Ms. Yolande “Nikki” Giovanni is a
black feminist and a prolific poet.
Recently, she published a book titled, On My Journey Now: Looking at
African American History Through the Spirituals. As suggested by its title, this book paints a
picture of African American history by examining how music was a means by which
to communicate a variety of sentiments.
Giovanni
begins her discussion of the spirituals by suggesting that the reader think of
the Africans transported on the Middle Passage.
The spirituals, she says, began on this voyage. It was a situation not unlike when a mother
attempts to sooth an upset child through humming or lullaby. The men and women and children were chained
together, terrified, and could not talk amongst themselves to try and calm each
other because they spoke a variety of languages and came from many different nations. But the most basic element of communication,
of music, is universal: it is a hum. Within
the bellows of the ship, Giovanni imagines a woman beginning to hum, an action
that was contagious and spread quickly through the confined space. She has visited the docks in Africa where men
and women were kept before departure, and she heard the echo of this hum from
all those years ago. She says it is like
a moan.
Giovanni
then traces the use of spirituals throughout the slave years. In so doing, she helps the reader to
understand the experience of being slave, especially of being a woman and a slave. She interprets the spirituals very
differently than joyful groups of contemporary worshippers. For example, she explains that the popular
song “This Little Light of Mine,” is not a happy tune, but rather a harsh
statement intended to get a person through a particularly hard situation. The correct way of singing it, she writes, is
not joyfully, but rather as a fact, like: this little light IS mine and I WILL
continue to let it shine, no matter the circumstance.
She
really expands on the idea that the spirituals are a dynamic, evolving genre in
the chapters that address the years following slavery. She begins this discussion by recounting a
dark period in the history of Fisk University, Giovanni’s alma mater. Following emancipation, Fisk, at the time an
institution focused mostly on the education of former slaves, was facing
repeated attacks from the Ku Klux Klan.
Determined to maintain the integrity of their school, a group of
students got together, left school, and toured the Northern states, singing
spirituals to raise money for Fisk. These
were the Jubilee singers, and they continued their tour through Europe, singing
for the German Kaiser and the Queen of England.
Largely due to the efforts of the Jubilee singers, the spirituals gained a larger audience. Consequently, criticisms regarding the origination of the spirituals began to surface. The American press asserted that they were learned by slaves who stood on the steps of Southern churches, listening to the worship of white plantation owners. Giovanni’s entire book stands as stark evidence against this claim, but she addresses the criticism directly by writing that “Americans need to get over [the idea that the spirituals were first sung by whites]. They need to because these people [the African Americans] didn’t just write the songs; they lived them.”
In the final pages of her book, Giovanni examines the role of the modern spiritual, a genre that is more diverse than ever. According to Giovanni, examples of today’s spirituals include the words of Tupac Shakur, protest songs from the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, the humming heard by NASA ground control on John Glenn’s turbulent descent to Earth, and in Arrested Development’s song “Raining Revolution.” After all, the essence of the spiritual is a hum, a moan, and a means of creating a community in the darkness.
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