“Look up,” announced the programs for “Cabin In The Sky” by Boston artist Ife Franklin, “an immersive exploration of heritage, resilience, and community.”
The crowd/audience/congregation gathered at Valley Gates in Boston’s Franklin Park last night, just down from the zoo entrance. They had been asked to dress in white, which glowed in the darkness. Franklin arrived on a golf cart, attired in a white dress and carrying a wooden staff. She greeted all with hugs.
“Cabin In The Sky” builds upon Franklin’s five previous ancestor slave cabins/praise houses and her 2024 “Egun Ancestor Procession” at Boston’s Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. “‘Cabin In The Sky’ is also deeply rooted in the aesthetic of Afrofuturism,” Franklin wrote in the program. “It envisions the slave cabin as a portal to a time-slip world in which the past, present, and future can be healed and re-imagined through a lens of Black liberation.”
The free performance/ritual/Afrofuturist church, presented through the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-Monument project, had been scheduled for Sept. 25 to 27, but last weekend’s nor’easter postponed it to the rain dates, Oct. 2 to 4. (Register to attend.) It was a lovely night, clear and in the 70s.
About an hour after sunset, around 7:30, Franklin led the group in an “ancestor procession” along a paved road, between trees on the low hills on each side, their canopies lit blue and orange and purple, and with vintage photos of Black ancestors projected on some tree trunks. “People of color will lead the processional,” a project coordinator emailed the group beforehand. “Allies and abolitionists will respectfully walk behind them.”
Then the group turned right, into the Overlook Ruins, an outdoor room of stone stairs and walls, and now at the front left a stage with microphones and at front right a simple wooden cabin with more images of ancestors projected upon it.
“‘Cabin In The Sky’ seeks to honor Black ancestors as holders of ancient technologies, as the first astronomers, as navigators who used the stars to chart freedom-bound journeys for themselves and descendants far into the future,” Franklin wrote in the program. “I envision the cabin as a rocketship readying for lift-off, sending my ancestors into a stratosphere of safety and love using the cultural launch codes they themselves invented: dance, song, story, and a unifying, diasporic visual language.”
“To remember is to pray,” Dzidzor Azaglo chanted on the stage. The crowd sat in rows of white folding chairs as performers danced at the front. Franklin joined the woman on stage and said into a microphone, “Let us say the names of those who loved us here. … Can you say their name?”
Then Charles Murrell III played a saxophone “Tribute to Coltrane/Solo/Cabin Dance Offering.” After, Franklin returned to the stage to invite the crowd to dance a ring shout: “Your energy feeds the energy of Egun, the ancestors.” People rose and danced in a line ringing the chairs as Franklin sang “Eve and Adam / Run Mary Run”: “Even Adam picking that cotton … you’ve got a right to be alive. … You’ve got a right to the Tree of Life.”
Then drumming by Kera Washington. Then Franklin sang “Buzzards Lope” backed by Carlos Alonzo, Angel Brooks, Cassandra Cato-Lewis and Milly Henry: “Throw me anywhere in that old field. … We’re picking cotton. We’re picking indigo. … We built this nation in that old field.”
A masked dancer (Charles Murrell III) slowly crept along the rows of seats, eyeing individual audience members, then danced at the front, fringe flying, then back through the audience, then with Franklin, before exiting.
“We have decided that is all,” Letta Neely proclaimed in a closing sermon/rant/“spoken word offering”/prophesy “The Other-Other Side (Version 3.2).” “We have decided to leave. We have been here long enough to know. … We have buried enough. … A country we have never been allowed to live in. … We gave them cotton. They made money. … We gave them cool. And they sold it back to us. … We gave them our dead and they gave us back statistics. … We’ve done our share of the impossible. Let someone else hold this mother fucker together.”
“We crossed water because somebody forced us,” Neely continued. “…This time we choose the water. … We are going past the other side to the Other-other. … We are trying to go somewhere nobody has ruined yet.”
The audience responded with yeses and mmm hmms and uh-huhs, like church call and response, and by repeating Neely’s words: through! earth! gone!
“We are not carrying the old world into the new one and calling it freedom,” Neely said. “…We are becoming weather. … We are becoming something you cannot redline. … We are going to the Other-other side.”
“We have carried / what was not ours / to carry. / We have stayed / longer / than love / required,” Neeley said. “So now— / without knowing, / without permission, / without proof, / without map, / without master, / without guarantee— / we go. / Not away. / Beyond. / Not other. / Other-other. / Not free / from. / Free / toward. / [Almost gone now.] / And if they ask / where the Black people went— / tell them: / we finally believed / there was somewhere / we had never been / that needed us / more / than this place / that never learned / how to deserve us.”
The ritual was re-imanging the “Ancestral Slave/Freedom Cabin” as a version of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic’s Mothership: “a vessel carrying the souls of our ancestors toward freedom.”
A giant plume of smoke billowed out from in front of the cabin.
Franklin spoke into a microphone on the stage: “The cabin took off.”
Previously:
2017: Ife Franklin’s Ancestor Slave Cabin and Ring Shout
2021: On Juneteenth, Ifé Franklin Debuts ‘Slave Narrative’ Film
2021: Ifé Franklin’s Juneteenth Celebration
2023: Artistic Responses To Inequities In Cancer Care For People Of Color
2024: Honoring The Enslaved And Healing At Ifé Franklin’s ‘Ancestor Processions’
2025: Ife Franklin’s Healing Hoodoo
2026: ‘Crafting the Mind’ At Somerville Museum
2026: Remembering Three Enslaved People Who Poisoned Their Captor: A Cambridge Symposium
If this is the kind of coverage you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content © Greg Cook 2026 or the respective creators.)
