My Home Is Over Jordan

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My Home Is Over JordanNaomi Ruth LowinskyPublished online: 08 Sep 2009.

To cite this article: Naomi Ruth Lowinsky (2009) My Home Is Over Jordan,Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought, 52:3, 315-334

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Psychological Perspectives, 52: 315–334, 2009Copyright c© C. G. Jung Institute of Los AngelesISSN: 0033-2925 print / 1556-3030 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00332920903098927

My Home Is Over Jordan

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

The great African American tenor Roland Hayes, as well known in his dayas Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson, both of whom he mentored, in-troduced the beauty and joy of spirituals to concert audiences in Europeand America. Sadly, he’s been forgotten.

This article remembers his story and his charisma. Roland Hayestouched the author’s life when she was a very young child, when her par-ents were faculty at Black Mountain College and her father invited Hayesto sing there. In the mid 1940s, in North Carolina, an integrated audienceheard this son of freed slaves sing both the European repertoire of Schu-bert and Bach and the African-American folk tradition of spirituals.

Spirituals offer a religious attitude that intertwines African, Jew-ish, and Christian roots with the practical function of conveying secretmessages about the way to freedom—a peculiarly American blend of soulthat has much in it to sustain us in difficult times.

Roland Hayes made a profound impression on the author. She in-vokes his spirit in this article and learns much about herself and abouthim.

my people are the people of the pianoforte and the violin

Mozart people Bach people hallelujah people. . . .

your people are the drum beat people the field holler peo-

ple the conjure people blues people jubilee people people who

talk straight to God

DEEP RIVER

T here are borderlands that only music and poetry can evoke; here ourcultural stories begin. They hover between myth and memory, be-

tween the realm of the ancestors and our “home over Jordan,” betweenthe Christian testament and the African oracle, between the Jewish and the

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316 PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES � VOLUME 52, ISSUE 3 / 2009

Nancy Romero, Night Visit, 2008.Tempera on panel, 12′′ x 11′′. Photo: Edward Carreon.

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NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY � MY HOME IS OVER JORDAN 317

African diasporas, in the haunted realms between black folk and white folk.In these stories we were slaves, taken from our native land by force. Wewere forced from the land of our ancestors, where we knew every tree, everystone. We walked the trail of tears. Many died. We escaped our homelandwith just the clothes on our backs, persecuted for our religion, our politics,our class.

Sometimes another story comes along, one that changes how we seeour origins, that shakes loose the old convictions, opens the door to a newmyth. This happened to me recently when I visited the ghost of Black Moun-tain College in a beautiful valley in the foothills of North Carolina.

My father took pridein being on the committee thatdesegregated Black Mountain,making it the first whiteSouthern college to acceptAfrican-American students.

Black Mountain wasa radical school, famousfor being an experimentalcommunity and for count-ing among its faculty andstudents some of the greattalents of mid- and late-20th-century America, includingJohn Cage, Merce Cunning-ham, Jacob Lawrence, RuthAsawa, Charles Olson, RobertCreeley, and Robert Duncan.The school opened in 1933 and closed its doors, for lack of money, in 1956.

My parents, refugee Jews from Germany, were on the faculty of BlackMountain in the 1940s. My father was a musicologist and a pianist, my mothera violinist and violist. I spent the first years of my life there. I heard storiesof Black Mountain all my life, that it was exciting, crazy, politically intense,and difficult. My father took pride in being on the committee that deseg-regated Black Mountain, making it the first white Southern college to acceptAfrican-American students. He took pride in having invited Roland Hayes andCarol Brice, African-American singers of the classical repertoire, to performat Black Mountain.

I had always seen myself as a child of catastrophe, of war, of the anni-hilation of my people in Europe. What I hadn’t remembered was the beautyof my first landscape. A lyrical campus by Lake Eden, in sight of two swellinghills which, I was told, the students called “Mae West.” In a borderland be-tween memory and imagination, I could see my little tow-headed baby selftoddling on these paths, friend to the willows and the maples, enchanted bybirdsong and the great goddess Mae West. The essence of everything I amand love was right there, by Lake Eden, in view of the female shape of thehills and their reflection in water, that and the intensity of intellectual andartistic life that flowed around me. I was filled with longing: I needed to hearRoland Hayes sing.

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Roland Hayes’s voice is hard to find nowadays. He was as well knownin his day as were Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson, both of whom hementored. He was a pioneer in the borderlands between African-Americanand European-American cultures. He introduced the beauty and powerof spirituals to concert audiences in Europe and America. Sadly, he’sbeen forgotten. It took a search online to come up with a CD with thestrange combination of the actor Charlton Heston reading from the Gospelsand Roland Hayes singing spirituals. Listening to Hayes’s beautiful tenorvoice filled me with a peculiar mix of longing, grief, and a deep sense ofhomecoming.

On a recent visit to my mother, in Chicago, I asked her to reminisceabout Roland Hayes, whom she first met at Black Mountain College in 1945.Listening to my mother tell the story of the concert at which Brice and Hayessang, the obvious struck me. All this had happened when I was two yearsold, a toddler of German Jewish origin in North Carolina. It was the summerof 1945. That was the summer the war ended. That was the summer theUnited States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was

In her child’s mythology, “LetMy People Go” was aboutblack slaves in America as

well as Jewish slaves inEgypt; so was the story her

people told at Passover.

the summer my father orga-nized a desegregated concertin the segregated South. Myfather, my mother told me,prompted the student ushersto be polite but firm. Peo-ple should sit wherever theywanted. “We were afraid thatthe Ku Klux Klan would burnthe college down,” she toldme. That did not happen. Anintegrated audience of over300 people heard Brice and

Hayes sing. The concert was a great success. Julia Feininger, wife of thepainter Lyonel Feininger, spoke of Hayes’s performance:

His concert . . . was beautiful beyond words. . . . It is not the voicealone; it is the whole man, the musician, the artist . . . the rhythm,well it is very difficult to describe it in words, as it is sound andpicture in one and the forthpouring soul of the man. And the as-tonishing thing is, that he sings Bach and negro spirituals . . . withequal fervor and religious feeling, understanding, deep convic-tion. (in Harris, 1987, pp. 101, 104)

A two-year-old would understand none of this. But she would feel thetension, the passion, the elation when all went well. Did she hear the concert?

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Did Roland Hayes come back to the cottage where she lived? Did she hearhim sing spirituals? Those songs still flow in her soul like a deep river; theyhave sustained her in unseen ways all her days. In her child’s mythology, “LetMy People Go” was about black slaves in America as well as Jewish slaves inEgypt; so was the story her people told at Passover. Her father encouragedthis, making spirituals a part of the family Sabbath ritual. The chariot swungdown to carry her to sleep at night.

Why did those songs mean so much to me? Was it that they describedthe world I saw, full of myth and mystery, a world in which chariots swinglow to carry a suffering soul home? Did they bring the bible stories my fa-ther told me to life in song? Did they assure me that the unbearable can beborne if one can sing about it, if one can get carried away on the wings ofthe imagination? Did they teach me that myth is alive, that a simple mythicrefrain, “Go Down Moses,” can transform feeling and merge traditions? Thatsong used as prayer, as exhortation, is transformative?

History swirls about us, collective and personal. There I was, so young achild, my imagination forming amidst all that music and conversation, all thatnatural beauty, all that symbol making and arguing, all that political intensity,all that passion for the arts. How strange that so many of my influences wouldpass through this place. Charles Olson would invite Jung to the college. Jungwas ill, but sent Marie-Louise von Franz in his stead. She gave a series oflectures on folklore, mythology, and hermetic philosophy. This was in 1953;my family was long gone.

Poets would come to Black Mountain College, long after we were gone,who would influence my work in major ways. I never crossed paths in personwith Robert Creeley or Robert Duncan, but they came to me in books whenI was a young woman. And when I heard them referred to as Black Mountainpoets, I knew they were kin. It is as though Black Mountain, that funny littleborderland of the universe, was an alchemical vessel in which the stuff of mylife was cooking, long before I had words to describe it.

What a gift to be born into all of this. There must have been fairiesat my cradle. They gave me the gifts of the mountains, the willows, greenlawns, the lake, the gift of spending my baby years amidst all that music andart-making, among people who understood that the arts were central, as myfather’s esteemed colleague Heinrich Jalowitz put it, in “the stupendous taskof reconstructing our shaken world” (in Harris, p. 94).

It is strange to be able to read about the world of one’s childhood, theworld in which one’s parents moved, the drama that shaped their young psy-ches. Mary Emma Harris published her beautiful book, The Arts at Black

Mountain, full of art, photographs, and history, in the late 1980s. My parentsshow up often, most notably in a lovely photograph of a musical performance,my father at the piano, my mother in a stunning evening gown, playing the

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violin. The historian Martin Duberman interviewed hundreds of people, in-cluding my parents, in the late 1960s, to research his book: Black Mountain:

An Exploration in Community. Reading his book is like peering through awindow at my young father, embroiled in the controversies of Black Mountainin the 1940s.

My father’s been dead a generation, but I’m still trying to figure him out.Was he all bluster and brag? He always told stories of himself that made himthe hero, like the one about being on the committee that desegregated BlackMountain. But wait, here in the intricate political maneuverings detailed inDuberman’s retelling, my father is on the conservative side in the schism of1944. He votes against the admission of blacks, though he compromises onone black student for a summer program. Eric Bentley, who was to become arenowned Brecht scholar, was the rebel angel of the radical faction. He calledmy father an “old panty waist.”

Hey, Dad—did you really lead your Southern college into integration?The past flutters in the breeze like a prayer flag, like lovely see-through

curtains with designs from another time. I can’t pin it down; there is no cer-tainty, no substance. What would I give to be able to push aside those curtainsand know what that baby heard, smelled, saw, dreamt. What I would give tobe able to talk to the people whose faces and voices were part of my earliestimpressions. To ask them, with what I know now of life, how it was then. Thenext best thing is reading Duberman. Hundreds of interviews, done 30 yearsago by those then still alive, each with an axe to grind. These were peoplewith hard edges. Many had been shaped by horror and loss. In Duberman’snuanced and balanced narration I catch some of the subtleties. My father’sstance had more to do with his recent experience in Europe. He was oneof a group of new faculty, German Jewish refugees, many of them middle-aged and very distinguished. My father was younger, in his late 30s, but hehad written a famous dissertation and was known in his field. The Europeanswere offended by the brash provocations of the Bentley faction, its youthand inexperienced idealism. They’d had painful experiences with the Germancommunists, whose machinations helped bring Hitler to power. They didn’ttrust radical political positions. And they felt disrespected by Bentley.

What blasted the place open and caused the schism was not racial butsexual. Two young women students took off hitchhiking to visit their belovedProfessor Bentley, who was teaching at Fisk for the summer. They were ar-rested for “loitering,” a euphemism for prostitution. Why had no one stoppedthem? They had spoken of their plans to at least one faculty member. A hugefight ensued about faculty attitudes toward students: Were they to be sup-ported and listened to, or was that coddling? Should they be confronted? Orshould they be left alone to suffer and find their own resources? I knew thesefights from later childhood when they happened between my parents.

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This schism resulted in several faculty leaving. In the aftermath myfather worked hard to shift the painful feelings in the community. It wasindeed he who led the effort to integrate Black Mountain. Duberman writes:

With Lowinsky, rather than Bentley . . . advocating further strideson integration, neither subversion of the college nor the creationof a communist cell could be charged as ulterior motives. Lowin-sky was judiciousness itself; neither his politics nor his privatelife could be thought in any way to compromise the “purity of hismotives.” He proceeded, moreover, with a pacing . . . exquisitelybalanced between caution and tenacity. . . .

Not only did Lowinsky locate [black] students for the summer in-stitutes, but he also managed to persuade two outstanding blackartists, Carol Brice (at the beginning of her career and not yetfamous) and Roland Hayes (at the end of his career, and worldfamous) to join the institute as guest faculty members. . . .

If she heard Roland Hayessing “Deep River,” about thehome over Jordan, about theGospel Feast, wouldn’t thatgive her soul grounding inall the worlds, invisible andvisible?

Roland Hayes . . . had neverheard Carol Brice sing andwas so taken with her, thatafterward, at a party at theLowinsky’s, he sang for herhis own unpublished arrange-ments of Negro spirituals andpromised her copies for useat her concerts. Hayes andhis family stayed for twoweeks and had an enormousimpact on the community. Hewas a magical storyteller anda charming man, and talked for hours on end about his personalexperiences . . . and his lifelong work with black music. (pp. 213–215)

So Roland Hayes did come to my family’s cottage! He sang the Aframer-ican (his term) spirituals he had collected and arranged. I was a baby in thatcottage. Was I asleep when Hayes sang? Or was I in one of my parents’ arms,or being handed from person to person in the crowded room? What does adreamy child take in of the world around her? Of its passions, its sorrows, itsschisms, its good works? If such a baby is born during the worst of times forher people, to a father whose mother has just died in a concentration campand whose father is on his way to Auschwitz on a train, soon to be bombed

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by the Allies, if her parents are suddenly in a position to do something aboutterrible racial injustice, if they give concerts at black high schools and col-leges in the South in order to attract black faculty and students, wouldn’tthere be a shift in the cosmos of her baby self, some opening to the possibil-ity of goodness and life? If she heard Roland Hayes sing “Deep River,” aboutthe home over Jordan, about the Gospel Feast, wouldn’t that give her soulgrounding in all the worlds, invisible and visible? Wouldn’t it make sense thatshe would, in later life, find herself organizing a writing circle, focused onAfrican-American poetry, and call it “Deep River”?

A BAND OF ANGELS

In a lifetime of tracking dreams, I am struck by the power of black folkin white folks’ dreamtime. Take me, for example. When I was in a majorlife transition, a psychological borderland, terminating an analysis of manyyears, Sophia showed up in a dream as a light-skinned black woman. She waspreparing me for a wedding, feeding me corn, red pepper, black beans. She,whose name means wisdom, announced to me in active imagination that shewould be taking over the analytic function. Indeed, she is more available thanany analyst, for, as it is said in the Jewish tradition “no sooner do you call toWisdom than she stands ready to serve you at your gates” (Schwartz, p. 45).

Sophia says that her father is Greek and her mother is African. Howam I to make sense of this, when I am a Jew, and she clearly comes from theHebrew Bible, from the Book of Proverbs, where it is written:

Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice?She standeth in the top of high places. . .She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city. . . .

(Proverbs 8:1–3; 22–25)

Does the Sophia who speaks for the wisdom traditions, she who is thebeloved of God, come from Africa bearing the secrets of the ancient fem-inine? With her beautiful skin, darker than mine, lighter than her Africanmother, Sophia integrates races and cultures. She leads me to the “DeepRiver” of African-American music and poetry. She is, von Franz tells us,the “wisdom of God” (p. 136). She shapeshifts in my dreams. Recently ina dream, I am exhausted, naked, wandering. It was a time in my life betweenselling a beloved home and buying a townhouse. Two dignified older blackwomen, who remind me of the wise black sisters in Sue Monk Kidd’s wonder-ful novel The Secret Life of Bees, take care of me. In active imagination theytell me they are sisters, Sophia and Isis. They have the same mother, Africa.But different fathers.

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Jung tells us about the connection between Isis and Sophiain Mysterium: . . . the cognomen of Isis was. . . . The BlackOne. . . . She was also called the Old One. . . . She appears as ateacher of alchemy in the treatise “Isis the Prophetess to her sonHorus.” . . . She . . . was equated with Sophia. (par. 14)

Isis is prima materia, mystery of the natural world, the philosophicalstone, the mystery of the widow, she to whom the angel, who desires her,gives the secrets of alchemy, according to von Franz (p. 52). She is the Ladyof Healing, source of medicinal herbs, great sorceress (Nicholson, p. 91).The black ones, the old ones, the wise ones, Isis and Sophia are my travelingcompanions, part of the band of angels of African origin who guide my innerlife. Perhaps they were among the fairies at my cradle.

But it’s not just women in that band of angels. When did I dream of thatblack man, wearing a fedora? That hat is always a giveaway that the dreamrefers to my childhood, when men like my father wore those fine-lookinghats. The man in my dream was solid, comforting. I knew him to be the uncleof a wild and troubled manchild; he was the only one who could contain him.How long has he been dreaming in me, wanting to be let out? It’s clear to menow that he carries the energy of Roland Hayes. Sixty years after I met him,I long to reach back to Roland Hayes, to talk to him, to hear his living voice,to listen to his stories.

MY SOUL IS A WITNESS

In his day everybody knew the story of Roland Hayes, the son of poor tenantfarmers, former slaves, who became a world-famous tenor and sang beforethe crowned heads of Europe. But it is long past his day, and it is hard to findhis music or stories about his life. I did find a biography written by his friend,Mackinley Helm, in Hayes’s voice. It is called Angel Mo and Her Son, Roland

Hayes, and was published in the 1940s. I also found a song book called My

Favorite Spirituals, arranged and interpreted by Roland Hayes. I think wehad that songbook when I was a child.

Roland Hayes was born in 1887. His father claimed to be part Cherokeeand much preferred the woods to the farm. In the words his biographer putsin his mouth, Hayes says:

He taught me to identify the songs of birds. . . . I used to stop workin the fields to listen to meadow larks, orchard orieoles and sum-mer tanagers—fancying, in the sympathetic way I learned frommy father, that I was a bird addressed by my companions in thetrees, and birdlike answering them.

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When my father called a deer, he was a buck himself. . . . He madean offering of his whole nature. . . . He opened the way for me tobecome a musician by showing me how to offer my body. . . . toreceive the music which he taught me to discover in the naturalworld. I learned from my father how the body follows the imagi-nation. (pp. 11–12)

He says of his mother:

My mother was a small, slight woman, with a beautiful erect car-riage which hard work never bent. She was very little more thanfive feet tall, and she moved rapidly about on her small feet, quickand sprightly as a bird. (p. 54)

Mother . . . worked hard all her life. She plowed and hoedand picked cotton. She washed and ironed for the white fami-lies . . . who kept the store and owned the sawmill and gristmill.(p. 47)

Roland lost his father when he was eleven, and soon thereafter thefamily moved away from the farm to the city of Chatanooga. His mother tookin washing, and Roland found work at a foundry. He nearly lost his life in thatfoundry when he fell into a conveyor belt and was pulled into a machine thatcrushed and mangled him (Hayden, p. 12). His survival was miraculous.

So was the series of events that led to his ascent unto the world stage.He had begun singing in the black church, where his beautiful voice was rec-ognized, and he learned the music of his people. Word about his gift got outin the community, and he was asked to sing for a graduation ceremony athis school. Professor Calhoun from Oberlin Conservatory of Music happenedto be there and was so impressed with Hayes’s voice that he offered to givehim singing lessons for 50� c a lesson. Hayes’s mother, who insisted that all herchildren get educated and wanted Roland to become a preacher, thought ita waste of money. No black man could expect a future as a singer. Neverthe-less Hayes started studying with Calhoun. When Calhoun played a recordingof Caruso singing, Hayes was transported. He wanted to sing like that. Hewent on to Fisk University, where he joined the Jubilee Singers, renowned forbringing black religious music to a wider audience. When the Jubilee Singerstraveled to Boston, Hayes went with them and stayed there, determined tofind a teacher. He was accepted as a scholarship student by Arthur Hubbard,who began training him in the European repertoire and encouraged him togo to Europe, where “it was no crime to be black” (Helm, p. 151).

Hayes sailed to England, where he slowly built up so fine a reputationthat he was invited to sing for the king and queen. He sang the classical

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repertoire, but he also sang spirituals. He made a great impression on QueenMary, and with her help, his career took off.

On the continent in 1924 he was scheduled to sing for a German audi-ence. He had been warned that there might be trouble. He saw an open letterin the morning newspaper, warning of the “calamity” of an American Negro“who had come to Berlin to defile the names of German poets and composers,a Negro . . . who, at best, could only remind us of the cotton fields of Georgia”(Helm, p. 21).

When I entered the concert chamber . . . there rolled out a greatvolley of hisses, which seemed to me to fill the hall entirely. Iwas terribly apprehensive, but I took my place in the curve of thepiano, closed my eyes, lifted my head into singing position andstood still as a statue. . . .

“I saw a miracle at TownHall. Half of the peoplewere black and half werewhite and while the moodof the song held, they wereall the same . . . Oneemotion wrapped them. Andat the end it was a singlesob.”

When silence came . . . thehall was more still thanany I had ever sung in. Itwas so quiet that the hushbegan to hurt. I . . . beganto sing Schubert’s “Du Bistdie Ruh,” which otherwisewould have occurred laterin the program. The entryto that song is almost assilent as silence itself. TheGerman text, stealing outof my mouth in sustainedpianissimo, seemed to winmy hostile audience over.(Helm, pp. 211–212)

Hayes was able to turn his European success into an opening in hisown country. He made his debut at Town Hall in December 1923, singingboth classical works and spirituals. The New York World columnist HeywoodBroun wrote of the event:

Roland Hayes sang of Jesus . . . and it seemed to me that this waswhat religion ought to be, it was a mood rather than a creed,an emotion rather than a doctrine. . . . I saw a miracle at TownHall. Half of the people were black and half were white and whilethe mood of the song held, they were all the same. They shared

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together the close silence. One emotion wrapped them. And atthe end it was a single sob. (Helm, p. 188)

Hayes was bridging a wide cultural gap in bringing the European clas-sical tradition together with black religious music. His biographer writes ofan incident early in his career, when he was on an obscure tour to the WestCoast, and his mother was traveling with him. Though he usually sang inblack churches, he had been invited to sing at a benefit for a white congrega-tion in Santa Monica. He sang the spiritual “My Soul Is a Witness.”

It seemed to be making very little impression upon my well-groomed white audience. Of the whole company of people there,only my mother was a practitioner of the primitive and highlyemotional religion which had produced those sermons in song;and she, great soul, under the compulsion of deep religious feel-ing, stood up in the midst of that fashionable assembly andcalled out, in a clear and ringing voice, “Hallelujah! I’m a witnesstoo.”

It was as though she had touched a match to a resinous torch. Thehall became suddenly luminous, with the light of feeling comeout of its dark hiding place, and at the end there was a fury ofapplause. (Helm, pp. 122–123)

After the concert Hayes was approached by a white man who spoke tohim about the quality of his voice, a quality not found in white singers. Hayeshad to recognize that he “had been working in a cloud of depression becausemy voice had not come out as white as . . . I . . . hoped it would.” He describeda great relief of inner tension when he recognized that he could be what nowhite artist could be.

SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT

As we approach the last portion of our days we are called by the first of ourdays, called by the fairies who gathered around our cradle. “What did you dowith that gift I gave you?” What did I do with the blessing I was given, in theperson of Roland Hayes?

Why is Roland Hayes so powerful for me? As the black uncle in thefedora in my dream he is the only one who can contain his restless unfo-cused nephew. Does the bad boy in me settle down in his presence, like thatGerman audience did? Is he a reconciling figure, bringing together the oppo-sitional forces in me that might otherwise battle it out: the European vs. the

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American, Mozart and Bach vs. spirituals and blues, high brow vs. low brow,religious attitude vs. worldly drive?

Did I sit in his lap as a toddler? Did I hear him tell his stories? Whatwould I ask him, were some good fairy to come along and grant me this wish?

Suddenly I realize, Sophia is with me, my inner analyst, a dark inquiringpresence, with beautiful skin and an irritated edge.

Some good fairy? Who do you suppose I am? Why don’t you remem-

ber to call on me when you need me? You are trying to do something very

important, you are calling up an ancestor. You need me.

Calling up an ancestor? Is that what I’m doing? Is Roland Hayes myancestor?

There are ancestors of the blood and ancestors of the soul. Some

are both. They live in the world tree and wait to be released by a mortal

who knows their power. When they are brought into consciousness by

the living, spoken, written, fed, they can ensure a flood of blessings from

the invisible world (Karcher, 2007). Roland Hayes has been forgotten.

But as you say, he is a shining spirit, a luminous light. You need him.

Your world needs him. Call him up from the dead, tell him who you are.

Sophia has a way of turning an offhand remark into a major project. Iam a little nervous, but, here goes:

“Mr. Hayes, I am Eddie Lowinsky’s daughter, that tow-headed two-year-old toddling about when you came to Black Mountain College in thesummer of 1945. Do you remember? You are long gone, and sadly not re-membered. I call you from the Promised Land, the campground, the GospelFeast where all is peace, I call you from your home over Jordan. You’ve beenpulling at me so intensely. Are you trying to get my attention?”

I see that Sophia, with her beautiful skin and dark eyes, hasshapeshifted into a large male presence in a fedora. He sits as if on a stairway,or a front porch. In life he was a small, delicate man. As a ghost he is large,encompassing, warm. A warm ghost, strange as that sounds, with a brightspirit. I can see him shining.

Ah, child, he says, we dead are always looking for a channel

through to the living. You are your father’s daughter in your love for

words and their music. But there’s something else in you, something to

which your father paid little mind, though it was the content of the mu-

sic he studied: strong religious feeling, spiritual longing. You heard it

in Gregorian chant, in the masses of Palestrina and of Bach, and in the

spirituals I sang in your home when you were a child.

Is there anybody listening to these songs now, outside the black

church? I poured my passion for this music into my life. Is there any-

one who appreciates the great religious vision of my people? The dead

want to feel their work go on. Some of us dead make our peace over

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Jordan. Some of us dead don’t. We’re restless. Our business in the realm

of humans is unfinished. What I need, for my soul to rest, is for the wis-

dom of my people, the wisdom of God as expressed in spirituals, to be

heard.

I feel the deep rich energy of Roland Hayes’s personality. I feel held byhim. Something restless and troubled in me settles down. I want him to keepon talking with that kindness of his, that cultured intelligence. Wisdom, hesays, the wisdom of God. He is talking about Sophia, he is talking about myinner guide.

Mr. Hayes, tell me about the wisdom of God as expressed in spirituals.You studied them, arranged them for solo voice and piano. You know, I havean inner figure, named Sophia. She comes to me in dreams and in activeimagination. She was just here, advising me to invoke you. She is the wisdomof God. She tells me her mother is Africa. I’ve never quite understood that,since my people are Jews. Do spirituals come from Africa? Or are they themusic of slaves submitting to their master’s religion?

Ah, you have an African spirit guide. No wonder you’ve been able

to invoke me. No wonder your soul needs to carry my light on. Africa

is the mother of us all, our spiritual home. Hers is a wisdom that can

take in the gods of other traditions while holding onto her own ances-

tral traditions. That’s what the spirituals did. My mother, who was born

a slave, told me: “The master, yes, one had to acknowledge him, I be-

longed to him, it was the law of the land . . . but what I am, here inside

me, he couldn’t touch” (Helm, pp. 93–94). That’s the great dignity, the

amazing wisdom of these songs. They are rooted in Africa; they reach

back to Africa’s rhythms, her great “Mother Drum”; they evoke some

high-frequency vibration familiar to Africans that harmonizes nature,

God, and people; they improvise on African “call and response” while

borrowing from the white man‘s hymnal (Hayes, pp. 10–13). They give

instruction, by allegory, as was the custom among our ancestors, which

made it easy for us to translate our religious experience into the stories

of the white man’s bible.

I translated these songs for the concert hall, for solo voice and pi-

ano. Originally they had been sung by unaccompanied chorus; orig-

inally they were sung by slaves working in the fields. In those days

they were our life blood, how we cultivated our souls and our commu-

nity, while keeping the master off our backs. Slave owners encouraged

singing. It helped them keep track of their human property. They got

more work out of their slaves when they sang.

We looked like we were cultivating the fields, and so we were. But

at the same time, we were transmitting subversive messages about se-

cret revival meetings, or about the way to freedom. The spiritual “Follow

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the Drinking Gourd” gives directions by starlight to the runaway slave

heading north. “Steal Away,” a favorite of mine, was on one level the an-

nouncement of a religious revival meeting. Imagine a cotton field where

there are many slaves hoeing cotton. The leader has arranged for a cler-

gyman from the North to preach the gospel secretly after nightfall. He

whispers “Steal Away” to the slave next in line to him. This whispered

word, spoken over rhythmic measures of hoe strokes is passed along the

line until it reaches the last individual. Work takes on a more lively gait.

The spoken word takes on melody which surges forth on the rhythmic

verve of an African idiomatic patter. The hoes simply play an ecstatic

rhythm as a background to the song. The plan of the slaves to attend

the religious services secretly, after nightfall, is hidden from the master

(Hayes, p. 74).

Imagine what it was like in that cotton field. I know something

about that. We were tenant farmers when I was a child. Imagine the heat

of the sun beating down on our heads and our aching backs, the nasty

way the cotton bolls cut our hands, our tired feet. And then the rhythm

that carried our resistance, our tenacity, our heritage. Drums were for-

bidden in many areas. They frightened the overseers. They carried our

old African power, our forbidden gods. But we didn’t need drums. We

had hands to clap, feet to stomp, hoes to strike the ground (Southern,p. 195).

Roland Hayes’s bright spirit seems to flicker, to fill up with a question.Child, do you have another spirit guide besides Sophia? There’s

someone else nudging me. Calls herself Isis. She’s angry, says she’s being

neglected.

Yes, Isis is a spirit guide. I don’t know what she wants. Isn’t one inneranalyst enough? I thought she and Sophia were interchangeable.

The spirit of Hayes has disappeared. A dark female spirit emerges withfierce eyes that glow like a cat’s. She says:

Sophia and I are not interchangeable! I’m a lot older and a lot

crankier. You call on Sophia when you want clarity, wisdom, perspec-

tive. But I’m the one who tracks you in the invisible realms, and I have

an agenda! I’m more priestess than analyst. I’m the one who insists you

make something of your feelings, your dreams, your inner experiences.

I’m the one who insists you make poems. I’m the one that makes things

real. It’s not enough to call up an ancestor and have a nice conversation.

You need to feed the brother!

Isis is clearly frustrated with me.

How do I feed a ghost?

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That’s obvious. Feed him a poem!

Do you mean the poem I wrote about my experience at BlackMountain?

For one.

MAE WEST IS WHAT THEY CALLED YOUR HILLS1

back in Black Mountain College days; your great green breastsmade glad my baby years. Your willows, your maples, whisperedall the secrets

of the sexual earth. You love goddess, you come hither and yon,hitchhiker to the bottom of Lake Eden, big wind over movingwaters, you who leap from mountain ridge to mountain ridge,who break the vessels

and the rules; make a man hard, a woman wet, a little girl full ofdreamy meanderings. O queen of the purple flower, music wasmade between your thighs,

fiery as Mozart, tender as Beethoven, melancholy as the spiritu-als sung by Roland Hayes—first black man at a white southerncollege—in that dining hall in 1945. But you,

gorgeous and terrible, who knew the parts my mother didn’tplay, the ones my father disapproved, have broken the world intopieces. Some say you were a free spirit, a wild adventurer;

some say you were a danger to us all, a harlot, a slut. You ate theapple, made the snake dance, had us cast out of paradise. And soyou did, and so we were, Mae West.

But I remain your priestess.

Isis’s cat eyes are gone, and it’s Roland Hayes again. If a ghost’s eyescan twinkle, Roland Hayes’s do.

Black Mountain was a pretty sexy place, though I understand it

caused some trouble. How good to be written into the world of your poem,

next to Mozart and Beethoven.

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I’d like to feed you another poem, one I wrote under the influence ofAl Young. He’s the Poet Laureate of the State of California. His poems areinfluenced by the blues. He’s a musician himself. He wrote a wonderful poemcalled “A Dance for Ma Rainey.”2

You mean the famous “Mother of the Blues,” the one credited with

naming the form? asks the spirit of Roland Hayes.The very one. Here’s the beginning of the poem, which is like a long

musical riff.

I’m going to be just like you, MaRainey this monday morningclouds puffing up out of my headlike those balloonsthat float above the faces of white peoplein the funnypapersI’m going to hover in the cornersof the world, Ma& sing from the bottom of hellup to the tops of high heaven& send out scratchless waves of yellow& brown & that basic black honeymisery

I’m going to cry so sweet& so low& so dangerousMa,that the message is going to reach youback in 1922where you shimmersnaggle-toothedperfumed &powderedin your bauble beads(pp. 18–19)

The spirit of Roland Hayes lights up. He makes it sound so simple,

but I suspect it’s not at all simple, the way he covers the entire realm of

African-American experience: saying he’s going to “sing from the bottom

of hell/up to the tops of high heaven.” That about says it for spirituals,

for blues, for jazz. And when he says he’s going to send his cry back to

Ma Rainey in 1922, that puts me in mind of your spirit guide Sophia,

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talking to you about “fixing an ancestor.” I think that’s what he’s doing.

Am I right, Sophia?

She appears, my inner analyst, she of the beautiful skin and the deepcalm, saying: I thank you for not forgetting me. Yes, Young is fixing an

ancestor in that poem. He is naming his lineage, that the great mother

of his poetry is Ma Rainey, in her terrible suffering, in her amazing

music.

She turns to me, with her lovely smile. Your poem in response to

Young fixes your musical ancestry. Why don’t you read it?

YOUR PEOPLE ARE MY PEOPLE

for Al Young

My people are the people of the pianoforte and the violinMozart people Bach people hallelujah peoplemy people are the Requiem people Winterreise people Messiahpeoplewho crossed the red sea Pharoah’s dogs at our heels

Your people are the drum beat people the field holler people theconjure peopleBlues people Jubilee people people who talk straight to GodYour people are the Old Man River people the Drinking Gourdpeoplesinging the Lord’s songs in a strange landMy family had a Sabbath ritualWe lit the candles sang Go Down Moses sang Swing Low SweetChariotsang slave music freedom music secret signals in the night musicmy father said you never knowwhen Pharoah will be back

I was youngI was American I thoughtmy people were the Beatles the Lovin’ Spoonful the JeffersonAirplanesinging Alice and her White Rabbit through allthose changes my parents did not understand

That didn’t lastthat was leaving home music magic mushroom musicPuff the Dragon music floating off to Never Never land

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now heard in elevators in the pyramids of financebut Old Man River still rolls through my fieldsBessie Smith still sweetens my bowlMa Rainey appears in the inner sanctumof the CG Jung Institute flaunting her deep black bottom

My father’s long gone over Jordanand I’d hate for him to knowhow right he was about Pharoah

but I want you to know Al

every Christmasin black churches all over Chicagothe Messiah shows upaccompanied by my mother’shallelujah violin!

Ah, child, says the ghost of Roland Hayes, now I feel nourished.

So, as you can see, my story has changed. I am not only the child of catastro-phe. I am also the child of a fertile borderland between the old world and thenew, gifted by fairies, witness to a transformative moment of desegregation,which my parents facilitated. I live in a version of this “Home Over Jordan” tothis day, where landscape is the Great Goddess, where the visible and invis-ible worlds meet, where poetry begins, where a band of angels, Isis, Sophia,and now Roland Hayes, guides my way.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is a Jungian analyst in practice in Berkeley, CA, and

poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives. Her poetic memoir TheSister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way has just been published by Fisher

King Press. A widely published poet, she won the Obama Millennium Award for

a poem about the spirit of Obama’s grandmother.

NOTES

1. This poem was originally published by Texas Review, 29, 2008.2. “A Dance for Ma Rainey,” copyright c© 1969, 1992 and 2007 by Al Young.

Reprinted with permission of the author.

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FURTHER READING

Duberman, M. (1972). Black Mountain: An exploration in community. New York:Norton.

Harris, M. E. (1987). The arts at Black Mountain College. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hayden, R. (1989). Singing for all people: Roland Hayes, A biography. Boston: SelectPublications.

Hayes, R. (2001). My favorite spirituals. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Helm, M. (1945). Angel Mo’ and her son, Roland Hayes. Boston: Little, Brown.

Jung, C. G. (1963). Mysterium coniunctionis. R. F. C. Hull (Trans.). The collected works

of C. G. Jung (Vol. 14). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Karcher, S. (2007). Re-enchanting the mind. Psychological Perspectives, 50(2), 198–215.

Nicholson, S. (1989). The goddess re-awakening. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical PublishingHouse.

Schwartz, H. (2004). Tree of souls. New York: Oxford University Press.

Southern, E. (1997). The music of Black Americans. New York: Norton.

von Franz, M.-L. (1980). Alchemy. Toronto: Inner City Books.

Young, A. (1992). Heaven: Collected poems 1956–1990. Berkeley: Creative Arts BookCompany.

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Documents

My Home Is Over Jordan