Stand Up Straight and Sing! (3 page)

One of the first operas I recall hearing was
Lucia di Lammermoor,
in the late 1950s. This would have been with Roberta Peters in the lead, and other times with Mattiwilda Dobbs. Later, in the early ’60s, the role of Lucia was taken over by a soprano new to me: the great Joan Sutherland. The well-known ensemble from this luscious opera stayed in my mind, and I remember humming the melody to myself rather often. At some point, I even enjoyed a cartoon showing animals on a tree limb “singing” this very melody. It is amazing how such beautiful music can enter the spirit and simply live there.

This is to say that I simply loved the whole idea of an opera performance. And as the dreams of children know no bounds, I thought about singing this music—certainly not as a profession, but simply singing it because it was beautiful to me and I loved it as much as I loved listening to the music of everybody else on my radio. I remember thinking that opera stories were not very different from other stories: a boy meets a girl, they fall in love, they cannot be together for some reason, and most of the time it does not end happily ever after. For me, opera stories were grown-up versions of stories that were familiar to me already. The way that I felt about the opera as a child was no different from how I feel about opera now. Duke Ellington once said these words, which I find just as profound today as when I first heard them: “There are two kinds of music: good music and the other kind.” Some of that good music was written by Mozart and Beethoven and Bach. Thank goodness, too, that some of that good music was written by Rodgers and Hammerstein and George Gershwin and Ellington himself. The good music that I sang as a child included children’s songs, hymns learned at the church, and, of course, Spirituals. My enthusiasm for good music only increased in the choir stands of Mount Calvary Baptist Church and in the school choruses at C. T. Walker Elementary, A. R. Johnson Junior High School, and Lucy C. Laney High. I sang in the assembly halls of local community groups and all types of organizations, even in the living rooms and yards of our neighbors. I was part of a small group of kids who were interested in the arts and were invited to give performances. Some of us sang, some played piano, some gave recitations and acted in plays and such. It was just something that we all did and loved.

When I say now that we were completely interchangeable as performers, I mean we were completely interchangeable. This is absolutely true. Aside from the fact that I knew I could sing with more power than some of my peers, there was no acknowledgment whatsoever that my voice was any more special than that of any of my friends who sang. I realized early in my professional life—and I still celebrate it now—that I was very lucky to have that part of my life unfold in such a way. None of us children were given reason to consider ourselves more special than the other. Yet collectively, we were special in the eyes of the community that nurtured and supported us. We were lucky to have had the support of our parents, teachers, and other influential adults in our lives. They understood the importance of these meaningful interactions, both to our early socialization and to the development of our communication skills, the ability to express ourselves in front of others comfortably and confidently—skills that would turn out to be extremely valuable later.

My parents were constant observers of how my siblings and I deported ourselves, what our school responsibilities were, what we were meant to be doing on any given day. I can still see myself standing in the hallway, with my mother getting herself ready for the day and my father preparing to take us to school, reciting a poem that my school’s class was charged with presenting on Monday mornings. My father would say, “Now, you’ve got your poem ready?” And I would say, “Yes, of course, Daddy.” And I would recite it, stumbling all the way, and my mother would say what she always said: “Stand up straight, honey.” I can still hear her voice.
Stand up straight.
And even on this day, I am sure she is looking down on me, saying the same thing, particularly when I fall into resting in my right hip, a lifelong tendency. When I realize I am doing it, I do my best to correct my posture.
Stand up straight.

The act of standing in front of crowds, large and small, and offering a performance of some kind, was as natural as passing around the Ritz crackers with pimiento cheese at the end of a program. I do not remember my first solo performance (though there are a number of stories circulating, purporting to know what my first song was), but I do know that my big numbers around age five were “Jesus Loves Me” and “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.”

Church gatherings on Sunday afternoons were held often in the living rooms of members of the congregation, and there were many times when this took place in our home. My mother would play the piano and I would sing something, and then I would go back outside to continue playing with my friends. (I was particularly fond of playing jacks with the girls of the neighborhood.) Even though being called into the house to perform interrupted my playtime, I was always happy to do the actual singing. I would be rewarded with cookies and juice from the grownups’ dessert plates. Those Sunday-afternoon gatherings were called silver teas, as the funds collected for the church’s activities were not expected to be grand sums of money, so “silver” could be offered, rather than dollar bills. They were far more important as social occasions than as fundraisers.

I sang my first opera aria in junior high school, under the direction of the choral director, Mrs. Rosa Sanders, who had decided that I should learn a special song: “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice,” from the opera
Samson and Delilah
by Camille Saint-Saëns. Of course, I knew the story of Samson and Delilah from Sunday school, but I did not speak French, the language in which the opera was written. Instead, I learned the song in English and sang it at various churches, recreation centers, and even at a supermarket opening around the Augusta area. After we had done that for a while, Mrs. Sanders decided that I could move on to singing the aria in French. We found a recording of the great mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens performing it and I mimicked her, singing it precisely as she did. I would listen to the recording over and over again, sing a bit, and then listen again. When it was time to sing the aria in French in front of my middle school peers, with the school band accompanying my performance, I was excited. I do think that if you can stand up and sing in French in front of an assembly full of middle-schoolers, then you can do just about anything. Can’t you just see the unchecked expressions of boredom on the faces of the boys, most particularly the popular boys who participated in athletics? I took absolutely no notice. Mrs. Sanders was happy, my other teachers were happy, my group of pals supported me, so all was well!

This kind of recollection reminds me to acknowledge the presence of grace in our lives. I sing and I truly enjoy doing so and have done so practically all of my time here on this earth. I live a blessed life, filled with the sounds of music. I take enormous pleasure in seeing the effect that music can have on the emotions and the spirits of people. It is wonderful to hear from music lovers that they listen to a particular recording on occasions special to them or that they feel a kinship with my music because it has come to mean something important in their lives. I do not take such sentiments for granted. I know that making music that means something to someone else is a privilege.

I noticed this as a youngster in church on Sunday mornings. The pastor would preach the Gospel, and with every crescendo, the parishioners cried a little louder, their tears flowing freely. I thought there was something very special about being a preacher. I came to understand and to appreciate that this wonderful exchange of energy from person to person is something that is alive. A similar kind of thing happens on the musical stage when we are very lucky.

Widmung
 • R
OBERT
S
CHUMANN
 • Dedication

***

2

A Mother’s Joy

“I WANT TWO WINGS”

I want two wings to fly away,

I want two wings, to be at rest.

I want two wings to veil my face,

I want two wings to be at rest.

Lordy, want you help me,

Lordy want you help me to run this race.

It is, perhaps, the scars on my legs that tell the story of sticky hot days in the Georgia sun, playing tag and hide-and-seek in the schoolyards and at home in Augusta or amid the thick stalks of corn on my maternal grandparents’ farm. Those scars tell tales, too, of roller-skating—unsteady, more than a little wobbly—on the L-shaped pavement over at Liberty Baptist Church, and riding bicycles down the bumpy, graveled streets of our neighborhood (our streets were not paved until I was about twelve years old). The scars remind me of those glorious days when the games that boys played together held my sharp attention. I was not at all good at them, but I wished much more to play softball and basketball than partake in the activities and events reserved solely for a girl child of the 1950s. I never learned to sew properly, or crochet or knit. I could never sit still long enough to pick up those skills. None of that was nearly as interesting to me as what was happening on our street, where the boys swathed themselves in fun, adventure, and, above all else, a delicious freedom to just . . . be.

Of course, I had a mother who, with two rough-and-tumble sons to usher into manhood, was happy with the shot of estrogen that came with having a little girl. Every bit of that desire played itself out in the way she dressed me. She was the architect of my most fancy wardrobe. There were dresses with Peter Pan collars, and pintucked tops, and organdy for Sunday, and great big bows that tied perfectly in the back, with black patent leather Mary Jane shoes shined with a little petroleum jelly just so—bangs and pigtails coaxed straight on Saturday nights with the scorch of the hot comb and a few fingerfuls of Royal Crown hairdressing, then gathered neatly with ribbons. Nothing pleased Janie Norman more than to see her little girl looking like, well, a little girl.

I LIKED DRESSING UP
, and I would oblige my mother’s wishes for me to walk instead of run, and to stop and recover should my sash get caught on the door handle, rather than just pull away, torn sash and all, in my mad rush hither and yon. But really, I was fascinated with what my brothers and their friends were allowed to do. Alas, wearing sneakers and climbing trees and skinning my knees on the hard pavement was but a dollop of salve for my independent spirit—the spirit of a baby boomer whose generation had yet to even begin a serious conversation about the liberation of girls and women. Girls were born, given a certain amount of schooling, then they were married, were mothers and homemakers and, if they worked at all, were limited to very specific kinds of jobs, not meant to leave a real mark on the world outside of their homes. Too few of our elders seemed to imagine a bigger world for us.

I craved bigger. And I found it hard, even at an early age, to fit my mind, body, and spirit into the too-tiny box carved out for girls and women of my generation. After all, I was raised by the hand of Janie Norman in a family full of strong women. There was my maternal grandmother, my mother, her seven sisters, and my four paternal aunts—each firm in their stance that none of us should be hampered by the limitations saddled on the shoulders of women. Each of them provided daily inspiration to simply “get on with it”—to grow into the best woman I could be, no matter the hurdles, despite the odds. My aunt Veronia, for example, was an ordained minister who would dress up, complete with heels, a handbag, and gloves, just to go the grocery store, because she felt one “ought to do so.” She also wrote books and held such glamorous events as “book signing parties.” One of my paternal aunts was named Cleopatra, and though we called her Aunt Cleo, she wore her full name splendidly, majestic and proud! Another paternal aunt, Louise, traveled often to Ghana, and wore fabulous African clothing that on someone else would have resembled a costume. They were amazing women.

My mother was the very embodiment of a woman who worked through gender limitations—a person who made no excuses, stood up for herself with the perfect mixture of strength and grace, and who managed to be much more than her country had come to expect of an African American woman raised on a farm in Washington, Georgia. Janie Norman was educated and an educator—a middle school teacher who found a career long before she found a husband (she married my father, Silas Norman Sr., when she was twenty-seven, which, in that era, meant that she was in danger of being labeled an old maid by the time she said “I do”). It was not easy for women—mothers, in particular—to have careers, when veterans were heading back to the States to reclaim their jobs and the media continually spread the message that women should be keeping the home and raising children while the men earned their keep. My mother followed her passion and poured her very soul into the betterment of African American children who, at the time, counted on their own communities to give them what segregation denied them: a fighting chance in a country that had yet to allow those of African descent to participate fully in the pursuit of the American ideal. Great progress has been made, yet still there is so very much to do. My mother and countless others are counting on us.