“Nobody understands me,” Norman says over tea at a crowded Barnes and Noble. We’re nearing the end of our conversation, and the fervor with which Norman had previously discussed his politics and explained his one-man show about the life of the controversial abolitionist John Brown has subsided. “But of course nobody understands me,” he says. “I don’t understand anybody else. I don’t care about anybody’s life, but I want everybody to care about mine. It’s incredibly selfish.”
Selfish, and, as is his MO, incredibly human. At 75, Norman, an activist and actor who specializes in portraying John Brown, is still as obsessed with championing a shared humanity–agitating for social, political, and racial equality–as he was over 50 years ago when, as a college student, he got kicked out of school for organizing a civil rights march. Growing up in the Jim Crow-era South with a father who was a Klansman, in an atmosphere of racism so pervasive it went unidentified, it seems nothing short of miraculous Norman should have ended up the leftist artist and political firebrand he is today. Today, Norman doesn’t believe in electoral politics. “We need to have thousands of people in the Pentagon parking lot…we need thousands of people in the streets marching every day.” John Stewart’s 2010 “Rally To Restore Sanity” held in Washington, D.C., which Norman’s wife attended, would have been more effective had people “turned over some buses, some army vehicles.” Norman believes it is possible to draw a causal link between the European Renaissance and the rise of white supremacy.
There is much that many people, across all walks of life, might find difficult to understand about Norman.
The only member of his family to have graduated from high school, Norman was “an impressive young man” growing up: an athlete, president of the student body, second in his class. His father, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, passed away when he was 13, so by the time Norman returned from serving in the military, there was no one but his mother and several siblings left to grapple with the liberalism he had found while fighting for his country. The army hosted Norman’s first encounter with racial enlightenment, furnished him with his first experience of being on equal footing with non-white men. Prior to enlisting, “no one had ever graced me with the notion that, perhaps, there was a political, social, intellectual equality of races. That idea didn’t exist in my world.”
His family may have thought he was nuts, with his newfound views on civil rights and habit of quoting Marx, but, given his elevated status as the intellectual, no one fought him. “I must [have been] right, because I was the smart one in my family,” Norman says.
After being expelled from college for his civil rights activism, and having brought a failed lawsuit against the school that “made it all the way to the Supreme Court, but not through it,” moving to New York City seemed the natural choice. Norman was a budding actor with a passion for politics. He rented a room in the Village with his first wife for only $18 a month, claiming they each needed to work only four hours a day in order to get by. The rest of the time they devoted to their art, until, eventually, they made the great migration out to the suburbs, where they raised their only daughter in Pennsylvania. A creative fallow period followed, 12 years during which Norman didn’t act or write. It was only after he and his first wife divorced that Norman decided to give show business another shot. Enter his “soul mate,” the infamous 19th -century agitator and abolitionist John Brown.
For many, Brown is little more than a paragraph in their sophomore-year history textbook. He is the answer to a multiple-choice question on the AP US exam. He is best known for organizing a raid on the Harpers Ferry federal armory in West Virginia. A militant abolitionist, he and several men seized the armory in 1859, took hostages, and allegedly planned to incite a slave insurrection. General Robert E. Lee, the Confederate demi-god who continues to draw worshippers today, defeated Brown’s forces after Brown had held the fort for almost two days, and had Brown captured. John Brown was later convicted of treason and hanged.
Brown’s legacy is mired by the violent methods he is thought to have championed in the name of abolitionism, resulting in perceptions which vary from borderline psychotic to troublesome at best. For Norman, Brown is nothing short of a hero, and far more rational than history has remembered him.
“It was a non-violent action gone wrong,” Norman says of Harpers Ferry. “If [Brown] wanted to terrorize people, if he wanted to be violent, he could have killed a lot of people. As it was, it was Brown and Browns’ raiders that suffered most of the violence. All of the hostages Brown took, 40 hostages or so, none of them was harmed…Many of them spoke glowingly of him as a man of principle, including George Washington’s nephew, Louis Washington, who was one of the hostages.”
“He did not intend an insurrection,” Norman continues, fired up but speaking calmly, using that reasonable tone of voice that, I imagine, must have impressed his mother and siblings into quietly accepting his socially heretical views all those years ago. “All he wanted to do was rally a force of guerrillas into the mountains, which would have made it easer for slaves to escape…that’s what his intention was, a good plan.”
Norman has done over 300 productions of his one-man show, “John Brown: Trumpet of Freedom,” since the mid-‘90s. It was a friend of his and writing partner who first suggested he research Brown when he moved back to New York City after his divorce, when he was in need of a new acting vehicle. It was a fateful piece of advice. In addition to a shared sense of injustice, Norman says he and Brown “have similar temperaments; we’re both absolutely bull-headed, we take no instruction from anybody, we both dislike bullies tremendously.” Not to mention their similar backgrounds; both are white men who grew up in an environment of extreme racial hatred, Brown in the antebellum and Norman in the Jim Crow-era South. Both felt a moral compulsion (throughout his play, Norman’s Brown frequently quotes Bible passages as justification for his unpopular views) to act against the injustice their fellow whites either participated in or stood idly by.
Of course, the idea of a white-man-activist lionizing a white-man-abolitionist to champion the cause of black victims is not without its racially fraught implications, no matter how good everyone’s intentions. When Norman speaks of the many black men and women who stood by Brown, refuting the claim that Brown’s extremist methods isolated the very demographic he sought to help, it sounds a little like a 21st century young white man citing the number of black friends he has in an effort to show how “with it” or “cool” he is with the black community. The short documentary about Norman and his play, “John Brown/Jim Crow: American Paradox,” further illustrates the difficulties Norman faces in his quest to spread the Good Word of John Brown. In one scene, Norman appears to be leading a panel discussion on race to a room full of young black men and women. He has just tossed around the N-word, mimicking an ignorant white Southerner. One of the black men raises his hand, and challenges Norman’s use of the word. Norman doesn’t exactly shrug off the man’s comment, but, in a sense, he does: he’s using the word in a historical context, Norman says, citing the historical authenticity defense. That’s the way things were, and that was a word in frequent circulation. Plus, “I’m not here to make anyone feel good,” Norman says.
“Anyone,” when speaking of Norman’s typical audience, is normally either many black people, or many white people, though, interestingly, both are rarely present in equal measure. The turnout for “Trumpet of Freedom” over the years has either been all-white audiences, or all-black audiences, but an “audience that is equally proportioned between black and white” appears only “occasionally.”
This ethnic disparity in viewership may have something to do with the venues in which Norman generally performs. He’s traveled both within the United States and abroad in Europe, but he’s frequently performing in support of something, like at a benefit for radical human rights activist Lynne Stewart (where many other white activists were present) or at some educational event (like where the aforementioned scene appears to take place.) “John Brown: Trumpet of Freedom” isn’t exactly Broadway fare, or even off-off-Broadway fare. Its politics are in-your-face and uncompromising; the modern, popular artistic tenet of ambiguity, where audiences can draw their own conclusions about what they’ve seen on stage like children selecting their own ending to an old-fashioned “choose your own adventure story” is wholly lacking. Norman knows what he thinks, and if it makes you uncomfortable, so much the better. Remember: He isn’t there to make anyone feel good.
For Norman, playing John Brown is more than an exercise in self-identification, or even catharsis; Brown is a peak we should all aspire to reach.
“I think a world in which John Brown is a hero would be a much better world than a world that sees him as a villain. He put his life on the line for justice. What a great example. Who could not follow that example and make a better world?”
Who, indeed? When I point out, however, the violence of Brown’s tactics (he also murdered several anti-abolitionists in Kansas – though they were planning to kill him first, Norman says), Norman bristles. “That’s one of the old wives’ tales we have to overcome. You’re just a surrogate for white supremacy.”
I don’t follow that line of thought; don’t fully understand how an acknowledgement of Brown’s aggressive methods lumps one in with a crowd of nasty extremists. Norman has confused many people over the years: family members, neighbors, young people who can’t fathom paying only $18 for a room in Manhattan, and even, occasionally, himself. Norman’s grown daughter is a pragmatist, very different from her two artist parents. “She’s better prepared, and more diplomatic, and smarter than everybody else,” he says. He muses, “Can you teach somebody stuff you don’t know?”
Norman doesn’t know when he’ll next play John Brown; it’s been months since he last channeled his kindred spirit–and 29 other supporting characters, including black icons Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman–before an audience during a performance of “Trumpet of Freedom.” Having entered what is more than likely the third act of his life, Norman is still creatively curious, even virile: He’s been too busy adapting his stage production into a screenplay, and writing short stories–“memoiric fictions”–based on his childhood. The latter are full of dark themes and memories he’s not sure anyone will want to read. It’s at this point in our conversation that Norman laments the ability of others to understand him, and expresses the desire for them to still care about his story.
We shake hands and leave, Norman a hulking, white-tufted figure in a brightly patterned Hawaiian T-shirt and cargo shorts. And I think, you’re right. I’m not sure there are many of us who can understand “the hideousness of the holocaust” that was the Jim Crow South, what it was like to bear witness to, and then reject, an ugly system of cultural attitudes. But the call to a shared humanity Norman has spent the past half-century sounding – in parking lots as well as on stage? In a world of Trayvon Martins and Fruitvale Stations, Norman’s struggle with racial acceptance strikes a note of honest work (“I was a tough study,” he says of learning to trust his fellow black soldiers in the army; to this day, he’s still “aware of race every minute, in every situation”) and the ultimate triumph of empathy and intellect over ignorance. If he can manage to set some sense of that down on paper, surely he will have a built-in readership who, yes, may never fully understand him, but for whom the very act of striving to understand the human experience of pain, and the possibilities for transcendence it begets, will be worth the price of admission.
