Val Gray Ward: One Women Show

             Last Thursday I was unsure what to expect when I walked into the Humanities Gallery in the Trinity building.  In the small room, which is usually used to display students artwork, there were about 5 or 6 rows of chairs accommodated to seat about 70 or so people.  At first I thought I was in the wrong place to listen to a poetry reading.  But that was exactly what it was for.  Val Gray Ward, 75, was going to entertain us for roughly the next hour or so.  When she told us that she was at the ripe old age of 75 no one could believe in such a notion.  She was so lively and gifted that it just couldn’t be true, but it was.  She has lived a very long and accomplished life which included 21 Emmy’s, a Grammy nomination and an array of other prestigious awards totaling some 200 plus.

 I was unaware at how famous this person was.  She even was an acquaintance of the great Dr. Martin Luther King.  Since this was my first time being in a poetry reading I was thrown back as to how she took a spin on it.  She recited from such authors as Harriet Tubman, Langston Hughes and Mari Evans to name a few.  She did it with such passion, replaying the characters with matching voices and bursting into song echoing through the small gallery room.  She did humorous pieces like a poem called “Sylvester’s Dying Bed” by Langston Hughes about an old ladies man in Harlem on his dying bed.  She did serious pieces such as a reading from Harriet Tubman about a women fleeing slavery for the north.  

Val’s work is a refreshing history of African-American culture.  Her style and talent are extremely entertaining but also are educational and very culture inspired.  At the ripe age of 75 she has seen 3 quarters of a century of change in the world of African-American culture and I’m just happy that I was lucky enough to witness an hour or so of her.