This is going to seem like a long meandering entry that takes its time getting to its point, but please bear with me. As those who follow my Facebook newsfeed may know, I am currently rehabbing from hip replacement surgery. In the course of that rehab a musical phrase kept occurring to me: “I’m not what I used to be, I’m not what I want to be” I wracked my brain, searched the internet for those lyrics. Where had I heard them? Then I finally remembered. I used to teach four courses per year (I know, seems like a luxury nowadays) at a college. Some courses had to be taught in a two-year sequence, but every two years I had an open spot to teach a course of my own devising. Over 25 years ago with my free course I taught a course called “Redemption Songs” which looked at African American history through the prism of its religious and related secular music. It took as its title and central point Bob Marley’s song “Redemption song” which begins
“Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit
But my hand was made strong
By the ‘and of the Almighty
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly
Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
‘Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
The course was about how such redemption songs enabled African Americans to survive and move forward “triumphantly.” We looked at work songs, spirituals, blues, gospel, r&b, Motown, and finally reggae songs to explore the relationship between the music and survival. I remember we had some friends over for dinner and when the conversation turned to what I was currently working on. I played for them some of the music I was “auditioning” for the course. My friend turned to me in amazement. “You got somebody to pay you to listen to this music?” As I sheepishly said yes, he just shook his head. As part of the course, I showed a documentary “Say Amen Somebody” about the rise of African American gospel music built around the career of Thomas A. Dorsey who played the blues with Bessie Smith and composed many of the first gospel songs including “Precious Lord Take My Hand.” The featured artists in the documentary included the Barrett sisters who were quite well known and loved within the black community, but little outside it until this movie. Sure enough I found the phrase I had been looking for within one of their performances of “He chose me.” in the film. It wasn’t a part of the normal lyric for the song but an expostulation they added. It also led me to another of their performances in the film, this time of the song “No Ways Tired.” This song had begun life as an African American spiritual and had been “gospelized” by the famous gospel choir leader James Cleaveland. The Barrett sisters’ version had the lyric:
“Nobody told me that the road would be easy, but I don’t believe that he brought me this far to leave me.
Sometimes at night you know my way gets drear, but I hear my God say I am here.”
Given the song’s origin as a spiritual during slavery I could imagine those lyrics going through the head of a runaway slave or just a slave who had a hard day. The lyrics fit my current situation, but my situation seemed so petty in the face of those faced in slavery and freedom by so many other African Americans. This reminded me of an opinion piece I had read in the New York Times on February 13, 2022 by African American historian Dr. Tiya Mills:
“Everyone around me seems to be talking about the end. The end of nearly a million American lives in the Covid pandemic; the end of American democracy; the end of a public bulwark against racism and blatant antisemitism; the end of the post-Cold War peace in Europe; the end of the stable climate; and the end of our children’s best futures, to name a few undeniable possibilities. A condition of apocalyptic anxiety has overtaken us, raising our collective blood pressure, and sending us deeper into a maelstrom of suspicion, conspiracy thinking and pessimism. I confess that I have also been down in this foxhole of doomsday thinking, but hearing it voiced by one of my children, a girl who should have a whole, vibrant life ahead of her, snapped me out of my anxious crouch.
This is just a change. I have given these impromptu words of maternal reassurance some thought since then, and I am not prepared to retract them yet. This is not the end. It is a change, albeit the largest and most dramatic transformation that many of us have seen in our lifetimes. Change is often frightening. We strive for stability. Because of the stress change causes, we often shrink or freeze in the face of it.”
She continues:
“The capacity to recognize those moments of emergency, catastrophe and impending loss as moments of change and then to anticipate what might come next are part of the psychological and emotional tool kit that saved Black America….Despite our anxieties, we are not standing on the precipice at the end of America or the end of the world. Instead, we face change of a nature and magnitude that we may not fully perceive, but which history gives us a way to confront.”
I live in the state of Texas nowadays where conservatism has such an iron grip on politics, that I often feel like Dr. Mills describes. It is a state where actions to stem the spread of Covid are prohibited; there are bans on abortion; teaching history that might make white folks uncomfortable is prohibited; books that describe different experiences of America are banned by conservative parents who are taking over school boards; where walls are being built to keep out immigrants, and where the fossil fuel industry prevents meaningful climate change.
I will take her advice however and work to create change and mitigate the effects of these policies to the best of my abilities. My own problems seem “a hill of beans in this crazy mixed-up world” to quote the movie Casablanca. Perspective, it’s good for the soul.
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2 Responses to “Perspective”
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Thank you so much for this. (I wish I’d taken a class with you at Bowdoin.)
I’m just wrapping up a long career in the public schools. Perspectives for sure. Thanks for helping right my boat this morning.
Thanks for reading it. Sorry we didn’t connect at Bowdoin. Really love your art.