"Go Down, Old Hannah": The Living History of African American Texans (review)

"Go Down, Old Hannah" contains fifteen short plays of varying length written by Naomi Mitchell Carrier between 1994 and 2002. All but two of the plays have been performed by Carrier's Talking Back Living History Theater Company, with the Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site, George Ranch Historical Park, Barrington Living History Farm, and Sam Houston Memorial Museum being among the original venues. The plays explore the impact of slavery upon interpersonal relations in Texas, both within the African American community as well as between blacks and whites, and occasionally Mexicans, during the period 1821 to 1930. The plays are mostly set in the period prior to the end of the Civil War, with thirteen of them exploring episodes that occurred in these years.

The book is divided into seven parts, each containing two to three plays on a similar theme, these being: "Celebrations," "Family Breakup," "Running Away," "Battles," "Civil War," "Emancipation," and "Reconstruction." Each part opens with an overview of how the plays came to be written and performed, as well as historical background on the episodes explored in the plays. The appendix, intended as a secondary school teaching aid, contains lesson plans and other materials linked to each of the plays. In publishing this collection of plays, Carrier's purpose is threefold: to publicize aspects of Texas history that over the years have been forgotten, overlooked, or deliberately ignored, such as the Underground Railroad's presence in the state; to champion an Afrocentric interpretation of the black experience in Texas, particularly during the era of slavery; and to extoll the virtues of "living history" as a means for achieving the first two objectives. Her aim is not to displace professional historians as interpreters of the past, but to complement their work of raising public awareness about history. She has served this end by writing and performing plays that reflect recent developments in scholarship on Texas and African American history.

As Carrier herself indicates, "Go Down, Old Hannah" would be best used as a manual for theater groups and African American communities wishing to stage their own living history productions. Carrier has drawn upon a combination of primary and secondary sources in composing these plays, all of which are based upon real historical characters and actual events. Some of the slaves, such as Uncle Bubba, Jeff Hamilton, and Arcy, appear in multiple plays, as do more well-known historical characters, like Sam Houston and Brit Bailey. However, from a historical perspective, the book's main interest lies in what it reveals about how contemporary Afro-Texans interpret and feel about their group's past rather than in any new information it might provide about the history of slavery and African Americans in Texas. For instance, Carrier's quintessentially post-1960s endeavor to reconcile the twin historical realities of black agency and white supremacy is evident throughout the plays. Carrier manages to straddle this paradox most skillfully, and with great dramatic effect, in the play Fugitives of Passion, which explores the complexity of the options confronting enslaved African Americans, even over such apparently clearcut decisions as whether or not to escape captivity. Although Carrier's Afrocentric perspective introduces a few dubious statements and interpretations into the overviews preceding each group of plays, fortunately the plays themselves are almost entirely free of doctrinaire influences and they ably demonstrate living history's utility as a device for encouraging the general public to take an interest in and ask probing questions about the past.