For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
At eighty one, I still feel such gratitude for my public-school music teacher from fifth to eighth grade. Young, pretty, with dark curly hair and warm, brown eyes, Mrs. Stasiw nodded, smiled at me as our class sang together, picked me to perform at school concerts, chose my artwork, inspired by the intriguing records she played for our class, to hang on her wall. (Trust me: that never happened before nor since!) That I also still carry one jarring, harsh, seemingly-racist memory of her has been one of those mysterious and puzzling cognitive dissonances I’ve pondered over the years; definitely an upsetting learning experience. (One of her colleagues, my odious eighth-grade homeroom teacher, routinely used the n-word. So in the late fifties, such uglinesses happened in the Fayetteville-Manlius school district, an affluent suburb outside Syracuse, New York.)
The incident occurred sometime during the Calypso Craze. As I remember it, one day Mrs. Stasiw made disparaging remarks about calypso singer, Harry Belafonte. Who’d seemingly become a superstar. Overnight. She’d been quite put out by his much-photographed bared chest. His gorgeous, dark-skinned, bared chest. Her point being, as I recall, that music was not about a performer’s physicality or sexuality but about, you know, music. More damning though: Belafonte’s dark skin was somehow offensive, questionable, it seemed; dangerous, perhaps? That’s certainly what I thought she was telling us.
But an obituary in yesterday’s Boston Globe makes me now question how I’ve remembered that nasty incident. Because a world-famous Trinidadian calypso singer, Slinger Francisco, better known as “The Mighty Sparrow,” had died, his obituary offered a brief history on calypso music. Which, I learned, was and still is protest music. As they’d engaged in the back-breaking and dangerous work of producing sugar, the enslaved people of the West Indies plantations sang sly, disparaging calypso songs mocking their oppressors. (And if you listen to The Mighty Sparrow’s lyrics, calypso is all about the sexual prowess of its singers, too!)
So is it possible that Mrs. Stasiw, perhaps a musicologist as well a gifted choral director, was actually trying to tell our class something about that history? And her disparaging remarks about a gorgeous man-of-color musician weren’t about his dark skin but more that Belafonte prettified a raw, unvarnished, transatlantic slave trade story?