Last week,
I posted a diary on a troubling experience, and promised a follow-up by Monday. Sorry to say work has kept me busy, but here it is.
To recap the earlier diary, last Thursday night my son Tyren, telling me about his day in first grade, happily and enthusiastically broke into this song:
Oh, Lordy, gonna pick a bale of cotton.
Oh, Lordy, gonna pick a bale a day.
Oh, Lordy, gonna pick a bale of cotton.
Oh, Lordy, gonna pick a bale a day.
Jump down, spin around, pick a bale of cotton.
Jump down, spin around, pick a bale a day.
Jump down, spin around, pick a bale of cotton.
Jump down, spin around, pick a bale a day.
All while putting his thumbs to his chest and turning them outward, which looked to me like he was hooking imaginary suspenders.
Why did this bother me? Well, here's my son:
More ...
In my previous diary, I asked for your advice on what to do. By the time I posted last Friday morning, I had done some research on the song (apparently I was one of the only Kossacks who didn't learn that song as a kid) and learned that it had been recorded by Leadbelly and Harry Belafonte, among others (including, oddly enough, ABBA). I couldn't pin down when it was written, but it was pretty clearly a slave song or sharecropper song. I also learned that it had been
pulled from a school concert in Michigan last November.
My girlfriend (who's Mexican-American) and I told Tyren we didn't particularly like that song because it made fun of black people. That may have been the wrong choice of words, but you must understand -- seeing him sing it, especially with that weird little dance -- made my Prince look like a Sambo.
Your response blew me away, in many ways. First of all, that diary made the rec list really quickly (only done that once before, on another diary back in May of last year) and got 492 comments. (Several of those comments were in a discussion of "Merry Christmas" and its appropriateness in certain contexts, which wasn't really as off-topic as it might seem.) Some of you wanted me to meet with the teacher and principal, with a lawyer in tow. Some called me racist for denying my son his black heritage. Some seemed to want to wipe the slate clean and see the song as just a fun little ditty. Some related experience of white relatives picking cotton back in the day and singing that song. But most of you wanted me to talk to the teacher in a rational fashion and go from there. Which is what I did Friday afternoon.
Before I get to the teacher's response, I want to clear a few things up.
I do not wish to expunge folk songs from education. I only wish they'd be taught in context. Take "This Land Is Your Land," for example. As a kid, I learned it as a patriotic, Pro-USA song. Ten years later, I learned that it was a subversive pro-labor song. I like it better that way, and I wish I would have learned it that way to begin with.
Same goes for Jimmy Crack Corn. At six years of age, "the master's gone away" didn't mean anything to me. But once I figured out that that song has a legacy of blood and tears, I felt guilty for thinking it was fun to sing. Imagine what I'd have felt if I were black. That's what I want to spare my son from.
I do not wish to pretend slavery didn't exist or for slave songs or minstrel-show songs to disappear. Quite the opposite. I think slavery is arguably the greatest evil ever perpetrated by humankind, and think it must must must be remembered. For that very reason I don't think slave songs or slave-era folk songs should be whitewashed and treated as fun little singy songs. That includes Jimmy Crack Corn, Shoo Fly, you name it. I think they should all be taught -- along with slave spirituals like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and God's Gonna Trouble the Waters -- in middle school, in the context of history.
Songs and other art forms do not exist only today. They carry with them the legacy of the time in which they came into being. To ignore that is silly and destructive.
Ultimately, I called the music teacher and introduced myself. I thanked her for teaching both of my kids the Wisconsin Badger fight songs (my mom LOVED that) and we had a good laugh over the kids singing "If You Want to be a Badger." I then asked about Bale of Cotton and where she got it. She said she got it from a book and then asked, "Why, is it offensive? Should I take it out?" I think that's when she put two and two together. I said that while I recognized I might be prone to be easily offended, I would rather it be taught in context. She said she strictly teaches music to kids this age, and that she was very sorry it was offensive. I mentioned the verse in the original that uses the n-word, and she was legitimately shocked. I asked about the dance, and she said it wasn't suspenders - it was "Me and my friends gonna pick a bale of cotton," with the kids pointing to themselves and then the friends on either side of them. She acknowledged that references to cotton should have made it obvious that it was a slave song, and apologized sincerely for not thinking about that. She also acknowledged that Tyren's the only black kid in the school, and that neither she nor the other teachers nor the other parents really think about these things much. She thanked me very much for calling her and promised to be more sensitive in the future.
So, a happy ending.
I told Tyren that he is more than welcome to sing that song, as long as he does so because he is proud to be black, proud that his people survived the backbreaking labor of the cotton era, proud of his legacy. But he's not allowed to do the dance. (I should mention that he is very wise for a seven-year-old about such things, as I've mentioned in a number of diaries before.)
I learned from the response to my diary that we in America still don't know what the hell to do with race. And then Crash won for Best Picture - don't get me started on that bullshit movie - which makes me think we aren't going to figure this race thing out for a long, long time.
Anyway. Thanks for sticking with me.
