When Leslie Lewis Sword, daughter of business tycoon Reginald F. Lewis, told her father when she was young that she wanted to be an actor, he gave her advice she still thinks about today: "You don't just have to be an actor. You can be a director. A producer. You can own the theater."
This week, Sword - now an actress, writer, producer and businesswoman - will perform 10 roles in Miracle in Rwanda, a one-woman play she created with Edward Vilga. Her performance at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture will kick off a celebration weekend to honor what would have been her father's 65th birthday.
Lewis, who was born Dec. 7, 1942, in Baltimore and rose from a working-class upbringing to make Forbes' 400 wealthiest-Americans list, died of brain cancer in January 1993 at age 50. He was the CEO of TLC Beatrice International, the first African-American-owned business to make the Fortune 500 list.
"My father was an incredible visionary," Sword said, "and I think he taught me and my sister how to visualize something and then allow it to happen."
Sword's most recent vision resulted in the creation of Miracle in Rwanda, a play that chronicles the experiences of Rwandan genocide survivor Immaculee Ilibagiza, the New York Times best-selling author of Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust. In addition to writing her book, Ilibagiza also told her story last year on CBS' 60 Minutes and on various PBS shows.
Ilibagiza's family was slaughtered during the three-month killing rampage in 1994, but she managed to live by huddling with seven other women in a hidden bathroom of a local pastor's home. She and the women stayed cramped in the bathroom for 91 days, even as her family's murderers repeatedly ransacked the house with machetes.
Sword first took interest in Ilibagiza's story when she heard the survivor give a presentation about her experiences, but it was her trip to Rwanda with Ilibagiza (during which Sword adopted two Rwandan toddlers) that cemented her decision to write about and act out Ilibagiza's various experiences.
It is Ilibagiza's outlook since the tragedy, perhaps even more than her survival, that continues to awe Sword.
"It's completely revolutionary to go through a genocide and forgive the people who massacred your family," she said of Ilibagiza, who now lives in New York City. "It's a quiet revolution."
