Interview with Jeffrey Cody, technical director, company member

By Nayo Watkins

Jeffrey Cody: I started with Carpetbag in ’82.

Nayo Watkins: What’s your official title? "Managing technical director"?

JC: Two hats.

NW: What does that mean?

JC: All the tech stuff and office stuff. Basically, we are talking about generating financial reports for the projects and overseeing the bookkeeping and also overseeing the business compliance documentation stuff like the 990 forms and the 941s, taxes, basically.

NW: And then you act? Any conflict between that business part of your world, your life and your creative part of your life?

JC: Often. Usually when we go up for a production or something the paper work doesn’t stop, it actually increases. There’s payroll and all that other stuff to get done. The tech part goes up, of course, which means I have to do lighting plots, sound, props and sets. I don’t get a lot of time. It’s more like it has become more administrative than artistic.

NW: And for you personally, what’s the conflict in terms of different parts of your brain – how do you manage that?

JC: A couple of things. One thing is, I kind of put it on automatic and just kind of go ahead and see what needs to be done and just do that, and not really revisit the other alternatives. Just keep going until I get the job done. And then also, I’ve gotten back basically to doing some more of what I initially came into the arts for which is visual art. Like that bust up there, I did. And there’s a painting down there that I did. It’s the one thing that makes me really Zen about the whole thing. if it’s supposed to happen. Not supposed to happen –okay cool.

NW: Let’s talk about Carpetbag – why it does what it does and in the way that it does it.

JC: Initially, there wasn’t an entity in the city that did do it for African-Americans. You had the old-school type of African-American stuff, like "Porgy and Bess," which spoke to Old Glory and not really speaking to the economic classes below them. Carpetbag stepped in to do all of that, to give the "voice" to those folks, and to help them move up that ladder.

NW: In your opinion what is Carpetbag?

JC: I guess it’s someplace between a cultural group, an artistic group and an empowerment group. So, the three combining to give people –what would you call it – a better ideal of their selves. So that they know that they’re not just this one type of person, they’re actually all three types, multifaceted types of people. A lot of people end up stuck, going, "Oh I’m just this, I’ll never get to that." It’s basically a group that helps people with transitions.

NW: Does it combine those things fairly successfully in your opinion?

JC: I think so. It’s hard to tell because you never really do know what impact you do. Once you impact somebody’s life, they’re going on to do what they are going to do and you are trying to catch up with the next crop that’s coming through. I guess it’s like school teachers feel when they have a class – it’s like okay, you did your best and now the new class is coming through. And not until you have a reunion or something like that, or someone comes back and says, "Oh yes, this is what I got from it, and I couldn’t have done this if I hadn’t gone through one of your programs, or one of your workshops, or saw one of your plays."

NW: How does Carpetbag make decisions about what it is going to do? If you could just talk from your experience about how you evolve those decisions about what you really want to do.

JC: I think are made on two separate levels: basically, by the mission statement, and the other level is availability of funds. Since Carpetbag is a nonprofit and relies heavily on grants and donations, sometimes you have to find the right person, the right group that is willing to fund the ideals of the organization. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it don’t. And sometimes you have to go, okay we won’t do this piece of the project, we’ll go ahead and do this other piece of the project and find the funds for the other piece of the project as we can.

NW: How does what you want to do play into the choices?

JC: I don’t know – it all comes back down to the mission statement. Since all of us believe in the mission statement, the personal angst of the individual kind of goes to the background in order to serve the mission statement.

NW: What are your favorite things, what’s the most satisfying part of the work for you?

JC: I’m what you would call an information junky. Having so many different projects to do and having to find so many different creative ways to do it – a lot of sweat equity stuff and a lot of, " Okay, we can’t do it this way, let’s find out how we can get it done to keep the project up to some level of high quality." Sometimes I’m like a kid in the toy store. I learn how to do this. If we don’t have this prop, then how can we build this prop. It goes back to the visual arts thing. Using found objects, renovating them so that they look brand new or came straight off a showroom floor. Same thing for information, doing flyers and brochures. I guess that all feeds into the creative part too.

NW: So you like the invention piece of it?

JC: Oh yeah! My favorite artist would be daVinci, Michelangelo – all those artists that started from square one. "We don’t have paint. What do we do? We’ve got some black rocks over here, we’ll chop those up. We’ve got some red flowers over here, we’ll chop those up. We’ll make our own paint and then we’ll paint the Sistine Chapel."

NW: Who all participates in making choices? To what degree does the board participate? To what degree do partners participate? Do the artists participate?

JC: I think mainly Linda is overall head of "jobs" and all that other stuff. She usually ends up choosing most of that from her conversations with board people, and from her conversations with people in workshops. Since the organization is so small and understaffed, me personally, the rest of this stuff occupies my time. And I guess it’s one of those things, like I said, since those things haven’t violated the mission statement, everybody else is normally cool with that. But, like I said, that’s just me. When Margaret was here she and Margaret picked a lot of that stuff. And it also comes through different collaborations with other organizations where they go, "Okay, we have a project coming down the pike. We would like you to participate in this. Would you like to?." And it’s like, "Okay let’s talk about it and let’s see where the funding is."

NW: What do you think is Carpetbag’s greatest accomplishment/s?

JC: Survival would be one. It’s been in business for over 30 years now and not operating under a budget that would theoretically support all the different projects. One thing that me and Margaret were talking about one time is that it seems as though Carpetbag does more projects than the funders fund us, for a budget that is way under theirs. Which tends to make a –well –so I guess besides survival and actually doing –okay

NW: Let’s talk a little bit about the kind of partnerships that you had with individuals and organizations within the community. Have you got any favorite stories about that, the successes and the failures? In terms of your work, does that change your work when you are working in partnership with any kind of organization, or when there’s a shared budget?

JC: Not that much, because it all comes down to ledger sheets and all that good stuff. Defining what is actually income and what is a grant. About the only problem I end up with is when I talk with the auditor at the end of the year and she has one idea of what it is and Uncle Sam has another idea about what it is. It’s like, "Okay, you two fight it out. These are the numbers". And it’s the whole deal that a normal business, a for-profit business I should say, gets along better with the accounting software that comes down the pike. But for nonprofits, you can’t really find a good piece of accounting software for what we do.

NW: What do you think are the advantages of when Carpetbag partners with organizations like the Literacy, or the Sexual Assault Center, or some of the other groups you’ve partnered with in terms of projects. What are the advantages of that?

JC: The experience gives the staff and project folks and ensemble folks a view into another part of the world, another culture. And through those linkages, you actually expand the audience base. You have another tool to help you in your mission.

NW: What are the disadvantages?

JC: Some of the disadvantages would be when you have a slight miscommunication about who’s doing what. When you initially think that they will be pulling more of the administrative load and you can basically concentrate on the production end, and it turns out that they are not as – I don’t really want to say savvy – but they don’t have the resources to do it, so you have to pull that up. It’s like, "Okay we thought you were going to do these flyers – oh, the project is in a few days, so let’s go ahead. We’ll do the flyers for you. Oh, do you have anybody to distribute them? Oh you don’t – oh gosh – okay we’ll go ahead and do those, too."

NW: Let’s talk about the community. What are we talking about – the people.

JC: I guess when I think about the community I’m thinking that we actually deal with different communities, because there is no way to tie them all together. You have the "African-American community" in Knoxville, and that’s subdivided into the people who focus mainly on education, the people that focus mainly on crime prevention, the people that focus mainly on straight-up cultural, i.e., arts. And then you also have the European-American community that is plugging into all of those, and also plugging into Carpetbag to reach some of those. And then you are talking about the artistic community outside of the region that Carpetbag plugs into. So it’s kind of like the Internet. What are we talking about today? Let’s plug in to this community. How are we going to get this done? Well, we are going to have to go to this one and put them into that one. And Carpetbag is then the intermediate between the two. So, it’s kind of multi-communities.

NW: What’s the exchange there? What does Carpetbag gain from those communities? Or how do those communities impact or effect Carpetbag?

JC: I think Carpetbag gets a bigger view, a view of the world. Instead of, this is my little corner and that’s your little corner. Carpetbag actually gets that worldview, and with that worldview and the local view, it is actually better able to serve the communities that it seeks to serve. And actually gains tools – cultural, social, financial – to serve the people better. And I think that actually happens on both ends.

NW: What do you think Carpetbag does best?

JC: What it does best is empower and motivate organizations and people to look to see what they can do, be it culturally or socially.

NW: Do you have a story that might exemplify that? Can you think of an example of how you felt Carpetbag motivated artists to do their work? Or can you think of a good example of how Carpetbag did a good job of making a social impact?

JC: The only thing I can think of right off the bat is Margo. When Margo came out of UT, she came out not knowing which direction she wanted to go to. She got into Carpetbag and she embraced the mission statement, and she was working part-time in the pharmacy department at K-mart. She got so into the mission statement that, on top of the other experience that she had, she got into working for diversity and empowerment. She just became a raging fireball. She has picked up so many tools and so many new things and has evolved them into her own. She has surpassed everything so that her association with Carpetbag has really motivated her to be somebody who we are going to go in the future, "Oh! Margaret Miller –" in the history books. It’s the whole thing with her being into computers and stuff, too. She’s going global.

NW: Are you satisfied with the way Carpetbag blends that artistic and social part of its mission? Does that feel right with you? Does that feel like it is fulfilling the mission?

JC: I guess not as well as it could. I think that’s mainly since the whole political situation since the whole Contract with America came down the pike. It is like Carpetbag was headed to a certain space, to actually fulfilling the mission as it had been envisioned. But with the whole political thing, whereas "artists have too much power, artists are getting a free ride, they’re corrupting the morals of the American children" and all this other stuff. "Artists and the NEA and NPR and PBS, we have to cut down on it." That happened and also the cutting the funds to individual artists kind of crippled the development of Carpetbag and a whole lot of organizations. It used to be you could get the empowerment rush through the organization, but still you could stop and get an individual grant to work on an individual project and that would feed the other part of yourself. So now, that other part, the individual part, is sort of crippled in art so that you can fulfill the social part of your mission.

NW: If indeed the money in arts became more conservative, what do you think that means for Carpetbag? Will it continue to do what it is doing?

JC: Well, I guess it will be a slight shift. I say that because even though Carpetbag is primarily an African-American organization, we do have linkages within the "folk" side of the arts. I think that when it becomes more conservative, money will be shifted to that folk side of the arts. So I think it will still be possible for us to get funding, but the projects will be less centered towards the African-American community and more centered towards the center of the communities.

NW: What is consistent and what will remain consistent for Carpetbag no matter what?

JC: I think what would be consistent would probably be some of the social work we do, i.e., stuff like projects for youth. The safe stuff it does. Not necessarily the stuff for artists. Presently we are doing a program called Cafe Noir, which is basically aimed towards the artist. It seems like we can’t get funding to fund that project. It is actually being done on a volunteer basis by a staff of folks. To promote writers in all the different genres.

NW: Is that the "not safe" stuff?

JC: It’s safe as in all the artists are together to share their work. But it has four-letter words and stuff like that, that you know the Republicans kind of go "No no no no no." They would prefer you to say "deep doo-doo" instead of the other words. And if you put the other word in there it’s like, no grant for you. It’s basically the adult stuff, other than the adult literacy stuff because they like that. That means that they can read their directions at work.

NW: What is consistent for Carpetbag now? When did you start with Carpetbag?

JC: ’76.

NW: Is there consistency that goes all the way through from ’76 for you?

JC: No, not really, because I think the whole reason that Carpetbag has been able to survive has actually been because of flexibility. Until we moved here to KC, we never had facilities. We had to use the facilities of other organizations, which linked us into other organizations. We did a lot of heavy touring, which means we didn’t need a space of our own, which means we didn’t have that big heavy mortgage and all that other stuff. We didn’t have to pay those great big light bills. We just paid it as we went, which fed into the survivability.

NW: Have you done any of the writing? Or has your part mainly been the tech and the acting?

JC: Yeah. Basically it has been bookkeeping, office management, sets and props and the acting. I’ve actually recently started writing a little bit. I think the pieces that I’ll probably come out with are the not-safe stuff.

NW: Four-letter words?

JC: Yeah. With the present climate of Carpetbag right now, I don’t feel like I need to bring it into this sphere. Matter of fact, me and a couple of the college guys here have committed to start our own for-profit, to the side organization called The Boiler Room which will be mostly un-safe stuff. Totally under a different heading, so no political guy can go and say, "Oh. You’re doing this. Carpetbag is doing this." And it’s like, no Carpetbag is not doing this. We have a separate charter, we have a separate tax number, we have separate staff. It’s totally different.

NW: I know that a number of Carpetbag’s pieces have been written within the company. Have you been a part of that? The discussions? Have you been a part of creation workshops, or writing workshops, just feedback?

JC: Yeah. And like I said, with me being an info junkie, that comes in handy when it comes time to doing research for productions and so forth. I’ve pulled off, before the Internet, I was a library mole. I would go to the library. I would go through the periodicals. I would go through the card catalog. I would go to the particular section in the library that dealt with the issue that we were dealing with and I would pull back reams and reams of research documents, and articles and bring them to the group. Especially like "Red Summer," I had to go down to the historic library, which is separate from the main library, and pulled up documents from the 1900s. Those little minute details like who lived on what street and if they were black or white. So I would say yeah.

NW: How do you evaluate the success of what you are doing? And how does Carpetbag as an organization evaluate what you are doing, what Carpetbag is doing?

JC: I guess it basically comes down to doing the job and having feedback from the organizations and individuals that you work for. After you finish a job they come back and say, "We need to work with you again." And realizing that they really mean it. You hear from them six months down the road, even if they don’t have a project that they want to work with you on at the time going, "Well, I’m just calling to check in on what you are doing. Is there something I could come see?" Actually having funders come to you and go, "We have extra money at the end of the year. Why don’t you write something and we’ll send you the money." It’s working on both ends, the people and the funders are coming back.

NW: Have you personally had experiences that just really left you frustrated, or left you feeling like you couldn’t carry on here? And I’m not talking about controversy or fussing with Linda or anything, just a part of the work that has seemed really dissatisfying to you?

JC: I guess it would come down to that whole artist thing. Newt [Gingrich] and the boys come down and cut the funding for artistic development for the individual artist, which actually also cut the amount of money for artists to tour with. That was part of the job I really enjoyed, the whole travel deal. You know, meeting more people, networking with more folks. And it actually at one point – it actually helped the organization, because you didn’t have to find a grant to match a grant. You had the grant and you actually had the earned income, which made all the financial stuff go a lot smoother. You didn’t have to worry about the whole accrual catch-22. Where is this money going to match this? Is this money going to zero out this?

NW: You had been doing a lot of touring at one time. You all have had to do more at home.

JC: Yeah. More at home and less artistically, because most of the work ended up being administration of paperwork for this grant and that grant – doing final reports for this grant, and final reports for that grant, showing how this matches into that and that matches into this, and doing the avoiding of restrictions that certain granters have and all that stuff. Making sure that this money that you got from this grant and the funder that got the money – that the two grants weren’t getting the money from the same source who says that they can’t match the two. All of the little stress builders. And still being able to do the project. It was much simpler when you had earned income and a grant.

NW: What are major changes your organization has been through?

JC: I guess that was the major change. Actually having the touring side basically eliminated, for all practical purposes.

NW: Have there been any good things that have grown out of that? Things that you wouldn’t have done if you’d been on the road more?

JC: For me personally, not really. But I guess for folks in the organization with families, it was kind of a good thing, that they don’t have to be on the road so much.

NW: Anything you want to add?

JC: I need a cigarette and a cup of coffee —

Nayo Watkins is an arts and community consultant who lives in Durham, N.C. She is sole proprietor of Bodacious Consulting and Organizing. Her work has included helping to build collaborations and partnerships between artists and communities that explore the relationship between art, culture, activism and empowerment. She served as coordinator for the Mississippi American Festival Project and for the N.C.-based Alternate ROOTS Community Artist Partnership Project. She was writer/facilitator for "Parables to Policy," an Internet project of Southern Rural Development Initiative and was consultant to the Mississippi Young Person’s Cultural Exchange. Prior to becoming an independent consultant, she served as executive director of the African American Dance Ensemble (Durham), At the Foot of the Mountain Theatre (Minneapolis), and the Mississippi Cultural Arts Coalition (Jackson), and as program assistant for the Afro-American Studies Program of the University of Mississippi. As an artist, Watkins is a poet, essayist, playwright and performer. Her poems and essays have appeared in literary anthologies and journals. As a playwright, she draws upon oral histories and participatory research to create plays rooted in place, people, culture and community. Productions of her commissioned plays have been staged in Port Gibson, Itta Bena and Oxford, Mississippi, and in Durham and Wake Forest, North Carolina. Her work is included in the repertory of actors John O’Neal, Cynthia Watts and Yolanda King.

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