Director’s Notes
As a young boy growing up on Casco Bay, I spent many idyllic summers on Yarmouth Island in Quahog Bay, just around the corner from the New Meadows River and Malaga Island. In the 1950s and 60s, I heard vague references to Malaga but it wasn’t until I was in my 20’s and 30’s that I really began to understand this dark corner of Maine’s history. I later learned that some families who were forced to leave Malaga actually moved their homes onto my family’s summer island, Yarmouth. Only recently did I learn that one of the men who was born on Malaga and moved to Little Yarmouth helped my great aunt Helen build her cabin; the place she lived alone for more than 80 summers. Then, in the early 2000s, I heard about the book “Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy” written by Gary Schmidt and subsequently adapted for the stage by Cheryl West. Once I knew this play existed, I was determined to bring it to the Theater Project. What better place to tell this story than in a community theater only a few miles from where the whole saga started?
It wasn’t until 2010 when then Governor John Baldacci came to the island and made an official apology for the State of Maine that some of the wounds began to heal. While dedicating the island to the Maine Freedom Trail, he said: “To the descendants of Benjamin Darling, let me just say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what was done. It wasn’t right and we were raised better than that. We’re better people than that.” Today, a scholarship fund has been established for the benefit of Malaga’s descendants and a monument was dedicated last year overlooking the Pineland cemetery in memory of those who lost their lives and homes.
Malaga Island is located at the mouth of the New Meadows River in Phippsburg. The origins of the first non-indigenous community on Malaga are traced back to a freed slave named Benjamin Darling who purchased Horse Island, now known as Harbor Island, just south of Malaga. His descendants, Henry Griffin and Fatima Darling Griffin were most likely the first settlers to make their home on Malaga. The star of our play is named Lizzie Bright Griffin.
It has been an honor and a deep emotional journey for me to help this wonderful cast and crew bring Lizzie Bright’s story to life.
“Racism is an undeniable linchpin…., but it is far from the only reason things happened the way they did,” says Allen Breed, a North Carolina-based AP reporter who has been researching a book on Malaga for more than a decade. There were other mixed-race hamlets on Great Yarmouth and Hen islands that were left alone. [The residents of Malaga] “were on a very visible, potentially valuable piece of real estate near the mouth of arguably the state’s tourism crown jewel, Casco Bay.”
How timely is this story! Across our country and around the world, we continue to witness similar crimes and atrocities being waged against people who are “different” and less privileged than the “ruling class”. And, in the words of Lizzie’s grandpa, the Reverend Griffin, “times move on.” But do they always move in the right direction? “Only time will tell”!
Our cast members visited the grave sites and the memorial at Pineland and walked the trails on Malaga itself on a beautiful October Sunday as we began rehearsals for the play.
Capturing a real sense of place and experiencing the sounds and smells of Malaga’s history has helped the actors and musicians connect with both the light and darkness inherent in Malaga’s heritage. Since 1912, the island has remained empty except for the birds, the red squirrels, the seagulls, the evergreens, and a few lobster traps piled along the shore by descendants still living and fishing along this part of the coast. It’s as if the island’s karma has kept it preserved in its natural state. It is now owned and protected by the Maine Coast Heritage Trust.
As we silently walked the narrow paths along the island’s rocky shores, we imagined what it was like for the island’s early inhabitants to look back and watch their mainland counterparts live quite different lives. And as we departed and landed at the dock in Phippsburg, we could sense what the folks in “town” must have thought and felt as they gazed across the few hundred yards of water separating them from the people living on “the island”.
Was there ever a young boy, like Turner Ernest, and a young girl, like Lizzie Bright, who became friends and chased each other along the mud flats, hit balls and rocks using driftwood bats, dug clams and took them home to their elders to cook for dinner? We can only imagine and we hope you will too!
Our cast ranges in age from 8 to 88 with students from Freeport, Brunswick, and Harpswell schools in leading roles. This production is truly a “Community Collaboration”. We hope you enjoy watching it as much as we’ve enjoyed telling it!
And, a heads-up, the Theater Ensemble of Color, based in Portland, will be producing their own original version of this story called “A Meal for Malaga” written by Christina Richardson and scheduled for 2018. Their story takes us to Augusta where the people evicted from Malaga meet with the governor and his cronies for dinner. What happens next is shocking and builds on the “Lizzie Bright” story beautifully.
Keep your eyes and ears open for this next chapter in the Malaga saga!
- Nat Warren-White