The Faith & Politics Institute's Weekly Reflection

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For the Week of May 29, 2006

History, Race, and American Democracy
From Blood Done Sign My Name

The work we face is to transcend our history and move toward higher ground. To find that higher ground, we must recognize, as Dr. King tried to teach us, that we are "caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." Dr. King's vision, like the gospel and the blues, came from the South but belongs to the ages. The chorus of the song that gave this book its name traces the connection of blues realism to gospel transcendence. Ain't you glad, ain't you glad, that the blood done sign my name?

"The Blood Done Sign My Name," which I first heard sung as a blues song, started out as a slave spiritual. After the fall of the Confederacy, it emerged as a paradoxical blues lament, sung by Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) from a Mississippi prison cell and by his counterparts across the black South. In the 1930's, as black hopes for a new America began to rise, "The Blood Done Sign My Name" evolved into a gospel song. My favorite version of it, recorded in the 1940s by the Radio Four, echoes the sorrowful roots of the blues and elevates the transcendent spirit of gospel, but listen closely and you can hear Chuck Berry rocking down the line. My own hopes for this country have taken a similar trajectory, moving from deep blues through gospel reconciliation and on into the full-throttle ebullience of rock and roll. And yet my ascendant spirits, like the future of our country, depend upon an honest confrontation with our own history.

That history reveals the blood that has signed every one of our names. The sacrifice has already been made, in the bottoms of slave ships, in the portals of Ellis Island, in the tobacco fields of North Carolina and the sweatshops of New York City. The question remains whether we can transfigure our broken pasts into a future filled with common possibility.

And so we turn to history not to wallow in a fruitless nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise that is rooted in the living ingredients of our own lives. America owes a debt that no one can pay, and yet it probably remains what Lincoln called "the last, best hope" of human freedom. As the spirit of empire stalks the land, the bitter irony of that possibility should not be lost on anyone. While it remains possible that our acknowledged pats will rise up and put an end to us, I believe that we can lay these ghosts to rest someday, provided that we turn and face them. I continue to believe, with James Baldwin, that if we do not falter, we "may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world."

--Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004, pp. 318ff.

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