Advancement

"People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening."

-- Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"

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The Telegraph reports that the musical performance at President Obama's inauguration was mimed. Because of cold and weather, said musicians Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, the risk of actually playing their instruments was too great--that the strings could have broken, or that the sounds just wouldn't have been their best. I guess when the world watches you perform, you can't risk actually performing.

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Been reading a lot by the Rev. Dr. King lately, brushing up on my Civil Rights Movement history. Not just for the current show, but also to know the tree from its roots, the river from its source. There are some who would rather see the river flowing than its source trickling, but not me. There's too much silt in the water as it falls from the peak. Maybe it's the liberal-arts education talking; whatever the reason, I find I am more apt to favor someone or something if I know where it came from.

Most things are pure at their beginnings.

And what I find in the writings of Dr. King, in his 1963 book Why We Can't Wait, is a blasting rhetoric, a pure and mighty stream. Having read his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," as well as some of his more notable speeches, I was prepared to read some powerful stuff. His prose does not disappoint.

A big part of what made me start reading up on the Civil Rights Movement, though, was a growing skepticism of the present version of the story. It seems that more silt has joined the river than I thought.

For instance, after our first performance of Coretta Scott King, the questions began to center around conspiracy theories of Dr. King's death and the NAACP. One of the actors in our group, an African-American, said--rather confidently--that Dr. King worked closely with the NAACP, that it was founded by black people for black people, and that it was conceived in the 1960s after the initial bus boycott. None of the above are true, though when I contradicted her (backstage, of course--you don't want to argue about such things on stage, especially in front of an audience of about fifty black folks who apparently love the NAACP), she dismissed me thus: "Yeah, I don't think that's true."

Ironically, on February 20, 2009, the NAACP will celebrate its centennial. She was sixty years off the mark, and yet because I am not black, she did not believe me, as if the history of the civil rights struggle could only be known by the descendants of those who struggled, as if knowledge of such things is contained in melanin, or genes.

Also ironically, Dr. King clashed repeatedly with the NAACP, and after the organization was kicked out of Alabama, he formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in its place. And in just a few years, they accomplished more than the NAACP did in half a century.

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And a final bit of irony: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons, now the supposed mouthpiece for African-Americans all over the country, was begun by a big group of white people in New York. And of its three initial founders, two were Jewish.

(Remember Lee Alcorn?)

In the expansive river of time, the silt covers up many gems, indeed.

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Even with this weight of knowledge, though, or despite my innate desire to perform, I would still hesitate to call Mr. Perlman or Mr. Ma to task about their questionable artistic ethics, or my fellow actor about her questionable version of history. Isn't that sad?

There is something about the austerity of an artist, or the power of a people, that scares the truth from the righteous man's mind. In the grip of awe or the feeling of smallness, the concern for truth seems puny, spurious--not that big of a deal. But dammit, I think it's a big deal to know the truth, whether it's about the sounds coming from an instrument or about how an organization began.

To know a river, you must know which direction it is headed; to know that, you must know the location of its source. Even the mightiest of rivers can flow backward. It is in that sort of confusion that silt settles to become mud: fixed, foundational, and still false.