Real Life. Marsha Hunt

their church after a meeting was to see reservation fashion. All manner of hats were worn by men and women alike. The ladies’ were usually adorned with a bit of netting, maybe artificial flowers or fruit like grapes or cherries, ribbons of silk or velvet. Maybe the lot. Hat, shoes, bag and outfit did not have to coordinate. Bright colours predominated.

      When I was young, there was a Holy Roller church a few doors from our house. Holy Rollers are very devout and put great stock in their own translation of the Bible. The corner building wasn’t a church by design, just the biggest house on the block owned and lived in by our landlady, Mrs White. Mrs White was ebony, and on meeting days she always wore a white dress and white hat indicating that she was an elder of the church, which was almost like being a minister. She was probably in her late sixties and she usually seemed disgruntled. I couldn’t call her attractive. (‘Yurgly’ is how my grandmother described her. Edna could hardly sing out the word before she’d start rolling about laughing till the tears streamed from her eyes.) Mrs White had a scrunched-up face with not enough chin to offset her very big mouth. Her pea-sized eyes were hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses. She was heavy set and wore an upper and lower plate which she never had in her mouth if we dropped by unexpectedly to pay the rent.

      Nothing was more exciting than to sneak over to Elder White’s on a warm summer’s night when we suspected there would be a meeting; it was usually a Thursday. A couple of us would creep along her side yard and right up to the window of her big front room where with a bit of luck we’d find the curtain cracked. If we were too early, we’d only get to see the twenty or so chairs of mixed description lined up in rows and waiting for a warm behind. There was often a partial drum kit and a saxophone near the piano which was next to the pulpit, a raised stage at one corner of the room furthest from the window looking onto our street. The pulpit was probably the carpentry work of one of the members, which doesn’t imply that it was crude handiwork; every part of this place of worship was an extension of the members’ lives. Some of the chairs were the same ones you might be offered to sit on if you came to the elder’s for dinner.

      Giving a testimony or bearing witness in the Holy Roller church was often a highly emotional and impassioned revelation that required a lot of energy. The testifier usually got so caught up with the spirit and in the spirit that not only would his or her testimony be sparked by jumping and shouting, but others might ‘feel’ the spirit of the testimony too. To ‘jump and shout’ was a religious experience which found its way into the blues, then into rhythm and blues, before it transcended into rock and roll.

      ‘Feeling the spirit’ and ‘getting happy’ must be experiences second to none, because perfectly healthy people would faint and have to be carried out in the midst of these revelations. Peeking through the crack in the curtains, we longed to see the sweaty heights of this excitement, but I usually got called home before the long meetings reached these emotional crescendos.

      A good minister or preacher was not only versed in the Bible, he was able to stir his parishioners to a revelry that evoked their testimonies. ‘Preachin” was an art and a good preacher was a star in the community. While most religious services have some element of theatre about them, not many can claim the standard of performance exchanged between the minister and his congregation in some of the reservation churches. In addition, some of these churches boasted excellent choirs. A couple of the more renowned ones were broadcast on our local Sunday radio station. Long before I was considered old enough to plug the radio in, my brother and I used to sneak away to listen to these church services. We weren’t allowed to, because my mother thought we were making fun of them, but it was just a way to get a dose of good music.

      Music was a survival tonic, and free. To hear my grandmother singing ‘Wade In The Water’ was sometimes a sign that she was mad as hell about something, like being left alone to wash the dishes, but she made music just the same.

      You could sing your way out of the reservation just as you could box your way out. While this was not the ideal of Melangians like my family, who had aspirations to become the doctors and lawyers of the community, musical talent was a passport to another America. And the church was as good a place as any to get your musical experience. Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan, Donna Summer, the Pointer Sisters, Al Green and Billy Preston are among the singers who started in the church.

      The best reservation music to my ears was the a capella singing of groups of boys on the street who would practise popular songs of the day and do their own special renditions, which they’d decorate with rhythmic little jabs of harmony thrown in here and there. These were casual groups of boys who happened to be socializing on the same street corner or sitting on the same stoop at the same time. Singing was an escape and a pastime, like playing a game of baseball in the middle of the street, especially for teenage boys who were too big to play marbles but not yet old enough to spend their time drinking in a beer garden, which was the grandiose name for a bar.

      The boys who roamed the streets were usually pretty rough and rowdy, and while I thought it was divine to hear a few of them working out the harmonies for a song, they weren’t a very savoury-looking bunch. They wore brimmed hats or peaked caps that were cocked to one side or perched some weird way or even worn back to front. The effect was not too becoming, but they were trying to look tough.

      A lot of them had a special way of walking, too. I can’t think what this particular habit grew out of. Most of them looked as if they had incorporated a simplified dance step with a stride which required a certain amount of rhythm and effort to look smooth. This was called ‘bopping’. My grandmother hated it. She said they ‘looked like overgrown simpletons loping up and down the street dragging one leg like a cripple’.

      I didn’t mind the crazy way they walked, but I did mind them taunting my mother or aunt with catcalls and whistles when we had to pass a bunch of them occupying nearly the whole street corner. We couldn’t avoid them even by crossing over to the other side. If the catcalls and the whistles were only a temporary interruption to some song they were working out, it didn’t stop me loving their music when they went back to making it. I loved to hear them singing in an alley that had an echo.

      My family disapproved of the language that was spoken on the reservation, because it wasn’t what the rest of the nation considered good English. To be fair, it was a dialect and should have been treated with a certain respect as Europeans treat their dialects. Instead, a lot of stigma was attached to it. How the children who had only ever heard and spoken this reservation dialect coped when they got to school is beyond me. Fun with Dick and Jane, which was the first primer, should have had a translation and a glossary.

      Of all the versions of English I’ve learned to speak, Melangian is the most expressive and emotional. Maybe this is why it is the language of popular music today. Whether by Hall and Oates, the Stones or Michael McDonald, a lot of hits are written and recorded by non-Melangians in our dialect. It certainly says what it has to say and takes the most direct route. It has a flatness to its tone which is basically guttural and combines this with rhythm and a Southern American lilt.

      When Charles Dickens wrote his American travelogue in 1846 after an extensive trip around the States, he said that the English that he heard spoken by women in the Southern states showed the influence of the mammies that raised them. So the Southern accent was affected by Melangian and vice versa. We picked up English how and when we could, as it was never formally taught us.

      To hear it spoken, Melangian is like upper-class county English in that it’s full of diphthongs and open vowel sounds. Consonants at the end of words are often dropped, as in the Scots accent, and when they are sounded, they’re softened. This is probably why Melangian is so useful for modern singing. It lets the mouth hold open sounds for words like ‘don’t, ‘last’ and ‘morning’, to name but three.

      Melangian was the language I relied upon to express myself on the reservation when my mother wasn’t within hearing distance. We weren’t allowed to speak it at home. I still enjoy using it when I get a chance. When an issue gets bogged down with unnecessary words, if I think in Melangian, I can keep a clearer picture of what’s really going on. Of all the English dialects, Melangian is the one that best expresses joy and ebullience.

      The class system on the reservation was more like a caste