Bde Maka Ska
When I moved to Minneapolis in 1964, I was encouraged to ride around and see all the lakes located right in the city. For the past four decades, I’ve been privileged to live just a couple of blocks from one of the largest of these wonderful places. When I first saw the name, however, I was surprised and, frankly, dismayed that “northerners” had chosen to call anything after John C. Calhoun. He was one of the most out-spoken and mean-spirited Southern voices justifying and praising the institution of slavery. When I asked people who had lived here much longer than I about this seeming anomaly, they usually admitted that they knew nothing about Calhoun–they just enjoyed the lake.
Over the years since 1964, I’ve found out that “my” lake was once important to native Lakota/Dakota tribes who gathered on its shore and on the cliff near by for yearly ceremonies. What came to be located on the adjoining cliffs is a large cemetery. My present home is half a block from this cemetery so I’ve walked it, biked it, taken picnic lunches to enjoy on the shores of a tiny lake in its center from which it takes its name–Lakewood. When I die, my ashes will be placed in a tiny box right beside that peaceful body of water. The cemetery is full of huge and impressive monuments to the families that built Minneapolis. Of course, there are lots of regular people buried there, but the founding fathers are located atop the land rise so their spirits look down on the same shore line once revered by Native Americans.
For the past few years, there has been a movement to change the name back to its original Lakota name of Bde Maka Ska. Though opposed by some individuals and groups, this idea has struck most people as the right thing to do as we try to make albeit feeble reparations for what white people stole from Native Americans as we moved them off their lands and denied them the right to celebrate their spiritual rituals. I have signed petitions and written checks to help move this project along. A little over a year ago, the park board took down all the signs that said “Lake Calhoun” and installed new ones with “Lake Calhoun” at the top and Bde Maka Ska just below it. Some of us learned how to pronounce the new name and began using it in everyday conversation. Some of us became increasingly irritated by this change, often arguing that it was hollow since it did nothing to help living Native Americans in Minneapolis. I Googled the new name and learned how to pronounce it from two Lakota grandmothers teaching their little grandchildren how to say the name of “our lake.”
Last Saturday, February 10th, I walked that lake with a good friend. The two-level signs were in place. Yesterday, Wednesday, February 14th, I was driving home along the lake shore when my heart leapt up (like Wordsworth’s did so long ago: “My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky.”) New signage had been installed sometime in those four days. The new signs just say “Bde Maka Ska.” I burst into tears and wondered it my elation in some small way mirrored how Southern black people say they feel if their community votes to take down the Confederate flag from the public square. I felt lighter and less oppressed by what my invading tribe had done to older indigenous tribe over a century ago. And it doesn’t matter to me if this decision doesn’t feed or clothe or hire any living Native Americans in my city. That is a separate and demanding set of actions that must be accomplished.
But a rose is not always a rose, Gertrude notwithstanding, and sometimes a lot is “in a name,” Juliet notwithstanding. I am proud of my park board and legislators for recognizing the empathetic importance of calling people, places, and things by the name preferred by those most intimately involved.
Super Bowl LII
Truth in advertising: I do not watch football, collegiate or professional. One reason is that I seldom can tell where the little ball is or why lots of large men are falling all over each other. For years, I’ve secretly suspected that the game was made up as a way for men to hug and come into intimate physical contact without any fear of being called “sissies” or “fairies.” So when my home town of Minneapolis was chosen as host for this year’s big event, I was singularly uninterested. As the date approached, I heard on local news channels about all sorts of closings of roads down town. I also was outraged when the city ruled that no one could ride the mass transit trains the weekend of the game unless they had a ticket. Then I was informed that some 2,200 private airplanes were arriving and had to be parked somewhere while their affluent owners watched the two teams vie for the trophy.
I kept not caring who won until a couple of days before the game, I heard Tom Brady, the quarterback for the Patriots, say about playing in the Super Bowl, something like “It’s just a game, like the others.” Surely that is not true for the men who are willing to risk brain injury to get to the Super Bowl nor for the millions of people who are fixated either on the actual playing of the game or the mania that can surround the event. The more I reflected about his comment, the clearer I became that it was an expression of entitlement–it was as if he believes his team “deserves” to win before anyone has thrown the pigskin or run the field to an end zone. And watching the expressions on the Patriot’s head coach’s face just made me want to cringe for the players who were in the line of his angry reactions to the slightest misstep on their parts. So I began to say maybe I would like the Eagles to win.
Though I didn’t watch much of the play, I did keep switching to it when my PBS program ended or a rerun on ion television went to an ad. So I knew the Eagles were playing strong football. Once we were near the end, when my skipping to the game showed me that the Patriots had managed to squeeze ahead, I decided to watch, lending my albeit tangential support to the men from Philadelphia who clearly wanted to win and did NOT see it as an entitlement they held by virtue of the name of their team. The whole thing began to mirror all the other arenas currently in which one faction of the population sees itself as possessing some kind of supremacy over the rest of us, by virtue of arbitrary factors over which no one has much control. Then Mr. Nick Foles did it! He led his team to a stunning victory and I felt good.
Today, Tuesday, all the private planes have flown back to where they came from, the management of the facility has reported several stolen seats pried loose by fan-atics, and the structures on our downtown mall are being disassembled. I also heard Torrey Smith, one of the Eagles’ players, say on CNN why he and several of his colleagues will not be going to the White House at the president’s invitation. His reasoning is basic and powerful: he doesn’t think the man occupying that building is a “good man,” as was Mr. Obama, in his opinion. So there’s yet another reason for me to like the large men in dark green uniforms emblazoned with a striking profile of my country’s emblematic bird.
A Walk-about with the Blind Boys of Alabama
Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) has recently begun airing a new program launched by National Public Radio (NPR). It’s called 1A and its host is Joshua Johnson. Joshua has eclectic tastes in both subject matter and guests, so I always benefit from hearing bits and pieces as I drive around doing errands on a given morning. This past week, he had one of the surviving original Blind Boys of Alabama as his main guest. Listening to him set me off on a fascinating chain of thought. One of Joshua’s questions was about what it was like for the black singers to star in a highly successful Broadway production that came to Minneapolis and played to large and enthusiastic audiences at the Guthrie Theatre in its original location adjacent to the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis. It was called “Gospel at Colonus” and told the story of Oedipus, King of Thebes, who blinded himself after learning that he had killed his father and married his mother. After the program was over, I made an obvious connection between these Gospel singers and a wonderful discussion group I host in my living room. This group of 10-12 adults formed to read Shakespeare, but when they had explored virtually every word the Bard wrote, refused to disband. Instead, they asked me if I’d facilitate discussions of Greek drama. Because I didn’t want to stop listening to them, I agreed, though it had been many decades since I’d given serious thought to the likes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, or Aristophanes. We just ended our fall set of evenings by have two intense discussions of Sophocles’ first play, “Oedipus the King.” Now, I was getting ready to talk about the second one, “Oedipus at Kolonus.”
Of course, I did some on-line research about the “Gospel at Colonus” and sent links to the study group, reminding them that some of them might have seen the local staging in 1987. All that afternoon last week, I kept being back in that audience of overwhelmingly white Minneapolitans as we listened spell-bound to four blind black men circulate the part of Oedipus and sing the iconic tragedy to rousing Gospel melodies. I had gotten tickets because I grew up in Alabama from which I fled the minute that was possible. Most of the time, I felt some mixture of shame, embarrassment, and anger about how my home state was behaving around race, gender, or sexual orientation. But I could feel pride about being from the same place as an internationally recognized singing group–and, of course, I’d grown up hearing Gospel music in my kitchen sung by the “Negro maid” who worked in our home and on 45 RPM records bought against my mother’s better judgment since such music wasn’t “classical.” I can shut my eyes and see five tall, lean black men in simple suits walk out onto the Guthrie stage to a wildly cheering audience. They walked in a line with a leader followed by the other three who placed their left hands on the shoulder in front of them to make their way onto the stage: Clarence Fountain, Jimmy Carter, Ben Moore, Eric (Ricky) McKinnie, and Paul Beasley. As they stood and told us the agonies felt by an ancient Greek blind man who refused not to know his identity, I kept time with the music and cried.
This group had met as children when they were students at a place called the Alabama Institute for the Blind Negro in Talladega, Alabama. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, I was told a little about this school in a history course. The Institute was founded in 1858 by a young medical doctor who wanted a place for his deaf brother to go so he could become educated. The first “class” had two boys in it but grew to 22 by the end of its first year. Today, operating under the new name of Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind (AIDB), the school has eight regional centers in addition to the original campus in Talladega and teaches more than 22,000 people of all ages (from toddlers to seniors) who are deaf or blind or multi-disabled. The five early students began singing as a chorus in the school, performing at assemblies there but quickly broadening their sights to include local black churches who welcomed them with loving arms. Eventually some white man in the music business heard them and met with them with a proposal to cut a single record. This record sold well to both black and white people, though the group was not invited to sing “live” before any white audiences for some time.
In the seven decades in which the Blind Boys of Alabama have performed stirring gospel music here and in many other countries, they have amassed fived Grammy’s and won the hearts of thousands of people from all walks of life. Only two of the original group still sings–Clarence Fountain (87) and Jimmy Carter (85). (The other founders are Johnny Fields, Olice Thomas, and Val Bozman Traylor). As Joshua Johnson talked with Clarence, he asked him to trace the path from being unable to perform in white venues to where the group is today. It’s clear from the words spoken and the timbre of his voice, that Clarence Fountain has made peace with just about everything wrong with American racial attitudes and policies. But he also refuses to gloss over history, so when Johnson asked him what it was like to be shut out of white performance spaces, the reply was “Well, it seems like a lot of white people liked our music–they just wouldn’t let us come sing it for them.” This was accompanied by a wry verbal “smile” that made its ironic point just fine. The last question from the 1A host had to do with what Clarence Fountain might say about how the Blind Boys were able to break through engrained prejudice and bigotry against black artists. He was quiet for a moment before saying something I’ve typed out and put on my refrigerator: “What comes from the heart reaches the heart.”
So my walk-about through my long knowledge and appreciation of these consummate musicians has taken me to this very present moment when so many people seem incapable of listening to anyone who doesn’t exactly mirror our own attitudes and beliefs. Surely Clarence has given me a little mantra I can try to hone as I cope with the latest hurtful and destructive policy emanating from the White House in Washington D.C. I can try to speak from my heart and hope that what I say can reach someone else’s. And, much harder, I can try to hear what someone else says if they tell me it emanates from their heart and not from some spoon-fed sloganeer or cowardly politician. And on February 22nd, when the study group convenes to talk about how Sophocles wrote a second play in which the isolated and despondent old king is redeemed, I will include the five black men in our circle because they belong there most assuredly.
The Reluctant But Grateful Gerbil
Two weeks of this January have been so far below zero both in actual temperature and wind chill that I have had to walk at my local YWCA. My days begin with an early morning walk of about a mile and a half, rain or shine. I walk in the street rather than on the sidewalk because my excellent chiropractor told me thirty years ago to do that if I wanted to be walking when I was eighty. It seems asphalt is much more “forgiving” than is concrete. Anyway, on those mornings when I could have gotten frost bite in 10-15 minutes, I’ve driven the six minutes to my Y and walked the same amount of time/distance as I would have done outside. I know I’m supposed to feel grateful to have a warm facility so close to my house where I pay nothing to belong now that I qualify for the Silver Sneakers program. But I have to work to get to gratitude.
When I’m outside, there are people walking their dogs. I’ve seen one dog grow into a huge black and brown adult from the days when he was a little pup. Occasionally, I’m lucky enough to meet up with one of the two shiba inu dogs that lives in my neighborhood. For truth in advertising, I need to say that I am a total cat person who often doesn’t delight in seeing the next canine. But these Japanese tan alert little dogs who so resemble foxes are something I can’t resist. If I ever had a dog, it would be a shiba inu for sure. Finally, I see very old dogs some with grizzled muzzles and bodies that limp or look stiff even to the naked eye.
In addition to all these dogs with their two-footed parents, I pass clumps of little children waiting for the big yellow school bus, playing and making happy noise while their parents converse in their own clumps. Over the years, I’ve watched the demographics of such adult groups shift from mostly mothers to mostly fathers, and registered what a positive sign that is about co-parenting in the houses I pass every morning.
In early spring, I hear the first mating calls of cardinals or see the first cadre of robins scouting out the territory before telling their fellows it’s good in South Minneapolis again. Always there are squirrels and the occasional kitty let out early by its keepers. Once I was graced by seeing a small real fox who froze when s/he saw me. I froze while we just stood and eyed one another as I tried to send out gentle energy that seemed to succeed because the fox let me pass slowly in front of it without fleeing into the surrounding bushes and I thanked her/him for sensing just how much I exulted in our convergence. Spring also brings new signs of growth as I watch trees and shrubs and then bulbs of all sorts make initial appearances and slowly but surely come to resplendent life.
When extreme cold drives me to the Y track, I simply put one foot in front of the other in whatever direction I’m told to go that morning. There is nothing to break up my movement, no sensory connections or familiar images. I merely get the physical exercise attendant upon walking the mile plus. If I think about how I feel, it’s always the same: I feel like a large gerbil in a sanitized cage. It’s become clear to me that I set out each morning not just for the physical exertion–I crave the connections to people, other living creatures, and nature’s flora. These aspects of my regimen are what nourish and sustain me for the day ahead of me. My body, then, is reluctantly grateful to the Y for a warm place to exercise its muscles and feel limber as I go home to breakfast. But my soul is expansively grateful to that larger world of the streets in my neighborhood and the life I relish therein.