Article by Todd Matthews / Photo by Jennifer Adams

It's late-August of 2005, and a handful of native Southerners gather in New Orleans. As each reflects on personal slices of Louisiana life, a storm twists and swirls over the Gulf of Mexico: a milky white cataract that carries the winds that will shred houses and knock out power through much of the state; the rains and floodwaters that will burst levees, drown thousands, and send survivors to rooftops, the only recourse to wave torn shirts and hand-made signs in the hopes of gathering assistance and attention from emergency workers and news media.

Elaine, a gossip with a heart of gold who refers to the storm as "Miss Katrina," growls at the drug addicts across the street, who she suspects siphoned gasoline from her car; Martin, a young man who tries to persuade his 67-year-old granny suffering from dementia to flee, as she waits futilely for a friend to take her to see a matinee; Sheila, the young mother of an infant daughter, who has heard her share of hurricane warnings before, stubbornly refuses to evacuate; Bernadette, a proud, middle-class, almost gilded homeowner who struggles to accept widowhood, homelessness, and the death of her old life of privilege; and Jill, whose claims allege the hurricane is man-made, part of a conspiracy to get rid of black folks.

"I write from feeling, about big deeds and questions," says Tacoma playwright and author C. Rosalind Bell. "I write to find answers." (PHOTO COURTESY JENNIFER ADAMS)

The scene is New Orleans, Louisiana at the height of Hurricane Katrina. The characters are part of "New Orleans Monologues," a fictionalized account of Hurricane Katrina written by Tacoma playwright C. Rosalind Bell. The play, which is scheduled for a stage reading Mar. 12 at Tacoma Actors Guild, is an attempt by Bell to provide some insight into the lives of people affected by the hurricane.

"Who were these people?" wonders Bell, during a recent interview. "They were everybody. They were you, me, everybody. That's what we don't know. We just see these poor, bedraggled people in front of the Superdome like they don't have any story."

Bell calmly makes these observations between sips of espresso at Blackwater Cafe in downtown Tacoma. Dressed in black pants, a red-and-black vest over a black, long-sleeved shirt, and a colorful band of bright fabric pulling her hair back in tight coils, Bell isn't frantically trying to convince a reporter that New Orleans matters. She's not dismissive, either. A tone of sad acceptance colors her voice, as if she's saying, 'At times, this is what life delivers.'

"It sounds cliche," she adds, "but before they were in the streets in all this water and all this mess, they were on their way to church, the grocery store. The first thing that came to me, as an artist, was just their voices."

"New Orleans Monologues" is a return to familiar territory for Bell -- namely, the eye of a storm.

"Stones in My Passway," a play she wrote in 1993, tells the story of troubled bluesman Robert Johnson, who died in his late-20s after drinking whiskey laced with strychnine. The script has received interest from an independent filmmaker in Hollywood trying to raise funds to begin filming.

"Le Cirque Noir," a play she wrote in 1995, recalls the rise and fall of the violent and egomaniacal Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, through the eyes Francois, Michelle, Jean-Claude, and Simone, and from inside the family's palace. The play will receive a reading this month at a small theater in Los Angeles.

In January, Bell directed a reading of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail." Instead of simply reading Dr. King's words onstage, Bell cast six local Tacomans of various backgrounds (Charles Canada, the local actor, Sister Margaret "Peg" Murphy of Tacoma's Katherine House, and Rabbi Bruce Kadden were among the cast) to represent the imprisoned preacher and white moderate clergy who urged Dr. King to back away from his message of social change. The result? A dialogue between two camps with two differing viewpoints: white clergy imploring Dr. King to end his protests; Dr. King, in solitary confinement, articulate and candid in spotlighting their hypocrisy.

Though her work is ambitious and tackles subject matter far beyond Tacoma, Bell has maintained a quiet, local profile (she describes herself as a "writing, working stiff"). She has carved out a modest living as a playwright, author, novelist, teacher, and chef. She has authored five screenplays and two novellas. A short film, Tootie Pie, based on Bell's short story, "First Friend," was produced in 2004 and screened at the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival. Similarly, "Stones In My Passway" was selected for SIFF's Screenwriters' Salon Series. Her work has drawn a series of honors and awards: a Washington State Artist in Residency Grant, a Callaloo Literary Journal fellowship, a residency at Soapstone (a writing retreat for women), and a standing invitation to Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros's annual literary workshop and retreat. She also hosts Good Eating with Ros, a show on Comcast that highlights the scores of recipes she collected over the years (she's presently at work on a cookbook based on the show's recipes).

"She's just the real thing," says Cisneros, the author of The House on Mango Street and Caramelo, and recipient of the so-called "Genius Award" MacArthur Fellowship, during a phone interview from her home in San Antonio, Texas. Cisneros and Bell met in 2001, when Bell was her Seattle escort during a book tour stop. "I don't often ask writer escorts to come to my private workshop. She was just very genuine and very sincere. Some of it is undefinable. You can't pinpoint until you spend time with her. There was a sincerity. I felt, 'This is someone I want to spend time with.'"

Bell was born and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, by her parents, Clarence and Geneva, both teachers, and with her younger sister, Trudy. Dad was a history buff, and it bonded him and Rosalind. "We were the original jeopardy team," she recalls. "We quizzed each other all the time. I just loved talking to him about history. He just seemed to be a retainer not of just fact, but the reasoning behind issues."

She graduated from Southern University in Baton Rogue, where she majored in political science. She thought about being an attorney, but she moved instead to Washington, DC in 1979, where she was hired as a civil rights investigator by the Treasury Department. "After school, I just wanted to experience life," she says. "I didn’t want to go straight into another school situation." Assigned to the department's West Coast division, she was sent to Seattle for a year, where she first glimpsed the Pacific Northwest greenery. "I took one look around and said, 'Oh, my gosh. This place is beautiful.'".

Still, it would be another 15 years before Bell would eventually settle here.

In 1983, she moved back to Louisiana to work at an architectural firm hired as master planners of the World's Fair in New Orleans. It was then that she started to "dabble" in writing fiction. A move to San Francisco the following year further piqued her interest in writing. When Bell started to date the African American director Claude Purdy, she was immersed in the city's theater scene. Purdy was a collaborator and friend of the late-playwright August Wilson, at a time when Wilson was starting to be recognized for his work.

"August and his work was a beacon," says Bell. "It was a cottage industry he was growing. All of a sudden, his work opened a world to a bunch of black actors and directors. It was a learning experience on par, for me, to going to any of the prestigious writing schools.

"All of a sudden," she adds, "I was thrown into this world of professional actors and writers, and marveled at it."

Bell ran with Purdy, Wilson, Theresa Merritt (best known for her title role in Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"), and actor Charles S. Dutton. "I spent maybe 10 years going from theater to theater with [Claude]," she adds. "[He was a b]eautiful director. A genius director, really, who was a great friend of August’s. At that point, August’s star was just rising. Of course, he had won a Tony. Being in that world of dreams coming true was fascinating, and a good place to be at that point for a writer."

That scene sparked creativity. She wrote "Stones In My Passway," "Le Cirque Noir," and a number of short stories. "There were so many things I wanted to say, and what better way to say them?" she adds.

In 1989, she moved back to Louisiana for five years to be with her parents before they passed. In 1995, she moved to Tacoma with Purdy (the couple is no longer together). It was here that she found an artistic environment that nurtured her creativity. "I'm so taken with the city," she raves. "When the writer is ready, there's an audience. Most writers ask, 'How do you bridge the writing with an audience?' Well, in Tacoma the bridge is there. In Seattle, unless you are a known quantity, you might not get an opportunity. I haven't met up with that cliquishness here."

Today, Bell lives in an old two-story, Craftsman-style home in Tacoma's North End. It's a headquarters for Bell, who spends two days a week at the African American Academy in Seattle teaching poetry to fourth-graders. It's part of "Writers in the Schools," an annual program hosted by Seattle Arts & Lectures that places professional writers in Seattle public schools. She also works late into the night rewriting a novel, Love, Me, which she originally wrote in the form of a diary. Two days a month, she heads out to a farm in Puyallup, where she tapes her cable cooking show. And since September, she has collaborated with several faculty members at University of Puget Sound (UPS) on "New Orleans Monologues."

One person who has worked closely with Bell in Tacoma is Geoffrey Proehl, professor and chair of the Theater Arts Department at UPS. He is director and dramaturg of this month's reading at TAG. He hopes to stage a full production at UPS this fall. "What attracted me first of all was the level of particular details -- the specific detail from the lives of these people," he says. "Over and over, there is this grounding in detail that helps us get to know who these people are."

Proehl says that what sets this production apart from other articles or stories about Hurricane Katrina is how it zooms in on the lives of small characters. "It offers a close-up view of what the experience might have been like, or how that experience might have been lived."

Actress Grace Livingston agrees. A professor of African American studies at UPS, Livingston portrays Elaine, the play's central narrator. "The thing that moved me in the script was that it is so layered," she says. "What Rosalind Rosalind refused to do was make all black people a monolith. One thing. Often that's what happens. She was digging up inner lives of people. We got inside of almost the gut of her characters. We heard about their love lives, their relationships with children, with neighbors. It helped us to actually see the place and why what happened was so devastating."

Hurricane Katrina, the fall of Haiti, Dr. King's Birmingham incarceration: Why is Bell drawn to heavy and epic issues of history, devastation, and conflict?

Part of it has to do with the interest in history she shared with her father. It also has to do with something deeper. "I write from feeling, about big deeds and questions," she suggests. "I write to find answers."

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2007 issue of City Arts Tacoma