“Little David, Play on Your Harp”

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 20^th 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.

So what has happened to us all?  The ancestors who made the circle whole again, by becoming the Joshuas and Esthers and Daniels and Hagars and Elijahs and Marys needed to restructure the circle of our survival: where are they remembered? Their lives, if mentioned, are reduced to postage stamps, calendar inserts or voiceovers for public service announcements. The songs are wrapped in muslin and kept on the shelves, often not gently circulated at family gatherings. Far too often there are no family gatherings where a song of hope can be chanted.  Separate and unequal is the description of our public schools.  The chasm of disparity is widened by lack of jobs, lack of intact families; increasing over-reliance on medicating the youngest of our children because of perceived and annotated “behavior problems”; the reliance on property taxes to fund our school systems. The forest of alienation grown deep these last four decades separates the “haves” from the “don’t deserves”. 

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD4SMtFrJpY&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN&index=16

What was true then is true now: we have to see beyond: There ain’t no grave that can hold my body down.

  

"To See What the End Will Be..."

(In honor of Sr. Eva Regina Martin, SSF, 1939-2014)

I.

No

They told the first one

                                             and then

year after year another   no   until

the house was built  the clothes were

stitched   the old castaways  and the invisible

babies were fed  and soothed

and then

                   there were enough faces to form

a choir of hope   healing their own hearts   they

twisted scorn into praise

                                                and then

dispossessed into the wilderness

they planted  harvested  and shared among

the restless wandering spirits

a little light   a little music   and

little by little

                            the world found them

and then   they all said   yes

II.

                                              it was how

she walked up the path

                                             mother prayers

grandmother secrets    the dreams

of babies had been rolled up carefully

in remnants from the quilts    packed

into the satchel

                               she dragged along

III.

Teaching

                   touching   holding  more

tightly  the very ones most afraid

                                                               the world

became a festival of heroes   where not

even dreams could root

But when the lightning flashed that summer morning

And the corrupted sermon that had long silenced

The mother-wisdom and ways of her house

came hurtling back the air

                                                  she screamed

her loss

                 another old woman

                                                       (placed there

I know   by the one who refused English to ever

touch her  teeth)

                                 said, “But you learned it all

any way you could"

IV.

The satchel

once again

                     went away

                                            and came back

overflowing for our feast

Was she conjure woman?

                                                   Yes.

No one

                knew how  deep her eyes

could see

the    yes   that was merely static

in the streets

                          spoke loudly in

iron  stone  remnants  beads  and   feathers

and whispers never failed to satisfy

and now it is our   no   that we know

fallen to the floor

                                 we demanded the miracle

that exhausted her

                                      at the last

And  no   was prayed and sung and caressed

in the vigil of those weeping before the tomb

was readied

Until

the first one

flung the light

and dissolved the shadowed room

                                                      reaching

her hand    she said    now

and the gentle sister of us all

said

yes

yes

9 April 2014

Sr. Mary Eva Regina Martin, SSF.Born in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, in 1939.  Entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family on September 8, 1959, professed First Vows on August 15, 1962, and Perpetual Vows August 15, 1967. Masters in Black Theology from Xavier University. Doctorate in African American Studies from Temple University (1994).  Educator and Administrator of Catholic schools in Louisiana and Texas. Curator, Archivist, Consultant.  Sr. Eva Regina was elected to leadership in her Community and served as a General Councilor, Vicar General, and succumbed to death, April 7, 2014, while presiding in office as Congregational Leader.

"Sometimes It Causes Me to Tremble"

When we gathered in the conference room we were bringing pocket crumbs of hope. Or maybe we were bringing a loaf each; or a small fish – hoping for someone to transform our fragmented and tightly squeezed dreams into a full meal. The great-souled artist brought a blocked-out quilt presenting the panorama are eyes hungered for: East St. Louis. July, 1917. Mass graves. Ida B. Wells. Du Bois. Garvey. Daisy Westbrook. Survivors with burn scars and amputations. News accounts leveling the blame squarely on the perpetrators.  The woman who refuses to let all our journeys from “can’t to can” be forgotten, flung her bag of possibilities into our minds like grains of wheat. The man who led the rescue of the books, the papers, the memories of our childhood learning was wheeled into the circle to remind us that the past is never past. The veteran teacher who still reads something new every day and challenges all of us to speak and teach and write with the eloquence which is our communal charge. The man who has spent a life praying and working for justice brought his steadfastness as a balm. Young professors who accepted a call to gather the reflections of their peers and explain to us all what we may have never really known – or admitted. The woman who was slain in the spirit of the stories she found and flashed them on the screen carries the pictures of indomitable stubbornness and grace from one side of the country to the other. Oh, and there was the no-longer little boy who heard his old folks say, often, “Yes. It was terrible. We hid people under our porch.”  His haunting also needed to be freed, released.

Anecdotes and snippets of genealogy worked to get us to the table, better than any security guard at a metal detector.  “Who are your people? Who were your teachers? Why do you still care about this city?” These are the East St. Louis identifications that are conducted at almost every gathering. Quietly and politely, but carrying significance nevertheless.  The man entrusted to be the steward of the city was the prayer he called for, to start the meeting. Because he knows the story has to be told in multiple layers, multiple rhythms and multiple tongues he said, “It must be so. It must be right.” And we sat ourselves down to the task. Even those like the griot and the judge, who could not attend, hovered in the room.

Oh, the story has never been told. For at least an entire year back then, the unrest in East St. Louis simmered, bubbled and flared up, repeatedly. From the meat-packing plant workers in 1916, to the laborers at the Aluminum Ore Company in in the late spring and early summer of 1917, the elements were being assembled. The factors affecting what would be called the “Race Riot of 1917” seem frighteningly familiar to us, today. Fear of gun-carrying “interlopers”; accusations of waves of scab laborers and an influx of “colonized” black voters to rig elections in favor of Republicans (the political party favored by many African Americans of that era).  Hysteria was ramped up and seemed as pervasive as the influenza outbreaks that would cripple the U. S. just months later.

So, white citizens stocked up on firearms. Politicians engineered more and more restrictive and intrusive schemes to limit the ability of African Americans to vote in local elections. Trains were met by mobs. Black workers were taunted as they entered and left the workplace. Any suspicion was elevated to fact.

Every doubt was transformed into certainty:  the city must remain white and the Negroes must be forced to leave.

Those gathered in the room with the windows showing the late morning rainstorm knew that finally, if the city were to be honored for surviving relentless efforts of social, political and economic eradication, there had to be a healing of the land and a healing of the memories. How does a city survive 100 years of post-traumatic stress? By dressing with elegance; by conjuring up acolytes to trumpet-playing Gabriel himself. By teaching every child as if that girl, that boy, can someday advance medicine, negotiate treaties, make words slap the ears and the hearts with intensity and truth. By telling the world that, yes, we were there; yes, when we even tiptoe near the story of that awful time in July, it causes us to tremble, tremble; tremble.  By preaching – sometimes, even, by words – and reminding one another and total strangers standing on the corner of 25^th and State -- that “We are here not to be the failures that everybody expects, but to be the harvest that everybody needs."

Around the room the ideas flew into the air like hummingbirds.  Overlapping call-and-response was a much better guide than Roberts’ Rules of Order. But no one was disrespectful – after all, we had a mayor, two ministers and several legendary teachers on site and in sight. Several times, the recognition moment occurred. Yes. That is exactly what “I/We” have been saying for 5, 10, 20 years.

No one disappears as long as their prayers linger in our souls.

But the questions that have surfaced are these: Will we be commemorating the riots (massacre, lynching, terrorism) so that we may finally begin to know enough to heal the land and restless souls? Will the commemoration in 2017 be a turning point in the life of the city, one that will be good for those who remained, who survived, who grew into magnificence? Or will the events actually do more to prepare the city for an influx of people for whom history is an inconvenience at best, or a nuisance at worst?  In the Sunday, April 6 edition of the New York Times there are two stories that attach to these questions. One, a photo essay about reconciliation in Rwanda is compelling and humbling. Some of the perpetrators of the violence sought out some of their direct victims and asked for pardon. [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/06/magazine/06-pieter-hugo-rwanda-portraits.html?ref=magazine]  Both perpetrator and victim are pictured, close to each other; looking at the camera, formally posed, they ask the viewer: “Can you step where we stand?”  

That will be a question for all those whose souls still tremble when they realize that parts of them are “still there” where ancestors were crucified and where ancestors carried out the killing. The other NYT entry reports on the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, to be opened in 2017, and which has already done much collecting of artifacts and spirit-filled texts concerning the bloody history of that state, of those people. [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/us/civil-rights-sins-curated-by-one-of-the-sinners.html?ref=us&_r=0] The Museum is under the control of the State of Mississippi and many of the survivors and relatives of those who perished are of mixed minds about the eventual story that will be told, and about who will control the telling. But they, too – like the men and women of Rwanda who have walked to the place of forgiveness – say that they cannot live – perpetrator and victim, both – unless the truly liberating story is told. And then, just maybe, the song will heal us all. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFOsVxQ_SmY&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN&index=9]

Let us pray. 

"Run, Mary, Run, I Say..."

In the great meditation on community, isolation, and the grief and madness that springs from nearly unbearable suffering that is Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the character of “Amy Denver of Boston” appears. In the woods, at the point when Sethe is most desperate to rejoin her sent-along children across the Ohio River: 

“On a riverbank in the cool of a summer evening two women struggled under a shower of silvery blue.  They never expected to see each other again in this world and at the moment couldn’t care less.  But there on a summer night surrounded by bluefern they did something together appropriately and well. A pateroller passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws – a slave and a barefoot whitewoman with unpinned hair – wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore.  But no pateroller came and no preacher. There was nothing to disturb them at their work. So they did it appropriately and well.” (Morrison, Beloved, 84)

Some of the particulars must be changed in order to adapt this story to the present moment. “Two throw-away people” can remain. The shared responsibility of bringing a child to life in the most desperate of environments can also remain – with some adjustments -- in the telling of this story.  We might even keep the “rags they wore” as a variation on the swaddling clothes of Jesus in the manger – even though in Sethe’s story, it is an abandoned rowboat in a river’s cove. In the variation that will be sung here, it is a 4^th floor set of offices at a school that was as determined to thwart a birth and hinder throw-away people as thoroughly as could have been attributed to the forces of humiliation and indifference that infect the air of Morrison’s novel.

My mother prayed me into the job of Director of Black American Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.  When I mentioned to her that I had applied for the job (at a school less than 100 miles from her house), she said, “My…I didn’t know that. I guess we’ll have to pray about that.”  When I was not selected for the position, I figured that Mama’s prayers didn’t work. And then the chosen candidate’s negotiations fell apart and I was asked, as the only remaining option, if I were still interested in the job. My mother’s prayers became the challenge. I had to say, yes. It was obvious that I had (from the university’s perspective) answered wrongly. No one involved in my hiring wanted me to say yes. One indignity after another accumulated to choke my integrity. But my mother said it would be so; and in August of 1997 I crossed the river from exile (of being jobless in New Orleans) to being isolated near to home.

No budget, no permanent staff. No job security. No academic standing for the program. Quite soon after arriving I hit a thick wall of low morale and confusion among the teaching staff; and tiny acts of sabotage from the temporary clerical workers.  The most well-intentioned veterans in the college’s central office supported me in my efforts to find some permanent solutions to seemingly deep-rooted obstacles. Finding a secretary I could trust became a nearly year-long quest.  The first trustworthy person soon grew tired of the emotional guerilla warfare in which the teaching staff engaged.  And then our “Miss Amy Denver. Of Boston” arrived for a job interview.

At the time she was Ms. Tish (NOT “Patricia” and NOT “Trish”) Emmett.  Within a few years she became herself, returning to the name of Ms. Tish Whitlock. During that interview, it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to hire her. She had a mind for budgets and contracts. She was simply honest. She needed permanency, and she needed consistency. But I soon found out that it wasn’t all that clear that she would “hire” us.  As she told me, soon afterwards, she was worried that she was a white, Baptist woman moving into a nearly all-black workplace, working for a Roman Catholic priest.  She asked her mother, “Suppose I saying something crude? What will his reaction be?”  When she told me this story, she said that she informed her mother, two weeks into the job, “Oh, I don’t have to worry about my language. He’s worse than me.”  (Did I mention, “throw away people”?) As to the issue of cultural comfort, my response to that

concern was to say, “If you can keep the budget in good shape, you will fit into this office quite nicely.”

And then we became family.

She and my mother talked. She brought the greatest gift imaginable to the labor of keeping the academic program on life-support until it could be regulated into a formal department. She brought clarity. She brought honesty. She brought a mystic’s gift of being able to read people.  Early on she asked me if I thought it would be appropriate for her to take classes from each of the faculty in our program. She wanted to know what we did so that she could offer an educated perspective to our deliberations and so that she could challenge students when they had questions or complaints.  She decided that any student we employed (or who showed up with great regularity), either undergraduate or graduate, needed to be successful, professional and a positive reflection on our program. Undergraduate students became graduate students or successful in other careers. Graduate students moved further into academic careers or quickly found employment in their chosen fields. And the visitors were stitched into the quilt also.

Tish spoke truth to power, not ever once knowing that it was her prophetic obligation. A little woman with an immense heart, she could gather people into a circle – or, if need be, put individuals into “their place.” Clarity.

Loyalty to the dream of a first-rate academic center motivated her to learn all she could about Africana Studies and to push faculty, staff and students to levels of accomplishment that reflected well upon the program.

On many occasions when I wondered why I let my mother’s prayers pull me into “trials and tribulations,” Tish Whitlock was there, in the boat, helping to keep the other side of the river clearly in mind. What old song brings its rhythm to this praise letter? “Run Mary, run, I say/ You got a right to the Tree of Life.” The referenced scene from Beloved is about the Underground Railroad. The characters in the scene display the historical truth of socially marginalized people bonding in the effort to bring life where there could be darkness and despair.  All that matters is that those running to a dream, be it the reconstructed family of Baby Suggs in Ohio, or velvet cloth in Boston, help each other for the little time they are together. Getting on to freedom. With clarity.

Tish Whitlock died on the 21^st of February, 2014. She worked in the Black American/Africana Studies office for 14 years until she officially retired (in 2011). She and my mother are sitting now, in the shade of the Tree of Life.  And I am the better for their prayers. We all are. ‘Cause we all got a right to the Tree of Life. This version is sung by my dear friends Kim and Reggie Harris. All of their music is worth knowing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0RdQijgX38

“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child: for MLK”

“Man has strayed to the far countries of secularism, materialism, sexuality, and racial injustice. His journey has brought a moral and spiritual famine in Western civilization. But it is not too late to return home. Martin Luther King, Jr. Strength To Love (1963; p. 92)

Those of us who would wish to commemorate the life, the struggle, the death – in essence, the reality – of Martin Luther King, Jr., might make a commitment to read more than a few paragraphs of the “I Have a Dream” speech as part of our engaging in any public gathering on either the federal holiday honoring his birth or the day in April when we are confronted by his death.  For far too long we have allowed several generations of young people to become reflexively bored with “MLK Events” and in some measure their (and, truth be told, our) disengagement with the man and the rituals in his honor might be due to a misreading of the usually quoted words in “I Have a Dream.”  If we do not understand the old songs, as has been mentioned before, then we will no longer wish to sing them. If we do not live with all the significant texts and contexts of King’s thought, we risk losing him altogether.

Why did he need to dream, and why did he need to exhort others to dream on that day in 1963? The speech is constructed as a model of black ritual. The great black sermonic tradition produces texts that are often conservative; simultaneously comforting and challenging; and effective in capturing the imagination of the listeners into seeing hope where previously there had been only the “shadow of the valley of death.” Beginning with marking the place where his congregation was gathered as being holy ground -- The Lincoln Monument, the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, the pilgrims becoming the multitudes marching into Zion: King evokes all of these necessary images at the outset of his remarks. And because, in his own wilderness encounter with the cries of the oppressed and crushed, he accepted the call to return to the city and proclaim what he had seen and heard, he uses Pentecostal rhetorical strategies to capture the attention of the entire world – which was listening that day; and since.

With very little warning, we are told that one hundred years after “emancipation,” “the Negro still is not free.”  King lays out his vision of the valley of oppression by enumerating the broken promises of a republic that denies full citizenship to men and women who had (and have) as much claim to the land as any other inhabitants.  He indicts those who use violence, legal manipulations and economic exploitation to maintain privilege over the victims left in the “dark and desolate valley” of segregation and indifference.  But, in keeping with his reflections in Strength To Love, King will not allow the perpetrators of injustice to continue unchecked and he does not allow the victims of oppression to justify taking up the tools of the oppressors:

“But there is something I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred…..Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

Black Theology is liberation theology, grounded in the experience of the believers and confirmed by the truth of scripture.  Martin Luther King, Jr., knows that one must dream, not on the mountain top, not on the “majestic heights”, but in the very basement of darkness and near despair.  “I know my wings are gonna fit me well/ I tried them on at the gates of Hell.”  Identifying with both Jacob’s children enslaved in Egypt and with the heroes like Moses, Joshua, Daniel, and David, those King called “my people” would return to police brutality, mob violence (both daylight public and night-time anonymous) and more years of nearly impregnable resistance to all calls for justice, freedom and respect for human rights.

The universality of King’s vision is rooted in the genius of Black Theology, among other sources. Those who claimed kinship with the Hebrew Children used their voices to become agents of their own liberation and added their voices to the prophetic choir of the Bible.  Needing only the truth of their experience and the power of the Spirit to proclaim the liberating truth of their visions, the elders of the hush harbors did something that receives far too little attention today. Motherless children could nevertheless shout, “True Believer.”  Those who felt that no one could possibly understand the trouble they had seen, nevertheless found deep within them a “Glory, Hallelujah!” to open yet another tomorrow. Those who spent many grief-filled nights abandoned and abused could still taste the banquet they would receive from the Welcome Table. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLR31UyuFP0]

But most importantly, they had the audacious confidence to supply what was lacking in the Covenant Statement of Exodus.  God told the Israelites that they must embrace with compassion, mercy and remembrance all those who are the “widow, the orphan, the stranger” in their midst.  Every time one of the old songs is sung, the singers become the strangers, the orphans, the widows, privileged by the attention of God. “A long ways from home.” A motherless child.”  “Went into the valley and I couldn't hear nobody pray…”  No, they tell us: you will bow down in grief, but you will not be broken by it. You will be called everything but a child of God. But you better live the truth as it has been revealed to you. You “been in the storm so long,” we know. But the Old Ship of Zion has room enough for all.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce8ix4VGR2w]

Use whatever it takes to get your head back up into the air.  Even if it means dreaming that the children of the woman who just spit in your face and called you a nigger will someday clasp your children’s hands in friendship. Dream if you need a reason to walk up the rough side of the mountain; and dream that those who set the dogs upon you in the streets of Birmingham and Macon will someday join you in singing, “Free at Last” because they have found that your freedom brought freedom to their frightened and desiccated souls.

Dream, Martin. Because you had been beaten, imprisoned, shadowed, threatened and slandered – sometimes by those you would call brother and sister. Dream, Martin, because you knew that if you let your soul take flight while you stood high above the crowd, you would find the strength to walk among those who sought to slay the dreamer before too long. Dream, Martin, that those who hear your voice only faintly will find in the stillness after the storm they must endure, the hope that is built on the truth. I only feel like a motherless child…sometimes. Sometimes I feel like I can go on.  And do.

Martin Luther King, Jr., means nothing to us if we do not understand that, even in his loneliest and most isolated moment, he knew that he had been the dream of those who long ago had looked over Jordan, and hoped for him. And it was never his dream alone. Can we tell our children we need them to be our dreams? And tell the world that we will never let them be anything less?

"Come By Here"

The “Gullah” people are Africans brought to the United States and who were placed on the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina.  The name most probably derives from the culture found in the area of West Africa, where they originally lived:  “Angola” (part of present-day Nigeria).  Because the Gullah were far more numerous than their enslavers, they reinstated themselves into a distinctive culture, with a continuity of their birth-cultures and with a Creole language also called “Gullah”.  Even though some of the Gullah no longer speak the language fluently, there are still many in the Sea Islands who do.  Their songs, proverbs and stories are widely studied.

One of the traditional methods of worship was for them to gather in non-populated forest areas where they could perform prayers to their ancestors; educate one another in the rituals of their belief system; and in some places maintain the integrity of their worship, in spite of the opposition of many of the Christian missionaries and slaveholders who otherwise attempted domination of their lives.  In fact, such gathering spaces appear all over the south – and all over the transatlantic Africana sites. (Albert J. Raboteau writes about this phenomenon in Slave Religion) One of the great Spirituals goes so far as to say, “If you want to find Jesus/ Go in the Wilderness.”  This was a place where one encountered God and learned a message that would be of great help to one’s fellow sufferers.  (Zora Neale Hurston discusses this journey into the wilderness in her essay, “Conversions and Visions”)  The places where they gathered were clearings shaped in the forests and which were called “hush harbors” or “brush harbors.”  The “hush harbor” was so- named when the practitioners would turn iron pots upside down on the earth, believing that the pots would focus their voices into the ground where, they believed, their ancestors resided.  They were convinced that such a method of communication was kept secret – therefore they were able to pray in “hushed” tones.

From the Sea Island people we have one of the most important of the Spirituals, a song that deserves much more respect than has been given it since it suffered serious collateral damage from the folk music revival of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Today, “Kumbaya” is used by political commentators, white and (unfortunately) black, as a metaphor for mindless, feel-good naïveté, an example of superficial hope in a bright tomorrow that will arrive with no blood, struggle or sacrifice.   The plainest example is: “What do you expect us to do? Join hands and sing, “Kumbaya’”?  Or, “Is this supposed to be a ‘Kumbaya’ moment, where we all stand around and smile at each other?”

As Bernice Johnson Reagon says in “The Songs Are Free” [PBS Video with Bill Moyers], "if people don’t know the context for a song, they lose its meaning. And they don’t want to sing the song."  I tremble when I try to imagine just how many campfires and youth revivals and demonstrations in the 1960’s had “Kumbaya” as part of their rituals. If we just keep the beat happy and fast, if we just smile and sway, if we just sing this over and over, we will all feel better. What has happened here is an example of the persistent deracializing of Black culture, when the greatest accomplishments of the people have been appropriated and utterly drained of prophetic and transformational transcendent power.

As an experiment, I have frequently asked students what they think about “Kumbaya.”  Invariably, the response is, “I don’t like that song. It’s a kid’s song. It’s dumb.”  And then I play it. Not the peppy, sugary folk revival version.  Often, the version performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  I read some appropriate verses from the Book of Exodus. I explain the cultural origins of the language. And then I play the song again.

It could be argued that the beginning of Black Theology can be traced to:  

A long time passed, during which the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their bondage and cried out, and from their bondage their cry for help went up to God. God heard their moaning and God was mindful of his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  God saw the Israelites, and God knew…. [Or, “God took note.”] Exodus 2: 23-25.

Theology is the story of God’s intervention in human history.  Black Theology begins with trans-located Africans exploding with the insight that if God could “deliver Daniel from the lions’ den, then why not every man?” Finding the initial biblical cry of oppressed slaves and knowing that the groaning of the lately oppressed and abandoned would be heard, the spirit-possessed singing believers – with the sound of their voices – became the Israelites anew. The Exodus story describes the action. The song, Kumbaya”, becomes the action. The song  is the prayer itself. It possesses the power to make the desire a reality (“grace”).

Come by here, O Lord (Kum ba yah, my Lord)
Come by here.                (Kum ba yah.)
Come by here, O Lord,
Come by here.
Oh, Lord, come by here
Someone needs you Lord…
Someone’s praying Lord….
Someone’s singing Lord….etc.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwtVDWpdMKE]

When we see how the singers forged the connection of the song to the moaning of the Israelites, it actually operates as a strong demand of the people in bondage to gain the notice of the liberating God and force him to intervene in their lives as He once did for the Israelites in Pharaoh’s Egypt.  Many of the old Spirituals have this sentiment. The notion of calling God down from the sky is present in all sorts of Afro-new-world religions, especially those where spirit possession is a common occurrence.   The slow, repetitive rhythm and the simple chanting of the lyrics would be useful for inducing a trance, whereby those engaged in the ritual of the hush harbor could alter their consciousness and feel the spirit of the divine enter into them and give them the strength to endure; or transcend, or overcome.

If only people would stand in front of Capitol buildings and City Halls and shout for the liberating power of the divine to fill the earth and the sky to rid the oppressed of the plagues that destroy them and the earth upon which they walk.  If only we knew.  Those who have no knowledge of the root of such a spiritual call embarrass themselves when they misuse the gifts of the old ones to dismiss those who still search for hope.  But those of us who allow such misjudgments to replace what the old ones knew are also at peril.

The need to have sharp, conscious minds that can resist or challenge the bombardment of the media today is not merely an intellectual determinant. If we do not know what we are being fed, our minds and spirits will shrink from cultural deprivation and malnourishment.  If our minds are not actively engaged in seeking the “true truth,” will we have the strength to call forth our own liberation?

A Tree Planted by the Water

A Chant for Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013)

"We saw in him what we seek in ourselves." – Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa

It was decided:

In order to protect themselves

they took him

                             walled him in

                                                        even

from the shouts of the prisoners playing

in the field

                       from the smell of his daughters’

hair    from the squinting eyes of the boys learning

at his books

                         They took him and found

themselves bound by his gaze

                                                         and he

did not move   planted by the water

                                                                when

you

can bring the sky inside you

the world will circle you

When they saw that even sitting on the floor

                                                                          he

was the tallest tree on the island

                                                                 They became afraid

of his shadow   the reach of his breath

                                                                   cracked the stones

when he walked through the walls

the children filled the air like

                                                   dawn-shocked summer birds

one day of ice and snow has stopped this city

so that

                We could hear the drum

The old man

has now released us

the laugh that his heart held

in fear  makes the circle

dance

-- Luke    5 December 2013