NASHVILLE — This is an arts town, and artistic miracles happen here with some regularity, but last weekend’s miracle was not the usual kind. Watching John Prine, at the age of 72, dance onstage after a three-hour performance at the legendary Ryman Auditorium — that’s a truly Nashville kind of miracle. Watching “Lucy Negro, Redux,” a poetry collection by an African-American woman, come to life as a ballet — a ballet scored by an African-American woman and danced by an African-American woman? That’s the kind of miracle Nashville has never seen before.
The project started with Caroline Randall Williams, who became fascinated as a graduate student with a theory advanced by Duncan Salkeld, a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Chichester, that the mysterious Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets wasn’t a white woman with a dark complexion at all — she was a black woman called “Black Luce,” or “Lucy Negro,” who owned a brothel in Shakespearean London. When Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 132, “Then will I swear beauty herself is black,” he meant, actually, black.
There are different theories about the identity of the sonnets’ Dark Lady — just as there is much speculation about the identity of the “fair youth” to whom so many of the earlier sonnets are addressed — but this one ignited the young poet’s imagination. Ms. Randall Williams descends from Nashville literary royalty: Her mother is the novelist and songwriter Alice Randall; her paternal grandfather was the civil-rights activist Avon Williams; a great-grandfather was the Harlem Renaissance poet (and later Fisk University writer-in-residence) Arna Bontemps. But Caroline Randall Williams also descends from white men who raped her black ancestors. She carries in her very DNA the conflict at the heart of “Lucy Negro, Redux”: What does it mean for a woman to be both desired and reviled for the color of her skin?
Margaret Renkl, continues
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