January 15–22, 1998

theater|second season arts preview

"When I found it, oh my God, I wanted to scream," she remembers.
"But, I thought, 'You're in a library.'"

Remember The Name

Kimmika L. Williams celebrates an unsung hero of Philadelphia black history.

by David Warner

If you've heard of O.V. Catto, it might be because you remember the old O.V. Catto Elks Lodge at 16th and Fitzwater, or the O.V. Catto Elks Band, the first black Mummers group to march in the parade.

If you've heard of Kimmika L. Williams, it might be from her poetry, or it might be from plays she's had produced at Bushfire.

But for the moment, neither O.V. Catto nor Kimmika L. Williams are household names.

When Williams' new play, Dog Days: The Killing of Octavious Catto, premieres next month at Venture, all that may change.

Williams, 39, remembers the first time she heard about Major Octavious V. Catto (pronounced CAYT-oh).

"It was in a bar on South Street, Bacchanal. Every time someone got too drunk on Monday nights—poetry readings were always on Mondays—somebody would always raise a glass to O.V. Catto."

Over the years, she would learn his story. Civil War vet, school principal and voting-rights activist, Catto was shot by a pair of white thugs in Philadelphia during Election Day disturbances in October 1871, then brought into a police station where he lay for an hour, bleeding to death. The murder led to rioting on such a large scale that newspaper coverage of the events rivaled reports on the Chicago fire, which happened the same weekend. And Catto's funeral procession was one of the largest the city had ever seen.

Williams, a former ranger at Independence National Historical Park, knows a lot about the 1800s, so she was surprised she'd never come across Catto's story before. She found out why when she first started looking into it more deeply. Researching a play she was writing for Bushfire in which black leaders of past and present debated whether they should celebrate the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, she could find no written materials about Catto save for a few references in Charles Blockson's books about black Philadelphia. And several years later, when she decided to write about Catto to fulfill an assignment for a graduate docudrama class at Temple, she turned to the Philadelphia Historical Society for help—and discovered that the only speech of Catto's they had on record had been missing since 1969.

"The folder was still there, but there was nothing inside… So I just ended up going through newspapers."

From there on, through "lots of afternoons going through lots and lots of microfilm," she set about reclaiming O.V. Catto. The class assignment would turn into her MFA thesis project, the MFA thesis project became a play that received three workshop productions—and the third workshop (staged at the Balch Institute in May '96 by Venture's associate artistic director, Ozzie Jones, with original music by blues pianist Sonny Hoxter) was so impressive that Venture Artistic Director Harriet Power says she made a commitment "on the spot" to give the play a full production in the '98 season.

The project, says Williams, "took over my life."

An award-winning poet and performance artist as well as a playwright, Williams is married (her husband Del Witherspoon, a SEPTA driver, has been "an inspiration") and has two teenage daughters. She's taught at a women's prison, reported on the arts for WXPN and is now an adjunct professor in both the theater and anthropology departments at Temple. In imagining and researching O.V. Catto, she's drawing on many different facets of her own life.

For one thing, he's become a kind of cause for her: she wants not only to tell his story but raise the question of why he's been forgotten.

"The more I looked for files on Catto the angrier I got, because people didn't remember him. He was important not just to African Americans locally, but nationally."

Her explorations are also informed by her interests in linguistics and women's rights. A character named Fanny Mae Jackson plays as crucial a role in Dog Days as Catto: fiercely independent, politically advanced and, despite herself, in love with Catto, she's based on the real-life woman who succeeded Catto as principal of the Institute for Colored Youth (the pioneering black high school which later became Cheyney University). We see her grow from teenage years through maturity, a flawed, impetuous character whose gloriously foul mouth almost always gets the better of her friend O.V. Consider her first line (she's 13 and highly indignant):

"You ole lowdown, lying, back-stabbin', fart-sniffin', toejam-lickin' scamp!"

It's a version of the insult word game called "the dozens," and even years later, she's still good at it. Storming into O.V.'s quarters to find out why he's going off to war, she yells, "Where is ya, you cloven-hoofed, lily-livered son of a polecat and what is the meaning of this here pamphlet I see hung up all over Seventh Ward?"

But Williams, who delved into oral histories of the period to get an accurate sense of 19th-century African-American lingo, doesn't just play the dozens. She also writes the blues—songs (set to Hoxter's music) augment the action of the play at various points—and she delivers a mean sermon.

"My God! MY God! Mercy, Father! That's alright! I don't hear you prayin' wid me but that's alright!" shouts Catto's father, the Rev. William Thomas Catto, in a first-act sermon meant to get his congregation (and the audience) mightily stirred up.

"I come from a long line of Pentecostal preachers," says Williams.

But there was some dialogue that Williams did not have to make up. In what she calls the most exciting moment in her entire research process, she stumbled upon a news story which contained, verbatim, the statements of the witnesses to the murder of O.V. Catto.

"When I found it, oh my God, I wanted to scream," she remembers. "But, I thought, 'You're in a library.'"

Presented in fragmented fashion, the comments evoke the chaos and the numbing bigotry that led to Catto's death.

"Why should we get him to a hospital?" asks a cop. "I mean, he was colored—so we just took him on in to the station."

The violent attempts to thwart blacks from voting which culminated in Catto's death were a bitter omen of the obstacles that black America would still have to face in the century to come—"dog days," for sure.

But for Williams, the title has a dual meaning. Anecdotes and images of pit bulls recur through the play—including a shocking story about two men who kill a pit bull by strapping it to a railroad track and watching a train slice it in half.

It's a true story—not from Catto's life, but from Williams'. She raises pit bulls, and she received the news of her dog's death the night before she was to hand in the first draft of her play to Robert Hedley, her docudrama teacher at Temple.

"In the midst of the crying and the anger" about her dog, it struck her: this was the image she needed.

"I had all this history, all this information, and I didn't know how to put it together. I couldn't think of where the play started."

Then, this senseless death—"this sense of frustration in the midst of all that fighting for freedom"—offered her a beginning.

Since that draft, the story of the dog's death has been moved to the end of the play, but the pit bull imagery remains important.

"A pit bull is an amalgamation of every mutt ever made," she says. "That's what Americans are—we're actually a combination of breeds."

Maybe, in telling the story of Octavious Catto, she'll guide all of us mutts toward a little enlightenment.