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Saints
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
54 Saints When Leadbelly sings “Down in the Valley” the man in the song is so low, so forlorn, that he asks his lover to hear the wind blow, to hang her head over and hear the wind blow. He says if she doesn’t love him, “to love whom you please,” but to throw her arms ’round him, to give his heart ease. He says he loves her so much even the angels in heaven know. He says build him a castle forty feet high, so that he can see her as she goes by. And it’s only at the end when he asks for some mail, that he tells her to send it to the Birmingham jail. Maybe jails serve to make some men saints. Maybe saints are just lovers torn away from their love, who find themselves singing when the moon breaks restraints, climbs the forty-foot wall, heads for the angels above. I think how Martin Luther King did time in the valley, wrote letters of his own from the Birmingham jail, and that’s close enough to sainthood for me. And when people say the word “saint” is too free, that we use it too much, toss it around, liberally, I say there are saints in supermarkets, angels in malls. I say there are thousands of Peters and Pauls, that the DPW man who at two in the morning hauls dead deer off the roads, bleaches the blood, goes home to his wife, holds the grail of the world in his hands. I say we are all saints, consigned for life, locked up, doomed, each night to watch the searchlight moon come and go, each day to awake, hang our head over, hear the wind blow. ...