Rhodessa Jones started life as one of 12 children of migrant farm workers in rural Florida. Later, her family moved to a farm in upstate New York. She was 16, pregnant and unmarried and “going down slow” when her brother Azel suggested she pay a visit to his friends at the Living Arts Theater in Rochester.
“I went in and experienced being needed, being loved. I watched women do other things than simply get married, have babies, pine away, and end up old at 55 or 60. It was the beginning of another life for me.”
Her transformation from despondent, pregnant teenager to artist and performer began at that moment.
“I always say that theater is the lover who’s never betrayed me or abandoned me,” says Jones, 49. “And whatever I put into it, I get back a thousand-fold. All those things have been life-sustaining to me. If I had not found the theater, I truly would be just a memory, because I was a wild child.”
Theater gave Jones a ticket out of her hopeless existence in Rochester and has taken her, joyfully, all over the world. For the last two decades, most of Jones’ performances have been under the auspices of her Center for African-American Art and Culture in San Francisco.
With artistic partner Idris Acakamoor, Jones runs the center from a shabby one-room office at the Cultural Odyssey Center in San Francisco’s Western Addition. In between the mismatched chairs and sagging filing cabinets, Jones is all energy and activity, dressed completely in purple, with her hair in small dreadlocks and large gold earrings glinting. The self-proclaimed “demolition woman” is doing three or four things at once: checking her schedule, talking to an assistant, answering the phone and pulling photographs out of a file cabinet.
In the late 1980s, Jones received a call from a friend asking her if she’d be interested in teaching aerobics to female inmates at the San Francisco County Jail.
“Now I’m not, and never have been, an aerobics teacher,” Jones says with a laugh. “But I’ve been a dancer. And I was incredibly interested in what was happening in jail. I went to the jail and learned right away that they (the inmates) weren’t interested in `getting help.’ “
Jones felt drawn to the women at 850 Bryant St. and returned week after week. “I started to talk about my life,” she recalls. “I talked about having a baby at 16, looking for love. They were amazed I was being so open. After a while, they wanted to talk.”
At the time there were about 300 women being held on the 7th floor of the jail. “Incarcerated women of all ages: That was fascinating to me,” says Jones. “Why was I here? Maybe it was to teach these girls some self-respect? Maybe that they didn’t have to be in jail?
“There was Doris. She was 19 and still sucked her finger ferociously. Mama Pearl, who was probably in her late 60s, the quintessential old con who’d seen everything and was a little bit world weary. At the same time she’d grown into herself as a woman. Even in jail, she took her position as nurturer very seriously. She’d found an agenda in this population and was the one who’d teach me about what was possible and what my position in the jail was.
“And there was Regina. She was about 35, and she was very up-front with me, very in my face about who I was, what was I doing there, why did I want to be there. She was the woman who said to me, `Are you the police?’ And I said `no.’ She said, `Who are you then?’ I said, `I’m an artist.’ She said, `What’s that?’ That question opened up for me the possibilities of how could I answer that question, in that context.”
Jones’ experiences led her to use theater in a place where it had rarely been: inside the corrections system.
“How could I impress upon them that they could reinvent their lives?” says Jones. “I was interested in getting them to talk about how they’d gotten themselves to this place. I wanted them to listen to themselves. Because I knew what it was like to go looking for love in all the wrong places.”
Jones, assisted by social worker Shawn Reynolds, formed a core group of jailed women, all of whom were facing sentences of at least one year.
“They thought we were crazy,” recalls Jones, “but Shawn was very smart about being able to bring up the issues she did: child abuse, child abandonment, children dying violently.
” `You’re standing,’ I said. `You’ve lived through some wars already. What are you going to do about your children? What kind of legacy are we going to leave our children? How can we rise to the occasion? How can we, as women, be self-sufficient and empowered?’ “
Jones had the women in her group begin by writing letters to their children. For some, the letters were to children they had lost, either through violence or to the state.
“Here were some women who had totally blown being mothers, so I thought, This was a good place to begin, to look long and hard at that,” says Jones.
Jones taped her conversations with the women, and those long hours in the jail eventually became her performance piece, “Big Butt Girls–Hard Headed Women.” Jones has performed the one-woman show, in which she “becomes” the incarcerated women, throughout the United States and Western Europe since its debut in 1989.
Jones named the women’s group the Medea Project for the sorceress of Greek myth “who had given up her power in the name of love and in the end was betrayed and abandoned. And in the end, she destroyed her children. I asked them: How are we different from Medea?
“The younger women asked, `Can we write rap?’ and I said, `Sure, as long as it’s about what we’re talking about.’ `Can we write love letters to our children?’ they asked. Slowly, we built a script, and I hung it on Medea and Jason myth.”
Sheriff’s deputies escort the inmates to San Francisco theaters for two-week stints each year.
“Part of the popularity of the Medea Project’s performances has been because people want to take a look at women who have crossed the line. And I want these women out front, talking about their lives,” Jones says.
Jones realizes that her own life could have turned out like those of the women in the Medea Project. She credits her survival to her parents and to her discovery of theater when she was just a teenager.
“My parents were poor,” she recalls, “but they were truly royalty. And in a big family you learn early to speak up for yourself. In my family, everyone was an actor of a clown. You were expected to tell a good story, fight a good fight, dance a good dance.”
Jones was 16, unmarried and pregnant and living with her parents in upstate New York. She thought her only option was to give her baby up for adoption. “I was going to run away from home,” she remembers. “I was set to meet a major from the Salvation Army.” Her mother walked into the bathroom while Jones was taking a bath and “just knew” she was pregnant, Jones remembers. “She’d had 19 pregnancies. I was so relieved when they said, `You’re not giving our grandchild away!’ My father said, `By and by, you’ll understand why you were blessed with this child.’
“My daughter — she 35 now and it’s like she’s my mother now. Her name is Saundra Lee. Saundra Lee Robinson. She’s a widow now; she’s strong; she’s amazingly strong.”
Jones raised her daughter as a single mother, working as a janitor and as a nude dancer.
Jones is passionate about the need for women to be powerful and self-reliant.
“There’s nobody coming to save us, nobody,” she says. “Even women who buy into the successful husband. Are you sure that sooner or later he’s not going to come back around with someone else? You’ve got to get out there and fend for yourself, even if it’s only emotionally. Are you ready if he dies? Are you ready if he chooses a younger woman? Are you ready if he wakes up one day and is a gay man? If you wake up one day and you are a gay woman? You’ve got to take care of yourself!”
Jones, who acts, dances, sings writes, directs and produces, refers to herself as a “performing artist.” She has appeared all over the world and most recently did a one-woman show about singer Alberta Hunter called “My Castle’s Rockin’.”
She’s collaborated a number of times with her brother, noted dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones. “He and I are real confidants. It’s so wonderful to have such a smart brother, who’s also such a wonderful artist,” says Jones, who laughingly adds, “I think he’d say the same about me.”
Mostly, Jones sees her work as inextricably linked with her social activism.
“I feel like great art is great social work,” she says. “If you are privileged to get up on stage, if you are challenged to get up in front of people and say, `Look at me. I’m an artist. I’m a performer’ — well, you better have something to say! And it better be able to resonate for people. Art can save lives. It saved mine.”
