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.
