QAF Narrative No. 56

Wine in the Wilderness and the Stories We Write About Others

On Saturday, September 19, at 7:30 p.m., I took my seat in the last row at Canadian Stage. A man sat beside me with a laptop open on his knees. As the lights dimmed, he began to type.

The stage came alive. Harlem was burning, and inside Bill Jameson’s apartment, another kind of fire was taking shape. Bill, a painter, was completing a triptych about Black womanhood. He already had innocence. He already had his ideal woman—distant, elegant, almost sacred. What he still needed was the opposite: a woman who could represent everything he believed had been damaged or lost.

Then Tommy arrived.

Bill looked at her and saw the missing figure in his painting. Before he knew her, he had already decided what she meant.

Watching him, I thought of Pygmalion, the sculptor in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who carved his vision of the perfect woman. He fell in love with his creation and prayed for it to live. The statue—later known as Galatea—softened beneath his touch. Ivory became flesh. His imagined woman entered the world.

Bill seemed to be attempting the opposite miracle. He had not created Tommy; she was already alive. Yet he wanted to press her into a finished idea, turning a living woman into a fixed image. Pygmalion gave life to an object. Bill was in danger of turning a person into one.

I was still following this comparison when a figure rose from the audience and slipped out of the theatre like a shadow. At that exact moment, the typing beside me stopped.

For an instant, I lost the thread of the story.

Who was writing it now? The man beside me? Had the writer slipped from the room with that shadow? Or was it me—already rearranging this moment into the sentences I would write later?

Even my detour into Pygmalion no longer felt mine entirely. Had I arrived at the myth on my own, or had Alice Childress quietly led me there?

Then Tommy’s voice pulled me back.

She had discovered why she had been invited into Bill’s apartment. She understood the place assigned to her in his work—and in the minds of the people around her. They had mistaken her clothes, her speech, and her circumstances for her whole identity. They had turned a glance into certainty and prejudice into art.

But Tommy refused the portrait.

This is where Childress reverses the old myth. Galatea awakens inside the form Pygmalion created for her. Tommy awakens the artist by rejecting the form he created for her. She is not a statue waiting for a man to give her life. She is a living woman demanding to be seen as she is.

For a moment, I no longer knew where I was: in Pygmalion’s studio, in Bill’s apartment, in the last row beside a silent keyboard—or somewhere inside my own memory, counting the times I had judged people through ideas formed before they ever spoke.

Once, an artist imagined that art could create the ideal human being. Pygmalion carved perfection and asked life to enter it. Bill attempts a darker reversal: before knowing Tommy, he asks a living woman to embody a degradation already waiting in his own mind. Pygmalion asks art to become life; Bill asks life to submit to art.

Tommy refuses. Her voice carries her beyond Bill’s canvas and beyond the role others have written for her—including the one I was beginning to write in my head. The keyboard beside me was silent. Yet beyond it, and beyond the stereotype, was a life no sentence, painting, or judgment could contain.

YF, September 21, 2026