Dispatch #21
Sunday, September 22
Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Last night on the campus of Augustana College, mixed in with my own speaking in the gymnasium, the Augustana Chorus sang. Seventy voices strong, students fresh and blonde and healthy. They sang the Spiritual, "Give me Jesus."

"When I come to die; Oh, when I come to die; Oh, when I come to die-- Give me Jeeee-sus...."

I could hardly stand it. There is in that song such a weight of experience, such a remembrance of long sorrow ("When I come to die"), such an age of living, that my head hung lower and lower and could only be raised again because--though sorrows are not denied in Spirituals--it is Jesus to whom they tend and in whom they are wrapped at the end.

And then I thought: how can youth bear to carry the weight of that song? No: how are they even capable of the grave communication from first oppressions to final hearers, as old as I am? And how can they do it without getting in the way--to this level of terrible accuracy? Why, they are less than a third of the way through their own generation!

But the "How" presented itself in the raised arms of their director, Jim Johnson.

It is in artistic obedience.

If the artist obeys the myriad commands of the composer; if the chorus, next, obeys the direction of a wise interpreter; if that chorus will, too, allow even its younger soul participation in the singing, so that the labor is not merely mechanical, it will be able to say more than it knows. Art is the preserver of a people's deepest soul.

Here is an example of the time I first comprehended this insight:

While pastor at Grace, an African-American congregation in Evansville, I invited a friend of mine to preach. Farai Gambiza, a theologian from Zimbabwe, agreed. On the Sunday he and I sat together in the chancel, Mrs. Allouise Story sang unaccompanied the spiritual: "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." She sang with a voice drawn from the depths, as an organ pipe must be long to draw so deep. She introduced almost no dramatics, but sang the song pure and slow, shaping the vowels like children in the air.

As she sang, Farai began to murmur: "No, no, nobody should sing such sorrow. Nobody."

He was borne down nearly to the ground by the song--and by, so he supposed, Mrs. Story's impossible experience.

But when the service was over, I went up to Allouise to compliment her on the solo, and then to ask her how she could accomplish the music of oppressions, the memories of slavery all the way back to the Hebrews?

She looked at me with a dry, pulled face.

"Because," she said, crisp and academic: "That's the way they taught us to sing at Tuskegee!"

Explanation enough: art carries the memories. The artists more recognized by ages past than by this age (where artists are conceived to be individuals of personal compulsions) release and communicate the memories.

But not by a private genius so much as by obedience.

Walt