The Sound of Light: Bernice Johnson Reagon

 

They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
The strongest leaves of my tree

 

If light could make a sound, I am convinced that one of the sounds it would make would be like the music of Sweet Honey in The Rock, the all Black women a cappella singing group founded by Bernice Johnson Reagon.

That's because while light is an electromagnetic wave, sound is created by vibrations in the air. When there is as strong a force of Spiritual Light as Bernice Johnson Reagon, you know there ain't nothin' going to happen but that Light wave will vibrate. And, make the incredible sounds of harmony and justice and freedom that become Light for all the senses.

Bernice Johnson Reagon was born on October 4, 1942 in Dougherty County, southwest Georgia, the daughter of Beatrice and J.J. Johnson, a Baptist minister. Church and school were an integrated part of her life, with music heavily intertwined in both of those settings.

Dr. Reagon grew up in a church without a piano, so her early music was a cappella, and her first instruments were her hands and feet. When she spoke about her upbringing in this musical culture, she explained that even her early schooling was heavily involved with music, not just the church. She said that her teacher would lead the students outside to play games that entailed singing with their hands and feet, as well as their voices.

She once said, "Singing with my hands and feet and my whole body is the only way I can deal comfortably with creating music." No wonder she causes light waves to vibrate.

A precocious child, she started attending school at age 4 and by the time she was in 4th grade, she started tutoring the children in the 1st grade. At the age of 16, she was accepted at Albany College to study music. While there, she was very active in the NAACP and SNCC. She was expelled from Albany for her involvement in a protest and then briefly attended Spelman College.

Later, she returned to Spelman to complete her undergraduate degree in 1970. She received a Ford Foundation fellowship to do graduate study at Howard University, where she was awarded a PhD in 1975. In in 1989, she won a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.

Albany, Ga., would become an important center of the civil rights movement when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there in 1962, causing the media to descend on the town. Dr. Reagon, however, wasn't there to see it. "I was already in jail, so I missed most of that," she recalled, "But what they began to write about ... no matter what the article said, they talked about singing."

The singing that so fascinated the media were freedom songs — often revamped versions of spirituals familiar to anyone who'd grown up in African American churches. Dr. Reagon would later say that, in many cases, she simply replaced the word "Jesus" with "freedom," as in the rousing "Woke Up This Morning."

After Albany State kicked her out due to her arrest, the rising civil rights organizer co-founded The Freedom Singers, an a cappella group that was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Through music, the Freedom Singers chronicled SNCC's activities, including a movement leader's funeral ("They Laid Medgar Evers In His Grave") and a visit from a Kenyan dignitary brought in by the State Department to demonstrate America's strides toward racial integration ("Oginga Odinga").

When they were being arrested and loaded into the paddy wagons, when they were in jail, when they were having mass meetings in African American churches to organize the next protest, civil rights activists sang all of the songs of their faith in all of those settings.

Dr. Reagon said, "When you're in the civil rights movement, that's the first time you establish yourself in a relationship that's pretty close to the same relationship that used to get the Christians thrown in the lion's den. And so, for the first time, those old songs you understand in a way that nobody could ever teach you."

Gospel music, the music of the Freedom Singers, the music of the Civil Rights Movement, became the sound of The Light of Christ.

Sweet Honey in the Rock

In 1963, Bernice Johnson and Cordell Reagon, a co-founder of The Freedom Singers, married. A year later, Reagon left the Freedom Singers to give birth to their first child, Toshi Reagon. The couple had one more child together in 1965, Kwan Tauna Reagon. Bernice Johnson Reagon and Cordell Reagon then split in 1967. Toshi has continued her mother's legacy. Kwan is a successful chef.

I first heard Sweet Honey in The Rock in the early 80s when they performed at a UCC Church in Portland, ME where we were living at the time. I knew nothing about them but the excitement of some of our friends convinced us that we really needed to cough up the $10 per ticket and go.

That experience changed something in me. Yes, it was the music but it was more how the music changed the feeling in the room. I know it's overused and will sound trite, but it really was electric. I knew that the sound and the harmonies that came from their voices arose from another place - an ancient place - a place which Audre Lorde described as " our deepest and nonrational knowledge."

Lorde named that place "the erotic," which, she said, "is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves."

Later, after I read Dr. Lorde's work, I came to know that Lord's understanding of the erotic is exactly the place from which the sounds of Sweet Honey in The Rock arose, and transported us all in the time and place to be back with the ancestors as well as in the midst of the chaos of our strongest feelings about gender and race, age and class. 

I was transformed by the Light of their Sound. I don't think I've ever been the same.

In 2003, upon receiving the prestigious Heinz Award, Dr. Reagon spoke in her acceptance speech of the decision she and her long-time partner, Adisa Douglas, made that their "different and related work and struggle would move better were we joined in life partnership--and so it has been--joined and better." The two women remained together as life partners up until Dr. Reagon's death.

Bernice Johnson Reagon died in Washington, D.C. on July 16, 2024, at the age of 81.

In her song, "They Are Falling All Around Me," Dr. Reagon sings

Death it comes and rests so heavy
Death it comes and rests so heavy
Death comes and rests so heavy
Your face I’ll never see no more

But you’re not really going to leave me
You’re not really going to leave me
You’re not really going to leave me

It is your path I walk
It is your song I sing
It is your load I take on
It is your air that I breathe
It’s the record you set
That makes me go on
It’s your strength that helps me stand
You’re not really
You’re not really going to leave me

And I have tried to sing my song right
I have tried to sing my song right
I will try to sing my song right
Be sure to let me hear from you.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.