A dose of woke in Durham
My wife, her sister, her sister's husband and I spent the weekend in Durham, North Carolina at the inaugural Biscuits and Banjos festival. I'm fired up!
The festival was organized by Rhiannon Giddens, an amazingly talented musician who deserves your attention. Her Wikipedia page will fill you in on the astonishing breadth of her career so far. Her songwriting and performing recently has included a clear, hard look at chattel slavery in the US. Her song At the Purchaser's Option is brutal, written from an advertisement she found in historical documents that offered a young woman for sale whose nine-month-old child could be included "at the purchasers option."
It's an awful story and a song that won't leave you.
Giddens is well-known as one of the three founding musicians of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The band was formed to preserve and to perform the black string band music of the 1700s that served as the foundation for American roots, bluegrass and blues music. They've got an amazing catalog. One of my favorite of their songs is Cornbread and Butterbeans. I tried hard to find a video you could watch because Dom Flemons on the jug and bones is mesmerizing live, but the audio was sketchy on everything I found. That Spotify link was the best I could do. Or fire up a search and find a version that suits you; it's such a fun song.
The Drops were together for nine years, but the members all did solo work at the same time. They split up in 2014. I have long been sad that I never got to see them together. When Giddens announced a reunion concert for the band at Biscuits and Banjos, I knew I had to get there.
That concert on Saturday night was magnificent. I'm sorry most of the planet missed it!
But here's what I really want to say:
We showed up in Durham on Thursday night. We had an AirBnB on Pauli Murray Place. She was the first African American woman to become an Episcopal priest. She got a law degree at Howard and was denied enrollment at Harvard because she was a woman; Berkeley admitted her for a master's in law. She served in Kennedy's administration and worked with Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
I use the pronoun "she" because she did, but she was a trans man before she and society had the vocabulary to say so, and before medicine could or would intervene. She went by "Pauli" because it was plausibly gender-neutral.
She's still celebrated in Durham today.
We spent the weekend surrounded by pride flags, proudly flown. We talked and walked and danced with old folks and young folks and black brown and white folks, straight folks and gay and lesbian and trans folks. We heard hopes and dreams and histories of all kinds, telling stories that mattered to the people who lived them, or their descendants, or the ancestors of those who might one day get to live hopes.
That's my America. I used to take it as a given – we've come so far from the days of my youth in Kansas City, when I didn't even know that I knew gay people, and when I hadn't learned to accept others for who they are. Still work to do, but we are better than we used to be.
MAGA wants to make you doubt that that America even exists anymore. It does, of course. Hiding from the truth doesn't erase it! But anger and threats and fear can push us backwards, erase some of our progress. It's important to remember who we really are. I did that in Durham. I'll carry it home.
Square dancing on Friday night, bopping to banjo with the Drops on Saturday, taking in gospel on Sunday morning, we were surrounded by real Americans. It reminded me how deeply I love my country and how worthy it is of our struggle to preserve and advance it.