The "Five Civilized Tribes"
on the Trail of Tears weren't dressed in breech cloths. Some wore suits and
dresses. They'd been neighbors--even friends--of white folks moving into the
Southern states for some time, more assimilated into American culture than you
might imagine. But they’d become, as all Native people were to white
folks, "in the way," so President Jackson and his own Congressional hostiles
moved them out to what would become Oklahoma. Of the 15,000 Creeks, 3500 were
buried on the trail.
They’d all come from Dixie, where they’d
owned the land they’d farmed and were often wealthy enough to own slaves they
brought with them to Indian Territory. Homesick and heartsick, slaves and
slave-holders alike were soon impoverished. The Omaha people lived in fear of being
deported; Poncas and Northern Cheyenne flat refused, chose death instead.
A man named Alexander Reid, a
graduate of Princeton, took a teaching position after seminary 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 an ex- slave couple named Wallace and
Minerva Willis, who had belonged to a Choctaw slave holder, but were given to
Rev. Reid for employment at the school.
I would never have heard of Alexander
Reid if it weren’t for Sheldon Jackson, one of the three names inscribed on
Sioux City’s Prospect Hill, First and Bluff. Sheldon Jackson’s first position
after seminary was at that same Spencer School. That’s the only link there is
to our own Prospect Hill monument, but when you stumble on stories this good,
you just have to tell ‘em.
Old Wallace and Minerva Willis were pure
delight to school boys, who loved to hear their "plantation songs," the
spirituals they took along from the cotton fields. After supper, the Willises would
sit together out on their porch and sing through a repertoire Rev. Reid himself
grew to admire so greatly he took down lyrics and melodies because he didn't
want those great melodies forgotten once Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva stopped
singing altogether.
When Reid's wife died, he left Oklahoma and returned to New
Jersey, where one night he attended a concert by the Fisk Jubilee Singers--all
"plantation songs." When it was over, the Fisk choirmaster told the
audience where they'd be singing over the weekend, then noted that what the
choir had offered that night were all the songs they knew. If people decided to
attend another concert, they shouldn't be sad to hear the same songs. That’s
all they had, he said.
Alexander Reid sauntered up later and
told the singers he knew songs as beautiful as anything he’d heard. From memory,
he taught them a few melodies from Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva, including
pieces called "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Steal Away,” and
more.
You’ve heard them maybe?
For decades, ethnographers have
insisted that "Negro spirituals" were less "spiritual" than
they were lightly disguised, heartfelt slave dreams of freedom.
I'd like to think those ethnologists are
right, that "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" may be as much a wish for freedom
as it is for heaven's glory. Whatever import may be in those call-and-response
lyrics--"comin' forth to carry me home"—the history records that the
Fisk Jubilee Singers began including Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva's blessed melodies
in their concerts, including the concert they gave later in England for Queen
Victoria.
From an evening hymn on the porch of
two beloved Choctaw ex-slaves in Indian Territory, all the way across the pond to
the royals at Buckingham Palace, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" became
one of the most beloved melodies in world musical literature.
I don't know that we can tell that
story often enough or hear those hymns, all about the triumph of hope on each
of our own Trails of Tears.
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