by Studs Terkel
When I was running the TB program in San Francisco we were taking care of refugees from Vietnam. TB is an enormous problem overseas. They carried with them a lot of TB into the city. We had extraordinary success in containing a TB epidemic in San Francisco. At the time, there was a refugee crisis in Somalia. My ex-wife went over there, and other friends of mine went. This was to do basic health care in emergency circumstances. They came back and said. “There’s an awful TB problem. Can you go over and just take a look at it?” Actually, I went over five or six times over two or three years. I’d go back every three to six months. I was having very good luck and success. We were setting up a program in one camp, and then we expanded it to three and then to ten and then to forty. Everything we did kind of worked. I was commuting between San Francisco and Mogadishu. In East Africa, there were about fifty thousand TB cases. Only about four thousand of those were being cared for properly. I got only five hundred people over here in San Francisco. We’ve done the job. “What am I going home for?” So I made the decision to move to Somalia. I stayed there three years: 1985, ’86, and ’87.
It seemed to be needed. It seemed like it had to be done. There was no one else doing it. Right now, I don’t have a lot of money. [Laughs] So I’ve occasionally had my regrets. My mom says, “You would have been bored being a doctor.” There’s plenty of doctors here. These doctors are competing with each other for patients. So I want to be part of that? Over there there’s not enough doctors. No one’s doing it. When you know that, what do you do?
I’m not exactly sure at this point why I went to medical school. I wanted to figure out how the body worked—I was particularly interested in how the brain worked. So it was really a pursuit of knowledge. I was actually majoring in physiology, and people were saying: “Get the MD, that’s where the better teachers and the better training is.” I also did have some visions of discovering something or being some kind of a hero in cancer or in something. But, frankly, I hit the wall on doing research because it was too tedious. When I went to Mogadishu, I went without a salary. I had zero. I scrambled to get someone to pay for a month, someone to pay for three months, and finally, after about a year, I got someone to give me a two-year contract. But that isn’t what we were there for. We had enough money. I was in my late twenties and early thirties—who cares? Now, I just hit fifty.
What we cry about is our helplessness. When there is death, death, death, death, death, and we can’t get to enough of them or even know that what we’re doing is the right thing, what frightens us so much is our helplessness. You have to realize the extent to which death is prevalent in Africa. There’s always somebody dying. We had a helper in the house. She herself was a refugee. It was the two of us, my ex-wife and myself, in this one place in Mogadishu. She helped with preparing food and keeping the house clean, for the smallest amount of money, which to her was the largest amount of money. She was asking us for our car almost every day for a funeral. There was always some friend or some family member dying. I attended a lot of funerals. What a funeral was like five or ten years ago and what it’s like now is different. There’s three to five times as many funerals now as there were five or ten years ago—because of AIDS. In most African countries, funeral ceremonies would last from three days to a week: all the meals that are involved and the family getting together . . . Now they’re down to a few hours. Because people can’t leave work so continuously. Some of them actually are celebrations, with drinking and dancing. If it’s an Islamic funeral, they are more solemn, with a tremendous amount of prayer. Somalia is Islamic. Much of Africa south of the Sahara is a mix of Christian and what they are themselves.
TB in Africa has increased almost every year over the last ten or twelve years. We don’t see the circumstance of Africa. We see a little bit of Europe, we see a little bit of Asia, but we really don’t see the circumstance of Africa. In Africa, most people don’t have water in their homes, don’t have enough food. Most people don’t have jobs. The climate is almost unbearable, the heat . . . And now we have this AIDS epidemic.
I left Somalia in 1987 and joined the World Health Organization. I stayed with them until 1994. They assigned me to the AIDS epidemic in Africa. I worked in Uganda and the twelve or thirteen countries around it, the epicenter. We learned pretty soon that between fifteen and twenty-five percent of the population in the cities were already infected with AIDS. My job was to work with the governments to develop plans and to raise money for public education campaigns, for outreach programs, for condoms, and for treatment services, basically. I’d go to each of these countries two to five times a year. I was always on the road. We’d talk to the U.S. government, Britain, England, Switzerland, Sweden, the World Bank, the European Community. We’d recruit people from the international environment to staff that program. And then we’d push and push and push and push. In Uganda we succeeded in part: the epidemic has been reversed there. This was the only country really in Africa where it’s been reversed. I put twenty-five percent of my time into that place, and so did my boss. The other countries never got the money, they never got the support. So Uganda remains to this day the example of how to handle it.
In the other countries, the situation gets worse and worse and worse. You see a lot of skinny people on the street. Absolutely everybody knows someone who is sick with AIDS at the moment. There are funerals constantly, the funeral bells are constantly heard. Most of these small villages have run out of nails for caskets—you can’t get nails. I remember being on a fishing boat on Lake Victoria, going from one part of Tanzania to another. This is a boat that, by convention, will carry some food and mats and things like this. The whole hull, the whole underneath, was just full of caskets. There are villages that are deserted. There’s a place I visited in northwest Tanzania where there’s hardly a person living. The few that remain have fled the place in fear of spirits. It requires only money and commitment to reverse it even at this point. Everybody, World Health and the UN, totally understands that this is still a reversible circumstance. But we’re not kicking in. It basically requires about four or five things, depending on the size of the country—about fifteen to thirty million a year. That’s all. Fifteen to thirty million a year per country. It’s nothing! We’re spending fourteen billion on roads in Illinois. If it were solidly put into prevention, it would cause about a fifty or sixty percent reversal. This kind of money goes into programs for young people, public education materials, posters and leaflets and billboards and training and workshops. And condoms. That’s basically all that’s required.
Now there’s another thing happening. So many people have the disease itself that there’s an overwhelming call for the medicines. The expense on the treatment side is very, very large, ’cause now actually we have the medicines to keep anyone alive. In this country it costs about twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year, per person, for the medicines. We couldn’t get two hundred dollars a year for TB for Africa. Sometimes we couldn’t even get fifty cents for penicillin! It’s probably the biggest ethical dilemma on the planet today: the fact that we have medicines that will keep people alive in the worst epidemic ever in history. We have the medicines and we have the prevention modalities and we’re not doing it.
The drug companies are mostly here, and the money is by far mostly here. When I was there, half to three-quarters of the hospital beds were all AIDS and TB. I see a hospital room—beds without mattresses. Picture a room of, say, thirty or forty frames of beds, springs, but no mattresses, OK? Some patients two in a bed. About another twelve or fifteen people on the floor, OK? No medicines available, OK? And no food in the hospital either. Some family members bringing food in. That’s what you got. That’s the rule.
Something comes to mind that I wasn’t thinking of when I came here: death is our teacher. It is the ultimate teacher of what we’re not doing in helping each other. If there are deaths happening that we can do something about and we’re not doing it . . . What could be more in your face as to how we have not grown up?
In the West, we are the experts at the outer world. In the East, they are the experts on the inner world. We have looked at the telescope and the microscope as far as you can, and we’re still trying to go further. In the East, they really have been, for four thousand or more years, looking in. They’re looking at the way their mind works and looking at all kinds of methods for accessing people who have died. In Tibet, one of their principal teachings is to reflect on death. In the West, no one has ever told me, “Think about death.” My grandmother died—don’t think about it. They say: “Think about it. Face it.” When we touch that loneliness or fear, we immediately go to the television or the telephone or the refrigerator. We don’t want to touch that fear. They say, “Touch that fear, go all the way into that fear.” When you go past that fear, that’s when you start to see something. But as soon as we feel fear, or sadness, “Oh, come on, let’s go for a walk.” I read and study Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism, and science—physics in particular. All this stuff about particles, and waves, and energy, and matter, and the interchangeability of energy and matter. Science and Buddhism come close together, actually.
I was brought up Jewish, but my parents didn’t practice any Judaism. I’m culturally Jewish. But I pretty much learned that the answers were going to be in science. I married a Christian woman, I moved to a Muslim country, studied Buddhism. I think that all of these have something to offer. I don’t like labels, because there’s something wonderful in every one of them, and they all kind of fall short, too. I’m open to them all. You need to experience something for yourself. There’s something wrong with the word “belief” with a capital B. Whenever you really say you have a belief about something, you have stopped your investigation. We have to be open to death. We won’t be able to run away from it, will we? I want to avoid it as long as I can. I think I’m doing something with my own mind and maybe for others too, so let’s keep the physical body together. No smoking, good exercise, good diet, do things to put death away for a while. But we should, when it comes, be prepared to go with it. I’m very, very compelled by Jesus and by Jesus’ life, as I am by science and by Buddhism and Judaism. I really am in them all.
Part IV
VISSI D’ARTE
Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore . . .
I have lived for art and for love.
. . . and offered my song to the stars
and to Heaven, and made
them more beautiful.
—from Puccini’s Tosca
Vissi d’Arte
William Warfield
A baritone celebrated for his work on the musical stage as well as his concert singing. He has appeared in a number of European countries as well as throughout the United States in Porgy and Bess, with Leontyne Price. He is perhaps best known as the favorite interpreter of Aaron Copland’s adaptations of American folk songs. Eighty years old, he teaches at the Northwestern University School of Music. “I still sing, but my main function is passing on to youngsters the results of what I have learned. Our profession is much like the laying on of hands, offering inspiration to the young to go further than you’ve gone.”
I WAS FIRST AWARE of death as a little kid, because we had a brother who was two and a half years old—he got pneumonia and died. Death, to me, was that ogre—although I was raised in the Church, where we were taught that our souls live and go on after death.
The first time I actually came to grips with death, the fact that I’m not going to be here long, was in my sixties. I had some prostate troubles and had to go to the doctor and he says, “We’re going to have to do a biopsy because this sounds like it could be cancer.” That word was the scariest word I’ve ever heard. I had all of this on my mind with a concert coming up. We went in to practice for this concert, my accompanist Robert Ray and myself. There was one spiritual called “My Good Lord Done Been Here”: “bless my soul and gone away.” I was rehearsing that and I got to the second verse which is [sings]:
When I get up in Heaven
And my work is done
I’m gonna sit down beside Sister Mary
I’m gonna chatter with her darlin’ son
Oh, my good Lord done been here . . .
I said, “Oh”—just like that. And my accompanist said, “What’s the matter?” I said, “Nothing, nothing . . .” And it just dawned on me that there is something after this and I need not fear it. And I’ve never feared death since and that was twenty years ago. [Laughs] That song. It’s just something hit me and I said, “Oh.” That’s affirmation. We were always taught that, but that was the first time I felt it for myself: This is only a journey to a place that’s much, much better. I never feared death since. It was book knowledge before then, but that was a spiritual experience for me, that moment.
I have not actually figured out in my mind exactly how Heaven and Hell exist, and how they will manifest themselves after death. Whenever I reach a perplexity about that, I just go back to the Scripture in the Bible. I have sung this in the last series of songs of Brahms. The first one goes,
Who knows whether our souls are different from the souls of animals
We see here only in part
But in that day, we will understand why these things are happening. . . . Here is love, charity, and the greatest of these is love.
From The Four Serious Songs of Brahms. The text in the last of the four is: “We see only through a mirror darkly. But in that day we will see clearly and understand all things.”
My father was a sharecropper in Arkansas. He had a calling to the ministry, and he thought he had to educate himself to be a proper preacher. So he came North and brought his family. I was raised in Rochester, New York. All of the time, it was in me that he figured the ministry was my calling. Somewhere along the line, I transferred that feeling toward my art. I said I was called to do this: If I don’t do this, I’m going to end up in the belly of a whale and be thrown somewhere, like Jonah. Every time I’ve reached any kind of a catharsis it’s always, “Well, my goodness, it’s not just me. I’m getting this from somewhere else, from a higher source than I am. I was talking to Leontyne about this. She said to me, “Bill, we are the closest to God when we are practicing our profession.” And I said, “Oh, baby, you are so right!”
My art and my religion, they’re all the same.
My father was a Baptist, he raised us kids, pastored a church in Rochester, went to school at night and ended up educating himself. He had a job with the sanitation department, and they started very early—five o’clock in the morning. Then he’d come home, and mother would have his breakfast. We’d all eat breakfast by the time he’d get back home, which was several hours later. Then he would take a nap in the afternoon and he would go to school at night. I remember my father saying, “Amas, amat . . .” I didn’t know what it was. Sure enough, later on in high school, I was saying, “I love, you love, he loves. . . .” That’s what Dad was doing, conjugating “I love” in Latin. It was just always there in the home.
I was definitely a church kid. My first learning of music came from the lady in the church who was our organist. I came to her and said, “Mrs. Edwards, I want to learn piano.” She said, “Oh, child, you don’t want to do that. Why don’t you just go on and play?” But I was absolutely adamant. I came to Mrs. Edwards and I said, “I make a dollar a week because I polish my math teacher’s car. I’ll give you that if you’ll teach me.” Years later, when I went back and my life had been successful, and I’d made a movie, Mrs. Edwards was sitting there rocking. She said, “I’m so proud of you!” She said, “When you came to me that day and offered me all the money that you were making just to study piano, I was so touched I had tears and I had to walk away from you because I was going to cry.” [On the verge of tears] She said, “I figured, I’ve gotta teach this boy.”
My introduction to classical music was through Handel’s Messiah. As a youngster, we were not allowed at all to bring a jazz record in our house. Jazz was considered the Devil’s work: You don’t
do any jazz in this house. Somebody asked me to come and play piano with a little group there, and my father said, “No son of mine is gonna be playing in a nightclub.” Let me tell you the ironic thing about that. When I got into the army I started learning how to play jazz because our post had a little combo. I was playing piano. When I got out of the army I played jazz for a time. When I didn’t have anything in New York, I would do nightclub work. I was in a club in Toronto. I was invited to the table of this gentleman and his girl, and he was telling me, “My girl says that you’ve obviously been trained for something other than this.” I told him that I had wanted to get started in the classical field, but you had to make a debut in New York if you wanted to get anywhere. And he said, “Have your manager draw up a budget. I think I want to sponsor you in that.” Isn’t it ironic that the very place my father wouldn’t allow me to go was where someone saw me, heard me, and sponsored me, and put me on my way on my classical career. Isn’t that wild? [Laughs]
I’m in a family in which religion dealt with grief. It wasn’t grief in the sense of having lost somebody, but that they’d gone to this place and you were going to be rejoined with them later on. They weren’t gone permanently. There’s something after this. I’ll be there, OK, I’m going to meet you over on the other side. So I didn’t have grief as such. It was just temporarily missing the person and sorry that they were not here anymore—but not grief in the sense that I see people just grieve over someone they’ll never see again. I want to just put my arms around them and say something from the sermons of J. Rosamund Johnson’s “Go Down Death.” The poem ends, “Don’t weep for her / She’s not dead, she’s just in the arms of Jesus.” That was the way I was raised. That is the solace of religion. I find right now, for instance, if something is bothering me, I just go and sit at the piano and start playing and singing and at a certain point I get up and I’m all right. Art is my solace as well as belief: the one is tied in with the other.
