Category Archives: Connections

High John de Conquer and Holy Laughter

From Zora Neale Hurston’s The Sanctified Church:

High John de Conquer came to be a man, and a mighty man at that. But he was not a natural man in the beginning. First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world in a low but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing-drum. Black people had an irresistible impulse to laugh. High John the Conquer was a man in full, and had come to live and work on the plantations, and all of the slave folks knew him in the flesh.

The sign of his man was a laugh, and his singing-symbol was a drum. No parading drum-shout like soldiers out for show. It did not call to the feet of those who were fixed to hear it. It was an inside thing to live by. It was sure to be heard when and where the work was hardest, and the lot the most cruel. It helped the slaves endure. They knew that something better was coming. So they laughed in the face of things and sang, “I’m so glad! Trouble don’t last always.” And the white people who heard them were struck dumb that they could laugh. In an outside way, this was Old Massa’s fun, so what was Old Cuffy laughing for?

Old Massa couldn’t know, of course, but High John de Conquer was there walking his plantation like a natural man.

You never know how or when the threads of your lives intertwine. I have written three books in recent years and, upon reflection, I see that they are inter-related: People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music, Reluctant Prophets and Clueless Disciples: Understanding the Bible by Telling Its Stories, and Jesus Laughed: The Redemptive Power of Humor. And now that I’ve begun work on Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement, I see where they all connect. They’ve all helped prepare me for this moment.

I wrote Jesus Laughed in part because of the visits Mary and I had made to black churches in the course of writing People Get Ready. Black churches resound with laughter before, during, and after the services in a way that the white churches I’ve attended do not. Where did we lose that capacity to laugh?

I’m writing Nothing But Love in God’s Water in part because of the ways black sacred song — from the spirituals through the union movements through the Civil Rights movement — has continued to irrepressibly bubble up and envelope black people at their times of greatest need … as if this music is always there, always available, always waiting for a moment like this.

And now I stumble across Zora Neale Hurston’s essay on High John de Conquer, a mythic black figure who pre-dates John Henry and Stagger (or Stack-o) Lee. High John’s weapons are laughter and song. And speed. High John is fast, as Hurston writes:

Maybe he was in Texas when the lash fell on a slave in Alabama, but before the blood was dry on the back, he was there. A faint pulsing of a drum like a goat-skin stretched over a heart, that came nearer and closer, then sombody in the saddened quarters would feel like laughing and say, “Now High John de Conquer, Old Mass couldn’t get the best of him. That old John was a case!”  Then everybody began to smile.

It’s about story — a story that came from Africa that sustained the slaves and their descendents for generations. It’s about song — songs that came from Africa and enveloped the best of the Christian faith and withstood the dogs and water cannons in Birmingham. It’s about laughter — laughter that came from Africa and enabled blacks in the Jim Crow south to laugh secretly at those who spent most of their waking moments trying to figure out ways to crush High John and the millions like him.

It is no accident, Hurston writes, that High John de Conquer has evaded the ears of white people. They were not supposed to know. You can’t know what folks won’t tell you.

And so it is with Nothing But Love in God’s Water. I’m teasing out from the songs and singers HOW this music helped them get over. WHAT this music provided that enabled them to challenge the most powerful nation on the planet armed only with love and justice. It’s all there in those on spirituals and those unstoppable gospel songs — the stories, the laughter, the music. The trouble is, of course, is that I’m seeing (and hearing) through a glass darkly. 

And armed this knowledge, once again, I pray for strength every day to do that song, that laughter, that story justice.

The more things change …

On the surface, Daniel Okrent’s new book, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, sounds like another interesting read about a quaint tradition from the distant past. But as reviewer David Oshinsky makes clear, there are some chilling parallels with today — but NOT in the areas I was expecting.

First, I was sadly unaware of the many connections, both sinister and innocent, that led to the 18th Amendment. As Oshinsky notes, there are studies a’plenty on Carry Nation, Billy Sunday, Al Capone, and the rest. But only Okrent puts the 18th fully in context:

“Knowing that alcohol taxes accounted for about one-third of all federal revenue, temperance leaders campaigned successfully for a federal income tax to make up the difference. Believing that women were more likely than men to support restrictions on alcohol, these leaders strongly supported women’s suffrage. And when America entered World War I in 1917, helped fan the flames of anti-German hysteria by accusing the Busch family and other brewers of harboring sympathies for the kaiser (a charge, not entirely untrue, that turned beer drinking into a disloyal act).”

There’s much more, of course. In the end, Oshinsky notes that Last Call resists the temptation to link what happened in the 1920s to what’s happening now in the political climate. Okrent may resist — but Oshinsky does not:

“About a century ago, a group of determined activists mobilized to confront the moral decay they claimed was destroying their country. Their public demon was alcohol. but their real enemy was an alien culture reflected by city dwellers, recent immigrants and educated elites. Always a minority, the forces of Prohibition drove the political agenda by concentrating relentlessly on their goal, voting in lock-step on a single issue and threatening politicians who did not sufficiently back their demands. They triumphed because they faced no organized opposition. Americans were too distracted — perhaps too busy drinking — to notice what they had lost. It’s a story with an eerily familiar ring.”

The Community of Teaching

“You know what community is,” Doops said, his voice rising with impatience. “It’s a bunch of folks getting along for some reason. Something holds them together. Generally something bad … Nobody needs nobody when they’re happy. But it just happens. We don’t make it. We don’t make community any more than we make souls. It’s created.” — Will D. Campbell, The Glad River

OK, this much I know:

1. Learning takes place better when there is community within the classroom (and sometimes out)

2. Will D. Campbell (and others) say that community can be created

3. Community, it seems to me, is best created when all constituents have a say, when they all feel invested in the process

4. How then can best can I create community? Students are NOT all equally interested/invested in every class. They’re NOT all equally skilled.

5. If — as I’ve been told — one of the best ways to create community is to foster daily dialogue in class, the (unspoken) assumption is that everybody in the class can contribute to the new topics and concepts and skill sets that few (if any) of them yet have in the average class.

6. And yes, I get it. That’s MY problem. To dis-assemble to the material in such a way so that everybody, including the kid who arrives late and sleeps in the back of the room during every stinkin’ class, has something pertinent to offer so that the other kids in the class are engaged.

7. But knowing what the problem/challenge is and morphing the material I know from 40 years experience into that kind of interactive give-and-take, the kind that leaves them with more useable information at the end of class than when they began seems to me to be a VERY tall order. And one that doesn’t necessarily involve technology — but might.

8. I clearly have a long way to go.

Perspective …

coal_hands_g1v4Despite its somewhat daunting title, Gavin Weightman’s The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914 is a bright, fascinating read. I was particularly taken with the stories about Abraham Gesner, the man who distilled a useable lighting and heating oil from coal and petroleum sludge.

For all of the horrible things burning dirty coal has done and is doing to our environment (incidences of asthma and autism skyrocket the closer you live to a coal plant, for instance), Gesner’s  invention is one of the cornerstones of the modern age.

And yet, in his own account of the process, he refuses to take credit:

“The progress of discovery in this case, as in others, has been slow and gradual. It has been carried on by the labors, not of one mind, but of many, so as to render it difficult to discover to whom the greatest credit is due.”

The deeper I get into the research for Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement, the more profound that statement becomes. I stand on the shoulders of giants.

It would make a good opening paragraph for my book, I think.

Thanksgiving

alone

It’s all about connections …

“What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.”

— an excerpt from “I Am Thankful for My Age” by Lisel Mueller