Bernice Johnson Reagon
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The
founder of the well-known acappella group, “Sweet
Honey in the Rock,” tells of finding her voice,
in this Veterans of Hope interview.
At Albany
State College we began to protest things. They had arrested
students for trying to buy bus tickets from the “white”
window at the Trailways bus station, and we had marched
from the campus in sympathy with them.
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By this time the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)
people were there, and we had decided we were going to do
this march. There were no people at the meeting point, maybe
six or seven of us. It was decided that was too few, so we
went to classrooms and told people to come to the march.
Then we left the campus and headed out. Maybe there were
10 people, so I just kept my face ahead. I knew if I turned
around, I would just run back to the campus.
When we got to the bridge, we had to turn to walk across the
Flint River Bridge. Annette, who was walking with me, said,
“Bernice, look back.” I looked back and as far
as I could see, all the way back to the campus, there were
people. I tell you I never knew where they came from. I never
heard them coming. Those students left their classes and joined
that line. It was like, “good-goodness-it-can-happen!”
The power of finding that you can step out and sometimes you’ll
have company before you get there!
We circled the jail twice and went back to Union Baptist
Church, and Charlie Jones said, “Bernice, sing a song.”
I started “Over My Head” and the spiritual goes,
“Over my head/I see trouble in the air.” So I
flipped “trouble” into “freedom.”
It was the first time I had ever done that, especially with
a sacred song, a spiritual that came from slavery. I realized
that there was something about the march that had moved me
to a position where I could use the songs I had been taught.
... The singing in jail went on endlessly. Hours and hours.
There were times we talked, but we sang more than we did anything
else. And so the way in which we created community was through
singing. That was when we felt the union. When we talked,
then we could feel the diversity and the complexity of the
union. And then sometimes when we would talk, the talk would
go on for awhile and just because of the intensity of the
diversity, we’d have to start singing again.”
... The changing of my voice came after jail. In the first
mass meeting, they asked me to sing, I sang the same song,
Over My Head/I hear Freedom in the Air, but my voice was totally
different. It was bigger than I’d ever heard it before.
It had this ringing in it. It filled all the space of the
church. I thought that was because I had been to jail; it
was because I had stepped outside the safety zone.
Reference:
Harding,
Vincent and Rosemarie Freeney Harding. "Veterans of Hope:
Bernice Johnson Reagon." Yes! A Journal of Positive
Futures, no. 16 (Winter 2001), http://www.futurenet.org/16culture/reagon.htm
(accessed August 24, 2003).
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