Some Sing, Some Cry

by Ntozake Shange

  In the summer of ’62 Memphis’s daughter Alelia was still living with her adoptive parents, her Uncle Jesse and Aunt Mabel, in Jefferson County on the outskirts of Birmingham, near Bessemer. Their little homestead beside the church was surrounded by forests so thick light found a hard time getting to the roots of plants and trees, tripping the feet and bodies of any remotely unfamiliar. Through this formidable foliage slaves escaped or didn’t, were chased by raving dogs and their masters carrying white-fire torches and cursing the niggahs what dared for a new life. Amongst these memories and the dense near-jungle of unharnessed Alabama lived Jesse and his family.

  Alelia sat at the kitchen table and begged her parents to let her join the sit-ins being mounted in North Carolina and Tennessee, or to enlist in the freedom rides that were spreading throughout the South. She wanted to be on the front lines of what people were calling the Movement like her brother Joshua. Jesse and Mabel’s natural-born son, she argued, had already participated in several demonstrations. He had written them all from his school about efforts to desegregate a lunch counter and to integrate the public library—all as practice he said for a major voting rights campaign across the South. Jesse and Mabel were adamant that Alelia should not leave. Yes, she was nearly the same age as Joshua, but clearly he was more mature. His having graduated and gone off to college while she was still in high school was testament to that.

  “Besides, Joshua is a man, and you are a young lady. It’s too dangerous,” Mabel scolded. “You don’t know these white folks like I do.” The whole congregation for weeks had been talking of the buses pulling up to stations engulfed in flames, the buses themselves reeking of smoke and fire, screams of the freedom riders rising above the crackle and harsh bursts of gasoline booming from the engines. Mabel simply forbade her to go.

  Jesse, ever the preacher, tried persuasion. “Alelia, my child, the struggle elsewhere ain’t no more urgent than right here. You got plenty of work to do right before your very own eyes. If you wanna do some organizin’, you can help right at home, helpin’ me to cover all the little black enclaves and farms ’tween here and Bessemer.”

  Mabel’s mouth flew open in astonishment at her husband’s suggestion. Alelia sighed with frustration. She didn’t want to stay in some backwoods hamlet, working out of her father’s church. She wanted to be part of somethin’ new. She wanted to be with the college students at North Carolina A&T or Fisk or Orangeburg State, not chattin’ up the congregation of Reverend Minor’s Gethsemane Baptist. Jesse just patted her hand and chuckled, “Your mother will tell you, you’ll be in as much danger as any soul ridin’ some bus, or sittin’ at a drugstore counter, waitin’ for their eggs insteada ketchup and oil spillin’ over their bodies. You don’t need to look for no trouble in the South. It’ll come find yuh. You young folk act like we ain’t done no battlin’ before. It’s just your turn, that’s all.”

  Mabel rose from the table in anger. “You mind what I say, the both of you! Bless my soul, what they riskin’ is they very lives, jus’ like you’d be doin’ right here. You listenin’ to me, Alelia?”

  Jesse shrugged and bit his tongue. Some part of Mabel knew Jesse was right, but another part—well, she just shook her head and rubbed her hands together. Alelia squared her shoulders and stretched her long neck, a tacit sign that she accepted her father’s vision that the struggle was anywhere the Negro was.

  Alelia retreated to her attic bedroom, which she had converted into her studio, the prize centerpiece a portable record player her birth mother, Memphis, had left behind the day her Aunt Cinn got married, coincidentally the day she was born. Her favorite refuge was the voice of Odetta with its thick, fully rounded body and mournful or challenging words. Odetta, thought Alelia, was the epitome of a true Negro folk singer. That’s what she wanted to be, a musical descendant of Marian Anderson, Mary Lou Williams, Nina Simone, and above all, Odetta—colored women whose voices were impenetrable and fearless. With song she could bring her folks toward her and get them to trust her. Then she would speak to them of voter registration, literacy, and the strength to stand up to white folk no matter what. She would talk to them of freedom, but first she would sing it. She didn’t actually want to be a lone soul traipsing the backwoods of Alabama, and there would be no band of white and colored college students to help, but she would heed her call. The next day, she slung her guitar over her shoulder and got on her bicycle and pedaled down the dirt road toward the hamlet of Bessemer, the county seat. “Gather ye baskets where ye may,” her father had said. Her confidence left no space for misgivings or self-pity. She too was a freedom fighter.

  Sun-streaked and sodden with her own sweat, she arrived in Adger, population four hundred, near sundown. She crossed the railroad tracks to the colored part of town, a cluster of tin-roofed shacks and a one-pump filling station. Being sure to address everyone as m’am and sir with a smile like she belonged there, she asked for a Mr. Goodenough, whom her father had said was her contact. Folks had just started to gather on their porches after a hard day’s work. They hummed songs of the gospel, seeding the way for Christ, a chorus of mostly womenfolk singing their way to heaven. Having grown up in the church, Alelia naturally joined them. Nods of heads and glasses of sugar water assured her that she was welcome. Suddenly a rich baritone filled in the bottom harmony, then launched into a solo. This, it turned out, was Mr. Goodenough, whose presence emboldened the women’s voices. At the end of the praise song, Mr. Goodenough said to Alelia, “You must be Reverend Jesse’s daughter. We’ve been waiting for you. Isn’t that right?”

  A group of women uttered in unison, “That’s right, yes, Mr. Goodenough.”

  Mrs. Wilder inquired, “Ain’t this the chile come to help us to learn to vote and such?”

  Goodenough rubbed his shaven chin, already showing a late-in-the-day stubble speckled with white. “Yes, she’s the very one.”

  The women nodded their heads in approval. Some had their slippers on, others their support hose, rolled up to their knees. All together Alelia figured these women were fierce churchgoers, the caretakers of children and culture, as much as they were tillers of the soil, tenders of their flock. What she wanted to ask of them was to change their whole way of living, to banish the fear and end being complicit in their own exploitation. Dignity was too scarce and life too precious for a people not to know it freely lived.

  What she said was, “Good evening, everyone. My name is Alelia Minor, and I’ve my guitar, too.” Silence followed. She scrambled to recover. “You all know my father, Reverend Minor.” She heard a whispered “Amen” and “Ain’t she speaking the truth,” and continued, “Actually I have a mission to carry out down here. I’ve come to register all of you. For the vote.” Silence. “Not just us womenfolk, but husbands and gentlemen callers, too.”

  A slight rumble of laughter went through the crowd. “Lissen at that, ‘Womenfolk.’ She ain’t nothing but a gal.”

  “I’ve come to change how we been treated all this time.”

  Miz Butler’s eyes rolled and then focused on Alelia. “Damn you, gal, Lord forgive me. Damn you, gal.” Her heavy body lumbered quickly down the wooden porch steps as she mumbled to herself, flinging her arms as if to cast the girl’s spirit far from her, “Come to get us kilt is what you done come heah for, to bring those Communists down on us ’long with the Klan and plain ol’ angry white folk.”

  Alelia rubbed her chin out of nervousness and answered her critic quickly before anyone truly heard what Miz Butler was saying. “I hear tell that during Reconstruction colored folks voted fine as a summer day. Had plenty of colored representatives—congressmen, even senators.”

  “A hunnerd years ago!” someone exclaimed, not knowin’ it to be the truth.

  “I’m just here to insure that we get represented again. Today.”

  The women shared puzzled looks as well as frightened gazes. “But lissen, gal, now we got to own land as well as know how to write in order to vote and cain’t everybody do that. Then when you
get up there, they test you on the Constitution. Say it’s the law.”

  Alelia strummed her guitar casually, trying to put the group at ease. “Well, that’s sorta what I’m here for, to help you to prove those old tests unconstitutional. See, I’m here representing the real law. How you’ve been livin’ is lawless.”

  An audible gasp went through the gathering. Seeing the unintended response of these churchgoers, Alelia corrected herself, “What I mean is how you been forced to live is lawless.” Thinking it was time to engender a little of that trust her father had talked about, Alelia pulled her guitar close to her and began to strum. “I’ve come all the way almost from the county line, and I brought this guitar, too, so I could sing with you like the Christian soldiers that we are. We’re workin’ against Satan, yes we are. Those who have us slave all day with little if anything to show for it, those who keep our children in the fields three quarters of the year so they can never better themselves, those who keep you from voting and from having say in how your town is run, those who tell you that you are less than, lower than any other human being that walks this land—they are his followers and it is our duty as Christians to stand up to them, powerful with God’s love and fearless in his Glory!”

  Alelia heard a whispered “Amen” and “Ain’t she speakin’ the truth now.” And the whispers turned to claps and shouts of affirmation. “Well, she sure is the Reverend’s daughter, that’s a fact,” said Mr. Goodenough.

  Miz Butler let loose a sigh and a grumble, while eyeing her latest handiwork hanging on the clothesline and over the fence. “White folks come round hyeah lookin’ for my quilts, missy. Is all this you plannin’ on doin’ gon’ mess that up? What you ’spect a vote gon’ do?”

  “Well, it’ll give you a say, and with that, you can make your lives better and you won’t be fearful. I’m talkin’ about a new world, where people walk together in peace and equality.”

  Miz MacGraty and Miz Pearl rolled their eyes at each other and laughed. Alelia was startled when Miz MacGraty said, “Chile, that there, what you talkin’ bout, awready exists. It’s callt Heaven, the Rapture, or the Ecstasy.” Now all the ladies were chuckling at the neophyte organizer. Alelia did blush some, her cheeks matching the rose panels Miz Butler had begun to work on. Not knowing what else to do, Alelia decided to play her guitar gently and softly at first, then more vigorously. Even if she couldn’t get these women to believe her this minute, she sure would get them to remember her.

  Mr. Goodenough asked who would house this young woman come all the way from the Gethsemane. Miss Halihan, a withering lanky woman, claimed her. “What do folks call you again, chile?”

  Alelia looked around so that she might address the group of women all at once, including every single soul. “I’m callt Alelia, that’s my given name.” At the look of raised eyebrows, she quickly added, “But please feel free to call me Lia.”

  “Well, we might as well get to know you, Miss Lia. Folk don’ usually bide much time here. Don’t rightly think a bicycle gon make it to Bessemer.”

  Reverend Jesse’s household was like the Atlanta train station. Folks coming and going with signs or paintbrushes. Mabel was loudly coordinating the chaos while, with his inkstand perched on his knees, Jesse sequestered himself in the bathroom to finish his sermon for the march the next day. Emboldened by the progress made by civil rights groups across the South, Bessemer had become a new focal point in preparation for a full campaign in Birmingham, the county seat. A planned march had been in the works for weeks. Jesse had to find a way to capture the community’s excitement in his sermon. It wouldn’t be his congregation’s first march, but Jesse hoped that, with the newcomers from Talladega and Montgomery, it would be their largest. Ordinary people are about to make history. Pedaling down those dusty roads, Alelia turned into quite a freedom rider on her own, even without Joshua. He dipped his pen in the inkwell again, and laughed to himself as he corrected a line. His adopted daughter thought him so old-fashioned, still writing his sermons by hand with a fountain pen. And Joshua! His son, who had brought some classmates home to participate in the march, had taken to not speaking. “As a symbol for the voiceless,” Joshua wrote on a sheet of blue-lined school paper.

  Jesse shook his head at his children’s impatience. Their ideas. Just then his quill broke and an ink blot spilled on the page in a jagged splatter, staining his hands and shirt. He sobered. Blood will fall this morrow. He shook his head to block the images, rejecting the sign, and tried to pull hope from his soul. Suddenly, a commotion startled him—Mabel banging on the door and behind her a tumultuous clatter.

  The Walker family had arrived from Chicago, singing a Supremes song. “Baby, baby, I hear a symphony . . .” Mabel banged on the door again. “Reverend, get on off the throne and come on out here! Joshua and Alelia, come on and help with their luggage. Lord have mercy, they done brought a trailer!”

  The Walker teenagers tumbled out of the car, stunned by the rich density of the thick forests and a real stream, the water so clear, they could see the fish in it. The trio had begged their parents to take them south, but now they felt some doubt. This really was the country. Strumming her acoustic guitar and singing a Joni Mitchell tune, Alelia strolled onto the porch. Her cousins were astounded, for she had cut off all of her beautiful hair and had let it grow into a bush as wild as the forest around her.

  Alelia stared at her cousins and listened to the casual banter with their mom and dad, their parents encouraging them, fussing with them. A whole family. She was surprised she felt envy. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Jesse, Mabel, and Joshua, but her real mother, Memphis, whether living in L.A. or singing in Europe, had refused to take her, ever. Every once in a while, some token or souvenir from Budapest or Oslo, that was the extent of the relationship. Or worse, an autographed glossy publicity photo. “Just like your great-aunt Liz,” Cinnamon once told her. “Memphis always did want to follow in her footsteps.”

  Cinnamon took one look at Lia’s hair and silently went inside to console her sister-in-law and see if she could be of some help in the kitchen. Lawrence succeeded in unlatching the trailer from the back of the family Buick. He opened the trunk and started unloading the luggage just as Jesse stepped onto the porch. “Jesse, got a rip-roaring sermon ready for tomorrow?”

  Still wiping the ink from his fingers, Jesse smiled slightly, nodding his head. “If it’s the Lord’s will, I surely do.”

  “Welcome to the Walker Family Band!” A mere station wagon wasn’t enough for the Walkers. They needed a U-Haul to accommodate the children’s musical passion. While their father and uncle struggled with the bags, the Walker teens unpacked only their instruments and abandoned the adults immediately for Lia’s attic. As soon as the hatch was down, Abbott picked up his saxophone, Tokyo set up her electric keyboard and amplifier, and James assembled his drum kit and cymbals. In no time, they were ready to hit it.

  Now, while his parishoners weren’t dyed-in-the-wool holy rollers, Jesse thought for a moment, listening to the din above his head, that the Walker children’s musical talents might be just what his congregation needed to rouse them for the very serious and dangerous march ahead. After supper, he called the young people to him and asked them if they knew “We Shall Overcome.” With their urban antennae piqued, the Walker youth quieted. Somebody inside the house started singing until everyone joined in, even the Walkers who really didn’t believe in “some day.”

  Alelia found her relatives fascinating. With her hair in two bushy pigtails, and dressed in a pantaloon sunsuit, Tokyo was a jabberwocky in constant motion. Yet her childish antics belied the powerful trajectory and command of her voice. Abbott in his stovepipe polyester pants and stocking-cap pressed hair was too cool for everyone, except during his awkward attempts to coordinate the group’s choreography. And James, the different drummer, sometimes would just close his eyes and rock his head to a rhythm that was totally his own. They talked constantly about music, but not the music Alelia loved, the torrent o
f protest songs from Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln on Freedom Now. She preferred John Coltrane’s Love Supreme to the Supremes. She looked askance at all of Tokyo’s electronic accoutrements. For Alelia the guitar itself was enough, surely. Tokyo couldn’t understand how she could survive without an amp. “Acoustic? That’s like the Middle Ages!” Still Alelia gravitated toward her younger cousins. Joshua had come home for the march, but spent his time with the classmates he had brought with him. When she tried to tell them of the organizing she had done throughout the county, his friends patronized her or ignored her. Her brother was different, introspective, removed. She took his vow of silence as a personal affront. At least you could talk to me.

  With a nod from Mabel, Alelia led each of the Minor children to their sleeping spaces. There were bodies everywhere. Fortunately, the Walkers were flexible. It wasn’t like anything the children had ever seen—all these strangers and strange-looking folks coming to support their uncle Jesse and his march against segregation. “Even white people!” James exclaimed. The Walkers, coming from one of the most segregated cities in the country, were taken aback.

  Abbott mumbled, “We gotta get the hell outta heah.”

  “Naw, Abbott, these folks came to help us,” Tokyo responded as they all settled down in their makeshift beds, Miz Patrick and Miz Butler’s downy quilts on loan.

  Early the next morning Mabel rang the triangular bell on the porch to alert her houseful of guests that breakfast was ready. Alelia came by each visiting soul in the midst of some kind of sleep to tell them that it was time.