Sharon is an African American woman in her late forties. She stands in her childhood home looking around the room and sharing the memories of her childhood in that room. She remembers her and her brothers watching television, playing tag with her friends and the moment that their friends started to be murdered. She speaks in depth of the Atlanta Child Murders that happened in Atlanta in 1979-1981. Black children in her neighborhood were being kidnapped and murdered at an alarming rate, unfortunately for a really long time it was only alarming to the black people that lived in that neighborhood. She talks about the idea of American history continuing to repeat itself and at the lack of basic appreciation for the lives of black people. She recounts the difficulty of just being a normal kid in a time like this and how this experience affected her life and the lives of her brothers in a negative way. Her story is raw an heart felt as we realize that what she reflects on now is just another page in our history of the dismissal of black lives. A beautiful story of how survival can always sit on your shoulders and weigh you down as you remember the people who died. *Performer must be African American, but pronouns could be changed to be male or female with the writer’s permission. This character is fiction.
Female- Black Atlanta Children Are Being Murdered
(Sharon, an African American woman in her late forties intensely watches television. She turns the volume up with the remote for a moment then turns the television off all together. She takes a couple of deep breaths then looks out of the window. Beat.) I used to love watching television… my brothers and I. When we were little my two older brothers Kevin and Nicholas would always sit (Pointing) right there on the floor as close as they could and I would sit on the couch with Daddy, and Momma would always come in from the kitchen with peanut butter cookies or sugar cookies, she was always baking something. But she would hit the two boys on their heads and say, “Now y’all know you need to scoot back or you’re going to go blind.” It was like clockwork, happened all the time. (Shifts as she looks back out the window) that all stopped, in the spring of 1980. Life just… stopped.