Delores Fisher, part time lecturer on African American music at San Diego State University, earned both an MA in music with an emphasis in Musicology and also a BA in the Humanities with an emphasis in music and literature from San Diego State University.

It started a few summers ago with the reading of a book from one of the New Negro authors of the nineteen twenties, Jean Toomer. I somehow became fascinated with the narratives of Toomer’s Harlem Renaissance novel Cane.[1] As I read, sleeping memories began to rise and haunt my waking thought. I knew I would never be the same, and I have not.

Cane . . . sugar cane….bending beneath breezes of stilted soft summer wind in early nineteen twenties backwoods rural Black Georgia. I feel as if I know Jean Toomer’s Georgia.  His description of dense rural woodlands conflate with frequently told family stories and several collections of faded brown edged early twentieth century photographs.

Several decades ago, on a cool early late summer upstate western New York morning, my uncle’s deep gravelly voice tap dances with intense excitement after a trip south to Georgia. He echoes palpable images of rural life. Uncle Lawyer and my daddy, holding thick bamboo looking stalks at eye level, laugh in a mystic sharing totally unfamiliar to me. Two working class Black men, looking back into a past of “in your face” survival, seem like one soul, lost in sights and sounds of rural life with shoeless feet, mule plowed fields, Sunday overalls, and coal stoked trains. Daddy hands momma the cane. She places it on the red formica kitchen table. Smiling she simply says, “Well.” Her eyes blink small tears. She looks at me as if I should understand her silence. “Is that stuff really sweet?” I ask. Momma, daddy, and Uncle Lawyer go outside to watch the red winged black birds noisily playing above the empty clothes line. When I try to follow, they shoo me back inside, laughing at my youthful Northern suburban naiveté.

I look out the kitchen window. Uncle Lawyer’s hand proudly grips a bundle of Macon Georgia sugar cane like cat eye marbles from an old treasure chest.  He and daddy break open a stalk. They hand momma a piece. All three stand in crisp morning sun, woods framing their unity. They laugh and talk for almost a half hour before momma brings several stalks back into the house. She slides one yellow-green stalk on the kitchen table and stands the rest next to the fridge. My brothers and sister eagerly lick their lips as they asked about the cane. I whine again, “Is that stuff REALLY sweet?”

Everyone looks at me as if I am a little space being. I run off to the railroad tracks behind the house, slamming the screen door behind me, singing at the top of my voice, “Freight train, freight train . . .” That’s when I saw Aunt Bert. She winks and shakes her head. Aunt Bert and Uncle Lawyer, momma and daddy, come back outside to sit and sip ice tea with mint leaves. They sit in our back yard facing the suburban Tonawanda New York meadows and trees behind our house.  Later, during a supper table of collard greens with ham hocks, pan fried corn bread, pork chops smothered in creamy brown gravy and mashed potatoes, their stories began again.

Like the rural inhabitants of Toomer’s novel Cane, all of daddy’s brothers and sisters inhabited a farmland terrain. Their personal narratives continued as they migrated from Georgia to settle within a few miles of each other in urban Buffalo New York during the late nineteen forties and early fifties. Momma’s immediate family also moved to large urban centers. Her surviving sister lived in Chicago; several distant relatives still lived in Georgia, some in the high mountains. Prompted by the sight of Uncle Lawyer’s gift that summer, it seemed as if all my kinfolk who visited Buffalo relatives, and us in Tonawanda, talked about sugar cane as if it was mythic ambrosia. Their conversations surrounded “cane talk” with a cast of colorful, sad, funny, and bigger than life characters from a sun baked distant south. In the next few weeks, with this new batch of cane, my daddy began to talk about parts of his life he hadn’t mentioned before. He talked about his quartet days singing tenor in a local group that travelled to La Grange, Idea, Manchester and other odd named Georgia counties. Music provided a popular source of folks’ entertainment at church, work, and at home.[2] Daddy and I would walk around our small vegetable garden, talking about birds and listening to their songs. Then, we’d sit on a stump in his small dark purple skinned grape arbor next to the vegetable garden. He’d look over at the oak trees, start talking about Georgia and remembering. We became closer than I’d ever remembered that year.

Some days that summer, when he was working outside alone, he’d whistle, gentle as a breeze, a sad tune. He would stop and pull a piece of cane from his pockets. Unfolding the wax paper, he’d look out over the yard, cane in hand. His whistling was almost as pretty as his sweet high tenor voice. When we lived in Buffalo, few of the neighborhood fathers sang like him. They were city born. Daddy sure seemed “country” then. Out in the suburbs, none of the dads, mostly European immigrants, whistled while they worked. My friends said their folks did sing old songs they mostly couldn’t understand. Seems we all had one thing in common, music.

            When we lived in the city, my family had an old piano roll upright.. I’d watch the keys and try to press my hands in them as the music played. I guess that’s how my folks decided that I had his and momma’s gift for music. As a matter of fact, they gave all my siblings music lessons. Clarinet, guitar, organ, accordion, and despite the fact that I wanted to play ukulele like Arthur Godfrey on TV, they gave me piano lessons at Wurlitzers. Momma liked that I was learning piano. Every year, she play hymns and Christmas carols as all of us gathered around and sang. Daddy and momma, who had the best voices of us all, sometimes sang duets. Momma had a high spinning soprano voice that made us sit quiet, made us listen. She and Daddy read music. His silky high tenor voice was smooth and honey-like.[3] My folks encouraged us to sing and play at least one instrument well. It was just what they grew up doing, what should be for us too. When our family moved to the Town of Tonawanda in Western New York, we traded the old piano roll upright for a smart spinet. The old neighborhood was becoming violent and too noisy. The Irish, Italian, and old world Jewish immigrants were moving out. Our new neighbors’ children didn’t play instruments or have a piano like us. And their parents always seemed irritable. Not like our old neighbors. We had somehow absorbed quite a few rural attitudes and ways of being. They were Northern born city folks—less friendly towards my folks. We couldn’t go to their houses and sing and just hang out and talk anymore. As girls and boy gangs began to surface, my parents moved us to the suburbs with meadows, woods, and no sidewalks on the street. Without the anger and noise of the city and its urbanely profane people, my parents felt at peace. It wasn’t Georgia, but it was enough.

            The Georgia of the early twentieth century that my parents grew up in was a different place than today. Most people who could afford a piano had a beat up old something to bang on. It was common for somebody in the house or the neighborhood to sing in a group or play the piano. Music also served as means to lightened long work days in the fields or at the laundry tub. Perhaps “progressive” urban Blacks in the early nineteen twenties were unaware of the cultural history linked to their use of music to ease the repetitiveness of manual labor and daily chores. It was an African tradition documented from slavery days.[4] Surviving ex-slaves recounted memory-stories of songs, work and religion into the extant collections of southern slave narratives.[5] According to my mom and dad, people came together in their communities to dance, sing, and play instruments, to celebrate rituals and holidays with music. The space could have been sacred, secular or profane, but music was often the common unifying performative element.