I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric

Afterword

a F t e r w o r d Years ago, Elizabeth Boquet was the keynote speaker at a National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing held in Lawrence, Kansas. The conference organizers had arranged a band for the conference reception. During one of their sets, Beth stepped up to the microphone, and to the band’s accompaniment sang an extraordinarily beautiful rendition of Curtis Mayfield’s song, “People Get Ready.” People get ready, there’s a train a comin’ You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin’ Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord People get ready for the train to Jordan It’s picking up passengers from coast to coast Faith is the key, open the doors and board ‘em There’s hope for all among those loved the most. There ain’t no room for the hopeless sinner Who would hurt all mankind just to save his own Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner For there’s no hiding place against the Kingdom’s throne So people get ready, there’s a train a comin’ You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin’ Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord (Curtis Mayfield 1965)1 1. “People Get Ready” lyrics. Curtis Mayfield. LyricsMania, http://www.lyricsmania .com/people_get_ready_lyrics_curtis_mayfield.html. 186 I HOPE I JOIN THE BAND I have always loved this song. I love the slow gospel roll of Mayfield’s version sung with the Impressions. I love the heartachingly beautiful sound of Eva Cassidy’s version. And when Beth sang, I heard the song in yet another and new way. It was Beth who, in Noise from the Writing Center, sent me to the question of what it means to get ready as a writer, as a teacher, as a tutor. As she sang the song that night, I thought about Curtis Mayfield, about the world into and for which the song was written . I thought about Beth’s work and her attentiveness to “the ready of ready, set, go” (Geller et al., 2007, 22; italics in original). I thought about the antiracist leadership training in which I was immersed at the time. And Beth’s version of the song, offered so unexpectedly on that night, as I worried over my ability to articulate what I was learning about antiracism during my upcoming conference presentation, helped me connect my sense of what it means to get ready to my sense of the work that composes the epistemologies and rhetorics antiracist activism. I write these words and am tempted to explain away, to excuse, the fact that it took a white woman singing for me to hear—really hear—the ways in which Mayfield’s song speaks to the work to which I have attached so much importance as a woman, as a mother and daughter and sister, as a scholar, teacher, writer, and activist. I’ll point to the context, I think to myself, as I remember the night she sang. I happened to be thinking of all these things on that night and so it’s an accident. And so it may be at some level. But as Vershawn points out in the last letter we’ve shared with you, such accidents seem to occur with alarming regularity for those of us most closely attended by whiteliness as we think, speak, and write. Just to be clear: it wasn’t Beth singing the song that caused the problem. It was me; it was my openness to hearing in her voice the import of Mayfield’s words and that which I had been unwilling or unable to hear from a man of color, even someone I had professed to be a hero of mine, that caused that “accident.” Here is deep matter, and Vay is not alone in calling us to attend to it: those of us who are white and are committed to Afterword 187 the work of antiracism must know that we bear a tremendous responsibility to bear witness, to testify, and to join with peoples of color in the struggle for racial equality. But we must also know that to do such work does not free us from our own implicatedness either in the enactment or the reproduction...