Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 11 - safronia

27 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Timothy Douglas (director),avery r.young,and Meagan McNeal at a workshop with orchestra. Andrew Cioffi / Lyric Opera of Chicago In her 2017 Ted talk, The Great Migration and the Power of a Single Decision , Isabel Wilkerson (author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration ) noted that “every four days a Black person was lynched for some perceived infraction of protocol.” It is a grim footnote to observe that Hitler sent Nazis to the U.S. to study Jim Crow in order to replicate and amplify its methods in Germany. “The Great Migration was the first time that American citizens had to flee the land of their birth just to be recognized as the citizens that they had always been,” Wilkerson says. “No other group of Americans have had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens. This Great Migration was not a move; it was a seeking of political asylum within the borders of one’s own country.” No one knows the exact number of African souls lost due to the socially engineered false racial hierarchy that some call the Black Holocaust. The Great Migration is “a shared narrative,” young notes, “but it’s not a monolithic narrative.” Cultural, physical, psychological, and spiritual distance from the South’s racial caste system did not relieve Black Americans of America’s problems in the North. In fact, some Black Americans came to believe that they would have been better off staying in the South; the promised safe haven from structural and systemic racism did not materialize. “People are trapped in history,” wrote James Baldwin in 1955’s Stranger in the Village , “and history is trapped in them.” Although Black Americans continue to make the Great Migration today, in 2021’s The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto , writer Charles Blow (whose memoir was the source material for Fire Shut Up in My Bones ) argued that Black Americans living outside of the South should return in a reverse Great Migration to reclaim stolen political power. His hypothesis compels the question: Can anyone claim to have achieved freedom and justice if forsaking their place of birth brought them to a fate similar to what they would have endured had they stayed? In responding to the Great Migration’s harm and violence, to artistically “make things right,” young answers the question by repatriating baar to his land. “That’s all Big Mama wanted to do. She wanted to go back South when she retired because she said her grocery store would be in her backyard,” young says. “One of the elements of the piece is this nostalgia that baar and safronia suffer from, or are trying to cope with. baar and safronia don’t really want to go up North. They would rather fight to the death and stay on their land.” If the grand art form of opera has another 400 years to hold our attention, let us hope it is with more operas like safronia — works that move us in the direction of truly transformative justice for us all. antonio c. cuyler, ph.d. is Professor of Music in Entrepreneurship & Leadership at the University of Michigan. He served as Lyric’s inaugural Scholar-in-Residence during the 2024/25 season. His Creative Justice in Arts and Culture: Global Perspectives , co-edited with Mark Banks (University of Glasgow), is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.