Wade in the Water

Wade in the Water

Descending three sets of stairs at the big country house in silence had become a well practiced morning routine. I padded through the living room and eased the heavy double-hung wooden doors closed behind me, shuffled down three brick steps and walked straight out to the car. Outside, the scene was illuminated by a late moon, simmering low in the pre-dawn sky, its reflection spread out over the cliffs and the bay like a beckoning path to some other place. I had learned to witness these transient moments with reverence - with the chance that beauty itself could diminish fear, the dark, the cold or, perhaps, the permanent scarring of being homeless on my soul.

I waited until I was on the road, switched on the headlights and headed towards town. I had become a familiar face in a friendly group of journeymen and women who, on any given day, gathered ‘round the big shiny coffee urns, selecting cups and lids, creamers and stirrers and offering each other cheerful morning greetings. They were regular folks - construction workers, nurses, plumbers, truck drivers and teachers. A kind man in a faded plaid shirt showed me how to rinse my thermos in the small commercial sink and advised me that, with a Farm Store club card, I could buy an entire thermos of coffee for two dollars. I was grateful for the many different ways the morning coffee klatch had become such a unexpected resource and counted the small miracles. I paid them all with a smile and a wave and left the store. My immediate destination was the church and, with fresh thermos of coffee in my bag, the grand piano where I would work for most of the morning.

The congregation at the liberal humanist church where I hailed as music director was a group of self-entitled intellectuals whose mission was active pursuance of social justice. Inherent cultural racism and white supremacy were frequent themes which I took seriously in bringing to bear with music. While they liked pop music and regularly accepted it as a cultural statement of the times, like a liturgy of the people, I wanted to cultivate a more mindful appreciation of traditional African American music.

I had a considerable budget for contracting musicians and looked forward to chatting with music friends about coming to play. I was two weeks away from the first Sunday of the new season. The job of selecting a piece and arranging it was somewhat technical, but my ability to find music and make it relevant to each church service was the reason I’d been hired. The job was not to simply play hymns, although I did that regularly as well.

The service I was preparing would feature a table-read of scenes from the 1964 play, Blues for Mr. Charlie, by author James Baldwin. But, this blues was not the “my baby’s up and left me” kind. Instead, Baldwin had created a much larger metaphor to define the overall cultural life experience of a black person in America as “the blues.”“Mr. Charlie” was the name Baldwin gave to all white men and women. In the play, Baldwin switches ownership of “the blues” to the white man. Whatever term he invented for the sum total of cultural experience in white America, he gave that prize to African Americans. By reversing stereotypical traits of white and black, Baldwin’s objective was the exposing of a harsh systemic prejudice born in to American culture.

My job was to create a musical interlude; a moment of spiritual reflection on Baldwin’s scene. I had read many historical accounts of Harriet Tubman during my restless nights at the Goldsboro campground and I knew that she’d master-minded secret coded messages in her Underground Railroad campaign with words to well known spirituals. When she sang “Wade in the Water”, plantation owners had no idea the song was Tubman’s warning to slaves, cold and cramped, hiding in the woods along the Choptank. Relayed down the line in Gospel call and response style, the clarion intensified as the dogs were released. In verse after verse, Tubman urged the slaves to get up from their hiding places and immerse themselves into the cold muddy rivers of the Chesapeake and throw the dogs off the trail. There were no boats - lowering themselves into the frigid black water was the only way to freedom.

Whether or not the church congregation knew the details of my inspiration for working on a specific arrangement was unimportant. In time, a few would come to understand the depths to which I regularly explored in an effort to make music sacred for myself and for them.

Carol Nethen West