Pamela's Blog 22

Published on Thursday, June 11, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Our Real Work”

12.13.11 Addendum: “…to speak for the silenced ancestors… and manifest… make real in the world… their longing to be free.”

A tangled web of willing witnesses…

…call down in finger-knitted unity…

…“Be free! Be free!”

by Pamela Satterwhite

It was Spring Break and I was staying at my mother’s house when my father had a heart attack and fell out of bed. One of my brothers, living with him at the time, found him and called 911. He was hospitalized.

When the doctor finally came to us he said, with a wry smile and a shake of his head, that it wasn’t a heart attack, that he’d simply had too much to drink the night before and had passed out. I was older then and racism was no longer the vague thing it had been for me when I was a child. I knew it when I saw it. But we accepted their pronouncement. We didn’t know what else to do.

One evening while he was still in the hospital, my brothers and I went to see him on our way to a movie. My father was propped up in bed with a book in his hands, a book I’d given him, called Been Here And Gone. He loved the book. His eyes were bright as he talked about how the book had captured the symbolism of ‘the train’ for our people growing up in the South of the twenties and thirties.

The people who lived alongside tracks, in the towns and in the fields, could also ride them, walk them, work for them. The railroad touched them all; it created impressions that became part of song and music.
Trains were nearly everything. They made men want to pick up and go away…Trains figured in song as images of despair, desire, escape, success in love, lonesomeness, fear, awe and exasperation; beyond all these, trains offered deliverance through death. Trains took people home, if they had a home; they took people down a long road, if they were looking for a home.
Engines and drive-wheels and whistles, traveling through dark miles in the wakeful hours just before day, created impressions of sound that pulled and twisted at people’s hearts. The roar of a fast freight, high-balling from no known point of departure to no known destination, struck a music in the ears of those who heard it and were left behind. Musicianers played with the rise and fall of sound, mimicking the far-to-near-then-far-again shuffle of the train winding through hills and valleys. They blew its whistles through harmonicas and horns and reed flutes; they thrashed out its coughing and scurrying rhythms across the sound boxes of their guitars. Many harp-blowers, like Horace Sprott, were proud to “call the train,” just as their grandparents had “called the wood dove.” …Between each couplet, he blew on his harp the sound of a train whistle as it would have come from far away. (Frederic Ramsey, Jr.)

My father made the sound, his face alive with the memory. It was a lonesome sound, he said. It made you long to get gone.

Then he began to tell me another story.

He was on a train riding through the South. The Second World War had ended and he was going home, taking the train back to Texas. At a station somewhere in Mississippi he walked out on the platform, all tall and proud in his U.S. Army uniform, to stretch his legs. A group of white men standing at the end of the platform looked him over, and told him he better get his black ass back on that train.

“What did you do?” I asked my Daddy.

“I got my black ass back on that train.”

But he left a piece of himself back there on the planks. And not he alone.

There are so many stories of the pain racism has inflicted. Stories that are never told because, we think, to do so means we’re stuck in a blaming mode, living in the past. But I believe the opposite is true, that not speaking our pain is what keeps us stuck – as a nation. For not speaking and remembering robs our ancestors’ pain of meaning; and it robs us of ourselves.

Here in America, we deny our roots when it’s our roots that could make us strong, give us a mooring apart from the meaningless tasks required of us by jobs.

Our real work – I’m convinced – is to face the pain we’ve experienced…are experiencing.

I’d like to say thank you to my neighbor, Gennenice Chapman Johnson, who died this past Wednesday, June 3rd, for her courage in modeling how to start doing that hard work.

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Pamela's Blog 22

Published on Thursday, June 11, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Our Real Work”

12.13.11 Addendum: “…to speak for the silenced ancestors… and manifest… make real in the world… their longing to be free.”