HartBeat Ensemble, the Hartford theater dedicated to social justice and anti-racism, is staging "Bee Trapped Inside the Window," a play about modern slavery, this month at its Carriage House space on Farmington Avenue. The company, which regrouped and expanded while stalled by COVID, has big plans for the rest of the year.
<p>Reckoning with the ancestors on my father’s side of the family has been exhausting. I opened that Pandora’s Box and out flew: the colonizers, the slaveholders, the rebel generals, the high-ranking Confederate officials. I’ve mined this family history for truths that challenge the Lost Cause narrative, the pro-Confederate ideology that fuels white supremacy. The long-reaching consequences of that creed empowered the insurrectionists of Jan. 6th, 2021, so this has seemed worth doing.</p>
<p>Yet after a prolonged stint of burrowing through 19th-century Alabama archives – examining census forms itemizing human property, wills bequeathing that property, descriptions of opulent slave-built mansions – I wanted a break. I was ready to spend time with someone from my family who’d been on the right side of history, a white man “friendly to the freedom of all men,” as Frederi