the same time, he still represents this system in this hierarchy, and as such resists just being human with me. What is the relationship between virtual art action and your site-specific work?Especially during a pandemic, the internet is a public space, like the streets. I was happy to share images of the first two performances and to have the chance to focus on a new dimension of the work. I created a series of triptychs of portraits of this country’s twelve presidents who owned slaves, labeled with their names and the descriptor “SLAVEOWNER” overlaid with images of whips, shackles, and blood. Those torture devices of enslavement are too often seen used, even now in movies, against the bodies of Black people, the victims of the violence. I wanted to see them on the perpetrators. The triptych form allowed for continuity of the overlain images from one president to the other; they are visually linked together by the violence they deployed against Black people.I paid attention to how many slaves they owned, the ones who had more slaves had more blood on their image. Washington and Jefferson both had over six hundred. Zachary Taylor, just a decade before the Civil War, still had over three hundred. This was not that long ago. The piece concludes with a final image of the forty-fifth president, who I also understand as a slaveowner in that he has profited from unpaid labor, abused his staff, and separated non-white families. The violence is continuous. In addition to being featured in my Chapman University Guggenheim Gallery exhibit, the images were also released and circulated on Instagram. Different kinds of media reach different audiences. Anything else you want to share?Just this. I read the artist statement from #PrecedentsDay2021 to my mom—this is a woman who picked cotton and went to a colored school. A woman whose memory isn’t what it used to be. And she got it. She got it and told me she was proud of me.