[icopyright one button toolbar]
Just some thoughts about trying to keep the magestic and human Martin Luther King IN “Martin Luther King Day,” as the lead figure, without erasing him in any way… as other ‘first of their kinds’ have sometimes been erased from our history. Leaving a hole in the fabric of accomplishments hard won.
Maya Angelou was my friend. We met on book tour in 1992. We spoke just days before her death last year. In between we prayed together, laughed together, I was a guest at her gracious home, sat on the board of her Minority Health Initiative along with Coretta Scott King and other well known African Americans and Latino persons.
In the last many years Maya/ Dr. Angelou was increasingly concerned about the ‘commercialization/collectivization’ of Martin Luther King’s life. She called him Martin. Martin King.
There was that issue of a cherry picked excerpt of a much larger quote from MLK that somehow found its way onto the heroic-sized monument for Martin. Something quoted out of context re ‘a drum major.’
Maya rose up like a mountain and in her deep voice, her so tall height, condemned the quote as a mishmash of Martin’s actual words. It cost a lot to remove it from the monument… but it was only the latest skewing of Martin’s actual words. And life.
Tomorrow there will be those who call the media to witness them doing many things to remember MLK.
But / and… I just came to tell what Maya told me…
She said when the well-meaning can start to erase the actual and earthy images of life lived by actual people, as MLK, by asserting they know the thousands of layers of a life, when they themselves did not live it… when the actual person no longer speaks for themselves to the culture, but is ‘interpreted’ to the citizens.
Maya had little patience for ‘lit-crit’ –that is analyses of another person’s writings, looking for definitive leitmotifs and whatever else] even though as a writer, trained actress and singer, even though she was trained to see what was fine and what was not…
For her, ‘interpretation’/ ‘fantasies’ about how it might have gone, could never replace the real– for the real is pinned in a time and a place that is no longer. That it is the person’s voice and writings that fill out their form. That though one can attempt to remember someone else’s life, in the end, as Maya’s life I hope will remain… she is the only one who speaks for Maya. MLK, the same.
In these many conversations with Maya about the late and the great, and the erasure of many amazing souls by pop tropes made up by others, Maya told me about Ruby Elzy.
I’d like on this MLK day of honor, to tell you about Ruby. For Kathleen Battle and my friend Jessye Norman, both beyond fabula-bravura re voice, know Ruby’s name, for she was ‘the’ great soprano of her time who was erased by the overculture rushing to find ‘the one’ or ‘the only’ whatever or whomever, and rushing right past the detailed life of a massively talented black woman.
Ruby Elzy, incredible soprano voice; and the first black woman to be invited sing at the White House… for Eleanor Roosevelt and dignitaries. The original deep singer in Porgy and Bess. Classically trained in a time of abject prejudice. At a time, when ‘colored’ were not allowed. Separate but unequal in every way.
Ruby’s life and story precedes Martin’s time, and yet is a part of MLK’s story, as each success and each setback of a black talent… was a push forward, and a step backward for what would become known as the Civil Rights movement. It was not made of MLK and certain venerable ministers and people…. the rights movement had been going on for long and long before MLK arrived at it…
The Civil Rights Movement was made on the people AND the memories of persons/ elders/ the young/the ancestors, now dead. killed or imprisoned, who had suffered so… the momentum growing from the souls of the dead and tormented… and inspiring the souls of the living, at that time, to rise up, and — like every other group harmed across the world- to vow, Never Again.
Maya told me that MLK knew of Ruby Elzy and had she been alive, he would have featured her at the head of the marches. But, as it was, Maya said, at the young age of 35, Ruby Elzy suddenly died.
How? How could a gifted person die so young. It was said a botched job by a greedy surgeon removing a benign tumor from her body. The voice, well here, you read about her… the voice silenced by anesthesia, never to wake again…
Except as Maya said, we can unerase her now, unerase Ruby by listening to Ruby’s one recording. By quoting her. By looking for her film. But most of all, by listening to her.
So too, I humbly submit: Martin also. Hopefully not allowing him to be erased by overlays by others. Thereby, listening to him. His words, uninterpreted. His photos without overlays of others’ faces who were not there in the front line with him. His film frames. His paper trail. His audio trail. His thoughts. His writings. His voice.
Not overwritten. Not erased. The great joy of the child he was, the young man of heart, the struggles with real world, the sorrow of feeling betrayed by his own brothers, the happiness to find allies, the sense of death near… the unjust jailings, the pride in his children… and more. In his words. In his eyes. From his human heart. From his mysteriously inspired soul.
There is a popular trope in some parts of culture, that people dont really know themselves. That they need to be told who they are, or others need to be told, for they cannot figure it out by reading that person’s words, by listening/ watching.
Rather than infantalizing others, I’d say, it is often quite the opposite, that people often know themselves so deeply and well they can barely forgive themselves about x and y, and yet keep rising to the calls that are beautiful and often greater than themselves alone.
Truly he was enough all by himself. More than enough. Certainly, just for his incredible writing of sorrow and hope in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” just my personal understanding: what came through him often, was greater than he himself alone.
‘What stands behind’ many a great and tortured soul–it is often that story that ought never be erased. For it is not of only the human realm, but also formed from collision with a Magnitude.
And Ruby Elzy, as we say back to home, ought not be erased “t’neither”–neither by covering over, ‘interpretations’ nor by fictionalizing her life. She can speak for herself, sing out in her strong memorable, original words. Martin too. Both from the human and the Magnitude.
And G-d willing, dear Maya also.
And further by the angelitos y santitos, all of us. That we all be understood by our callings that come banging through the crosswinds of tortures and la lucha, struggles.. those that lead us and lead us to return time and again to our longings to find, but also to bring forth: beauty, justice and peace.
Martin. Ruby. Maya. And us.
Each in our own ways
As each soul sees fit.
_____________
The image: Ruby Elzy in Porgy and Bess.