In their last scene, the characters of “An Ocean In My Bones” are no longer enslaved, no longer oppressed, no longer infirm. They stand tall and give an account of themselves.

Until its final act, the work has presented an artful historic re-enactment of one of the most shameful chapters in Mobile’s history. But now it transforms into something otherworldly, a little surreal, almost supernatural.

The characters represent survivors of the slave ship Clotilda, the founders of the community of Africatown. The audience has seen their past: Taken, enslaved, separated, stranded. Now it is brought to the present day. News comes that the sunken wreckage of the ship has been found. The tolling of a ship’s bell seems to free its long-buried survivors from a twilight state.

The female warriors who destroyed their villages and took them captive in a long-ago slave raid stalk the margins, like ghosts. The slave owner who trafficked them laughs his taunting laugh again, another hallucination. These and other terrors that they carried with them throughout their lives no longer hold any fear: The survivors of the Clotilda are ready now to return home, or rather to move on to the next world’s version of it.

So ends “An Ocean In My Bones,” a play crafted over the last three years. Conceived by community leaders in Africatown, produced by volunteers, acted by novices and crafted by a director recruited from afar, it has been seen by a few hundred people. The culmination of the effort has been three showings in a school gymnasium during the recent Spirit of Our Ancestors Festival presented by the Clotilda Descendants Association.

The question is, what comes next?

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Is “An Ocean In My Bones” a work that will become a work of local interest? Might it become a work that other companies present at festivals or campuses elsewhere? Might it become the basis of something bigger, such as a touring production?

The potential, at least, has been created. And that’s something Joycelyn Davis was hoping for, she says, when she and others began kicking the idea around a few years ago.

“The Africatown-Clotilda story is much like ‘Roots,’” Davis said recently. “That is such a big and profound movie and I felt like — I feel like — our story should be on the stage and on the movie screen.”

Theater was a logical place to start.

“My dream was to make this play as big as ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’” said Davis. “I want that to be us.”

Setting the stage

The Clotilda made the last known voyage carrying captive Africans into slavery in the United States, bringing more than 100 prisoners to Mobile shortly before the onset of the Civil War. That story was brought to global attention in May 2019, when researchers announced that sunken wreckage in the Mobile River had been conclusively verified to be that of the Clotilda. In 2022, the award-winning documentary “Descendant” brought much wider awareness of Africatown, a unique community founded by some of the ship’s survivors, a place where they were able to preserve their language and folkways in an alien and often hostile world.

The Clotilda and Africatown had never been secrets, but a moment of change seemed to be dawning. Perhaps Africatown could become a destination. Perhaps its residents could enjoy some relief from decades of blight, economic decline and industrial encroachment. Perhaps the story of its founders could be told properly, rather than focusing only on the best-known individuals and anecdotes.

A goal for the Spirit of Our Ancestors Festival was that “I wanted all the different descendants to talk about their ancestor,” Davis said. “Because I felt like Gumpa wasn’t highlighted, James and Lottie Dennison weren’t highlighted.”

It’s believed the Clotilda left Africa with 110 captives aboard and arrived in Mobile with 103 still living. Recent scholarship by Hannah Durkin shows that the captives were scattered across southwest and west-central Alabama, with about 30 remaining in Mobile County. Cudjoe Lewis, aka Kazoola or Kossula, became the best known of those. The last of Africatown’s founders, he lived long enough to be interviewed by Zora Neale Hurston and even to be the subject of a short film clip she shot.

“I just started rereading all the books that were written and just started thinking, you know, everybody needs to know about these different ancestors and what they did,” Davis said. “For so many years, Cudjoe Lewis has been like the main character.” His bust was in front of the church she attended; his picture was in some of her school history books. “His face is there which I understand, you have to have a face,” she said. “But to tell the complete story, you have to add all those [others] because they all did significant things. And I don’t know if the children know that or even the adults in the community know that.

“Everyone needs to know their story, their stories need to be told,” she said.

Among those involved in early discussions was Greg Cyprian, a strong advocate for Black theater who wanted to put her in touch with Terrence Spivey, a playwright based in Cleveland. When COVID-19 nearly killed Cyprian and left him facing a long recovery from debilitating health impacts, the course of the project was changed. But Davis went on to make contact with Spivey, whose extensive experience in Black theater included more than a decade as artistic director at Karamu House, a historic Black theater company.

Over the last three years, Spivey has spent a good deal of time in Mobile, developing the play with input from Davis and Pat Frazier, another liaison to the Clotilda Descendants Association, teaching a cast of actors whose inexperience has been balanced, in at least some cases, by personal appreciation of the material, and in some cases a familial connection to it.

Speaking to a reporter during rehearsals in January, Spivey was apologetic about some of the resources he didn’t have. With “Ocean” there wouldn’t be much in terms of sets. There wouldn’t be a weeks-long run of performances to hone every detail.

And yet, it was striking how much technique he was packing into the production. Much of “An Ocean in My Bones” depicts the horrors of African slave raids and of the miserable transatlantic voyage. But year by year, more artistic elements have been added. A quartet of actors represent the female authors, including Hurston and Mobilian Emma Langdon Roche, who did much to preserve and popularize the Africatown story; they serve as narrators and, at times, almost as a Greek chorus. The Clotilda herself speaks, with production manager Ashley Austin voicing the part. Dancers with swirling blue capes represent the fury of a storm at sea, and another with a fire-colored train embodies the fire used to wreck and hide the ship.

The fire dancer, Andrea McArthur, said she joined the cast because she wanted to develop her acting ability and hoped it would be a learning experience. It has been. In a rehearsal in January she found herself the subject of Spivey’s full attention as she tackled a particularly challenging part: She had to synchronize her movements to the speech of the actor playing ship captain William Foster as well as to the music, and at one point in her dance she had to deliver a shout. It seemed like something with the potential to genuinely shock an audience.

Again and again, Spivey called for another take. Again and again, McArthur ran through what was basically a gymnastics routine. Again and again, her yell sounded triumphant, like the joy of a young flame getting to blaze. And then suddenly it sounded like fury, like fire promising destruction.

“That’s it!” yelled Spivey. “See, you’re mad at me –and you’re using it!”

Amid laughter, everybody took a break.

“We wanted to take the play to another level,” said Austin. “We didn’t want it to be the same. The first year was different than last year and this year is different than last year. We wanted to show the audience different aspects of the play, a different view of the journey that the 110 went on. and we wanted them to have a full experience. Sometimes when you’re just speaking the words and you’re acting it out sometimes it doesn’t, you know, you don’t really portray it the way you want to. But when you incorporate all of these different elements, it brings to life the actuality of everything that happened.”

Casting call

Whatever audiences the work may reach, “An Ocean In My Bones” has touched its performers. For many of them, it’s been a chance not just to portray historic figures, but to do so in the community where they lived, where descendants may still have firm ideas about how they should or shouldn’t be depicted.

“It’s personal, it’s emotional for me,” said Jason Lewis, whose roles include Africatown elder Peter “Gumpa” Lee. “And really, it’s family. My family grew up in Africatown adjacent to those West Africans that established it. … My uncle was best friends with a descendant of Peter Lee, James Lee, and they grew up in Plateau together.”

“Imagine this,” said Lewis, speaking before a dress rehearsal in the auditorium at Mobile County Training School, where he once was a student. “I came back to Alabama after retiring from the Navy and the only other time that I ever acted in anything as far as a play and on a stage was that stage right there. Our band teacher put on a play [years ago] and I never forget walking in, and I walked out that doors sobbing, crying, because I had thought about the fact that, you know, last time I saw that stage, I was in the eighth grade.”

“So this was personal for me,” he said. “I want Peter Lee to be aggressive in how he delivers because Peter Lee had a real disdain for white folks and he had a real disdain for the Takba people. But his disdain for the Takba people wasn’t so bad that they couldn’t connect and create a community here.” (Note: Unlike the other captives aboard the Clotilda, Lee was not captured in a internecine slave raid. In negotiations between agents of Dahomey’s king and Foster, he was a citizen of Dahomey who apparently was thrown into the deal as a sort of bonus. Though from a different ethnic group than the rest of the captives, he went on to become a respected elder of Africatown.)

Lewis said he and fellow cast member T.J. McCovery saw Africatown at its worst. He grew up in nearby projects that since have been torn down. “When I say at its worst, when the crack epidemic came through here, it killed off most of our friends,” he said. “The only remembrance I have of any excellence about Africatown was talking to James Lee.”

McCovery’s roles include that of James Dennison, an enslaved man of African and Native American heritage who was forced into a marriage with one of the African captives, Lottie “Kanko” Dennison. McCovery said he grew up in Georgia but visited relatives in Africatown on holidays and in summers.

“It is so different and it hurts so bad to see the difference in it,” he said. “Like, we can step outside right now and look at five abandoned houses. And to see to see that, it does hit different, and it makes you want to tell the story even more because all of this is historic landmark and the people that are living here don’t even realize. So that’s why we have to get the story out and tell people about it.”

“Look, I grew up here, bro,” said Lewis. “I ain’t never heard about Africatown.”

It’s a complex legacy. Some descendants of Clotilda survivors worked hard to pass along awareness of the community’s unique history to new generations. Fear of persecution, among other factors, meant that some did not.

“Exactly,” said McCovery. “And none of the kids nowadays know anything about Africatown or the Clotilda. They just know Plateau and they do not go to Plateau. That’s all they know.” (As a geographic term, Plateau overlaps with Africatown in referring to formerly unincorporated areas now inside Mobile’s northeastern limits.)

Austin said she grew up elsewhere in Mobile but her mother worked at Scott Paper and she has childhood memories of passing the Africatown’s historic cemetery, which was severely overgrown at the time. “I love y’all but this was not the place that we wanted to hang out,” she said. She agreed that in her lifetime, Africatown’s declining fortunes have contributed to a lack of awareness of its historic significance, even among residents.

The play is a way of reclaiming lost ground, she said.

“Doing this play and meeting people like Pat Frasier and Joycelyn Davis and Bobby Dennison [has meant] hearing the stories of their ancestors,” she said. “And them adopting us so that we could say, you know, not by blood, are we descendants of the Clotilda, but by love, we are descendants of the Clotilda. And it’s kind of like, when Cain killed Abel, his voice cried out from the ground. So the descendants, so the ancestors, their voices are crying out from the ground, you know, to tell their story.”

Among the cast, E.A. Keeble has the rare role of a white character who’s not one of its epithet-spewing villains, ship captain Foster and slaveholder Timothy Meaher. She represents author Emma Langdon Roche, a Mobilian whose 1914 book “Historic Sketches of the South” included text and drawings about the last few living Clotilda survivors, including Cudjoe Lewis.

Keeble said that when she first heard of the play, she just wanted to be a part of it in whatever way might be possible, even if it was backstage. Roche and the other authors weren’t part of it at the time, and even if they had been, she wasn’t familiar with Roche’s story.

“I’m still pinching myself,” she said.

Her desire is simply that more people see the work. And that seems to be a common motivator among the cast. That’s why they have put in the massive effort.

“I told the actors here that you all have a double, triple responsibility,” said Spivey. “You live in a city where the history has a history and you also are playing roles of the ancestors of descendants who will be in that audience. And here again, a lot of them didn’t know much about the story. They started doing more research about the Clotilda and talking to Jocelyn and Pat and other descendants.”

“It’s been a lot of hard work from each and every person in the entire cast,” said McCovery. “I mean, from on stage to offstage with personal stuff, we all had to dig deep as a family and come together and make it better than it had been.”

Lewis said he knew of cast members dealing with serious health issues. “Nobody will ever know because they gonna perform in a way that shows their respect and love for what these ancestors did and just our love for each other,” he said. “I mean, this is, we are, family. We done got into arguments, we done forgave, we done laughed and we have encouraged. … This cast this year, there’s a different fire to us.”

In search of an encore

Frazier and Davis said that “An Ocean In My Bones” has been brought this far by grants, sponsorships and donations that have funded the presentations and Spivey’s involvement. Backers have included the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Alabama Humanities Alliance, PNC Bank, Hargrove and the Community Foundation of South Alabama.

“We really feel good now, in terms of the play itself,” said Spivey.

They just want more people to see it. And that’s an uncertain road.

Thus far, “An Ocean In My Bones” has been staged in Africatown, in the hope that it can increase awareness within the community of the community’s own story.

“I still, I feel like I still haven’t reached everybody in the community,” said Davis. “I see a lot of people outside of the community there. … So there’s still work to be done as far as outreach, still work to be done.”

On the one hand, the white portion of the audience has been small. On the other, Keeble and others say they’ve seen significant interest, even if it hasn’t always translated into attendance.

“People need to find themselves in this story and take ownership of it because they didn’t get it in the history books,” said Lewis. “I think the arts gives us the opportunity to learn something that somebody else felt like didn’t deserve to be learned. And so I want people to take ownership over this story. I want them to leave with saying ‘I’m gonna own this,’ as a European, as an American.”

School audiences are another possibility, though the liberal use of the n-word by Meaher and Foster, and the potentially disturbing violence depicted, pose obstacles. So is a recent political tendency to ban “divisive” truth.

“We left our country speaking one language,” said Austin. “When we got here, we were speaking another language. And these are the atrocities that were done to us, and it needs to be heard in a world where so many states now are trying to take that out of the history books, that are trying to take that out of our schools. … You’re, trying to erase our story and we’re here to say, no, you cannot erase our story.”

Spivey says long experience has shown him that it takes concerted effort to incorporate a work of art, such as a play, into an educational framework. The work has to be known, first off. Then there has to be a curriculum to go with it, materials that teachers can use to bring out the lessons. Promotion is a big part of it, too.

All that work lies ahead.

There’s also the possibility that the play could be produced elsewhere, for presentation at a festival or by a university. It’s not practical to try and take the local cast and crew on tour, and it would take another level of backing to put together a production capable of traveling. Should backers for such a venture emerge, Spivey and the Clotilda Descendants Association both will have a say, and a stake, in how that develops.

The 2024 Spirit of Our Ancestors Festival has come and gone, with three presentations of “An Ocean In My Bones.” The next performance isn’t yet on the books. But this much is for sure: No one involved is ready to let the Clotilda settle back beneath the water.

“This story is bigger than us, it’s bigger than any of us,” Austin said. “And I hope, and I pray, that when people come in, whether they’ve been here before, whether it’s their first time coming in when they see their play, this play, that their lives are changed, that they will begin to see Africatown in a different light.”

“It’s not just a play for Africatown,” she said. “It’s not just a play for Mobile. It’s not just a play for the state of Alabama. It’s a play for the world. This play should be for the world to see.”