We Will Dance When You Sing

We Will Dance When You Sing

-- for the episcopal ordination of Fernand Cheri, OFM

They would send the boy

to the edge of the land

                                       when

one of the old ones smelled a storm

See if a stranger walks in need

and bring them

                               He was the child

who did not doubt

                                 they

had seen his haze-haunted eyes

and knew

                        One new seeking

found the man who walked   pushing

a song far before him

                                      Boy and man stood

still

         unlocking the curved bone

and stone necklace    the man

leaned to the fence

                        You belong

to this

               And his song faded

before clouds blackened the sky –

Later

           one by one   they fingered

his skin   his shirt    his hair

What must we

                         carry

Tell us

what

and how

and where

                     the circle will appear

We will dance

when you sing

                               Sun sparks

the stone

                  and then

they swim in his eyes

                                      home

to where his dream-song

led

23 March 2015
New Orleans

While this poem has its own integrity, one note is offered as background. Decades ago, the first Black Catholic Bishop of the 20th century, the Most Reverend Harold R. Perry, SVD, made a gift of his pectoral cross to then-Father Fernand J. Cheri, III -- with the blessing of "you will need this some day."  

Bishop Perry was the ordaining prelate for my own ordination, May 27, 1972, in East St. Louis, Illinois. Bishop Cheri has been a constant support and collaborator of mine for many years, including his authorial contributions to Sweet, Sweet Spirit: Prayer Services from the Black Catholic Church. This man brings what is useful of our past into the present, in order to help us walk and sing and dance into our future --which is, of course, the foundational meaning of "Sankofa". 

         

“Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning”

Very specifically, this meditation is grounded in a time and place that seems a convergence of desires; frustrations and hesitations; anger and rage; and hope. As the country is drawn into commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the Selma marches, the country is also forced into staring at the children who began marching in August of 2014, declaring with their bodies, their selves, that the death of Michael Brown made the stone before the tomb of silence and submission shatter and turn to dust.

So what does “Spring” possibly mean in a week when the United States Department of Justice declares that former Officer Darren Wilson will not be prosecuted for the murder of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri; and simultaneously declare that Darren Wilson was surrounded by a culture of policing that diminished Black lives and that trivialized and corrupted the very notion that the duty of all police and “public safety” officers is to “protect and serve the citizens of the community.”  The great “Constitutional Project” that Robert P. Moses has focused on for years deals with just who is covered (and not covered) by “We” in “We the People”.  Young people across continents, cultures; across racial, ethnic and gender identities have found solidarity in saying, first, “Black Lives Matter,” and then, inevitably, that “All Lives Matter.”

Not “us” and “them” but “we” – We the People…

And yet.

In this second week of March 2015, the Oklahoma University members of a chapter of a long-notorious fraternity [Sigma Alpha Epsilon], are discovered singing, “There’ll never be a nigger SAE…You can hang them from a tree, but they will never sign with me…there’ll never be a nigger SAE.” The fraternity is the largest in the U. S, with over 15, 000 members and was founded before the beginning of the Civil War.  Hearing the chant and the subsequent pseudo-apologies of the first two members of the fraternity to be expelled from Oklahoma University, I am confronting once again the enduring darkness that is the foundation of racism in America.

At the same time as the publicity attending this public display of the camaraderie of some of this country’s future leaders, there were also public displays of yet more gatherings to mourn the deaths of unarmed black men, killed by police. – all within a week of each other. One man, Anthony Hill, in DeKalb County, Georgia was not only unarmed but was also naked – obviously manifesting signs of severe mental disassociation.  Anthony Robinson, the unarmed teenager in Madison, Wisconsin, had been a concern to his family for a long time because of his issues with mental instability and behavioral disorders.  The third man, Naeschylus Vinzant, was shot in the chest, in Aurora, Colorado, while being handcuffed by police.

The apologies of the young men who got caught – and is this not the pattern for apologies in this society? “I am sorry, less for what I did, than for being caught at doing it" – these apologies are cushioned by the protestations, “But I am not a racist.”  [A modest suggestion: before any education professional, from pre-K to graduate school, is allowed to enter a classroom as an instructor, he or she must prove competence in explaining what racism, prejudice and bias are; how they are similar and how they are different.  That simple requirement should be part of the test of any national “core” curriculum.] Yes, young person; you are a racist. But so are the people who raised you, taught you, rewarded you – and supplied you with the liquor you consumed while under the legal age.  The light has captured you and you are discovered.

Besides Sigma Alpha Epsilon, there was another Civil War era “fraternity” formed at the same time; only this other fraternity was not formed in the South and its members did not fight for the Confederate cause. This second fraternity consisted of the men who became brothers as they formed one “colored regiment” after another and joined the fight on the Union side. Because they knew who they were, and what their goal of liberation could cost them, they too sang chants as a way of deepening their band of brotherhood.  One of the great songs they used, the night before a battle, is detailed in Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), written by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of the officers of the Massachusetts 54th regiment. 

Using music in the tradition of warriors preparing themselves, these Black men were clear in their understanding that if they did not prevail in battle, they would be slaughtered, since the Confederate Army had that as a policy; taking no “colored soldiers” as prisoners. So when they stood around a fire and sang, “Keep your lamps trimmed and burning,” they did much more than make a seemingly odd appropriation of the New Testament parable of the “Wise and Foolish Virgins.”  They were declaring that, indeed, in the darkest hour before their ultimate confrontation they must (as they sang elsewhere) “hold on the light, the beautiful light.” It was not merely a rhetorical device to exhort each other, "Children don't get weary until your work is done." Indeed.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIfr5ETw9p0

When else do we more need light, but when we must confront the terrifying and terrible darkness that is without and within? And what greater lesson of culture could there be for all who are born, dwell or seek to live in this so-called “land of the free and home of the brave,” than to declare that no one can be free without a journey into the wilderness that is within the heart – the darkness for which so much collective effort is expended to keep shrouded in denial and falsification?  America has never needed a Joseph Conrad to teach itself that Jacob wrestles with the midnight angel at all times and everywhere. The singers of these songs, the freedom singers, have always been with us.

Every electronic device that has been employed to be the light that our young are keeping trimmed and burning is being used to shed light where the darkness of anonymity and denial and the transferring of blame have long ruled in this land. The victim can no longer be easily blamed. We have seen the bleeding, choking victims, splayed on the sidewalk of our cities. The threat of violence can no longer be waved as a flag of defense: not when the sufferers of post-traumatic stress (and what Black person in America is free of that condition?) are naked and stumbling toward their extinction.

The argument of false innocence -- “But I didn’t know” – has the simplest refutation. “If I have to know, you have to know.”  “If I am not exempt, you are not exempt.”  The toxic cloud of racism that corrupts the spirit of all who walk in our land is dark, indeed. But at this very specific moment in my life, I sing, “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” knowing full well that the warrior children, the men and women who have kept their eyes cast down far too long, are now holding up the light.

It is an exorcism long prayed for. Now, “everybody knows the trouble some of us have seen waking and in our nightmares."

Sooner than we may have thought, the burden is being transformed, here and there, more and more into a story that can bring power.

And courage.

Walk together, Children, don’t you get weary. And please, keep your lamps trimmed and burning. 

As Rev. Gary Davis sang a long time ago:  “Don’t get worried, for this world is almost done. Sister (Preacher/Brother) don’t stop praying (shouting); for this old world is almost done.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHayOpWimlM&index=33&list=PL5384FE34170E9995

Even when the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness knew it not, it kept on shining. 

And so it shall be now.

Nunc Dimittis

Nunc Dimittis

“…Whose Name was Simeon”

Luke 2:25-35

Smelling the smoke

                                   he sat leaning

on his stick     no more children     he prayed

enough of the squalling   the rancid odors

the stumbling  nagging parents

                                                     asking God

for what

                  he wondered

sin-free lungs    food   more cloths to cover

withered legs   and dangling useless arms

No

         more children  only break

the silence   the heart   the hope

leaning on his stick

                                   he feels the air

cool from the outside

                                      and

sudden   still   shimmering  light

not only from the greening bronze

doors pushed wider

                                    She walks

past him    nearly

                                no more than a child

who will not cry

                                    Oh   how at

last   have you found me

                                             God I threw

away    when all my little hopes

had been buried

He sits in the cloud of dark

comfort

                  and she waits

And he says

                        Now

Give him to us

we will feed

                       and feed

and feed

-- Luke 

 21 December 2014

"Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down"

Out of the depths I call to you, Lord;

Lord, hear my cry!

May your ears be attentive

to my cry for mercy.

I wait for the Lord,

my soul waits

and I hope for his word.

My soul looks for the Lord

more than sentinels for daybreak.

More than sentinels for daybreak,

let Israel hope in the Lord,

For with the Lord is mercy,

with him is plenteous redemption…” [Psalm 130: 1-2, 6-7]

And the Psalm continues the act of radical faith by proclaiming over and over that God will hear, God will forgive; God will save.  And in this summer of 2014, yet again:

A voice was heard in Ramah,

weeping and great mourning,

Rachel weeping for her children;

and she refused to be comforted,

because they were no more. (Jer. 31:15; Matt. 2:18)

The mother of Oscar Grant, the young man killed at Fruitvale Station, Oakland, California, in 2009, writes to the mother of Michael Brown, the manchild killed in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. Attending to Michael Brown’s mother is the mother of Trayvon Martin, the child killed in Sanford, Florida in 2012.  The old song says, “Mary don’t you weep/ Martha don’t you mourn…”

But we have no one’s permission to tell the mothers of sorrow when and how to grieve their sons. We can only say, "For as long as your heart is full, we are with you."

And also weeping: the grandmother of Kajieme Powell, who was 25 years old, when he was killed, “holding a steak knife” in front of a convenience store in north St. Louis, on August 19, 2014.

And the parents of Gregory Towns, who, on April 11, 2014, in East Point, Georgia, died after police shocked him with a Taser as many as 13 times because he said he was too tired to walk, due to a foot chase.

And those who are weeping over Ezell Ford, of Los Angeles, John Crawford, of Beavercreek, Ohio, and Eric Garner, of Staten Island, New York.

And the children of Rachel are male and female,

 created in the image of God,

 reflecting the beauty of our people.

 All unarmed, all killed by police officers:

Tarika Wilson, 26 (Lima, Ohio); Aiyana Jones, 7 (Detroit, Michigan); Miriam Carey, 34 (Washington, D.C.); Shereese Francis, 30 (Queens, New York); Shantel Davis, 23 (Brooklyn, New York); Sharmel Edwards, 49 (Las Vegas, Nevada); Rekia Boyd, 22 (Chicago, Illinois) Tyisha Miller, 19 (Riverside, California) Yvette Smith, 47 (Bastrop, Texas). [Compiled by Khadijah Costley White, Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt-af4wp_nU&index=20&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN

Let us be truly attentive. For if we do not hold on to this act of radical faith, then our children are dead. Finally dead. Simply dead. And we do not have their permission to leave them unfinished and defamed.  Their names shall not be “scandalized.”

A meditation that might be useful is to consider that when Abel offered a sacrifice pleasing to God, his brother, Cain, grew increasingly angry.  What is often overlooked in this story (Genesis 4: 2 – 16) is that God spoke directly to Cain and said: “Why are you angry and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Cain would not listen to God. Inviting his brother into the country, Cain slew his brother Abel. When God confronted him, asking where Abel was, Cain said, “I do not know, am I my brother’s keeper?”

God indeed did place a mark on Cain – but not a mark of “blackness” as the proponents of racism have maintained for centuries. God marked Cain with a sign that would prohibit others from slaying him. Abel, the innocent, beloved of God, was killed by his brother. And Cain was forgiven. And the world saw that sign.

Today, do we need to pray over the signs that protect those who would kill their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters? We hear the dying gasps of the children, the weeping and mourning of the fathers and mothers, the grandmothers and grandfathers, the children of the slain. And we wonder. We wonder.

Is the mark of Cain today, the police uniform, the badge, and the riot gear? And just what do they protect? And whom do they serve? Those who are captured by their own fears? Their own nakedness? Their own doubts? How deep the source, how thick the wall that must be maintained at all costs – and from the beginning to now, how do we reckon the price, the worth of a child of God?

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” James Baldwin

For every generation of those who are determined to hold on to something larger and stronger than the dark abyss -- otherwise known as the Valley of the Shadow of Death – there has been a song.  The assembly of those who crawled out of the cabins or who slipped away to the hush harbors or who gathered in the yards and kitchens of the grief-stricken, told one another to look for something to cling to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukYKKIvwjr0

And today, in the language of the harrowed heart, some of the young are finding out the wisdom of the people:  find your song and bring others within the sound of your voice to the truth you and they will need. 

This is one voice -- among many others -- emerging from the silence after the whirlwind. And he says it is “we” who sing.

J Cole: “LIFE HITS. We become distracted. We become numb. I became numb. But not anymore. That coulda been me, easily. It could have been my best friend. I’m tired of being desensitized to the murder of black men. I don’t give a fuck if it’s by police or peers. This shit is not normal.

I made a song. This is how we feel.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPzPqVqoYV8

Once a song runs through the body, the spirit awakens. 

“Deep River…My Home is Over Jordan”

An article in the New York Times for July 7, 2014, dealing with the “surge in unaccompanied minors” across the southern borders of the United States, refers to a law against human trafficking, overwhelmingly passed by both houses of the U. S. Congress in 2008.  The law is called, the “William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.” 

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/us/immigrant-surge-rooted-in-law-to-curb-child-trafficking.html

Another NYT article presents another context for the “surge” in fleeing towards the U. S. borders -- the epidemic of children being killed by gang-generated violence in Central American countries.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/world/americas/fleeing-gangs-children-head-to-us-border.html?ref=us&_r=0] 

The countries that are the focus of this – and most of the -- reporting are El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQJjMifOIpQ&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN&index=19

Each article, each television commentary, each opinion piece that I have read about this wave of sorrow, at one point or another, will creep into a discussion on whether this phenomenon is a crisis of immigration or an humanitarian crisis. My small mind is reduced to an even smaller space when I am confronted with the pictures, the stories, the “noise” that is being generated. My perennial question surfaces, “Who defines the terms by which we live?”  And I would speak that question for the children. But our failure in our long-standing tradition of collective denial has silenced that question throughout whatever it is that we call American history.  Who spoke for the hundreds of thousands of children – children the same age as these suffering migrant children – who were culled from the villages of Africa and harvested for the centuries of transatlantic enslavement?  Who spoke for the children who ran – and Frederick Douglass was a teenager when he ran – from the unutterable cruelty and abuse of domestic slavery?  Who spoke for the Mayan and Aztec and Lakota and Algonquin and Shoshone and Mississippi and Seminole children who crawled out of the woods to see their parents, grandparents and siblings slaughtered by the purveyors of “Manifest Destiny”?

Who defines the terms by which we, by which they, live?

When U. S. military went into Central America years before the Civil War; when much debate in Washington at one time focused on how to invade Caribbean countries for the expansion of slavery; when drugs and guns infested the inner cities; when gangs in Chicago and Detroit and Atlanta and Los Angeles and Houston threaten the same generation of children on this side of the border as are walking northward – then who is defining any term, in any language, that would lift up the children and say, “We stand indicted by our own hypocrisy.” Let not the judgement stand that we do not value the lives of children, anywhere. Not in Nigeria, not in Bangladesh. Not in Chicago, not in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

In the Book of Deuteronomy, clear (and, perhaps, surprising) injunctions about tithing are set down (Deut. 25:19 -- 26:15). Setting aside the first fruits of the harvest, the Israelites were to distribute the produce among the Levites (the priests of the temple); the aliens, the orphans and the widows, “so that they may eat their fill within your towns.”  So that they may eat their fill within your towns.  How radically apt is that commandment, especially for the children who are hungry and frightened and orphaned and abused and sexually assaulted all along their flight from home. Much of the hunger is due to those who appropriated their land for the diets of the industrialized north. Much of their fear of assault and death flows from the behaviors of those who scramble in the dung heap of drugs that feed the addictions of the civilized, prosperous nations in control of the resources of the planet.  Our children are aliens in their own home land. Other children, even more brutalized, more abandoned to the engines of death, are meeting them in this desert in which we wander.

Who defines the terms? And how do we live?

The sin about which the Israelites were warned by Moses was of profound importance to all of us who are narcotized by denial. “Do not forget.”  Nowhere is it more clearly articulated than in Exodus and Leviticus. It seems a compulsion of mine to repeat these verses, over and over and over. It is the foundation stone for every act of liberation that we can exercise:

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. If you do afflict them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.” [Exodus 22: 21-24] 

“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” [Leviticus 19:33]

The sin is to forget.

The sin that today infects so many of our souls, I think, is to deny that we ever knew. But some of us are part of the unbroken story, the unending song: 

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

Of course, James Baldwin understood sin, and the price one paid when one chooses denial. But he also speaks, prophesies about salvation:

Salvation is as real, as mighty, and as impersonal as the rain, and it is yet as private as the rain in one’s face.  It is never accomplished; it is to be reaffirmed every day and every hour. There is absolutely no salvation without love: this is the wheel in the middle of the wheel. Salvation does not divide. Salvation connects, so that one sees oneself in others and others in oneself…It is a mighty fortress, even in the teeth of ruin or at the gates of death. It protects one from nothing except one thing: one will never curse God or man. [“To Crush a Serpent”, in James Baldwin: The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, p.203]

We do not dare trample the children as if we and they are not the same. We define the terms by which they live. Or do not live. And they define us, when they stare at us and cry.

“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.