I wanted to play but it just hasn’t happened except with very limited abilities. But I do love music. As with many people, music has been a big part of my life – it is in my DNA. And there have been several traumas concerning music.
I grew up with a piano in the house and my earliest memories, which are now mostly lost along with the talent, were learned in the lap of my babysitter and sometimes my mother. I banged out as they say, a boogie woogie that I could mimic from watching Lucille Brown play and my mother played Mamma, Mamma Have You Heard…
My church had music and lots of it, but our fundamentalist church split early on. Before the split, the hyper conservative branch, who later moved out, did not believe in secular music and so much of my life — and the lives of many members — was spent estranged from family over music or in hiding.
I remember doing a visitation for some ladies when the regular girl could not deliver the food basket (before meals on wheels, it was church ladies). I did not regularly do this but was a fill-in and, after the day, I never wanted to do it again.
The shut-in ladies offered cake and coffee and I offered to play a tune – I never could resist playing to hear the sound of any piano that I came across. Of course I knew not to play my wee bit of feeble no-talent boogie woogie and I ran through a standard repertoire of my poor versions of hymns played from ear. Near The Cross, What A Friend We Have In Jesus, The Old Rugged Cross and At Calvary.
With every song the ladies would offer praise and approval with light clapping of their hands in a most reserved manner. I doubt I could play them now and could not play many songs then, and so I decided to play my embarrassing version of Clair de Lune, by DeBussy.
But when I finished — and it was only a partial anyway — the ladies did not clap. I turned around and Miss ? said they did not have music like that in the house and she walked over to the piano and put the lid down over the keys. I soon left.
That day was one of the times in my life that I believe G-d was moving in the moment and powerfully. From that day forward I believed in my heart of hearts that G-d loved all music and that lady, those ladies, were wrong.
But to this day I am frozen, can’t let go to play – I try, and some days, inspired, I can try to give the feeling, but others, I am torn in my mind and my heart over the grip of the learned behavior of what is evil – what is not allowed.
I am sure some will call me daft that anyone could call Clair de Lune evil but the woman knew enough that it was not a church song.
Fast forward 20 years and I was playing boogie on the piano in a women’s drop-in in Toronto and a cult lady wearing a white nun’s habit spoke to me about my music and saving my soul and how I could play for G-d. I was loving and kind in speaking back to her, and told her that G-d loved my music.
Of, course I don’t know if G-d loves my music…
I am not so isolated that I don’t know that some religions in the world ban all music and would do a lot more to me than close the keyboard lid if I played in their midst – what can I say? But the taboos bend the mind and soul and hamper the love of life itself and certainly hamper love itself.
I do say all people — with in-tune ears or not — should play a musical instrument and sing. The music is not about being any good at it – it is about the healing properties of music in one’s self that makes a person whole with the cosmos and G-d (or the G-desses)
I wasn’t the only one crippled by the psyched-out terror.
Growing up, we were too many people in one house in some ways but lived lavishly compared to others. The house was three bedrooms and Mamma (Emma ‘Pearl’ Stripling Knight, my grandmother) kept the front bedroom almost untouched as the guest room. She wanted it pristine for the visits from her three children already out of the nest with families. Of the other rooms, Daddy Paw, Harry Samuel Harry Knight, had the back bedroom, Great Uncle Louie (Louie Daniel Stripling) had the breakfast nook (a room popular at that time in those houses) and in the middle bedroom there was Mamma, Carol Jean (my aunt) and me.
I wet the bed way too late and was as terrified of getting up. I was said to cry myself to sleep so maybe once I got to sleep I was gone. I was terrified something was coming up from the floor at the side of the bed to get me, the solution for this was stuffing pillows down beside the bed between the edge and the wall so the scary things could not reach me. No one would sleep with me but Mamma because of the wet and there were not enough beds to go around so she slept damp for a number of years, surprised she did not catch her death of cold.
I don’t know who all had scared me but I was scared.
I couldn’t play, and I was afraid of the dark.
With the death of the former President this week we heard through his services the Apostles’ creed a couple of times and I bristled at the propagandists, for goodness sake even the Pope has sense enough to say the heavens won’t fall if we sort out the exaggerations in interpretations.
“…Ain’t right in the head, she just ain’t right in the head…” was said about me.
I was in the same bible study as everyone else, but I heard something else when the teacher read the words.
So Paul’s story is, he was a Roman agent assigned to ferret out Christians so they can be identified and punished. But in the end he preaches for all people to become Christians and pay your taxes and serve your masters faithfully. No, you must not kill yourself, your masters need you to serve them, your reward will come in heaven in the next life, be a good Christian you must live and serve and take it.
This is over-simplified but I questioned who was on whose side. This questioning did not happen from the beginning in my life, it happened as I went to the stove and was burned over and over again wanting to believe in and trust the people around me and continued to go back long past when the lesson should have been learned. Paul said one thing and did another and the Christian community in Birmingham, Alabama in my formative years said one thing and did another.
Almost overnight the Christian brotherly love of the cordial addressing of one another in the church of Sister Her and Brother Him went from, ‘invite people to come to church’, to, ‘they aren’t coming in here’. True enough I heard more than most children. Reared by my grandparents, most of the activities and friends that we were around were an extra generation back of conservative thinking. I went everywhere with my grandparents, one or the other, and both. Family history excursions across five states to families and cemeteries and I can’t remember when I didn’t know how to use a county records office for finding great aunt so n so’s great granddaughter’s new husband’s name – and off we would go to see them.
And my grandparents were part of church and much more than just worship, every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, every Wednesday night and in a revival all week long – they also sat as lay workers, my grandfather was a former minister and continued part time from his accounting business.
I have to say my life was not devoid of liberal people in this glum depressed fear of mine, my grandfather was almost run out of town for wanting to include African Americans in the 1930s Great Depression-era soup kitchen of the little community. My grandmother’s shortcomings were laced with her support to help drive a few folks in the 1960s boycotts and she supported the Black folk we knew in those times of great change. When the entire neighborhood was selling out and moving, my grandfather’s attitude was why move and we were the last white family in the community for several blocks by the time we did move. He later said our African American neighbors were some of the best they had. Years later I would have more liberals added in my life from my mother’s family but for those formative years I still had more broad minded thinking around me than some.
So for me I not only heard the sermons I also heard the administration meetings and remember vaguely the meeting about how people would react when Black people came to church to make their statement of integration.
Of course today, these churches have bands and Jesus to the tune of rock and roll but in those days and those places it was no make up of color lipstick and rouge, do not cut your hair – you hid it in a bun, do not dance and the only music is the southern gospel of Near The Cross. Those folks never stopping to think that that music also would have been scandalously modern to the Puritan founding fathers.
Our church was full of amen this and amen that and went on and on and always had an altar call and would regularly go on well past noon, but the day the African American couple showed up for church you could have heard a pin drop, no ameners and I have no clue what the sermon was about, I only really remember the sermons that scared the pee out of me over hellfire and brimstone anyway. I remember holding my breath and thinking something was going to happen and I remember I was damp and I remember looking back and around at the men, the men who spoke so hostilely in the meetings were saying nothing – thank goodness.
I can’t remember for certain who greeted the black couple but someone did and I don’t know what was said. It was either Brother Howard S or Brother Jim P, one of the two. But the service was the shortest I recall in my life in that church and at the end of closing prayer the entire congregation did not move or flinch and the ushers again walked to the couple and then they walked them out.
I was terrified over what could have happened, I can still look back in my mind’s memory at the Black couple sitting at the back of the church and how there is one story of what happened that day in the 1960s but there are so many different things to remember about what happened and didn’t happen that day and how that day has lessons still.
The ushers did what they thought their legal duty to do, but they did not go farther, and they, and the congregation, certainly did not welcome this lovely and very brave African American couple to our church.
Now, what seems like a thousand years later, when I get scared I run toward the facilities. I have never forgotten the shame and embarrassment of shortcomings and wishing I could go back and do something right if I had another chance.
Nothing happened untoward that day in church but I still remember it like the terror of my childhood nightmares and I recalled that 1960s Sunday in church again this week with the President’s funeral. Who all should have shook whose hand first or last – I don’t know.
The opportunity missed in the 1960s was a tragedy for the future and for me in the present and certainly did not help the good and just cause of civil rights. I was about nine or ten and I still try not to feel guilty. I will not say the inaction of those Christians cost me my faith, what I do about my faith is between me and G-d, but I saw Saint Paul’s teaching differently and read his words differently from then on.
I think of the President’s club this week and I can’t play a note, I can’t write a word. Who am I to play a melody of thoughts about presidents or church members? Who am I to say there was a missed opportunity again in the lives of humankind?
Marionetta Strung-Out 