A few years back in the Twin Cities, I was fortunate enough to see writer/actor Anna Deavere Smith twice in one week. This was just after she concluded her study, or what she calls her "search for American character." I found an excerpt from her show on the TED site, which I think is important for my students to see, particularly Smith's word for word performance of her interview with inmate Paulette Jenkins, which she titles "A Mirror to Her Mouth" (at 6:00 in the video below).
Here, Jenkins's telling of her experience witnessing then covering up the murder by her partner of her child Myisha illustrates for us the complexity of what it is to be human within a complex world of social and emotional imaginings regarding "the right," "the good," secrecy and notions of privacy, sacrifice, gender, poverty, race, and the ultimate varied effects of often purposeful social differentiation. Smith states that several people recommended that she remove Jenkins's story from her show, but of course she did not. For Smith, Jenkins' story is a way to fathom the "negative imagination" (a reference from Smith's talk with Maxine Greene); it is about risk, "what nature is, what Mother Nature is, and about what a risk can be."
"On the Road: A Search for American Character" (23:05)
