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Artistic Director, Cheryl Martin on sisterhood and celebrating what holds us together.
Our show We’re Not Going Back, is about a family of three sisters involved in Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC) during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. It hits home for me because I’m the oldest of three sisters, and we’re as different as the women in the play. But what is the same, for them and for my sisters and me, is the closeness and the understanding and the support.
Thinking about the play brought back memories of being with my grandmother and United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) union official uncles. Writing about my uncles for Red Ladder led me to the WAPC march in Durham last Saturday because women miners from the UMWA, who read my blog and who have been working with WAPC for many years to fight for their respected causes, generously invited me to walk alongside them.
WAPC Durham March 02.03.24
Meeting the women miners who came over from the States to renew their connection to Women Against Pit Closures was unexpectedly emotional. They’d been to Gary, West Virginia, where my grandfather and uncles and cousins, too, all worked as miners. Some were from West Virginia, where my mother and her ten siblings grew up, and some were from Tennessee, where my grandmother and grandfather were born. The women miners, some who had worked over 21 years in the mines, brought their partners and children to meet their sisters (in activism) here in the UK.
Meeting them was like touching my grandmother’s face again, hearing her voice, listening to her talk about the times she and her children knew: the company store and the Pinkertons brought in to break strikes; the fights, the hardscrabble times; the camaraderie and the love that brought them through it all. That love that surrounded me as a child, sitting under the dining room table, listening with all my might, and my sisters.
Cheryl with Anna Dawson, Sacriston WAPC
We’re launching this tour of We’re Not Going Back, revived for the 40th anniversary of the ’84-’85 miners’ strike, on International Women’s Day 2024. It’s the perfect day to launch – sisters holding each other up through life-changing times, finding resources within themselves and in their closeness to each other they never knew they would need so much.
It reminds me of all the women in my family who helped me get to be here at Red Ladder: my grandmother whose house was full of books. My mother who let me join The Cat In The Hat book club when I’d only just learned to read –letting me pile books into her shopping trolley whenever we went to the grocery store, and paying for them all without a word. My aunt who ushered at a great theatre and took me along for free, for years. Another aunt who used to recite poems from both the New Englander Longfellow and African-American, James Weldon Johnson. My baby sister who is a walking, talking history book and gives me exactly the background I need when I’m researching a new play. My little sister who shows me what dedication to the community means through the untold causes she works for, unpaid. The old saying goes “it takes a village to raise a child”. It took a whole family of women to help make me.
Going to the Women Against Pit Closures march last weekend and seeing all those women not simply reliving the past, but still fighting for their families, for each other – that’s what plays like We’re Not Going Back bring to life. That’s what International Women’s Day is about for me: celebrating what holds us together. What lifts us up.
And we do lift each other up, even though we still have a long way to go. That reminds me of a song I learned listening to Nina Simone, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free:
… Well, I wish I could be like a bird in the sky
How sweet it would be if I found I could fly
Oh, I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea
And then I’d sing ’cause I’d know…
I’d know how it feels to be free…
Main image: L-R Cheryl Martin, Kipp Dawson (UMWA) & Sian James (WAPC)
