Swing Low Sweet Chariot
Lead: Swing low, sweet chariot
Chorus: Coming for to carry me home
Lead: Swing low, sweet chariot
Chorus: Coming for to carry me home
Lead: If you get there before I do
Chorus: Coming for to carry me home
Lead: Tell all my friends, I’m coming too
Chorus: Coming for to carry me home
In his stump speech, as it is called in the media, when candidate for presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama says with all the might his lithe body can manage, “Yes We Can,” I get goose pimples—and don’t get me wrong, this rarely happens to me—I’m no goose-pimple kind of girl. But like in those olden days when they said, “Ther’s gold in dem der’ hills,” there is a stirring golden nugget of remembrance in the delivery of those words and in the pitch and tone in which they are delivered, not necessarily in the words themselves or their origin.
Recently, much has been made of those words … from whence have they come? We see Massachusetts Governor, Deval Patrick, Obama’s campaign co-chairman, uttering these same few lines in some of his speeches albeit not with the same hard-to-put-a-finger-on power and poignancy of Obama. On “Meet the Press,” (February 24, 2008) viewers also heard Senator/Former First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most recent closing remarks from the February 21, 2008 CNN/Univision Debate, Austin, Texas with Obama, spilling out of both John Edwards’ and Bill Clinton’s mouths on different occasions and during various years—an odd pastiche given Clinton’s recent criticism of Obama.
But back to Obama’s words and words generally. Words gave colonizers power to enslave. Through proper reading of the written word we found the opportunity to become free and women added a few new words to gain the right to vote. Words are chief tool of the downtrodden, the misunderstood and the looked over. Words have power and meaning through which we can call forge change.
I get goose pimples when I hear “Oh, yes we can,” in part because I’ve been around for a while. Around since my people were called Negroes and Jim Crow was still lurking about in some backwoods and long enough to be called black, the n----- word on far too many occasions and now African American. I’ve been around long enough to see a day even someone good with the tarot and dreaming like me could not foresee, long enough for a black man of direct East African origins to pop up and onto the national and international radar whom reminds us of our past but makes us look straight toward to a brighter future.
This past reminds us of the time when folks sang Negro Spirituals like, “Swing Slow Sweet Chariot Coming for to Carry Me Home.” I flash back to a time when folk listened intently in the fields stooped behind broad-leaved tobacco leaves and ornery stalks of sugar cane, listening for signs and verbal cues that we were going to get stronger together, that things were possible and through these possibilities we were going to work without the “powers that be” knowing it, towards a powerful change—a seemingly impossible change. This was the power of those chanted, a cappella and choral words that came from the spirit of those with calloused hands, scarred lashed backs and but still bright brown eyes held down by twisted words. Then later, when thousands of men and some black women were incarcerated, many unjustly so they could work for free for the state, there is the ancestral memory awakened by chilling, goose-pimple-producing “Prison Songs” accompanied only by the foot stomp, ensemble march and sound of the hoe for emphasis. These songs—were raw, recycled words passed along through the generations but they are containers of hope for all that have had their rights stripped—the poor, the new immigrant, children, women, the mentally ill; mentally or physically challenged, religious and spiritual minorities, gays, lesbians, transgendered, and bisexual, as well as the elderly—regardless of race, ethnicity, geography we are all now peeping from around the Bushes to hear these potent words that speak about a new day to coming soon.
