By the time this column is posted on Tuesday morning, I should have finished my second cup of coffee, and will have read some of the news online before cooking and serving and eating breakfast. And I will have taken however long it takes to vote. Because schools close on election day here in Kentucky, we will probably bring our daughter to watch us vote, instead of dropping her at kindergarten.
After that, I don’t know what I’ll do, because I am not a praying man. Maybe I’ll go on down to the coffee shop and talk with whoever else is killing time there; maybe I’ll go out to the orchard and do something useful, which is about as close as I come to worshipping, for it is a beautiful, graceful field, and the leaves are especially colorful just now.
If I am alone in the truck, or abandoned here at home, somewhere during the day of what promises to be the most consequential election of my lifetime, I will play the new album Mavis Staples has offered, Live: Hope At The Hideout, which officially releases today on Anti- Records. And I will be moved. Oh, yes.
Those of you who have come this far despite having voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin…even you, I hope, will be moved. Four years ago, Mavis Staples was asked to sing “America The Beautiful” at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, the convention which proved the coming-out party for an unexpectedly gifted politician from her hometown of Chicago, Illinois. In 1961, the Staple Singers sang “Help Me, Jesus” at John F. Kennedy’s inaugural. They also sang, on a number of occasions when more marginal security procedures were in place, with Dr. Martin Luther King.
No matter your politics, we have seen this country take one hell of a journey since the Staple Singers began recording in 1955.
I cannot imagine the emotion with which Ms. Staples and others of her generation will cast their votes today. No, I can guess at it, but I can’t hope to know what it feels like, not with anywhere near the depth she has sung about faith and freedom and what’s right for all these years. Still sings, in a voice that is deeper and rougher and more grounded in the depths of experience and hope than ever before. I cannot know what it feels like, except that I know that I will be overcome.
Hope does not come easily to me.
I do understand that no small number of readers come here for a respite from politics, and that the intersection of politics and music and popular culture is festooned with bad art and shallow ideas and preening egos. My late-dawning admiration for Mavis Staples (it took Marvin Gaye to open my ears to the notion that Philly Soul was the nadir, not the apex) is shaped in large part because she is both a profoundly gifted singer and an artist who has placed herself and her art at risk in honor of her beliefs, in the service of simple and fundamental human decency. To ask that America do what is right, that it live up to its promises.
She sings still. Not like an angel, but like mother earth, a woman of some years and formidable wisdom.
It remains possible that Barack Obama may lose this election, that in the time which elapses between when I write these words and when they are posted, some terrible thing will happen, some desperate gambit will unexpectedly work, or the pollsters will be proven sadly and irretrievably wrong. Or we will be found to be a more racist nation than even our worst nightmares dare hint.
I do not think that we as a people can stand that disappointment, nor do I think that many among us would endure it casually.
“Black and white together/We shall not be moved,” Ms. Staples is singing in my headphones, my daughter soundly and happily asleep two rooms down the hall.
The thing is, come January 21, 2009, somebody has to govern. Has to govern all of us, not just you who are still with me, you who share or are prepared to endure my particular political bent. We come upon a difficult time, replete with challenges, and nothing will be possible should we continue to spew hate and invective at each other because we cannot find ways to agree on how best to solve the considerable and complex problems of this country.
For all of us, then, I recommend the collected works of Mavis Staples, of the Staple Singers. I am not expert in these matters, I am simply a poor man fumbling for an anchor against these tumults. And, tonight, I find that anchor in this deep, eloquent, profound voice, this voice of patience and passion. All this, she has witnessed. Lived through.
“I’m on my way/To freedom land,” she is singing. “Great God almighty/I’m on my way.” I know why she sings so sad, for I have read and heard and – in pictures, on television – seen the cost paid. We all have.
Enough.
Go in peace.
