Digging, Flapping, Churning, Soaring

my sister and i created wondrous shadow worlds for ourselves when we were girls. We were dancers on clouds and underground, or we had to lie still under floor planks with heavy boots plodding above us, or we were mean teachers in one-room schoolhouses with unruly children, or we were grandmothers being monstrously magical and impossibly old for no good reason. Quite often we were flying, free or in spaceships. No one could tell me I wasn't out there somewhere on another planet; Star Trek: The Next Generation just got canceled before Captain Jean-Luc Picard and them found me, which is just as well because, to this day, I don't want anybody to know exactly where I am. We sat on the very top branches of the two pine trees Daddy planted for us when we were born, watching what Anansi the Spider and Bruh Fox was up to. And we almost always had swords, even in that classroom. We were ghosts and dead and deadly.

Outside of the goings on of these worlds, I recall being periodically preoccupied as a girl with where Ms. Mavis Staples and the Staple Singers were taking us. Mama sang all the songs on the oldies station, whether the Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin,'" or Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair," or anything Temptations, with equal vigor, like she hadn't heard each song in many years, when in reality they were in such regular rotation that my sister and I would be going about our everyday lives and suddenly burst out, "Parsley, saaaage, rosemary, and thyme!" Nonetheless, Mama was transported somewhere far away by these songs and so were we, as much as we allowed them a spot on the soundtracks to our sword fights and space travels and grandmother tales. But when the opening bass beat, the all aboard, the altar call, of the Staple

Jeffrey Gibson, another side inside of you, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, glass beads, and artificial sinew inset into wood frame, 82 × 74 × 2.5 in. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Singers's "I'll Take You There" would come on, Mama's drama reached new registers. She would sharply shout, "Hey!," snapping us back to the present of our funky bodies in our usually hot car like a boomerang. It was startling, the shout and the special joy with which she sang and waved her hands, seeming to let Jesus take the wheel and making me nervous. It was also, I felt, a betrayal. Because I would look over at Mama, eyes closed sometimes while she was singing, fingers steady snapping, face so peaceful and joyous, and I just knew she knew the place and exactly how to get there. I wondered why in the hell she wouldn't just take us there instead of violin lessons.

Jeffrey Gibson, brighter days, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, glass beads, and artificial sinew inset into wood frame, 96.125 × 107.875 in. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

In church, they sang of the hereafter and heaven and yonder and elsewhere and going and going and going there. Where and when was there? The imagination, made manifest in their voices laying on top of one another, was the fuel, the ignition, the propulsion, for where we were trying to go. I came to know death, standing over bodies in caskets as choirs sang above, as freedom and peace and escape to this yonder. Heaven as a place and an ontology. I was still scared to die then, but I asked the spirits that visited me to show me. Over and over, they led me to the floors and the tops of woods, to the rivers, to the oceans, and to the electric space just above my head, which, in a good moment, led to the cosmos.

For my sister and me, the material world overlapped with our interior worlds, the infinite but fragile container for our imaginations, in ways we didn't and still don...