By Taylor M. Coffman
Herald Intern
The theater is packed to the brim. The room’s attention is focused on a small stage, simply decorated with a wooden chair and table, a glass of water, and a straw hat. A set of jail bars waits onstage as a grim sign of things to come, and a smoke machine makes the entire experience feel hazy and intimate, like the house of a long-lost family member.
The lights go down and award-winning vocalist Mzuri Moyo Aimbaye takes the stage as Fannie Lou Hamer bathed in golden spotlight. She wears an understated floral dress and immediately captures the audience’s attention with her powerful voice and moving story - and she’s not going to let your attention go until she’s done. She begins the play at the beginning of Fannie Lou Hamer’s life, explaining how she was born in Mississippi in 1917, the 20th child of Mr. and Mrs. Townsend.
Fannie Lou Hamer was the daughter of sharecroppers and the granddaughter of a slave, and she describes the “dead dreams” that waited for children like her. Aimbaye then launches into a haunting rendition of Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” as she describes how Fannie Lou Hamer witnessed a lynching at a young age. The experience pushed Mrs. Hamer into the struggle for voting equality and civil rights that dominated most of the 20th century, powered by the belief that the old ways would not change unless people like her did something about them.
“I could see a new day coming on an old, bloody horizon,” says Hamer.
As the play continues, Aimbaye remains painfully honest in reporting every aspect of Mrs. Hamer’s life. She explains how Hamer and her family struggled to survive, how she was forcibly sterilized, how she lost her job on a plantation because she wanted to register to vote, and how her adopted daughter died young due to color discrimination in hospitals.
And then, in a stunning show of solidarity and inspiration, she gets the entire audience to stand and sing “We Shall Overcome.”
Emotionally speaking, the lowest point in “The Fannie Lou Hamer Story” comes near the end of the play, as Aimbaye recounts how, in June 1963, Mrs. Hamer and a group of voting rights activists were wrongfully arrested in Winona, Mississippi. While in prison, Hamer was abused, degraded, and painfully beaten. Aimbaye doesn’t shy away from the horror of it all, even as she sobs and pleads for mercy on the theater stage.
Throughout the entirety of “The Fannie Lou Hamer Story”, Mzuri Moyo Aimbaye’s voice remains the focal point of the experience. Her voice is powerful and resonant as a church bell as she moves through “Amazing Grace”, “This Little Light of Mine”, and “We Shall Not Be Moved”, among other gospel classics.The emotion with which she tells the story is palpable enough to move the audience to laughter with the occasional quip, or to tears as she describes the bloody battles Mrs. Hamer had to fight to gain freedom and equality for people like her since, in her words, “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
As the play winds down with a look at some of the other activists Hamer knew, a sentiment rings true in the hearts of the audience: “Every time you go to vote, the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer will rise.”
In summary, “The Fannie Lou Hamer Story” is, as advertised, a one-woman play. It’s one emotional, powerful woman on a small stage, trying to tell the story of another, equally powerful woman, and doing it well enough that the audience won’t be able to - nor will they want to - look away.
