Saint Indy Official Song Carly - The Monday Morning Memo

“We honkies would be sitting there by our bunks, shining and whining, employed in a forlorn funk, when down the center aisle would come one of the black guys to the latrine, the water fountain, or the bulletin board; and he’d be grinning and relaxed, just snapping his fingers, shaking his booty, and, singing; not showing off, mind you, or seeking attention, just unself-consciously lost in the music he was hearing in his head and in his heart, a music that toil and trouble could not silence – and perhaps made necessary. It never failed to lift our spirits or send us to bed in a rosier mood. I report this not to perpetuate the myth of racial specializations – the musicality of African Americans doubtlessly owes far more to environment than to genetics – but it’s impossible to recall those moments without thinking of the Revue Nègre, Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker et al, and how expatriate black American jazzmen put a smile on the sad face of a Europe chronically depressed in the years after World War I.

Two centuries earlier, America itself began to be slowly uplifted by the people they had enslaved. Our nation was settled, remember, by emotionally constipated Puritans and purse-lipped prudes; expanded by brutish fortune hunters with a taste for hardtack and genocide. It would be insensitive to say in regard to something as evil as slavery that it’s an ill wind that blows no good, but it’s a fact that in addition to their other contributions, former African slaves managed over time to bring joy to a dour, priggish population which danced, when it deigned to dance at all, with heavy feet and a guilty conscience.

In any event, that experience in air force boot camp stayed with me, doubtlessly affecting in some way my unpopular stance as an integrationist in 1950s Richmond.”

- Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie, p. 110-111

More Information

Contact Us

Address