Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  And they made this dance called a Buzzard Lope. [She acts it out.] You’d see the buzzard coming to its prey that’s dead. He dances around it, sees that it’s really dead, and he’d get it. Take away their bones, their body, but it’s all right with them since their soul would be safe. [Sings]

  You may beat and hang me

  Since my Jesus save me

  Throw me anywhere, Lord

  In that old field

  Don’t care how you treat me

  Since King Jesus meet me

  Don’t care how you do me

  Since King Jesus choose me

  Throw me anywhere, Lord

  In that old field.

  The buzzard could choose a horse or a mule, same thing. That hope will still be there.

  [Almeda “Granny” Riddle speaks.] I was a widow in ’26 with three children to support and had nothing but just my hands to support them with. There was that great tornado. My older son I had to keep four months in the hospital and I got splattered. My face you see is not mine: it’s plastic surgery, most of it. There was twelve places on my face that had to be grafted. After this, I went back to work on the farm. I bought a house and then brought the three children up, got them through school, being on the farm.

  I commenced singing when I was six years old. The first I remember was “The Blind Child’s Prayer.” Singing is part of me. If I’m unhappy, I sing. If I’m happy, I sing. If I’m in need of inspiration, I sing.

  Bessie and I are entirely different types of singers. I’d be glad if I could sing her style, but I can’t. I can only be myself. But, like Bessie, we oftimes sang songs about death. “Come Angel Band and Around Me Stand” . . . People lived within that song and they died by that. I remember in my childhood people asking me to sing it to them in their last hours. One time I had to do that. The lady got better, but she thought she was dying. So did the doctor. She asked me to come sing “Angel Band.” [Softly, in a treble, she sings a line or two.] “My last sun has set / My triumph has begun . . .”

  [Bessie Jones resumes.] That is like the song of the dying sinner. A person that’s dying without the Lord and it’s “O Death in the Morning” . . . He’s begging death to spare him over another year, begging death to have mercy. Also, it helps that person that is in sin to try to live up and do better. If he hears this song sometimes it helps them to change their ways. It’s a spiritual. The song of the living sinner, as I foremost told you, someone that’s dying out of Christ.

  I was standing at the bedside of a man that was going. I didn’t see the thing, but he seen it. I was to the side, and he see that somebody come in that door. I could tell he seen it come right around him. I wanted to touch him but the people wouldn’t let me touch him. I knew somebody seen something. Whatsoever it was, he died, and I was on the backside of the bed. Brother! I wanted to come out from there but I couldn’t. He was drawing his fists back, saying, “Unh-unh, unh-unh, unh, unh . . .” He was just drawing back and hitting at the thing with his fists, you know. Without saying a word, you could tell when it caught him. It got him and then just laid over that way. He went on and just died, he laid on the bed and died. Brother, I tell you he seen something, he really seen it. I could see his eyes . . . when it transferred, his eyes went right around with it in and out that way. Then the windowpane broke. [Sings]

  Yeah, Death walked up the sinner door

  Said, “O, now, Sinner, you gotta go”

  The sinner looked around and began to cry

  Said, “O, no, Death, I’m not ready to die

  Death, consider me age and do not take me at this stage”

  All my wealth is at your command

  If you just remove your cold, icy hand

  “O, Death, O, Death in the morning

  O, Death, spare me over for another year”

  He cried, “O Death, O, Death in the morning

  O, Death, please now spare me over for another year.”

  Death is a thing we never have seen but we can be acquainted with him. [Suddenly] I don’t know why I did that—to call it a he. We don’t know whether it’s a he or not or a she. [Laughs]

  I see it this way, whatever it is. The Lord speaks of a man this and a man that. He means she, too, ’cause you can’t spell “woman” without spelling “man.” So that’s why it must be a he. [Laughs]

  I was once praying, and I wanted to know something I had no business to know—wasn’t none of my business. I wanted to know how the Lord looked and what kind of man He was. I prayed so hard, I fasted a long time and I prayed so hard with this. I figured if you mean what you’re doing, He’ll give you satisfaction, some way, somehow. But He left me in a condition that I would never try it again.

  ’Cause you see, at one point, the Scripture said that his face was like polished brass. Anyhow, I see this great huge head, the biggest head I ever seen in my life. I was in this vision, and in his head it was just like the flowers in that chair. It had every head, every face, every kind of face that can be under Heaven. He just turned it slow and I seen millions of faces and it looked just like me. I looked every which way and everywhere you could see was a face of every kind of creature, every human being. I worried over that. I said, “Lord, I want to know what it means.” Then He said, “I’m the God of every nation.” And that set it with me. [Laughs] I ain’t tried that no more. But I advise anybody, if you want to know something, ask God. He’ll give you that satisfaction. Oh yeah, faces, no bodies, just heads, turning slowly. So that’s a mystery.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Almeda Riddle joins Bessie Jones in singing “Amazing Grace.” It was the most singular interpretation of the hymn I had ever heard, their styles and tempos being somewhat at variance. Yet, call it what you will, they wound up amazingly and gracefully as one. Unfortunately, the impromptu performance took place after the tape had run out. So it is not to be heard except through my memory of that moment.

  *When I once asked Edith Piaf if she really felt sad when she sang a sad song, she replied: “Oh no, I feel happy when I sing a sad song and feel bad when I sing a happy song. When you sing a song that is up, where can you go but down? But if you sing a song that is down, where can you go but up?”

  Rosalie Sorrels

  She is a traveling singer of folk ballads, though she has composed many of her recent songs.

  I don’t fear death. I’ve already had two really close encounters with it. I had a cerebral aneurysm in 1988 and I was in a coma for eight days. And I did not see any bright lights, nor did anyone come. [Laughs] It was a big black hole and I have no memory of it. And three years ago I had breast cancer—and it certainly would have killed me if I hadn’t been doing self-examination. Although I was getting a mammogram every year, it never showed up. But it became very aggressive at the point I found it. If I hadn’t discovered it, I would have died. I had to go through a very aggressive chemotherapy, and I lost all my hair and all my skin and my fingernails and everything. And it was massively unpleasant. But look at me. [Laughs] It made me more stubborn and it made me love life more.

  YOU KNOW, I’ve never thought of death as unfriendly. I was raised on a farm by a family where, when someone died, we all took turns sitting with them till they finished doing it. I always thought it was the last thing you do, and you would want to do it as well as you could. This was in Idaho. My dad was a road builder, an engineer for the state highway department, so he was gone a lot. My mother went with him, and they often left me with one set of grandparents or the other. My mother’s father had a self-sufficient farm, which we know is an oxymoron in Twin Falls, Idaho. [Laughs]

  My father’s mother was a photographer and a journalist. She wrote for the newspaper. She wrote the church news. My father’s father was an Episcopal missionary. He had a cabin, about thirty miles out of Boise that he bought. That came into our family before I was born, and I’m fixing to be sixty-eight. And he lived up there. It wasn’t a farm, it was a mountain dwelling. They grew their own food and hunted. They mostly lived
off the land. There was very little money in the family and no money to put anybody in a fancy sanitarium. You died at home.

  The Depression lasted a long time around Twin Falls. [Laughs] We had to do that ourselves. Which, I think, was a blessing. A lot of people are afraid of death ’cause they don’t live with it. It’s like birth: they put you in a hospital and try to make it so you don’t notice anything unpleasant about it. They take it away from you. I think they do better now, but for a long time death and birth were removed from the people. They think, well, we can’t let the kids see this because it’s hard and it will scare them. But they’re more scared if they never saw it. I know people who are fifty or sixty years old who’ve never sat with somebody who died. They’re scared to death of it.

  I remember when they died very well. We sat with each person. I was expected to spend time just the same as anybody else in the family. That’s when I got to know them the best. My mother’s mother, it took her a year to die. I sat with her a lot. She wanted to talk. She told me lots of things I didn’t know. My mother’s father died when I was eight. That’s the one I didn’t get to talk to—but I remember him better than almost anyone I ever met. He was the Irish atheist, and he was very forthright about it. No one told me he was sick. He seemed really strong. He died in his late sixties. I loved this man more than anyone I’ve ever met. Probably I’ve never met a man I thought was so powerful. He had fantastic eyes. We call them raven eyes; they could look in your soul. I was in the second grade, and he came into the room where I was in class. He just came and took ahold of my hand and looked at me, and he never said anything. And then he went out of the room. There was this tiny window in the door. And the last I ever saw of him was his eyes looking at me through the door. The next day they told me he was dead—and I didn’t even know that he was sick. I was really angry. I mean, I was angry for years. When I did that little book of my mother’s I showed you,* she comes to me with it and says, “Why did you say you didn’t know how my father died?” I said, “You never told me. You didn’t tell me he was sick. You didn’t tell me he was going to die.” She said, “No one ever told you?” I said, “Well, years later my father told me he died of a petrified pecker.” [Laughs] I said, “I took that to mean he didn’t get any loving and he died of a broken heart.” She gave a big harumph and she said, “Well, he died of prostate cancer—he died on the table.” He definitely knew he was dying. He never wanted to be buried, he wanted to be cremated. But my grandmother was a Methodist and she was very religious. They hired mourners. Oh, he would have been so mad. [Laughs]

  My father, Walter Pendleton Stringfellow—we called him Walt—was wonderful. He drank too much. He lost his job. I think he lost it because he supported Henry Wallace.* He worked for the state of Idaho. He was also a chemist. He was well-educated. I know that he always liked to drink, and he liked to fight. He was Irish. [Laughs] He began to drink too much when he wasn’t working. For a while he picked apples—he did this and that. My mother went to work when I was in junior high school. She ran a bookshop in Boise. She did that for twenty years. She made the money and he began to build the house which I now live in, which is a log cabin. He built it with his hands.

  [She shows me a photograph.] This is the house. He cut every log, he made all these bricks. My mother lived there after he died in 1971.

  I think that was the first time I was old enough to be involved in making the arrangements. It was 1971, so I was in my late thirties. He was only sixty-three and he looked strong and healthy all the time, but he’d been drinking a lot. He died of a bleeding ulcer. Partly because he was up there at the cabin and he didn’t get medical attention soon enough. It was a hard death. My brother and I went to see the mortician, who was unbelievably unctuous, or as my father would say, an oily son of a bitch. This was at a time when you were required to have a coffin, whether you meant to cremate the body or not. You had to buy a coffin—it was a law. We asked for a plain pine coffin. So this guy says, essentially, that we’re really cheap because we’re only going to have a plain pine coffin. And we said we were going to have him cremated. He said, “Well, how are you going to feel at the viewing?” And we said, “We’re not going to have a viewing—we know what he looks like!” [Laughs] And then he said, “Well, what florist do you want me to call?” And I said, “We’re going to bring pine boughs and dried weeds down from the cabin to the memorial service”—it was fall, and that’s what my father would have liked. And he said, “Oh my God . . . Well, what organist do you want me to get?” And I said, “Oh, I’m going to sing for my father.” And he said, “Well, you’ll need an organist to back you up.” And I said, “No, I’m going to sing unaccompanied”—and I did. I sang “Bright Morning Stars Are Shining.” [Sings]

  Oh, where are our dear fathers

  Oh, where are our dear fathers

  Oh, where are our dear fathers

  Days abreaking in my soul

  Some are down in the valley praying

  Some are down in the valley praying

  Some are down in the valley praying

  Days abreaking in my soul

  And some have gone to Heaven shouting

  Some have gone to Heaven shouting

  Some have gone to Heaven shouting

  Days abreaking in my soul.

  I thought I couldn’t do it because I would break down. But I figured out if I didn’t look anybody in the eye I could do it. I stood in the back of the church and sang so I couldn’t see anybody’s eyes. I got through three songs fine. Afterward I was a mess . . .

  Anyhow, this guy was distressed that he couldn’t talk me into an organist or flowers or anything. So finally he says, “Well, one of our services is that we write the obituary. Now tell me something about Walter.” I’m feeling very hostile toward him by then, so I said, “We called him Walt.” [Laughs] And he said, “What did he do for a living?” And I said, “He hadn’t worked in a long time.” And he said, “He was retired?” And I said, “Well, you can put it that way if you want.” And then he said, “What was his religious affiliation?” And I said, “He didn’t go to church much either.” And he said, “Well, did he belong to any fraternal organizations, anything?” And I said, “He used to sing for the Elks Glee Club.” So he says, “Oh, good, I’ll put that.” And then he says, “Now, tell me something else about Walter.” And I’m just looking at him thinking, my father could walk on his hands for two blocks. He could walk all the way to the top of the capitol steps and back down on his hands and never get off his hands. He could jump over a card table from a standing jump. He was a piece of work! [Laughs] And he was incredibly literate and he used to make up dirty lyrics that I loved and write them to me in letters. [Laughs] He wrote me letters all the time, beautiful letters.

  My mother’s father, the atheist, taught me all the soliloquies from Hamlet before I went to school. Before I went to grade school I knew: “Speak the speech trippingly on your tongue.” I knew: “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt.” He used to swear in Shakespearean language . . . at the horses! “The devil damn thee black thou cream-faced limb.” [Laughs]

  My mother wanted to die up there at the cabin. She’d been living there all alone since my father had died, which was 1971. I actually went back home in 1983, ’cause she got really sick and I thought she was going to die. I wanted to stay with her so she could be up there. But eventually she got too weak to stay and had to move into an apartment in town. It was one of those high-rises that the government supports for older people. She was on Social Security. She got better during that time and lived another eleven years. I just stayed at the cabin, and I’m going to stay there!

  When you come into the place there’s two great big pine trees that my father planted when they were just little babies. They’re huge. They’re two stories tall, and they’re like guards. He used to go down and stand between them in the morning and sing. I always thought he was like Orpheus and he made the morning happen, ’cause he would sing and then the sun w
ould rise into the canyon. He made the morning happen. So we put his ashes there around those trees.

  My son died in 1976. My son committed suicide, and we put his ashes there. My brother and I did this, each time. We didn’t have a lot of people around for that. We did that ourselves—we sang and we came back. And each time we had a memorial for all the friends up at the cabin. We didn’t let anybody bring cut flowers—we planted things each time, trees and flowers. My mother, when she died, we put her ashes up there too. Even my old dog, I put up there. I had him fourteen years. I had his ashes for a long time after he died. I wanted to put him out on the Day of the Dead. My old dog’s name was Dominick the Enforcer. I wanted him to be a watchdog. Now I got a new dog. His name is Lenny Bruce Peltier. I’ll be there. My brother. It’s where those trees are I was describing. Near where the old house used to be. And up into the spring, and in the creek. My mother wrote a poem about it. This was her instruction to us. We followed it faithfully and it’ll get read anytime anybody goes. My mother’s name was Nancy Ann Kelly Stringfellow.

  So this is what my mother said. It’s called “Scatter My Ashes.”

  Down by the sweet curve of the river

  Down where the twin pines reach to each other across the lane

  Their branches embracing

  Scatter my ashes

  Scatter the ashes of my old bones

  My tired bones

  Let them float free and weightless

  Calcium burned away

  Pain gone

  Dissolved in healing waters