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Early on in his novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison depicts a fateful encounter between his young protagonist, a college student, and Jim Trueblood, a sharecropper who has brought disgrace upon himself and the local black community by impregnating his own teenage daughter. Trueblood explains how it happened—only incidentally for the benefit of the college student, mainly for the benefit of the elderly white trustee for whom the young man is serving as driver during his visit to the college. And Trueblood ends his story by relating his anguished search for solace. He goes to his preacher, but the preacher sends him away. He moves out of his house because his wife and his daughter both have rejected him. He is in agony. And then:
"Finally, one night, way early in the mornin', I looks up and sees the stars and I starts singin'. I don't mean to, I didn't think 'bout it, just start singin'.
I don't know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All I know is I ends up singin' the blues. I sings me some blues that ain't never been sang before, and while I'm singin' them blues I makes up my mind that I ain't nobody but myself and ain't nothin' I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen. I made up my mind that I was goin' back home and face Kate; yeah, and face Matty Lou too."
This passage came to mind again and again as I read To Stand on the Rock, which is about nothing so much as the saving power of black music.
As Fr. Joseph A. Brown tells it, black music—the authentic stuff, the kind that resonates with Africa and the sweltering American South, that combines slavery and the faux freedom that followed it, that comes from the depths of the souls of people whose unique characteristic is a history of enslavement—can save individuals from insanity, families from fragmentation, communities from disintegration. As with Ellison's Jim Trueblood, it can restore order to a soul in chaos and call forth strengths that individuals did not know they possessed.
The question that underlies this volume is: Can black music—and the people and culture it reflects—find a place in the Catholic church? Is it possible to be, in the words of the black bishops in their letter to the church, "authentically black and truly Catholic"?
Almost four decades ago, when I was a teenager, there somehow came into our house a recording of something called the "Missa Luba." I had been a Catholic all my life, and in my youngest years my family had been part of an all-black parish in the South. But I had never previously heard anything like this recording of African voices singing the Latin liturgy of that pre-Vatican II time and what must have been some African-language hymns as well. They made me want to move, to clap, to shout, to sing along in ways that Gregorian chanters certainly never could. It was the first inkling I ever had that, somewhere in the Catholic church, there was soul.
Later, in the post-Vatican II era, I began to hear all kinds of music in the church. Frankly, a lot of it was (and is) very bad music: unsoulful, unsingable, all head and no gut or groin. And even when the music is good, the performance can be abominable. The way "Amazing Grace" is sung in Catholic churches, for example, is a disgrace and an affront to the ears.
So far, I regret to say, except for what may be performed in all-black Catholic churches, I hear very little music that feels African American, that makes me want to sway and clap and sing along, that makes me want to shout at the end, "Amen!"
To that extent, the African American experience has not truly penetrated and become part of American Catholicism; to that extent, African Americans remain unknown to the church. For, as Father Brown wisely observes, "It is in the songs that we shall find the keys to unlocking the treasure of African-American theology and culture."
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