The October People’s Choice Award goes to…

The people have spoken… The October People’s Choice Award goes to Kimberly Ridgeway for her play, The Infiltrator, presented as a staged reading at Monday Night PlayGround on October  19, 2026 live at Potrero Stage and simulcast via Vimeo Livestream. Congratulations, Kimberly!

Courtesy of Kimberly, we’re pleased to share the first two pages from the award-winning script. Enjoy!

THE INFILTRATOR
By
Kimberly Ridgeway

She stole the secrets that won the war. Now she must fight to save her legacy.

Mary Bowser, an educated, freed Black woman who worked as a Union spy inside the Confederate
White House, speaks to a journalist to record her story before she is erased from history.

CHARACTER

Mary Bowser (a.k.a Mary Jane Richards, Mary Jones), Black, Age 31.

SETTING
A dimly lit room in a rural southern town, approximately 1869.

At Rise, Mary, in a dimly lit room, is looking out of the window to see if she’s been followed.

MARY
Mary Bowser. B-O-W-S-E-R. Born Mary Jane Richards; aliases include Mary Jo—
(turns toward the journalist in the room)
Actually, put your pen down a moment.
Look at me.
What do you see?
A woman? A Negro? A servant? A spy?
Never the latter. That would never be expected of a Negro woman servant. We’re not thought of
as smart. “They’re stupid.” “They can’t read or write.”

They don’t want us to. Because knowledge makes you dangerous. That’s right. Knowledge is the
most dangerous weapon in the world, and I should know. I used it to dismantle their Confederacy
from the inside.

Tomorrow, when the sun rises, I will be gone. The threats are getting too close. I will disappear.
And I will change my name again; all records of Mary Jane Richards, Mary Bowser, Mary Jones,
will also disappear. The government will hide files to protect their secrets, and the South will
pretend a woman like me never existed.

That is why you must listen carefully and record my story – my true story. Because if we do not
tell our own histories, they will write us out of them entirely.

Pick up your pen.

You ask how a young, educated Negro woman ended up cleaning the floors of the Confederate
Executive Mansion? It wasn’t luck; it was calculated.

We knew Jefferson Davis needed domestic staff. Southerners believed we were too stupid to
understand politics and too submissive to rebel. They saw a docile face and an empty mind. They
thought they were hiring a servant. They were actually welcoming an infiltrator.

For months, I walked those halls like a ghost. I would enter Jefferson Davis’s private study under
the guise of dusting the furniture, polishing the silver, or trimming candle wicks. Because they
believed I was completely illiterate, they left everything exposed.

I didn’t just read documents; I memorized them. The Lord gave me a photographic mind. I read
the top-secret dispatches from General Robert E. Lee. I memorized the exact numbers of the
Confederate soldiers in Vicksburg. I saw the logistics blueprints, letters detailing low ammunition
supplies, and supply train routes.

Do you know what prejudice does? It blinds people.

Jefferson Davis sat at his dinner table bragging to his cabinet about how they would demolish the
Union. I stood three feet away pouring the wine and mentally absorbing their entire strategy. Every
manifest, every report, every order.

At night, I would slip out into the darkness, find a courier in the Richmond Underground, a
sophisticated Union spy network, and unload all of the information I had stored in my memory.
Secrets I gathered in Davis’s Mansion were on Abraham Lincoln’s desk forty-eight hours later.

What was done with all that stolen intelligence? It was used to defeat the Confederacy.

(to be continued…)

Stay tuned for information about the next installment of PlayGround-SF! For more info, click here