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“Let’s do a quick warm up and then we’ll pick back up where we left off on Thursday with ‘Swing Low’—we have only five more weeks to get this perfect for graduation,” I said, looking up at the other students in front of me. Some were other Zenobias, others were coming close, and fewer, Opal included, were fighting their best to escape it. The rest simply hadn’t come to school.
On cue, they groaned and rolled their brown eyes as if they’d thought there was some chance I wouldn’t require them to sing—in chorus. Send them all home for not having combed their hair. Zippers unzipped and song sheets rustled as they were taken out to be held in front of the faces of the few kids who still had their copies or needed the words.
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was the traditional spiritual the choir had sung at every graduation since Black Warrior was founded for Negro students in the early 1900s.
“Let’s go.” I walked to the organ I’d placed in front of the old piano.
Hum.
Hum.
Hum.
Hummmm.
I keyed and sang each note for all of the sections to warm them up and just as they did whenever I sang in class, the students relaxed in their seats and looked on like babies being soothed to sleep by a lullaby. They requested the notes again and again and finally, I laughed and said it was time for them to sing.
“But we want you to sing,” Opal whined, and I shook my head no. But I was used to this. I’d grown up being a soloist in the choir at my father’s church and my mother always bragged that I had the voice of an angel. I wasn’t that confident, but when I was just a little girl, I realized that my singing could do things. My father would push me to the microphone and I’d sing nervously, watching as people fell to their knees and got saved right in front of me. Grown men and women would crawl on the floor and sing along with me, crying and praying, some speaking in tongues.
Hum.
Hum.
Hum.
Hummmm.
The sopranos. The tenors. The baritones. The altos. They sent waves of vibrating sounds through the oval-shaped room as I keyed the notes through the short warm up. Suddenly, the room went from dull and tired to a soothing rainbow of sound. The echoes from each group bounced around the room in a tide of confidence and calm.
Zenobia had come back, and we went on, charging at “Swing Low” so hard that it seemed as if the spirits of our ancestors, who rested on the very plantation that the school was built upon, were singing along. The children could feel this energy. All of them. And it came through in their voices. They were forgetting the past with song and living just in the moment in the wonder that we could sound
as one. Right now, who they were and where they were from really didn’t matter. When class ended, they would walk out and return to the world; but for now, singing and “Swing Low” held their spirits captive. In that moment, I was winning.
“Wow,” Billie exclaimed, her face appearing and reappearing in the waves of a sea of students rushing out of the room when the bell rang. My best friend since she stopped Angie Martin from beating me up on the school yard in second grade, Billie taught language arts at Black Warrior. “They sounded really good. I heard them all the way down the hall.”
“Thank you.” I sat down at my desk and sighed. “Let’s hope they sound that way at graduation.”
“Oh, they will. They always do. Anyway, let’s go get some lunch. I need to get out of here.”
“You know I can’t do that,” I said, reaching for the running sneakers beneath my desk.
“You’re working out today ... again? This is five days in a row. This is getting out of control.”
“Don’t be mad at me because I’m actually keeping my grown lady New Year’s resolution,” I said, and Billie rolled her eyes at my reminder of our New Year’s pact. At my parents’ annual New Year’s Day breakfast that year, Billie and I sat stuffed and sleepy in my parents’ den, talking about how fast time was flying by. It seemed that only days ago, we were twenty-one and just graduating from college—making plans neither of us would keep and feeling like the rest of our lives were in front of us. And then, just in a quick snap of time, we’d awoken and found ourselves grown up and feeling like the rest of our lives had already happened. The maps had been laid out and we were just biding our time at work and in the mall. We groaned and complained that we were too young to be so old. We weren’t in our forties, fifties, or sixties. We were in our thirties! And that was supposed to be the new twenties! So, why did we feel so ... over? Not young enough to hang out in the new nightclubs downtown, but not old enough to play bingo in the basement of the VFW either. Then Billie came up with an idea—we had to make “grown lady” resolutions. We had to set up three goals for ourselves for the new year and not let another year pass us by without moving on them. Billie’s grown lady resolutions came quick—letting go of her tumultuous relationship with Clyde and finally dating other men, going back to school to get her master’s, and getting a new car—she’d been driving the same red Eclipse since college. My resolutions took a little longer. I just didn’t know what I wanted. But finally, I decided that I wanted to start to travel—to see the world beyond the South, to start writing songs again, and to lose all of the extra weight I was carrying around.
“I’m just walking around the track outside for an hour.” I added, “You should come, too.”
“But it’s Friday!”
“And?”
“And ... it’s your birthday weekend. You’ll be thirty-three on Sunday.” She sat down in the chair next to my desk and whimpered helplessly. “We need to start celebrating now.”
“Celebrating what? It’s just another year.”
“You’re one year growner!”
“Growner?”
