The Center for Puppetry Arts’ latest show portrays the story of a little girl who experiences racism for the first time in the segregated South.
The show “Ruth and the Green Book” is adapted from Charles Alexander’s children’s book. It depicts the story of eight-year-old Ruth, who travels with her parents in their new green Buick, driving from their home in Chicago to visit her grandmother in Alabama in 1952.
“Because they have to travel through the Jim Crow South, sometimes they run up against a few brick walls whenever they tried to go to a white-owned gas station or a “white’s only” motel and then get turned down because of segregation laws at the time,” said Judah Norman who plays Ruth’s mother and several other characters in the show.
During their journey, a gas station attendant gave them a guidebook called “The Green Book” to help them safely maneuver through businesses like restaurants, gas stations and motels during their long car ride.
“There were addresses of safe places to get gas, spend the night or eat,” Norman said. There were locations of all the sundown towns, so they would tell you where not to be and where the safe places to hide if you were in one.”
From 1910 to 1970, over six million African Americans moved out of the Southern U.S. to other parts of the country because of poor economic and social conditions due to racial discrimination and Jim Crow laws. Many migrated to cities like New York City, Detroit, Los Angeles and Ruth’s hometown, Chicago, moved to what would become the Great Migration.
With the vast number of job opportunities in these cities, the middle class included Blacks for the first time in American history.
Ruth’s father was one of those migrants and became an insurance salesman in the midwestern city. When he bought his first car, he wanted to visit his mother, who still lived in the South.
Officially called “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” it was written by a New York City postal worker named Victor H. Green, who used his connections to find minority-friendly businesses for middle-class Black motorists driving through the Southeast during this time.
“As the audience is learning about what caused the need for “The Green Book” through the eyes of a child who’s experiencing it for the first time,” said Beth Schiavo, Executive Director for the Center for Puppetry Arts.
She added that as time progresses, some of those stories and injustices soften, and those stories are not being told.
“One of the themes in the show was the importance of sticking together at the end of the show,” Norman said.
Tara Lake, who plays Ruth, said that the children in the audience connected with Ruth and her experiences to the point where her life is in danger.
“[The show] is an excellent opportunity to show young audiences how we can explore these issues and do so with a level of awareness and also do so while approaching the gravity of that moment,” Lake said. “But also doing so with a sense of possibility, and hope for what these young people can create.”
Schiavo thinks that textbooks are one-dimensional when describing Jim Crow in the South which could make anyone numb to the messaging. However, if you see it played out and pull back the layers of the different ways that it affected human life daily, it makes it feel real.
“I want people to see this show and walk out talking about it, having conversations saying “I learned a lot” or “that’s something that I’ve never heard before,’” Schiavo said.
“Ruth and the Green Book” plays at the Center for the Puppetry Arts through Feb. 25.
NOTE: “Ruth and the Green Book” was considered to be banned from the Northampton Area School District in Pennsylvania in 2022.
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