One Hour

There’s always one moment in my Jazz Course where deep—and necessary— grief enters the room and we all feel the weight of unbearable sorrow. It came yesterday, a troubled but needed and welcomed guest, appropriately enough as we entered the story of the blues. My invitation came in the form of describing the tour I took recently at the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana and the Whitney Plantation Tour I took in New Orleans some years back. I shared the unfathomable suffering of people locked in dark, damp dungeons for upward of three months, living (how was this possible?) amidst their own human waste with no light, no sunshine, little food. We get hangry if our restaurant meal arrives late, complain when it’s foggy for three days straight with no sun, feel our biorhythms getting off if we miss a few days of exercise and get distressed if our toilet doesn’t flush until the plumber comes. Are we even capable of imagining the full measure of such human-created misery? Can we imagine how we could survive? Put ourselves in those Cape Coast cells?

 

Picture yourself three months living in a cesspool. Then when you’re released from the dungeon and brought out to fresh air and sunshine, it lasts for an hour or so as you get shoved into the hold of ships where we enter another living hell in the long Middle Passage sea voyage. When you finally get our feet on land again, it’s in a new alien world where you will be stripped of everything that defines us as human beings— name, language, family, religion, music, the freedom to claim our own identity— sold as property, and made to work 12-15 hour days in hot sun doing back-breaking labor for no money, little food and at the whims of the mood of slave-masters who can beat you or rape you at their whim. And without having committed any crime,  you're sentenced to live in such horrific conditions not only our entire lifetime, but our children’s and children’s children and children’s children’s children, all the way down the relentless long tunnel of human misery for some 400 years. 

 

And why? So people in a land far away can drink coffee with sugar and have a smoke afterwards. Frivolous human leisure activities that not only are unnecessary, but actually bad for your health. And when the laws that upheld and sustained this purposefully manufactured chain of deprivation, agony and wretched sorrow called chattel slavery were finally changed, the narrative of a God who approved and an economic system that depended upon it continued to wreak havoc with the Black Codes, Jim Crow, lunching without consequences, School to Prison Pipeline, Police Brutality and murder, all publicly sanctioned and approved and backed by new laws from the people who stood to benefit from it. If anyone knows a story more horrendous and gruesome than that, I’d like to hear it. 

 

You can imagine the feeling in the room after I spoke. I then turned to Rhonda Benin, a beautiful black woman in the course who sang with Linda Tillery’s Cultural Heritage Choir and asked her to sing a Field Holler, that ancestor of the Blues, to translate all of this into the Sorrow Songs enslaved human beings sang to bear up and survive. She did and the Ancestors came to listen and our tears poured out. Where to go from there?

 

Exactly where black Americans have always gone and white Americans always resisted— down into the Grief in the muck and the mire and then rising up to the heavens toward love and forgiveness (but never forgetting). And so I began to sing this song with its corresponding motions and the invitation to invite someone else to go down with me, who then invites someone else until we are all in it together.

 

Little Sally Walker, sitting in a saucer. Crying and a’weepin’ over all she has done.

Rise, Sally, rise, won’t you wipe those cryin’ eyes, won’t you

Turn to the East, Sally, turn to the West, Sally, turn to the very one that you love the best.

 

We hugged our neighbors when the game ended and went on to sing some blues.

 

Earlier, Rhonda told the story of visiting a plantation where they whitewashed the real story and talked, as so many do (except the Whitney) about the architecture and such. At the end of the tour, a smiling white woman asked Rhonda how she enjoyed it and Rhonda confessed that it was difficult. The woman said, “Oh, come on, when are you people going to get over it?” 

 

In some thirty states here in 2023, me telling the story I just told would have endangered my job. Terrified that the truth is coming out, the Republicans are scrambling to get the next bill in that forbids teachers from teaching anything that might make some of the (white) students or their parents feel uncomfortable. One complaint from someone whose poor traumatized tender soul takes offense is enough to fire the offending teacher. 

 

To which I reply:

 

“Let the offended person, child or parent or Plantation tour guide,  spend one hour in the conditions of Cape Coast castle or in the ship’s holds of the Middle Passage or in the forced labor camps called Plantations picking cotton in the hot sun, and then we’ll talk. One hour. Until then, sit down, shut up and listen to the truth. Open your heart to the grief and rise up into love. That’s the education we’ve refused and the one that might finally heal us and move us forward.”

My friends, more than ever, it's time to speak up and speak out and then sing and dance together toward the redemption we all need and deserve. May it be so.