Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch

the darker brother.
    They send me to eat in the kitchen
    When company comes,
    But I laugh,
    And eat well,
    And grow strong.
    Tomorrow,
    I’ll be at the table
    When company comes.
    Nobody’ll dare
    Say to me,
    â€œEat in the kitchen,”
    Then.
    Besides,
    They’ll see how beautiful I am
    And be ashamed—
    I, too, am America.
    And from Gwendolyn Bennett came “To a Dark Girl,” a battle cry of the spirit:
    I love you for your brownness
    And the rounded darkness of your breast.
    I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice
    And shadows where your wayward eye-lids rest.
    Something of old forgotten queens
    Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk,
    And something of your shackled slave
    Sobs in the rhythm of your talk.
    Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate,
    Keep all you have of queenliness,
    Forgetting that you once were slave,
    And let your full lips laugh at Fate!
    Ralph Ellison, who was born in 1914 and played a Conn trumpet in Oklahoma City’s Frederick Douglass High School Band under the direction of Mrs. Zelia N. Breaux, recalled his similar high school experience with awe. “Those Negroes who taught us were both idealistic and optimistic. Theirs was a social world of segregation, of course. I emphasize the word social because they had taken it upon themselves to make sure that we never became segregated in our minds . We were prepared as though we were cadets fated to go into battle, battle which we might lose as easily on the basis of poor preparation and lack of will as we might lose on the basis of bad luck.”
    Ellison recognized in his teachers an example of forward-looking education. “We must remember that the human mind is integrative by nature, that it makes use of everything that comes before it, judging some things as more important than others, but never failing to perceive. We know that culture is at least partially about the way in which we are taught to perceive, and those Negroes were determined to prepare us to understand as much about the world as we could. They understood perfectly the challenges of our democracy, and they were up to those challenges because they were not about to allow us to have segregated visions of human possibility. They had a mission, and their mission was to make sure that we never became provincial about our own race or about anything else.”
    In particular, Ellison recalled, the teachers at Frederick Douglass High School “made sure that we were accountable to the rich diversity of America and the world at large. We grew up hearing all kinds of music, Negroes singing the classics, Negroes singing spirituals, Negroes performing classical piano pieces in the Negro churches, and so on. We did European folk dances, and we observed jazz musicians broadening the identities of the instruments they were playing.” Everything was open to adaptation. “Hell, you could learn a lot from listening to the white cornet players in the circus bands, and Negroes did learn a lot from them. Our world may have been segregated, but our objectives were not. . . .
    â€œAnd that is one of the reasons why the music that came out of those territory bands had such a lilt,” Ellison recalled. “It brought together all of the idealism, the humor, the tragedy, the eroticism, and just about anything human that could fit into music. Those Negro musicians had so much to choose from, and they didn’t avoid sampling whatever they found worthwhile whenever and wherever they could.”
    It was in that atmosphere—of optimism and opportunity—that Rebecca Ruffin sat through the recitations, sat and listened as Charlie Parker performed with the band. Rebecca had seen Charlie at practice. “You could go and watch them in the auditorium,” she recalled. “So you know it had to be that some girls would sneak around and look at the boys with their instruments. Like other girls was with their young men, I was