Black is Beautiful II.

Bessie Jones gathered her grandchildren and great-grandchildren living on the island, and the children of her relatives into a great group to teach them Afro-American songs and games. They were filmed for days in the garden around the little house or at other places, but always outdoors. 

Bessie and the eighteen children – among whom there were six- as well as seventeen-year-olds – were dancing, playing, singing tirelessly. Their repertory seemed inexhaustible. A new world opened up in front of me. I was fascinated by their humour, by the ease of their movement, their amazing polyrhythmics, the resourcefulness of their games, the richness of their improvisations. 

I was sitting on the grass, barefoot, in the hot Georgian summer, amazed. In the pauses of the shooting the children gathered around me to teach me. They didn’t have an easy job, I could hardly understand their words, the Southern accent was impossibly alien to me. But they did not lose patience, and taught me eight song-games. 

Dizzy Gillespie, the black trumpeter who had one of the main roles in the film was playfully improvising; he taught me Cuban rhythms and learnt czardas from me. In some of the scenes of the film, Bessie told me the story of the Georgian slaves. She showed me the old graveyard where they were buried in unmarked graves, and the port where the legendary four hundred African threw themselves among the waves before they would have had to disembark on alien soil. “They sank chained to one another there” Bessie said showing me the bay as if she saw those who chose the watery grave instead of slavery. “And the ancestors who survived the misery of slavery survived it with the help of music” she said. 

Music had a function, they were singing while they were working, and as a rest from work exchanged messages in the songs’ lyrics. The Biblical lyrics of the spirituals carried secret meanings. For example, “train” did not mean a train, but the road of escape for slaves, the line of families receiving and helping runaway blacks towards the free north. 

Drums were taken from them as soon as they stepped on the shore, since they could have communicated with them. They beat out the rhythm on their bodies, this is how their dazzling clap-solos and rhythmical accompaniments came into being. With great patience and perseverance I learnt some of these.