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.”
JO CARSON
(October 9, 1946–)
Jo Carson is a native of Johnson City, Tennessee, where she makes her home. A poet, a playwright, a short story author, and an actress, Carson graduated from East Tennessee State University in 1973 with a degree in speech and theater. In addition to writing and acting, Carson has been an occasional commentator for National Public Radio's All Things Considered.
Carson first began writing poems around the age of ten, which got her in trouble, she says, because she ignored her schoolwork. “I was a terrible student, and I hated school…. I took a long time getting through college because I did other things. I was still writing in college instead of doing other homework.”
Many of Carson's plays have received national recognition, including Daytrips, which won the Kesselring Award; Preacher with a Horse to Ride, which won the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Fund for New American Plays; and for The Bear Facts, Carson received a National Endowment for the Art's Playwright's Fellowship.
Her collection of poems, Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet, was selected for the American Library Association's recommended list for 1990, as well as Booklist's Editor's Choice. The poems in Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet form the basis of People Pieces, a one-woman stage production Carson has taken to theaters and colleges throughout the United States and abroad. “The pieces all come from people,” Carson explains. “I never sat at my desk and made them up. I heard the heart of each of them somewhere.” Carson describes the poems as “distillations” which remain “true to the thoughts and rhythms” of the original speaker. Carson says, “Everything I write is to be spoken aloud.”
In her review of Stories, George Ella Lyon noted, “What we hear…is not the poet's voice but what she listens to. We are made listeners by our reading, hauled within earshot of voices…. Fundamental to Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet is the belief that all lives speak truths worth listening to.”
In the opening scene from her short story “Maybe,” from her collection The Last of the ‘Waltz Across Texas’ and Other Stories, Carson's three narrators—Dessa, Brenda, and Harry—take turns sharing their thoughts on love and marriage.
In the excerpt from her play Daytrips, Carson examines the impact of Alzheimer's disease on a mother, Ree, who has the disease, and her daughter, Pat, who has to deal with the consequences.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Selected Drama: Whispering to Horses (1996–97), The Bear Faas (1993), Daytrips (1991), Preacher with a Horse to Ride (1990). Books for children: The Great Shaking: An Account of the Earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 (1994), You Hold Me and I'll Hold You (1992), Pulling My Leg (1990). Poetry: Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet (1989). Short stories: The Last of the ‘Waltz Across Texas’ and Other Stories (1993). Interview: with Jo Harris, Appalachian Journal 20:1 (fall 1992), 56–67. Autobiographical essay: “Good Questions,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 72–79.
SECONDARY
Kathie deNobrogia and Valetta Anderson, eds., Alternate Roots: Plays from the Southern Theater (1994), 338–39. Joyce Dyer, “Jo Carson,” Bloodroot, 71. “Jo Carson Issue,” Iron Mountain Review 14 (summer 1998). Jennifer Mooney, ‘“Room Is Made for Whoever’: Jo Carson and the Creation of Dialogical Community,” in Her Words (2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 50–65. George Ella Lyon, review of Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet, Appalachian Journal 17:2 (winter 1990), 204–5. James S. Torrens, “Trying Them Out Off Broadway [review of Daytrips],” America (8 December 1990), 453.
40
> from Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet: Selections from the People Pieces (1989)
The day I married, my mother
had one piece of wedding advice:
“Don't make good potato salad,”
she told me, “it's too hard to make
and you'll have to take something
every time you get invited somewhere.
Just cook up beans; people eat them too.”
My mother was good at potato salad
and part of the memories of my childhood
have to do with endless batches made
for family get-togethers, church picnics,
Civitan suppers, Democratic party fund raisers,
whatever event called for potato salad.
I'd peel the hard-boiled eggs.
My mother would pack
her big red plastic picnic bowl
high with yellow potato salad
(she used mustard),
and it would sit proud on endless tables
and come home empty.
What my mother might and could have said is:
Choose carefully what you get good at
’cause you'll spend the rest of your life doing it.
But I didn't hear that.
I was young and anxious to please
and I knew her potato salad secrets.
And the thousand other duties
given to daughters by mothers,
and sometimes I envy those women
who get by with pots of beans.
49
from Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet: Selections from the People Pieces (1989)
I am asking you to come back home
before you lose the chance of seein’ me alive.
You already missed your daddy.
You missed your uncle Howard.
You missed Luciel.
I kept them and I buried them.
You showed up for the funerals.
Funerals are the easy part.
You even missed that dog you left.
I dug him a hole and put him in it.
It was a Sunday morning, but dead animals
don't wait no better than dead people.
My mama used to say she could feel herself
runnin’ short of the breath of life. So can I.
And I am blessed tired of buryin’ things I love.
Somebody else can do that job to me.
You'll be back here then; you come for funerals.
I'd rather you come back now and got my stories.
I've got whole lives of stories that belong to you.
I could fill you up with stories,
stories I ain't told nobody yet,
stories with your name, your blood in them.
Ain't nobody gonna hear them if you don't
and you ain't gonna hear them unless you get back home.
When I am dead, it will not matter
how hard you press your ear to the ground.
THE LAST OF THE ‘WALTZ ACROSS TEXAS’ AND OTHER STORIES (1993)
from Maybe
[Dessa:] I am not telling this for sympathy. I don't like sympathy and I don't want any of it. Harry'll say I made my own bed and I now have the honor of lying down in it. Well, maybe I did. If I did, what I'm doing right now is tucking in the corners like they ought to be tucked in. No call for sympathy here. A body feels sorry for somebody, they feel like they're better than that somebody, that's the truth. Now, I might feel different if Harry had died, but Harry didn't die. Harry got mad at me, went to Nashville, stayed two weeks and come home married to somebody else. What I get is “Oh, poor Dessa, I feel so sorry for you…” Well, don't. Feel sorry for Brenda if you want to feel sorry for somebody. She married Harry.
[Brenda:] There probably isn't much I can say to keep from looking pretty crazy. Meeting a man in a bar and drinking and talking and after two weeks tying the knot is not what anybody I know thinks Dear Abby might call a good idea, me included, so I knew it was a tomfool thing to do and it was. But I'm not sorry I did it and if I was still just hanging out in Nashville, giving up whatever hopes I had—I am 37—I'd do it again in a minute. Don't get me wrong, marrying was not what I was hoping for, I don't know if I can say what I was hoping for, hope's such a mess spreading all over everything, but I was lonely and sick of trash jobs like waiting tables and getting up the next day and doing the same thing and then there was Harry and marrying Harry was the gift horse that stood grinning at me. I think I was sort of a gift horse for Harry too, and a couple of gift horses that are given to one another know better than to look each other in the mouth.
[Harry:] Now, I am not real proud of myself. What I did was half-cocked and I knew Dessa wasn't going to like it. Even standing there in Nashville at the justice of the peace, I was thinking Dessa ain't gonna like this much. And then driving back up the interstate, Brenda's stuff in the back of the truck, I was doing strict 55. I never drove 55 since the law went in, but I did it coming north on I-81 ’cause it takes longer. I was driving with Brenda sitting next to me, and I was saying things a man says to a woman that just married him and he's taking her home, things about the house and who she's gonna like in the neighborhood, things like if she wants to go to church, I reckon we could do that for awhile. But I'm thinking about what I really ought to be telling Brenda and 55 ain't slow enough to get it out. How do you say you have a common law wife you haven't talked about yet and you're getting a common law divorce right as you sit here saying it, only the common law wife doesn't know it yet? And then I'm thinking about how Dessa probably ain't gonna like Brenda even a little bit and she probably ain't gonna be very happy about my getting married. Dessa don't take up with people easy like I do. I stopped at one of those rest stops and I called her. I was going to say it but I couldn't think of how to start. She said “hello” and I couldn't push out a word. I just hung up.
[Dessa:] Marriage is not what it's cracked up to be. I knew that right from the beginning. I knew what I was supposed to think it was and I knew what me and my friends wanted it to be. We wanted romance. Well, my mother made sure a youngun didn't get out of her house without hearing something different. She had this list of names for daddy that began with hard-headed and ended with son-of-a-bitch and got pretty hot in between. But you didn't have to hear the names. You could look at my mother and see her life wasn't much to brag about and daddy was part of the problem and the name calling didn't help. So I knew about that marriage. I just figured I'd be different.
My mother knew when Harry first started talking about getting married. She could tell, I swear she could smell it and she started in on what she called woman-to-woman talks. They were not about the facts of life, she never did get to that. I could have told her stuff. These were talking-tos, they were what I got when I was in trouble right before I got the real punishment. They started the minute Harry knocked on the door to pick me up for a date. They included Harry sometimes, not that he was a volunteer, but then, I wasn't either. They began with “Now Dessa, you are not old enough…” To be seeing one boy regular. To be going out as much as I was. I was old enough and we both knew it. I was eighteen. It was like she was talking to take up time. The more she did of it, the worse I wanted out. So I told her I'd find out if Harry was as bad as she thought before I did anything to make it permanent—she didn't like it but she thought I meant sleeping with Harry when I said that about making it permanent and anything was better to her than running away and getting married so she didn't disown me or anything. And I told Harry maybe I'd marry him but I didn't see no reason to rush into things and why didn't we just move in with each other for awhile and see how it worked.
[Harry:] You fall in love like I did, you decide you want to live with a person and you ask that person to marry you and she either does or she don't, right? That's how I see it now. There ought not be no halfway about it and Dessa and I were halfway. All Dessa would go was halfway. Dessa'd stop halfway to the gates of heaven, turn around and tell the ange
l Gabriel maybe she'd go on but maybe she's just gonna sit here for awhile. She said maybe to me and she never got around to saying yes. It ain't no way to live together, it makes a man uncomfortable, like he ain't welcome to pull his shoes off. It did me. I pulled my shoes off when I wanted to, I don't mean I didn't ever do that, but I never felt halfway about Dessa and Dessa was halfway about me. She had to be. Why else would she stop halfway? Ask yourself that. I asked myself. Over and over and over again, driving somewhere in the truck, even with Dessa sitting there. I couldn't help it. And I asked Dessa. She'd say “Harry, I'm not with you because I'm tied to you so it must be because I want to be here. You should be pleased by that.”
[Dessa:] Moving in together was fine with Harry then. He told everybody he knew that he'd hooked up with a swinging woman. “Knows her own mind” he said. I didn't think I was so swinging or so smart either. At first I was worried and I didn't want it to be awful or expensive if it turned out like my mother was so sure it was going to. But it turned out to be almost easy and I thought we did all right.
[Harry:] For a while, I was satisfied. Took the “being with you” bait hook, line and sinker. But people say more than that to one another. Dessa said you can't say more than that, but I know you can. People get married to each other and marrying is deciding I do or I don't, I am or I ain't, it's drawing some lines. Marrying is not having to sit with your back to the wall anymore. I would have married Dessa right up to the minute I married Brenda and been happy as a bug in a rug, but Dessa wouldn't do it and I could not stand all the maybes any more.
[Dessa:] I thought Harry proved my mother wrong. Turns out he proved her right. What I did was different from my mother but it didn't work and what's funny is that after fourteen years, it's not gonna cost much money to get out. It's hard to say what it is costing. I think what mother was trying to tell me is that loving somebody costs, costs in ways you never know it's gonna cost, costs in ways you never think to think about. Loving daddy cost my mother years of her life. I don't know how many but I'd bet it's true. I don't think loving Harry cost me years—Harry wasn't as hard to love as my daddy—but loving Harry cost me more than loving me cost Harry. I'm the one that got the surprise. “Surprise! I married somebody else!” I wouldn't have ever, ever done that to Harry. I wouldn't have even thought of it.
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