I once was griot - Themo H Peel

I once was griot 
For my Aunt Bea Dozier-Taylor, griot to many 
 
Fenno Heath, a White man born in 1926, 
taught me negro spirituals – 
these songs deep as the roots of willow trees 
that my family is named for,  
weaving our sour histories with sweet harmony,  
our fear, our hope, our terror and bravery 
transcribed and taught back to me by White men 
because, during slavery, Black families were not allowed to sing*.    
 
Here’s one you probably know: 
             “Swing low, sweet chariot. 
             Comin’ for to carry me home.  
             Swing low, sweet chariot. 
             Comin’ for to carry me home” 
 
That’s England rugby’s unofficial anthem.  
Sometimes they use it in a drinking game. 
I’m unable to understand how this refrain, 
this melancholy cry for deliverance 
from centuries of torture and pain,  
this secret message of warning sent through time, 
this pressure made diamond  
could be mined by middle-class Englishmen  
trying to get a ball over a line.  
 
A surface reading about defiance 
can be seen. But, I’m sure Paul Robeson’s dream 
was for something more because  
a rugby pitch was never a gladiatorial  
arena where the only reward  
is the sweetness of death and nothing more. 
 
I just thought of a joke: 
What’s black and white and red all over? 
Blood-blistered cotton-pickin' hands 
 
As Fenno Heath conducted our songs, 
hands waving in white cotton gloves,  
do you think he imagined them stained 
with blood, like so many cotton-pickin' hands? 
 
When a golden-haired soprano sang, 
             “Are you ready my sisters? 
             Are you ready for the journey? 
             Do you wanna see your Jesus? 
             I’m waiting for the chariot ‘cause I’m ready to go” 
 
 
do you think Fenno felt the weight of life, 
the strength it took to hold on despite 
the horror of seeing your child ripped away, 
sold, and murdered? 
 
I didn’t get to sing ‘Ride the Chariot’,  
even when my golden-haired soprano was sick  
and all agreed that my voice ‘fit’. 
Perhaps it was the quaver in my tone matching frequency 
with absolute clarity what others couldn’t see –  
a connection to history (misery) in my notes that dropped 
too much gravity in songs meant to bring glee.   
 
Even then, I didn’t see the grace-hewn beauty  
of my ancestor’s Black hands. It was hidden from me  
because Black families weren’t taught to sing.  
 
How could we? 
 
For hundreds of years we weren’t allowed to gather 
and learn the strength it takes to grow melodies of triumph 
beneath punishing southern heat, 
whips tilling our backs for fertiliser, 
White men raping to grow the bounty of their mulatto property. 
 
Me, I have the ‘holy grail’ of genes because 
1% of me is Native American. The smallest sliver of salvation  
because every mocha-American like me 
would rather believe that we are descended from African  
queens and Native chiefs rather than the reality that  
even Sally Hemings was property when President Jefferson  
started raping her at 14.  
 
Many African-Americans who have ‘way back’ European genes 
got them through rape and that heartache  
we face every day when we shave, or bathe or 
when a White friend shows us their arm, 
and demands we regard their sun-pinched tan with: 
 
 “Look, I’m blacker than you now!” 
 
             “Deep river. My home is over Jordan.  
             Deep river, lord. I want to cross over into camp ground. 
             Oh don’t you want to go to that gospel feast.  
             ​That promised land where all is peace.” 
 
I think I was born suicidal,  
a faithless impatient racing towards tonal resolution. 
I find the general tenor of life devoid of escapist joy, 
the endless wading and waves of cacophonous breying,  
scrambling, an unending stumble towards unlikely peace.  
 
This unsettling need was gifted me by my 15% Celtic ancestry 
because, statistically, suicide was and is surprisingly 
low in people of African descent, even for those held in slavery. 
 
But, the genetic hope and bits of oral history, 
undertones of endurance and prosperity  
encased in those sombre melodies  
was taught back to me by Fenno Heath 
because Black families weren’t allowed sing.  
 
Here’s another joke: 
How do you cook chitterlings? 
You boil the shit out of them. 
 
The joke is, chitterlings are pig intestines. 
That’s what my enslaved ancestors ate.  
That’s what they were given. 
And with their bellies full of pig guts and corn 
they worked from dawn until night, 
hungry, sun stroked, and afraid 
and still they created music. They told stories. 
They charted stars and plotted routes to freedom.  
 
             “Follow the drinkin’ gourd 
             Follow the drinkin’ gourd 
             Follow the drinkin’ gourd 
             For the old man is comin’ 
             To carry you to freedom.” 
 
That song was code for how enslaved people 
fleeing the inhumanity of captivity might 
watch the night sky for a celestial sign,   
the drinking gourd – or big dipper –  
faithfully pointing north.  
 
Here’s another joke:  
Marion Jones, a white woman with a guitar and curly blonde hair  
taught me ‘Follow the drinking gourd’.  
 
I learned it as a fable  
in a lesson at school about constellations 
and how “even slaves had different names for stars”. 
We all sat in a big circle, 
tiny hands clapping along and we 
were told to drop the ‘g’ 
off ‘drinkin’ to make it more authentic, 
the way people back then would sing.  
 
And, when I told my Aunt Bea, 
a Black entrepreneur and pioneer in her own right,  
about our ‘slave ancestors’ 
she sat me down and lectured through the night  
about how our ancestors were ‘enslaved’ 
because it was something put upon us.  
Being a slave is a chosen state of mind. 
And it was up to me to find a way to not 
be held down in a narrative set by those who abused us.  
 
But she could only scold because she didn’t have a song 
to share the hard-won stone in our bones 
blossoming as joyous music. 
  
My family don’t sing. 
 
             “Keep your lamps, trimmed and burning 
             Keep your lamps, trimmed and burning, 
             Keep your lamps, trimmed and burning. 
             The time is drawing nigh.” 
 
That was my solo in choir. 
The conductor described my “raucous” tones  
as better suited to the “heart felt” ad lib 
rather than the classically refined, 
honed over decades of perfection ‘Ride the Chariot’. 
 
Fenno Heath did a marvellous thing, 
he was born with the gift of music and the privilege  
to study the only language of my people allowed to survive. 
Our words and melodies preserved 
when bodies and minds were left 
to rot in fields and nourish dogs. 
 
             “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. 
             Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. 
             Sometime I feel like a motherless child, 
             A long way from home.  
             A long way from home.” 
 
Our names and native tongues were taken.  
Our gods and culture were ground up and poured 
into Christian cups otherwise we went without water. 
Our lives were treated as seedless fodder for 
for a burgeoning country’s profit.  
So, when Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ 
was thoughtlessly slaughtered as sacrificial fodder  
for one more forgotten social media trend,  
I wanted to swing. Not low, 
 
but because that fertile fruit contained the seeds of me, 
seeds of our true strength and gifts which were 
twisted and choked into nothing but commodity. 
 
And we survived.  
 
That enduring kernel of creativity, 
our spark, our anima, our spirit, slept inside 
on ships across the Atlantic and through 
hangings, and burning pits,  
Black children strip-searched in schools, 
curb-stomping homicide, and Jim Crow genocide. 
 
Our music survived, side-by-side with our humanity. 
It was planted and buried under shit and horror 
and was fed with our cotton-pickin' blood, 
and fearless end trails sustained on pig guts, 
 
and it thrived.  
 
That life, that song of Africa and what it  
means to endure – the wawa seed  
that I have tattooed on my arm –   
provides a means to be more than tragedy 
and injustice. It’s a transcendent vine pushing upward 
through time to connect us to something immortal.  
Something divine.  
 
It is a power that I was never meant to see, 
because we were poisoned, and hunted, and 
taught we couldn’t be anything more than  
what they wanted to pay for us. 
But the strength of that sacred seed 
that would one day be a tree, was cloaked in ivy scented rags  
and smuggled back to me by Fenno Heath.  
 
             “He delivered Daniel from the lion’s den.  
             Jonah from the belly of the whale.  
             And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace  
             Then why not every man?” 
 
Fenno Heath, a White man born in 1926, 
was given stewardship of my heritage,  
and, like so many of our songs, 
that fact is bitter sweet –  
grateful that he preserved these memories 
of those who lived and died for the  
only promised land that is inside me.  
 
But how good it would be to drink  
the nectar from the fruit of the tree  
from the hands of those that planted the seed. 
Not just their spirit but their hands, 
gently entreating me to wade on because  
Jordan just might be.  
 
And, even though my family weren’t allowed to sing, 
in poetry there are counterpoints and harmonies;  
motifs and refrains like melodies; 
rhythms, and rhymes, and breaks 
gradually giving shape to make the writing sing. 
 
So, maybe this isn’t a poem, 
but something more organic, a beginning 
meant to grow and conceive and harvest 
and weave just like the willow trees 
standing beside my ancestors’ peace.  
 
Or, maybe this isn’t a poem or a seed.  
Maybe it’s a song, a generational call and response, 
linking those who come after me to history. 
And every breath I take, free, adds complexity  
to the sumptuous notes  
we were always meant to sing.  
 
And what a thing it would be  
for my ancestors to hear my family… 
             “Sing a song,  
             full of the faith that the past dark has taught us. 
             Sing a song,  
             full of the hope that the present has brought us! 
 
             “Let our rejoicing rise 
             high as the listening skies. 
             Let us march on til victory is won” 
 
 ---
 
“Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge... where learning is confined to a few people, liberty can be neither equal nor universal.” – Benjamin Rush, Founding Father 
 
 
* “Black families were not allowed to sing” is a metaphor for the very real “slave codes” and other restrictive laws during and post US chattel slavery that sought to revoke the inalienable human rights of people of African descent in America. These laws prevented our people from gathering, marrying, learning to read and write, and took away our right to life as we were considered property. This lack of regard for the inherent value of Black lives is still reflected in the disproportionate harsh sentencing and deaths of Black people in the US legal, penal, and correctional systems.