There are moments when music can elicit emotions that words on a page cannot. That is the power of song, and the heart of African American spirituals. Prayer in the form of poetry, these religious and inspirational songs birthed from the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade often refer to a time of future happiness. By pairing the anguish of bondage with the sweetness of freedom, they evoke the brilliance, wit, pain, and devotion of people who were routinely denied their humanity.
I’m a Black South Carolinian raised in the church, so these spirituals are ingrained. Their nature-based metaphors about lost sheep, valleys so low they exist in an all-encompassing darkness, deliverance from oppression—“I wished I had wings like Noah’s dove / I’d fly away to heaven and be at rest”—a coming salvation, and the hereafter are my legacy. My years of singing them taught me about how deep listening—to the spirituals but also to the stories of the dead—can help the living craft a way to survive hard times. Singing is self-expression. Sharing these spirituals is self-preservation.
Today’s world is testing my faith. By the time I slide into a creaky, hundred-year-old pew at Mother Emanuel church in Charleston, South Carolina, to hear the Fisk Jubilee Singers on a damp evening at the end of February, I have no words to express my mental state. The institutions that form the bedrock of my identity—libraries, universities, even national parks—are under threat.
Five months after Hurricane Helene, things in my world were not quite right anyway, and I had to confront the thought that they might never be again. Then came the fires. Friends lost their homes in Los Angeles, and now on this coast the ground is smoking, the harbinger of wildfires that will go on to tear through the Carolinas, closing one of my favorite state parks in the process.
I feel like I’m living in a tinderbox, literally and mentally. I have watched scores of friends lose their jobs, and my livelihood as an English professor hangs in the balance too. There are nights when all the things weighing on my heart threaten to pull me under.
I forget all of this, just for a little bit, when the Jubilee Singers begin. Hundreds of us sit rapt as the group’s director, G. Preston Wilson Jr., shares its history. Fisk Free Colored School, now known as Fisk University, was established in Nashville in 1865 to educate formerly enslaved people. By 1871, the endeavor was mired in debt, and that same year the school’s treasurer, music professor George L. White, established a nine-person student choral ensemble to raise money.
The group’s name refers to the biblical “year of jubilee,” in which all the enslaved were to be set free. Juneteenth is sometimes also called Jubilee Day. A national tour was so successful that the singers embarked on an international one, even performing for Queen Victoria in 1873. The proceeds allowed the school to build Jubilee Hall, the South’s first permanent structure for the education of African Americans, which remains in use today.
As he ends his story, Wilson presents the audience with one more sentiment: “There was a quote from an adage that I heard that says, ‘The question is not can you carry a tune, but what tune can carry you?’”
Ten years ago, on the afternoon of June 26, 2015, then-President Obama stood in the pulpit here at Mother Emanuel and sang “Amazing Grace” as part of his eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney after a white supremacist murdered him, along with eight of his parishioners—Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Tywanza Sanders, Ethel Lance, Daniel Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson, and DePayne Middleton-Doctor—nine days earlier. The perpetrator would go on to receive the death sentence, but in the decade since the Mother Emanuel massacre, the background-check rule that allowed him to purchase a weapon has yet to be federally addressed.
So many of these can’t-turn-back moments, the ones that we were convinced would be tipping points, have faded from the headlines, nothing changed. Love and forgiveness can build a bridge, but what can we do when the justice we were told to expect fails to materialize? How to honor the weight of these nine lives lost?
In the past five years, I’ve attended this church more than any other. It is my chosen place of worship on holidays and whenever I’m in town. Charleston is a haunted place, a hard place, but I cannot shy away from coming here. My family’s story, and my ancestors’ enslavement, began in the South Carolina Lowcountry, their bodies trafficked through this city like so many others. What am I, a Black woman without the luxury of forgetting, to do with the fact that many refuse to truly reckon with this racist past?
I sit in my pew and meditate on the murdered, the survivors, the inheritors of all these memories. The music covers the sound of my sniffles. As a child I was taught that believers were to put their cares on the altar; our troubles are not as heavy if we carry them collectively. So it is here that I leave my present-day bevy of concerns. I let the sacred melodies that carried messages of hope and survival for the enslaved wash over me. Folks don’t sing spirituals as much as they used to, but even with any song in the world at my fingertips via such apps as Spotify, few uplift me in times of great peril as these do.
After the concert, everyone files out of the sanctuary and back into the night. I return to my hotel, but at 3:00 a.m., I still can’t sleep. I tug on a jacket over my pajamas and walk around Marion Square, named after a Revolutionary War hero and slaveholder. When I reach the corner of Meeting and Calhoun Streets, I stop to stare at Mother Emanuel, gleaming white. The air outside the church doors has a hint of heaviness in it. I attempt to put my thoughts forward in a way the church might recognize.
Couldn’t hear nobody pray
O way down yonder by myself
And I couldn’t hear nobody pray In the valley
Couldn’t hear nobody pray
On my knees
Couldn’t hear nobody pray
With my burden
Couldn’t hear nobody pray
Faith in the unseen, in the hard to comprehend, remains an integral part of my life, and I have to believe this church can hear me.
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, often called Mother Emanuel, is the oldest Black church in the South. The building in front of me was completed in 1891, but the idea of this place—a sanctuary for Black people—goes back to its founding in 1816. Created at a time when state and local ordinances limited worship services by Black people and prohibited Black literacy, this church body has weathered the worst of an oppressive history. In addition to the most recent horrors, a mob of angry white people burned down Emanuel’s original structure in 1822, and the church was raided several other times in its two-hundred-plus-year existence. It has withstood fires, flooding, hurricanes, and earthquakes.
And yet.
Mother Emanuel is with me in the predawn, so I ask.
What am I to do with the tenet of forgiveness when all I feel is rage and anguish—if not simply for myself but also for those around me?
What does it mean to be a Black teacher and artist in a time of turmoil?
Sometimes we do not emerge from the wreckage whole. We instead come away forever changed on a cellular level. In the Bible, a “witness” refers to someone who has experienced something and testifies to it, often with a focus on sharing his or her faith. That is my purpose, as I see it, as a writer. When others turn away, it is my job to watch, to write down what is happening. My task is to not avert my eyes.
There are still moments when words seem insufficient, or the right ones don’t seem to come. But I live with the hope they will one day again. Until then I’ll carry the songs inside of me that are constantly calling me to act, to speak, and to preserve what matters.
