How a Secret Language Born Under Slavery Found Its Way to the Opera Stage

By Mood Magazine

MOOD: OPERA | BLACK HISTORY | LANGUAGE | CULTURE | CREATIVE FREEDOM

Imagine creating a language because learning could get you punished.

Imagine living in a world where literacy represented power—and where people in power understood that giving you access to words might eventually give you access to freedom.

So you find another way.

You encode knowledge.

You pass it quietly from one person to another.

You protect it.

And generations later, something remarkable happens.

That language enters an opera house.

Not whispered.

Not hidden.

Sung.

That is part of the extraordinary cultural conversation surrounding Lalovavi, the new work emerging from Cincinnati Opera’s Black Opera Project and incorporating Tut, a coded linguistic system associated with Black Americans navigating literacy under slavery.

And if you listen beyond the music, there is something almost poetic about what has happened.

A language connected to survival has become a language of art.

WAIT—WHAT IS TUT?

Most Americans have probably never heard of it.

That’s part of what makes the story so fascinating.

Tut—also called Tutnese in some accounts—is a coded language system passed through generations of Black Americans.

Its history has been connected to enslaved African Americans finding ways to communicate and pursue literacy within a society that deliberately restricted Black education.

Think about what that means.

Reading wasn’t merely educational.

Reading was dangerous.

Knowledge creates questions.

Questions create independence.

Independence threatens systems built upon control.

So when access to conventional learning was denied, Black people did something Black people have done repeatedly throughout history:

They created another route.

THEN OPERA GOT HOLD OF IT

Now move forward generations.

The setting is no longer a plantation.

It’s an opera house.

And Lalovavi brings this linguistic inheritance into contemporary Black classical storytelling.

That alone deserves our attention.

Because opera has historically asked Black artists to enter worlds created by somebody else.

Sing Mozart.

Sing Verdi.

Sing Puccini.

Learn Italian.

Learn German.

Learn French.

Understand European history.

Master European musical traditions.

And Black singers did.

Beautifully.

But there is another question Black opera is increasingly asking:

What happens when the opera house has to learn us?

Our languages.

Our histories.

Our musical traditions.

Our mythology.

Our imagination.

Our memories.

Our future.

That’s a different proposition entirely.

BLACK OPERA DOESN’T HAVE TO LIVE IN THE PAST

There is a trap waiting for Black historical art.

We can become so committed to proving that Black people were present in history that we forget Black people are also allowed to imagine the future.

That’s what makes the larger Black Opera Project conversation interesting.

Black classical storytelling does not have to become a museum exhibition.

We can preserve Florence Price.

Perform Margaret Bonds.

Study William Grant Still.

Sing H. Leslie Adams.

Honor George Walker.

And then—

create something they never had the opportunity to create.

Preservation and invention aren’t enemies.

One protects the archive.

The other expands it.

We need both.

FROM SURVIVAL TO SOVEREIGNTY

There’s something else here.

For centuries, Black creativity has repeatedly transformed the materials of survival into art.

Spirituals carried theology, longing, resistance and coded meaning.

Blues transformed pain.

Jazz turned improvisation into an intellectual language.

Hip-hop took equipment, records, streets, language and necessity and built a global cultural economy.

Again and again, Black people have taken what was available and created something nobody could have predicted.

Tut belongs to that larger continuum.

Something protected quietly can eventually become something proclaimed publicly.

That’s why its appearance in opera matters beyond novelty.

It changes who gets to define what belongs on an operatic stage.

BUT THERE’S A SECOND QUESTION

And this is where Inside the Opera House wants to go deeper.

We should celebrate Black stories entering major American opera companies.

We should celebrate commissions.

We should celebrate Black composers.

Black librettists.

Black singers.

Black conductors.

Black designers.

Black audiences.

But eventually we have to ask:

Who owns the house?

Because representation and sovereignty are not the same thing.

Being invited onto somebody else’s stage is progress.

Having the resources to build, commission, produce, archive and distribute our own work is something different.

Both matter.

But they shouldn’t be confused.

WHAT IF THE NEXT GREAT BLACK OPERA DOESN’T NEED PERMISSION?

Imagine an ecosystem where a Black composer doesn’t spend years hoping somebody decides their story is commercially viable.

Where Black singers aren’t invited only when the repertoire calls for Blackness.

Where Black audiences aren’t treated as an outreach project.

Where Black classical organizations own their spaces.

Where scores are commissioned regularly.

Where recordings are preserved.

Where children can study this repertoire.

Where new operas can fail, evolve, return and eventually become classics.

Because that’s another privilege established institutions possess:

the freedom to experiment.

Black artists deserve that freedom too.

THAT IS WHY THE ARCHIVE MATTERS

A culture cannot perform what it cannot find.

It cannot teach what it does not preserve.

And it cannot build a tradition if every generation has to begin by rediscovering what the previous generation already created.

That’s why Black classical music needs more than performances.

It needs institutions.

Libraries.

Scores.

Recordings.

Teachers.

Publishers.

Stages.

Orchestras.

Choirs.

Critics.

Audiences.

And yes—

money.

Art requires infrastructure.

Always has

FROM CINCINNATI TO HARLEM

That conversation doesn’t stop at the doors of one opera company.

It reaches Harlem.

It reaches historically Black colleges and universities.

It reaches Black churches.

It reaches conservatories.

It reaches community organizations.

It reaches young singers who have spent years being told that classical music belongs somewhere else.

And it reaches the work being undertaken by organizations such as Harlem Collective Opera.

Because the goal cannot simply be:

Put more Black people into opera.

The larger goal has to become:

Build an operatic culture in which Black people possess the power to create, preserve and determine what comes next.

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PART

Still, I keep returning to the language.

Think about the journey.

Something associated with communicating and learning under conditions designed to restrict Black knowledge survives.

People remember it.

People preserve it.

Generations pass.

Slavery ends.

Reconstruction comes.

Jim Crow comes.

Harlem rises.

Black music transforms the world.

Opera changes.

And eventually—

the language reaches the stage.

There is something profoundly beautiful about that.

Because systems can prohibit a people from reading.

They can prohibit them from entering institutions.

They can refuse them stages.

They can refuse them schools.

They can attempt to erase their histories.

But human beings have an extraordinary capacity to preserve themselves.

Sometimes in books.

Sometimes in music.

Sometimes in memory.

And sometimes—

inside a language somebody else doesn’t understand.

THE MOOD QUESTION

What have Black people preserved in private that the world is finally ready to hear in public?

That’s bigger than opera.

It’s about archives.

Grandmothers.

Churches.

Family stories.

Recipes.

Letters.

Photographs.

Songs.

Languages.

Traditions.

Things carried because somebody understood they might matter later.

Maybe later is now.

INSIDE THE OPERA HOUSE

Opera is at its most exciting when it doesn’t simply preserve what we’ve already heard.

It asks what else is possible.

A secret language entering an opera house gives us one answer.

But it also gives us a challenge.

Don’t simply invite Black history onto the stage.

Give Black imagination the resources to build the next one.

Because perhaps the greatest tribute we can offer our ancestors isn’t simply remembering what they created to survive.

It is taking what they preserved—

and using it to create something they never could have imagined.

Inside the Opera House — where we don’t just listen to the music. We ask who gets to make it.

Mood Magazine. Mind. Body. Spirit. Culture. Harlem to the world.