Learning to
listen to the radical hope embedded in the Spirituals we discover that long
before theorists in Communications Studies drew the contours of the field of
“performance studies”, the Old Folks (known hereafter as the “Old Folks”) had
been hard at work, telling each other that the sacraments of salvation had much
to do with acting out the reality they believed was not only possible but
necessary for their continuance as human beings and their transcendence out of
enslavement.
When we
refresh our memory of the Kongo Cosmogram as it has been taught to us by (most
notably) Robert Farris Thompson, we are humbled by the spiritual genius that
gave them a strategy for becoming the ancestors of themselves – replacing the
ancestors erased from the circle by the devastating disconnect of transatlantic
enslavement.
The place on
the circle where midnight is located is also the place where the “living dead”
the ancestors reside. People always “knew where they
stood”, where their cultural foundation could be found. Going into the burial
ground, singing praise songs, presenting gifts of bread and wine, asking for
guidance, protection and confirmation, the people taught their children what
the elders and ancestors had taught them: No one is dead as long as you can sing
their names and tell their stories.
And the
dislocation of the slave trade erased that surety, that comfort, that
coherence. The “bottom was taken away
from them.” They no longer had ground to stand on. When it was their transition
time, where would they go? Who would welcome them? Meaning had been forever
corrupted. And who could they call upon in times of confusion? Upon whom could
they rely to provide them the texts from which they could draw the lessons
needed for righteous and generous living? Losing the place of the ancestors was
as traumatic as any other aspect of racial enslavement.
So they
became the ancestors they and their children needed. When they chose to
survive, “strangers in a strange land,” they placed themselves upon the altar
of sacrifice – the alien earth that could not whisper to them – and offered
themselves to be the past from which
wisdom could be harvested. Once they
learned the names of the new God and the new heroes of that God’s faith, they
appropriated their identities, their communal functions and their power to make
things happen (the “ashė”, as RFT describes it). It should be no surprise, therefore, that
Moses and Elijah and Ezekiel and Joshua and Daniel and David and Mary and Martha
and John; and Sweet Little Jesus Boy and his mother, Mary; and Jacob’s angels
are all called into service by these wonder-workers.
What those
Bible Folks did, what they “stood for” is something “we need in our lives,
right here and now,” the Old Folks decided. So they tried to be what they read
and heard about and made songs to make that appropriation as thorough as
possible. And then they performed a grand discernment of spirits. If they saw
someone with a certain gift useful to the community, they anointed that person
with the name of power. No one better exemplifies this dynamic than Harriet
Tubman, who we are often told was called “the Moses of her people.” It might be
time to clarify that title: was called
“Moses” by her people. Any mother who
survived childbirth could have been soothed by “Mary had a little baby, born in
Bethlehem/ and just as soon as that baby cried/ She rocked him in a weary
land…” Or “Go Mary, Ring them bells…I heard from Heaven today.” Or, most importantly, “We are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.”
But at the
season of remembering the anniversary of the U. S. Supreme Court decision, in
1954, of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, it is the David of the
Spirituals who hums in our heads. [Paul Robeson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CC5WM1Fnuo&index=13&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN]
The long,
long struggle to bring the quest of freedom through literacy into the 20th
century was fought by one generation after another. The apartheid of Jim Crow segregation began
in the United States, long before it was exported into South Africa. The
energy utilized to keep a people chained in ignorance was a tragic waste of
human gifts, for all concerned. The savagery inflicted on those who fed their
hunger for knowledge was relentless, all-encompassing and did as much -- if not more – damage to the perpetrators of
the ever-failing strategy to withhold literacy from those who lived out what
Douglass discovered: that which some most feared, others most desired. And when
the post-Civil War emancipators filled the legislative halls and established
public schools for the formerly excluded, black and white, the South was
transformed as thoroughly as was the “West” by the Homestead benefits.
Leftover
learning, discarded texts, inadequate resources were piled up as barriers to
success. The integrity of the minds of black folks was unassailable, though.
The Old Folks kept singing more and more Little David’s into existence. From Du
Bois to Booker T; from Anna Julia Cooper to Countee Cullen to James Weldon
Johnson to Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker
Motley; to Langston Hughes and Paul
Robeson and Zora Hurston: the brightest of the bright got into the school-room,
the library, the church hall, the universities. Whenever they found a giant
standing in their way, they hurled a stone word across the chasm. And the
threatening giants and the walls began to tremble and eventually come tumbling
down.
And the
victims are blemished by a mark far worse than that imprinted on the brow of
Cain. He, after all, was marked so that none would murder him, in retaliation
for his murderous rage. Today, those who are marked and obligated to wander
farther and farther away from their dreams often do not know that they have
been signed in failure and washed in despair.
But the need
is still there. It never disappears. And the sounds the Old Folks murmured,
shouted and moaned linger still in the air we breathe. Little children, such as Linda Brown, in
Topeka, Kansas (1954), and Sylvia Mendez, in Orange County, California (1946),
were the elder siblings to the teenagers who constituted the “Little Rock Nine”
(1957), and to Ruby Bridges (1960; the first black child to attend an all-white
elementary school in the South) and the bewildered, trusting and courageous
children of Maryland, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee. Virginia, and the
unnumbered legion who started on down the path to today.
No matter
how many times the same soul-stealers – in whatever guise they assume – come into
the places where we dwell, to hold our dreams hostage, just that many times –
and one or two more, for necessity – are we obligated to grab whatever we have
been given, or whatever we could quickly grab, and hurl defiance and
re-commitment at the shadowy demons who tell us our efforts will not change. We
cannot sacrifice our children to ignorance, abuse, neglect and denial. Too many
of our sons and daughters are put into the solitary confinement that suffocates
their imaginations. [A recent survey of the reestablishment of segregated
schools, the UCLA Report is of great help: http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2014-press-releases/ucla-report-finds-changing-u.s.-demographics-transform-school-segregation-landscape-60-years-after-brown-v-board-of-education]
The Old
Folks made a way out of no way. We are the Old Folks for the children being
born to us today. And we need a resurrection of our minds and souls and bodies,
so that we can shape those who will have to lead us, once again, through deep
rivers, be they the Red Sea, the Jordan or floods that seek to wipe away the
roads we trod.
What was
true then is true now: we have to see beyond: There ain’t no grave that can
hold my body down.
