In “An Evening with Sancho … and Me?” on Sept. 18, Paterson Joseph will portray the main character of his historical novel “The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho” and interact with the audience. Photo by Faye Thomas.
But it’s another role that brings the classically trained Shakespearean actor to Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts on Thursday, Sept. 18, at 7 p.m.
It’s someone he’s been portraying for more than 20 years and writing about longer than that.
Charles Ignatius Sancho was an 18th-century man who led an extraordinary life. Born into slavery, he went on to liberate himself and become a celebrated musician, abolitionist and the first Black person to vote in Great Britain.
In “An Evening with Sancho … and Me?”, a free, ticketed event, Joseph will transform himself into Sancho on the Schwartz Center stage and read excerpts from “The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho,” his acclaimed novel based on Sancho’s life, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Christopher Blandon Prize for Debut Fiction.
“An Evening with Sancho” delves into parallels Joseph has found between Sancho’s life and his own, some of them deeply personal.
Joseph says the generous doses of humor in the performance often surprise audiences who’ve steeled themselves for an educational evening about a difficult era in Black history.
“A lot of people have said to me, ‘I really didn't know I would be laughing so much,’” says Joseph. “‘But I've also learned so much.’”
The performance, sponsored by the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, launches “Life/Story,” the theme for the center’s 2025-26 programming year.
The confluence of storytelling modes in “An Evening with Sancho” makes it the ideal event to kick off the year, says Carla Freeman, director of the Fox Center and Goodrich C. White Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
“In Paterson Joseph,” Freeman says, “we have a Shakespearean actor, a popular TV and film star, and writer who has used a novelistic lens to give greater depth to the life of this historic figure. And with his embodiment of Charles Ignatius Sancho in ‘Sancho and Me,’ he’s bringing yet another layer to his storytelling.”
Telling a great historical truth
For many years, Joseph says he had no idea there were Black people in Great Britain before the 20th century. “I wasn’t taught it in school,” he says. “I’d certainly never seen it in a movie, and I’d never read it in a book.”
Joseph’s parents emigrated to the United Kingdom from the Caribbean nation of St. Lucia, which was a British colony at the time. And he says he often felt unwelcome in the U.K. during his childhood and adolescence.
In London, he grew up seeing and hearing racist slurs — including some directed at him. “There was a sense of ‘Where do we belong? We’ve got no story here,’” he says.
Then, in 1999, he read “Black London: Life Before Emancipation” by Gretchen Gerzina. The book focuses on England’s considerable Black population in the 1700s, but it also chronicles Black presence in Britain back to the time of the Romans.
“It was absolutely that blown-head emoji,” he says. “How come I’m this middle-aged man, born and bred in London, who went through the school system and the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, all these plays — and I had never come across this?”
His response was to seek out a Black British historical character he could play onstage.
When he spotted an arresting portrait of Charles Ignatius Sancho in Gerzina’s book — a proud Black man wearing a red waistcoat — he was intrigued. Soon, he was reading everything he could find relating to Sancho’s story.
He learned Sancho was born on a slave ship around 1729. At age two, he was shipped from Colombia to Great Britain where three white women raised him. They refused to teach him to read and punished him for trying to teach himself. Eventually, he ran away and ended up working for a duke at Windsor Castle.
Sancho became an early supporter of the nation’s burgeoning anti-slavery movement, weaving wit and irony into letters denouncing bondage and other social ills. His letters circulated widely and were published in two volumes after his death. And in a parliamentary election just before his death in 1780, he cast his vote for antislavery candidate Charles James Fox.
He also composed jigs and reels that Joseph characterizes as defiantly upbeat, in the spirit of all the best protest music.
“I call it ‘militantly joyful,’” he says. “Because this awful stuff is happening to his people, so it seems like he should be writing really sad stuff. But this music is going, ‘To hell with that. We're going to dance.’”
In light of Sancho’s multitude of accomplishments, Joseph says, “The question that’s obvious to ask is: Why don’t we know this story?”
For more than two decades, in print and on the stage, Joseph has worked to bring Sancho’s story to light.
The myth of perfect heroes
Why would an actor write a novel?
Answer: The intimacy of storytelling on the page.
Books lack what actors call a “fourth wall,” the invisible barrier that separates characters and the audience. Unlike an actor onstage, notes Joseph, a character in a novel can turn to the audience and tell them what he’s thinking.
“As Sancho, I can whisper into your ear how I feel about working for the royal family or about my love for my wife,” he says. “You can really tell a deep story in a novel.”
Neither Joseph’s book nor his performance shies away from depth. Both give voice to the ways Sancho’s romantic and personal lives shape his public accomplishments. They also depict his flaws.
It’s this well-rounded portrayal that makes Sancho a compelling character, says Michelle M. Wright, Emory professor of English. Joseph will meet with undergraduate students in Wright’s class, “African American Literature Since 1900: Black Desire,” during his visit to campus.
“The thing that really struck me about Paterson Joseph's novel was how human he allowed Sancho to be,” she says. “He was able to navigate what it means to be a flawed person who sometimes can muster courage and whose courage sometimes fails.”
This Sancho, she says, is no two-dimensional hero, but “a complete life; someone who doesn’t only live and breathe in moments where the questions of abolition or enslavement come up.”
Allowing for improvisation
Joseph has described “Sancho and Me” as “a dual biography, told fresh every performance.” So, what does that mean?
“Well, it means terror for me,” Joseph jokes.
That’s because the second half of his performance includes improvisation. On the Schwartz Center stage, he will answer questions submitted by Emory students. This part of his performance usually calls for him to alternate between his own identity and that of his 18th-century counterpart.
This is easy to do, he says. “It's like a membrane between me and him, to be honest. He’s affected me so much.”
Joseph finds inspiration in the confidence he sees in Sancho’s letters. And both men are drawn to wit, drama and the artistic life.
“But I love his humor above all. He'll find the funny even in the darkest circumstance, because he knows that’s the way to live. You can't live in the heavy, because if you live in the heavy, you will bury yourself.”
Fox Center to welcome Min Jin Lee for 2026 Ellmann Lectures
The Fox Center’s “Life/Story” year continues in the spring, when it hosts Korean-American writer Min Jin Lee for the 2026 Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature.
Lee will take the Schwartz Center stage for three evenings of events March 1-3. She is the author of the novels “Pachinko,” named one of the best books of the 21st century by The New York Times, and “Free Food for Millionaires.” Tickets to the free events will be available starting Wednesday, Oct. 1.
Since 1988, the Ellmann Lectures have welcomed celebrated writers like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Margaret Atwood, Salmon Rushdie and Paul Simon to Emory’s campus.
Sunday, March 1, at 4 p.m.
Lecture title: “The Education of a Writer”
Monday, March 2, at 6:30 p.m.
Lecture title: “Writing American”
Tuesday, March 3, at 6:30 p.m.
Creativity Conversation: Min Jin Lee and Tayari Jones, Emory Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
