Listen Here (13 page)

from
Wildwood Flower
(1992)

Where my father's house stood
at the edge of the cove is a brown church
the faithful call Bosom of God.
I have come back to sit at the window
where I can see apple trees bud
while the preacher shouts death has no victory.

Everywhere dogwoods are blooming
like white flesh this man claims
is devil's work: woman who tasted
the apple and disobeyed God. But for Christ
we are doomed to the worms waking under
these hills I would rather be climbing

again with my father's goats bleating
so loud I can't hear this man say
I must ask the Lord pardon for what
I've come back to remember—the sun
on my neck as I shook loose my braids
and bent over the washpot. My bare feet

were frisky. If wind made the overalls
dance on the clothesline, then why
shouldn't I? Who's to tell
me I should not have shouted for joy
on this hill? It's the wind I praise God for
today, how it lifted my hair like a veil.

from
Black Shawl
(1998)

News travels slowly up here
in the mountains, our narrow
roads twisting for days, maybe years,
till we get where we're going,
if we ever do. Even if some lonesome message
should make it through Deep Gap
or the fastness of Thunderhead, we're not obliged
to believe it's true, are we? Consider
the famous poet, minding her post
at the Library of Congress, who
shrugged off the question of what we'd be
reading at century's end: “By the year 2000
nobody will be reading poems.” Thus she
prophesied. End of that
interview! End of the world
as we know it. Yet, how can I fault
her despair, doing time as she was
in a crumbling Capitol, sirens
and gunfire the nights long, the Pentagon's
stockpile of weapons stacked higher
and higher? No wonder the books
stacked around her began to seem relics.
No wonder she dreamed her own bones
dug up years later, tagged in a museum somewhere
in the Midwest: American Poet—Extinct Species.

Up here in the mountains
we know what extinct means. We've seen
how our breath on a bitter night
fades like a ghost from the window glass.
We know the wolf's gone.
The panther. We've heard the old stories
run down, stutter out
into silence. Who knows where we're heading?
All roads seem to lead
to Millennium, dark roads with drop-offs
we can't plumb. It's time to be brought up short
now with the tale-teller's
Listen
: There once lived
a woman named Delphia
who walked through these hills teaching children
to read. She was known as a quilter
whose hand never wearied, a mother
who raised up two daughters to pass on
her words like a strong chain of stitches.
Imagine her sitting among us,
her quick thimble moving along these lines
as if to hear every word striking true
as the stab of her needle through calico.
While prophets discourse about endings,
don't you think she'd tell us the world as we know it
keeps calling us back to beginnings?
This labor to make our words matter
is what any good quilter teaches.
A stitch in time, let's say.
A blind stitch
that clings to the edges
of what's left, the ripped
scraps and remnants, whatever
won't stop taking shape even though the whole
crazy quilts falling to pieces.

(December 27, 1939–)

Cultural educator Candie Anderson Carawan has been at the forefront of social change in Appalachia since the 1960s. A native Californian, Carawan first came to the South as a college art major on an exchange program from Pomona College in Claremont, California, to Fisk University in Nashville.

Shortly after her arrival in Tennessee, she was caught up in the fledgling civil rights movement, becoming one of the first whites arrested in the lunch counter sit-ins to protest segregation. She met her husband, musician and folklorist Guy Carawan, at a civil-rights workshop; together, they have devoted their lives to preserving grass roots culture and furthering causes of social justice.

In 1963, the Carawans went to Birmingham, Alabama, to record the songs of the civil rights movement, and they were arrested by the infamous police chief Bull Connor for attempting to enter a black church. Carawan recalls, “We could see the demonstrators as they came from one of the mass meetings…fire hoses were turned on them. We could see this from the jail cell.”

Over the years, Carawan has used the Highlander Research Center in New Market, Tennessee, as her home base. Dedicated to empowering the disenfranchised, Highlander offers leadership training and community building workshops. Through books and recordings, Carawan and her husband have documented the songs and stories of a number of America's major social movements. “We've worked not only in the civil rights movement,” says Carawan, “but with coal miners, migrant workers, and on women's issues.”

Now retired, the Carawans live in East Tennessee in a cabin adjacent to the Highlander Center. Candie Carawan is a potter who continues to write, make music, and remain active in issues of social justice.

Carawan was an exchange student at Fisk University in the spring of 1960. In the following excerpts from
Sing for Freedom
, she recalls her experiences.

Nonfiction:
Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs
(1990),
Voices from the Mountains: Life & Struggle in the Appalachian South
(1982),
Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Freedom Movement
(1968),
Ain't You Got a Right to The Tree of Life?: The People of John's Island, South Carolina, Their Faces, Their Words, and Their Songs
(1966).
Folksong recordings:
Sparkles and Shines
(1999),
Tree Of Life=Arbol de la vida
(1990),
High on a Mountain
(1984),
Birmingham, Alabama 1963
(1979),
Green Rocky Road: Songs & Hammer Dulcimer Tunes From Appalachia & the British Isles
(1976),
Music from the People's Republic of China Sung and Played on Traditional Instruments
(1976),
Been in the Storm So Long: Spirituals, Folk Tales and Children's Games from John's Island, South Carolina
(I960).

Fred Brown, “Eyes on the Prize,”
Knoxville News-Sentinel
(2 May 1999), E1–E2.
Contemporary Authors, First Revision
(1976), Vols. 17–20, 125.

In the spring of 1989, Appalachian miners striking the Pittston Coal Company were singing “We Shall Overcome.” In China, where a massive campaign for democracy by students and workers has just been put down, students were photographed with “We Shall Overcome” on their headbands and T-shirts. Bishop Desmond Tutu has used the song as he tries to help people in the United States envision what his country is going through in its painful struggle toward equality and justice. This powerful song, which came originally out of the black church in the southern United States, was adapted and used in the labor movement, and rose to international prominence as the theme song of the civil rights movement. It lives today. It is but the best known of more than eighty songs which were developed and spread in the South and around this country between 1960 and 1965.

The civil rights movement has been described by some as the greatest singing movement this country has experienced. The freedom songs came out of the historical experience and the creativity of southern black communities. There are many kinds and ranges of moods. Two especially important ones are the old, slow-paced spirituals and hymns that sing of hope and determination, and rhythmic jubilee spirituals and bright gospel songs that protest boldly and celebrate victory. Many of these songs have new or revised words to old tunes.

Having witnessed the civil rights era, most of us take for granted the notion of adapting well-known songs to situations of the present. It wasn't always so.

…

So how did this begin to happen? One place it happened was at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Highlander was one of the gathering places during the early days of the movement. Weekend after weekend in the early 1960s, community leaders and activists from across the South came to share information, to strategize and to plan, to bolster each others' spirits as they returned home to confront segregation.

We were based at Highlander for those years and could build on what had been learned there during the Labor Movement—that singing could be a strong unifying force in struggle, and that commonly known songs, particularly southern gospel and religious songs with repetitive stanzas adapted to the situation, were most effective. For many years Zilphia Horton had worked with grassroots community people coming to Highlander. She drew from them their favorite songs and helped them change a word or two or shape them slightly differently to fit the situation in their home community (often a union campaign). She also taught songs that she knew from different parts of the South, from around the country and from abroad. In the 1940s and '50s she carried songs from Highlander out to picket lines across the South and brought songs back from various union struggles.

…

Pete Seeger had been in contact with Zilphia and with Highlander. His repertoire, as he sang with progressive movements in the North, included many songs from the South. He came to Highlander to share his music, and in 1945 carried away from the school a labor version of “We Shall Overcome” which had been used by striking Food and Tobacco Union workers in Charleston, S.C.

Guy had been greatly influenced by Pete, struck by his exciting way of playing the banjo and his collection of songs from grassroots Americans. In 1959, on Pete's suggestion, he came to work at Highlander and tried to carry on Zilphia's way of working with people. He met with groups gathered there and learned their songs, helping to adapt them to the movement activity in their communities. He also began to travel out to visit the people he had met and found himself leading singing in mass meetings and at civil rights conferences. It did not take long for the notion of adapting songs to catch on and to hit its stride.

…

As the movement spread, the songs began to spread. Nashville had one of the first citywide campaigns against segregation, and songs emerged there to suit the sit-ins…. Candie was an exchange student at Fisk University in the spring of 1960 and learned firsthand about the power of singing in tough situations, including jail cells.

…

“My stomach always hurt a little on the way to a sit-in. I guess it's the unexpected. There was so much we didn't know early in February 1960, when the sit-ins first started in Nashville. Will the sit-ins accomplish anything? Will non-violence work? What happens when demonstrators are put in jail?

“I was an exchange student at Fisk, living in the dorms and attending classes with Negro students. The biggest question for me was the rather lonely one of what can a white student do? What would my presence at the lunch-counter mean? Would I alienate and enrage the community to a greater extent than the Negro students? Or would it show that this is more than a Negro problem? I didn't know…

“During the demonstrations I found myself and the other few white students singled out by the crowds, called different names and eventually even segregated in the Nashville City Jail. Eighty of us were arrested the first time. It was one of the first instances where large numbers of students went behind bars, and we found that singing was truly good for the spirit. For two white girls, alone in a cell and only in sound's reach of the other students, the music offered a bond of friendship and support.”

…

“We were crammed into a narrow hallway to await booking and I studied the faces around me. Many were calm and serious, some were relaxed, smiling, several were openly belligerent and a few were really frightened. But there was a unity—a closeness beyond proximity.

“It was a shock then to be suddenly removed from this large coherent group and thrust into a lonely cell with only one other girl, the only other white female. We protested and inquired why we could not join the large group of Negro girls across the hall. The entire jail was segregated. Through our own small diamond-paned window we could see the corresponding window in the fellows' cell. There were nearly sixty boys crowded in there—a cell the same size as ours which held two. When a face would smilingly press up against that window, we had our only visual contact with the group which had been so close that afternoon, and the previous Saturday afternoons when there had been sit-ins.

“The contact which became more real then was vocal. Never had I heard such singing. Spirituals, pop tunes, hymns, and even slurpy old love songs all became so powerful. The men sang to the women and the girls down the hall answered them. They shouted over to us to make sure we were joining in. Some songs that the kids had written or revised came out—notably some rock-and-roll protests composed by four young Baptist preachers. Calypso songs and Ray Charles numbers made us dance in our roomy quarters and then all of us were singing spirituals—‘Amen-Freedom.'

“We sang a good part of our eight hour confinement that first time. The city policemen seemed to enjoy the singing. They even came up with a few requests. Our wardens actually welcomed us back when we returned to jail in a few days, going off our bond. We were a change from the Saturday night drunk who rarely sang.”

…

“The day of the first trials in Nashville a crowd of 2,500 people gathered around a city court house. Mostly they were Negroes who simply wanted to state by their presence there that they were behind the students and that they wanted justice. As we waited to go inside we sang:

Amen, amen, amen, amen…

Freedom, freedom…

Justice…

Civil Rights…' etc.

“I looked out at the curb where the police were patrolling, and caught one burly cop leaning back against his car, singing away—‘Civil Rights'…He saw me watching him, stopped abruptly, turned, and walked to the other side of the car.”