She sees herself in story of black poet
After one of her living-history performances a few years ago, Sandra Quick was approached by an elderly white woman who bent close and whispered, "I’m sorry about what my people did to your people."
Quick assured the woman that she did not consider her responsible.
"But I forgive you," Quick said. And then they embraced and cried together.
Moments like that are why Quick, a retired Columbus teacher, principal and administrator, does what she does.
Quick, 68, portrays characters such as Phillis Wheatley, the 18th-century slave girl who became a renowned poet but still faced harsh limitations because of her skin color.
At a Black History Month performance for students at the Statehouse last week, Quick didn’t sugarcoat the story: Her screams when she, as Wheatley, confronts the body of her little brother, killed by the same invaders who kidnapped her into slavery, echoed off the walls of the atrium.
Wheatley’s story is full of triumph (a girl who knows no English becomes an accomplished poet by her teen years) and tragedy (Wheatley wins her freedom but lives a life of deprivation and dies young).
When the half-hour performance ended, a student from Barrington Elementary School in Upper Arlington asked Quick how Wheatley’s story affects Quick as a person. (Great question, I thought.)
“It grounds me,” Quick said. “It makes me believe all people have a voice.”
Although she and Wheatley are from vastly different eras, Quick sees so many similarities in their lives, she thinks that God must have had a hand in leading her to do the portrayals.
“There’s a very strong spiritual component,” she said.
As a child, Quick, like Wheatley, was a precocious lover of learning and had to overcome low expectations: One of her teachers at West High School told her she was so smart, she ought to go to secretarial school. Sandra Quick as Phillis Wheatley, a slave who became a renowned poet She went to college instead and taught in Columbus schools before becoming a
principal and later supervisor of community relations for the school district.
“I was born to be a teacher,” she said.
A few years ago, she formed Our History Awakens (ourhistory awakens.com), which does performances about the African-american experience. Its slogan is “lest we forget.” Quick has also published two books on
creating living-history characters.
She performs perhaps a dozen times a year, which is more demanding than it sounds. The kinship she feels with Wheatley makes telling the poet’s story a wrenching experience every time.
“I am drained literally, figuratively, emotionally,” she said. “I have to recover. It takes a lot out of me. It’s not a performance for me. I don’t perform; I become.”
Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist. jblundo@dispatch.com @joeblundo