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And then, when I was about to gesture for the pianist to begin the music, I lowered my hand. I thought, right then that if I wanted the audience to really hear the beauty of our new arrangement, it should be unaccompanied. Zenobia was right. We should sing it the way we had in the classroom. Just us letting the words vibrate around us.
I shook my head to the pianist and stepped toward the choir.
“A cappella,” I whispered. Their eyes widened and then I witnessed smiles curling up on faces sporadically. Zenobia winked back at me and smiled, too.
“Watch for my hand and then come in just as you did in practice,” I added.
They straightened up and I could feel the crowd growing restless behind us.
I closed my eyes briefly and took a deep breath. I opened them, counted to three, and raised my hand in front of my chest to begin conducting the song.
Nana Jessie used to have this saying. When I came off the altar after singing a solo, she’d pull me to her breasts and whisper in my ear, “Sounds like the flapping of angels’ wings.” And that’s how my students sounded on the first notes. They hit “Swing low, sweet chariot” crisp and clean, so defined and so articulate that I was sure everyone in the whole outdoors could hear them. Standing in front of them, their voices made me quiver through and through and I hardly had to direct. I don’t know if it was the crowd or the occasion, but these young people poked out their chests and stood tall and proud, hitting notes as if they were a professional gospel choir. From stanza to stanza, some looked at me, their eyes alert and clear, as if they too were surprised at how melodious their voices sounded as they met the open air. It was a moment of chance confidence, of reverence to the blood that had no doubt been shed beneath our feet. And suddenly, the reason we sang that song, year after year, for so many years, left me full as they sang:
If I get there before you do
Coming for to carry me home
I’ll cut a hole and pull you through
Coming for to carry me home
This wasn’t a song about dying. It was about living. About getting free and starting a new life. Being reborn. Not as a slave to man and his rules. But free of sin and washed clean in the river. They sang:
If you get there before I do
Coming for to carry me home
Tell all my friends I’m coming, too
Coming for to carry me home
And I started crying. For our past and the students who’d come through Black Warrior by the river for which the school was named, for which Tuscaloosa was even named—“the Black Warrior” in Choctaw. And out of this place those students, the sons and daughters of slaves, for generations went on to become great. To become what they dared them not to. And then I cried for my students. Who it seemed time had turned its back on. Zenobia and Opal. And the others. Who had endless talent—all of them—but nothing seemed to be tapping into it. They needed a sweet chariot right now. And their voices were calling for it to just swing low to catch them from falling.
Everyone was silent when the last note was sung and the song had ended. But I wasn’t nervous. I just stood there looking at my children and smiled, not bothering to wipe my tears. I’d performed enough to know what this kind of silence meant. And even with my back turned to the crowd, I knew then that they’d felt what I was feeling. They remembered. And they wanted more. It was like in church when my father signaled for the pianist to keep on going. Play the chorus again. People were fired up and the Spirit was turned loose in the crowd. And if the choir didn’t keep it going, then somebody else, Nana Jessie or one of the other church mothers, would just stand up and start her own song, lead the praise until we were all full.
And then, as if she was thinking just what I was thinking and had forgotten we were at the high school graduation and not Prophet House, Zenobia just started the song again altogether. Alone. In the sweetest, most peaceful voice I’d ever heard, she sang, with tears in her eyes, “Swing low, sweet chariot.”
Then I raised my hands and the choir joined in behind her. But what happened next was what moved me the most. I felt sound hit the back of my head, as if it was coming from booming speakers. The audience, I turned to see, was on its feet, singing now, too. The same notes, the same lyrics, the same cadence, as if they’d learned to sing that same song at Black Warrior. Even the graduates and the guests and stakeholders on the stage joined in and we were one choir in praise.
It was the most touching thing I’d ever experienced at Black Warrior. And when we were done, the crowd cheered the choir on so lovingly that Mr. Williams joked he was putting all of the million dollars the school got into the music department. That would’ve been nice.
As I walked back to the car to meet Evan to head to my parents’ house for their annual postgraduation barbecue, people stopped me every two steps I took.
“Great job!”
“That was amazing!”
“I hope you get the million dollars for real!”
“We need more teachers like you!” Everyone had something positive to say in my ear. And I couldn’t help but to remember how nervous I’d been about the new arrangement and singing the song a cappella. If only the one person who’d inspired me to do that could’ve been there.
“Not too bad, music teacher,” Angie Martin said when I walked past her car. And I insisted I was going to just keep walking as I normally did, but filled with pep, I stopped.
I tossed my hip to the side and put my hand on my waist like Billie always did when she was about to tell someone off.
“Well, the way you watch me, you should know,” I said, rolling my eyes and giving her as much cattiness in my one line as I could to make up for the years I’d just walked by. I was tired.
“Okay,” she said. She dropped her keys and looked completely stunned.
