August 2024

I well remember that first collaboration in 2017 with Eboni, Alonzo Van Wilson, Dr. Minuette Floyd of USC’s School of Visual Art & Design, her graduate students, and students from a local middle school. In response to Alonzo’s request for a youth-focused program in conjunction with his Well Suited exhibit, we at McKissick Museum worked with these partners to weave a collaboration that met everyone’s needs. During the residency, we brought students into the exhibit to explore, and then into our classroom to write and create group projects that grew from the students’ imagined communities.

Earlier that year, Chuck LaMark—then McKissick Museum’s Advisory Council Chair—told me, “You need to meet my friend, Eboni.” At his urging, I called her up. We chatted and she invited me to her next gig at Chays Lounge in Columbia. My husband and I were immediately captivated by her rich voice, heartfelt delivery, and warm presence. When we spoke between sets, we agreed to keep in touch about future possibilities. As we planned and carried out the Well Suited residency, Eboni’s care, thoughtfulness, and creativity shone forth. Most of all, her unique gift for inviting people to inhabit a safe space where they can fully be themselves, express their ideas, and tap their creativity to form community made a big impression on me.

As new projects came up, I was delighted and privileged to work with Eboni again. It was Eboni who came up with the name “Communal Pen” for the community writing workshop that began in 2018 as a public program to deepen and personalize visitors’ experience of traveling Smithsonian Museum on Main Street exhibits. Here again, she carefully crafted a workshop template around exhibit themes, through which participants delved into their own stories and shared them with others through spontaneous writing and feedback. As covid sent many of us home to shelter in place, and George Floyd’s murder left us reeling—again—Communal Pen migrated online and became a refuge from isolation—a haven to build community and connect across miles and different perspectives. A regular Communal Pen participant in those workshops recently told me, “We got each other through the pandemic!”

The pandemic also motivated Quilted Quatrains—a creative aging pilot that Eboni co-developed with narrative quilter Peggie Hartwell. Like Communal Pen, Quilted Quatrains was a collaboration, this time between the South Carolina Arts Commission and the Blackville Community Development Corporation, along with other community partners. Over eight weeks in the spring of 2022, we met online with rural seniors, who animated childhood traditions and memories through poetry and quilt making, and became more comfortable with digital technology. There was also the Pottery and Poetry Workshop at McKissick Museum’s 2018 FOLKFabulous festival at the South Carolina State Fair, a tribute to David Drake, the fabled enslaved potter who etched couplets and phrases into his vessels. Eboni led fair goers in composing their own lines of poetry and incising them into wet clay.

Time and again, Eboni’s gift brought out the best in all of us, and melted groups of strangers into communities of writers, even and especially those who would tell us, “I’m not a writer.” We believed that everyone is a writer with an important story to tell. Eboni’s workshops were a sacred space where all manner of stories were valued, some heard for the very first time.

Sometimes, within the context of a workshop, Eboni shared her own or others’ poetry or a saying. A favorite of hers was this quote by Benjamin Mays, “No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star, each in his time.” Even as she inspired others by unabashedly following her own star, she encouraged us all—from children to seniors and everyone in between—to find our true purpose in life, to create our own meaning and share it with others. Through these and other programs, she has touched so many lives and hearts.

Over seven years, our journey together building community through creativity and self-expression deepened my respect and admiration for Eboni, as well as our friendship. Gradually, her health made it necessary for her to take a break from our projects. When I last saw Eboni a few weeks ago she reflected, “You and I have done some good work together.” And she was looking ahead to more. The following week she called me to let me know she had been mulling over new possibilities for future projects, to continue our work with seniors. I was out of town at the time and she told me, “Give me a call when you get back—I want to talk to you about some ideas I have.” Her untimely passing the day before my return has left me wondering what she had in mind. It is hard to imagine carrying on without her dynamic presence, the sound of her laughter inviting joy and ease, and her spark. Yet Eboni’s radiance and beauty will shine on, a star to guide me, a star to guide us all.