The story of love pulled apart by slavery is being told though dance

Transcript

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

The legacy of the emancipation of Jim and Winnie Shankle reaches through generations of their family. The story of their love - pulled apart by slavery - is now being told through dance. The Texas Standard's Kristen Cabrera recently saw a performance in the town founded by the couple.

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KRISTEN CABRERA, BYLINE: It's a hot Saturday afternoon at Mt. Zion C.M.E. Church in Shankleville, Texas.

STACEY ALLEN: It's 4:03, so we're just going to wait two more minutes.

CABRERA: Stacey Allen is choreographer of "The Fairytale Project," a show that tells the story of two enslaved people whose love founded this church and the town around it.

ALLEN: We're used to seeing, like, "The Nutcracker" and other ballets through movement. This is an opportunity to tell a Black story through movement.

CABRERA: That story starts in the South in the 17th century. Jim Shankle was born into slavery in 1811. He met his wife Winnie on a plantation in Mississippi. Then they were separated. Tracey Clay is a descendant and president of the Shankleville Historical Society.

TRACEY CLAY: The master there sold her to a slave owner here in East Texas.

CABRERA: The family story is that Jim didn't give up. He set off to look for Winnie instead of heading North to freedom, says Stacey Allen.

ALLEN: Jim could not bear the thought of living without his wife, and so he escaped his plantation in Mississippi, traveled across the Mississippi River.

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CABRERA: In the dance, the river is running through the center aisle of the church. It's a long, flowing piece of blue fabric that is being waved by Shankle descendants 8-year-old Chase Allen Jr...

CHASE ALLEN JR: And we act like it's water.

CABRERA: ...And his 6-year-old sister, Zora Allen.

ZORA ALLEN: I put the water up and down.

CABRERA: This is an homage to famous choreographer Alvin Ailey's dance piece, "Wade In The Water" from the acclaimed "Revelations" performance. Choreographer Allen is mom to Chase and Zora. She wanted the power of water to help connect the past and the present.

ALLEN: Even before Jim and Winnie, we're thinking about all of our people who've had to cross many, many rivers and survive the Middle Passage. So there's so many references to people of African origins crossing waters.

CABRERA: In this story, Winnie was taken across the Mississippi River when she was sold. Jim swam across the Mississippi to find her.

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UNIDENTIFIED DANCER #1: Winnie.

UNIDENTIFIED DANCER #2: Winnie.

UNIDENTIFIED DANCER #3: Winnie.

CABRERA: To showcase the crossings, dancers use an African technique called Yanvalou.

ALLEN: Yanvalou is a Afro-Haitian dance. It's a serpent dance, and you undulate through your torsos and your arms. And so as they were crossing the river, you could see that undulation.

CABRERA: Jim dodged slave catchers and traveled more than 400 miles to get to Texas. The story goes that once he made it, Jim snuck into different plantations at night, asking about Winnie, until one day, he found her.

CLAY: They had a whistle between them that they had established.

CABRERA: Tracey Clay again of the Shankleville Historical Society.

CLAY: And Winnie's - one of her responsibilities was to go down to the spring. And so while she was at the spring one evening, he whistled to her, and she recognized the whistle. And then they were reunited.

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CABRERA: Back in the church, two dancers begin a duet by moving in unison. But Jim and Winnie's journey isn't over. Once reunited, Winnie sneaks food to Jim for days. She convinces the master to buy Jim from the plantation owner in Mississippi. And then they were emancipated. Jim, along with their son-in-law, Stephen McBride, pooled their resources and began to buy the land which would become the freedman's town of Shankleville, with 75 families at its peak.

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ALLEN: Shankleville is a part of that legacy - that very, very strong and vast legacy - of Black people making a way out of no way and creating their own communities, coming out of enslavement.

CABRERA: The descendants of Jim and Winnie Shankle continue to celebrate their legacy, hosting annual homecomings and family reunions just yards away from the couple's final resting place together in the historic Jim Shankle Cemetery. For NPR News, I'm Kristen Cabrera in Shankleville, Texas.

(SOUNDBITE OF KEHLANI SONG, "BETTER NOT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.