"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

Wade in the Water, Children

During an intensely engaging November weekend, I attended and spoke at the funeral of one of my oldest friends. We began grade school together, in 1950, at St. Augustine’s Mission for Colored Catholics, in East St. Louis. Jacquelyn Stanback Mosley was the smartest person I knew. After she graduated from high school, she married and began her career in higher education, leading to three degrees. For many years she was the medical affairs coordinator of the Grace Hill Neighborhood Health Center in St. Louis. With her husband (Marshall), she raised six children and embraced grand- and great-grandchildren.  Cancer made an aggressive intrusion into her life, a life extremely well-lived, with conscious grace and a dedication to service.

The next day, I was the invited preacher/presider at the Sunday liturgies at St. Alphonsus “Rock” Church in St. Louis. That had been Jacquelyn’s parish for twenty-five years. November has been named “Black Catholic History Month,” and I had agreed, weeks earlier to being one of the guests at the parish for that observance. For the next day, Veterans Day, I had also earlier agreed to celebrate a Mass at the Loyola Academy, a Jesuit- sponsored middle school at the edge of St. Louis University. Sixty-two sixth, seventh and eighth grade African American and Hispanic male students assembled in the chapel for the weekly all-school mass, coordinated by the Jesuit chaplain and members of the eighth-grade class. One of the staff agreed to provide a song for the worship event.  And the senior religion teacher left the campus to bring a special visitor to the liturgy.

As I was in the chaplain’s office, vesting for the Mass, in walked Sr. Antona Ebo, FSM, one of my great guides in righteous living, in truth telling, and in perseverance.  Sr. Antona established herself as a national justice worker when she defied the inner voice that cautioned, “no”, when one of the leaders of  her religious community suggested that Sr. Antona should make the journey southward and upward. After much prayer and discernment – and some very deep breathing -- she made known her intention to join John Lewis, and his associates on the now-famous March from Selma to Montgomery. The organizers of that march wanted religious leaders to be at the front of the march, in order to make clear and plain the prophetic foundations of the struggle for racial justice and human rights.  By countering the  “no” that haunted her with a deeply rooted, “yes,” Sr. Antona announced herself as a leader, both in the Roman Catholic Church and in the nation. She became one of the founding members of the National Black Catholic Sisters’ Conference, in 1968. From numerous documentaries and scholarly interviews to honorary doctorates, Sr. Antona has shone her light, over and over. She walked into the office where I was vesting for Mass; and something leapt inside my soul. She brought the unassailable authority of her life to the room. All she had to do was be present.

The scene: A room full of young men of color between the ages of twelve and fifteen, looking at two people who had pushed against the currents of racism in society and in the Catholic Church. It was a weekend crowded with the stimulus of history. My friend’s funeral, watching the brilliantly conceived film, “Twelve Years a Slave”; preaching at one of the most respected black Catholic sacred sites and then sharing the “Welcome Table” with Sr. Antona and dozens of the heralds of our future.  So it was altogether appropriate that the young staff member started playing “Wade in the Water” as our opening song. Even though I had some strong ideas of how to weave together my remarks about the occasion with the scripture readings of the day, the song said to me: “Just let us in, and we will give you what you need to say.” The ancestors always arrive on time.

So I told stories, especially about some of the journeying Sr. Antona and I had made, carrying hope with  us the whole time – the hope that the generation seated before us would be preparing themselves to shape their (and our) futures. As is usual when I use “Wade in the Water” as an outline for a talk, I broke the phrase into its components, first acting out the different ways one could confront water. Not “tread” in the water; not “drown” in the water; not “paddle” in the water; but “wade” in it. Push against nature’s resistance, not losing your cool, and looking good as you make your progress. Pausing at various references in scripture for getting into the water. The Exodus story and then the crossing of “the Band that Moses led,” over the Jordan, under the leadership of Joshua. The baptism of Jesus in that same Jordan river and the wonderful, odd and beautiful story of Jesus speaking with the man at the edge of the temple pool, called Bethesda (John 5:1 – 9). The belief was that any who were infirmed would be healed if they could be in the pool when the angel of the Lord descended and “stirred” (or “troubled”) the waters. The man Jesus encounters “had no one to put” him in the water. So Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”

The last aspect of the song that usually needs some attention is, “Wade in the Water, Children.” From  the construction of the song, it is clear that elders are exhorting children to push against their fear of  the unknown (or even the probable) and get into the water – the challenges, the obstacles, the dangers  of life – and step into the world that they cannot escape. Not all water will drown you. Not all the world  will overwhelm you. Not every danger will kill you. We made it over to the other shore; now let the  sound of our singing – our testimony, our witness – guide you through. Your history is an effective  guide.

But somebody has to teach our children how to hear the song, sing the song; and look good while wading into whatever comes rushing at them. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?av08GHz_9C4&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN]

The illustration: The musician had planned only the one song. The first singing could have used much improvement. It was obvious that the young participants did not “own” the song. Their efforts to find a key were admirable. Not necessarily effective; but admirable. The awkwardness of the performance was one of the sparks that gave me the push to explain the song. When it was repeated during the offering of the gifts – after the sermon – there was much more power in the singing. During the time for communion only the twelve or so students who were Catholic came forward to receive the Host. But all were encouraged to step forward for a blessing. The power of that procession nearly collapsed my heart. Such open, honest, sincere energy came toward me in those two lines; bringing me as close to tears as I have ever been at a Mass. Sr. Antona joined me in the formal final blessing, thanking them for moving on up, a little higher. When we know the song, it can claim us. Once again, the chords of “Wade in the Water” enjoined us. Oh, the final performance of the song.  It was theirs. Full lung power; open throats; and the smiles on their faces made the song shine.

At the waterside, we blessed each other.

"A Long Way From Home"

When some brilliant, charismatic and eloquent young African Americans reflect on the state of our culture today, there are certain perceptions that wound my heart when I hear them.  For one significant example, The Reverend Otis Moss made the following comment in an interview conducted by the Center for American Progress:
There is a tradition in certain black churches of what I call the merging of our blues with the Gospel. In order for you to accurately sing gospel music, [you must know that] gospel music is built on the chords of the blues. And I think in the best of the black church tradition, the blues speaks to the existential, to what you’re dealing with. And the best of our tradition says, “This is the reality, this is the existential crisis, this is the problem. We serve a God who demands that we take our blues and sing the Gospel simultaneously.” [http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/news/2013/07/19/70064/merging-the-blues-with-the-gospel-rev-otis-moss-iii-on-trayvon-martin-and-building-a-more-united-america/#.UgVJaTbQby0.email]

"God demands that we take our blues and sing the Gospel simultaneously.”  Somewhere or other, I thought to myself, the spiritual and cultural ancestors of Reverend Moss would be shaking their heads over that sincere insight of his. If there is anything we need to renew in our intellectual and theological tradition, it is the central fact that the enslaved Africans who began communicating with each other, “huddled spoon-fashioned” in the ships’ holds, became the exemplary post-modern existential actor when (in the words of Vincent Harding), they chose to survive. We know that part of the science of enslavement as it was refined for maximum control of the captured African children and adults entailed separating the captured from those who spoke the same language. Watching the late Bede Abram perform his introduction to Black Theology, telling us to hear the moaning of the chained Africans as an act of resistance and of restoration of the self, I learned to send my imagination into the moment.

A child begins crying. Far on the other side of the floating dungeon, a mother disconnected from her own offspring – or a father, lost to his children – begins humming a “sleep song” and the sound moves through the darkness. Another throat takes up the sound and soon, the women and men and children are a community-of-the-moment on more levels than contained by their common imprisonment. The captors hear these sounds and the disquiet of their souls intensifies. They cannot control the sound of the darkness; nor can they dismiss its power.  At the initiation of the groaning and murmuring, the sending of sound to comfort the disconnected, something marvelous, strange, at once old and new, entered into the world.  Bruno Chenu says it well: “In African music no one remains outside the singing.” (The Trouble I've Seen: the big book of Negro Spirituals, Chenu, 88)

Yes, the Blues speak to the existential condition. What Moss says has been asserted by Douglass, by Du Bois, by Albert Murray, by James Cone; and by performer after performer. Those who embody the blues tradition have possessed “a deep-seated sense of exclusion, disaffection, alienation, disillusionment, detachment, dissatisfaction, disorientation, and so on…” These singer/writer/artist/lovers are known as “Blues Heroes” – by Albert Murray (in The Hero and the Blues), and by many other critics.  But they are not first and foremost. The piled-up descriptors just mentioned fit those on the long walk to the ships; those who were locked in floating prisons; those who sang in order to use their singing to break through the walls within which they existed.

Post-modernist?  Absolutely.  Existential?  Before breakfast.  Africans became “black” through the process by which they were permanently dislocated from all sense of home; by which trauma was deliberately induced through rape, torture, and sensory deprivations. There was no past by which to be nourished, no future for which to plan. Only the hungry, scarring present to be endured.  And they moaned. They plotted. They performed non-verbal intricacies of communication that are still present in the culture today.  Black was not the condition of enslavement; it was the result of their acts of transcendence performed over and over. They started with the “blues condition” and used their cultural genius to reconstruct that which the enslavers were, with demonic determination, attempting to grind into submissive dust.   Chenu also says this:
Through all these musical manifestations, a communal identity was built up. The slaves did not have a wide choice of means to recognize each other in the diversity of their origins and grow into belonging to a community of destiny.  But song was one of them. It allowed the group to exist, and to last, on the basis of a common identity that was forged by the creativity of vocal expression. (95)

A community of destiny.  The community of the blues artists lasts about as long as the song lasts – or if the singer/performer is unusually lucky, until the next morning.  The Blues have an incredible power to “tell it like it is.” But these songs cannot tell anyone “what it ought to be.” It does not surprise me that many scholars will discuss the “crossover” phenomenon of blues music. At many concerts, these critics contend, the vast majority of the audiences are non-blacks. Black people seem less interested in the traditions of the blues. And this has been noticed and remarked upon since the middle of the 20th century.  But more and more, we have to admit, the same thing can – and must – be said about the audience for the body of Black Sacred Song known as “the Spirituals.”  Reverend Otis Moss implies this in our opening quotation. A blending of Blues and Gospel music is, in his reckoning, “the best of the black church tradition.” 

That indeed may be true.  At least the newer tradition. Very few travel very far back into the Black tradition to hear or sing the Spirituals. But fewer African Americans would consider themselves “churched” by any sociological measure.  This phenomenon has also been increasingly common since the middle of the last century.  From the days immediately following the end of the Civil War (whenever it did indeed end…) there were many who no longer wished to have anything to do with those old days, those old ways.  The young people who formed the Fisk Jubilee Singers, for only one example, had to be persuaded to sing the Spirituals.  They preferred to perform music that proved their emancipated status. But it was their performances of the Spirituals, not Mozart, which allowed them to raise the money to endow their university.

The Blues and much of what is known as Hip Hop music today seem to manifest the best of the existential mandate of blackness.  The Blues tell us “what is real.”  Most commercialized, corporately appropriated Hip Hop seems to tell us “what is fantasy” according to the best of classical Hollywood gangster or western films. But what will feed the ever-present hunger to form a community of destiny? Again, who will sing these songs?  We have millions for whom “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” could have been composed this morning. And we, all of us, know that in spite of the great symbolic exceptions, the rest of that song is also true: we are “a long ways from home.”  The old ones are asking, “What will you build, my child?”

Tried Them on at the Gates of Hell

The 1963 birthday revisiting continues. Last week as I was surveying my bookshelves for a copy of slave stories from the Georgia Coast, I found another part of the birthday gift my family sent me while I was sitting in a house of studies in rural Minnesota. Inscribed:  “To Joseph Brown, N.S.J—for Birthday—September 5, 1963—from the Family.” It is in my mother’s handwriting. From the Family. My, what that simple line says to me, fifty years later.  The book was retrieved and sent to me by one of the dearest friends I could ever hope to have.  “Dear Joseph, Birthdays are appropriate occasions for reconciliation. Please accept this book from the “Society” as an apology for the ignorance of the former days . . . discovered this in the library. By returning it to you, I hope to express at least some understanding of its contents.  Happy Birthday.” [Editorial comments: “N.S.J”—“novice member of the Society of Jesus.” “Society”—internal shorthand for “the Society of Jesus”]

The book? Strength to Love, a collection of essays by Martin Luther King, Jr., explaining in the clearest language possible the truly life or death choice behind his theology of non-violence.  The friend? One of the first people to prove the possibility of James Baldwin’s understanding that a bonding occur between: “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others.” [Again, from The Fire Next Time]

In an interview published in The Black Scholar [reprinted in Conversations with James Baldwin), Baldwin puts it plain, as plain as he could be when his interlocutors would allow him room to soar like an eagle.  He is asked whether political themes play a role in his writing. Oh, the man reminds us all that he left the church but the church never left him: “The role of the artist is exactly the same role, I think, as the role of the lover.  If you love somebody, you honor at least two necessities at once.  One of them is to recognize something very dangerous, or very difficult.  Many people cannot recognize it at all, that you may also be loved; love is like a mirror.  In any case, if you love somebody, you honor the necessity endlessly, and being at the mercy of that love, you try to correct the person whom you love. Now that’s a two way street.  You’ve also got to be corrected.  As I said, the people produce the artist, and it’s true. The artist also produces the people.  And that’s a very violent and terrifying act of love.  The role of the artist and the role of the lover.  If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.  Insofar as that is true, in that effort, I become conscious of the things that I don’t see.  And I will not see without you, and vice versa, you will not see without me.  No one wants to see more than he sees.  You have to be driven to see what you see.  The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which I call love.  You can call it a poem, you can call it whatever you like.  That is how people grow up.  An artist is here not to give you answers but to ask you questions.”

My family sent me Baldwin and King. These men anointed me from afar, as a child in the wilderness is claimed for some task that will benefit the people. “Find the words and use them well. Speak honestly and tirelessly to those you love, even when they allow you ‘no name in the street’.”  That is all right, in the long run. “I told Jesus it would be all right if He change my name…” I never told the world it had anybody’s permission to call me anything but a Child of God.

King's acceptance of that name, “Child of God,” influences his writings in Strength to Love. His variation on the theme of consciously loving the other is to talk about having a “tough mind and a tender heart.” Both King and Baldwin start with an assumption concerning the dominating culture that is America eternally (or at least from then to now) about African American people. African Americans are, in the mind of the other, incapable of the “higher faculties” (as Jefferson claimed about Phillis Wheatley). But we actually do know what we are talking about, when we talk about racism, prejudice, violence, economic inequality, oppression, and abuse. We remain ignorant only at the risk of death. “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”  And for King, making America conscious meant forcing the guardians of power and domination to see the hatred that was soul-destroying for all concerned. Deciding to love the one who seeks to destroy you takes the “dogged strength” of Du Bois; the artistic genius of every singer and dancer and preacher and comedian and photographer and poet (traditional or contemporary) we have ever allowed to correct us. From Frederick Douglass to Richard Pryor; from Sojourner Truth to Nina Simone; from Bert Williams to Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield and Sam Cooke; from Wheatley to Nikki Giovanni; we have always given birth to the poets to call us all to consciousness. 

But who are they today? And where do they prophesy and challenge us? What dismays me more than a little is that in the face of the rabid forces that refuse to admit the reality we all share, the artist/poet/prophets have gone underground or have become nearly mute in their utterance.  King demonstrates a pure joy in his rhetoric when he describes “softminded individuals.” (Ah, so, yes; he is a poet, too.  A purveyor of terrifying love.) “Softminded individuals are prone to embrace all kinds of superstitions. Their minds are constantly invaded by irrational fears....The softminded man always fears change…For him the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea…Dictators, capitalizing on softmindedness, have led men to acts of barbarity and terror that are unthinkable in civilized society.” And then King introduces a reference that is as pertinent today as it was fifty years ago—and also eighty-eight years ago: “Adolf Hitler realized that softmindedness was so prevalent among his followers that he said, ‘I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.’”  

Leaving absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone who has picked up this book to read, King says, finally,”Softmindedness is one of the basic causes of race prejudice….Race prejudice is based on groundless fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings…There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance.  The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of softmindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.” (Strength to Love, 2-5).

Young females shot and raped in Afghanistan for attending school. Children beaten, tortured and killed in Syria.  The lost children of the Congo. Orphans in Haiti. Trayvon Martin. Oscar Grant.  The Tea Party. The denial of essential validity for Barrack Obama. Sequestration.  Homeless veterans. Hungry children in the U. S. al Shabaab - a Somalia-based al-Qaeda affiliate group, murdering the innocent in Nairobi.

We know whereof we speak. We have always known that we began in hell and had to fashion our wings so that we could fly away.  Ah, but then, we – as profoundly as Melville’s Ishmael – “we have returned to tell what the end will be.”  “We know our wings are gonna fit us well…We tried them on at the gates of hell.”  Without love, for ourselves, our children and those humble enough to be conscious, we would have crashed long ago. Or believed that the fire was fatal and never tried to fly.

Who is there today to sing the truth-telling song we need, so that we can learn to move in the darkness?