A 21-year-old Black woman walks into the Civil War and actually changes history. No cape required.
At the beginning of the Civil War, Union gunboats sailed into Port Royal Sound, on the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia. White plantation owners fled, and the 10,000 blacks who lived there, almost all of whom were slaves, were freed in the first test of President Abraham Lincoln's dream of emancipation. Charlotte Forten, a 21-year-old educated black woman, helped the freed slaves to begin to build a new society. That experience forms the plot of this drama, based on Charlotte Forten's journals, which was telecast on "American Playhouse."
Writing
Adapted from Forten's actual journals—her voice survives.
Acting
Mary Alice as Blind Lily will wreck you quietly.
Production
1985 TV budget, 1860s ambition—somehow works.
Director
Barry Crane
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