Yesterday I traveled by way of the Number 3 train to 72nd and Amsterdam by subway, then walked from the subway stop over to Fourth Universalist Church (76th St and Central Park West) to pick up some items that I had lent Rosemary Bray McNatt,. I walked back to the subway and took the train to 42nd Street and then transferred over to S train and took it to Grand Central. I then walked to the Community Church at 35th and Park. I met with Janice Marie Johnson about some details for the Memorial Service for my late wife, Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley. Then I walked over to Sixth Street and got on the N to bring me back to Court Street in Brooklyn. The subways are wonderful ways of getting around the city, but the haven't been updated for ease of use, upstairs and downstairs and long corridors for transfers.
I think I might have walked four miles during the course of the afternoon plus at least 12 flights of stairs. I am not in terrible shape, but not ready to hike up a mountain either — but New Yorkers do this kind of thing everyday.
One can be car free in New York, get a good workout, and spend the money one would on a car on taxis when time is pressing. And save enough to retire to the Sun Belt, I can' t imagine doing those stairs for many more years.
Of course I might have walked a few less steps if I had my sense of direction up and running. Marjorie always told me I could find my way anywhere, but I have found myself turned around more than once in this city. I got to corner of the 35th and Park Ave. yesterday and lo there was no church! I called Janice, and she told me to cross the street. Community Church is one the West Side of Park, not the East as I had remembered.
A 1997 sermon by Martha Niebanck recalls Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley:
Breaking social rules, sometimes just even talking about our culture and the meanings of what we say and do takes courage. I had an experience this summer at Star Island that brought this message home. I still haven’t learned all there is to learn from the experience.
Two weeks before I went to Star Island for a week with religious educators I was driving home from the Doolittle Home one Friday and went into Building 19. That’s my Friday afternoon ritual. I saw a CD of Sweet Honey in the Rock, called Sacred Grounds and played it when I arrived home. The first song, “I Remember, I Believe” left me in tears the first time I heard it. I couldn’t explain it but I was drawn to that song. I played it again and again for the next two weeks, imagining getting a singing group together to sing it for the talent show. In my past years at Star Island, I had always waited to be invited to sing with other people, so to initiate a singing group was new for me. I wasn’t sure of the rules, the conventions involved in inviting singers, of ignoring the choir director, of getting men and women to sing together instead of the usual women’s singing group. I didn’t think about it consciously, but the sense that I was in new social territory gave me a vague uneasiness.
The theme speaker that week was the Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatly, an African-American woman who is the affiliate minister at the Community Church in New York. She spoke each morning about the challenges of making our communities diverse. She spoke about the need for African Americans to define and control their own culture rather than to simply disappear into the white-western culture. What she said wasn’t new to me but I got more and more uncomfortable about singing a Gospel tune in her presence. I proceeded with asking people to sing and one night, over dinner, I asked Marjorie to sing. She told me that she had taken lessons with Sweet Honey and that she might sing with us if she had the time. I felt encouraged to get the group together, assuming that Marjorie would teach us to sing it authentically. I thought to myself , “She would give it soul.”
I got a group together, men and women, and we practiced, and we decided we were good enough to be in the musicale. I was learning how things got done in this new cultural context of Star Island. Marjorie wasn’t able to join us until our very last rehearsal. She slowly walked into the room and asked a question. “How do you understand yourselves to be singing these words.”
I swallowed hard, feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable and spoke about the theology of remembering and believing. I looked her in the eye and said, “ I believe that I can, by singing this song, learn in my body the kind of courage and faith of the African Americans who have survived slavery.” When I said those words I thought of myself as honoring those people and their courage. She didn’t overtly respond with approval or disapproval but instead asked each person for their understanding. One man walked out of the room without a word, the others began to talk all at once, defensiveness in their tone. I heard my own defensiveness in my voice that sounded aggressive and pointed and realized that we were being forced to have a real conversation about something uncomfortable. Until Marjorie had the courage to break the rule of silence, we had practiced good manners and kept quiet about our understanding of how a group of Euro-Americans could sing this song with any authority of their own experience. In our discussion we learned that each of us had a sense of our own slavery or an oppression that a family member had endured.
But I make it all sound clear in my telling, when it was not clear in the moment. Some folks felt that we were being told not to sing the song. Some folks thought Marjorie was accusing us of being racist. There was anger and frustration and tears. The man who left told me,” I come to Star Island to get away from arguments. I am in charge of how I spend my time and I didn’t want to spend my precious hours fighting-even if it was a good fight. I just wanted to sing.” Marjorie stood her ground, even as the second member fled the room, she insisted that we needed to talk rather than to keep silent. She insisted on breaking the rule of polite silence we had been practicing. She insisted on breaking the social convention that allowed us to borrow African American culture and use it for our own, undiscussed purposes.
Our conversation did not resolve itself but we agreed to sing anyway. I promised to introduce our singing with a statement that allowed the audience into our discussion. I said, ” We are singing a song tonight that comes out of the suffering of slavery. It took us a week to have a discussion about how we have the right to sing it. We are doing the work of diversity that we came to Star to learn and we ask that you hear us sing and know that it is a prayer for our healing.
I am still in the process of learning from my experience at Star this summer. Today I am aware of the silencing oppression of good manners —the fear of making a fuss, going along with the status quo, in the service of behaving “properly.” Like the hemorrhaging woman we are expected to stay in the privacy of our homes if we are bleeding.
The Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley taught me something about challenging the etiquette of silence.
