A bunch of years ago I came up with a simple tune for Miriam's words when she Crossed the Red Sea with her tribe.
"Sing unto the Lord for He has triumphed gloriously! The horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea!"
But it got stuck there. Creativity never made it to the other side of becoming a song.
Last week I learned that the church service was going to be about that passage, including the dancing. The time was ripe, so I composed two verses. It is a jubilant piece of music, and the team included two drummers, a pair of violins, a guitar, piano and four voices.
The minister spoke about the back story, which gave momentum to Miriam's exultation. The Children of Israel had been slaves in Egypt for four hundred years. Their rescue was one of the greatest miracles in history. But in my mind I skipped over the misery part and went straight to joy. Which is perhaps like deleting the shadows in a landscape. Something is lost.
The next day a friend posted about a documentary by Bryan Stevenson, called
True Justice. While I had had
a plan for the events of the morning, the world fell away as I wept over the gut wrenching history of slavery, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration. Bryan Stevenson is an attorney who devotes his life to defending prisoners on death row, and changing the odds for men of color. He says the inmates who have been vindicated after unjust incarceration number one in ten. One was released after thirty years in the queue for the electric chair.
An example of the impactful words he used is enslaved, as opposed to slaves. Such a minor shift. Yet like the fulcrum of a see saw it swivels the weight of guilt onto those who are invisible. The enslavers. The people in chains are no longer defined as such and can, one prays, be liberated of unjust bonds.
Bryan has created a museum in the deep south to crack open the conversation. On one wall are hundreds of jars of earth, scraped from the ground where men and women were lynched, not just in the stealth of night by villains with hoods, but in the center of town for all to mock. On each jar is a name and a date, and inside is the red clay, or khaki sand, or russet soil of that region, and the trace remains of that hateful day.
It is more fun to sing, than to rebel. More pleasing to dance than to mourn someone you love. Yet I wonder about the voices on the other side who have become the Song. Their collective chorus will be exponentially richer than anything I could crank out on a Sunday morning when the only thing I have to celebrate is a warm breakfast.
