At age 77, Ancella Bickley has written a full-length drama about a Monongalia County  slave woman tried and executed in 1790.

Bickley's drama takes its inspiration from a 1790 county court record about a slave accused of burning a barn and attempting to kill the man who owned her. The accused said she was pregnant.

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Retired English professor and college administrator Ancella Bickley has more writing projects she wants to complete.

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The court took the then-extraordinary step of empaneling a jury of women to determine whether her claim was true. The panel ruled she was not pregnant. The woman was hanged. An enslaved male, accused of being her accomplice, was branded in the hand and given 30 lashes.

A retired English professor and college administrator who taught at West Virginia University and later at West Virginia State University, Bickley lives with her husband, lawyer Nelson Bickley, in retirement in central Florida.

Bickley first learned about the case while reading a WVU master's thesis in the 1980s. "I was intrigued by it - especially by the panel of women," she recalled. "Although I knew that I wanted to write a play using this material, it took me nearly 20 years to get it on paper."

Bickley's play, "Two Saint Say," opened Feb. 29 for a two-day, three-performance run at Central Florida Community College's Ocala campus. Nearly 1,000 people attended three performances, according to Judith Stitzel, a friend and former colleague of Bickley. Admission was free, but organizers asked for a $5 donation that would go to charity.

The play's title comes from Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Haitian who led the only successful slave revolution. American slaves would not have known French, and Bickley presumes they might have pronounced Toussaint's name Two Saint.

Bickley hadn't written anything this complex for the stage. In the 1970s, she wrote 20- to 30-minute skits, funded by the West Virginia Humanities Council, that encouraged black people to vote. She had written monologues, including one still performed called "The Crossing," about the reminiscences of a slave freed in Virginia who crossed West Virginia to settle in Ohio. 

The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, who died recently after completing a 10-play cycle about the black experience in Pittsburgh for each decade of the 20th century, took plays-in-progress to the Yale School of Drama for reading and critiquing, Bickley said.

"I once told a friend I wished I knew someone like this," Bickley said. At a New York party, Stitzel ran into Eva Burgess, who said she could offer advice. Long phone calls followed as Burgess digested the script and Bickley revised.

At age 77, Ancella Bickley has written a full-length drama about a Monongalia County  slave woman tried and executed in 1790.

Bickley's drama takes its inspiration from a 1790 county court record about a slave accused of burning a barn and attempting to kill the man who owned her. The accused said she was pregnant.

Monongalia County was part of Virginia then. The Civil War, the splitting of one part of Virginia from the other, and the creation of the state of West Virginia were more than 70 years away.

The court took the then-extraordinary step of empaneling a jury of women to determine whether her claim was true. The panel ruled she was not pregnant. The woman was hanged. An enslaved male, accused of being her accomplice, was branded in the hand and given 30 lashes.

A retired English professor and college administrator who taught at West Virginia University and later at West Virginia State University, Bickley lives with her husband, lawyer Nelson Bickley, in retirement in central Florida.

Bickley first learned about the case while reading a WVU master's thesis in the 1980s. "I was intrigued by it - especially by the panel of women," she recalled. "Although I knew that I wanted to write a play using this material, it took me nearly 20 years to get it on paper."

Bickley's play, "Two Saint Say," opened Feb. 29 for a two-day, three-performance run at Central Florida Community College's Ocala campus. Nearly 1,000 people attended three performances, according to Judith Stitzel, a friend and former colleague of Bickley. Admission was free, but organizers asked for a $5 donation that would go to charity.

The play's title comes from Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Haitian who led the only successful slave revolution. American slaves would not have known French, and Bickley presumes they might have pronounced Toussaint's name Two Saint.

Bickley hadn't written anything this complex for the stage. In the 1970s, she wrote 20- to 30-minute skits, funded by the West Virginia Humanities Council, that encouraged black people to vote. She had written monologues, including one still performed called "The Crossing," about the reminiscences of a slave freed in Virginia who crossed West Virginia to settle in Ohio. 

The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, who died recently after completing a 10-play cycle about the black experience in Pittsburgh for each decade of the 20th century, took plays-in-progress to the Yale School of Drama for reading and critiquing, Bickley said.

"I once told a friend I wished I knew someone like this," Bickley said. At a New York party, Stitzel ran into Eva Burgess, who said she could offer advice. Long phone calls followed as Burgess digested the script and Bickley revised.

"One of the things she told me was we needed to hear more from the young woman in the play," Bickley said. "We needed to hear more about her feelings about what was happening."

Burgess told her not to tie her play so closely to the historical record that she left herself no creative room. "That freed me," Bickley recalled. "We didn't really know anything about this slave. It freed me to make up and imagine a past for these people."

Before she talked to Burgess, Bickley struggled with her characters' motivations. "I don't know what those women on the jury thought. So what they think and say is what I wanted them to think and say."

Bickley decided to use the white women to deliberate as jury and - shifting around on their stools to face the audience - comment as Greek chorus. "Some of the arguments voiced by these women are contemporary to our time.  It's what I, as the writer, wanted to do. I wanted to suggest that white women also had longings that they could not voice and that some may have been opposed to slavery."

Bickley introduced a love interest between the accused black woman, Oage, and Tom, a white man on the next farm. No matter how these relationships began - a slave woman put herself at risk if she rebuffed a white man's advances - they sometimes evolved into true affection, Bickley said. The love relationship, she believes, added complexity to Tom's character, to the slavery question and to the deliberations of the all-women jury.

"I don't know that this play has a future, but it has a past" Bickley said. "The production wouldn't have happened without the director, Bobbi Jordan, and my friends Charles and Diane Jacobson, who financially supported it."

Bickley has two more writing projects she wants to finish. One is a book of short stories. The other is a collaborative effort she feels a special responsibility toward.

Before she left West Virginia in 2003, she and Rita Wicks-Nelson, a clinical psychologist who taught at WVU Tech, interviewed 25 black women who were public school teachers at the time West Virginia's schools integrated. The women they interviewed are old or dead, and Bickley wants to preserve their recollections in book form.

"I'd very much like to do it, and Rita would, too," Bickley said, "but we've both gotten involved in other projects and been pulled in different directions."

To contact staff writer Bob Schwarz, use e-mail or call 348-1249.