Summertime has arrived. From now until Labor Day, we plow through the worst of our midday heat and the best of our mornings and evenings. Everything grows abundantly with water and shrivels when water is withdrawn, including our children. Our old people. Our souls.
I don’t hear that word without
turning on the record player in my mind and hearing Bess sing “Summertime,
when the living is easy.” I’ve
sung it myself a few times, mostly over the kitchen sink but once or twice
before an audience. I always find myself
reaching for the meaning between the notes.
People not familiar with the musical
“Porgy and Bess,” especially people right here in California’s sweltering
breadbasket, might snort and say “Easy? Yeah, if you’re not a farmworker.” But Bess is black, singing to an orphaned black
infant cradled in her barren arms. The
chorus behind her and the community they represent, too, are black, poor, and
obtain every scrap of food they eat by the labor of their hands. They live tightly conscripted lives under
white rule. Nothing is easy. Summertime is just easier: “Catfish
are jumping, and the cotton is high….”
Then Bess croons some fabrications
to the baby, which puts the “easy living” idea in context. “Oh, your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good
lookin’,” she lies, comforting herself more than this tiny soul who has
yet to speak its first word. The truth
is, Bess’s soul is rising to the occasion of this unplanned motherhood,
expressing perhaps her first words of protective parental instinct. “So hush, little baby, don’t you cry.”
Then parental hope arrives. “One of these mornings,” she projects,
“you’re
gonna rise up singing. You’re gonna spread your wings, and take to the sky.” In one rendition I heard when I was growing
up, this prospect brings Bess not only hope, but also a kind of terror that we
hear in the singer’s voice. What mother
hasn’t freaked at the thought of her chicks fledging the nest? And when the world outside Bess’s community
is so incredibly hostile to people of her class and color, the natural fear is
tinged with terror.
These things come to mind, I think,
because summertime for so many people is tinged with terror. This summer could be worse than previous
ones, not just due to climate change, but because we’ve become short-tempered
with each other and politically hamstrung, and because some people in power
think the way to deal with fear is to increase it.
I’m glad I live here and not in New
York or New Orleans, Chicago or Cleveland.
Grateful, last weekend we took a joy ride up to Three Rivers at
sunset. As we zig-zagged up the western
slope of Rocky Hill, the Friant-Kern zig-zagged below, glimmering fluorescent
orange against the dark groves, reflecting the polluted horizon. This year, with its abundant water supply, summertime
living is easy – for some. Let us not
forget the others.
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Trudy
Wischemann is an unromantic Western writer who lives in Lindsay. You can send her your sunny thoughts c/o P.O.
Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a
comment there.
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