Clara Brown was the first African American woman in Colorado Born a slave and later freed, she was a pioneer, and led former slaves to better lives.

During the Gold Rush in Colorado, she built her own business and later invested in real estate.

She turned away luxuries from herself and was generous throughout her life.

This is a story of triumph and overcoming that needs to be continuously retold.

I was about to go out to a place called Central City, Colorado and sing at the Central City Opera House the role of a woman named Clara Brown who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest women in Colorado.

John Moriarty was the General Director, Emeritus.

He wanted this particular opera, about this particular woman.

The reason we specifically chose Clara Brown out of all of the possible women that have made substantial impacts in the state of Colorado, was because she had a direct impact on the city of Central City.

John Moriarty came to me backstage and said 'there's a wonderful woman, her name is Clara Brown and he said, ‘do you know her'?

And I said, ‘no'.

He said, ‘well there is talk about commissioning an opera about her'.

So fast forward two years and he came to New York and actually I auditioned for the job and I got it.

There are very few records of Clara's early life.

We have some Census records that indicate more or less where she was born and her travels from Virginia where she was probably born, to Kentucky later she mostly was listed without a last name.

She assimilated the last name of her owners first Smith and then Brown, which is the name she later became known by.

She was owned by these people.

Does a person just become okay with that because that's just the way it is or you know, what happens to the soul of a person really inside.

What were some of her contemplations?

She was allowed to marry and that's the word.

She would have had to have been allowed by her owners and she did raise a family.

She had four children: a son and three daughters.

The son was later sold into slavery in the deep south and that was virtually a death sentence in those periods.

They would have been worked on the plantations, literally to death and she never really heard from him again.

Another daughter Margaret was sold to a merchant in a nearby town.

She had a pair of twin daughters, Paulina and Eliza Jane.

And Paulina died early probably at the age of about eight in a drowning.

And then Eliza Jane was also sold to another family.

And Clara was able to stay in touch with her for a number of years.

But sometime in the late 1840's, maybe 1850's she lost touch with her as well.

Probably because the family moved and felt no compunction at all.

Why would they would need to notify her mother?

Slaves were denied the basic human right of remaining with their immediate family.

After her daughter, Eliza Jane is sold away from her, she has to sing an aria of course And that Aria was so hard to get through, through the tears, to fight through the tears.

In writing Gabriel's Daughter, I use a lot of different forms of music.

Pop, Jazz, etc.

Because that's what an eclectic composer does.

The music always, for me always in whatever project I'm doing, comes out of the imagery of the words.

I read the libretto and then when I'm ready my head generally jumps to music.

The music just comes.

If the words are good, the music is better.

My favorite song in Gabriel's Daughter is Glory Day.

And it's the song that Clara sings with Evaline and Lucinda who are the two young ladies whom she raised on the Brown Plantation after they've given her freedom and 300 dollars.

They sing this wonderful gospel number called Glory Day; again that speaks to Henry's genius that he brought this gospel number to light!

And Glory Day went something like this.

I think that Evaline probably would often forget that Clara wasn't there of her own volition.

She just kind of assumed that she had always been there.

She basically raised Evaline and her sister.

So I think there was a really strong love and a bond between them.

Their participation after the death of their father George Brown, in getting Clara released.

It was through their actions and actually putting up some money that Clara was able to gain her freedom at last.

So there I was, a free black woman in the south.

It was scary.

But I kept right on moving.

I went west, feeling my Eliza Jane just might be out there.

I earn my way in a wagon train washing clothes, cooking three meals a day.

And a wore out my shoes walking.

Yes, ma'am.

every step of the way.

When you write an ensemble, you're weaving together all of the different characters.

Colorado, which was a real bouncy kind of melody.

Notice the rhythm changes there.

um, baa, baa, baa, baa, baa-um, baa-um, baa, baa-um And that all came from the words!

It had to be about these people getting on a wagon train.

And so she arrived in this booming town of Denver.

And then she moved up to Central City, just the next year.

Central City, Colorado was discovered pretty much by John Gregory.

He was a miner and he knew all about gold mining.

He almost died the day that he discovered the gold on May 6th, 1859.

It was actually a few months after his discovery that between 10 and 20,000 people arrived here.

The Cornish miners arrived early on and they brought with them the expertise of mining into the hard rock.

They brought with them singing societies and choral groups, and music was very important to them.

They built the opera house so that they could enjoy music while they were up here, working really hard.

A lot of them worked in the mines and then helped build the opera house.

So I mean that right there is the roots of what we do.

It's not some elitist group of people that came and built this big building.

It is a whole group of people that worked really hard and loved music, and that's how they showed it.

And it was actually Peter McFarland and his brother with their construction company McFarland and Company, that constructed this grand building in the Bonanza Victorian style with perfect acoustics that were designed by Robert Roeschlaub.

He was Colorado's first licensed architect.

The building was used for operas in plays and those performances were done by touring theater troops.

You know, if I could have a conversation with Clara, I wonder if she ever actually attended an opera?

Because I know that the Opera House was built it would head its opening night in 1878.

So I'm wondering did Clara ever actually attend an opera at that house?

No possible way of telling, that Clara was ever in the Central City Opera House.

It would have been astonishing if she were not.

So Clara, decided to become a laundress.

She invested in some large laundry tubs and other material.

And it was a very difficult way to make a living but at that time it was very lucrative.

She was willing to do the dirty work that a lot of other people weren't willing to do.

They weren't willing to come to a remote mining camp in the middle of nowhere to wash the dirty clothes of the dirty miners.

The dirty miners had the money to hire her for her services and appreciated her.

They appreciated that she was even there because of places like this, in the early days had no accommodations, no services at all.

There are some descriptions of some of the things she did in walking the hills and hauling her laundry tubs and so on that are just almost hard to imagine.

And doing laundry itself, in those days, was an extremely difficult task.

And she did it for 50 years!

She used her money to help miners as well.

So she would give them money for supplies and if they struck gold, she would get a percentage.

She didn't have a medical degree, but people would flock to her for her midwife competencies.

So the mining prospectors and their wives would come to her if they were sick.

They would go to her if they needed her to deliver a baby.

They would go to her.

That although she did all these things for everybody in the community, she particularly did them for the members of the African American community there.

I had good news from Kentucky.

They believe my daughter had been found.

Well sir, I was headed to find out right away.

And especially so after she had gone back to Kentucky after the Civil War and using her own money brought probably two dozen settlers back to Colorado.

She made sure that people who came to Central City they were set up well.

And it was those settlers that she brought back who really became the cornerstone of the African American community in Denver and in Colorado, for the next hundred years!

Apparently she did that for a lot of other black businessmen black real estate investors.

And that's where she got a lot of her insight in terms of what would be a good property perhaps to invest in.

She had the savvy to invest in land and property and she had many properties.

At one time, she probably had more than a dozen just in Central City and probably two dozen counting nearby towns such as Idaho Springs and Georgetown.

She actually paid to send some of the black children from Central City to Oberlin College in Ohio, which was one of the few institutions then, that would admit African American kids.

She made friends with people like Barney Ford, who became a very successful entrepreneur himself, you know, he had restaurants and hotels, and stuff, but not necessarily in Central City.

I think his wealth was in Chicago, but he did try he made several attempts at mining for gold but whenever he would have a successful stake, let's say, then some of the really nasty miners white miners would come and take his stakes away from him.

So he never really had success there.

But once when he was really down and out, he heard of a woman named Auntie Clara Brown and that's how he met and Clara took him in and took him under her wings and they became very very close.

I've not ever heard of sadly of Barney Ford.

I had no idea that he was such, a fantastic entrepreneur and if he got any of that from Clara, I mean, what a story because you know as hard as it was for him, it had to be doubly as hard for her as black woman at that time.

So learning from her his entrepreneurial ways it's just fantastic.

And so between the real estate deals that she made and the grub staking and her successful laundry business, she became so incredibly successful and was so loving in spite of it all.

But apparently Clara was so well loved, that if anybody came to town and mistreated Clara, Clara went to the law and said these boys over here gave me a hard time.

So those boys would either be put into jail or punished, or thrown out of town.

But whenever those things happened, there was an outcry against it.

Those were people who did not know her and did not know how widely loved she was in the community.

She worked to help other people while she was in the middle of her own struggles, while she was in the middle of trying to establish herself.

There's certainly documented examples of Clara being treated poorly by local towns people.

People would ‘jump the land' which means they would just come in and say it's theirs, and she had very little recourse to get it back.

Often times she didn't even bother to go to court.

Someone would just take over her property, and there was nothing she could do about it.

And a seemingly disproportionate number of them were lost to fires and that was not uncommon in these mining towns the building for old and rickety and wood, and heated with wood stoves, so it did happen, but it certainly seemed to happen to Clara's properties perhaps more often than we would have expected.

I think she knew that the legal system back then and even today, is probably stacked against them but through perseverance and optimism and incredibly hard work, she managed to triumph and I think she would, encourage others to do that as well.

And that's always a fine balance and I think even in Clara's life, you see evidences of that.

When she saw injustice, she let her voice be heard, loud and clear but she did it in a way that was not condescending.

She was not adverse to taking to the newspapers when she felt she had been wronged, and boy, for an African American woman to do that in 1860's, that's something!

She was very, very vocal at times and very outspoken.

But she always did it in a spirit of love.

Certainly, the African-American citizens of Colorado who had moved out there, while they were generally accepted certainly were a second-class citizenry.

But far below them on the social ladder, were the Native American indigenous residents of Colorado.

They had virtually owned the state until 1858, 1859 when gold was discovered and all of the sudden they were simply pushed aside.

Sometimes there were formal reservations established, sometimes, they were just basically told to get out of an area.

And the oppression got worse and worse and this culminated in the Sand Creek massacre in 1864, I believe it was, down in Southeastern Colorado, where government troops led by Colorado Colonel, John Milton Chivington, just conducted a horrible massacre of women and children in this campsite.

And it's a real stain on Colorado's name to this day.

You know, folks wanted Colorado to become a state.

Nice big word red as sunset.

One problem though, they didn't bother asking the Injun's.

It was their home first after all.

Hoo wee!

Massacres crashed like thunder on our town.

Hatred for Injun neighbors, bloodshed for men, women and children.

Why some hateful men even bust into my cabin, try to kill my best friend Jenny just ‘cause she was Injun.

And I put myself right in between Jenny and him.

So clearly she, as a member of an oppressed community, did tend to sympathize with the Indians and at least in some cases reached out to them.

And I can only imagine how the massacres must have broken her heart.

Especially given her longing for her own daughter to realize how that sort of separation and brutality would have been so difficult for the Native American women and children.

I would say because Clara Brown was probably the victim of so much discrimination, that she herself probably wasn't very likely to discriminate against others.

A lot of her strength came from her spiritual disposition, her spirituality and her faith.

I think that without Clara Brown's influence here in Central City, we may not have the beautiful churches that stand here today.

The Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, Saint Mary's Catholic Church and Saint Jame's Methodist Church, all of them were started with her help, with her assistance.

As nearly as we can tell, the churches in Central City were always integrated.

There was never a black church for example as there were sometimes in the larger cities.

And I think part of the reason for that was just that it was a much smaller community.

And I think a lot of the reason why Central City didn't have that kind of discrimination was because of the respect that the people had for Clara.

So she really was very active in developing the spiritual attitudes of this somewhat rough and tumble mining community.

In this new nowhere, some women unpacked old hatred and mixed it up with new fears as they stitched and so-called prayed.

Lord, Lord, I tried the doctor their souls with my prayers as I doctored their bodies with my country remedies.

Some of them stitch and pray, women judged the fancy gals at Janie's house say'n ‘dem shady ladies.

I refused.'

How else was an unmarried woman supposed to feed, clothing house herself.

I want go to Janie's...... no.

When I was Saturday night at Janie's, it was about a brothel.

And so I had to make the music kind of, brothel like.

So I wrote this tune, Saturday Night at Janie's.

A lady in a brothel had to be a mother, a lover, a companion, a nurse, and these ladies were all that to these miners.

They were about the same age.

And in those days working in the mine's meant you had a short life.

Most of them were dead by the age of 30 or the early 30s.

And so the girls were not that different in age from these people.

It's quite a unlikely friendship.

Jane Gordon is the owner of a brothel and brothel's today are different than they were back when this story takes place.

However, they were still not highly considered by society.

And I think what's so beautiful about Clara is that she believes that everyone should be treated as a human that's worthy of love, and respect, and worthy of care.

The process I undertook to perform Colonel Chivington, I did a lot of research on Clara Brown.

I wanted to dive in and really find out what she did who she was, and then looking up her relationship with Chivington and what he was all about.

John Milton Chivington was one of Clara's early friends and partners in developing the early Methodist Church in Denver.

He was one of the visiting pastor's, traveling pastor's who helped establish this church, where she is listed on the initial membership roles.

I think for the contradiction that Colonel Chivington being a man of God and then also having this deep hatred of Native Americans.

I can't imagine how devastating it must have been for Clara to find out the same spiritual man, was the one who led this massacre of Native American women and children.

She must have been just devastated.

To see a man whose faith she would have respected, act in such a bestial manner.

And I think it stuck with her.

When you talk about how the music response to what's written.

I have to think about emotional responses.

How am I going to express music for an Indian Massacre?

What kind of music do you write for that?

I think it's a winner.

And then when you listen to it back with all of our voices and all of the three different thoughts going at the same time, it's just volcanic!

Certainly, one of the most dramatic episodes in the Opera, was one of the most dramatic episodes in Claire's life and it was The Great Fire of Central City in 1874.

This was not an unusual situation for mining towns.

Almost everyone was so hurriedly thrown together.

They usually didn't have an adequate supply of water.

They built them out of whatever wood was available, in whatever method was available and fires were not at all unusual.

Central City had severals and in one of them along Lawrence Street, Clara had actually lost her own house at one point and the building I think where she did her laundry.

I'm not sure on that.

But then the big fire in May of 1874, just wiped out a two block area that was the Central City business district.

The fire took down Main Street in about six hours and the fire stopped at the Teller House because it had fire shutters and because every door and window was covered with metal fire shutters.

The fire actually didn't make it up the hill past the hotel and that pretty much saved the town of Central City from burning down.

The hotel was a very fancy hotel the rooms cost two dollars and 50 cents a night compared to your average 50 cent rate.

And what I remember mostly about the Teller House, is standing in front in one of Clara Brown's costumes, and they took photographs and those photographs were used in just about every publication to advertise the show.

In the 1860's, when Henry Teller arrived at Central City, he sued the Central City School District.

So that the black kids could go to school with a white kids.

And he won, and he helped create one of their very early integrated school systems in the United States.

So what you see today in Central City, the nice brick storefronts and the taller two, three story buildings, this was all built almost immediately after that.

Within the next year, virtually the entire downtown had been transformed.

So it really redefined the life of the town.

Certainly, Clara would have lost property in this fire.

Probably some of her African-American community did as well.

But again by then they really were a community of family and they were very good at taking care of each other.

And so they all came out of it all right.

As did most of the people.

It was a very tight-knit community both white and black.

Between the flood and the great fire of Central City.

I lost everything.

Poverty and age caught up with me, too.

I'd spent all my money bringing freed slaves out west and looking for my sweet 'liza.

God bless them, kind neighbors help move these old bones to Denver City.

By the late 1870's, early 1880's, Clara's health was beginning to fail.

And she was having trouble breathing and like a lot of people in Central City at 8,500 feet,thought it would be better to retire, so to speak to Denver.

But she didn't have any money but she was so well known, there were folks in Denver who essentially gave her the use of a house on Arapahoe Street.

It's no longer there.

It's been covered now by the Auraria Campus, College Campus.

But she lived there then for the remainder of her life.

There was this one part in the Opera where Clara gets the letter that they've actually found her daughter.

The Brown Sister's, Lucinda and Evaline, never gave up looking for Eliza Jane because they know how much that meant to Clara.

And I think that was their way of showing love to Clara.

And at that point, between the storytelling and the music, as Clara, I just lost it.

I mean, I couldn't control my tears, and I, and I cried.

From that point through the end of the Opera.

And at that point, the whole entire audience cried with me, everybody, you know, I don't care what color, I don't care what age, they all cried together.

They all came together in a united moment of compassion of human compassion.

There were times when I was rehearsing that my voice was reduced to a whisper and I fought back tears.

I kept singing and built up my inner strength to fight, to tell the story of Clara Brown, Eliza Jane and Eliza Brooks.

Eliza Jane must have felt a sense of pride knowing that her mother kept looking for her all of those years and it must have instilled self worth in her life knowing that her mother's love for her never died.

There are two versions of Clara Brown's reunion with her daughter.

The one in the Opera obviously takes some huge dramatic leaps, shall we say, and it works tremendously well dramatically, but it had nothing to do with the actual reunion.

The actual reunion was in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which is where her daughter was living and she found out through a circuitous connection, people who had lived in Denver, knew Clara and were back in Iowa that you know things just kind of meshed.

That this young, this women, she was no longer a young woman, she was in her 50's.

This woman named Eliza Jane Brewer's story meshed with Clara that they thought maybe this was the long lost daughter.

And no telephones remember, so telegraphs were exchanged and they became convinced that yes, this really was Clara's daughter.

It was widely publicized in the papers and they publicized that she needed money to get back to Council Bluffs to find her daughter.

And everyone knew that she was looking for a daughter had been for 50 years.

And so, a lot of people chipped in, got her a train ticket, she went back.

The daughter was waiting for her, the train was delayed; when Clara came off the train the daughter saw her, ran to her, and they just collapsed in the street, in tears and it would have been difficult to stage.

The way they did it in the Opera was perfectly fine.

But that's apparently the way it really happened.

And the people who were there, remembered it and wrote about it.

A few years later she died.

And there are a couple different newspapers in Denver at the time who covered her last days.

Dearest Clara, thank you so much for your life.

I'm so grateful to know you.

And they have some really beautiful descriptions of her passing.

And in all of them it mentions this extended black family who came and who were around her.

Some of whom might have been related to her in some way or another but most of whom were her children in only a symbolic sense.

She had brought many of them back from Tennessee and Kentucky.

She had financed many of them, fed many of them and they were to a real extent her children.

The first two members of The Society of Colorado Pioneers, conducted the funeral for Clara when she died.

The ceremony was at Central Presbyterian Church in downtown Denver.

The Mayor attended, the Governor attended, as well as ex-lawmakers as well, and just the whole body of these pioneers who were now getting a little up there as well.

Who remembered this woman, who had just been a beacon to them of what civilized life they had left behind and hoped to recreate could be.

And she reminded them of that.

She reminded them of home and she reminded them of family and it was so fitting that in the few years before her death, she finally got her family back.

In 2003 when we premiered Gabriel's Daughter, the response from the community up here and the community the greater community of Colorado was quite wonderful.

Doing this piece, allowed us to interact with parts of the community.

We had an awful lot of interaction with the black community in Denver.

So when I got out to Central City, I went to and spoke at black churches, I spoke with black radio stations, I spoke at the Denver State Capitol and, you know, people came out in droves.

And also with a lot of children through the education efforts in the telling the story.

So it offered us an awful lot of avenues into areas of the community that we had not had as much impact in the past.

When we did Gabriel's Daughter, we coordinated with the Colorado Historic Society.

We had a big get together in the garden and the Mayor of Denver came and they did presentations with different African-American groups.

It was really interesting and really good for people to see that the Opera likes to do a variety of things and touch a variety of people.

It went from being the little Opera that could, to being the little Opera that people could'nt get a ticket, to see.

When the Colorado Capital was remodeled a number of years ago, they put in several really large, magnificent stained glass pictures of some of Colorado's pioneers, from other ethnicities and other backgrounds.

And so she now has this beautiful, large stained glass and it's just a pleasure whenever I go to the Capitol to peek in there and see it.

Looking at Clara Brown's stories, there's so much that her story can teach us about social justice, diversity and inclusion, and it's an important story I think when we're all looking for stories.

This is a perfect one.

One of success and one of bravery.

To know about her contribution, it can serve as such great inspiration not only for people of color but for women all over the country, all over the world.

That you can do it, that you can have your own things your own company, your own dreams and desires.

We have to teach our children about who these incredible people were.

These amazing hidden figures.

Their stories deserve that.

And so I hope that with this project that opera companies and symphonies, and theaters and Broadway houses, all over will produce this and tell this story of Clara Brown.

Good is not always rewarded in this life.

And this is an example of where after a very very, very hard life.

Clara Brown was given the thing she most wanted in the world.

And that's a wonderful story.

And a wonderful thing to see.

You know, I don't care how old you are or how young you are, everyone needs inspiration.

And I also think, that in this world that is so filled with divisiveness and so much despair, that it would be so wonderful to tell a story like this to uplift people and also to unify people.

Glory Day!

Jenny and him.