Mollie Beauchamp Sings Her Sorrow // Fleishman

 

Mollie Beauchamp Sings Her Sorrow

By Maxfield Fleishman

   

Bessie Smith, Blues Singer

     "Roth Edmonds sold him," the old Negress said. She swayed back and forth in the chair. "Sold my Benjamin."

    "No," Stevens said. "No he didn't, Aunt Mollie. It wasn't Mr Edmonds. Mr Edmonds didn't--" But she can't hear me, he thought. She was not even looking at him. She had never looked at him.

    "Sold my Benjamin," she said. "Sold him in Egypt."

    "Sold him in Egypt," Worsham said.

    "Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin."

    "Sold him to Pharaoh."

    "Sold him to Pharaoh and now he dead."

    "I'd better go," Stevens said. He rose quickly. Miss Worsham rose too, but he did not wait for her to precede him. He went down the hall fast, almost running; he did not eve know whether she was following him or not. Soon I will be outside, he thought. Then there will be air, space, breath....

    He descended the stairs, almost running. It was not far now; now he could smell and feel it: the breathing and simple dark, and now he could manner himself to pause and wait , turning at teh door, watching Miss Worsham as she followed him to the door--the high, white, erect, old-time head approaching through the old-time lamplight. Now he could hear the third voice, which would be that of Hamp's wife--a true constant soprano which ran without words beneath the strophe and antistrophe of the brother and sister....

    "I'm sorry," Stevens said. "I ask you to forgive me. I should have known. I shouldn't have come."

    "It's all right," Miss Worsham said. "It's our grief."

   Go Down Moses, "Go Down Moses," Pg. 362-3

    In their grief,  Mollie, Hamp, and Hamp's wife sing. They make a chorus, a "strophe and antistrophe." They sing of Pharaoh, Egypt, and Benjamin, of slavery, betrayal, and death. 

    James Baldwin, in "Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption" says this about jazz, and its ancestor blues: "The music called “jazz” came into existence as an exceedingly laconic description of black circumstances, and as a way, by describing these circumstances, of overcoming them. It was necessary that the description be laconic: the iron necessity being that the description not be overheard. Or, as the indescribably grim remnants of the European notion of the “nation-state” would today put it, it was absolutely necessary that the description not be “decoded.” It has not been “decoded,” by the way, any more than the talking drum has been decoded....This music begins on the auction block."

    During slavery, "black circumstances" were such that there could be no lingual expression of grief, of hope or of fear. There was endless pain, physical, emotional, and psychological, and no possible language for describing it. Enslaved people thus sang their sorrows. From this tradition arose spirituals, sorrow songs, the blues, and jazz. It was imperative (and, as Baldwin says, still is) that the blues not be decoded, overheard. This was a reaction to the dangers of slavery, and still today of blackness. Imminent threat requires secrecy. Hence emerges the "laconic" nature of the blues and of jazz. The words are short and understated. They are almost always symbolic, as "Pharoah" and "Egypt" and "Benjamin" are. But their force lies in the voice, the breath, the soul which flows through them. These transcend language and history; these create the blues and jazz; these heal the one who creates them. 

    Frederick Douglass describes how, when he was enslaved, those around him sung in their misery: "This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do....They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness....slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears."

    Gavin Stevens listens to the chorus of lament, but cannot understand it. He tries to argue with Mollie. "No," he says, "it wasn't Mr Edwards." She does not look at him. He feels he must leave: he cannot find the "air, space, breath" that he needs. 

    Baldwin has more to say about this: "Now, whoever is unable to face this—the auction block; whoever cannot see that that auction block is the demolition, by Europe, of all human standards: a demolition accomplished, furthermore, at that hour of the world’s history, in the name of “civilization”; whoever pretends that the slave mother does not weep, until this hour, for her slaughtered son, that the son does not weep for his slaughtered father; or whoever pretends that the white father did not, literally, and knowing what he was doing, hang, and burn, and castrate, his black son—whoever cannot face this can never pay the price for the “beat” which is the key to music, and the key to life."

    Stevens, in denying Roth's culpability in selling Benjamin to Pharaoh in Egypt, denies the weeping of the slave mother, denies the death of her black son. But in doing so, he precludes the possibility of hearing her cries. The code is yet unbroken by him. He craves silence, space from Mollie's wild cries of grief. Perhaps this inability to bear another's another's unbuffered suffering causes Gavin to turn his car around at the end of the funeral procession, to want nothing more than to return to his desk, his work, his distraction. There, perhaps, he may be safe. 

    When Gavin runs away from the chorus of grief, Miss Worsham comes out with him. They stand downstairs, within earshot of the cries, and Gavin apologizes. "I should have known. I shouldn't have come." "It's alright," said Miss Worsham, "It's our grief."   

    Whose grief? The Worsham / Beauchamp's grief only? Or Gavin's grief too? 

    Baldwin says: "People certainly cannot be studied from a safe distance, or from the distance which we call safety. No one is, or can be, the other: there is nothing in the other, from the depths to the heights, which is not to be found in me."

    Perhaps Gavin runs away from Mollie's cries of grief because somewhere in him, underneath all of his ancient Greek and funeral arranging, he wants nothing more than to wail with her about his own grief. And he certainly can't let himself do that. Not with her.