“The staircase was almost leaning out of the building,” Dawkins, 65, recalls by phone. “The house was actually in two parts. It was like an explosion went off and we had to come and put a giant puzzle back together.”
Three decades and much fundraising later, the fixer-upper has flowered into a museum in Columbus on Georgia’s Chattahoochee River. Now Dawkins hopes that the release of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a film adaptation of August Wilson’s play starring Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman, will put it firmly on the map.
Davis is magnificently caked in greasepaint and sweat and wears gold teeth and heavy padding, at once pantomime dame and tragic queen: she is capricious and domineering yet bears the weight of generational trauma. “They don’t care nothing about me,” she says of her white record producers. “All they want is my voice.”