In Shay Youngblood’s play, Talking Bones, Eila, the granddaughter of Ruth and daughter of BayBay, returns home to their small southern town from New York City in a worried state––she has started having waking visions and hearing voices. Her mother and grandmother greet this news with knowing looks and thoughtful advice. They too have this ability and had been waiting for the day it would reveal itself to Eila. The women run Ancestors Books & Breakfast, a bookstore where one can get poetry and a bowl of soup. BayBay counsels her daughter to learn how to hold her newly revealed second sight: “You’ve got to learn to walk with your feet on both sides of the street, baby.”
Shay Youngblood flourished by embodying the wisdom of motion and multiplicity. Throughout her exemplary life, Shay charted pathways and left us luminous testimony to help us chart our own, together and alone. She wrote from the places where the multiplicities of our life’s truths meet the grids, reductive definitions, rigid boundaries, and quantum brutalities of our age. She did so always as a sower of possibility, who had the evidence to prove it. She sojourned with her feet on both sides.
Born in Columbus, Georgia in 1959, Shay was orphaned as a toddler; her mother’s light blazed bright and all too briefly. She became the daughter of a community of committed working-class women. The success of her first book, The Big Mama Stories, which chronicled their incredible tales, led her to explore other disciplines, as she sought multiple forms through which to reanimate the circle of folks who raised her. The result was Shakin’ The Mess Outta Misery, her first play, which continues to be produced and taught over three decades later. Shay deftly structured a rite-of-passage theatrical event, expressing the power these women had to walk with one another through life’s exigencies, drawing on hard-won wisdom, humor, and their ample provocative fire.
Shay’s contributions to the arts are polyphonic. Her novel Black Girl in Paris, for example, has become a travel guide for a generation of artists seeking both freedom of expression and an alignment with the liberatory lineage of world-traveling Black artists who lived lives full of passion, imagination, and risk. Her children’s book, Mama’s Home, is reaching our youngest generation; it was recently featured on Abbott Elementary. Her performance installation Add Architecture, Stir Memory used drawings, text, paintings, and storytelling to explore the idea of home, illuminating the weave of connections she made while a resident artist in Japan. She was a painter, filling canvases with dreamscapes and geographies as rich as her writing. And, like two of her many cultural heroes, Vertamae Smart Grosvenor and Ntozake Shange, she proudly embraced the role that cooking plays as cultural continuum–if you were ever so fortunate to fall under the spell of one of her bespoke recipes you never forgot the taste. She knew how to season her words well.
Shay moved freely. She joined the Peace Corps and served in the Caribbean island nation of Dominica. She traveled to Europe and lived for a time in the UK and, most notably, in Paris where she worked variously as an au pair, an artists’ model, and a poet’s helper. Shay moved among many cultural realities, and was ever interested in all forms of artistic expression across the African diaspora. She always wrote. Writing was her anchor throughout life. In the early 1990s, she attended Brown University for graduate study in Playwriting with Paula Vogel and Aishah Rahman. She harnessed the energies of the time, deepening her inquiries into film, dramatic theory, and interdisciplinary practice. Shay’s subsequent body of work significantly added to a wildflower field of art that flourished at the intersection of multiple identities and experiences. Youngblood’s plays called us to account for our own role in creating coherence, facing injustice, remembering ourselves anew, and conjuring back some presence of mind across difficult times. Her Blackness, her feminism, her queerness, her transnationalism were all of a piece, and sounded themselves, effortlessly, within all she wrote. Shay realized lasting connections across all kinds of borders. She could see the best in us and she wrote to it, spoke to it, and invited it forward each and every time, without ever collapsing the complex nature of our collective struggles.
Black Power Barbie in Hotel de Dream was a meditation on loss and radical love, holding the story of two Queer siblings, Jackson and Tabitha, themselves children of Black Panthers killed for their political activity. Shay rooted the play in their interior truths, their longing, their lust, their fear, and their resolve. She catalyzed the telling with the presence of a white female therapist whose observations revealed schisms in worldview that decades later have become part of our national conversation about culturally informed approaches to mental health. The play staged tender scenes between Jackson and his lover, and Tabitha and hers, that centered heart and soul. The play was her response to the AIDS epidemic and offered lessons on how to keep choosing life in the face of sudden change. She eventually turned the play into a graphic novel.
In 2022, Horizon Theatre in Atlanta produced her play Square Blues. The story of three generations in a Black southern family centered on Karma, a young queer artist-activist who finds herself in tension with her uncle, a disgruntled reparations activist, and her grandmother, Odessa, who transgressed miscegenation codes by marrying a Jewish man in the 1940s. Karma’s art actions bring her and her family into conflict with the authorities–a fiery dance with the long history of political repression in the United States. Audiences were shocked to learn that Square Blues had been written thirty years earlier, but never produced because of its then-controversial content. The late Edward Albee said of the play, which he picked for a prize, that it “has a virtue of gut, urgency, and necessity.” As we once again grapple with vital exercises of freedom of speech and political protest in our world, Shay’s prescience is palpable. Her willingness to write what she knew was necessary but was unpopular to voice at the time speaks to her integrity.
Just as we can sketch some individual stars into multiple constellations, Shay belongs to many contexts. In some sense, Shay’s plays were ahead of their time. But they were also right on time. They are evidence that there were, have always been, and must be multiple voices, multiple ways of telling the tales, and multiple approaches to our collective reckoning, and hopefully, collective healing. She will certainly hold a particular place in the pantheon of Black American artists whose work was yoked to liberation. Those who charted ways forward and through. Those who refused to degrade us on stages, choosing, rather, to remember us whole, with all of our contradictions held together. Those who kept connection. Those who chose to blueprint generative futures that some would deem fantastic, but which they knew to be immanent–if we are bold enough to claim them in concert with one another. In her short play, There Are Many Houses In My Tribe, two women, Nia and Estella, conjure a creation story: “I dreamed that there were snakes in my hair, and the languages of trees on my tongue, and two headed people in my tribe. I dreamed I made a world.”
Shay died on June 11, 2024, of ovarian cancer. She has both feet on the other side now. We here who loved her feel grief and incalculable gratitude for the gift of knowing her. At the end of Talking Bones, Ruth, the grandmother, goes to join the ancestors, opening her colorful umbrella and stepping high across the realms. Shay asked for and received a massive dance party as homegoing. She wanted us all to remember the precious joy of life–especially in challenging times, for such joy supports creative courage. What would a dream of peace look like? What can the force of your love accomplish even when all hope seems lost? These were the kind of questions Shay would ask. And she’d note, every time, “when you pray, move your feet.”q
