RAC is excited to partner with Humans of St. Louis to highlight stories from some of the talented creatives and artists who call St. Louis home. All stories and photography in the RAC + Humans of St. Louis series were created by and are credited to Lindy Drew, co-founder, lead storyteller, and book co-author of Humans of St. Louis.

 

Zenique Gardner Perry 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“It takes skill when it comes to writing a memoir, an essay, or narrative poetry about something personal in your life. A lot of my stories have come out of a place of hurt. And when you’re writing from an emotional place, you need to sit with it for a while. When I started the MFA program at Washington University, that’s when I really got to focus on my writing. There was just me to think about, so I had an opportunity to work on my creative nonfiction. That summer, Covid already hit, George Floyd happened, and I started my program virtually in the fall.

At the time, the publishing industry was also coming to terms with how white it was. All these publishing houses and writing entities were thinking about how they could diversify to be more equitable businesses. So they started creating imprints where they were thinking more about Black and Brown stories. Well, Columbia Journalism School put out a call for writers, and someone sent it to me like, ‘You should apply.’ I almost didn’t, but I ended up doing it. And I was one of the folks selected. It was sweet because, from some of my journal entries, I had wanted to tell the story about why I moved back to St. Louis.

I had been living in Philly for 12 years and knew I wanted to return home to be with my mom. She’d been living in Bevo Mill for over a decade and was raising my 16-year-old nephew. In 2014, you know, Michael Brown Jr. was killed. Well, around Thanksgiving, Darren Wilson, the cop who shot him, got acquitted. That same weekend, my nephew got out of the house to hang with some friends. And he ended up being one of the four boys who got in a fight with a Bosnian man, hit him over the head with a hammer, and killed him. The Bosnian community protested, saying that Black folks were retaliating against them and ‘they’ve killed one of ours.’ Mayor Slay promised to prosecute the boys to the greatest extent to make an example of them, and my nephew was detained and locked up.

“…My mom, who was dealing with all this by herself, went to live with her mom in Holly Hills. But before that, she had built a community in Little Bosnia. She was a former teacher at Long Middle School, so she already knew a lot of the children, families, and their stories. And they knew my nephew because he had grown up in that environment, too. After the incident, my mom would go home sometimes, and the neighbors would tell her, ‘Come home, Mary. This is your home.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“When I moved back to St. Louis, it was my mom and I navigating this whole criminal justice system. Three years later, my nephew got sentenced to 35 years. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There were a lot of things I had to make sense of over that time. So I knew I wanted to write a story about those first few months back with my mom and the things I noticed about her at that time. Like, how she didn’t let herself cry. Anytime she’d get emotional, she might start crying, but instead she’d pray. My mom’s a pastor. So she was allowing her religiosity and spirituality to hold her grief until days after that first hearing when she had to testify in court.

I got a taste of working with an editor from the Columbia Journalism School, which was wonderful for my writing, but the story was just so heavy. In the process, I became overwhelmed because I was a student focused on writing this and other things. Well, in my program at Washington University, these big authors would visit, we’d submit a story, and they’d give us feedback. I’ll never forget Aisha Sabatini Sloan was one of our visitors, and I told her how stressed I was. I felt like I was getting a lot of pressure from my editor to complete the story. But I was like, ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it on their timeline. I think I’m going to pull out of it.’ And she said, ‘No, it’s your story. You tell them what you need. If they can’t wait for it, there are other people who will publish it.’ And that was the richest advice I’ve ever gotten when it comes to being a writer. Like, ‘Girl, no. We ain’t finna do this.’

I ended up having a conversation with my editor and told them, ‘I feel like I’m under a lot of pressure.’ I had already gotten a monetary award, so I said, ‘I’m happy to send the money back. I didn’t cash the check because I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do everything in time.’ But he said, ‘No, Zenique. Put the check in the bank. What time do you need?’ And I learned that when people want your story, they will fight for you. They’ll give you the space you need to create the story the way you want.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“While advocating for more time from my editor, I won a second award, the Illuminating Black Lives Fellowship, which was the gift of time at a writer’s retreat center in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, called The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. If you ever need space to write something, this place is wonderful. So this two-week retreat was coming up, and I went with a plan to complete the story. Every time I go on a retreat or residency, I always finish a piece, and it gets published right afterwards. So I went during my first and second year at WashU, finished the story at 3 a.m. one night, and cried my eyes out. I texted my mom, ‘Mom, I finished a story.’ I told her how thankful I was for her. She told me how thankful she was for me. And then it got published in The Delacorte Review, a long-form narrative nonfiction literary journal. It’s the longest story I’ve ever published to date. It’s the most emotional and personal piece for sure. And I had to fight about its title.

I was able to keep one of the titles mutually agreed upon when it was published in print. But for the online version, they wanted something more like a journalistic byline. And I had to tell them, ‘No, we won’t publish it online then.’ I expressed how important it was to maintain a level of dignity in this story I told and not do something exploitative. They wanted some salacious headline, like, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐻𝑎𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑟 𝑀𝑢𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟: 𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑎 𝑇𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝐺𝑜𝑒𝑠 𝑊𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑔. I mean, that was basically the headline here in St. Louis: 𝐻𝑎𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑟 𝐾𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝐵𝑒𝑣𝑜 𝑀𝑖𝑙𝑙. And I said, ‘We should use the same title we always have: 𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑀𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑎’𝑠 𝑃𝑟𝑎𝑦𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑊𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛’𝑡 𝐸𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ.’ Because one of the things I know that happens to families of perpetrators of violence is that we get treated as if we’re the perpetrators ourselves. I always say we’re like the silent victims of a crime. Sure, sometimes you can see the writing on the wall. But usually, the families are just as blindsided as everyone else experiencing the news of whatever crime their family member or loved one committed. And a lot of times, the public doesn’t know how to access compassion for families of the perpetrators of violence.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“While I love writing and the writing process, I also help people shape stories, tell their own stories, and figure out how to get their stories into the world. Ironically, I’d been working with formerly incarcerated people for years. For several of the years I lived in Philadelphia, my baby brother was locked up in prison here in Missouri. Out of a desire to connect with him, I ended up teaching a writing class for the Institute for Community Justice (ICJ), which announced its closure earlier this year. But this incredible program was part of Philadelphia FIGHT, an organization that provides information and resources for folks living with HIV. So the ICJ had this program supporting folks on the inside who were HIV positive and coming home. I had just finished my undergraduate program and had time. So I taught a class there.

A lot of times, those who are incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, working class, or historically marginalized don’t think their stories matter. And in the process of writing, there’s room for personal redemption, to reflect and have space for introspection, and to figure out, ‘How do I reconcile? How do I forgive myself? How do I forgive others? Who do I need to reach out to?’ I use these prompts to help them figure it out.

Fast forward a few years later, after I returned to St. Louis. My baby brother had long completed his prison sentence, I’d just graduated with my MFA from WashU, and I was hired as an English Writing professor for the Prison Education Program at Saint Louis University. While it was a semester-long appointment, I only taught for four weeks at the Missouri Department of Corrections in Bonne Terre. In that last week, my students were working on an important project with some really difficult stuff and arrived to class so sad and weepy. We were doing creative nonfiction. They were excavating their life stories, mining the details of their pasts. And we were thinking together about how to mold that into a narrative, a story.

The class was made up of 23 men who had done all kinds of things in the world. “…I refrained from looking at their records because I didn’t want to think about their histories. I just wanted to see them as my students; to have in front of me who I came to know, their potential, and that’s it. When they had to write their first drafts, they were feeling all the feels. So I did a meditative exercise to help them quiet their minds beforehand.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“When I left that day of teaching, I got an email from the Prison Education Program director asking to meet her on a Zoom the next morning. I thought, ‘Something happened.’ Sure enough, when we met, she told me the prison said they did not want me to come back because I assigned a book that was inappropriate. The book, 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝐽𝑎𝑑𝑒 𝑊𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑, is written by Ira Sukrungruang, an amazing author. And I found out about this particular text because he did a reading and book talk with students from WashU’s MFA program while I studied there.

The book is a memoir in which the author talks about how his wife wanted a divorce. In it, Ira tackled his food codependency, described himself as a fat Asian man, and really started thinking about Asian male desirability. He was also jumping into bad habits of sleeping with women and things like that. Ultimately, it was the sexual content they deemed inappropriate for the students. I guess it made sense, but in thinking about stories, I don’t focus on what’s salacious. I think about how they provide such rich reality.

When I talked about it with the SLU Prison Education Program staff, they were so good to me. They knew the pushback was also likely because the prison had never had a Black woman work in that program before. Ya know, I had been to prisons for years, visiting my brother and cousins. So I put so much thought into how I showed up. I dressed professionally because I knew all the guidelines of going into that space. In hindsight, I should have gotten some boiler suits to wear every visit. But I feel like I could have stripped myself down and it still wouldn’t have mattered. Looking back, I still blame my appearance for the racism, discrimination, and misogynoir that they put on me as a Black woman teaching men in that facility.

Thinking more about that book, I let Ira know I had gotten put out because of it. He wrote back that he was really sorry. The book is good, though. The way it’s written, there’s a pattern he uses and things he had to explore to get to the end to understand his own worth. That I really appreciated.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

𝐷𝑖𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑎 𝑚𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑎𝑦 𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑏𝑦𝑒?

“No, I didn’t get to speak to them directly. They did find a different facilitator — a white man who carried out my syllabus — so the students didn’t have to lose a whole semester of classes. I was able to work through him and, of course, there were no problems. The program continued to pay me for the rest of the time, but it was really sad. I’m still in touch with the professor who hired me, though. One day last fall, we met for coffee, and he told me, ‘Zenique, I had to sit in at the prison the other day, and your name came up. Some of the students asked if I ever talk to you. And I told them we were meeting. They said, “I still think about her stories, how important they were, and what she did.”’ I was like, ‘Thank you so much for telling me this.’ One day, I’m going to write a story about that experience, too.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Now I’m writing stories that I’m hoping to pursue an agent for. The first one came from a prompt from one of my classes in school that I never intended to see the light of day. But from this one writing prompt, I started writing a story about my nephew, and I ended up writing more and more.

So, I have four siblings. I’m the eldest girl, and we have an older brother. I also have many niblings, my nieces and nephews, and my sister, who’s a year younger than me, is a mom to five of them. Her eldest was the one who got locked up as a teenager while living with my mom. Shortly after that, my mom visited my sister, who was living in L.A., and we found out one of her kids was getting homeschooled, which, for reasons I won’t get into, was very strange. So I said, ‘Momma, why don’t you bring my niece home to St. Louis?’ And she did. My husband and I ended up taking her in, raising her, and putting her through school. She was 11, and now she’s 21. She was the first of my sister’s kids to come live with us.

A few years later, my sister’s younger son also came to live with us. He was the love child of my sister and an undocumented Guatemalan she met in L.A. When they eventually split up, my nephew went to live with his father, who lived in a home with his large Latino family. When he got sick with a brain tumor, he got sicker. And since he was undocumented, he got hooked up with this hospital doing something experimental on his body to cure him. They kept him alive for a long time. But when he died, my nephew was six years old.

My husband and I kind of knew at some point that it made the most sense for my nephew to live here in St. Louis. Now, he had been immersed in his Guatemalan household, and he was bilingual. So how could we preserve this as he came to live with his Black family? We enrolled him in St. Cecilia School & Academy to make sure he was still learning and connected to as much of his culture as possible. He entered as a 1st grader, and recently matriculated to high school. Plus, he’s not only learned Spanish but Japanese, too. Today he has a great sense of his heritage, which especially matters to me.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Now, my sister had two additional children after my niece and nephew. Their father was an aspiring rapper from St. Louis who was physically and verbally abusive. Eventually, my sister wasn’t doing well at all and had to move back to St. Louis. As far as I knew, she’d never had a substance use problem, but she had struggled with mental health issues. While she was out West, we’d send her money, and she’d stay in shelters, get put out of one, and go to the next. At some point, our aunt, who is a nurse, said, ‘If I run into them and see a problem, I’m gonna report it. And you’re gonna have to deal with it from there.’ Well, when she met up with them, she was full of compassion, and sent them on a train to St. Louis.

I picked up my sister and her kids from the station, and they reeked like they’d been living on the street. A woman traveling with them, and who had been so worried, gave me the warm handoff. I said, ‘Thank you, we got it from here.’ Oh, I was so relieved that she and her kids were all here, even though it was a huge undertaking. Upon arrival, my sister and her two youngest went to live with my mom.

My nephew had been with us for about six years when my mom and his two younger siblings moved into our house a couple of summers ago. And my husband’s boundary, because he’s also a social worker, was that my sister could not come with them. So then she was unhoused in St. Louis and had to get herself together. She had no other options. She was making bad choices for the longest time, and she’s much better now. She got connected with Places for People, which really helped shift things for her and saved her life. And children are pretty much always going to choose their parents, even when their parents might not choose what’s best for them. It’s hard, and it’s hurtful. It hurt my feelings. I’ve been hurt many times by the children choosing their mom in good, bad, or indifferent circumstances. Like, if it’s Mother’s Day or Easter, and they say, ‘Can you take us to the store to get a gift for our mom?’ I say, ‘Okay.’ Still, it’s just always an emotional journey.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

𝑌𝑜𝑢’𝑣𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑠𝑜 𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑡𝑜 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑘𝑖𝑑𝑠 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑜𝑛 𝑎 𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑝𝑎𝑡ℎ.

“And children don’t necessarily see that. They don’t notice it. My sister has since moved into an apartment with the kids, and they all have their own rooms. She also bought them phones just to use at her place. At my place, they had to read books before bed, and they had a bedtime. And, yeah, in juxtaposition, I recognized I had been a rigid parental figure. I also had expectations and guidelines they had to follow.

My life, overall, is pretty chaotic. In my house right now is my husband, who in my mind is my first priority. But let him tell it, and he’ll say he’s eighth. And that’s after the animals. So, my husband, my mom, my 21-year-old eldest niece, my 14-year-old nephew, my 9-year-old niece, my 8-year-old nephew, a rottweiler, and a cat. And the cat is actually the most demanding. I also have a bonus child, who’s a grown woman, whom I call my baby. She’s from Uganda, and I met her while she was in her graduate program. She came here pregnant and didn’t know she was pregnant until a few months after she got here. Well, we became close, and her baby, whom I call my grandbaby, is two and often at our place, too. So we have a full house all the time.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Growing up, I read voraciously. I read so much. I feel like any writer has that story. My paternal grandmother was someone who also enjoyed Black American literature. She wrote stories that never got published, but she read a lot. When she passed, I asked if I could have all her books. So I inherited a whole collection. So I fell in love with Black stories and Black writers through her. I also fell in love with Black dialect because she loved reading authors like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Zora Neale Hurston. And I picked up how they captured the dialect of enslaved people and people who were emancipated and the stories that came out of that time.

I’ve read most of the books I’ve inherited from my grandmother, and one of the most touching things is running into a slip of paper with her handwriting. She wrote her name inside the front cover of all her books. And I own that from her. As a kid, I also read 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐵𝑎𝑏𝑦-𝑆𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝐶𝑙𝑢𝑏 and the 𝑆𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑡 𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑦 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑛𝑠 books. I read the 𝐿𝑒𝑓𝑡 𝐵𝑒ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑑 series and 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑊ℎ𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝐵𝑜𝑜𝑘 because I grew up in church. I loved 𝐽𝑎𝑐𝑘 & 𝐽𝑖𝑙𝑙 books. And I loved to get magazines in the mail. I still love that, especially with literary magazines. My husband says, ‘You are single-handedly keeping magazines in business.’ But it was my grandmother who influenced me to become a writer. And now I need to set my sights on having a published book. I’m always saying, ‘I have to finish my own book because Granny never did.’ I cannot wait to have a whole book finished. And the first page is gonna say, ‘For Granny.’ That’s it.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I appreciate that there’s an independent route to get things published. But it also requires a lot of sacrifice when it comes to finances, time, mental capacity, and figuring out editors and artists. I know about the independent route. But I’ve done a lot of work. I have a bachelor’s degree in writing. I have a master’s in fine arts and writing. And I want to pursue this next step to write a book through the traditional route. I know once you’ve published independently and sold a number of copies, there’s an agent interested in representing you. And contrary to what you think, if you have a good agent fighting on your behalf, you don’t have to spend any of your money. The main publishers are so well-endowed, they’re gonna give you an advance to write your second one, you’re gonna get paid royalties, and all of that from the books you end up selling. Another thing I want writers to know, especially talking about writers of color, is that we need to be doing more to ensure that the publishing industry sees our stories. And now, in particular, because certain stories need to be prioritized. This is the time. We need the voices of people who are impacted in this moment. And there are people who want to ensure those stories are put out into the world.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I’m a chaotic writer. I told everybody at the Wild Seeds Writers Retreat with the Center for Black Literature in upstate New York. And the teacher who led our workshop, Ladee Hubbard, who is this well-published, beautiful writer and author, said, ‘When I do my first drafts, I don’t have an outline. I only have an outline when I’m starting the editing process.’ I’ve heard many teachers say, ‘You may have an idea for your story, but you don’t know where it’s going until you’re writing it. And once you start writing it, it will take you on a completely different journey.’ I’m always open to that. I’m also primarily writing true stories, and the process of writing true stories is that it’s f*cking emotional.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Since moving back to St. Louis, I’ve also done intense work in violence prevention. I worked at Safe Connections primarily around teen dating and gender-based violence. At one point, I was the manager over our youth programs. I’m a teacher these days, but I worked in violence prevention for over 10 years. And now I own a business around anti-racism work called Undo Bias. We work with organizations in thinking about how to create equitable workspaces for Black and Brown folks. Of course, that’s been challenged with the current administration. But we’ve still had partners who count on us for the work. And that work provides a lot of liberty for me to do my writing. It is the thing that sustains my writing.

Writing is something a lot of places have taken for granted unless you’ve published books and quite a few of them. But writing hasn’t always been readily recognized as an art form. Poetry, yes. But when you’re writing a memoir or creative nonfiction, it’s not always the case. There are many awards and grants for these things, but I think what people attribute to the arts are the visual arts. Like, there’s not a museum of letters. The library is, if you will. But we take writing and reading for granted, whereas the skill of creating a tapestry or monument or painting or photograph — those mediums are on display.

Writing is such an undertaking. When I write, I have to do it in isolation. I write into the wee hours of the night. I used to stay up all night. And it’s hard because I have to juggle my other work and need to be available to people from 9 to 5, too. So residencies and retreats to get away for weeks at a time help me finish pieces to get them out to the world. When you get to a residency, everything is taken care of for you, and a stipend will or will not be provided. If it’s not, that’s an example of how having Undo Bias is supportive of my creative process. Even when residencies provide a place to stay, my bills don’t stop. I can’t put that kind of pressure on my husband in addition to being away from home, so running Undo Bias helps fill that gap.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“When I went to Arkansas, I finished 𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑀𝑎𝑚𝑎’𝑠 𝑃𝑟𝑎𝑦𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑊𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛’𝑡 𝐸𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ for publication. And when I went to Alaska for a residency, I completed 𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝐶𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑈𝑠 𝑖𝑠 𝑀𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑐, which got published immediately after I came back home. Last summer, I went to New York and finished 𝑇𝑜 𝐾𝑎𝑏𝑎𝑙𝑒, a story I was set on doing for a long time. Our fiction workshop facilitator and author there, Ladee Hubbard, said something that clicked to help me finish a piece and get it out. Mere hours after submitting 𝑇𝑜 𝐾𝑎𝑏𝑎𝑙𝑒 to several literary journals, it was accepted by Cutleaf Journal and published online earlier this summer. So I know that when I get out of this environment of being stressed with work and my family, and I’m able to sit down with my stories, I get things done. I get them out into the world. But I must have the time and resources to do that. Before I left my last job, I’d been working so hard it was ridiculous. I missed two grant opportunities to apply with RAC. But this past year, I got a Regional Arts Commission grant. I also work with Mid-America Arts Alliance, which is great at compensating artists for the work they’re doing.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“In the last few years, Undo Bias has built this program called Arts and Liberation. Doing antiracism work is a huge undertaking. I’m a Black woman going into white spaces all the time. My counterpart is white, and he gets to work a lot of times with white folks. But even still, I’m up against hearing, encountering, pushing back against some of the things said, and also fighting to tell people, ‘My life matters. Black boys’ lives matter. Black moms’ lives matter.’ I have to always push back against that, and at one point, it became so exhausting. So I was like, ‘We have to do something gratifying in this work.’

I do a lot of retail therapy on my dime, but actually, I wanted to do something a little healthier. So that’s how Arts and Liberation began. James Meinert is a musician and visual artist, and I’m a literary artist. So we’ve been curating these programs where we get to work with artists and bring together activists, artists, and community members to enjoy and partake in some kind of art. There’s always a literary component to it. And we feel like it should be sustenance for the people doing this work in the world, but also to have revolutionary moments of joy and to simply have a good time with one another.

Last year, we partnered with the Saint Louis Art Museum to bring BLK MKT Vintage to St. Louis. This past fall, we partnered with Moraa Nyaribo, a Kranzberg artist-in-residence, whose exhibition, NYUSO, highlighted Black resistance, beauty, and abundance. We threw a closing party for her show by bringing in Kenyan author and Voodoonauts co-founder Shingai Njeri Kagunda from Vermont, African drummers and dancers from Spirit of Angela West African Dance & Drum, and DJ DemBari, an STL-based dancer and choreographer. It was an incredible event, and our goal is to do more.”

𝑌𝑜𝑢’𝑣𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑠𝑜 𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑎𝑙𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦!

“This is why my stories take 10 years to write.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡’𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑒’𝑠 𝑔𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘?

“One I really appreciate is when people say they feel like the dialogue is real, that they can hear it. That’s such a huge compliment because I pay close attention to the way people talk in order to capture that on a page. People who do screenwriting and playwriting do it well because it’s for the stage. And it is a skill. Because when it comes to creative nonfiction, I’m not going to remember dialogue from 20 years ago. So what I’ve learned is important is keeping the essence of what was said and figuring out a way to convey the actual words in a way that still allows it to be felt and heard by the reader.

Sometimes I do remember a line of what someone said, and that’s enough to build a whole world of dialogue. Taking that kind of permissive approach for true stories has been helpful for me. And in the world of creative nonfiction, every author is different in how they keep fidelity to real life. I feel strongly that my stories have to be as close to true life as possible. And the only deviation from that is in dialogue, because you can’t necessarily remember everything that’s been said. But at the end of the day, I do also subscribe to the idea that creative nonfiction is not journalism. In journalism, we’re responsible to the audience to ensure that the truth is what they’re reading. As authors of creative nonfiction, we’re usually telling our own stories, and we’re the owners of those stories.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

𝑌𝑜𝑢’𝑟𝑒 𝑎 𝑣𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑟, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑢𝑝, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑖𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑙𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘 𝑖𝑛. 𝑌𝑒𝑡, 𝑤𝑒’𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑 𝑎𝑠 𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒.

“We don’t read enough. My husband did a deep dive into AI and how addictive the tech world is. And he learned that people who are wealthy in the tech industry are very regimented in how they introduce and prescribe technology to their children. I’m sure it’s a spectrum, right? There are people throwing screens at their kids’ faces, and there are people religious about not doing that. And I think wealth plays a big part. I spent time in New York not too long ago, and people still read on the train. So I am curious about how do we get our children interested in writing and reading in these working-class communities? I don’t think that everywhere in the world people aren’t reading. I know so many African writers. My goal is to open up a bookstore and library in Mukono, Uganda, where the university is where I studied. I studied in East Africa and, later, in Lagos, Nigeria, was a student of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for two weeks. Because of that, I’ve come to learn of so many Nigerian writers who are writing and whose work is being read. 

I was a neighborhood reading captain for Ready Readers, and my god-grandbaby, who is two years old, is in love with books. We have so many books around our house, and he loves all the board books. He’s like, ‘Book, book, book!’ How do we ensure he keeps loving books? I make the kids read in my house. And I intend to instill a love of reading in them for as long as I can. I’m hoping they are always excited about books and storytelling.

People are still reading, and maybe it’s not so much here in this country. But my goal is to write something that is beloved here by people who are still in love with letters and the word and how people beyond our borders are interested, too. It’s necessary. It’s hard and sad to see how the writing world is diminishing. But then again, it’s not. I’m reading so many stories right now. I was at Goodwill and saw this book I’d been thinking about that I fell in love with in college. I was like, ‘Oh my god, 𝐵𝑙𝑢𝑒 𝐿𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝐽𝑎𝑧𝑧 by Donald Miller is right there. I’m taking it home today.’ And I started reading it again last night.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Finally, I wanted to be sure to mention that I had this feeling of, ‘Gosh, the Regional Arts Commission chose me to do this interview, when there are so many literary artists in St. Louis?’ I had a whole lot of trepidation about it initially. Because I don’t have a book published. So for me, it used to be, ‘Oh, I don’t have an MFA.’ But now I have an MFA. Now it’s, ‘Oh, I don’t have a book published.’ So, I’m always moving the benchmark to my value when it comes to being seen as a writer, an author. And I don’t even embrace the term literary artist anymore because I’m also able to curate programming, I love teaching, and I feel like an Evangelist to tell folks, ‘Write your story. And don’t just write it. Get it out into the world.’ People are always looking to publish your stuff. I have so many resources to share, and I want to make it more pronounced that I am supporting writers in getting their work out into the world.”

 

Zenique Gardner Perry | zeniquegardnerperry.com

About Humans of St. Louis
Humans of St. Louis (HOSTL) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with the mission of sharing photographic portraits and first-person stories to highlight local needs, issues, and experiences from people in the St. Louis region. HOSTL gives followers an intimate look into the lives and struggles of the people of St. Louis, one photo and story at a time, and is the second most popular “Humans of” site in the U.S. after Humans of New York.

RAC is excited to partner with Humans of St. Louis to highlight stories from some of the talented creatives and artists who call St. Louis home. All stories and photography in the RAC + Humans of St. Louis series were created by and are credited to Lindy Drew, co-founder, lead storyteller, and book co-author of Humans of St. Louis.

 

Phillip Hamer & Valeria Rodriguez

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “I’ve longed to have conversations with my grandfather since he passed away when I was 13. So I figured the next best thing was to have conversations with his children. I started doing audio interviews with my aunts and uncles. While my fiancée and I were still getting to know each other, I remember her telling me about how she came to this understanding: ‘We don’t know our parents beyond them being our parents, yet they’ve had entire lives prior to us existing.’ When I thought more about my elders and what their lives were like before I knew them, that was intriguing. So I took a month to individually interview and photograph my family, and I learned some really cool things about everyone. Like, how much I was aligned with one of my aunts who I spent a lot of time with as a kid. I used to visit her in Chicago. I’d spend summers at her house once she moved back home to St. Louis, too. She was like my second mom. Just talking to her, hearing more about her life before being a mom and getting married, it was like, ‘You were living life. You loved to travel. You were seeing things. Oh, you were on the same sh*t I was on!’

Through my aunts and uncles, I ended up getting words from my grandpa. When I started this project called ‘Home,’ I knew they hadn’t been speaking to each other about it. A question I asked each of them was, ‘What was one of your fondest childhood memories?’ And four of them ended up speaking about the same exact moment — being in the backyard of their childhood home, drinking lemonade and tea. And that’s what they were doing when my grandfather had told them to close their eyes, and he started to name different places. Then he said, ‘Imagine you were sitting with a friend having a lemonade or a tea with them. A rich man couldn’t live better than this.’ And four of them, literally verbatim, recalled the same story. For me, it felt like an affirmation of words from my grandfather. That was also one of the first photography projects I’d ever done where I didn’t feel nervous or have any insecurities about the artwork I was trying to do. It just felt natural. “…So I started doing more personal projects that included not only family but also showed the beauty of Blackness.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “My wife and I were driving to Nashville when we got on the subject of cowboy boots, which got us talking about rodeos. Sure enough, while in Nashville, I bought my first pair of pecan, ostrich-skinned boots. It happened to be Juneteenth, and we learned that there is a Black rodeo in St. Louis. Of course, we’d miss it driving back. But I thought, ‘I’m going to find the next closest one, and we’re going.’ I looked it up, and it took us to Oklahoma. When I take random trips like that, I’m the type of person who loves to do research to make connections in the area and meet people. So for this one, I was fortunate to come across a young photographer named Jakian Parks. He grew up in the cowboy culture and has been adamant about documenting and preserving this culture. It has always been a part of his life. I learned these Black rodeos were dying out because of violence among the younger generation. But when the young Black cowboys started seeing the importance of the culture more, they did all they could outside of what the elders were doing to keep cultivating it.

It was the best-case scenario for Jakian to be the person we met. Came to find out he was one of EBONY Magazine’s Power 100 Youth, and he got some of the Black cowboys he worked with day-to-day to walk in Pharrell’s 2024 Paris show. How cool to meet someone like that and then be able to experience Black cowboy culture for myself. Of course, as a photographer, there was no way I was not taking a camera.

Taking pictures of this subject felt so foreign yet so familiar. Every turn, through everyone we met, there was never a situation that felt forced or unwelcome. The project started with simply getting to meet people, going to these rodeos, and learning more about Black cowboys in the Midwest. This is the third time going, and we’ve gone to the two biggest rodeos each year. We plan to show up at the rodeos more, but at smaller ones. Now I’m compiling work to put together a coffee table book. And I’m getting a better understanding of where to shift my focus when telling a story. Rodeos are happening every weekend. Some are in a small town, and it’s usually just a lot of people from the community. Most people don’t travel to go to those. So I just want to get a better feel for them, and see where I can find other stories that connect everything I’ve photographed so far.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “I’ve befriended a lot of the cowboys I’ve met through my documentary project. Actually, I got back into fishing, and through following these Black cowboys on social media, I also get to fish. So I’ll catch up with a few of them before heading to a rodeo, and go fishing with some when I get over there. One of my buddies, D-Bogus, was like, ‘Man, we got a lake on our land. I got 10 horses. We can just saddle some up, ride down, and go fishing on horseback.’ Yeah, I can’t wait to go back. My intention is to explore and have the courage to just keep going somewhere new. I especially like meeting all these people and getting to have different experiences that come about on a whim.

Outside of making portraits of these cowboys, I’ve also photographed in the arena. My first time in a rodeo, not knowing what was happening, Jakian came over to me and said, ‘I can get you in the arena.’ I wasn’t going to say no. So I got into this arena, turned to the guys, and told them, ‘Look, I’ve never been in one of these. I’m assuming that if this is where you are, and I’m over so-and-so’s shoulder, I’m gonna be okay.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, you’ll be all right.’ I said, ‘But if I’m somewhere I don’t need to be, let me know, and I’ll move.’ And they were like, ‘We got you.’ I will say you’re definitely coming out of the situation dirty at all times. There are all types of animals around, so you know there’s animal manure and stuff like that everywhere. But I can’t even think of a time when I even smelled any of it. I don’t know if it’s because of the excitement of being in the arena, but the smell hasn’t even crossed my mind.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “One of the things I found most interesting at the Black rodeos was meeting Black people with native ancestry. They identify as Black, and their native bloodline is evident in their bone structure and build. Older cowboys have been interesting to me, too. That’s a group I’ve been intrigued by because I get a lot of stories from them. My first year photographing in these spaces, I took a picture of a gentleman, and I could tell he had stories. I introduced myself, and he said, ‘You should come to the bulldogging competition tomorrow.’ I was like, ‘Great! My partner and I are gonna be photographing here all day tomorrow.’ He was like, ‘Oh, I’m not talking about tomorrow evening at the rodeo. I’m having a special bulldogging competition at my house in the morning.’ And he gave us his address. So I asked him his name, and he said, ‘I’m Clarence LeBlanc.’ I was like, ‘Nice to meet you.’

Well, the rodeo we were at is called The Roy LeBlanc Invitational. So I thought, ‘Let me look this man up.’ Turns out, he’s a rodeo legend. And the rodeo we were at was started by his father. A lot of white rodeos wouldn’t allow natives and people of color to participate back in the day. So the LeBlanc family started their own. Now it’s one of the oldest running rodeos in Oklahoma.

When we went back to the competition a few mornings later, I met an older man who had to be in his late 50s or early 60s, out there riding horses. I didn’t know exactly what happened, but he got into a fight with another guy. Later on, I saw him, took his photo, and we got to talking. I was like, ‘I saw you out at Mr. LeBlanc’s. And trust me, there ain’t no judgment. I’m the same type of man.’ He said, ‘That guy was talking about my horse. Two things I don’t play about are my horses and my family.’”

𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑢𝑝𝑜𝑛 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑏𝑒𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠.

Phillip: “Just because I was curious. It was as if we had a map and just threw a pin at it. That event was the soonest and the nearest to us, so we just showed up.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “My buddy, D Bogus, has this beautiful stallion named Harry. He told me a guy he rode horses for owned Harry, and Harry was really thin and frail because the guy was only grazing him. He wasn’t taking proper care of him. My friend ended up buying Harry for like $2,000. He said, ‘When you look at his bloodline, this horse could have easily sold for 10 grand.’ D Bogus is a cowboy who runs in the races, and Harry’s now his racehorse. He also trots horses at the derby track in Oklahoma, and Harry is the horse he leads the other horses out with. So Harry is a very dominant, head-first horse. If he’s walking side by side with another horse, he’s always gonna try to make sure his head’s in front.

Well, a few years ago, Jakian started a youth camp, and we went out there for a week to volunteer. One particular day, I was riding Harry. We were having a good time riding around the kids at camp while they were all riding other horses, too. Then, on the next day, another one of the cowboys was riding Harry, just trotting him for 20 minutes in the arena to warm him up. Well, Harry was also aware that he was in the arena he races in. And there were all these other horses nearby, walking in circles. So, in Harry’s mind, he was preparing for there to be a race. I didn’t know that or know to think about any of that. So after about 20 minutes of my other friend trotting Harry, I got on Harry, like, ‘Let me ride.’ Now, mind you, I’d been riding Harry all day the day before. And I had a good time riding him as we went up and down the fence. So I got on Harry, and I could immediately feel him just quivering. I was like, ‘Whoa!’”

𝐿𝑖𝑘𝑒, “𝐻𝑜𝑙𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 ℎ𝑜𝑟𝑠𝑒𝑠!”

Phillip: “Exactly. And he’s a stallion. So standing next to him, his back was almost level with my head. I was like, ‘Harry, we’re gonna stay here for about five minutes to calm down.’ After that, I gave him the reins a bit, and he was ready to take off. Again, I was like, ‘Whoa! Harry, chill out.’ So I got him to walk, but then he was trotting sideways. And as soon as I gave him the reins that time, he took off. I think I was on him for five minutes until I realized, ‘We’re gonna have to do this another day.’ I knew that I didn’t have enough experience for that. And more than anything, I was in this arena with all these kids. Still, I love any opportunity I get to get on a horse.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “At this point in my series on Black rodeos, I want to capture more of the younger guys just because they’re keeping this history going. I’d come to learn that some have gang affiliations, and that was a part of some violence that was starting to kill the culture. At the same time, the riders have the wherewithal to revive it by putting those sorts of detrimental situations to the side. Within the last eight years, there’s been a resurgence to cultivate the culture. And they’re doing all they can to remove the negativity that was causing issues. At the same time, if you win a race, it’s major bragging rights. And you can see some of the tension in how they trash-talk and all that. But they leave the arena after a good race and keep it moving.

A lot of riders take part in the Pony Express, a modern-day race very specific to Black rodeos. It’s an homage to the Pony Express mail riders, and it’s even more specific to Black rodeos in Oklahoma. The race runs two teams at a time in an arena, whereas, if you were to go to a Black rodeo in Texas, there’s one team in the arena, it’s timed, and whoever has the fastest time wins. But this race is made up of a team of six, and everyone’s on horseback. Each team has a baton, and they race four barrels with one barrel in the center of the arena. The last rider with the baton is the drop man. So he’s dropping it in the center of the barrel. Whoever drops their baton first wins the race. Imagine you could have the lead, but if you miss the barrel and another rider comes from behind you and drops their baton in, they win.

In Oklahoma, two teams make up 12 riders on 12 horses in the arena. They’re all in one corner while the other guys race. And once they come to a certain point, two of the guys kick out of the corner and meet as they turn a barrel to pass the batons. It’s competitive and exciting, but you can also see how it’s very dangerous. I’ve seen horses flip people over. People fall off them. There are moments when horses are running at full speed, and the cowboys are all riding side by side, reaching over their opponents to get the baton to their teammates. And the team names are great, like The Country Boys and The Young Fly Cowboys. It’s been cool to meet them, see how they practice, and learn what they do to try to improve their racing. I’m going to start focusing on photographing the teams to tell more of their stories. Because they’re going to be the ones that carry this tradition on to the next generation. Without them or their experiences or the troubles they’ve faced, we probably wouldn’t even get to witness this whole experience.

Thus far, it’s been all me funding this documentary project. I haven’t found backing. Outside of wanting to create a coffee table book, it’s just something I’ve fallen in love with photographing. So I go to these rodeos any opportunity I get.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “My mother was my gateway to photography. She studied it for two years in college. I don’t recall her ever having much interest in traveling or doing photography projects, but she loved taking photos. And she photographed our family a lot. My mother kept National Geographic books in our home, and I vividly remember not reading the articles, just looking at the photos and being enamored by seeing all these people and places from around the world. I do, however, remember my mother always having cameras. Back when you could buy a four-pack of disposables at Walgreens, she’d easily have them at the house. And she used to give them to me when I’d go to Chicago for the summer to visit my aunt.

I can’t really think back to the first time I took a photo, but I know I fell in love with photography in middle school when I took a mass communication class. I went to Carr Lane Visual & Performing Arts Middle School, where we had a darkroom. And I got to develop my first photo in seventh grade. I kept cameras in middle and high school, and photographed my friends. From then on, I knew I wanted to do photography. It never crossed my mind to do it as a profession until college, though. And that’s crazy to me to love something so much and never think about it as a career. It never crossed my mind that this is what people do for a living.

I actually went to college for athletic training because I was also interested in massage therapy. Finishing up my first semester, I was getting ready to test for an anatomy class. But I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m gonna remember this sh*t.’ I’d fall asleep in that class. Sure enough, I came out of that class one day while a friend of mine and one of his classmates were running across campus with cameras. I asked, ‘What are you doing?’ My friend said, ‘Homework.’ ‘What major is this?’ ‘This is mass comm.’ I can still see him looking at me like, ‘Why are you asking me all this?’ But I’d just come from anatomy, not knowing what the hell I was gonna do. Running into him right outside that building was God’s grace.

I had an hour and a half before my next class, so I went right to my advisor and changed my major. Second semester of my freshman year, I started in mass comm and worked in radio and television. I was also doing so much photography that my English professor asked me to shoot her wedding. She said, ‘It can be expensive to hire photographers, and we don’t have the money to hire a pro. You do great work. We’d love for you to photograph our day.’ Looking back, some of the images were terrible, some of them turned out really great. Nevertheless, my love for photography was always there.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “Doing all the work I was doing during school, I wanted to pursue photography as my career, but I just didn’t know how I was going to do it. I told myself, ‘I’m going to figure this out one way or the next.’ Senior year, I was looking into interning with ITV and was about five minutes from calling to get more information when my buddy, Kwofe Coleman, called from The Muny. He’s one of my best friends, and he became my boss. I actually started working at The Muny as an usher in the summer of 2007. I’ve worked as a driver. I worked as backstage security. So Kwofe said, ‘We want to offer you an internship in photography.’ I came home to St. Louis that summer, and the position was very unique. Because when you’re interning, you’re usually working under someone, learning from someone who has experience. But I wasn’t working under a photographer or anyone who had experience as a photographer. I was the photographer. And I stayed there for nine years.

At one point, I was making photo and video content for The Muny, but I was doing it from a really crappy laptop, and they were asking me to turn things around quickly. I’d tell them, ‘This doesn’t work that fast. Turnaround can’t be that fast.’ Kwofe began to help with editing, understood, and said, ‘Oh, I see what you mean.’ That internship lasted for two weeks, and then they offered me a position as the staff photographer. My first summer out of college, after interning for only two weeks, I got a full-time position. And I was the first staff photographer that The Muny ever had. Before that, they’d always outsourced photographers. So I got to grow my team. I got to have my own interns. And that’s where I cut my teeth and really learned my chops as a photographer working in theater. Even now, when I look at my work outside of the theater, I can see the influence the theater has had. As much as I love black and white photography, I myself cannot grasp doing good black and white photography or seeing my work in black and white. Turns out, I prefer color. I also have a niche for shooting in low light. And a lot of that came from photographing the shows, the sets, and backstage, and not always being able to use flash.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “One of the most challenging productions I had to photograph was 𝑆𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝐴𝑐𝑡. Because the actors and actresses were primarily white faces in all-black clothes. They were being lit, but you have to find this balance of exposure. At times, the lighting was way too bright for what you’re seeing. And what I’ve enjoyed most about photographing theater, which varies with the expertise of the lighting and set designers, is that everything is being lit for you. Of course, you run into issues where, if there’s a lot of movement happening and if it’s not lit well, you’ve got to find a workaround. But I got to capture shows from my own viewpoint and vantage points while being able to convey the artistic values and viewpoints of the lighting and set designers, too. I fell in love with theater from being able to photograph it. And I’ve come to love certain designers because you can really see the difference in how they choose to use lighting when they’re working on live productions.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “Because I went to a performing arts school, I did theater growing up. Once you get behind the stage, seeing so much of the ins and outs of theater, you start to understand all these artists and creatives work together to put on a production. The lighting designer is completely different from the set designer. The set designer is completely different from the costume designer. The costume designer is completely different from the hair and makeup designers. The props designer is completely different, too. And at a place like The Muny, everything happens at such a fast pace. There’s no other theater where productions happen like the way they do there.

My role in there had always been to capture the moment, and I’d been given the freedom to explore my ideas even when we had to sell the productions in a short time frame. Think about it: the shows run for a week at a time. Everyone’s learning the shows 11 to 14 days prior to putting them on stage. So I was having to capture content during rehearsals to help promote the show leading up to it. Beyond that, because I’m interested in what people do and how things happen, I was backstage seeing all this fantastic stuff, but we were really only visually catering to what happened on stage. That’s when I asked, ‘Can I start photographing what happens backstage?’ I photographed the stagehands doing their job. I photographed the actors and actresses in their dressing rooms getting into their wigs and makeup. I photographed people’s portraits. To this day, it’s one of the albums that is seen the most. And as we were doing this, we started seeing theaters on Broadway doing backstage photography, too.

One of the projects I did was called Characters In Frames. I had a huge rinky-dink frame that I hung from a light stand with fishing wire, and I’d photograph cast members. Being that we couldn’t use flash, I’d set up some continuous lights. And when people passed by in between scenes, they’d take portraits in the frame. Like, ‘Still be in character and take a portrait of who your character is.’ It became such a thing that one of the stagehands ended up building me this beautiful gold frame with crown molding. And getting your picture taken became a thing everybody looked forward to. Then, same thing, years later, we saw a Broadway show doing characters in frames. But it was nice to be able to document and have free rein to do it how I saw fit.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “I finally decided to finish working at The Muny, and I’d never had a panic attack in my life until then. I like to plan. I like to research. But I’m not like a big planner. So I made the decision that I was leaving after the 2019 season in October. But it never crossed my mind that, ‘Oh, you’re leaving right after the season. You’ve been busy as hell with the season. You’ve had no time to prepare yourself for what’s next after.’ None of that crossed my mind until I was like, ‘Oh my god, what am I gonna do?’ So October came, and I had a panic attack. And I sat down. Now, I’m a weed smoker. I don’t smoke nearly as much as I used to. But I told myself, ‘I’m gonna stop smoking for a month. I’m gonna sit my ass down, and I’m gonna figure this out.’

I started crunching numbers to see what I needed to do and how I needed to bring money in to make it all work. Once I wrote everything out, I was like, ‘This isn’t that bad. Now I gotta figure out where the money comes from.’ 

My whole life, people always told me, ‘Take the leap. You’ll never know until you jump.’ So I took that leap. And sure enough, that same month, a photographer named Eric Woolsley called. I knew him through working at the theater. He’d shoot specifically for the design team. He built his career in St. Louis, photographing for multiple theaters here in the city. So he called me up and said, ‘I want to invite you out to lunch. I’d love to talk to you about some things.’ And then he told me, ‘I’m taking a full-time position at Opera Theater of St. Louis. I’d like to recommend you to all these other theaters I’ve photographed for.’ So that ended up being St. Louis Shakespeare, Webster Conservatory, and New Jewish Theater. I’d also started building a relationship with The Black Rep. Plus, The Muny kept me as their photographer when I went freelance. I found work because I took that leap, and someone was able to catch me.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “Freelancing was all happening during talks of COVID hitting other countries, and then we got hit with everything here in March 2020. I’ll never forget, I was driving to New Orleans to photograph the Mardi Gras Indians. I’d been reading up about them over the winter. I found a tribe that said, ‘We’d love for you to come down.’ So I was driving to stay with one of my best friends from college, who lived there when a State of Emergency was issued. I ended up being at his house for a few days because sh*t was hitting the fan. Everything shut down. Then I drove back home, and we were in a full-blown pandemic.

Navigating that and figuring out how to get government assistance and things of that nature, I remember sitting down with myself, thinking, ‘If I have to find a job doing something else to suffice, I’ll do it. I’ll come back to photography. But first, I’m going to try to make it work.’ And from then on, I never had to find another job. I got a call mid-June from The Muny. And then the calls never stopped coming. Of course, I had to make a major pivot and start doing more video work. A lot of theaters were pushing out video series to their audiences just to keep a buzz around what was happening in the theater scene.

Now, before the pandemic, I had purchased some lighting from a woman on Facebook Marketplace. Her husband did video work and passed away unexpectedly. So she had all this audiovisual gear that she didn’t know what to do with. She told me she just needed to price it, but that she was going to sell the rest at some point. And I never heard anything back from this woman. That year came and went, and in the middle of doing so much video work, one day I ended up driving past the neighborhood where I met that woman to get those lights. I looked at her parents’ home where I met her, and something just came to me telling me, ‘Call that woman.’ I went home, went through a year of messages on Facebook, and found her. I wrote, ‘I know it’s a shot in the dark, but I remember you said you had a lot of other gear you wanted to sell. Do you still have it, and are you trying to sell it?’ She said, ‘Yes. I live in Chicago, and I’ll be in St. Louis this weekend. Come over to the house. Take whatever you want.’ I was like, ‘I can take whatever I want?’ She said, ‘Whatever you want, you can have.’

I went to the house, and she had so much gear that I had to borrow a friend’s truck. I asked the woman, ‘Would you be okay if I just took it all off your hands, and whatever I can’t use, I can give away?’ She said, ‘Take it all.’ So, from just looking up what I was planning to buy, I ended up with about $15,000 worth of equipment. And it was all items I’d been looking into purchasing, from mics to drones to camera lenses. She said, ‘I just want a hug. I’m thankful it’s going somewhere, and it’s going to get used. This was all my husband’s. This is what he loved doing.’ For me, as I was coming up on that one-year anniversary, that was affirming. Like, ‘You’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing.’”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “I consider myself a people photographer. I love photographing people more than anything. I’ve never had an interest in food photography, object photography, or nature photography. I love photographing people because I like meeting people. And I like to learn from people. I like to hear people’s stories. I’m a firm believer that when you look at the history of us as people and think of the history of how knowledge is carried, it’s from person to person. So, as much as we can dive into books and learn from reading, there’s nothing like learning things from people who have had firsthand experiences. And photographing that has given me such an opportunity to learn about people’s lives.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “We had no plan to open a studio. We were living in our loft Downtown, and it was purchased by a new owner who was a slum lord. Some guy from London. He didn’t even live in the States. He just used an address in Miami. So he bought the building sight unseen and was just not taking care of it. When I moved in, it was great those first few years. But once he purchased it, it started going downhill. We got roaches. We had a gnat infestation. It was too much. I found the owner’s number and called him every time anything happened. Still, we were going to try to tough it out one more year.

For this place we’re currently in, I photographed the owners’ wedding and then their baby shower. I also shot events for the company the wife works for. So we had built a relationship. Well, I was shooting an event for them in December, and out of nowhere, the wife asked, ‘Where do you live? I told her, ‘Downtown. We love our loft there, especially because we have a live-work space. But our building is really going to sh*t.’ She said, ‘We have a unit available in one of our buildings at the beginning of the year. We enjoy renting to people we know. There may also be an opportunity for a commercial space below to have your studio.’ I was like, ‘Okay, we’ll talk about it.’

So we went by the building, and they showed us the apartment above and then this space, which was puke green. The hardwood floors in the downstairs place were in bad shape. There were blotches of epoxy all over. The previous renter had used it as a workout spot. Still, we were like, ‘We’ll take it.’ The selling piece really was this studio. The owners were getting ready to have their baby, and a few things were still up in the air. We sent an email to say, ‘We’re ready now to make this move, but it’s important we speak about the commercial space. It truly is the selling point for us. We do need a space to work out of.’ It’s one thing to go a few months and not have a studio, but past six months kind of starts to create an issue. They said, ‘Okay, we’ll let you rent it all, but only if you take it as is.’ And rightfully so. They didn’t have the time to put a facelift on this place as they were expecting their first child that month. So we took it. And it’s been a learning process. I learned a lot about depending on other people. And as much as I like to research things, I’ve learned even more about rehabbing because I had no clue about what I was doing when it came time to fix it up. But, you just do the research and get things done.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “We had to clean, sand, stain, and seal the floor. So we did all of that. When we first started, my uncle was helping. And part of what we realized out the gate was that the floors were just really dirty. Between the tornadoes in May 2025, him only being available on the weekend, and The Muny season coming around, work on this place kept getting pushed back. It got to a point where we set a date to open because we were planning a soft opening. And we were like, ‘We just got to figure this out.’ The two of us literally got the floor sealed five days before we opened. We finished painting the walls the week before. Luckily, the landlords were like, ‘Whatever you want to do, it’s yours to do.’ So whenever we got the opportunity to come downstairs here and get some work done, we’d do it.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Valeria: “Time with other creatives is important to us because we love community. We thrive in community. We built our careers in community. We’d been wanting to spend more time with our creative friends, and we realized we were only seeing them in workspaces. Fun spaces, but workspaces. We’d just have a moment here and there in passing because all of us were working. So we created this space, The Manifesto, with the intention of bringing our fellow creator friends together. The Manifesto is our hub. And it’s a nice catch-all. Because we also want to manifest that this space is rooted and based in friendship and connection. Now we can work out of here and host meetups and hangs. Because we both work for ourselves, we’re also adamant about working with people we enjoy working with. Like, ‘If I don’t f*ck with you, I’m not coming in to work with you.’ Also, so many of us creatives work for ourselves, but we’re all part of this community, and some of us want to build together.”

Phillip: “So the idea for The Manifesto was all Ms. Rodriguez.”

Valeria: “A lot of times with businesses, you set a mission and vision, but the manifesto part is about the intention behind it. We’re a group of people of color and then some, aiming for experiences that are purpose-driven. Look, work is gonna happen no matter what, whether we’re partnering or by happenstance when we end up in the same spaces. So we thought, ‘Let’s just bring our friends together. Let’s elevate each other. And let’s prioritize our relationships so we feel safe talking about all the things that matter when it comes to what we do.’ Now, some see us as the auntie and the uncle of the group. I don’t feel like I’m that old to have that title or responsibility, but we are. And since we don’t have kids right now, we’re frolicking with the yungins, I guess. Even though they’re just a couple of years younger than us. A lot of friends also have children, so we’re straddling the in-between, and we get to include everyone.

People are always asking us to mentor them, or it’s like, ‘Hey, can you teach me?’ And I can tell them, ‘Now that we have a space, we’re here. Let’s talk business. Or just come kick it with us.’ And it doesn’t have to be too formal. I could kick off my shoes, or I could be fabulous. Be whoever you want to be. And for us to be able to barbecue or do karaoke, it’s a little more elevated than just being outside in the summer.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “I need to be better about posting on social media. It’s just not my thing. I get bursts of inspiration now and then. But she’ll say, ‘Send me the content, I’ll take care of it.’ I’m really thankful I have such a phenomenal partner who does such phenomenal work. And it’s something she enjoys doing, so that opens up time for me to just be able to photograph.”

Valeria: “Phil and I are both different entities; we’re just under the same roof. With him, if you want mentorship, you can come here and get mentorship. What does that look like? His structure makes sense: ‘You can use my equipment, you can use my space, and I’m here if you need me. Ask me questions. If you don’t want me to jump in, cool.’ For me, I work with a lot of small businesses and organizations. Sometimes I’m asked to be a speaker, so it’s like, ‘Y’all can come meet me in this space where we don’t have to feel rushed. I have everything I need. And my partner does photography and video if you need.’”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

𝐼𝑡’𝑠 𝑠𝑜 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑚𝑒𝑒𝑡-𝑢𝑝 𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑡𝑠. 𝐴𝑠 𝑎 𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒, 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠, ‘𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑤𝑒 𝑔𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔? 𝑊ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑐𝑜𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑒 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑝? 𝑊ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑠𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑒?’

Phillip: “We want things to feel like home. Even prior to her and me living together, and when I had the live-work space on my own in Downtown, I thought a lot about how women would feel there. It wasn’t only my home, but a place I worked out of. And I didn’t want it to feel like, ‘I’m inviting you to come to my house to take photos.’ I was very intentional about making sure my home felt like a home and making sure the studio felt like a studio. And that when people came in, specifically women, they didn’t feel uncomfortable. I had modifiers hanging up. I made sure my backdrop stand was set up and my gear was out. Just coming into our new spot here for the first time, I thought, ‘I can see the space. Let’s make it all white walls and nice hardwood floors.’ For me, it feels warm, comfortable, and homey.”

𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑡𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒.

Phillip: “Yeah, as you can see, so much stuff is on wheels. So it can be moved and shifted as necessary to maximize things. And because this space is shared with the owner, I wouldn’t feel comfortable renting it out and leaving. So whoever’s renting the space, they can also use my gear and get me as their assistant because I’ll be here. If you’re highly experienced and just want someone to come set up your things so you can focus on photographing, I’m here to do that. If you’re not as experienced and you want to learn how to work in a studio and improve your lighting, you not only have me as an assistant, but I’m also around to give advice and lend a hand.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

Phillip: “When I started doing photography in this city, it felt to me like a lot of people were kind of keeping things to themselves, like there wasn’t enough work to go around. But over the years, I’ve seen a lot of younger photographers blossoming with an openness and a willingness to collaborate with one another, grow with one another. I’ve built a career in photography here in St. Louis; however, I want to be friends with more photographers. I’m especially intrigued by seeing work that younger photographers are doing in this city. My project about Black rodeos has been a creative outlet for my world. But when you choose to build creative portions of your life as a career, you can find yourself creating solely to make work or make work for others. In the last year, I found myself coming to a place where — and I’m thankful for you being here, because it allows me to put it on record and say it out loud as well — where I need to begin growing my chops again. I know I was always able to grow my chops through creative projects. So I’m excited about what else will happen this next year. Between an unplanned move, planning our wedding, and building out The Manifesto, that’s all been the focus. I know for certain this space will create flexibility for us to make more creative content. And to the young photographers out there, I’d love to work with you.”

 

 

Phillip Hamer, www.philliphamer.photography |  Valeria Rodriguez,  www.valeriar.com

 

About Humans of St. Louis
Humans of St. Louis (HOSTL) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with the mission of sharing photographic portraits and first-person stories to highlight local needs, issues, and experiences from people in the St. Louis region. HOSTL gives followers an intimate look into the lives and struggles of the people of St. Louis, one photo and story at a time, and is the second most popular “Humans of” site in the U.S. after Humans of New York.

RAC is excited to partner with Humans of St. Louis to highlight stories from some of the talented creatives and artists who call St. Louis home. All stories and photography in the RAC + Humans of St. Louis series were created by and are credited to Lindy Drew, co-founder, lead storyteller, and book co-author of Humans of St. Louis.

 

Kathryn Bentley

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I’m Kathryn Alise Bentley, named after both my grandmothers. My mother’s foster mother was Katherine. And my father’s mother was Alice. When I was younger, I thought I was going to be an actor. I don’t remember wanting to be anything else. That’s what I wanted to do. I used to do a lot of theater stuff at home when I was little. I have a younger sister, and my parents put us in dance class. I don’t know if this is true, but apparently, we would just make up shows. I’d be the director, and I’d make my sister do all sorts of things, playing theater with me. My mother was just reminiscing the other day that we’d put on a dinner theater and take our parents’ dinner orders. And the menu had to be what we could cook, like cheese toast. So we’d write down their order, we’d make their dinner, then they’d watch a show that I’m sure I would have written and acted out. We’d use any of my mother’s accessories that she’d let us, so her scarves and hats would be our costumes. And we’d come out and do theater and dance and sing for our parents. That was me as a young actor to be, director to be, writer to be.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I am a daughter of an 88-year-old mom and an 86-year-old dad, who are the reason I do theater because they introduced my brother, sister, and me to all kinds of arts. They took us to New York and Chicago to see all sorts of plays. We’d go to Alvin Ailey whenever they were in town. So I am quite blessed to have been exposed to the arts early on. And they went on to support me to work in the arts. Well, they kind of also said, ‘You need to double major.’ To which I was like, ‘Uh huh.’ So I was actually a mass communications major. But they’re very much supporters of the arts, and supporters of me. And that’s been a very important part of my life. Aren’t I lucky? They still come to my productions when they can. You know, they’ve missed a few because of illnesses, but they try to get to everything. They couldn’t get to the reading of my playwriting debut because they just weren’t feeling well. But when that full play goes up, I’m hoping that they’ll be able to go.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I loved dance school, but middle school is when I started doing theater, and by high school, I was just all in when it came to theater. My sister and I used to take dance from Pelagie G. Wren Academy of Dance. A lot of the young Black children in St. Louis took dance from Ms. Wren, who was awesome. She was a ballerina and the first Black dancer at The Muny. I remember one time we had a show in Heman Park when I was eight. I got up on stage to dance, and I fell. So my classmates just danced over me. I was like, ‘Oh my god!’ That was devastating. I was so embarrassed. But I was little. Like, ‘Whatever. The show must go on.’ What an awkward moment in my career. But, you know, theater is live. So a lot of awkward things can happen.

High school drama was a lot of fun as we put on musicals like 𝐾𝑖𝑠𝑠 𝑀𝑒, 𝐾𝑎𝑡𝑒, and 𝑀𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑐 𝑀𝑎𝑛. I remember we did this play called 𝑆𝑝𝑜𝑜𝑛 𝑅𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝐴𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑦, and I had to kiss this guy who, in real life, was a jock. Well, I saw him at our class reunion not too long ago, which did not go well because he wanted to relive that moment. I was like, ‘Get away from me. Eww!’ Yeah, he was drunk. But back in high school, kissing someone was a big deal. I was the thespian, and he was the jock. So I told myself, ‘I can do this. I’ve had my first kiss. I know what I’m doing, I guess.’ The good thing is that stuff didn’t show up on Instagram back then. Thank god we didn’t have the internet when I was in high school. I can’t even imagine.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“My high school drama teacher, Mr. Kenney, became my good friend and mentor. He shaped me and really guided my future in so many ways. I spent a lot of time in the theater at Webster Groves High School with him. He was just the coolest. He always had this little twinkle in his eye kind of thing, so he’d look at us and smile out of the corner of his mouth. And he always smelled like smoke. I don’t know how many packs of cigarettes he smoked a day, but it was way too much. 

My father’s from DeSoto, Missouri, so some of the ways I pronounce words are from there. And when I’d say, ‘I’m gonna warsh this,’ or ‘I’m gonna go to Warshington,’ Mr. Kenney would say, ‘Bentley! It’s wash.’ I’d pronounce the word ‘um-brella,’ and he’d immediately correct me, like, ‘It’s umbrella, Bentley. Umbrella.’ Then he’d just look at me and kind of half-smile. He was so funny to me. And he was also very encouraging.

Since then, that little high school theater has changed so much. Last summer was our 40th class reunion, so I got to see it newly renovated. It’s in the back of the high school, and as kids, we’d be out there doing whatever. You know, having fun. But man, when I walked back into that place, I felt Mr. Kenney’s energy still in there. Like when we’d be back there having fun, creating, and learning about ourselves. I haven’t been back to teach or perform. But I had been back because my daughter graduated from there, too.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑑𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑟 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑏𝑖𝑔 𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑘?

“That’s an interesting question because I’m not quite sure what that means for me and my career. After high school, Mr. Kenney was so helpful in getting me into The Goodman School of Drama in Chicago, which is now The Theatre School at DePaul University. So I did that conservatory my first year of college and didn’t like the setting. I did well, but it just didn’t feel right. I wanted to come back home. So I returned to St. Louis, ended up interning at The St. Louis Black Repertory Company for a semester, and that’s where I met my next mentor, Bill Grivna. These two men have just completely shaped my path.

Anyway, I was stage managing a show that Griv was directing, and while getting to know him as the director, he was like, ‘Why don’t you come to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE), and finish your damn degree?’ He cursed a lot. Well, my parents had let me know, ‘Yes, you came home, but you can’t stay here. You gotta do something.’ So Griv was very convincing. Like, ‘Come by and visit the campus.’ Knowing that my father had gone to SIUE, and how he was one of the first students when the school was still in East St. Louis before moving to Edwardsville, I went to visit. And that’s how Griv got me to finish my degree there. You ask about a big break? Maybe that was it. Meeting him and working with him did shift my life and trajectory. After all, he became my dear friend and mentor.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Going to school at SIUE and studying theater was not the greatest experience in the ’80s because there were hardly any opportunities for the Black students to perform. This is when people would say they were doing nontraditional casting, but that didn’t mean colorblind casting for real. They just weren’t there yet. There were so few of us, and I was on stage a few times. So to do the real, meaningful roles, I’d drive over to St. Louis to do shows with The Black Repertory Company.”

𝐷𝑖𝑑 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑝𝑢𝑠ℎ 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘?

“The pushback would fall on deaf ears. Maybe we’d get an understudy for a role, for example, or sometimes we’d get cast. But for me, I knew my theater home was The Black Rep. So I thought, ‘I’m just gonna do stuff there cause I know it’s gonna be cool and meaningful. Plus, I’m already connected.’

But the reason I loved Griv so much was that we could have that pushback, and he would listen. As a student in school, he was this hippie white man who I just loved, loved, loved. He was from Minnesota, and as cool as cool can be. And in his mind’s eye, he was very inclusive. But there I was as an undergraduate in his directing class with this project to research a director. He had given us a list of them, and I spoke up, like, ‘Where are the Black directors?’ He said, ‘Well, there aren’t any of note.’ So I said, ‘Wait a minute. What?’ Looking back, he said that’s when I called him racist. I don’t remember that, but I’m sure I did. He had to be challenged. I ended up naming Lloyd Richards, did my report on him, and turned it in. After college, Griv and I became good friends, and we maintained a close friendship. It was really rough when he passed away. That was hard for me. What a good dude. I don’t know the last thing he saw me perform in, but he was the reason I taught for 20 years.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I finished all my classes at SIUE except for one, but I was like, ‘Whatever, I’m still graduating.’ So I ended up moving to New York, where I lived for 10 years. I was acting with a theater company there that does work in Harlem, and that’s when I started getting into directing and more community-engaged work. I got married when I was there. I had a daughter. Then I got divorced. This whole time, I maintained contact with Griv. So when I moved back home to St. Louis, I told him I wanted to get my master’s. He was like, ‘Okay, get a master’s.’ So I went to Lindenwood University because it was the only program that was close, and I didn’t want to move away again. Then Griv was like, ‘I want you to come to SIUE to teach.’ I started teaching with him. He got me an adjunct position, and eventually I got a full-time position there teaching theater. I retired not too long ago. So now I’m an associate professor emeritus, all because of Bill Grivna. I’d try to get together with him to have a nice brunch, maybe every six months or so. And at our last brunch, he was giving me advice like, ‘You need to put money away for this and that as you get ready to retire.’ So I was taking notes. Well, he wrote two books after he retired, and he went to his car to get me a copy of his latest one. I still remember him jogging across Grand and then coming back to say goodbye. I never did see him anymore after that. Looking back, when I left SIUE, I was that student who said, ‘I am NEVER coming back to college.’ College was not for me. I did it. I didn’t fail. I did well. But I did not feel like I was cut out for that setting. So the fact that I went back there to teach for 20 years, yeah, that was Griv.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Griv grew to teach a class called multicultural theater in America, which he developed with another professor who has also since passed away. He wrote in his story that my interactions with him as an undergrad helped him to grow in those ways. He also taught that class because he had done so much work in Asian theater studies and wanted to bring all of that in. When I first started as an adjunct, I team-taught that class with him. Then I continued teaching it for 20 years. I respected him and Mr. Kenney a great deal, especially the way they worked with students and influenced me as a student and a teacher. Eventually, we made multicultural theater a mandatory class because it should be. And a few years before I left, it became mandatory for all of the theater and dance majors, not just the performance majors.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I was proud of the things we did to try to give our students a well-rounded experience in theater. Lisa Colbert, the first Black professor in our department, collaborated with Griv to start the SIUE Black Theatre Workshop. We did a yearly performance that sometimes the students wrote and directed, or sometimes I directed. And I was the artistic director. It took a lot of effort. And it was always stretching me, even though it was considered something extra for a while, like, ‘That’s cute.’ But our school and our department began seeing the value in it. They could have said, ‘You know what? We’re not gonna support this anymore.’ But they started to understand that Black Theatre Workshop was important. As a result, so many students’ lives were changed. They wrote, directed, or were the producers because of it. They developed leadership skills because of it. They stayed in school because of it.

I always taught them that we were actors and that we were also artivists — we’re activists through our art. The students had so much in them that they wanted to share, take control of, and express. They were working through things like Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown’s killings, and I was with them through those too. So I knew these young people were dealing with a lot. In fact, we wrote a whole special production about that so these young people could express themselves using art. That’s what kept me going, too. Because I couldn’t think of any other way I would want to express what I was feeling in times like those. Some students were so driven; they were such leaders. Now they’re out here doing their thing, acting and having their own theater workshops. I’m so proud of them. Sometimes you just gotta make stuff like that happen because it feels right.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑖𝑡 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑑𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟 𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑒 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑢𝑠 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑒?

“Director mode is when you’re the point person for everything and everybody. So it feels like a thousand questions are coming at you every day. Kind of like being a mother: ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!’ You’re collaborating with designers and producers. And you’re shaping the entire story, the entire everything, so you have to make all these decisions. I love putting that puzzle together. However, it’s also extremely stressful. At night, you’re not turning it off, and your mind races constantly, like, ‘In that one moment, what do I need to do to get this actor to that part? The lighting wasn’t right here, so I need to talk to the lighting designer tomorrow.’ But then, when everything comes together, I get so excited.

I directed the Shakespeare Festival’s Shakespeare in the Streets in East St. Louis, which is in the streets outside, and we missed a dress rehearsal because it was pouring down rain. So we rehearsed inside, which was good because we still rehearsed. But it’s different because, like, you don’t get the feel of how long it takes to put on a costume backstage and then run out. Our first full run-through was the day before opening. And sometimes with theater, opening night is your first real run-through. So that’s nerve-wracking. But it’s like, ‘What can you do? We’ll be fine. See you tomorrow.’ I’m like a yogi; I’m flexible. And I’ve gotten past people judging, like, ‘That play was terrible.’ Whatever. I know where we came from. So, ‘We’ll be out here tonight, having fun. And we’ll be out here tomorrow again.’

Then there’s actor mode. A friend of mine was directing one summer when I acted in Shakespeare in the Park. Theater in the park is a huge endeavor, and I was giggling to myself, like, ‘Luckily, I don’t have to make any of these big decisions. I can just focus and be concerned about what I need to bring my character to life.’ Actors who also direct can be critical, too. But I can turn it off so fast. I “…do my blocking, I let the director say, ‘Oh, that light’s not hitting Kathi,’ and I stand still. Then I can just relish in being an actor. That’s why I tell actors all the time: ‘Just do your job. There’s a whole team in charge of this, that, and the other. All you gotta do is learn your lines and do your character and your blocking.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I do still act. So I get to focus on using a whole other side of my brain than when I’m directing. I was recently in 𝐸𝑚𝑚𝑎 with the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. But when I was teaching, it was really hard to juggle acting. I also had my daughter, so when she was little, it was hard to split my focus. I did a couple of plays early on, and I could direct because I could kind of set my schedule. But that first summer I retired, I had a role in the Shakespeare Festival’s Shakespeare in the Park and was like, ‘Yes, I finally can be in this!’ The production was 𝐴𝑠 𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝐿𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝐼𝑡, and I said my little parts. I know it’s said that there are no small parts, but I don’t care — that performance was fun. And I’m not saying it’s not stressful. Acting is stressful. My gosh, for the last play I was in, I was looking at my lines, like, ‘I’m scared. I still gotta learn these.’ And if I’m not prepared, that makes me nervous. So there is a level of pressure. And there is a sense of vulnerability as an actor that makes me wonder, ‘Why the heck did I say I wanted to do this? What if you make a fool of yourself?’ Then I just get out on stage. Directing is vulnerable as well, but nobody in the audience knows what might be off. Being on stage, however, that makes me nervous. Nervously excited. Sometimes I sign up to be a part of production, and I ask myself, ‘What are you doing?’ And then I’m doing another play. People ask me, ‘Aren’t you retired?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I retired from SIUE so that I could do all this stuff.’”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡’𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑟𝑜𝑙𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑣𝑒 𝑒𝑛𝑗𝑜𝑦𝑒𝑑 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡?

“The best part of my life has been being a mother. My child is grown now. But there is nothing like having raised her. It is the absolute joy, and sometimes heartache, of my life. That has been the most challenging role, where sometimes the job is thankless and sometimes the rewards are great. My daughter, Essence, is brilliant, beautiful, and unbelievably talented. She has a huge heart. Very giving, very loving. She’s an only child. She’s strong and has been since she was young. Her dad and I are her closest cohort. We’re her peeps. We’ve gotten to see her brilliance as a performer, and I’m just like, ’Oh my god. Who is this child?’

Growing up, she was with me a lot. She saw stuff she probably shouldn’t have seen because she was up under me as I was directing all kinds of stuff. I mean, when I was pregnant with her, I was directing a children’s show. Her dad was in it, and we were married at the time. So she’s just always been around theater. As a young baby, she used to sing in a perfect pitch. She had a beautiful voice and a great ear. And she had to put it out there that that’s what she wanted to do. So when she said she was ready, I put her in dance school as my parents did for me. Then, when she was 12, she wanted to audition at The Muny. I was never that stage mom. So I had my good friend coach her. I still remember going into the audition with her. She was a little bitty thing, but held her sheet music and walked like she just knew what she was doing. And I knew she was so nervous. I’d worked with too many kids, too many young people, to ever, ever, ever push my child into doing something she may not want to do. So I walked behind her because she had to lead it. And she absolutely did. She did her audition, and she became a Muny kid. And then she was a Muny teen until 18.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“My daughter has come to me for advice, especially when it was time for her to audition for college. I was her coach for her monologues. And she had a voice teacher who a lot of The Muny kids worked with. One play she finished in Colorado was a one-woman show about Billie Holiday, and she was brilliant. There were musicians, but she was the only actor. It was 90 minutes of extreme emotion. Lots of singing, lots of three-page monologues. I was like, ‘I’ve seen this performance six times.’ Because, you know, if I visit, I’m gonna see it. And I was watching my child, like, ‘How did this happen?’ I was looking at the audience, and they were so into it. Just amazing! People were crying. People were coming over to her afterwards. And I just sat in the back so proud.

For me, the most challenging thing was to let my child, who is an adult, be an adult and do her thing and make her own choices and be there if she needs me. So for this last show, there was some calling Mama to ask me things. And that’s what you’re supposed to do because you gotta be resourceful as an actor. But as a parent, I want to make sure she doesn’t have anything bad happen. And that’s ridiculous. Like, I had to have stuff happen. That’s how I grew into who I am. I’ve been growing a lot just in the last couple of years because she’s moved to New York now. And she’ll be like, ‘Mom, it’s okay. Get off me. I’m good. I’m fine. I’m gonna do it this way.’
So I might think, ‘I did New York.’ But she’s gonna do New York differently than I did. It’s a different time, and she’s totally a different person. It’s hard. I’m not saying that I’m good at it. I don’t have it yet. But I’m working on it. And I have to work on it.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“When I’m creating work, it always feels like art is imitating life. I’m a co-founder of Action Art Collaborative here in St. Louis, and our work is all about social justice. Fellow creative producer, Colin McLaughlin, and I released our first show, 𝐴𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛, about activist Percy Green and his organization, which was also called ACTION, that unveiled the Veiled Prophet in the ’60s. Colin wrote the piece, I directed it, we co-produced it, and it did very well. But the work we do isn’t gonna be the kind everybody is going to love, especially because sometimes we call people out. You know, sometimes big names in St. Louis need to be called out. So the audience listens, the art connects, and it allows an opportunity to be changed. And an opportunity to go out of the theater differently than when you came in. Like, ‘Did you learn something? Do you want to take action about something now?’

We told the actors, ‘Look, you all gotta be ready for this kind of work. Because, yes, it’s a strong play. The message is strong.’ And some admitted, ‘I don’t know if I want to be saying these things about some of the families we mention.’ But what was really beautiful to me was that the activists we interviewed and talked about in the play came to see the play. We’re connecting with the activist community and the labor movement. And, as a result, we have a family of folks who like the work we do and activists who respect the work we’re doing.

I love creating something out of nothing. When I lived in New York and started working with another mentor and big sister of mine, Stephanie Barry, and her small company in Harlem, Blackberry Productions, we were doing meaningful community-engaged work created for and by the people. And there was very little money. So I brought that grit back to St. Louis with me. Then, to meet my like-minded brother, Colin, who was like, ‘Yeah, let’s start something.’ You don’t have to have anything but an idea. And all these wonderful things can bloom out of that one idea. Now, Colin is a phenomenal grant writer, so we do get funding. But we could also put on a production with very little. You don’t have to have a Muny budget to do a show. In fact, I prefer not to. I like less spectacle. Just start with a conversation with somebody. Just do it, and go.

I saw the change happening with the St. Louis art scene over my years of teaching, because every year I would have more and more students saying, ‘I’m gonna stay in St. Louis after I graduate. I’m not moving to New York, L.A., or Chicago.’ That’s how I knew that our city’s theater scene was changing. Theater is so big here that there are so many places to see good theater. St. Louis is blooming all of that right now. And it’s not just with theater but with visual arts and music, too. People are being creative and even saying, ‘I could do something in this backyard over here.’ So you don’t have to have anything except an idea, maybe a couple of friends, and a heart to do something cool, fresh, and new. Maybe it’s just you.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

𝐻𝑜𝑤 𝑑𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑓𝑖𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑙 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑣𝑒 𝑔𝑜𝑡 𝑠𝑜 𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑔𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑛? 𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑤𝑒 𝑜𝑓𝑓 𝑡𝑜 𝑛𝑒𝑥𝑡? 

“What feeds me right now is freedom. I have an enormous amount of freedom that I didn’t have when I was working full-time, and I love it. Actually, at night I’ll say to myself, ‘What do I get to do tomorrow?’ And I look at my calendar, and I say, ‘Ooh, I get to do that.’ Sometimes it’s something like paying taxes. That’s not fun. But sometimes it’s, ‘Ooh, I get to go meet with Lindy.’ That’s my day, and I feel so grateful. Like, today. What did I do? I went for a two-hour walk. Because I can. And there are some have tos. But the wonderful thing about my have tos right now is that they’re all connected to something I love that I get to do. I have deadlines when I’m directing. Things have to be done for pre-production. I had to put a cast list out recently. But it’s all towards something that I get to do, so for me it’s all exciting.

I also get so much out of traveling. I like to go somewhere every year when my birthday comes around in February. I don’t know where, but somewhere warm. I’ve been to Africa a few times and would love to go back. I didn’t see any theater when I was there, but I would like to go back and see live performances.

I’m really proud of the work I’ve done with The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, trying to get the community out to see a particular play. And the thing is, the play was beautiful. And people were coming to see it. But one year, they put on a play that my daughter happened to be in, and that was written by a Black playwright, but the audience was not representative of the folks in the play. Very few Black people came. And it’s hard for a performer when you’re doing a play that speaks to a certain culture, and you look out to the crowd and don’t see the folks it’s intended for. I really didn’t want that to happen again at The Rep. So it was rewarding to invite people to the theater who might not think there’s a place for them.

People need to know, ‘Theater’s for you. It’s for you. It’s here.’ But, oftentimes, theaters are so elitist. I mean, we used to go to Forest Park when I was little because my grandmother would get us on the bi-state bus with a little box of food, and we’d get to The Muny and sit in the free seats. A lot of theaters are not accessible, and something like free seats makes it accessible. That’s why I was hired to recruit. So there were pre-activities and follow-up discussions on Zoom for those who wanted to process the play because it’s a very layered and beautiful work. People just needed to be invited and to feel welcome.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝑎 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑠𝑒𝑒𝑚𝘦𝘥 𝑡𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝑠𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑟𝑦?

“Playwriting. And in this class I was taking, they wanted us to write and share. Writing, I’m very nervous about doing. I’ll get there. But I was so nervous to write because it feels extremely vulnerable. You write something, your name’s on it, and it’s forever. Directing, people forget that ish. You direct a play, it sucks, and people forget it, even though the review is out there forever. But writing, I get caught up in my head. And I have other projects in me that I know I’ve got to put down. Like, I’ve got to write about my mom and dad. My mom had a clinic for 33 years in St. Louis named CHIPS Health and Wellness Center that served the uninsured and underinsured. In fact, I have a Regional Arts Commission (RAC) grant, which is gonna jumpstart me to write about it.

And something I’m fearful to try that I haven’t done yet is direct a movie. I’ve got to direct a film. I’ve got to get into that realm of storytelling. I know I’m supposed to. I’ve even said to some of my actors over the years, ‘I’ve got to direct a movie because I’m sick of you all changing stuff.’ I mean, I’ve said that to myself, too. We’re human, so things change day to day. My daughter hates sitting next to me after I’ve directed a play and I come back to see it because I’m squirming or holding onto my seat because I can’t believe what the actors are doing. But just like human beings grow and change, they mix stuff up, too, to do different things on stage. So I’m gonna direct a movie so it’s edited and that’s the story I was trying to tell and it can’t be changed.

For now, I have this huge project in my head, which is why I’m so grateful to RAC because I can begin. And it’ll be bigger than talking about my mom’s clinic because it’s actually about my parents’ love story. They’ve been married 67 years. And my mom’s clinic, where my father was also the longest unpaid bookkeeper, is the offspring of their love story. You know, we called CHIPS our youngest sibling? She was 33, and she never got a job, but she gave a lot of people a lot of love. She’s another baby my parents poured into, and she poured into the community. The story starts there. Not only is it tempting to try and write it, but it’s inevitable. It’s necessary. It’s a must. I gotta do it.”

𝐼’𝑑 𝑎𝑠𝑘 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑡 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑦 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑑𝑎𝑦!

“Okay!”

 

Kathryn Bentley | @kathibentley

 

About Humans of St. Louis
Humans of St. Louis (HOSTL) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with the mission of sharing photographic portraits and first-person stories to highlight local needs, issues, and experiences from people in the St. Louis region. HOSTL gives followers an intimate look into the lives and struggles of the people of St. Louis, one photo and story at a time, and is the second most popular “Humans of” site in the U.S. after Humans of New York.

RAC is excited to partner with Humans of St. Louis to highlight stories from some of the talented creatives and artists who call St. Louis home. All stories and photography in the RAC + Humans of St. Louis series were created by and are credited to Lindy Drew, co-founder, lead storyteller, and book co-author of Humans of St. Louis.

Content Warning: This story contains references to near-death experience and suicide. 

 

Cameron Jamarr 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I went to Clayton High School, where my dad worked in their preschool custodial side. So K through 12, I’d book it out from the Southside to Clayton every day. That’s where my friends were and where I’d start to get my exposure to the arts. In 2nd grade, we had Fairy Tale Theater, and I played Rapunzel’s father. In 4th grade, we had a Renaissance festival, and our teacher asked, ‘Who wants a big speaking part, and who wants a little one?’ So I spoke up: ‘I want the big speaking part!’ and I became Dromio of Syracuse. I didn’t know what I’d be doing, but I came home like, ‘Mom, I’m doing this part.’ I just always thought it’d be cool to go on stage, speak, and shine. In 6th grade, I went to Wydown Middle School and did musicals like 𝐵𝑦𝑒 𝐵𝑦𝑒 𝐵𝑖𝑟𝑑𝑖𝑒 and 𝐽𝑜𝑠𝑒𝑝ℎ 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑚𝑎𝑧𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑇𝑒𝑐ℎ𝑛𝑖𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑟 𝐷𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑐𝑜𝑎𝑡. Then in 8th grade, I played Jim in 𝐵𝑖𝑔 𝑅𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟. That’s how I found my place in the arts. Outside of acting, I was a choir kid, a band kid, and I played the clarinet. It was always a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Because, why not? That’s what we’re here for.

Who really put me on the acting path, though, was my high school teacher and local actress, Kelly Weber. Sophomore year, there was a meeting after school one day about the fall play. At first, I was very against doing plays. Like, ‘I’ll do a musical. But a play?’ Well, the show was 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟’𝑠 𝑇𝑎𝑙𝑒. And that play ended up following me later in my life. We’ll circle back to that. So, I was sitting in the black box, thinking, ‘This is cool but not for me.’ And as I walked out, Kelly said, ‘Where are you going? Here, read this.’ She gave me the role of Camillo. So I got up there, did my lil’ Shakespeare, and next thing I knew, I was in the play. We mixed the play with Baroque and operatic songs, so we actually sang monologues and worked with voice instructors who taught the school choir. As I stepped into theater, I was getting this cross-training out the gate that was synthesizing music, poetry, acting, and theater all together. I was hooked. I was in. From there, I was a drama kid.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I was all over the place in high school because I had to be there early since my dad worked for the district. Junior year, I became the drama guild president. Senior year, same thing. Part of that was just me killing time. It was me as first chair clarinet in the band every year, ‘And don’t come for it because I want it.’ It was me in the show choir and the chamber choir. It was me in musicals and plays. And I had to stay on top of my grades, which I did as much as I could in the subjects I cared about. In advanced English and AP Literature, I was reading these rich stories, learning grammatical structure, and how to write with complexity. That’s how I discovered a passion for poetry and writing. Sophomore year, I was asked if I wanted to participate in the Missouri Fine Arts Academy, MFAA, but I didn’t know what I wanted to go for. I could go for clarinet. I could go for singing. I could go for acting. I wanted to go for all of them, but we live in a world that often makes you choose. Until you start learning how to play by your own rules.

So I chose to go for acting, and I met all these cool people from high schools all across the state. We’d get together at arts camp for the summer, and we were learning how to create. Part of my journey hasn’t been just performing, but meeting artists who empowered me to go within to create something. They’d say, ‘You know you can make something yourself outside of us and apart from taking up someone else’s stories or words. You have it within you.’ Some of the best pieces of art I’ve seen have been passionate artists being like, ‘F*ck it. No budget. Here’s the idea. We’re gonna throw this together. Let’s go!’ One of the coolest pieces I saw at MFAA was 𝑆𝑢𝑏𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑎𝑛, this dark, moody, eclectic composition of dance, movement, music, and poetry. It was everything an adolescent was at the time. And I was like, ‘Yes, sign me up for more of this.’”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“High school was like college prep, and my classmates were already doing some dope ass Ivy League sh*t, so there was pressure on me to do the same. Meanwhile, I was just trying to make sure I kept my grades up so I could do fun things like stay in theater, or so my parents would maybe get me a car. Fast forward to senior year. People were asking, ‘Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?’ I wasn’t even thinking about what I wanted my future to look like. I was involved in so many things, like the Principal’s Advisory Council, student government, Black Student Union, class treasurer. I was also a marching band drum major. I kept getting bombarded with, ‘Don’t you want to go to Northwestern or Brown?’ The thing is, I was schooled out. I had the brain for it, but I just didn’t know what was next.

When it came to college applications, I cast my seeds wide to at least 11 schools. Some were art schools, and some were academic. I applied to Northwestern, had my final interview, and got in. I also applied to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music – CCM. Okay, storytime. I’m probably gonna detour, if that’s okay… The week of my CCM audition coincided with our Peppers Prom, which was our high school’s unofficial prom. A week or two before, the school had to nominate who they wanted to be in the court, and I didn’t even know I was nominated. But what I did know was that I had these important auditions coming up and had to work on them.

My drama teacher said, ‘I know the artistic director (AD) of the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival. I’d like her to watch your monologues for your auditions.’ So she gets the AD to come to my school to coach my college monologues during my lunch break. Turns out, when I got to school that day, I was also going to get kidnapped as part of the prom court nomination. Pillowcase over my head, I was put in a car, driven to someone’s house, and dressed in this insane get-up — some multi-holiday sweater with Halloween, Christmas, and Chanukah all mixed together. We’re talkin’ frills and tutus and makeup on my face. I looked a hot Grinch mess. Because the idea was that you’re supposed to draw attention to yourself at school so people would know to vote for you. Even more awkward, I still had to do my monologue coaching. My first audition piece was fine because it was a comedic Shakespearean monologue from Trinculo in 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑇𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑠𝑡. But my second monologue was me playing a bisexual jazz musician dying from AIDS and confessing this to his mom. And there I was dressed like every goddamn holiday.

Later that day, I was on the bus going home when I got a call from my teacher saying, ‘Shakespeare Festival wants you to audition for Prince Edward in 𝑅𝑖𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝐼𝐼𝐼 in Forest Park this summer.’”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Fast forward to my college audition. Peppers Prom was the night before. I won King. I also got the flu. Cold, chills, cough, fever. And my parents had to take me to Chicago, because that’s where the auditions were. So they drove me, but we could hardly see because the weather was so terrible. We get into the city, go to the hotel, and I wake up the next day not feeling better at all. I barely knew where the hotel was that was holding the auditions, and by this time, I’m running late, sick, anxious, sweating. Finally, I find the hall my auditions are in just as the program chair announces, ‘Cameron Davis.’ I get my sh*t together, walk through the door, and it’s go time. He asks, ‘How are you feeling today?’ I was like, ‘Eek.’ I performed the two pieces I just had coaching on — one which was full of energy, and the other where I was very sick. And because I was actually very sick, I used it.

Now, a lot of my friends had auditioned for different programs, too, and eventually they began getting rejection notices. Rejection is a reality. It happens. So I was like, ‘Damn, I ain’t heard nothing back yet. This must mean I’m getting super rejected.’ I remember thinking, ‘What are you gonna do? You’re waiting to hear back about a professional play. You could be going to acting school. How is this all supposed to play out?’ This was all happening while I was directing our student-run musical, a version of 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑇𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑠𝑡. And it was lit. It was so, so, so, so, so good! Well, I was working on the set with a friend who said, ‘Honestly, if everyone else has heard back, you probably didn’t get in.’

Not one minute after he said that, I got an email: ‘Congratulations, you’ve been accepted to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music – CCM.’ And I geeked. Like, ‘Holy sh*t, I got in!’ I mean, they saw thousands of students, and only let in 15. And that 15 got whittled down to 11 by the time I graduated. Other acceptance letters came back, and now all these schools were waiting for my decision. So I told myself, ‘If I get into the show at the Shakespeare Festival, that will be the sign that I should go to acting school.’ Lo and behold, I booked it. My first professional show. And that’s when I said, ‘I’m gonna go to acting school.’

Now, my parents weren’t necessarily all about it. They thought I should have gone to Northwestern. I got into an argument with them, and I was so upset that I went to my computer and sent my acceptance to CCM. Then I told them the next day.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

 “When it came to my high school graduation, I gave one of the commencement speeches, which was the same date as opening night for my first professional show with St. Louis Shakespeare Festival. So I gave my speech, my parents were in the bleachers, and my drama teacher was right there waiting to drive me to Forest Park. It was so aligned. I walked straight off one stage in my cap and gown to go straight onto another stage to play Prince Edward in Richard lll. For me, there was no preparation for one or the other. I was ready and just had to trust it. I was operating on a huge degree of faith. Coming from the church, I guess I was raised to have that. Also, I had a lot of love from my family. My mom was the most supportive. She was always like, ‘You can do anything.’

I was actually just reflecting on that show, and how I’m grateful I was to have been surrounded by some top-notch actors then. Even though I was young and didn’t know much, I knew these people were good. They took time to mentor me in the kindest ways. Like, I’d take lunch breaks with this powerhouse actress named Claudia Robinson, a sista from the UK who had the most elevated, darling British accent. She acted her ass off. She played Queen Margaret, the prophetic, sharp-tongued, Widow Queen. Her scenes would kill every night. And I’d just watch her in awe, like, ‘I want to be like that.’ So I’d ask her, ‘How do you do it?’ And she’d tell me what she knew.

That summer, while also doing the Shakespeare Festival’s teen camp, I played Romeo in 𝑅𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐽𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑡. So I remember being in my trailer during a performance of 𝑅𝑖𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝐼𝐼𝐼, and going over my Romeo lines. And when you’re in the trailer, there’s a monitor to hear the show and the lines to make your entrance on time. So I’m going through my lines for Romeo when all of a sudden I realize I’m supposed to be on stage as Prince Edward. I missed my entrance, and the scene started with me. I had the first line! I ran for my life to the stage and jumped straight into the scene. After, I get off stage, walk back to the trailer, tail between my legs, feeling awful. But all the other actors were like, ‘Dude, that was great. It happens. We waited for you. We improvised. We made it work. You started the scene with a different energy tonight. And it was fun!’ To be so seen, so supported, so encouraged, I will never forget it. At that moment, I was an actor. A professional actor. Before I’d even set a foot into acting school.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Once I finished that summer with the Shakespeare Festival, I felt confident about starting college. Like, ‘I got this. Of course, there are things to learn. But I know a little something.’ I didn’t know what it was or how to define it, but there was something. The thing is, when you’re young, you’re caught up in proving yourself. So even when you’re confident, there’s still a degree of insecurity. And I wasn’t in my hometown anymore. I was in Cincinnati with a bunch of other actors, who had been handpicked just like me, who I assumed were also the best at what they did. So there was something to prove.

When people ask me about my time at CCM, I tell them I’m grateful for what I learned there. The experiences I had were transformative in some of the best and worst ways imaginable. It’s a party school, especially the arts school. And I was ready for that. I literally went into college as a sophomore because I had so many AP credits, which is why I felt comfortable kind of f*cking off to a degree. I was like, ‘I’m good. I’m locked in. I’m gonna graduate. All I have to do is complete my program. I’m ahead of the game. Let’s kick it.’ 

But CCM was its own experience. Let’s talk about the welcoming performance board you do immediately upon arrival, before starting class, before anything. Boards are essentially you performing for the entire department and whoever else wants to be there. Your teachers sit in the front row, taking notes on you, grading you, judging you. And after, they let you know what they thought. So I performed the same two pieces I’d already done for the faculty to get into the program, and I was all feeling all the nerves. My first point of feedback, the thing I remember the most, was one professor saying, ‘You weren’t a human being. I struggled to see a human being.’”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I was blessed that I was always booked every summer, and there was always some professional job right around the corner. My freshman year, I did a three-month performance internship with the Hangar Theater in Ithaca, New York. My first summer break in college was also my first encounter with death. And death is part of my story. Three other actors from my class and I drove upstate and lodged together in a house. The first week, one of my buddies and I got into a car accident in the backwoods that left us stranded about 30 miles out of the city. I remember seeing my life flash before my eyes as he drove off the road into a ditch, crashing head-on into a tree. We spent hours trying to rescue ourselves. We stole an ax from a nearby farm in an attempt to cut down the tree we were stuck on. But the car was totaled. And we were pretty much at rock bottom. No phones, no money, no car, no help. Nothing.

Eventually, a man and his wife found us. The man’s name was Jim, and his last name started with a C, so I recall him as JC. And to this day, I say, ‘Jesus Christ saved my life,’ because that couple spotted us off the side of the road and saved us. At first, we denied them and said, ‘No, we’re fine. We got this.’ You know, we were two young guys who thought we could rescue ourselves. But there was no way we could have gotten out of that situation alone. Jim came back and said, ‘I got a friend with a tow truck. Happy to help you fellas if you’d let us.’ JC took us to his house, let us shower, and gave us a fresh change of clothes. His wife made us breakfast, and then they drove us home. Once I got inside my room, I remember lying in bed hugging myself in shock, like, ‘I just almost f*cking died.’ And I should have. Knowing what we were doing, I was like, ‘I should be dead right now. What?! Why am I here? Thank you, God.’ And I cried myself to sleep.

My mom was livid and scared, saying, ‘I want you to come home right now!’ And I was like, ‘No, Mom. I have to finish what I started here. I got this. But I won’t do that again, I promise.’”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“The summer of my sophomore year, I ended up booking my second summer at Shakespeare Festival. I came back to St. Louis to do 𝐻𝑎𝑚𝑙𝑒𝑡, where I played Reynaldo, the assistant to Polonius. And that’s when I was starting to see a certain degree of treatment from faculty at CCM. I was the only Black actor in my class and the only one consistently booking work outside of school, actually getting paid to act. But I was also getting some of the most negative and critical feedback from the faculty that they weren’t giving to other actors in my class. Even when it came to the performance boards. You were given a grade of satisfactory or unsatisfactory. In my opinion, and in the opinion of my colleagues, I killed my last performance board. But the faculty was like, ‘No, this is unsatisfactory.’ And a couple of them kind of took pleasure in it as if they enjoyed telling me I wasn’t good enough. What they didn’t know, however, was that I had already booked and signed my next summer contract. So while they were telling me their feedback, I responded, ‘I hear you. I respect that. Just so you know, I won’t be able to finish the semester here because I’m performing in 𝐻𝑎𝑚𝑙𝑒𝑡 for my second summer with the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival.’ My program chair was mad mad. I left regardless. And that’s when I began to build this rebel spirit.

I returned to school as a junior, and that year was the most devastating and destructive. I had this overbearing tenured professor who I saw five days a week. She taught acting Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and combat Tuesdays and Thursdays. The irony is, out of all my teachers, she brought me some of my most cherished insights about being an actor. I treasure the knowledge and lessons to this day. But since I wouldn’t, in her words, ‘submit to her will,’ we had a lot of friction. That turned into stalking, harassment, and intimidation tactics. She tried to push me out of CCM because she couldn’t expel me. She verbally assaulted me. She physically assaulted me before my peers. She intentionally lowered my grades. My family and friends were all in St. Louis, so I felt alone. It was bad. It broke my spirit. It went from me pursuing this thing that I love to me fighting for my life. And I didn’t know why.

I was at a party one night, and asked my buddy who I got into that car accident with, ‘Dude, what is happening? What can I do? How do I stop this?’ I had people in my class spying on me, reporting my actions and conversations to this teacher, who used whatever info against me. My friend said, ‘I don’t think there’s anything you can do.’ I left the party, went back home to my room, and cried on the floor. It came to that teacher saying, ‘You can either get down or lie down. If you want to just go act, go act.’ But no one in my family had ever finished college, and I wanted to graduate. She said, ‘You have spring break to think about it.’

So, that spring break my friends and I took a trip to Little Rock, Arkansas. And on a bright, beautiful Sunday morning, we visited Little Rock Central High, where the Little Rock Nine integrated a racially segregated school in the 50s. No one was there, just us. The sun was shining on the building. I was walking around the empty halls outside. And sitting on the school steps, I decided, ‘You will not run me away. I will stay in school even if that means I have to be the bitter spouse in this relationship that just stays and stays f*cking bitter. I will stay. Because you will not stop me from achieving my goal.’”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

”That year, CCM was putting on a show called 𝑅𝑒𝑑 𝐿𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑊𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟, and I wanted to play the lead. I was the only person yet to play a lead role in school in my class. I was constantly working outside of school, but somehow, school was telling me I wasn’t worthy of a serious role within its walls. I killed the audition because people told me that the teacher I struggled with said I gave the best audition. But apparently, she didn’t want to cast me in the role because the character rapes a woman at the end of the play, and she didn’t think that Cincinnati audiences could tolerate a Black man doing that to what would be a white woman playing the role. As if Black rape is worse than white rape? My bigger issue was that they didn’t respect me or think I was adult enough to have that conversation. Instead, I was gaslit and told, ‘You’re being an egoist and need to apply what we’re learning in class. We already have a Black President.’ I eye-rolled, sighed, and said, ‘Tell the truth. Treat me like an adult and an actual actor. And be willing to face your own racism. Is Black rape really worse than white rape? Because I think rape is just bad.’

I was so dejected. Then, the weekend the cast list came out, I didn’t get cast as a lead in either show. My coping mechanism for trauma became escapism. Like, ‘Turn up, let’s party!’ I was gonna try to have a good time as much as I could. Junior year was when I first did LSD. And when people look at my work, I think that’s evident. Like, ‘The way this person’s mind works, he’s had to have some things crosswired up there.’ So when a friend of mine said, ‘Wanna do some acid?’ I was like, ‘F*ck yeah, I’ll do some acid. Run it.’ The first time I did one hit, it was incredible. My little hippie tribe and I were like, ‘We’re so bonded by this experience now. These others, they just don’t understand what we’ve been through.’ So the second time we got together, we decided, ‘Let’s do three hits. Why not?’ But what we didn’t know was that every hit was actually a triple hit. So I ended up doing nine hits the second time I ever did it. That was crazy. “…But from then on, my mind has just been unlocked. The gateway was opened.

That summer, I ended up doing 𝑃𝑖𝑝𝑝𝑖𝑛 at a nearby theater with another local college. I had a good ole time doing 𝑃𝑖𝑝𝑝𝑖𝑛. Because I love doing musicals, under the right circumstances. And that one found me at the perfect, magical time.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Spring of my Junior year, CCM was participating in its first and only cultural exchange, called 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑎𝑑𝑎𝑎𝑏 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑗𝑒𝑐𝑡. Graduates of the program started their own initiative to work with the United Nations to go to Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, in Nairobi, Kenya. They were doing arts and storytelling work with the people who lived there. For months, five actors from my school collaborated with this group of artists before meeting in person for World Refugee Day to present a show we’d create together called 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐶𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑝𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑆𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝐵𝑒𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑈𝑠, an original devised performance piece about the human condition and the inseparable bonds that unite us despite geographic and cultural barriers. The universal human string, if you will. I was the only Black actor from the U.S. And this was during that year I was so broken that I kind of no longer knew who I was. But when I went to Nairobi, I had the most profound spiritual experience of my life.

After we did our show, we were watching a group of Congolese drummers, dancers, and acrobats. I was sitting on a patch of grass, and I was blown away by how incredible the performers were. I’d never seen anything like it, from their attire to the way their bodies moved. The way they danced and did these insane acrobatics, I didn’t even know bodies could move like that. And then the drum… I had an appreciation for music of all degrees. So I was listening to these drums, in total awe, when these spirits started speaking to me. Like, ‘These are your people. This is you. Do you see you? Not only are these your people. This Earth, can you feel it? It too is yours.’ Something started channeling through me. The drum beat got more intense. And everything around became white noise until all I heard was the drum beat ringing in the back of my skull like I was in a trance. Then I heard this voice say, ‘You are home,’ as energy shot up from the earth, surging through my being. I could feel the earth vibrating under me, and before I knew it, I was crying in a way I’d never cried before. Bawling like a newborn baby. I got my soul back. That thing CCM and that one professor tried to break. Unbreakable. It never left. It just retreated until it was safe again to return. I had to remember it, reclaim it, re-own it. I had to take it back.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“My experience in Nairobi gave me what I needed to come back my senior year to be like, ‘Respectfully, f*ck y’all.’ I was ready to wrap up my final year of college and graduate. We were doing another show, and, again, I wanted my lead role. Like, ‘Can I please get a lead at school? This is what I’m paying for. I have leading man qualities. I’m a leading actor. I’m damn good. Give me a role already.’ So we did a show called 𝐶𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑚 𝐵𝑜𝑦, and I auditioned for the lead, who is a villain. But the character also gets publicly hanged at the end of Act 1, so you know they were not about to let a Black man play that role. Instead, they made me Dr. Smith, the choir teacher, who started the show. I went into rehearsals like, ‘I’m cool to do my little role or whatever. This one’s for me. I told you, I’m a motherf*cking actor.’ So we were rehearsing a big scene in which we were about to catch the villain, and it was time to hang him. The scene starts with the entire town in an uproar. Our director goes, ‘All right, everyone. And, begin.’ So I came in hot, like, ‘Down with the villain! Damn, devil!’ But no one else was giving. The director shouted, ‘Stop! So I guess Cameron’s the only one who came to act today? Try again.’ Then everyone in the room got with the program and got the sh*t poppin’.

Now, in the middle of this show, I booked my first paid Screen Actors Guild commercial. Didn’t mean to do it. I only went in because my agent said, ‘You should go out for this. We’re submitting you.’ And as it was starting to look like I could book it, I told my director and program chair, ‘The commercial shoot is also during tech week for our show. Would it be possible for me to do it?’ He said, ‘No, it’s a conflict. So we won’t be allowing you to.’ Mind you, I was going to school to be a paid actor. So I told my agent, ‘My program chair said I can’t do the commercial.’ My agent did not take kindly to this. They called the chair, like, ‘This is absurd. Why are you not letting him do this project? You are ruining his career.’ That turned into my program chair kicking me out of my final show at school. He said, ‘You went behind my back, and I didn’t appreciate it.’ And just like that, I was crying my eyes out again, like, ‘Why does this keep happening?’

The student body threw a fit. The director then felt bad and gave me half of my performances back, but still made me split my role with a sophomore when I was a senior. Whatever. In the end, it was all about hearing my mom scream when I walked across the stage that June for graduation. My mom, dad, aunt, and best friends were there celebrating with me — all the people who had been holding me up that entire time. But my mom really lost it when she saw me walk and accept my diploma in my cap and gown. Her baby was a college graduate. The first in the immediate family from both sides. I had survived it all. Every obstacle, prejudice, disappointment, and heartbreak. Seeing her smile made it all worthwhile.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“After graduation, I was like, ‘What’s next?’ I came back to St. Louis to get a job at Starbucks, because that’s the job I had in college. And I was 22, running around outside, getting in bar fights. That summer, I was in a show called 𝐷𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝐶𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑠 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑠, a musical fan parody of 𝐺ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑏𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠, which got picked up and went to the Cincinnati Fringe Festival. And while doing that show, I got offered a job with The Children’s Theater of Cincinnati. I figured, ‘I should probably get out of what I’m doing in St. Louis, and get back to what I’m supposed to be doing out here.’ But I quickly got disillusioned. It was not for me. The hours were grueling. The pay was underwhelming. I was exhausted, performing with 102-degree fevers, going across state lines, driving and performing all day. On top of that, the artistic director, a Black woman, said one day that our cast was suffering from n*ggeritis. I was like, ‘I cannot do any of this.’ When I had the conversation with her, I was told I had a chip on my shoulder and that Black people needed to get over themselves. I said, ‘Well, this Black person quits. And you can hire another one.’ I don’t know what came over me. It had to be the spirit of my mom. I’ve always been a little saucy, and I knew, ‘This is what I am gonna do, this is what I’m not gonna do, and you need me more than I need this.’ So the day I quit that contract, I needed another job ASAP. And Starbucks wasn’t gonna cut it. That’s how I started working in upscale hospitality.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“A graduate from my acting program was the floor manager at this restaurant called the Taste of Belgium. So I walked in and was like, ‘I just quit a job and need a new one.’ She said, ‘Cool, got you.’ I started in the back on expo as a food runner, and then became a host, which I got really good at from being able to talk to people as an actor. Before I knew it, I was a bartender and a barista, and just doing my thing in my cozy little life in Cincinnati. I had my work, my art, and I was dating a bit. 

I eventually went to New York to see this person for their birthday, and she asked, ‘Why are you in Cincinnati?’ I was like, ‘Because I’m doing things. Trying to figure it out.’ She said, ‘I think you’re just afraid to move.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘You’re afraid. You should just do it.’ And because I love a challenge, she got me a babysitting gig and a bartending gig, and I moved to New York City at 23 years old with $300 and two duffel bags on a Chinatown bus. The day I showed up, of course there was a blizzard, and there I was trying to figure out the A train in the thick of it. Talk about a crash course welcome to the city. Because now, I was in this b*tch.

So I was makin’ it happen, figurin’ it out. I was auditioning, but I hated it because I was bombing in the room. I hated myself. I hated how I was showing up. I was just too in my head. And I had all this unprocessed trauma from college that I was bringing with me. I didn’t understand it; I just knew I didn’t like how I was feeling about acting or my work. I felt so bad, I quit acting for about nine months. Like, ‘F*ck it, I don’t want to do this right now. I’m gonna be a 23-year-old in NYC.’ Whatever that meant.

I ended up getting a job working room service at The Standard Hotel, a really posh, celebrity hotel in the Meatpacking District. I was making some good money, and had a room for $450 at 157th and Amsterdam with some cool roommates, all Black actors in Harlem. So I told myself, ‘This is what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna get this bread. I’m gonna live. And I’m gonna be young, wild, fast, and free.’”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Working overnight room service at the hotel by myself was like the devil’s playground, and oh boy, did I see some things. I was like, ‘This is fine. This is new. This is fun.’ But my soul was dying. I finally admitted to myself, ‘This isn’t what I came to the city for.’ I wasn’t performing or being creative. I was just living and surviving in NYC. So I decided to focus on writing. I figured, ‘I’m just gonna write things out. I’m gonna reflect and try to identify what I’m going through.’ So I started writing poetry and journaling again. Then an audition came about for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. And I love Shakespeare. So, I told myself, ‘Okay, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it on my terms. I’m going to act how I want to, not how I was trained to, told to, expected, programmed, or conditioned to. I’m going back to what I do for me.’ And I did. I did the audition, but didn’t hear anything for the longest time.

During that time, I got hit with a wave of bad luck, back-to-back. I got fired from my room service job after helping a drunk hotel guest into the wrong room. I ended up twisting my meniscus on some ice at a club and couldn’t walk, so good luck with the new job hunting. And while I was sitting in my house with insomnia and a bad knee, one of my roommates’ friends spends the night and dies that evening in our living room.

I heard him dying, but I didn’t know that was what I was hearing. Since I had insomnia from working overnights, I was falling asleep at 7 in the morning, unknowingly listening to his final gasps for breath, thinking he had sleep apnea or he was snoring. So, that day, my best friend, Brad, was moving to New York to stay with me for two weeks so he could figure out his transition to the city. When I woke up to greet him, I saw my roommate’s friend with his clothes on, ready to go, but seemingly sleeping with his mouth open. I thought, ‘He must have fallen asleep again.’ I let my friend in, and we caught up for two hours. We had no idea the man on the couch was deceased “…until one of my roommates came in and asked about him still sleeping despite us talking so loudly. We were like, ‘Oh.’ Then we all looked at the man asleep on the couch, wondering, ‘Actually, how is he not awake yet?’ We checked on him, and he was cold. 

We called 911 and were told to put him on the ground to do CPR. I went to help lift his legs, only to discover they were locked stiff. This was my first time touching a dead body. I saw where he’d already vacated himself, so I already knew he was gone. And that was my first close understanding that death is real. People die.

None of us living there was the same after that. And that was the beginning of what would become a deep, dark, and highly spiritually trying time for me. A man dies in my apartment. I’m broke. No job. I can’t walk. I can’t pay rent. I don’t even have money to eat. Like, it was bad. I was trying to stay optimistic, waiting for unemployment to come in, and then I discovered that the AD who cast me in my first professional show was holding auditions for another Shakespeare Festival. So I put myself together the best I could, and went.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I auditioned because it was the one thing that brought me joy in the midst of the f*ckery that was life at that time. I remember leaving the audition feeling strong, confident, and really good. The best I felt in weeks. Then I got a call from my dad to tell me one of my close childhood friends died by suicide. Completely shocking. A second death in less than a month. That friend and I hadn’t talked in years, but I loved this person. I knew I had to get to St. Louis to see him off. But my dad was very against it. So, in defiance, I used the last $100 to my name to buy Greyhound bus tickets so I could go to my friend’s service. It took me a day and a half to get there from New York City.

I stayed with my mom because my parents had separated by then. And after the service ended, it was time for me to go back to NYC. This was in January, in the thick of winter. I had to wake up super early to leave, before my mom had to go to work, to catch my bus on time. And there was so much I wasn’t telling her. I didn’t want her to know that I was broke or worried about food or that I was struggling to survive. I didn’t want her to worry about me. If she was worried, then I was worried. And nobody had time for that.

And as I was about to go out my mom’s door, she gave me this huge hug and was just holding me so strongly. At first, it was like, ‘Oh, I love you, Mom.’ But she wouldn’t let me go. It was such a strong embrace. A mother’s embrace. And I was like, ‘Mom? I love you, too. It’s okay. I’ll be fine.’

When I got back to New York City, I had 75 cents in my bank account. I’d tell people that I fasted for a week, but in all honesty, I starved for a week. And maybe that also forced me to be in a spiritual place. At that point, I’d already been stealing groceries to eat, and I didn’t have it in me anymore. I didn’t know where life was taking me, but I was in one of the darkest places I’d ever been. I had to surrender to it. While I was waiting for unemployment and food stamps to kick in, the only thing that sustained me was reading Julia Cameron’s 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑟𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑡’𝑠 𝑊𝑎𝑦. So I kept writing. It was literally all I could do.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Once I received government assistance, things started to happen for me again. February, I heard back about my audition for Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. I was offered a summer contract as an acting apprentice understudying their lead male roles for the season, including 𝑂𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑜. Even though I was only going to be paid $100 a week, I had some motivation knowing what that season was going to look like and that I’d finally get the chance to act and take on some roles with weight. So I got a job working at a gym and another as a host at a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. My knee was doing better, so I felt like I was finally back in the game and not on the sidelines anymore. Plus, I was working with actors who were showing me a new way to work with pure craft and creativity. And they taught me where my artistry wanted to go. I was eating it up, tearing it up. People were encouraging, and life was finally starting to go in the right direction.

I ended up getting a job on the Upper West Side at a private school getting paid really well as a substitute teacher. I had an agent. I was auditioning. And I booked the lead in a show upstate called 𝐿𝑜𝑏𝑏𝑦 𝐻𝑒𝑟𝑜. At that point, I hadn’t been home in over a year. So I told my mom, ‘I’m coming back to visit in March, and I’ll surprise my dad for his birthday. Don’t tell him. I’ll just pop up.’ She was so excited. But then I had to call back to tell her, ‘Mom, I just booked this new show, and rehearsals start the week I was gonna come home.’ I remember her saying, ‘You’re breaking my heart.’ I knew she understood. But it didn’t change her wanting to see her son again.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“A blizzard was coming into town, and school got dismissed early. So I was sitting in the cafeteria to kill time before getting on the subway, and I decided to call my mom. I was like, ‘Hey, Ma! How you doin’? You good?’ It was the most mundane conversation you could have with your parents. She said, ‘I’m at work. You alright?’ I was like, ‘I’m fine. I was just callin’ to check on you before I leave work.’’ She said, ‘I’m good, baby. I’m just at work. Can’t talk on the phone too long. You need anything?’ I was like, ‘Nah, just want to hear your voice. Call me later when you get off work.’ But we ended up not calling each other later. I went to bed and woke up the next day to a bunch of missed calls and texts from my aunts. Her sisters were all asking me how to get in contact with my dad.

I was like, ‘Why y’all calling me? Why do you want my dad’s phone number? I don’t have time for this. I have to go to work.’ I called my dad to let him know they all wanted to talk to him. And he called me back, like, ‘Hey, can you get to St. Louis?’ I said, ‘No, I’m broke. Why do I need to come to St. Louis?’ He said, ‘Well, your mom just needs you to be with her right now.’ This quickly turned into them buying me a first-class ticket for a flight leaving in three hours. I got to LaGuardia, and my flight was delayed five hours. So I was sitting in the airport all day, calling friends, giving them the update, like, ‘I’m coming back home. I don’t know why. But I’m coming home, so let’s hang.’

I’m such an impatient person. I hate lines. And the wild thing is, in the midst of all this, I was so peaceful. Because there was nothing else I could do. I even remember before I left my house, thinking, ‘God, whatever is going on, just let my mom be okay.’ I knew she had high blood pressure. She’d been in the hospital for it before.

So, I finally got into St. Louis at 11:18 p.m. I saw my dad, and I was like, ‘Where’s mom? What hospital? Let’s go see her.’ He was still acting so aloof that he wouldn’t even look me in the eye. So I was like, ‘What’s up?’ He said, ‘We got some decisions to make.’ And didn’t say anything else.

In the silence, I started backtracking my day. Then it just came out of me: ‘Is my mom dead?’ Still, he didn’t say anything. So I continued, ‘If my mom’s dead, and you’re not telling me, that’s really unfair right now. Is my mom dead?’ Too shocked to say, he answered in three looks that I remember to this day. First he looks at me, then up, then away. It wasn’t even like he said yes. His response was, ‘There was nothing we could do.’

March 5, 2015. Remember the date.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Talk about spiritually broken. My mom was my rock, my best friend, my biggest support system. Just ripped out of nowhere. She had an aortic dissection, meaning her aorta split. It’s so rare that you have a higher chance of winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. And even if you survive it, your life span is super short afterwards. My mom had high blood pressure and would be on and off her medications. She had to be on them for life, and they slowly wore away the lining of her arteries. That day we talked, she had gone shopping and told her sisters she felt a cold snap in her back and that her back was hurting. My mom was such a strong woman. She even carried her pain with strength and grace. Her sisters told her, ‘If you’re hurt, you should probably go to the hospital.’ But she didn’t want to. Finally, she got one of her neighbors to help her get herself together and go. The ambulance took her to SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital where she let the team know what her complications were. But they ignored her and she died in their waiting room.

The hospital didn’t contact the family to let anyone know she died. Her sisters had to call looking for her, and that’s how they discovered what happened. Once we started investigating, you could see they were doing a whole lot of backtracking to cover up where they f*cked up with my mother. It was infuriating. Heartbreaking. Still, over a decade later, it was just a blow I had to accept.”

𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠 ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑛𝑎𝑚𝑒?

“Regina Hall. Like the actress.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“My mom’s neighbor, who waited with her while the ambulance came to get her, didn’t find out my mom died until I was cleaning out her apartment. When she saw me, she was like, ‘Who are you?’ And I was like, ‘Who are you?’ She said, ‘I ain’t seen my friend since I helped her go to the hospital two days ago.’ And I had to be the one to tell her. That was hard. We cried together at her front door. 

As my mom’s only child, who’s also an actor, I immediately knew, ‘No one’s doing her eulogy but me.’ Fast forward to her funeral, it was a beautiful service. Standing room only. My mom was a legend, so many people loved her. I’m talking like damn near 200 people showed. I’d never seen such a turnout for a funeral. And it was nothing but performances, mostly from youth in the family. We turned the day into art.

The week before she passed, I’d auditioned for Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival again. Then, as I got in the hearse to go to the cemetery, I got the email: ‘Congratulations! We’d love to have you back for another year.’ It was almost divine. Like my mom was saying, ‘You have to keep going.’ So I stayed in St. Louis for a month to handle her affairs. Then I went back to New York City and moved out of my place after having a fallout with all my roommates. Everything just started falling apart. Later that summer, my girlfriend’s apartment burned down, so we moved to Los Angeles. 

The two shows I’d end up doing that season were 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟’𝑠 𝑇𝑎𝑙𝑒 and 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑂𝑛𝑒 𝑇ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑂𝑛𝑒 𝐴𝑟𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝑁𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑠 by Mary Zimmerman. That’s where I got this quote in Arabic from on my arm that reads, ‘Fear not death, for you have known love.’ It’s from “The Story of Perfect Love” in the play.

I had said 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟’𝑠 𝑇𝑎𝑙𝑒 would be a show that’d follow me, and it did. The play involves a beloved queen who dies from the heartbreak of grief and imprisonment from being accused of infidelity and having her child murdered. Sixteen years pass, only to discover that she’s been preserved as a statue by a mystic maiden. And at the end, the statue comes back to life, and the queen returns.

The day we first rehearsed that scene was Mother’s Day. I was a f*cking wreck. And I’d be performing this show for three months, two to three times a week. But what I didn’t expect was that this scene would become my healing ground for everyone to bear witness and see onstage every evening. I understood there was a reason for me doing that show at that time, and I knew this was where I could learn how to heal and let art transform me. I held nothing back. Leaning in, that’s when I realized how much art can heal. Art can save. Because it did for me.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“After my mom died, I lived for months in this perpetual fear of dying. I was like, ‘Any day is the day.’ Knowing she died of a heart condition, anytime my heart rate would go up too much, I’d get even more anxious, thinking, ‘Now’s the moment. I could die right now.’ Well, there’s a story in 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑂𝑛𝑒 𝑇ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑂𝑛𝑒 𝐴𝑟𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝑁𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑠 called The Dream. And in my performance, the story before The Dream entailed this big ass party that involved me running around a massive field waving colorful smoke bombs. Because we were right across from West Point, which has this huge promenade, I was running with full physicality and stamina, only to get on stage and then have to sit down and pretend like I was asleep. So I’d be in front of 500 people every night, heart pounding out of my chest, thinking I was going to die on stage.

Now, The Dream tells the story of a man from Baghdad who has a dream that says, ‘Go to Cairo, because a fortune is waiting for you there.’ So he decides to go only to get beaten up, robbed, and thrown in jail the moment he arrives. While in jail, the jailer asks. ‘Why are you even here?’ He replies, ‘I had a dream that said come to Cairo, because there are riches for me here.’ The jailer says, ‘You’re a fool. Who would I be to leave my beautiful home with my fountain and rose garden and beautiful bricks?’ And as the jailer’s talking, he’s exactly describing this man’s home but doesn’t know it. So when the man goes to sleep that evening, he has another dream that tells him, ‘Go back to Baghdad. Your fortune is waiting in the garden of your home.’ He returns home, digs up the earth underneath his garden, and finds a wealth of gold and riches that have been there for him the whole time.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I finished the contract, and I was done with New York. Like, ‘I don’t want none of this. I want peace. I need to find myself again. I need to heal. I need light. I need warmth.’ Once my mom passed, I was her sole inheritor. Coming out of a season of being broke and hungry, I now had funds and the ability to do anything I wanted. So I left. I was like, ‘I’m going to LA, where there are beaches and where I can sit in the sun and find myself.’ And also, where I could get paid to be young and youthful. I had just turned 25, I had friends out there from college, so I went out west. With my obsession about death, having seen so much of it, and me thinking I was going to die, my big question was, ‘What does it all mean?’ I started asking myself, ‘What is it like to die? How did my mom die? What was that like for her? Did it hurt? Was she in pain? What is death? You know what it is, but you don’t know what it is. What IS it?’ Long story short, I got drugged at a club one evening and almost died.

Being new to LA, I went out to this spot even though my spirit told me to stay home. And my friend gave me her drink after I lost mine, not knowing hers had been spiked with GHB, liquid ecstasy. When you compound that with alcohol and marijuana, it can cause your system to shut down and kill you. Well, I didn’t know I got dosed with it. And that’s when I thought I was dying. I went from feeling really great to really awful really quickly. I felt my heart rate slowing down. I was coughing up blood. My body was getting cold. By the time I got home I felt like, ‘This is it. Let me get in a warm shower. So if I go, I go there.’ After what happened to my mom, hospitals were the last place I wanted to go. I remember being back in the fetal position on the floor of my shower. I was in so much pain and just wanted it to stop. To end. I just wanted peace. To sleep, no matter how deep. And I said, ‘God, if I’m going to die, just let my mom come get me. And I’ll be cool with it. I’m okay. I’ll accept it.’ And I passed out.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I woke up hours later, the water still running on me, sunbeams spraying through my shower window. And as I came to, I realized I was alive and immediately started laughing, like, ‘I’m alive?’ And then I started crying in pure shock and gratitude, like, ‘Why am I alive? I’m alive!’

It was then that I knew I had to start making some changes in my life: ‘There’s something here I’m living for. There’s something that wants me to live. I have to figure it out.’ So I did that. And I lost all my friends, ended my relationship, and had a fallout with my roommate over racial politics. Before I knew it, I was homeless, living in my car on the streets of LA. And this was all within a year of my mom’s death. It was just me in the back of a Pontiac Grand Prix, thuggin’ it, figurin’ out how to live under these new circumstances. From what I inherited from my mom, I paid off some student loans, got an apartment, and got some things for myself. But, by this point, I had no more of it. I fell into tribes of hippies and different spiritual people. I expanded my consciousness even more than I had in college.

Then, in the middle of things being f*cking awful, I ended up booking my first equity show. I was doing 𝑃𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑎, 𝑄𝑢𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑡 with the Celebration Theater, the country’s longest-standing LGBT theater. It’s a great show about a group of traveling drag queens across the Australian Outback told as a jukebox musical, so we sang all these hits from the ’70s. The show starts with ‘It’s Raining Men,’ and I’d come out in my trenchcoat, just living my best Chippendales life, and having so much fun. I was living, doing my thing again. It didn’t matter that I was sleeping in the back of my car every night. It didn’t matter that I was hungry because it was feeding my soul. But I’d leave these rehearsals knowing I was about to go to sleep on the street. And not only did it wake me up to realize how many people are homeless and sleeping in their cars, but it woke me up to how many people were just like me that I had completely ignored before.

I was getting paid sh*t even though I was equity, working my ass off as a swing for the show. Equity means you’re a unionized actor, which means producing companies have to follow certain protocols, you get health insurance, you have to be paid a certain rate. It’s a labor union, so you’re protected. So I was like, ‘Tickets are $75. I’m getting paid $25 per performance. I know the rest of y’all are making beaucoup money.’ Also, I knew how much the show was benefiting me and my mental health, so I questioned the producers like, ‘Why are you not opening this show up to more people? There are homeless, queer, youth struggling on the street who need this experience as much as I do. You could be providing that for them.’ But the theater turned them away. Even if they stood nearby listening to our rehearsals, they’d be accused of loitering and asked to leave. I thought, ‘This isn’t right. If I’m ever in a position to do better, I will.’”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“Eventually, I was in Beverly Hills, wearing an all black three-piece suit as a host in this ritzy-ass steakhouse, trying to make it all work. This would be my life for about a year and a half before getting a job at a five-star beachfront hotel in Malibu, which allowed me to finally get out of my car and into an apartment again. I had a place that was entirely too small and expensive in Koreatown. But I was grateful to have a bed, running water, a kitchen, and a bathroom. I was grateful to not be outside, grateful to have somewhere to cook a hot meal and stretch my feet. Basic needs. Not wants, needs. 

I was around all these celebrities and insanely wealthy people. I was looking at the beach every day. I was seeing dolphins. As a host, I’d stand there with a lot of free time to read during the day. And I had time to think about what my future could look like. So I’d be daydreaming, and I’d tell myself, ‘When I’m in my mid-40s, early-50s, it’d be nice to start a theater company. And my theater company is gonna do better than what I’ve seen from some of these other companies I’ve worked for. I might not know how or when. But, damnit, I’m gonna.’

Well, a kind woman named Kelly was staying at the hotel where I worked, and let’s just say she was generous. She’d bless you if you gave her a lighter or an umbrella. So, one day she called me over to the bar, where she’d post up with her red wine and do her thing. And she said, ‘I keep hearing you talk about this theater thing. What do you do?’ I told her, ‘I’m an actor. I want to have a theater company one day.’ She said, ‘Sounds interesting. Do you have a business plan? I’m here for a week.
Give me something.’ So every day after work, I’d go home and put together this plan for a theater company I wasn’t even ready to make.

I thought, ‘Let me come up with a name. Soul Siren Playhouse. We’d do this, and here’s a season I would do, and here’s a budget I would need, and this is why I’d do it, and this is what I want the company to do.’ I figured it out in a week and sent it to her. And she replied to my email saying, ‘I looked over everything and sent my correspondence via mail to your job.’ That kinda caught me off guard. I was like, ‘She could have just told me to f*ck off over email. Like, who sends personal letters anymore? This is strange.’

I went to work on my day off to get what she sent. It was a large envelope with a letter inside written on her own personal letterhead. It said, ‘I looked over everything. I think this is an exciting project. I’d love to help support. Here is what you’ll need for operational expenses.’ And there was a check for $25,000 dated March 5, 2019. The day my mom died four years prior.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I was on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway crying my face off. I had just come out of such a trying season of being homeless, broke, hungry, lonely, and losing everything. And this woman, who didn’t know me from Adam or my dreams or my talent, saw me and believed in me off the cuff. I told myself, ‘Now I have to do this.’ So within the month, I incorporated the company and used the funds to get going. I didn’t know how I was going to do any of it, but I was going to keep stepping out on faith.

The idea was always to start Soul Siren Playhouse in LA, and keep the company there. Until COVID happened. I never dreamed about coming back to St. Louis. My mama wasn’t here anymore. The earth didn’t feel the same anymore. How was I supposed to come home when the one who made me feel like home wasn’t home? I didn’t want to be here. I’d rather be lost in the world and find myself there. So I was sitting in my apartment with my best- friend-turned-partner, Brad, like, ‘We’re here, but I don’t know why if we can’t do what we came here to do. We can’t act right now. We’re trapped in this small space. We can’t do half the things that make this city worth living in.’ I started questioning why I was living there.

I remembered my aunts saying, ‘We miss you so much. When are you gonna come back to St. Louis?’ And I said, ‘Since the world is shut down, I might come sometime this summer.’ One of my aunts asked, ‘You’re gonna move back?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not. Don’t ever ask me to move back.’ And this was all around Mother’s Day, which is close to my birthday.

The day after I said no, everything started saying — and I’m talking a deep ancestral pull — ‘Time to go home. The world’s changing quickly. And if the world’s about to fall apart, even if your mom’s not there, St. Louis is your home.’ Then, on my birthday, The Dream started speaking to me. Those words: ‘Go. Go back to St. Louis. A fortune is waiting for you in the garden of your home.’ And quickly, I was like, ‘I’m out. Today, maybe tomorrow. Swiftly.’ And within a week, I left and was back in St. Louis in May 2020. I simply said, ‘We will take the company home. That is where Soul Siren is supposed to be. That is who needs your mission. That is who needs your story. These are the people who need to see you. Your home needs you. Return.’ And I returned as a bit of a stranger in my own backyard.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“No one really knew me in St. Louis anymore because I had been gone for over a decade. So the past few years have been a slow road of me proving myself. This is the ‘Show Me State,’ afterall. And that’s the mentality here in St. Louis: ‘What you got? Show me something. Period.’ So we shot a film. We shot some music videos. We couldn’t do theater immediately due to the pandemic. But since I had just come from a film town, I knew how to be behind the camera, shoot, and edit. So I shot two PSA films in alignment with the social consciousness and social outreach mission of Soul Siren Playhouse. Our first film, 𝐷𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝐿𝑜𝑣𝑒, was about domestic violence in queer melanated relationships, because people normally only discuss the topic in heteronormative dynamics. Our second film was a horror thriller we released around Halloween called 𝑆𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐶𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟 𝑈𝑛𝑠𝑒𝑒𝑛, exposing human and child trafficking influences in our modern media, and how maybe we need to look at a greater pandemic outside of Covid. And that’s what the company does. It creates high-caliber art that speaks to the heart, opens the mind, and hopefully transforms the soul. 

Then I started making small moves in the direction of professional creative leadership to help the company gain legitimacy and awareness. I knew it would be hard, and that I needed to do things strategically. So I got a fellowship assistant directing 𝐴 𝑀𝑖𝑑𝑠𝑢𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑟 𝑁𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡’𝑠 𝐷𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚 with the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival to position myself outside of being an actor. I ended up getting my first acting role back in the city doing 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑅𝑖𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑙𝑙𝑙 with The Black Rep. I won the St. Louis Theater Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor in a drama. And I went on to do a Community Arts Training cohort with the Regional Arts Commission in addition to continuing to act on professional stages across the city.

Then I started figuring out how to apply for grants and pursue artist residencies. It was just the right move after move until I got to a place where I’d be able to produce my first professional stage production in the city. Soul Siren Playhouse did its first show, Amiri Baraka’s 𝐷𝑢𝑡𝑐ℎ𝑚𝑎𝑛, on the first day of Black History Month in 2024, right around the 60th anniversary of the play’s first production at Cherry Lane in New York. And to produce that show, especially as a first as a Black theater company, set a new bar and identity for us. We had arrived, and we weren’t just surviving, we were thriving. The pandemic didn’t kill us. Everything happened in its own proper divine time.”

 

Photo credit: Lindy Drew / Humans of St. Louis

 

“I’m blessed to say I’ve had a strong stage career since I returned home. I was in 𝑀𝑢𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑂𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝐸𝑥𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠 at The Repertory, 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐵𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑠 at The Black Rep, 𝐴𝑖𝑑𝑎 and 𝐶𝑙𝑢𝑒 at STAGES, and an educational musical concert called The American Musical at The Sheldon. Most recently, I finished a literary artist residency with the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, where I developed 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ 𝐽𝑎𝑚, a poetic, dramatic retelling of half of the stories I told you here, and me reconciling my relationship in the space between life and death. Essentially, it’s shadow work presented on stage, and how you must embrace your shadow to heal and return to light. I was also able to leverage that time to make Soul Siren one of their newest resident organizations.

Currently, I run Soul Siren with Bradford Rolen, our director of operations, who I’ve known since fourth grade. It’s just us, a two-man crew holding it down. We’re also connected to a lot of theater companies in St. Louis. My passion for music has me teaching myself how to DJ. I’ve been designing video projections and editing, experimenting with visual and electronic art and media outside the theater space. So I’m back in the flow.

The love I have in the world and the love I’ve been shown, it’s been beside me the whole time. Friends and family support me. The love of my mother continues to heal, sustain, inspire, and elevate me. My mom’s sisters, my aunts, make sure to pour into me. They allow me to experience the love I miss from her at the times I need it most. Then to be celebrated as the artist I am in my own hometown, and to create with people I admire for audiences that reflect and resonate with my creative expression — my heart is full.

I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. People are like, ‘You went to New York and LA, and you don’t want to go back?’ If you only knew my story. Then you’d know why I’m so rooted and comfortable being home.’ How good it feels to say, ‘I’m home.’ How powerful it feels to have a home. I feel powerful now. There’s something in me that’s indestructible. So many people have their hands on my shoulders saying, ‘Go. Go. Go. Go with bravery. And go with courage. And go with love. Go with everything we have given you to go.’”

 

 

Cameron Jamarr | playsiren.com

 

About Humans of St. Louis
Humans of St. Louis (HOSTL) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with the mission of sharing photographic portraits and first-person stories to highlight local needs, issues, and experiences from people in the St. Louis region. HOSTL gives followers an intimate look into the lives and struggles of the people of St. Louis, one photo and story at a time, and is the second most popular “Humans of” site in the U.S. after Humans of New York.