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03/01/2023 07:44 AMYou could say Denise Page started to prepare for her life’s work even before she was born. It started when her parents, James E. “Jimmy” Keyes and Dorothy Manning Keyes, were courting. How, they wondered, if they ever did marry, would they raise children who would stand proud in their legacy?
“And they decided they would talk about race every day,” says Page. “My dad did travel a lot for work, but I can tell you most of our dinner conversations were about race. And they were very politically active. So we’d have a daily diet of those things.”
As a child, she was also surrounded by excellence in the form of people who were “firsts of” s. The first Black person to accomplish this, the first Black woman to do that, the first Black man to be elected to the other thing. Her mom was a teacher and an artist. Her dad was a businessman, an alderman, a political strategist, and an activist, locally and nationally.
“My dad, he was the first, like everything,” says Page. “I don’t even know the list anymore.”
Through the conversations, her own experiences growing up in a middle-class family in a mostly all-white town, and watching the “first of”’s, Page grew to understand that racism did exist on both an individual and systemic level. She learned it might be overcome but only with exceptional effort. She decided to become a writer, speaker, and facilitator in the field of social justice, diversity, and inclusion. She also is a sought-after professional storyteller with a focus on “victims and saints as well as those too-often untold stories of the spaces in between.”
Page, a Madison resident, and her friend and colleague Merrie Harrison, also a Madison resident, are often gratified to find so many white people on the shoreline who want to answer this: “‘But What Can I do about racism?” So they came up with a plan that draws upon their vast and deep knowledge of the issue, a plan that also involves storytelling. It’s called Indaba. Graduates of the program will come up with ways to help answer that urgent question. Page and Harrison are currently seeking recruits for a second cohort launching March 17.
Like-Minded People Gathering
“The beauty and strength and most adorable factor of Indaba is that mostly white shoreline residents thought it was an investment of their time well worth it, attended the seven-week session, and then proceeded to form the Indaba action team to offer learning in community opportunity to their neighbors. They are truly amazing,” says Page.
The upcoming workshop series, facilitated by both Page and Harrison, requires an investment of time with other like-minded people talking, eating, and telling stories. It will launch with a Moth-style storytelling concert at the Guilford Community Center, followed by a retreat in the serene setting of Mercy By The Sea, with additional sessions at the North Madison Congregational Church.
All are welcome to apply. Page and Harrison hope to draw a wide variety of people with different life experiences, including the business, education, law enforcement, civic, religious, municipal, and residential communities. Thanks to generous donations from supporters, this series is being offered free of charge.
Already, graduates of the first cohort are out in the community, sponsoring conversations about race at local libraries, with the most recent one occurring late last month in Madison. “Attendees of the first series insisted that we provide this opportunity to shoreline residents again,” says Page.
Indaba from the Zulu and Xhosa languages means “a council to discuss an important matter,” says Page. The workshops are designed to provide a non-judgmental place where people can feel safe discussing what can be, for some, a confusing, volatile, and sometimes explosive topic.
Those who are interested in finding out more can write to Harrison and Page at IndabaWorkshop@gmail.com. The Indaba Opening Event is the Ubuntu Storytellers Opening Concert Friday, March 17, from 7 to 8 p.m. at the Guilford Community Center, 32 Church Street, in Guilford. The free event is open to everyone in the community, even those not enrolled in the second cohort. It will be performed by Black and Brown storytellers “sharing stories of living in the skin they’re in, beyond victim and saint.” More information about that event is available at www.ubuntustorytellers.com.
While anyone is welcome to attend this event, those who are participating in the second cohort are required to attend. The follow-up retreat is at Mercy By The Sea, 167 Neck Road, Madison, the following Saturday, March 18, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and lunch will be included.
“This retreat provides an opportunity to introduce ourselves, share our personal goals and expectations of Indaba experience and begin to form an inviting community of learning and growth,” says Page. “During this retreat, we will unpack the stories that we heard together and begin to deconstruct our own stories and experiences around racism, identity, and justice.”
The sessions that follow will take place from 5:45 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on five Tuesday evenings, March 21, 28, April 4, 11, and 18, at North Madison Congregational Church, 1271 Durham Road, Madison. Each session will start with dinner, provided by Indaba, with the support of generous area restaurateurs. “During these gatherings, we will continue to deepen our empathy and self-awareness,” says Page. “We will hear from guests who are on similar journeys, watch film excerpts, share readings as we continue to excavate our own personal stories and examine our perspectives on racism and allyship.”
The closing retreat will take place Saturday, April 22, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Mercy By the Sea. Participants will share another meal, talk about their collective and individual journeys, share stories, identify next steps, and take some time to celebrate, says Page.
Next Steps
Harrison and Page are understandably excited about the prospect of having more of their neighbors stand beside them in the shoreline’s, and in the country’s, ongoing journey towards justice for all. But one of the things they are most excited about are those “next steps.”
“We’ll be taking all of the participants on a journey of excavating how their own racial identity was formed and how their awareness of other races formed. And at the end, we will have a whopping $1,000 for them to come together and decide this: ‘now that I know more, what can I do with my new awareness,’” says Page. The 13 graduates of cohort one are sponsoring the ongoing discussions at local libraries. “Is that not fabulous?!” says Page. “They decided that other people need to have the same kind of conversations they were having.”
Including storytelling may seem a small thing, but if so, it’s a small thing that can, in a gentle way, lead to huge shifts in people’s perceptions and beliefs, says Page. Some of the biggest shifts happen when people start listening to a story, expecting one outcome, and perhaps expecting that due to their ingrained perceptions about race or the skin color of the person telling the story, and then they find themselves surprised by the ending.
“You might see yourself in at least one of the stories in a way that you’ll say, ‘Oh, my God, that happened to me.’ ‘Oh, I felt just like that,’” she says.
And so bridges are built, story by story, brick by brick.
Leaving The Door Open
While Page and Harrison have invested a lifetime of work into combating racism, and even as they are happy to have allies join them in their quest, they were also gratified to find generous donors who were happy to step up to make this program free. Among those donors are Seeding Conscious Cocreation and William Graustein, the individual, not the Foundation. A third funder requested anonymity. Several local restaurants also are helping out by donating meals.
But I have to ask Page, even with this support, how does she have the emotional energy and tenacity to have made this her life’s work when most of us, including many of us who have not labored under the burden of racism, do a bit of this and that and then fall back, exhausted, confused, or distracted by something else? This is not a problem for people to like Page and Harrison to solve on their own. They need all of us to step up. How can we solve it when some of us who may be part of the problem don’t even know we’re part of the problem or refuse to even consider that we might be?
“Thank you for asking,” she says. “So this is an answer that comes from my age. Because I am not patient.” She says it can be frustrating to understand that progress will only come with time and continued effort. She admits that.
“But I do this work because it pains me to think of the burden that Black and Brown children wear simply because of the color of their skin and the damage that’s done to them, even by well-intentioned people, simply because of their own ignorance and fears. When I worked in the school system, I saw children laboring under the labels they had not earned. And so the impatient part of me says there is no time. This shift has to happen today because we cannot sacrifice another great mind and spirit to this.”
She remembers the lessons of her childhood, where she learned and saw that those with Black and Brown skin who are excellent, when it comes to either effort of their God-given gifts, can break down barriers. “And, yet, even if you are exceptional, you won’t raise to the heights of your white counterparts with the same gifts. But you will; you will be able to break down some of those barriers. And your most important job is to leave the door open behind you.”
To find out more about Page and her work, visit ubuntustorytellers.com/denise-manning-keyes.