AMEN!

As I’ve said, my dream, from the time I was twelve years old, was to become a singer. In the dining room of the Doswell house in St. Anthony Park, there was an old upright piano that I’d started to play…but gave up before long, convinced that it was too late for me to ever be any good. (It didn’t help that my mother said I looked so tense at the piano it was painful to watch.) In high school, however, inspired by the folk singer Joan Baez, I borrowed a cheap, battered, steel-stringed Hawaiian guitar from my uncle George and began to work out the chords to accompany myself—this, despite the fact that from the time I was little, my mother had never had anything nice to say about my voice. And though learning to play the guitar was the only creative outlet I allowed myself at home during my teenage years, she resented the time I spent practicing, which she regarded as an idle pastime.

At Garfield Junior High, I hadn’t mustered the courage to try out for the chorus, but my first semester at Berkeley High I did. I took Girls Glee, then quickly advanced through the ranks of choruses to Bel Canto, Aeolian, and finally to Concert Chorale. When I auditioned for this last, Mr. Pearson, the choir director, exclaimed over my voice, just as the choir director in seventh grade had.

All went well until the day we went on a field trip to Stockton to take part in a concert with a couple thousand singers from other high schools all over California; we would be singing en masse under the direction of Jester Hairston, who wrote and sang the spiritual “Amen” in the movie Lilies of the Field. I wrote the following letter to my father about it:

“Mr. Hairston is small and wiry, in his sixties, I think, with a croaky voice and lots of charm. Though we had to rehearse for six hours, he made it enjoyable by telling us funny stories about his experiences during our breaks. He’s been a sort of good-will ambassador teaching Negro spirituals all over the world.

“During our rehearsal he tried to help us understand the songs and the feelings of the people who sang them. ‘Wade in De Water, Chillin’ was sung by runaway slaves crossing the Ohio River at night. He told us the slaves would move up or down the river after entering the water so when their masters’ dogs trailed them to the water’s edge and their masters fired shots out over it, they would not be in the range of fire. Of course, the white men caught on after a while and would shoot upstream and downstream too. So it was a dangerous journey for the slaves—they risked being shot or drowned—and many of them did die. When we sang ‘Wade in De Water,’ he wanted us to feel the slow heaviness of someone pushing steadily forward against the river’s strong current and to convey the slaves’ determination, as well as their fear and sorrow over those who died.

“In the evening we performed from the floor and balcony of a huge semicircular auditorium while the audience sat on stage. The final number was the spiritual Mr. Hairston sang in the movie Lilies of the Field. ‘See the baby…’ he began in his hoarse voice. ‘Aaaay-men!’ we joined in. ‘…Lyin’ in the manger…’ he sang on. ‘Aaaay-men!’ our voices rose together. And rose and rose throughout the song, until, when the last note ended, for just a moment the air sustained it—an echo—and we all heard the tremendous volume of our sound—and felt it too. The vibration shook the whole auditorium.

“All two thousand of us went back to our buses, singing, ‘See the baby…Amen…’ and clapping in time. For blocks around you could hear our chorus as we loaded onto the buses. You got the feeling that this was the remedy for all man’s problems with his fellow man—just get people singing together, and they’d forget all their hatreds. I know it isn’t that simple, but that’s the way it felt at the time.”

What I didn’t mention in my letter is what had happened with Mr. Pearson on the bus ride home.