As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs.
- James Weldon Johnson
Through a stroke of good fortune, I once met the late, great playwright August Wilson years ago in Minnesota while volunteering as an usher in exchange for free tickets to a fund-raising event. Wilson's magic first entered my life via the 1995 screen adaption of The Piano Lesson and later by virtue of the Penumbra Theatre Company in Saint Paul. The scene residually active in my imagination is when Charles Dutton, Carl Gordon, Lou Myers and Courtney B. Vance delivered Berta Berta.
Mesmerized, I sought out this Parchman Farm so brilliantly and tragi-comically lamented by Wilson's characters. Results quickly yielded that Brandford Marsalis had also paid stunning tribute to this forgotten culture in 1992, several years prior to the film.
Everyone should view the aforementioned links to grasp these chains forged for convict-lease victims so long ago but which now shackle all Americans psychologically via the proliferated sociopathy of the race construct.
Meanwhile, the Idiot Box (TV) programs into our skulls more pressing concerns such as Oil Spill 2010 but don't chickens come home to roost in the strangest of ways? Is Black Gold still Texas Tea or just a Spoiled Sea? Aren't we all now cooped in the same holding pen, ever slaving for less while cravenly hoping for more?
The slave had many means of resisting the dehumanizing effects of slavery. Religion became one of them. And through religious songs they made up from Biblical stories, they expressed their real feelings.
- Julius Lester
Singing was liquefied religion. We sang because it temporarily freed our spirits from torturous states of involuntary servitude while synchronizing our bodies with the exercise of brutal labor mandated by the framers of this society. We sang to maintain our humanity. We sang to resist. Most importantly, we sang to keep it real and steel our psyches for hell on the horizon.
Don't forget to remember those who were railroaded into building the infrastructure of this nation. From Birmingham, I share a final video in tribute to these forgotten people, our Pantheon of the Option-less.
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