Growing up in the deep South, I heard a lot of story-telling, on front porches, on the party-line, in kitchens, in beauty shops. But the singing I heard (outside of church, I mean) was sung by our black neighbors and farm workers. Background music, I grew up thinking of it, but when my friend, poet doris davenport, scolded me, saying, "We are tired of being background music for white people," I realized she was right, and more important, that I was wrong in thinking of that singing as "background music." It was, as Evie Shockley sings in her poem, "a background in music. "
On this day when we celebrate the life and words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I remember those voices, how their songs wove their way into my deepest self without my knowing it, and how I am still trying to learn how to harmonize with them.
Legato
.”..we sang everything there was to say.”
 |
| doris |
---a background in music (from the new black, Wesleyan U.P.)
 |
| Evie |
When the bell
rang out noontime,
they lounged under oak trees
and drank from a mason jar
and drank from a mason jar
sweet tea the taste
of a lemon slice lingering
at stovetops
and wash basins
cradles
and deathbeds
their voices kept
rising and falling
like wind riffling
cotton fields
folding sheets
scrubbing floors,
spinning mayhaw juice
into a red thread
they were all the time
singing
but we didn't listen
because it was backdrop
to what we sang
back ground
and ground back into
darkest leaf mold
that covered
the root of our other
life theirs
with which we never learned
how to harmonize.
Pembroke Magazine, 2012
With Doll, Patsy, and Lois, at a wedding celebration for Lois's son.
