Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines

Anna Deavere Smith, the award-winning playwright and actor, has spent a lifetime listening—really listening—to the people around her. As a child in the segregated Baltimore of the early 1960s, Smith absorbed the words of her parents, teachers, neighbors—even train conductors—and realized that there was something more being communicated than the actual words:

The conductor's voice had a mild kind of grandeur that was a cousin to the vocal tones I had heard at funerals—"Ashes-to-ashes"—and at ...