What's in a Name

Oh man do I hate rewriting. It's one of the things I only really discovered a couple years ago: when I'm doing the first draft of something, it's free-form and exciting, and I never outline, I just start putting words down and they just kinda go. Word leads to word, thought leads to thought, I don't know how it works and I don't want to.

The result, however, was always a bit of a mess (structurally most of all). A creative mess to be sure, but a mess. It was hard enough dealing with the mess when I was working on a novel or a short story; but in a screenplay, where everything is about structure, it becomes a gigantic problem.

Thus, Beaudry. The genesis of the idea came from Marc Rosenbush, when we were both working with the Splinter Group Theatre in Chicago. (Splinter Group has since morphed into Irish Rep, and is still run by our old friend Matt O'Brien.) While Marc and I were working on the Beckett stuff (it's what Splinter Group was known for, back then), the theatre had a touring children's production of a Harriet Tubman piece going. One of the actors they hired was named Horace Toombs, and he was a young black actor. I never actually met him, but as soon as I hear the name Toombs associated with any black people I know there's a fairly high likelihood that their family was once owned by my family.

Which of course brings up who my family is and was. Now we don't know for sure, but my great-grandmother (whose stories always turn out to be essentially true, even if the details have, shall we say, drifted) always said that we Toombses were related to Robert Augustus Toombs, the first Secretary of State for the Confederacy. We are thus about as classically Southern as it's possible to be--Toombs's father, also a Robert, was a major during the Revolution, and we've lived in the South for at least three hundred years. And yes, they owned slaves.

As I said, we've never proved the connection to these famous Toombses, but I tend to assume that it's true. (Genealogical research has hit a dead end with a widow named Sallie Toombs, my great-great-great grandmother, listed as a widow in the 1880 Census in Richmond, Virginia--if anyone has any info on her, hey, I'm listening.) And although it's not always true that slaves automatically took the last names of their masters, still it did happen, and it seems safe to assume that black people bearing my last name have that name for the obvious reason.

So, back to Horace Toombs. Like I said, I never met him. But Marc was fascinated. "That would make a great story," he said, "if you two met." And so a script was born.

Or rather, six scripts were born, because that's how many times I've tried to crack this damn thing. And I'm running out of time, so I'll have to pick this up later.