A Bermudian actress has recorded an audiobook of a novel by one of Bermuda’s most celebrated writers about the 1959 theatre boycott.

Tsilala Brock has lent her voice to the reading of Girlcott, by former theatre boycott organiser Florenz Maxwell.

Ms Brock said: “Florenz Maxwell is a legend in Bermuda, so to be able to honour her craft and honour the history of Bermuda is amazing.”

Girlcott, published in 2017, centres around the life of Desma Johnson, a young Black girl growing up in segregated Bermuda at the time of the theatre boycott.

Ms Brock, who lives in New York, said that she had done audiobooks in the past but this was the first she had edited herself.

She said: “Narrating a book, making sure your characters sound the same from chapter one to chapter 16 and then editing it takes a ton of work.”

The actress, who will soon star on Broadway in the musical Suffs, said she enlisted the help of New Wave Studios, in Bermuda, to help her record the audio.

Ms Brock appreciated being involved with a story where the main character was allowed to be Black and happy.

She said: “As an actor in New York, we have come across so many auditions where a Black character’s humanity is only seen if they’re suffering.

“So to have any kind of story around the civil rights movement that doesn’t begin and end with police sirens is rare.”

Ms Brock added: “We’re getting to learn through Desma about the civil rights movement as it’s happening in front of her, through her curiosity and how she understands the world through her intellect, which I think is extremely rare to see and one of the benefits for it getting out there again.”

Ms Maxwell said that Ms Brock’s involvement had almost been fated after they met when the actress was 14-years-old.

She explained: “When I first saw her, she was with her mother, and just her mannerism and her beauty and her colour made me go ‘that’s my main character, Desma’.”

Ms Maxwell added: “When we were talking about doing an audiobook, I kept thinking ‘it’s not a bad idea, but who can do it?’. And then I remembered Tsilala.”

Ms Maxwell said that, while she initially had no intentions of turning Girlcott into an audiobook, she thought it would be good for accessibility — something she had always considered important.

She explained that she made Girlcott a fictional story because she thought it would appeal to children more.

“I know one woman who was very upset because her eyesight’s not good and she kept bugging me about when I was going to make the audiobook. Now she’ll be happy because she can hear it,” she said.

Ms Maxwell added that the accessibility served a major purpose to remind young people of the extent of segregation and racism in Bermuda.

She said that segregation was much more covert in Bermuda compared with other countries and was easier to deny in the modern day because of this.

She added that Girlcott was a necessary tool in combating the effect of the hidden racism, which was reflected in everything from the subject matter to her main character, Desma, being dark-skinned.

Ms Maxwell said: “I have a problem with dark-skinned people having low self-esteem, because I never had it; and because I never had it I was able to survive the stupidity of shadeism.

“The lack of good self-esteem has come from seeing themselves as a loser, and I didn’t want Desma to be a loser.

“White publishers don’t want books like Girlcott with a Black girl in it — and I mean Black — who are outstanding and not dysfunctional.

“She has to be dysfunctional for people to understand she’s Black. Not me – I’m not writing that nonsense, because I know better.”

The audiobook will be released on February 25 on the Audible app.