Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  My father died a deep racist. That makes me sad to think of it too, because he was such a wonderful guy. He was this Irish guy, full of blarney. He was a good union man, too. In church, we used to sing the little song: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” We sang that at least once a month or more. But somehow they managed to instill a deep racism. My dad wouldn’t go near any church. He said they were all full of blarney.

  My mother was very religious. When my grandma went from the Catholic Church to the Pentecostal movement, Mama went with them. She became Pentecostal, too. My aunt and my grandmother both spoke in tongues and danced around. I don’t understand tongues. I would say it was gibberish, but you can go from California to New York and from Canada to Mexico and you hear this talk and it sounds the same. I don’t know how that came out of my aunt, because she could barely read and write.

  We were all going to go to Hell unless we admitted our sins and accepted the Lord Jesus into our hearts as our savior and leader. To me, it was a contradiction because, on the one hand, they tell me that Jesus died for my sins, but yet I was going to Hell unless I admitted them. So Jesus must have known I was going to sin—or he wouldn’t have been willing to die to save me and all the others like me! I believed in Heaven and Hell until I was around ten, twelve years old, and then so many things just didn’t make sense to me.

  When they would have revivals, it was church every night and three times on Sunday. Sometimes revivals lasted two weeks! All my girlfriends would go to the altar every night and get saved. I thought it was just silly. You’d lay there on the altar crying and screaming and begging for forgiveness. I would go the first couple of times, but after that it just seemed silly. It seemed pretentious to me. I felt the girls were wanting attention, which was the reason they kept going down to the altar. At that point I still believed in God. My questioning at that point was just questioning the Church and the things that went on—the things that I could see. Later on, I stopped believing any of it. I lived in deep fear that when I became twelve years old, I would be responsible for my own sins. Until you’re twelve, you’re not responsible, your parents are, for any sins you commit. But when you turn twelve, you become responsible. I lived in absolute fear of turning twelve. I wanted to stay eleven.

  I remember Blanche Ryan. She was just beautiful to look at. She was Black Irish, had coal-black hair that just hung in ringlets on her shoulders, and she had bright blue eyes. She had danced in a showgirl revue on the stage. She’d come to church—her family had been Catholic. I’ve noticed in the past few years that a lot of Catholics turn Pentecostal because they’re starved for a way to express themselves. In the Catholic Church they don’t express themselves very much, except maybe to a priest in confession or something. They snubbed Blanche in church. I felt if she was such a sinner, where else would she belong more so than in the Church? I wasn’t allowed to associate with her. I’d wait till Mama was busy with her babies, because she always had a baby in her lap. There were seven of us. I’d sneak away and go behind her back and go sit with Blanche. Blanche would let me look in her purse, and oh, that was exciting because she had lipstick and all kinds of things. I was about eleven. I didn’t fear being with Blanche because she was so full of love and life and such a beautiful singing voice. She was like a light in the darkness. I never felt any fear of going to Hell over her—it never occurred to me. But it occurred to me that they didn’t treat her right.

  I didn’t lose the fear of Heaven and Hell until I was grown. I had children of my own before I really kicked it. When I really kicked the chains that kind of held me was about the same time I joined the civil rights movement. It didn’t have anything to do with what I learned religionwise—it was in spite of what I learned in religion. I was living in Montgomery when the bus boycott there started, and all the women in the neighborhood were talking about Reverend King. ’Course, that wasn’t what they called him! He was in jail. These were white women. At that point I didn’t know any black people. They were talking about this smartass nigger being down there in jail. So we all went down to look at him, to see what he looked like, the troublemaker. We were standing on the sidewalk watching when he was released on bail. He came out of the side door of the jail, and the minute he was going to walk to his car they were waiting there for him. And about six or seven guys jumped onto him and started beating on him and kicking him. It just flashed in my mind. There’s an old saying in the South, two on one is nigger fun. It means white people are above jumping onto another person like that—only niggers do that. White people are too honorable, they fight man-to-man, one-on-one. I thought, here’s white guys jumping onto him. I don’t know . . . I started seeing things in a different way.

  I was in the grocery line, and this very small black woman had her cart full of groceries. She started out the door, and the guy that was in front of her, he started to hold it open, and then he looked around and saw she was black, and he just let the door slam on her. And pushed her back with the cart and everything.

  I’m originally from Oklahoma. The only church that I went to in Kentucky was the one where the minister felt up my breast. When I told my mama, she slapped me and told me that he wouldn’t do a thing like that. Well, I knew he did. So that was another nail in their coffin. [Laughs] I don’t believe in the hereafter now, not the way it’s taught. I’m not sure what happens to us when we die. But why should we be so concerned about it? Think of it as a flower, or a tree that dies and adds its whatever, vitality, to the earth. Flowers die every year. Trees die. All living things die. So why are we so much more than the animals of the Earth, or the foliage, or any of it? We’re all part of nature. I don’t know why we should all be so afraid of it. It’s a nuisance knowing you won’t be here anymore. The one thing I hate about thinking about dying is I won’t be able to read. If I could take books with me, I wouldn’t care. [Laughs] I never was so proud of being who I was until I read The Grapes of Wrath. I was forty-five when I read it. I have a fifth-grade education. Actually, I graduated, if you want to call it graduated, from grade school after five years. I just read everything I could get my hands on—no matter what it was, I’d read it. I used to know football like crazy because my cousin read football stories.

  I don’t want to die, but I’m not so afraid of it. What concerns me is the grief of the ones I leave. That is the bad part. You know they’re going to be heartbroken, just like I was when my mother went. I wish I could do something about that, not being here with them. Of course that concerns me. It happens to everyone. Death is a leveler. I think if we spent more time being kinder to our fellow man than all the time we wasted in churches and grieving about dying, it would be put to better use. I wish that everyone could just go peacefully. But of course, you have to picture death in many different ways, because some people die violently. Some people are lucky and go, zip—heart attack or brain hemorrhage and they’re gone. That’s lucky. I’ve worked in hospitals enough that I know what it’s like to lay there. I worked as a nurse’s aide for five years at Mercy Hospital in Jackson, Michigan. I remember taking care of cancer patients who smelled so bad when you’d go in the room that you’d just have to paste a look on your face to keep them from knowing. But this one little man I took care of, he was nothing but skin and bones, and he put his hand on mine and he said, “You don’t have to pretend with me.” He said, “I know it smells terrible in here.” And I said, “Well, we won’t talk about it.”

  The first death I remember is when my baby sister died of pneumonia. She was three years old. We went to Oklahoma from Kentucky in January of 1929, before the Crash in November. My sister died in May—my baby sister. I was about seven. I didn’t understand the full implication, because I was excited about this dress our neighbor had made for me to wear to the funeral. It was a beautiful little dress. Of course, everybody made their own clothes back then. Mama took me over to th
e side and told me to sit down and be quiet, my little sister was dead.

  I felt a grief again in a hospital near Waco, Texas. My sister and I worked there. Her husband was at Camp Hood. I saw young soldier boys die—that was real grief. It was like they were kin to me. Soldier boys of World War II. I remember the wonderful guy I wrote to for such a long time. He got the bottom part of his face shot off. He always signed his letters to me, “the chinless wonder.” [Laughs] So that was grief . . .

  As for me, I’m for burial. It’s somewhere where your folks can go and communicate with you. They can pray and sing and talk to the dead me. I think I’d rather like that. I’ve already got a place in the Symsonia Cemetery in Paducah. It’s where all my folks were born, it’s a suburb of Paducah. The graveyard where I bought my grave goes back to my great-great-grandfather. And there’s, oh, at least a hundred, maybe more, of my people in that graveyard.

  My little baby sister, she died in ’29. My sister Elsie died in ’79. And my brother Lon died just a few years ago. I have two sisters left. I was born in ’21—I’ll be seventy-eight in October. We went there to my grandmother’s grave and my cousin, Willie Helms Draffen, was my mother’s age and he remembered all those people. He remembered Grandma. He told many things about her, and my sister talked. We had a tape recorder with us, the three of us. We were searching. I was working on my family tree. Willie, of course, knew everybody out there because that’s where all the Draffens come from.

  Being at that grave is consoling to us, that’s it. I don’t believe there’s anything like Heaven because if there is a God, in my opinion, He’s not worth worshiping. If He was what I was taught, a loving God who sees the fall of the sparrow, why are so many people in the world in such horrible, miserable conditions? If He is all that caring, why do so many people suffer so terribly? Why are people who go to church every Sunday still deep racists? Maybe they don’t care that there are people that fought for this country sleeping down under the thing on Wacker Drive, no homes, no place to go, no medical care, no nothing. If God has his eye on the sparrow, why doesn’t He have it on us people? I love sparrows, but . . . [Laughs]

  I think Hell is right here on earth, absolutely. Look at the misery. My heart is heavy every day because every—I don’t listen to television anymore. I seldom turn it on. It’s horror story after horror story. I mean, they’re starting to put children in jail! Those two little boys they had for raping this child, they had them charged with murder. Six and eight years old, for God’s sake!

  All I can say is, He’s the most ignorant God that’s possible. I have more respect for the ancient gods of Rome. At least, you know, they didn’t claim to really care about us mortals. They cared about themselves and made no bones about it. They were the gods and we worshiped them, but they didn’t promise us anything.

  I’d love to believe in reincarnation—that would be such a sop. Wouldn’t that be wonderful if we could believe that? I think one reason people are so desperate about dying is they haven’t lived yet. All we do here is we try to see who can get a little higher up the ladder than the neighbor. That’s what we spend our time doing, that and driving to work and back, polluting the air and all of that . . . I think life is so miserable for most people. All the time they’re racing around like mad, drunken ants, they’re fearing dying. That’s the way it got this way, that’s what keeps it this way, is greed. To teach people from the time they’re little to have respect for each other, maybe not love, but at least respect and kindness toward each other, care more about each other than you do about getting a new car. Then we might have a different attitude toward death.

  I don’t think there’s anything after. If we’ve fulfilled ourselves as human beings—not as collectors of stuff, money and bank accounts and all that, but as human beings—then I don’t think death would be as frightening. I don’t think most people understand that their lives are completely empty. Or maybe they do: they know it in a way, because they get up in the morning and they go to work, they work all day like hell and then they come home at night. They get up the next day and do the same thing. Maddening traffic, people who are getting nastier to each other day by day. And they watch the TV news and they think, My God, they’re all a bunch of animals, and here I am living in a zoo where all the animals have gone wild, but I’m above that because I’m out here in the suburbs or I’m somewhere in Chicago where those animals can’t get near . . . And they look with contempt and fear. What kind of living is that, that you live in fear?

  How would you like to be remembered?

  [A long pause] As a symbol for the have-nots that, if given the right opportunities, can find their way out of their holes of misery and ignorance the same way I did. I’d like to be remembered as one that tried to push that as far as I could, to do as much about that as I could. I’d like Fran Ainsley to sing “Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life.” And no holy words said over me. [Laughs] My favorite Irish war song is “The Minstrel Boy”:

  The minstrel boy to the war is gone, in the ranks of dead you will find him

  His sword and shield he has girded on and his wild heart slung behind him

  Land of song, said the warrior bard, though all the world betray thee

  One sword at least thy right shall guard, one faithful harp shall praise thee.

  You’re the minstrel girl. Any epitaph?

  “I did my best.”

  POSTSCRIPT

  Never have I heard an ovation equal to the one she received after a speech she made at Operation PUSH in 1968. The audience was overwhelmingly African-American. Reverend Jesse Jackson introduced her. As I remember it, she spoke of her arrest after a civil rights demonstration. A fellow Southerner had asked her, “What were you doing inside there with all those niggers?” She replied, “Where else could poor white trash like me be greeted with respect by a Nobel Prize–winner like Dr. King?” The audience let out a roar, rose to its feet, cheered, laughed, stamped its feet, and shouted amens, on and on and on.

  Bessie Jones

  Among the performers at the University of Chicago Folk Festival of 1969 were the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Their home, St. Simons Island, was seven miles off the Georgia coast. Their work was fishing, loading and unloading boats, and housework on the mainland at white people’s homes, while they were remembering the oft-told tales of their elders, many of them slaves. They celebrated these memories and histories, as well as their daily lives, in song.

  I first met Bessie Jones in the early sixties. The musicologist Alan Lomax had introduced me to her and her fellow islanders. She was, at the time, in her mature years, and, though her companions told their own stories vibrantly, she was obviously their oracle.

  It was at the 1969 festival that she met Almeda “Granny” Riddle, an elderly white singer of olden folk songs and hymns from Heber Springs, Arkansas. During Bessie Jones’s reflections, she invited Almeda Riddle to offer her own reminiscences.

  We couldn’t get out to the mainland much, and that kept us like it was. We do the old work songs, the old rain shouts and prayers. My grandfather, a hundred and five years old, he was a slave and he told us the many things that he did and what did happen. He would get out and pray with us, sing with us, with vim, do it right.

  They’d be singing a work song, a shout song, a chantey, or a spiritual. They’d be doing the work while they were singing. They wouldn’t be singing one thing and doing something else. If they’re rowing, they’re singing a rowing song. If they’re washing, they’re singing a washing song. If they’re working in the field, they sing a hoe song. If they’re loading a ship, they’re singing a longshoreman’s song. If they’re pulling a rope, a sailor’s song. Something to lift, they’d say, “Boys, let’s pull.” Everybody pull at once. So you got vim when you’re singing like that. That’s why you always see us moving, because you have to feel like the person who you’re singing after or else the song wouldn’t be no good.

  You’d see boys go to the woods, they’d have two, three load
s of wood. Make a big fire and sing all night. We didn’t have no moving pictures to go to or nothing. We’d just sing and make ourselves happy. Like the church song “Let Me Fly”—just the hard times they had, and they realize what God would do for them and they feel like flying. Help you survive the day.

  Same thing with sad songs. The sad songs is not to make people sadder, it’s to make them gladder. Even if he is in jail or on a chain gang, he’s singing something out there to help himself to forget the feeling. They sing to make them forget about the hard tasks and this treatment that they was going up against.*

  We’d sometimes sing and play in the moonlight. They got that way back in slavery. They wanted to say something to white people and they couldn’t—so they’d sing, “I’m going to rule, I’m going to rule the ruler.” They wanted to rule, sometime, sometime.

  There was nightwatch songs to help you out of trouble. When you’re in trouble, you’d sing about Moses leading the people out of the land of Israel and Pharaoh pursued them. The night was falling and they found out they was going out on a cliff. They had rock on either side of this entry and the Pharaoh behind them, so they started talking to Moses. We’d sing “Moses, Don’t You Let Pharaoh Overtake Us.”

  That was the way they used to tell people about their own selves.

  WHEN THEY WOULD DIE, the colored people would be put away most anywhere: some behind some old bushes or whatnot. And not very decent like the white people was. They used to call them coffins in those days, but they had a rough box and put them away. You know, these colored people had feelings for their bodies and the people that was gone as well as anybody else. So they made a song about it: “Throw Me Anywhere in That Old Field.” They just made it up with their self and God: just throw me anywhere in that old field, because they didn’t care because they knew that Jesus would be with them, go down with them. They arrived with Jesus. That was in their heart, soul, and mind—you can just throw me anywhere.