Michael Jackson: The Black Tribal Funeral

I’m steeped in the high stylizations of funerals of blacks and funerals of immigrants. Between them one could not decide which one was more ornate, symbolic and filled with near suicides, screaming, singing, clothing fit for high opera, even dancing on the rails of the pews, or afterward, getting dead drunk to celebrate the rising of the soul of the loved one into heaven.

It was because where I grew up those two groups, blacks and immigrants, were still deeply tribal in their recognition of the soul, the love-dependence between family members, whether they liked each other or not… they loved each other deeply.

They had all stepped –or been pushed– into the ‘melting pot’ but there were things the tribal people were made of… that would not melt into an undifferentiated pool, no matter how high the heat meant to force tribal people to merge with the greater masses who no longer remembered their ancient rituals and symbolic life.

What would not melt was high ritual, deep understanding of symbolic gestures being the language of the spirit and soul, the desire of the body to act out what the heart is experiencing, the decorum and decorating of the funeral attendees to show that in this day, they are not the usual selves;

… rather, on this day, the mourners are spirits, ghosts, who have, like the kachinas of the Hopis, come to accompany in full tenderness, the soul whose body has died to this world.

Today, some will say peope ‘performed and gave speeches’ at Michael Jackson’s funeral. That’s not it. In those funerals of my childhood, whomsoever could play music, sawed or thumped or blew violin, fiddle, metal barred slide guitar, silver tipped accordion, clarinet, country harmonica, before, during or after the funeral.

There were walking-processions behind the casket, often candle-lit and with singing and playing clarinet, fiddle, guitara. And when some of the people could afford old cars, then the procession became headlights during dusk for miles and miles to church, and then cemetery.

It was not lost on us that the ‘last ride’ of the body of the dead was in a hearse that outdid anything that soul had ridden in during their lifetime. That many families pooled coins to try to buy the ‘best’ castket they could manage. They understood the casket as the chair the soul would have in heaven. Often, no expense was spared, including mortgaging a parcel of farmland.

Whomsoever could sing well, sang at the funerals. The coloratura sopranos of the Hungarians and Poles and Czechs, the Lithuanians, Estonians, Greeks, Italians, soaring Ave Marias by rag-tag choirs made up of immigrants in mismatched dusty black dresses and suits and hats with whole partridges plastered on their sides, the women in veils with black velvet dots on them, the old men wearing white spats.

The dance of ‘stylin’ by the ministers at the end of funerals of blacks where the blackrobed men would strut down the aisle after the casket in a victory-soul’s-in-heaven-now dance… the full-lunged alleluia-ing that literally loosened the nails in many of a church’s ramshackle roof. The satin gowns of the singers stretched over round bellies and rounder breasts, the mirror-shiny boots of the ushers who held up fainting women and bodily kept other mourners back from jumping into the open grave in grief.

When I saw the Michael Jackson funeral today, I thought of home… I saw home played out in his funeral for and by the mourners…

all the music, all the leaping, all the stylized clothing, all the symbolic gestures like the sequined gloves worn to the funeral by MJ’s family. Some of the people breaking down and needing help to walk, needing to be held up under their arms… Michael’s children so young and so incredibly beautiful and clearly comforting of others

…and his daughter Paris, 11 years old, bravely speaking her love for her father straight from her little broken heart… you could hear the audience suddenly soft-wail for her…

and the family ladies in their big black picture hats and sunglasses worn indoors– that last being a symbolic gesture of ‘we are in the dark now during our mourning; even when it is daylight we are still in the other world with our loved one for now’)… you saw in them for Paris, grim-lipped strong-woman faces under their hat brims… that “I will protect you, give my life for you” mother love, that is in every woman who truly loves …

and seeing the praise-trance coming over so many mourners, and the casket looking like an entire rose garden had been planted on it, just right, just as it was long long ago in the tribes.

Some observers will rant, condemn, complain about MJ, his life, his funeral, saying it was this, that, claiming on ‘lost productivity’ or decrying that it was an unmerited extravaganza. It wasn’t. It was a small town funeral. Gary Indiana style. Attended by many world over.

It was also a tribal funeral in which mourners sang and danced their hearts out to create the wind to send the soul to Creator. Tribal. Sincere. With all the relatives liked and disliked, controversial and not, funny, and not funny, broken down… giving out their hearts on plates for everyone to see. Just like home. Birthplace home, and far far back tribal home, both.

Requiescat in pace Michael Joseph Jackson. Your people did you proud today… in the old ways.

CODA
Just background…

As a little girl I grew up in the backwoods of farms and factories where blacks, Latinos, poor ‘whites’ and newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe had migrated and all lived together because that’s where there were menial and labor jobs.. These diverse groups of poor were held together in the back-paining work, the tractor turn-over accidents, the falling through the iced over lakes, the meetings of small dark sedans with eighteen wheelers in white out storms, the overdoses of laudanum, the shootings, cutting with razors, the drownings…

I know many persons now, who say they never attended a funeral until they were adults, and that it seemed strange. But to me, funerals are like days, bound to come, important to live through, but also in… for my childhood contained a long string of funerals, often month after month, certainly season after season… friends, relatives, schoolmates dying way before their time, so devastating the injuries of big machinery, so unforgiving the rivers and big water, so little money for doctors… it was like a mantra often said, ‘nothing can be done’ when something could in fact have been done, but it cost money.

Thus, many funerals. And I, the funny looking child whose hair never looked right, whose dresses were always too long or too choking at the neckline and waist, scuffed shoes that were always too big or too small.. that child being filled with sight and sound and knowings about how raw and deep is the love human beings have for other human beings. That funerals open a door normally closed, showing the raw humanity of so many. Like we saw today. As always. Siempre.

Photo via WBZ Newsradio website