Stand Up Straight and Sing! (17 page)

I take great solace in knowing that even as race continues to divide us, innocence abounds. I am reminded of this when I think of a little friend of mine, a French girl I shall call Yvonne, who was no more than eight years old when I came to know her through her parents, who taught French, English, and Spanish in an international school in the South of France. Yvonne had a lot of different-looking friends because of the nature of her environment, and so she tended to focus on traits and qualities such as kindness or laughter in describing them. The way children do. One Sunday afternoon after a lovely, leisurely lunch, she and I went for a walk in the fields of her parents’ property, having a fine visit, when she told me about a new friend she had made. “He is from a country called Africa,” she said proudly. “That is a place very much south of here, but they have some of the most beautiful people I have ever seen. My new friend is wonderful. He is just such a very nice person and I am so glad he’s in my class at school.”

“He’s from Africa?” I inquired.

“Yes,” she said excitedly. “We know where Africa is because we saw it on the globe in school.”

That child went on and on, talking about her new friend and the continent from where he came and how nice he was, and never once did she mention his skin color. So I asked her about it: “Yvonne, what color is his skin? Does it look like mine or does it look like yours?”

Her answer was so simple. “Je vais aller jeter un coup d’oeil demain,” she said: “I will have a look tomorrow.”

What is more beautiful than this? She just saw
him.
Nothing more. Nothing less. Just a beautiful new friend who came from a continent called Africa. This helps confirm what I grasped instinctively as a child: that society will, inevitably, come to the understanding that racism is mindless, lacking in all the light that is within us. And despite all evidence to the contrary, I still hold to that belief today. I am an eternal optimist and thus believe that one day all of humankind will embrace the fact that we started from the same basin and share a common origin. Our migrations around this planet determined our manner of speaking and the way we look, but that’s about as far as the true differences go. It is wonderful to see us evolve on the issue of race. Laws have been changed, and although there are still people wedded to their thoughts and feelings in bigotry and prejudice, many more are coming to understand the emptiness of such thoughts. And the times have, in many important ways, changed. I do wish, like so many others, that my parents had lived to see President Barack Obama take the oath of office. Not once, but twice! I feel that both my mother and father, along with countless others, were disappointed that their hard work, particularly of the 1950s and ’60s, did not yield more tangible fruit in their lifetimes. But I remain steadfast in my belief—the belief planted in my heart by Janie and Silas Norman Sr., that some fine day, the world will right itself and say, collectively, “Well, yes, that person looks different from me, has a different belief system, a different creed, but what does it matter? We are all one gargantuan family: human.”

Interlude: Marian Anderson

“MY LORD, WHAT A MORNING”

My Lord, what a morning,

When the stars begin to fall.

Done quit all my worldly ways, join that Heavenly band,

My Lord, what a morning,

When the stars begin to fall.

One of the neighbors who lived next to my childhood home in Augusta was Miss Daisy. She did not have children of her own, but she had us, the Norman kids, and we loved her as she loved us. She was really Mrs. McCluskey, the wife of a well-known minister, but we children all referred to the female grownups in our lives by employing “Miss” and their first names.

I have many fond memories of Miss Daisy, and in particular the two huge, beautiful pear trees in her backyard and the phonograph that adorned her living room—both of which she allowed us to use practically at will. But, I promise you, by the time I left home for university, I had had my fill of pears. It seemed that every piece of fruit those trees bore ended up in our house one way or the other—as pear purée, pear preserves, canned pears, baked pears, pear pies and tarts. Everything you could do with fruit, we did with Miss Daisy’s pears. I was pear-free at Howard University. The season for the cherry tree in our own yard was much shorter, and one had to be quick to beat the birds to the harvest, so I never tired of cherries.

In our house, we did not have a phonograph that played seventy-eights, but Miss Daisy did, along with a wonderful collection of recordings, many of which had been given to her as gifts. Miss Daisy loved music, and as a nurse at University Hospital, she understood its healing power and was one of the first persons I knew to have played music for her patients. Miss Daisy never once hesitated to allow free access to her living room and to her phonograph. I could visit whenever she was at home and enjoy listening to her recordings.

One of the recordings to which I listened at Miss Daisy’s house has never left my mind: it was a 1937 disk of Marian Anderson performing Brahms’s “Alto Rhapsody”—a wonderfully extended song for male chorus and orchestra, set to the text of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Harzreise im Winter” (“A Winter Journey in the Harz”). I am still as inspired by the text and this music as I was all those years ago when it was not absolutely clear to me what all the German words meant. But somehow I felt that the words were important. I wondered how a female voice could sound so deep, so rich, so beautiful. At the time, I was more accustomed to what I now know to have been soprano voices. Of course, Marian Anderson was a famed contralto. I listened again and again to the recording, mesmerized by that voice and somewhat amused that Miss Daisy’s phonograph bore no resemblance to the one we had at home, which played LPs and which had the little disk that held our thirty-threes in place and allowed them to drop down to be played one by one. This machine at Miss Daisy’s house seemed a far more serious piece of equipment.

The name Marian Anderson was already a part of my consciousness. For several years, in the celebration of Negro History Week—which later became Black History Month—I had been encouraged by my mother to go to the library, to read as much as I could find about this great lady, and to make her story my assignment for this single week of celebration of our unique history. Our parents and teachers made certain that we knew the stories of renowned African Americans past and present, and so I was aware of Marian Anderson’s importance in the world, along with performers like Mattiwilda Dobbs, a fellow Georgian, and Roland Hayes, both internationally known opera singers, as well as other luminaries like Ralph Bunche, Jackie Robinson, and, later, Hank Aaron. The list became longer as my knowledge and experience increased.

One day, a year or two after my wonderment at hearing “The Alto Rhapsody,” I was playing in the yard with pals when my mother called to me to say, “There’s something on television I want you to see.” It was summertime and early evening, with the promise of several more hours of daylight. I was having a good time outside and did not welcome the idea of going inside to watch television.

This, of course, was at a time when television was not the vehicle for trivial entertainment it is today. We did not so much as have a set in our home until I was about nine years old. We had our favorite shows:
The Firestone Hour,
a classical music presentation sponsored by the Firestone Tire Company, which featured live American symphony-orchestra performances. Then on Sunday afternoons,
Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts,
with the New York Philharmonic, was a must-see. This was followed by a program that my brothers and I also loved, which had nothing at all to do with music:
Wild Kingdom.
We would all sit together early on Friday evenings to watch
The Goodyear Television Playhouse,
which offered live theater on television—imagine that! This is where I first saw a young Julie Harris and the heralded Geraldine Fitzgerald along with such famous English actors as Laurence Olivier. Television certainly had its merits.

Still, playing happily in the yard, just beyond the garden of corn and cucumbers and beets and greens and okra we tended and prepared for our family meals, was much more fun, and I wanted to stay outside.

“No, this is very important,” my mother insisted.

I dusted myself off and went inside to watch this important television program. And right there, on our console black-and-white television set with the rabbit ears on top, was the story of the woman whose singing had entranced me a year or two earlier: Marian Anderson, in a documentary of her life,
The Lady from Philadelphia.

I sat there, totally transfixed by the narrative of this beautiful, stately, majestic African American woman singing all over the world, in several languages. I was completely engrossed by the images of her being presented at court in Norway, England, and Austria. And though I was beginning to process the separate and unequal treatment we faced in the South, I nevertheless had a hard time understanding how a woman as magical as Marian Anderson could face the same discrimination, the same obstacles, as all other African Americans. Seeing her image in our living room that afternoon, I am sure, ignited a passion in me—gave me insight into what could be. I was singing at the time at all different types of events in our community, and singing was as natural as breathing. I had no thought of singing as a possible profession. A path to such a goal was not apparent.

Around the same time, I found and read Miss Anderson’s biography,
My Lord, What a Morning.
By now, I was a total devotee. I could hardly bear to read about the trials she’d faced, the hardships placed in her path in her own country.

A WORLD-RESPECTED AND ADMIRED ARTIST
, Marian Anderson’s voice was described by none other than Arturo Toscanini as being “a voice that comes around once in a century.” She sang the world over, at a time when an African American classical singer was an anomaly; there were so few. The reverence she garnered around the world was clouded by the separate and absolutely unequal laws of the day. Despite her talent and extraordinary ability, Miss Anderson was barred from studying at the colleges, conservatories, and universities that would have given her the opportunity to work with those able to support such an enormous gift. At this time, historically black colleges and universities offered wonderful choirs and courses that prepared students for teaching positions in music, but not solo-performance studies.

Even though Miss Anderson saw her professional life truly soar in the years leading up to her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955, this grand lady of the world was relegated to segregated train cars, saw doors to hotels and restaurants closed to her, and was even banned from performing before integrated audiences. Yet on the stages of the smallest church halls and high school auditoriums, she offered that much-revered voice with a majesty that was hers uniquely. And when she lifted her beautiful voice for the masses on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the 1939 concert organized by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a fitting response to the Daughters of the American Revolution’s refusal to allow the great Miss Anderson to perform on its stage at Constitution Hall, Marian Anderson forever solidified her place in America’s consciousness—in America’s history. She demonstrated the full meaning of her faith and her humility when she offered as her first song that Easter Sunday morning “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”

My country, ’tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing.

It was the actor Ossie Davis, a friend of Anderson’s who had been a student at Howard University at the time, who recounted to me the details of that groundbreaking concert and who spoke so movingly of just how subtly, powerfully, she used her voice that day in what is widely recognized as the first-ever public protest concert in America.

“There was a chill in the air,” he said. “Spring had not quite settled in on the Potomac, but the sun was shining, and once we all packed together it was fine. And when she came out, there were all those microphones and television cameras waiting to capture the moment. Miss Anderson was wrapped in a coat, not showing the least amount of worry, just opening her mouth to sing her spirit and soul.”

Miss Anderson had never considered herself to be an activist, but in fact, on that Sunday morning, she was. When I think about how, despite the pervasive prejudice she experienced, she did not allow hatred to dampen the song within, I can only be grateful. Just by lifting her voice, she opened doors and turned on the lights so that the rest of us would be able to see our way more clearly. I am grateful to her. With my whole self, I honor her.

This is, indeed, what I had in mind when we celebrated the beginning of the new millennium at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Washington, a magnificent soiree that would have as its centerpiece a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I thought it fitting and proper that Marian Anderson, who died in 1993, be honored at this celebration. My colleague Kathleen Battle agreed readily to join me in singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” with a live orchestra and, on a large screen behind us, the film of Marian Anderson’s 1939 performance of the same song. Blessing us. It was a remarkable visual.

Miss Anderson was famous for speaking of herself and her performances in the third person plural. She would say something like, “We sang for the king of Sweden,” not in reference to herself and her accompanist, Franz Rupp, but herself and her God. Her faith did not allow for time to dwell on those things that were meant to cause her pain. She felt that doing so would cater to that part of the human spirit that she did not wish to feed. Her spirit was not different, in many ways, from what we understand of the expansive hearts of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and of the Dalai Lama; open-hearted embrace of all.