In a Back Room

In the dimly lit back room of my great grandmother’s two-bedroom house on 4153 West Bayou Street, which stood at the end of the cul-de-sac that led to Ms. Knight’s pass, in the room that I can’t quite remember whether or not my great great grandmother, Minnie Flowers, died or where I was born, stood an old stereo console with cabinets full of treasures.

MyMy, the woman my mother called mama, and her husband, Russell, had a collection of 45s, which suggested a worldliness that I could not fathom as a ten-year-old. Imagining them in clubs, drinking brown liquor, dancing and enjoying music, good company and each other never came to mind. They were my great grandparents. MyMy didn’t like eating meals with her teeth in. Russell enjoyed his Camel cigarettes and Old Milwaukee beer while sitting in his weathered recliner, next to the love of his life’s Lazy Boy, watching NWA wrestling with Gordon Solie.

For me, the soft flesh that dangled from my great grandmother’s arms as she cooked and the slow drive down Main Street with my great grandfather to the Chevron station in the beige Chevrolet truck he drove with two feet (a holdover from driving a jeep in the war, he told us) set them apart. They were old and precious. Love aged and cured.

I never imagined them as young folk cutting up a rug. But the neatly stacked treasures of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter, alongside blues and other R&B records revealed another story. Stories lost in the silences I wish I could hear.

In my tenth year or somewhere around there, I found myself in that back room. I went treasure hunting and discovered Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” I was somewhat of a strange child, even if people saw me as ordinary, and that strangeness, at least to me, felt more like being out of place and time: that some thing or something more called me. I didn’t know what it all meant; I didn’t have a language to describe it or my sadness. But I felt both deeply – in the marrow of the bone.

I escaped the laughter in the kitchen and gathered myself in front of the old stereo console and played the 45 record. When I heard the lush assemblage of strings and French horn that open the song, and then Sam Cooke’s lyrics – “I was born by the river. In a little tent. And, oh, just like the river I have been running ever since” – I was transfixed. It was a moment, as I remember it now, that opened up a world for me. My imagination soared and, somehow, I left the small house on West Bayou Street and the back room with its hint of Old Spice and moth balls and fell into a sensibility, where hope and despair danced, that I have never lost.

I had no idea about the context of the song, of why Sam Cooke had written it, and only vague ideas of the movement that formed its backdrop or of the Mississippi that shaped his sound. He was from Clarksdale. I was from the water. A difference between cotton fields and the Sunflower River in the Mississippi Delta and the oyster beds and white trout on the Gulf Coast. The difference between Magnolia trees baked in the Delta sun and those salted by the breeze off the Gulf of Mexico. All I knew was that the song spoke to my sadness and gave me flight.

It's been too hard living
But I am afraid to die
‘Cause I don’t know what’s up there
Beyond the sky

It’s been a long,
Long time coming, but I
Know a change is gonna come.
Oh, yes it will

Whatever happened that night, an incantation or Benediction, I’ve never lost the song. I memorized the lyrics as I grabbed the needle and started to play the record over and over again. I tried to explain what I felt to my brother. His eyes puzzled. I remember or, perhaps, misremember that I repeated the words to myself as we drove home. “A Change is Gonna Come.” A mantra for me and for the people who made me possible.

I never thought to ask my great grandparents questions about their lives. Some details fell haphazardly in my lap like the story of how MyMy bought the kitchen stove and refrigerator with dimes she saved from working in white folks’ kitchens. Or, how Russell helped a poor white family struggling to eat, and that one of the children grew up to be my Dixie Youth baseball coach. But not much else. Silence shrouds.

I wish I could ask them so much, especially questions about those records, about their obvious love for music, and about their love for each other. Something beautiful to hold on to amid the current storm.

In this political moment in which sadness and despair threaten to overwhelm, I reached for a memory in which my imagination was given life and power. The stereo console with its treasures in my great grandparents’ little house on West Bayou Street came to mind. In that back room, Sam Cooke’s powerful lyrics spoke to me when I was a child, and they speak to me now. Sadness transforms into flight. Imagination soars. And the treasures of an inheritance fortify me, perhaps us, for what lies ahead.

“A change gon’ come. Oh yes it will”