The Real Geneva Tisdale

The amazing differences in the written word and the spoken word are never more apparent than in the story of Geneva Tisdale. Reading the text of the story lends a historical, impartial view of the happenings of that time. One can get an overall view of the layout of the restaurant and how hard the employees worked. But once Geneva begins to speak does the true story emerge.

To read the script, one would think the story was about the civil rights battles that were going on all over the south at that time. It was a fierce and frightening time in the history of our country during which many people were hurt and killed.
Civil rights leaders such as Martin King and Malcolm X were murdered outright as people were afraid of their charismatic leadership.

The real story here is in the wistfulness of Geneva’s voice as she tells her story. One hears the pride as she recounts being the first African American to be served at the counter. One can almost hear the anger as she focuses only on her work and ignores the demeaning work of waiting on Caucasians for years, always the servant but never the served, until the moment arrives. One can hear the yearning to be on the customer side of the counter on her own terms and not guided by her boss’s dictates. And after all that she has lived through for so many years, to be making such a low wage with the knowledge that the Caucasian waitress would make more money.

If I were in control of the telling of this tale, I would create a one-woman show in which I would have a woman of color deliver a monologue, speaking of all of the internal conversations that she would have with herself during this time. I would want to know what she was REALLY thinking behind that counter, but would be in too much deep trouble to voice. I would want to hear the longing, the anger and betrayal that was too dangerous to be expressed in a more open way. I might even have her spit in a hamburger before she would serve it to the man who called her racist names.

Yes, Geneva Tisdale is a remarkable woman whose real story is in her feelings and thoughts of a time that discounted her humanity, a story that can be more aptly portrayed through a spoken history rather than a written one.