Hope on the trail of tears

The Trail of Tears

President Andrew Jackson's bright idea to put every tribe and Native nation under the sun into what he called "Indian Territory," then keep them there, created what we know as "The Trail of Tears," a bloody path that took thousands from the deep South all the way into what is today Oklahoma.

The "Five Civilized Tribes" who made the journey weren't dressed in breech cloths or buffalo robes. They'd been neighbors--even friends--of white folks moving into the Southern states for some time, were more assimilated into American culture than might be imagined. But they became, as all Native people were to Euro-Americans, "in the way," so Jackson and his minions in Congress moved them out. Of the 15,000 Creeks who journeyed the trail, 3500 were left behind, buried along the way.

The Cherokee and Chickasaw, like the Creek and Choctaw, had come from Dixie, where those indigenous people who owned land they farmed were often wealthy enough to own slaves, Black men and women they brought with them with to Indian Territory. Homesick and heartsick, slaves and slave-holders were soon all immensely impoverished. Just getting along was not easy in Indian Territory. The Omaha people lived in fear of having to go there; Poncas and Northern Cheyenne flat refused, chose death instead.

All of this is a tale that can't be told enough. A Rev. Alexander Reid, a Scotsman, graduate of Princeton, took a missions position after his seminary graduation and was sent to the Spencer School in Indian Territory, a school for Choctaw boys. In the years before the Civil War, Reid got to know a slave couple who had belonged to a Choctaw, but were given to Rev. Reid for employment at the Spencer School.

Wallace and Minerva Willis, whose entire lives had been lived in slavery, were a delight not only to Rev. Reid but also the school boys who learned to love to hear them sing what they called their "plantation songs," spirituals created and sung in a fashion that even the Choctaw boys came to hear as African-American. The story goes that the two of them, the Willises, after supper, would sit out on their porch and sing together, go through a repertoire Rev. Reid grew to admire so greatly he took down the lyrics and melodies himself because he didn't want those blessed spirituals forgotten once the couple he called Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva stopped singing altogether.

When the Reverend Reid's wife died, he left Spencer School and went back to New Jersey for his children's education, where one night he attended a concert put on by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a concert composed of "plantation songs." At the concert, the Fisk people announced their immediate schedule, told the audience where they'd be singing in the area, and then noted that the melodies they'd sung that night were all they knew and that if anyone in the audience determined to attend another concert, they shouldn't be saddened to have to hear the same songs over again. 

The Rev. Reid lingered after the concert and told the singers he knew songs that were as beautiful as anything they'd sung that night. From memory, he taught them a few melodies from Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva, including something called "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and "Steal Away," and more.

For decades already, ethnographers have suggested--even insisted--that "Negro spirituals" were less "spiritual" than they were, in fact, lightly disguised ads for the Underground Railroad, or simple expressions of heartfelt hopes and dreams, finally, for freedom right here on the earth beneath their shackled feet. 

I'd like to think they're right, that "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" may well be as much a wish for heaven's glory as it is for ordinary human freedom. But whatever import may be in those call-and-response lyrics--"comin' forth to carry me home"--what is historical fact that the Fisk Jubilee Singers began including Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva's melodies in their concerts, including the concert they gave in England for Queen Victoria. From an Indian Territory's evening hymn sung on the porch of the home of two beloved Choctaw slaves, all the way to Buckingham Palace, "Swing Low" has become one of the most recognized melodies of world musical literature.

I don't know that we can tell that story often enough, a story we all need to hear sometime or another, a hymn all about the triumph of hope on the Trail of Tears.