Lonnae O’Neal: ‘Deep River’ for these deeply troubled times
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Version 0 of 1. Sometimes, if I’m on deadline or writing an especially thorny piece, I’ve been known to send my editor a message. If she asks how things are going, I might tell her I’m sitting at my desk singing Negro spirituals and invite her to join me. Or I might start a phone call with a mournful lyric: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” It’s meant for laughs — a melodramatic way to convey my anxiety. But the impulse to use a spiritual as a metaphor (and coping mechanism) for pain, trepidation, the sense that what I’m going through is hard and I’m not feeling great about it, comes from an old place. But in these times of racial anguish and invective, in many ways it is full of modern utility. The first spirituals are “the story of African Americans before they started going to church,” says Stanley Thurston, artistic director of Washington Performing Arts’ gospel choirs. “These are plantation songs, songs in the field. Something to help you feel better about what was going on.” They became more religious as slaves heard Bible stories and began looking to God for refuge, “but a lot of the songs were about how to make it through to the next day.” Thurston, who founded the Heritage Signature Chorale 14 years ago to help keep spirituals alive, is co-conducting “Deep River,” a multimedia performance Saturday at the University of the District of Columbia exploring the history and resonance of the American spiritual. The show is based on the song “Deep River,” arranged by Harry Burleigh, a protege of famed composer Antonin Dvorak (Dvorak once predicted that “Negro melodies” would guide the future of American music). Early in the 20th century, Burleigh would have been one of the first black men to have gone to college and been able to write the piano and vocal parts of the songs he’d heard his father sing to him. Famed contralto Marian Anderson, whom the Daughters of the American Revolution once disallowed from performing at Constitution Hall, would have known “Deep River,” but her white pianist would not, until Burleigh’s arrangement. I cue up an Anderson rendition and feel my eyes shutter. There must be some hidden notes, some secret coding, some language from God in spirituals. Because it is impossible to hear them and not be moved. Impossible, too, not to celebrate their subversiveness. In kindergarten, I sang “I got shoes” from the spiritual “Walk Over God’s Heaven.” Our teacher told us to pay attention to the line “Everybody talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t going there.” Even as a 5-year-old, I could appreciate a double meaning. Spirituals were engines of agency, information and escape: Wade in the water children, about going to the river to escape. Swing low, sweet chariot /comin’ for to carry me home, a code song about the Underground Railroad. I was 12 and I sang that song in a talent show on the last night of sleep-away camp. I can’t sing, and I can’t say what the feeling was that propelled me to that stage, but whatever it was, I was full up with it. I swayed and rocked as I sang a cappella, and people in the audience started clapping along. It was my first solo. Later, in the most trembly times of my life, I sang it to myself. Tazewell Thompson, who is directing “Appomattox” at the Washington National Opera through Nov. 22, is working on a play about the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers, who helped introduce the world to spirituals in the late 19th century. Thompson calls spirituals flexible and open to reinterpretation. “When we hear these spirituals today, they have a way — an almost Zen-like quality — to transport us,” he says. “It comes to us with an idea. In case you didn’t get it, it repeats. You still didn’t hear it, it repeats again. I think today with all the turmoil going on with race in this country, I think it’s time to return to spirituals.” Sometimes an audience member will burst into tears listening to one of the songs, Thurston says. Or some of the performers will become emotional. “It’s not phony,” he says. “It’s not a caricature of someone acting out on stage. It is perhaps a bone memory. A recognition that you may not be going through the exact thing the song talks about, but we’ve all been through something.” Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. “Something in the slave character or history or ancestry is a model for us to don’t give up,” Thurston says. “Look at how bad they had it, and they didn’t give up.” An old message from slaves, for everyone, for the ages. Deep River: The Art of the Spiritual will be performed at 8 p.m. Saturday at UDC Auditorium, 4200 Connecticut Ave. NW. $30. www.washingtonperformingarts.org. For more by O’Neal, visit wapo.st/lonnae. |