Deon, Abraham, Martin and John
Friday May 29, 2020
Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham,
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
This song has been running through my head all week. I’m walking through the factory floor, which is mostly deserted these days, looking for someone, and the song is in my head, playing in a kind of loop. I sing along, trying to capture that husky wistfulness that sticks in my mind from the last time I heard it, what, maybe 20 years ago?
He freed a lotta people, but it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he’s gone…
The song is in my head not because I can’t find my co-worker, but because of an earlier conversation, and a baby’s name. A friend of mine and I are bent over his smartphone, admiring the picture sent by his brother-in-law. A little cappuccino complexioned curly haired boy a few hours old grins up at the camera with the semi-vacant look all newborns seem to bring with them into this bewildering world.
Chuck and Ilace have managed to adopt after years in the process, and they are ecstatic. The joy is contagious and Brian is bragging the picture around and announcing the name: ‘Deon Duke’.
Deon…pronounced Dion…like the singer… our eyes connect, and the song fragment surfaces simultaneously ‘…hennybody here…’
The human brain is a strange and wayward thing, sometimes refusing to cough up a name even though a holographical face hovers in the mind’s eye, sometimes spontaneously leaping sideways through homonyms to suggest fantastical associations.
Much of what we call meaning is actually layers of cultural references and echoes of earlier languages and lives. As Mark Twain famously said, poetry is what gets lost in translation.
I was thinking about translation today as my wife and I participated in our ritual consumption of the Cuomo coronavirus briefing.
In the corner of the screen, in a small floating box, a disembodied sign language translator energetically retransmits Cuomo’s commentary for the deaf audience. He is theatrical and fluid, mimicking the interaction between the press and the governor with subtle shifts of position and facial expression, indicating emphasis and tone of voice with energetic arm motions.
Intrigued, my wife googles as I stare mesmerized at the screen. Apparently Arkady Belozovsky is transmitting his one-man signing act from a studio in Albany regardless of where the actual briefing takes place, and has never actually met Cuomo. He emigrated from the former Soviet Union as a teenager in 1990, and lived in Brooklyn before acquiring his masters degree in American sign at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
But get this. He’s deaf. His parents are deaf. His grandparents were deaf. His children are deaf. He is completely steeped in deaf culture, as well as having grown up as a Jew in communist Russia. Think of everything this man has had to absorb in order to reach the pinnacle of signing daily on a nationally televised event with millions of viewers.
There are two ‘hearing’ sign interpreters off-camera in the studio with him. He watches them, as well as the live video feed of Cuomo, and does an instantaneous simultaneous retranslation. Apparently he was selected not only because of his fluency, but because he signs with a Brooklyn accent which matches the rapidity and forcefulness of Cuomo’s delivery.
Incredible.
The mind boggles at the improbability of it all. How can communication actually be occurring across all those potential disconnects?
Come to think of it though, isn’t all interpersonal communication a miracle anyway? Between what I meant to say, what I actually said, what you thought I said, and what you thought I meant… these blogs being a prime example.
There are perfectly well-respected philosophers who believe that the self is the only existing reality, and that all other realities, including the external world and other persons have no independent existence. What I don’t understand is why they wrote books then. Who would read them?
Anyway. Too much isolation can induce a tendency toward solipsism and I digress.
This weekend is Whitsun. The celebration of a miracle that occurred 2000 years ago. A simple fisherman stood on the balcony of a house surrounded by a crowd of pilgrims from numerous countries who had converged on Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, and who now stood thousands deep in the street, silently awaiting an explanation for the mysterious sound like the blowing of a violent wind.
As Peter spoke, each of them could understand him in his own native language. They were cut to the heart and asked one another ‘Brothers what shall we do’? And as they repented and were baptized, the first church was born. An international and multicultural church born of a miracle, not so much of ‘speaking’ in tongues as of ‘understanding in tongues’.
The Dion song fragment has plagued me for days, and I pull it up on Spotify to refresh my memory. The husky wistfulness is as I remember it, the ambient Hammond organ and chimes draw me into a world that existed when I was a child of 2, a world introduced to me by my father. The reel-to-reel tapes of Civil Rights activists singing on the street, the spirituals, the blues, the documentary films, the old photographs.
That indefinable sense of hope and the stirring of a spirit that could unite black and white and overcome the age-old hurt and history. These things, and a sensitivity to injustice, an alignment with the poor and the oppressed were urged on me at an impressionable age.
Has anybody here seen my old friend John,
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He freed a lotta people, but it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he’s gone.
As I listen I’m struck by the simplicity of the song. Each verse is identical except for the substitution of a new name. Abraham, John, Martin.
On the surface, it is a roll call of leaders assassinated in the struggle to free the African American people, but there are deeper echoes. Abraham is an old-testament figure and the father of a people. John a first-century disciple and visionary, Martin Luther a 14th century reformer.
Then the bridge:
Didn’t you love the things they stood for?
Didn’t they try to find some good for you and me?
And we’ll be free,
Someday soon it’s gonna be one day.
100 years between Lincoln and Kennedy and King. Bobby walks up the hill to join them.
Someday soon it’s gonna be one day.
Abraham, Martin, and John.
Rodney King. Abner Louima. Amadou Diallo. Laquan McDonald. Freddie Gray. Antwon Rose. Ahmed Aubrey. Breonna Taylor.
George Floyd.
Oh Deon, what world is this that you have been born into?
Your black father and your white mother have given you to my friends to raise.
To honor your heritage, and to honor theirs.
And on Whitsun, my son will be baptized.
Someday soon it’s gonna be one day.
