Ladysitting by Lorene Cary

Author:Lorene Cary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

At Art Sanctuary, we were planning for our ten-year anniversary. The centerpiece was to be a musical commission by Hannibal Lokumbe. The spectacular jazz trumpeter and Grammy-nominated composer had come to Art Sanctuary’s performance by the elegant jazz duo Dwike Mitchell—on piano—and Willie Ruff—on bass and French horn. Mitchell and Ruff had been to the Soviet Union in 1959, China in 1981, and the rest of the world in between. In the Church of the Advocate’s French Gothic cathedral, full of Black Arts murals, Mitchell and Ruff played—and Hannibal whooped! Hannibal had been raised in Texas. When it got too hot for human beings to keep picking cotton, he said, they’d start singing. And then, somehow, they’d keep working. The music, he said, kept them alive.

Hannibal grew up in the church, with his mother’s favorite songs, such as “I’ll Fly Away.” A prodigy on the trumpet, he began playing with bands at clubs when he was in high school, with the men coming for him in the car and promising his mother that they’d see to it he got his homework done on the road. So, he’d earned the right to whoop and holler when the music moved him. He loved hearing that we’d filled the church earlier in the day with high school students who had read excerpts of William Zinsser’s book about the two men, which had come out after his New Yorker article about their private concert for the Beijing conservatory. Hannibal loved my stories about how the publisher Paul Dry and I had met with educators hawking the exquisite curriculum guide Paul had commissioned for our event. Zinsser had attended the high school matinee, as we called it, an eighty-something-year-old white man delighted to find himself surrounded by dozens of black and Latino kids, budding young musicians and writers, who asked thoughtful questions after the performance while dozens of others rushed to get photos with Mitchell and Ruff. One boy, a French horn player, had hardly been able to stay in his seat, he was so excited.

After the performances Hannibal told me that seeing and hearing these icons of black jazz playing at a black arts organization for mixed audiences of youth and older folks made him want to write something for us. For our tenth anniversary, we’d cobbled together funding for him to write one of his signature musical tributes to black heroes, this one to Father Paul Washington, the priest who had led the Church of the Advocate into the radical record by hosting Black Power conferences in the 1960s and the first-ever 1974 ordination of women as priests in the Episcopal Church. To get a sense of Father Paul, Hannibal wanted to talk to people who’d known him, so we set up meetings: with North Philadelphia neighbors and a former Black Panther member at the church; with the Washington family at their home; and, at a dinner in our rectory, with some Episcopal clergy who’d known, worked, and worshipped with Father Paul.

Nana’s living with us overlapped these arrangements.

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