Over the break…the winter recess… My wh...

Over the break…the winter recess…

My whole family. Cousins and Aunties we meet up in uh---Stone Mountain Park

Just outside Atlanta

We have this tradition you know

Day after Christmas we always go up there and have a picnic

Catch up with each other

Its real nice. Trees. Lots of land

And of course—big old plantation house

And a museum about the plantation house

Where they tell you the stories about the old times

How things used to be

And then there’s Stone Mountain.

There’s an actual Stone Mountain right there staring down at you

And chiseled into the side its got like all the civil war guys

Jefferson and Stonewall and Robert E

We grow up hearing about these guys like they’re saints

our whole lives. And you know, I mean, really my family is not….

Anyway, so we’re at the park and there’s this other family ---really there’s a lot of family’s out

there that day but there’s this one that I keep over hearing

Two guys really

And one of him say that it was right there on that Stone Mountain

was where the Klan…

They jump started the Klan there.

Like the second coming

They met there on Stone Mountain

They don’t share that fact with you in the old plantation museum

And these guys were talking about….

Action

How these guys weren’t afraid to act

And how Dylan Roof

[...]

They were saying how they thought he was just a mixed up kid

And they don’t agree with murder but

Didn’t he have some balls

He wasn’t afraid to take some action

[...]

Yeah and I just---wanted to walk over there and say a million things to them

But I was ---look I’m not gonna lie to you Deja and pretend like

A lot of these so called liberal kids here do…

I’ve heard shit like it before

But what really really—hit me

They started complaining about how

After Roof, killed those people, they took the flag down

[...]

Yes, this flag.

They took it down in South Carolina

And these guys

Kept saying “they better not try and do that here in Georgia”

That “Big eared Sum bitch Obama better not try and take my flag”

And it just kept going from there

And I swear Deja

I thought about you

And that night with that….Harry.

Idris Goodwin offers these 5 plays to be read and produced across communities. To publicly present any or all of these works, they must be offered to the community free of charge. For further conversation about production in a professional setting, inquiries can be directed to Idris Goodwin at goodwright@gmail.com.

View the short film version here.