The Fierce Urgency of Now

By Jim Doyle

As those of you I’m proud to call my regulars know already, I grew up in Bolivar, a town of just over 3,000 in southwestern Tennessee about 16 miles from the Mississippi border. I have been known to tell Louisiana natives, particularly here in Lake Charles, that I grew up in “the real South.” This is often expressed by us Southern chauvinists as having been raised in a place “where there is blood on the ground.”

I have maps of the Shiloh battlefield in my office because it has a reference to “Duncan’s Field,” a major field of fire in that spring battle that was owned by one of my relatives. We’re not proud of the war so much as of the history--the type of angst that fueled Faulkner novels of mixed race and old grudges. At Shiloh, for example, more than half the troops from Hardin County, site of the battle, fought for the Union. Nothing was cut and dried except the tobacco.

In 1961, when I was a young 10 years old and in the sixth grade, my director recruited me for the “stage band,” which was short on saxophones. This honor meant I went to school every day in the winter at 6 a.m. and played “Stardust,” “Muskrat Ramble,” and other songs my parents dug but seemed more shopworn to me than the ragged paper they were printed on. It was fun, though. I got to stand up from time to time and play solos.

Perhaps because of where we were, our director added a singing feature to our repertoire that included what were popularly known as “Negro spirituals.” Strange because, of course, I was a student musician at a completely segregated school, performing for all-white audiences in a town where the “new courthouse” was built in 1868 to replace the one the Yankees burned in a conflict in living memory of our grandparents’ parents. 

As singers, we were divided up into parts. At 10, much to my chagrin, I was one of the sopranos. I don’t remember every song we did. I do remember “Go Down, Moses,” which contained the line, “let my people go.” I didn’t get the irony. I’m not sure anybody did.

A couple of years later, that song, and others we sang, were staples of a civil rights movement fueled by one of the men we honor this month, the Rev. Martin Luther King of Montgomery. “O Freedom; O Freedom; O Freedom over me. And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.” The music was haunting, laden with the time and distance between us in those years when we supported with our skin color, if not our hearts, a system, which equally labeled water fountains, public bathrooms, and people.

I cannot imagine growing up black in that environment, nor the anger I would have. But Dr. King led, thank God, a non-violent movement. So anger was tamped down.

I never met him, of course. I was a senior in high school when he died. I was in Memphis that day, as it happened, on my “Career Day” visit to the band director of a state University. I remember being shocked, but – and I’ll say this carefully, but I’m still going to say it – I don’t believe more than a handful of Southern white people heard the news with any real emotion, nor could even imagine the desolation their black neighbors felt.

The riots of the summer of that year ushered in the beginning of the worst of the 60s and early 70s, when this country was divided race by race, generation by generation, rich vs. poor. More than today, even.

By 1969, I was in college and the civil rights discussion was ongoing. That summer, I played in a garage band in Alabama, several times in Selma. We stayed in a motel at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where heads rolled to state police batons as punishment for the sin of speaking out.

The next year, two of my best friends were black kids from the Delta. One night, we tried to get something to eat at an all-night diner in downtown Hattiesburg. Nobody lynched us or anything, but they sure didn’t want us there.

It is fitting, I think, for the holiday celebrating Dr. King to be an occasion to remember his role in our history, mostly because his power to convince outlived his years. Hard to believe he was only 39 when he died, 34 when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, which included President Obama’s often-quoted point about the “fierce urgency of now,” and what I think was his greatest line: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

When I became a lawyer, I argued (in 1991) a racial discrimination case in the United States Supreme Court and quoted Dr. King’s admonition to Americans to judge one another “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” This Southern boy, who grew up where there was blood on the ground from a conflict fought to end slavery, has indeed traveled far.

And so have we all. The election of Barack Obama is much more than a political event. Bill Cosby said last week that he brought pictures of his mom, his dad, and his brother, all deceased, into the booth when he voted. I have spoken to dozens of people, of both races, who cried when they cast their ballot or watched the returns pour in. Me, too.

It says something profound about our country that a black man could reach out in 1963 to his fellow citizens, then embroiled in a sometimes vicious battle for equality, in complete faith that this nation would achieve an end to the wound which has been healing, in fits and starts, since 1776, that he could see a time when his country would “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” It says something more that, in this century, a man running for President brought us together by pointing out the obvious: E Pluribus Unum, out of many, we are one.

God, I hope so. I want to watch the next months as disagreements with the President are based on honest policy differences and nothing else. I want to see a nation at the end of his term that will promise a togetherness we’ve never had, because the division of race has shackled us all in the same chains. Maybe now those shackles will open, and in the words of another of those 6 a.m. spirituals, we will be:

“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

God save the President of the United States. See you on the flip, fellow Americans.

A New Year of New Possibilities

By Jim Doyle

Now that we’re finally out of that Bah Humbug mode, I’m ready for a REAL celebration.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the idea behind Christmas, peace on earth, good will towards men and all that. But how could you not love New Year’s? Booze, parties, good will towards women and vice versa, loud music, funny hats, black-eyed peas at midnight with your scrambled eggs (when would you EVER eat that combination?), steely-eyed resolve to (a) lose weight, (b) quit smoking, or some equally unlikely self-improvement exercise. Now THAT’s a holiday.

Of course, by the time you read this, we will be well into 2009, eight years after we thought we’d be on our way to Jupiter to find the black monolith, 25 years after Aldous Huxley told us we’d be one world ruled by the thought police, nine years after people with funny hats living in fallout shelters told us our computers would crash and we’d be eating grass for months, three years before the end of the world according to the Aztecs (or was it the Mayans? Who invented tequila? Never mind).

So, how are those New Year’s resolutions coming? I decided, way back in 2008 on my birthday while writing this column, that I would make a dramatic resolution for this year, something new and different, not your father’s resolution. Something in the same category as weight loss or smoking cessation, but more likely to be achieved during the course of the year. After a lot of thought, I finally found it.

Drum roll, please. . .

I will grow hair in 2009. On my head. Nose and ears don’t count.

Resolutions reflect the meaning of the holiday for most civilizations, which associate the turn of whatever calendar they used as a benchmark for new things, makeovers, if you will. It is the oldest of all holidays, beginning with the Babylonians, who also began the practice of resolutions. Their most popular one was the return of borrowed farm equipment. Ah, you gotta admire those pesky Babylonians. The Jewish tradition marks the year with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which requires mankind to repent its sins for ten days in preparation for a new start, cleansed of the detritus of the old.

I am spending my New Year’s with my son Stratton, a musical star of no small talent. He is proud of the fact that he has been playing in bars since he was 17, when Jay Ecker snatched him into Rikenjak’s on jazz night. Stratton’s primary instrument is the saxophone, and many of you will have heard him play at some point in those seven years. He now performs all over the country and beyond with Hamilton Loomis, a Houston star who does a combo blues-funk kind of rhythm. Their New Year’s is at the Crystal Ballroom in downtown Houston.

One of the songs they will play has become a favorite of mine since Stratton picked up the keyboards and amplified his singing prowess in pursuit of his artistic vision. It’s called “I Wanna be a Better Man.” What better theme music could there be for a New Year’s celebration?

The human condition is a ceaseless search for renewal, redemption, and occasionally romance. The world is an awesome place to conduct that search, full, as it is, of the possibility of something new around every corner. The winding down of one year, with what seems like ceaseless holidays, grinds to a halt as the new dawn of possibility approaches. “A New You,” as the sign says in the beauty shop.

My favorite mother-in-law, Liz Linam, once told me that life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.

Let’s see; now we have Twelfth Night, the MLK Holiday, Inauguration Day, multiple Mardi Gras balls, Fat Tuesday; Spring Break, Easter, Memorial Day; summer; and so it goes. Sounds like the roll is going pretty fast already.

I promise I will do my best to grow hair and be a better man. I wish all of you  great luck, Dear Readers, in pursuing your goals and resolutions, whatever they may be.