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Jessye Norman (1945): Als Ob Ich S
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180 Jessye Norman Als Ob Ich Säuseln Hörte Dante Micheaux The pull was instant—as if a tether that had always been there, convinced of independence, suddenly conceded to the demands of its source. I was in the eighth grade and had just returned from my first trip to Boston. Mom was waiting, late that Sunday night, with the rest of the parents at school for our charter bus to pull in. Enthused by this latest adventure, masking fatigue, I hopped into our Plymouth Horizon ready for the forty-fiveminute debriefing—the highlight of which was either the view from John Hancock Tower or chocolate-covered strawberries in Quincy Market. 181 When I arrived home, I dumped my bag, took off my shoes, and began (what was at age fourteen) my only devotion— television. I was becoming quite the fencer at that time, and my hand-eye coordination was stellar. Having all the buttons on the Magnavox remote memorized, I let the channels whiz by, knowing that if something caught my attention, I could recall the station and get back to it in a blink. And catch my attention she did. There, on PBS of all places (not appreciated for its late-night programming before I was savvy enough to watch the interviews given by Charlie Rose), was a black woman . . . at Avery Fisher Hall . . . singing! Though she had a snowy orchestra as backdrop and an even snowier audience, she appeared to be all by herself. Draped in what must have been a stolen Pollock canvas, it was her voice—all three Sirens rolled into a voluptuous brown goddess— that called to me. Recruited by the American Boychoir at age nine, veteran of the Trenton Children’s Chorus at age thirteen, and in the midst of an internal struggle between surging levels of testosterone and a platinum soprano voice, I knew a little about singing. I also knew that I was under the sound of a voice that would change me forever. I have always been lucky. I could have gone immediately to bed and, considering I had school the next morning, was not sure why Mom hadn’t forced me to do so. Readying for school meant Mom and I would be up at 5:30 a.m., so she would have enough time to unload me the aforementioned forty-five minutes away and get to her security post by 7 a.m. at the Justice Complex. I have never thought of my mother as a Super Friend (long replaced by ’80s ringers like Transformers, Gem and the Holograms, and, the cartoon to end all cartoons, ThunderCats) but she did actually have employment in a hall of justice and wore a uniform. And in this instance, because of her allowing me to stay up, I had stumbled upon an episode of Great Performances, when the PBS executives weren’t afraid of the effects opera had on ratings and scheduled back-to-back broadcasts. If I had been home at eight, I would surely have watched something else and would have been Jessye Norman [3.81.79.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:09 GMT) 182 heading to bed at ten. Scratch luck; I was destined to hear this voice. I recognized the German from a Bavarian children’s song I knew. The tone was velvet, the most plush, most comfortable thing in which I had ever been enveloped. I was surrounded, held-up and stolen from myself. To quote Toni Morrison, “how can I say what that was like? The taste, the taste unlid my eyes.” I was certain of two things: she was not Marian Anderson and I was not who I had been just a moment ago. At the end of her breathy lieder, she had made slaves of the audience—with me as its most intimate member, clapping so hard I thought my hands would shatter when Mom ran into the living room, wanting to know what the matter was. The matter was, and has been since, Jessye Norman. Jessye Nor man ...