“WHERE IS THE FREEDOM IN THE LAND OF THE FREE?”

A COMING MARGARET BONDS PREMIERE WORKS TO RIGHT AN OLD NEST OF WRONGS

Part 2 of 3

The title of this series of posts refers to righting an old nest of wrongs, and in Part 1 I identified that “righting” as the world premiere of Margaret Bonds’s late musical about Elizabeth Keckley at Queens University of Charlotte (NC) in April, 2026. In this post, I explain the connection between those two things – beginning by highlighting a few key points of Elizabeth Keckley’s extraordinary life and then moving on to the hows and wherefores of the Margaret Bonds/Elizabeth Keckley Project at Queens. I should note that much has been written about Keckley: the core resource is her own memoir, Behind the Scenes . . . Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), but other essential readings are included in Dr. Sheila Smith McCoy’s brilliant two-volume collection of essays, The Elizabeth Keckley Reader (Hillsborough, North Carolina: Eno Publishers, 2016 and 2017).

• Sometime in May, 1817, while his wife was pregnant with their tenth child, Colonel Armistead Burwell of Virginia raped a woman enslaved to him. His victim’s name was Agnes (Aggy) Hobbs. Of this rape a child named Elizabeth was born into enslavement in February, 1818. (Her exact birth date can’t be ascertained; this was common among those enslaved.)

• Elizabeth endured lashings and cruel treatment at the hands of Armistead Burwell and his wife, but she entered a new chapter of travails when she was fourteen. That’s when Burwell sent her to work for his son / her half-brother, Robert (a Presbyterian minister), and his wife, Margaret Anna, in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Short of money, the couple hired Keckley out to a neighbor (Alexander Kirkland, a member of the gentry in Hillsborough) who repeatedly beat and raped her – this continuing over a period of four years. Of one of those rapes Keckley conceived a son, whom she named George after her mother’s common-law husband.

• At the end of those four years Rev. Burwell returned Elizabeth Keckley to her original enslavers in Virginia – and (this is the relatively familiar part of the story) Keckley was eventually able, using her skills as dressmaker and her financial savvy, to purchase her own and her son’s freedom for the sum of $1,200 (about $30,453 in 2025 dollars), rising to become the preferred dressmaker and a close confidante of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. She led organizations for the benefit of formerly enslaved Blacks and wrote her memoir that disclosed the brutalities of the cultures of chattel slavery and the hypocrisy of white enslavers with consummate grace, as well as speaking of the human vulnerabilities of Mary Todd Lincoln and some of the intimacies shared between a formerly enslaved Black woman and the most prominent white woman in the U.S. (More about this groundbreaking memoir in Part 3 of this post.)

• Meanwhile – and here the “old nest of wrongs” was redoubled many times over – Rev. Burwell and his wife, who had repeatedly lent Keckley to the neighbor who had repeatedly raped her, led the Burwell Academy for Young Ladies in Hillsborough. As a result of the success of this venture, they were asked to lead the Charlotte Female Academy (in Charlotte, NC) at its inception in 1857. Under Burwell the institution became the Seminary for Girls in 1891. In 1896, the year after Burwell’s death, it became the Presbyterian Female College in 1896, and Queens College in 1912. In 1914 the College honored Margaret Anna Burwell, who with her husband had repeatedly “rented” Keckley into servitude by the man who repeatedly raped her, by naming its main administration building after her: Burwell Hall.

  

• Queens College became co-educational in 1987 and was renamed Queens University of Charlotte in 2002. In 2019, after University staff pointed out (“discovered” is the official verbiage) the Burwells’ links to enslavement, the institution’s president appointed a task force to research the issue. On Thursday, July 2, 2020, during the intense but short-lived steps toward reckoning that were taken around the U.S. in the wake of the murder of Mr. George Floyd, the University’s trustees voted to rename the building. It’s now Queens Hall.

With the renaming of Burwell Hall in 2020, the ugly ties between Queens University of Charlotte and the enslavement of Elizabeth Keckley officially became a part of the institution’s past, only vestigially manifest in its present and future. That was the first step in erasing the long history of institutional honoring of the enslaver while ignoring the enslaved.

 The next step was taken in November 2023, when Professors Justin Smith and Jennifer Piazza-Pick of Queens University of Charlotte organized a three-day Margaret Bonds symposium that culminated in Dr. Smith conducting an excellent performance of Bonds’s setting of the Du Bois Credo, with Prof. Sequina DuBose of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte delivering an unforgettable rendition of the second movement (“Especially do I believe in the Negro race”). (I’ve reviewed Dr. DuBose’s landmark album Blurred Lines elsewhere on this blog). Toward the end of a talk that I gave for that impressive symposium I mentioned that “[Bitter Laurel] remains unpublished and unperformed to this day and has never even been mentioned in any of the biographical or musical literature on Margaret Bonds, but it is fully performable” – and in the post-presentation discussion Kel Williams – one of the fine students at Queens – noted that that there were strong and well-known ties between the University and Keckley, then elaborated. (Until that moment I knew of Keckley but knew nothing of the connection between Keckley and Queens – and if ever there’s been a moment that illustrated the rich joy that teachers feel when they learn from students, this was it.)

With that, things were in motion. At a post-symposium dinner Dr. DuBose, Dr. Smith, and I returned to the subject of Bitter Laurel and Bonds generally. Since then they have both secured grant support for the projects that grew out of that moment: Dr. DuBose, who is Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, a Faculty Research Grant for an album (to be recorded in 2026) for PARMA Recordings that will feature excerpts from Bitter Laurel; and for Dr. Smith, a Noble Fellowship from Queens University of Charlotte supporting the editing and performance of Bitter Laurel. Slowly but surely, thanks to the artistry and advocacy of Drs. DuBose and Smith and the support of the grant-giving agencies, right is finally being done where so much wrong was done before.

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Which brings me to the final section of this installment – because initiating the process of doing right (which is where we are now) is not the same as achieving right. And here the stakes are especially high, partly because of the complexity of the circumstances that have marginalized Bitter Laurel to begin with and partly because we live in times where the very freedom that was a core theme of Keckley’s life and Bitter Laurel is under fire – arguably more so than at any point since the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. Those of us involved in bringing Bitter Laurel to light have to get it right in order to honor Margaret Bonds and her art, and to honor what she and Elizabeth Keckley waged in that struggle for freedom. And that means mediating, musically and theatrically, between the languages of freedom as Bonds and her collaborators expressed them in the late 1960s and those of our own time. 

So I asked the other principals in the Bitter Laurel Project for their thoughts on the venture, its progress, and its challenges. Dr. DuBose, who is collaborating with Dr. Smith to organize, produce, and direct the many moving parts of the performance, immediately cut to the challenge of mediation and the ethical imperative for modern musicians not to let Margaret Bonds’s Keckley project remain absent from our world:

Dr. DuBose further highlighted the commonalities between Bonds and Keckley and the unacceptable marginalization of her legacies in popular song and music theater:

Meanwhile, my friend and Southwestern University colleague Christopher Washington, who is realizing the edited lead sheets and orchestrating the whole, also comments on Bonds’s remarkable polystylism, describing his hands-on experience working with Bonds’s music as “illuminating,” “moving,” and “nostalgic.” Prof. Washington singles out Bonds’s sensitive handling of Lovoos’s lyrics, especially her use of word-play in No 18 (“Many Little Things”). Of this poignant number, sung by newly widowed Mary Todd Lincoln as she thinks back on her life with President Lincoln, Prof. Washington observes: “The sentiments of Mary Lincoln don’t go unheeded” and continues: “It’s been a rather humbling experience connecting to Bonds’s creative genius.” 

Dr. Justin Smith, chief music director and project lead at Queens, sums up all these themes:

There’s much to unpack in these observations from those most directly acquainted with Margaret Bonds’s Bitter Laurel and most intimately involved in bringing to light for the first time – more than space permits. But one thing is abundantly clear: that Bitter Laurel compellingly disproves the conventional wisdom (discussed at the outset of Part 1) that Bonds’s late California period was of little artistic or social consequence. On the contrary, in Bitter Laurel and the other surviving works of those late years we see in Margaret Bonds a composer whose musical imagination enabled her to fluently engage any number of widely disparate musical styles not only to advocate for causes related to social justice, but also simply to give voice to her imagination – an imagination that could not be bound in the service of a “Bonds mission” that, for its part, could not be repressed. Bitter Laurel, never heard and unaccountably obscure, is one example of that passion for justice, that musical talent, and the achievements of Bonds's late California period.

            That’s a tall claim, but I’ll substantiate it, with a few points about Elizabeth Keckley and a few snapshots of Bonds’s music and its text, in Part 3 (coming soon).