We Have Only Been Facing The Wrong Way

Brett Bernardini Civic Institution Builder | CEO & Executive Director | Arts, Cultural & Historic Organizations | Philanthropic Strategy at Campaign Scale

Poetry, eloquence, memory, the beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought, all these gifts which heaven shares out by chance turned to the advantage of democracy and, even when they belonged to the enemies of democracy, they still promoted its cause by highlighting the natural grandeur of man.

— Alexis de Tocqueville

In the spring of 1780, John Adams was in Paris, trying to keep the Revolution alive, and he wrote home to Abigail. He told her what he believed all of it was for. “I must study politics and war,” he wrote, “so that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy” — so that their children may have a right to study “painting, poetry, music.” Even in the face of an existential war, Adams understood what the arts were: not a decoration on a settled life, but the very point of the politics and the war.

Today, it feels impossible to escape the political vortex. It consumes our attention and demands it back the instant we glance away, forcing us to defend our rights, our communities, our very right to exist, around the clock and without rest. The noise is deafening, and somewhere inside it I have lost the long arc of history — and most of the energy a celebration would ask of me. And here is what unsettles me. The arts have always been how this country says what it cannot otherwise say — the truths it tries to bury, the people it tries to forget. Let that witness grow fierce enough and it gets loud, too loud to ignore. When the country buried its truths — the Dust Bowl poor, the Jim Crow South, the men in its prisons, the treaties it broke — its fiercest witnesses came up far from the centers and refused to be drowned out: Woody Guthrie, Nina Simone, Zora Neale Hurston, Johnny Cash, Maya Angelou, Gordon Parks. Voices that did not care what it cost them, that made the country listen to what it would rather not hear, that told us who we were when we could not say it for ourselves. Walt Whitman heard that chorus long before any of them: “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.” This year I put my ear to the room and strain for that sound — and I am not sure I can hear it. So where are they now — the heirs of Wheatley and Whitman, the voices defining America in this moment? The answer begins with disbelief.

In 1773, a young woman enslaved in Boston published a book of poems. Before the printer would set the type, eighteen of the most prominent men in Massachusetts signed their names to a document swearing the poems were really hers, because the colony could not accept that a stolen girl from Africa had written verse this fine. Phillis Wheatley became the first African American to publish a book of poetry — and the eighteen men who put their names to that document became, in the end, a footnote to her. The poems outlived the doubt. Abolitionists carried them for the next ninety years as evidence of a humanity this country had written its laws to deny.

It happened again, a century later. On a farm in Georgia, a formerly enslaved woman named Harriet Powers told the stories she carried in the only language fully her own — cotton, dye, needle, and the hours left after the field work was done. Reading and writing had been denied to all enslaved people, first by law and then by custom; the authority to narrate belonged to other people. So she narrated in cloth. Her two surviving quilts — scenes from scripture and from the folk memory of her people — hang today in the Smithsonian and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Denied a voice, she made one out of cloth and spoke the meaning of every panel aloud — and it is being heard still.

By the next century, that voice reached the nation’s capital. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused the contralto Marian Anderson the stage at Constitution Hall, in Washington, because she was Black. She sang instead, on Easter Sunday, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — in the open air, to seventy-five thousand people standing between the monument and the reflecting pool, and to millions more on the radio. She opened with “My country, ’tis of thee.” The society that took its name from the American Revolution is remembered now mostly for the American it turned away and the voice it tried to silence. That voice filled the Mall.

The song that became the anthem of the movement Anderson’s moment foreshadowed did not come from a city. It was shaped and taught at the Highlander Folk School, a small training center in the hills of rural Tennessee where labor organizers and then civil-rights organizers came to learn how to change a country. Out of an old hymn, the people there — Zilphia Horton, Pete Seeger, Guy Carawan among them — made “We Shall Overcome,” and the organizers who learned it in those Tennessee workshops carried it into Montgomery and Birmingham and Selma. The state shut the school down and auctioned off its land. The song it made could not be auctioned. It has become the sound this nation still marches to — music from the countryside, from people the cultural map of America does not trouble to mark.

A century after Harriet Powers, the country picked up the needle again. Beginning in 1987, as a plague moved through a population the government refused for years to name and would not mourn, friends and lovers and parents began sewing panels — each one three feet by six feet, the size of a grave — for the people they had lost to AIDS. They sewed in the names. The first time the panels were unfolded on the National Mall, that October, you could walk among them. In 1996 the entire Quilt was laid across the Mall — the last time it would ever fit. New panels are still being added. Today it holds more than fifty thousand of them, bearing the names of more than a hundred and ten thousand of the dead; laid end to end, it would run more than fifty miles — too vast, now, to be shown whole anywhere. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is widely called the largest work of community art in the world, and it is not finished — because the work of making the unseen visible is not finished. A formerly enslaved woman in Georgia stitched her stories into cloth because no one would let her write them down. A grieving country stitched its dead into cloth because no one would otherwise look. The same medium, a century apart, doing the same thing: making, with our hands, the living testimony of the voices this country tried to silence.

For two hundred and fifty years, this long lineage of makers has been a chorus that reminds us who we have been, what we believe, what we hold close. The arts have not been what we turned to when democracy was tested; they have been who we are — and what democracy draws on when it needs to remember itself. This is not a reserve a country calls up in emergencies; it is always present in the creative work, generation after generation — a continuity that is the vanguard of our democracy.

For the past fifty years, that continuity has had an infrastructure. In 1965, this country decided that the arts were a public good and built public architecture to carry them: a national endowment, an arts agency in every state, and beneath those, the working layer — the regranting councils and community theaters, the historical societies and libraries, the folk schools, festivals, granges, and school music rooms where the making actually happens.

I can testify to this, because this is where I have focused my working life. I founded a theater in a Connecticut mill city that conventional wisdom said could not sustain one, and led it for twenty-one years; it is still there. I have produced Shakespeare under a Nebraska sky, helped return a 1915 hall to a Hudson Valley farm town as a center for the arts, and serve today as board chair of an arts council whose work is moving resources to artists and organizations in counties most funders will never visit.

The risk in forgetting this is not a risk to the arts. It is a risk to a country that forgets where its strength has always come from.

So here is what I want to say to my country on its two hundred and fiftieth birthday. Who we are today is one moment in a long lineage of makers whose creativity keeps defining us. It was true when a stolen girl in Boston picked up a pen, true when a freedwoman in Georgia threaded a needle, true when a contralto sang into the open air because a door had been closed, true in the Tennessee hills and true on the National Mall beneath a hundred thousand stitched names. It is true this morning in every school music room, library, and grange hall in America. We have never been powerless. We have only been facing the wrong way. We kept our ears on the center — the loudest stages, the voices the whole country could hear at once — and waited for the sound to reach us there, the way it once did. But the center has only ever amplified what the country makes somewhere else. The makers themselves have always worked in the rooms no microphone finds. The silence we feared was never theirs. It was the sound of us listening in the wrong direction.

So I am going to turn around. Not toward the cities that already have our attention, but toward the country that doesn’t. I am going to rural America — the back roads and the mill towns, the granges and the school music rooms the map never troubles to mark. Not because the voice is only there; it is in the inner city and on the reservation and everywhere the country forgets to listen. But rural America is the slice that goes most completely unheard — heard within itself, but almost nowhere beyond — and it is the one I am called to.

The makers rising right now are out there — in a 1929 movie house a town refused to let go dark, in a grange hall on some county road, in a music room at the end of a school hallway — and I don’t yet know their names. So I am going to drive to where they are, walk into those rooms, and listen. The only way to learn their names is to go. That is how this country has always renewed itself: one voice at a time, found by someone who finally bothered to ask.

On a birthday like this one, I find myself wanting to look forward, not back — to ask who we could still become if we finally turned to face the voices that have held us all along and told us who we are, and lifted them into a chorus the country can finally hear. That is the work I am giving myself to now: to go and find the makers among us. I hear America singing still. I am going to learn the words.