Dixwell Fest Closes Out Summer With Community

Top: Shari Caldwell, Diane Brown, Fred Christmas and Shamain McAllister. Bottom: Puppeteer, musician and storyteller Iyaba Ibo Mandingo. Lucy Gellman Photos.

The words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” sailed across the Q House’s wide, bright plaza, making their way onto Dixwell Avenue. Across the grass, vendors put the finishing touches on their tables, laying out blank canvases at one station, earrings at another, pink and red tubes of lipstick at a third. Back on the plaza, a voice carried the verse skyward—Let our rejoicing rise! High as the listening skies—trembling with the grandeur of the words.

“This is the village,” dancer and vocalist Shari Caldwell had said just moments before. “This is love. This is community. And when things happen, we come together.”

That multigenerational village came together Saturday afternoon outside the Dixwell Community “Q” House, to fête the 13th annual Dixwell Neighborhood Festival three months after it was moved because of rain. An initiative of Stetson Branch Manager Diane Brown and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, the festival brought together food, fashion, music and movement, closing out the summer with a full-fledged party.

It concluded, just as in years past, with a dazzling fashion show from designer Donald Carter; read more about that here and watch part of it here. 

“This feels great,” said Brown, who has helped grow the festival into a vibrant celebration of community. “I’ve been doing it for so long now, people reach out and they actually want to participate. We’re doing good, and I’m happy. I’m going to start to wind down some things that I’m involved in, but this is one thing that I will continue to do.”

Normally, the Dixwell Neighborhood Festival is held at the beginning of June, on the day before the Elm City Freddy Fixer Parade and the day after the Freddy Fixer’s annual gala. The timing marks the informal start of summer in New Haven, where Dixwell Avenue fills with joyful noise and a week or two stand between students, graduations, and their summer vacations.

But this year, a rainy forecast had other plans, pushing the festival back from the end of May to the middle of September. Brown, who in her work has become an anchor in the neighborhood several times over, was unfazed: she worked with performers and vendors to find a new date, and knew instinctively that the community would show up.

Crystal Gooding, there to represent the Dixwell Community Management Team, with Sharon Stevens and Andrea Mastriano of Women of the Village. 

She was right: the last community groups to join did so on Friday, after dozens of vendors and hours of live performances were already in place.

Saturday, the long-awaited celebration seemed to be in full swing, as vendors, organizations and social service providers set up beside the Q House’s plaza, and double dutch and drumming unfolded in front of the city's stage. Shamain (Sha) McAllister, associate director of education and community impact at Arts & Ideas, buzzed around, checking in with a few attendees before making her way toward Brown and stopping to soak in the sounds of the healing drums.

McAllister later stressed how tenacious Brown has been (often as a committee of one), helping to build trust in the community where there was once a distrust of the Festival.

In front of the plaza’s stage, that was on display as Caldwell—a daughter of New Haven, although she now lives in Maryland—took the mic, holding it gingerly as she looked out at a growing audience. All around her, there were familiar faces: Brown smiled that gentle, knowing smile, Alder Frank Douglass gravitated near the stage, ready to unleash a gorgeous baritone, the actor Terrence Riggins made his way across the pavement and hovered by a chair.

Caldwell, who moved to Maryland in 2016, looked out over the audience and seemed instantly at home. She explained that when she reached the last verse of the song, which James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1900, she wanted attendees of all ages to call out the names of their ancestors, both those related by blood and those bonded by a deep sense of community.

The words resonated in Dixwell, once a self-sustaining Black business corridor that is now working through its revitalization, thanks both to the new Q House complex, reimagined Stetson Library, and a new development from the Connecticut Center for Arts & Technology (ConnCAT) moving in across the street.

“Speak the name of your grandmother,” Caldwell said. “Speak the name of your teacher … remember your librarian. We are here today because of people whose shoulders we stand on.”

As she sang, that vision came to life. At first, Caldwell’s voice was quiet, certain but low and gentle. “Lift every voice and sing/’Till earth and heaven ring,” she began, and voices joined in across the wide, open space.

In her left hand, Johnson’s words fluttered across a page, as if they might take flight in the warm breeze. She pressed forward, the volume rising. In the plaza, a few people had pulled out their phones to record, singing as they held them up. The video footage captured the moment, as Caldwell tilted her head toward the sun and then looked back out over the audience.

By the time she had gotten to the first chorus— Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us—a few people had come closer, listening anew to words that seemed to echo anew in a week upended by violence. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us!

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun/Let us march on 'til victory is won.

“Speak their names!” Caldwell cried when she had finished several verses later. Douglass, who had lifted a rafter-raising, silky tremolo to the sky just moments before, called out the name of his father. Others invoked grandparents, parents and extended family that had passed on.

It set a collaborative tone for the afternoon, which included everything from double dutch and line dancing to live music to stations for painting and puppetry to social service providers. Across the grass, arts organizations shared the space with food vendors, small Black-owned businesses and social service organizations, some of them making the time to trade information before the afternoon got too busy. For attendees with a sweet tooth, slices of Chauncey’s Butter Pound Cake and gem-toned bottles of Gorilla Lemonade waited patiently for passers by.

Beneath a tent from artist and educator Sheree Baldwin-Muhammad, tiny painters worked on their canvases one brushstroke at a time, as paintings of flowers, rainbows and color fields bloomed into being. One tent over, puppeteer Iyaba Ibo Mandingo pulled out a character and began to tell a story, every word delivered with a gentle, almost musical lilt. Several yards away, Azaria Samuels greeted passers-by with news about the Shubert Theatre’s new season, including a chance to win free tickets through signing up for a newsletter.  

“I just think the exposure to different people in the community, it’s nice,” said dad Julian Brown, in the center of the action with his young daughter, Savannah, and his partner Pilar Rodriguez. As Savannah uncapped a green marker and got to work coloring a white visor, both Brown and Rodriguez lauded the event, which they heard about through the Stetson Branch Library staff.

Savannah, Rodriguez explained, is a regular at Stetson’s weekly Stay N’ Play, which takes place Mondays and Saturdays inside the library. At the neighborhood festival, her favorite storytime buddy wasn’t far away: Young Minds and Family Librarian Phillip Modeen, who runs Stay N’ Play with the talent and precision of a Broadway producer, manned a booth for the library within waving distance.    

Across the field, Sharon Stevens and Andrea Mastriano handed out information and free, pre-wrapped packages from Women of the Village, a food pantry that operates Tuesdays and Fridays out of the Dixwell Community Police Substation at 26 Charles St. As a service provider, they were in good company: stations for free clothing and blood pressure screenings stood nearby. Since January, Mastriano said, volunteers have seen demand triple at the food pantry, as the cost of food rises and so too does food insecurity.

“We want to get the word out to the community,” Mastriano said.

That warm, all-encompassing sense of a family fits, of course: the Q House and Stetson are both historic sites and present-day hubs of cultural connection. Long before the last bricks were laid at the new Q House in 2019, it held decades of New Haven’s history, from dance and drum classes to spaces where teens could safely hang out after school. Artist Tracey Massey, who runs the booth Everything Is Art at fairs and festivals throughout the summer and was there on Saturday, all but lived there when she was a kid, soaking up arts classes that helped make her into the community fixture that she is.

Stetson too, which Brown has turned into a literary destination, safe haven for kids and de facto community center, is also part of that history. While it now rises off Dixwell Avenue as a gorgeous, two-story homage to history, culture and literature across the African diaspora, it was across the street that Stetson grew its most tenacious community roots, from weekly chess games, homework help and a partnership with the Shubert Theatre to visits from literary luminaries, playwrights and musicians in whom neighborhood kids could see themselves.

Back on the plaza, members of the 40+ Double Dutch Club had gathered on a corner of the pavement, heads and shoulders already bobbing to a mix from WYBC. Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” sailed through the air, the guitar infectious even before his high-pitched voice came in. As she listened, hopping in and out of the ropes as they slapped the pavement, Yolanda Crowder beamed and soaked in the scene around her.

“The energy!” she said instantly when asked what she enjoyed about the event. Each Saturday, Crowder makes the journey from Naugatuck to New Haven to jump rope with the 40+ Double Dutch Club, a national movement meant to inspire fitness and fellowship among Black women over 40. In New Haven, it’s led by Xan Walker, who also teaches line dancing with her sister, Scheri.

“This is beautiful,” Crowder added. “I especially like how it’s outdoors. Whoever can come and have fun … the openness is just a blessing.”