Black and White

An example of how laterally my brain works: last night, something outside sounded like a bullfrog ==> so I posted on FB that he might be called Jeremiah ==> Three Dog Night ==> my favourite song by them.


In fact, one of my favourite songs of all time.


It was decades after desegregation that I first heard this as a child, and even then, I felt its power: I stayed stock-still to listen - and cried, falling in love with it years past its heyday.


I sang it as I watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison on television, wanting to ring it out over South Africa in joy and pride.


Today, after SCOTUS' Voting Rights Act decision of a few weeks ago, after Trayvon and George Zimmerman, even the furore around the biracial couple in the Cheerios advert, the sense of Martin Luther King's dream dying makes it even more powerful and poignant, especially as I learned today, whilst hunting it down, that the original 1954 version opened with this verse:

Their robes were black, Their heads were white,
The schoolhouse doors were closed so tight,
Nine judges all set down their names,
To end the years and years of shame.

The Warren Court. The Court I so desperately wish could have been immortal; and if not them, then the Burger Court that followed them, the Court of my childhood.

Three Dog Night dropped the verse - and why not? It was 18 years after Brown v Board of Education; 8 years after the Civil Rights Act. They thought we'd won. How wrong they were.


My heart hurt - I'm not sure how many more times it can break.


And just like that first time, the older me wept, for different reasons - for the hope in the song, the certainty we were going to be there soon, surely in the 28 years that would mark the millennium. They could never have imagined the SCOTUS decision in 2013 that would be so different from the 1954 one. 

The world is black, the world is white, with so many of us so many shades in between. And together we learn to...do everything.


Perchance to dream that one day, all the colour of one's skin will mean to anyone is how much melanin it contains.

GC, Day 14 - Music

What to say? So much, yet there aren't words.

Music has always been the way into my feelings - especially when I didn't know what I was feeling: from Tallis to Victoria to Bach to Evanescence and Twisted Sister, music has been my salvation, my joy and my soul's voice; how I enter and explore my emotional and spiritual depths. With or without lyrics, it is the one place in which I lose - and find - myself.

Crikey, this isn't easy to explain, is it? Ok, I'm a teacher, so let's take a recent example.

Today, my friend, Marie, mentioned a couple of songs that had really moved her, and gave me a napster link that didn't work. So I googled both song titles and youtube. Only one popped up, and I took it as a sign that it was the one I needed to listen to.

I should have known - from the first line, I had to fight back tears as I worked, thinking, 'I'm at work, can't cry; I'm at work, can't cry.'

I grew up in what is probably best described as an emotionally dysfunctional family - by the time I was 4, I felt no attachment to my parents at all - and the feeling was mutual. My dirty little secret has always been this: 'How unlovable must I be that my parents couldn't love me and how horrible must I be that I didn't feel attached to them?'

I always felt that my only purpose was to be an extension of my parents; to be something that propped up their sense of worth, though I couldn't have phrased it that way then. Never was there a sense of being loved no matter what; 'love' - or rather, approval - was doled out sparingly when one got an 'A' or did something else that enhanced the parental image. Everything else was met by scorn or anger, even things beyond our control: my mother was furious with me when I got my period too early for her liking; my father once refused to speak to me for a week for something I didn't do - but he couldn't be bothered to find that out before cutting me off.

No, wait. The best summary of my father is actually the following: when I finally told him his brother had sexually abused me for 4 years, starting when I was 5, his response was, "It's not important; it doesn't matter."

So I grew up in a house never feeling safe in someone's love and protection; never believing there would be anyone there for me when I needed them; believing childhood was hell, marriage and family a trap; never believing that I would be worth anything to anyone simply for who I was rather than what I could do for them.

I've come a long way, baby, believe me.

So I grew into a girl - and then, a woman - who is a remarkable survivor, much like a spore, but didn't know how to revert to seed: I knew how to keep people out and I knew how to pursue love, but not how to be in it or with it. As recently as Sunday, I said to a friend about my being loved (specifically by a man in a romantic relationship), 'I'm not sure I believe in it.' It wasn't what I meant to say, but it was absolutely true.

Loved, adored, for me? Someone caring enough for ME to come after me because they treasure me, love me, want to be with me, care for me, because I'm me?

Are you on CRACK? I don't even believe that of God. I never went to God with things I couldn't handle until I was completely stuck because, of course, God would just yell at you, tell you what a fucking failure you were, and why couldn't you EVER get it right? He gave you free will after all.

And so, when Marie brought me this song, music finally found a way in where nothing else had:

I saw you as a little girl
When you were in this room all alone
And you wanted to be found
But no one came and found you
But this is your time now
This is your day
Cause that little girl inside of you
Is what makes my heart ache

You are my love
You are worth purusing
You are my love
You're worth pusuing

I am finding you right now
Right now I'm finding you in that room
And I am taking you by the hand
And I'm leading you out
Into a new place
Forever that place that kept you in
Forever that place that held you in
Forever that place
Forever that place will be shut off

You are my love
You are worth pursuing
You are my love
You're worth pursuing

And you're not going to have fear anymore
You're not going to fear being alone anymore
You're not going to fear
You're not going to fear
Becuase it's being swallowed up in my love for you
And my passion for you
I'm so taken by you
And I'm going to restore all your years
I'm going to restore every tear
You will know my joy
You will know my smile
And you will know dance
Because I am going to show you off
I am so proud of you
And it's time for you to know it
You're so beautiful to me
You're so beautiful to me

Wait. What?

Something that happened to me made someone's heart ache?

Me? Worth pursuing? You want to find me? To really know me, all of me? Not just what I can do for you or how I can make you feel or...? You're PROUD of me?

You'll always be there? I'm safe?

...you love me?

Okay. Something in the music tells me I can believe you, so I'm willing to give it a try.

Deo gratias.