On Mute

September 20, 2021

Robert Gipe:

In 2003, Dr. Tony Sweatt and I interviewed his grandmother, Missouri Cottrell, at her home just outside Harlan, Kentucky, where Tony and I both live. Among other stories, Ms. Cottrell told us how as teenagers, she and her brothers ran a poker game for coal miners as a way of making money.

Tony Sweatt:

My grandmother’s mom passed when she was a young girl. Her dad left my granny and her younger siblings and moved up the street with another family, leaving them to fend for themselves. They started running a poker game, making money off the miners. During her story, I remember laughing at the thought of a young girl running a card game. However, after getting the whole story of what led to her running the game, I remember experiencing sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, and finally the joy that came from knowing my grandmother was a resilient Black woman.

RG:

Ms. Cottrell’s story was adapted for Higher Ground, a 2005 play sponsored by the Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College Appalachian Program. Over two hundred people were involved in the creation of the play, which focused on how we might apply our community’s strengths to combat the opioid crisis.

TS:

I was raised by my grandparents for the most part until age eight. My granddad was a coal miner, worked at a gas station, and collected rent for Mr. James Turner. My grandma was a nurse’s aide. My grandparents had nine children, and I made ten. I was reunited with my mother at eight years old. Early on, my mother was a nurse at UK and then in Harlan. Shortly after rejoining my mom, she quit her job and we went on welfare. To this day I am not sure why she quit. We never talked about financial matters. I graduated Evarts High School in 1988. My first full-time job was in the military. I got out of the army December 23, 1991, shortly after the first Desert Storm ended. They gave soldiers early outs to go to school. I made more money taking computer repair at the vocational school on the GI Bill than some of my friends were working. I remember guys saying, “Hey Sweatt, [so-and-so] is hiring,” and I’d be making more money going to school. Why would I quit school? It’s like the old-timers say: “That would have been hustling backwards.”

RG:

When I met Tony, he had finished his associate’s degree at Southeast and was working on his bachelor’s degree in human services and counseling at Lindsey Wilson College’s Harlan-based program. He did his interview with his grandmother as part of my Appalachian Studies class at Southeast and then came to work on the Harlan County Listening Project.

TS:

With the Listening Project, we went out into our different communities to find out what folks’ perceptions of our biggest challenges were, and once we identified those challenges, we wanted to develop that into a community play to share what people were saying. We said, “We want to hear your story. We don’t care where you’re from and if that story is happy, tragic, or sad. We want you to talk about what you want to talk about.” We didn’t go in there with an agenda and say, “OK, we’re just going to talk about the opioid problem.” We gave them the opportunity to say what they saw hindering us from being a healthier community. The group that did the interviews, many of us were addicts, recovering addicts—we were the misfits. We interviewed addicts, recovering addicts, educators—over two hundred interviews. That opened my eyes up. It wasn’t just me going through this struggle. This is a whole community.

RG:

The Listening Project and the first Higher Ground play led to fifteen more years of community engagement and art-making grounded in maximum participation of the broadest cross section of the community. Over a thousand Harlan Countians have been part of creating more plays and public art, and we have traveled together to present that work—which has addressed community experience with race, strip mining, harm reduction, gender, sexuality, and other topics—at conferences and gatherings. And the work continues.

TS:

Everyone has a story. [People] felt honored when we approached them to hear those stories, especially if they considered themselves poor, first generation, low income, living in poverty, and all that stuff—they were like, wow, they want to hear what I think. [Robert and I] crossed paths at a time when I could have gone either way. This work connected me with people. It helped me build confidence within myself. I think about the community college—what it was and still has the ability to be. It can be a game changer.

RG:

I was hired by Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College in 1997. At that time, the president of the college, Dr. Bruce Ayers, had the idea that our community college would be more welcoming to coalfield students and their families if the school celebrated and integrated the culture of the community. My mandate when I was hired as program director of the Appalachian Center was to use Appalachian culture to make people feel welcome at Southeast. The work that followed was my interpretation of that mandate.

TS:

I was hired by Southeast in 2005 as an interactive television facilitator. In 2006, I received my master’s degree in human services and counseling, and in 2008, I accepted a job with the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation. In 2009, I came back to Southeast as director of enrollment. I successfully defended my dissertation and received my doctorate degree from Eastern Kentucky University’s Educational Leadership and Policy Studies doctoral program in December 2017. Since then, I worked two years with Partners for Education with Berea College and am now the managing director of the Appalachian College Initiative with Teach for America Appalachia.

RG:

For many years, Tony was not as involved in the work of Higher Ground. But in 2021, Tony came back to help a new generation of Higher Ground leadership create a play about the pandemic; the demonstration in Harlan that took place in the wake of the Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd killings; and the 1970s erasure of Georgetown, a Black community in Harlan.

TS:

As a youngster, I grew up on stories of folks that migrated to Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati and came home every payday just to party in Georgetown. But by the time I got old enough, Georgetown was gone.

RG:

An early draft of the 2021 play Higher Ground 9: Shift Change included these lines:

Leena:

Summertime, I eat a tomato a day, buy vegetables from roadside stands and farm-ers’ markets. This August I was getting a five-pound bag of green beans a week, cooking some with taters, bacon, and onions, but stringing up most of them to make shucky beans.

Hank:

Summertime to me is getting out and running the roads. Going to Dollywood. Maybe go see the Cincinnati Reds.

Acey:

There wadn’t much of that running this past summer. That corona kept us all at the house.

Cotton:

That governor kept us at the house.

Myra:

And those protests kept picking up steam. Lid blew off in Louisville. People remind-ing people how Breonna Taylor got shot in her bed by the police.

Cotton:

That woman was up to something. You know she was.

Acey:

I don’t believe she was. And it don’t matter. She shouldn’t have died like that.

RG:

There were about fifteen of us on the script committee, but I was one of the main ones editing the script into something we could perform. Tony had issues with Acey’s response to Cotton and sent me a rewrite:

Cotton:

That woman was up to something. You know she was.

Acey:

Cotton, that’s your “go-to” line every time a Black person is killed. You said Tamir Rice was “up to something” when he was killed in the park with a toy gun, but when Kyle Rittenhouse was accused of killing two people and went home, you didn’t say a word. You said Walter Scott was “up to something” when he was pulled over and killed for having a busted taillight, but I didn’t hear a thing when James Alex Fields Jr. ran over and killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. How is it okay for Blacks to be killed for MAYBE being “up to something,” but white people who we can see are “up to something” still get their day in court? But you know what, that’s my fault.

Cotton:

How is it your fault?

Acey:

An old man told me a long time ago that “it doesn’t cost a thing to listen.” And ever since I met you, I have allowed you to spit those insensitive comments without challenging your idiotic view. Therefore, from here on out, when you approach me with that bull crap, I consider it my duty to voice my opinion whether you like it or not. As a result, one of two things will happen: either you will at least look at it from my point of view or you will stop talking to me. I’m fine either way.

RG:

I thought a long time about what to say to Tony, because I thought Acey’s briefer response in the earlier draft is so often what happens in real life. We don’t say what we feel in the moment. And we had other characters talking about how difficult it is as a Black person to show your emotions in front of white people for fear of being labeled the “angry Black person.” But who am I, a white man, to tell Tony, a Black man, what African American character Acey would say in response to Cotton, an openly racist white man, in that moment? Before I could respond to Tony’s rewrite, we had a script meeting on Zoom. There were about ten people on the call, including Tony. The director, Keith McGill, asked Tony how his rewrite was coming. Tony gave a summary of his rewrite, and another cast member on the call said he had a friend in Louisville saying Breonna Taylor was mixed up in drugs. A cast member who’d had their own run-ins with violence at the hands of law enforcement jumped on that cast member, saying it doesn’t matter whether she was or wasn’t—she doesn’t deserve to get shot in her bed. The scene from the play was playing out in real life on our Zoom call. When I talked to Tony later, he said he had muted himself during the confrontation.

TS:

I’m not a big social media guy. I’m getting to where I hate it. I get on there and I see people that I have respected, former teachers and folks that on the surface are good people. But they have been given the power to freely say openly hurtful things. I think back to First Lady Michelle Obama—when they go low, we go high. But damn, man. Sometimes that shit gets old. I think the reason I muted myself is cause the old me would have talked to him in an intentionally disrespectful way, and I may have called him out his name in hopes he wanted it to escalate to the next level. But in this transition I’m going through in life, I’m trying to be a productive, positive citizen. The somewhat intelligent version of me must pause before responding to ignorance. It reminds me of when I got a DUI when I was at the college. Dr. Ayers came to see me. He was compassionate with me, but he also let me know that on the Harlan campus, “You are the face of this college. And so, we cannot have this—the face of our college in the paper for negative things.” That right there let me know I had to change what I was doing because it was bigger than me. I’m in a position now where I have to ignore ignorant statements. Or if not ignore it, I have to take more time to make a conscious effort to respond.

RG:

In the end, Tony and I had Acey say very little to Cotton, but turn to the audience and share his thoughts with them. Here’s how the scene was performed:

Cotton:

That woman was up to something. You know she was.

Acey [with anger in his voice]:

I don’t believe she was. And it doesn’t matter. She shouldn’t have died like that.

Cotton:

Aaaa, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I heard she was mixed up in drugs. Acey: She was an EMT. A first responder. You support first responders, don’t you?

[Cotton makes a gesture expressing his disdain. Acey starts to speak, restrains himself. Lights shift. Acey addresses the audience.]

Acey:

“Up to something.” Breonna Taylor was “up to something.” That’s what that man says every time a Black person is killed. He said Tamir Rice was “up to something” when he was killed in the park with a toy gun. He said Walter Scott was “up to something” when he was pulled over and killed for having a busted taillight. But he didn’t say a damn thing about what Kyle Rittenhouse was up to when he killed two people and went home, when James Alex Fields Jr. ran over and killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. How is it okay for Blacks to be killed for MAYBE being “up to something,” but white people, who we can see are “up to something,” still get their day in court? But I didn’t say that to him. I put myself on mute. Why do I do that?

TS:

I think by turning to the audience, you’re letting them know what you’re struggling with. There’s no greater struggle than the one that goes on within, and the Black man struggles with that daily. It gets hard.

RG:

I liked the solution because rather than forcing the audience to choose sides in a confrontation between Cotton and Acey, it becomes an opportunity for them to participate in Acey’s decision-making process. Our director, Keith McGill, who is from Louisville, talked to the cast member who made the hurtful statements, and there was reconciliation amongst the cast.

TS:

You know I thought maybe at one time y’all might ask that cast member to not be a part of the play, but you can’t do that. I told you years ago, it don’t matter to me if they got KKK tattooed on their forehead. That lets me know who they are. And what did Maya Angelou say? “When they tell you who they are, believe them.” So I don’t want to censor or mute you. You continue to talk, so I know who you are. As my granny says, that lets me know I need to feed you with a long-handle spoon. Or not feed you at all.

RG:

The kind of cultural work we are doing at the community college has gotten harder over the last five or six years. Budgets have constricted. Positions in the humanities have not been filled when people retire. Adjuncts replace full-time faculty. Engaging people in critical reflection on the present and history of our communities has not been made grounds for punishment in Kentucky, but it has been elsewhere. Higher Ground has had to raise a larger percentage of its budget through external sources to survive. In 2016, I wrote a federal grant proposal for our work and the college was awarded $596,000 in federal dollars. But somebody held it up. Maybe a US senator. Maybe a US congressman. I was never told. But my administration suggested I clean up my Facebook because something on it had given offense. I censored myself to protect the workers I feared would lose their jobs if we didn’t secure that grant.

TS:

That was the whole thing Rob never wanted to get into. He was always committed to the work from the ground level and left the politicking to the senior administrators. It is harder today for people to remain neutral.

RG:

It is. We have worked very hard in our cultural work for multiple points of view to be represented, to be about conversation and not dogma. But even talking about the issues that divide us has become too “political” for some.

TS:

The truth is that white, European American, heterosexual males hold power and set the parameters for interaction in our institutions. For muted groups to “fit in,” they have to change the way they act and talk, which results in a loss of power. Injustice is a direct result of the dominant group’s concerns being attended to while the concerns of the marginalized people are muted.

RG:

Arts and humanities budgets get cut and we are told our work is frivolous or nonessential. But when cultural work is done right—when it is engaged with all the different types of people in our world—it is extremely potent. And I think the budget cutters know that.

TS:

If we are going to heal our wounds and come together as a nation, we must invest in honest conversation with one another. We cannot be a nation of individuals with the idea that I can overcome if I pull myself up by the bootstraps. The song is “We Shall Overcome,” not I.