Lifting My Voice: A Memoir

SINCE HER DEBUT IN 1974, BARBARA HENDRICKS has showcased her vast repertoire in opera performances, recitals, orchestral concerts, and with jazz and blues ensembles. She has sold fourteen million albums of nearly one hundred recordings, and in 2006 founded her own record label, Arte Verum. She has sung with the world’s major orchestras and conductors, including Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado, Sir Georg Solti, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, and Riccardo Muti, receiving widespread critical acclaim for the beauty of her voice and the intelligence of her artistry.

As an African American growing up in segregated Arkansas in the 1950s, Hendricks witnessed firsthand the painful struggle for civil rights. The daughter of a Methodist minister and a schoolteacher who struggled to make ends meet, she sang in church and school choirs from an early age, then pursued studies in science. But in 1968 she received a scholarship to the Aspen Music School to study with the great mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel, who invited her to attend the Juilliard School, changing the direction of her life. And shortly after her graduation, she won a number of important international prizes.

Lifting My Voice takes us on a remarkable and inspiring journey as we follow Barbara from singing spirituals in her father’s rural churches to the stages of the most prestigious opera houses, concert halls, and festivals in the world. She speaks to us open-heartedly about raising a family, love, and friendship; and she raises the curtain on her experiences with the greatest musicians of her time—Jennie Tourel, Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma, Radu Lupu, Quincy Jones, and Maria Callas.

In September 1957, Barbara watched the Little Rock Nine try to enter Central High School not far from where she lived. This changed how she saw herself and her world, and forced her to ask, How can we live in harmony together? At that moment, one of the world’s staunchest human rights activists was born. In 1986, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) asked her to be an advocate for refugees; here she introduces us to survivors of Cambodia’s killing fields and the Rwandan genocide. We run with her through sniper’s alley in Sarajevo under siege and sit with her through the inauguration of Nelson Mandela and the independence of East Timor.

Hendricks has always been down-to-earth and straightforward—beloved by audiences and appreciated by her colleagues. Lifting My Voice, her long-awaited memoir, is a warm, engaging, and honest self-portrait of a singular woman who has always listened to her inner voice and gone her own way as a wife, mother, artist, and citizen.

Jacket design: Jonathan Hahn

Cover photo: Denise Grünstein

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright © 2014 by Barbara Hendricks

Foreword copyright © 2014 by Kofi A. Annan

All rights reserved

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-61374-852-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hendricks, Barbara.

Lifting my voice : a memoir / Barbara Hendricks.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-61374-852-7 (cloth)

1. Hendricks, Barbara. 2. Sopranos (Singers)—Biography. I. Title.

ML420.H3728A3 2014

782.1092—dc23

[B]

2013037625

Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

To my parents

To Sebastian, Jennie, and Malcolm

To Ulf, the light in my life that illuminates my soul

Negro National Anthem

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,

Ring with the harmonies of liberty;

Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

—James Weldon Johnson

CONTENTS

Foreword by Kofi A. Annan

1 Childhood

2 Birth of a Rebel

3 University

4 Aspen

5 New York

6 Debut

7 The Giants of the Orchestra

8 My Family

9 My Repertoire and My Musical Families

10 Behind the Scenes

11 Cinema

12 Arte Verum

13 Encounters

14 Human Rights

There Is No Conclusion, Only Continuation

Musical Portrait

Complete Discography of Barbara Hendricks

A Life—and History

Index

FOREWORD

On November 20, 1948, when Barbara Hendricks’s voice was heard for the first time on a rural farm in Stephens, Arkansas, her mother, Della, and her grandmother, Tumaie, could not have imagined the path that her life would take and where it would lead.

Her birth preceded by almost a month the proclamation by the United Nations General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and she was born in a state in America where the Jim Crow laws, the model for the apartheid laws in South Africa, were the law of the land. As Barbara says, for all intents and purposes I was born a refugee in my own country—born without the same protection under the law that the Constitution afforded every white girl born that day.

Barbara’s voice has undoubtedly shaped her life. She began to sing in her father’s church as soon as she could speak and her first repertoire was Negro spirituals, the music of the slaves with their roots in Africa and an expression of their suffering and hope for freedom.

Since then, Barbara has enjoyed a remarkable career that has taken her around the globe singing a repertoire that spans five centuries: opera roles, orchestral song, Negro spirituals, jazz, and blues. Today, Barbara claims to experience even more joy when singing than she did as a little girl singing a cappella in her father’s rural church, because she is aware of the humility needed to serve her art whenever and wherever she sings.

Since I have known Barbara Hendricks, she has also used her voice to shape the lives of others and taken her responsibility as a citizen very seriously. For Barbara, her artistic engagement and her humanitarian engagement are one and the same; she believes that the place where Art vibrates in us is the same place from which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has sprung.

I have been moved by Barbara’s singing on a number of occasions; she seemed to have read my mind at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 2001 when she sang, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, just before my acceptance speech, which began: Today in Afghanistan, a girl will be born. And I will never forget her moving tribute after the deadly attack on the UN headquarters in Iraq that killed twenty-two of our most dedicated colleagues, including our close friend, Sergio Vieira de Mello, in August 2003.

She has sung for children in the ghettos of New York City, and over the twenty-six years that she has served as Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Barbara has comforted refugee children from Cambodia and Bosnia to Rwanda and Mali. Her commitment to the refugee cause and to the ideal of the United Nations working together for a better world is unwavering. Her dedication to the plight of millions of refugees by visiting camps, actively raising awareness, and providing the most passionate of voices for those who are forced to flee is an example to us all.

She has lifted her voice in song on the most prestigious stages of the world, in the cathedral of Dubrovnik under siege, and she lifts her voice in indignation against injustice and in defense of human rights. Her life has been fueled by an insatiable curiosity, a search for truth, and a willingness to serve. Through her work, Barbara has become a symbol of hope for millions.

KOFI A. ANNAN

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

—Nelson Mandela

In 1948, Burma became a member of the UN, the Berlin Blockade started, and newly elected Prime Minister Daniel François Malan of South Africa began the apartheid era. In Montreux, Switzerland, the town where I would later live and raise my children, on September 20, Richard Strauss completed September, the last song of his musical testament, Vier letzte Lieder; thirty years later this song cycle would become one of the mainstays of my orchestral repertoire. And in San Francisco, California, on December 10, the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Also in 1948, in Stephens, Arkansas, on November 20, my mother, Della Mae, and my maternal grandparents, John and Tumaie Graham, heard my voice for the first time. None of them had ever heard of Richard Strauss or of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but they did know all about the Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation—America’s apartheid.

It must have been sometime after four o’clock, my mother said, when I asked her the exact time of my birth. She knew that it was shortly before my father, Malvin Leon, arrived home from work around 5 PM. He had been a cook while in the army during World War II and now, as a fledgling young pastor in the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, he was working in a restaurant kitchen to supplement his meager earnings.

I cannot presume that those first cries were in any way indicative of how I would later use my voice. But I like to think that as they penetrated the walls of that modest farmhouse and soared freely into the countryside I had taken my first step on my way to developing an instrument of service to art and justice.

In 1987 I started to work as a goodwill ambassador with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations refugee agency, and when I learned the official definition of refugee I realized that for all practical purposes I had been born a refugee in my own country. My birth on American soil entitled me to US citizenship but was not enough to afford me, a Negro or colored child, the same rights and responsibilities of a full-fledged citizen as provided by the Constitution of the United States of America, a document that I would later learn to treasure. Its Bill of Rights was ratified over 150 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My parents and my grandparents never told me that I had neither the same protection under the law nor the same inalienable rights that every white male child born on that same day and in that same place would have been able to take for granted.

But for as far back as I can remember I had a feeling that confused me because I could not verbalize it. I know now that what I felt was fear. It was as if an ominous, diffused cloud hung over us, here and there, sometimes opaque and sometimes translucent, ever present in the very air that we breathed. It was reflected in the faces of the adults and nourished by the intense conversations that took place when they thought that we were not listening. I wanted to know more whenever I heard my mother speaking in hushed tones to a neighbor or friend. I assumed that they were relating tales too horrible to describe out loud. A story might begin with, Did you hear about what happened to poor Missus So-and-So’s son? We children had to try to piece together the rest of the story from the snippets of the conversation that we strained to hear as their voices rose with indignation and anger and ebbed with fear and pain. I picked up from their whispers and accompanying looks of sadness and inevitability a sense of an underlying shame in their own helplessness.

This ever-present fear seeped into our daily existence like fog rolling in from the sea. It lodged itself in the pit of my stomach. It never left us completely in peace. It seemed to come and go at its own whim. But a story, a word, or a glance could bring it back in an instant. Like most children who live mostly in the moment I could easily ignore it. But I was forced a little later in my life to learn what it was—and to defeat it. I have spent my entire life facing and trying to master this primordial fear, for to live without fear is true freedom.

Stephens is a small rural village in the southwest corner of Ouachita County, near Louisiana, whose population today is a bit more than a thousand people. During my first eight years I lived in similar communities in Arkansas where the great majority of the inhabitants, both Negroes and whites, were very poor and uneducated. Arkansas was usually classified in just about every positive category as number forty-nine of the fifty states, slightly ahead of Mississippi. Thank God for Mississippi was a kind of unofficial slogan. But I was unaware of life’s trials and tribulations and did not know that my parents had difficulty making ends meet or that we were considered poor. My spirit was always free and I spent most of my time outdoors, in my own opulent and varied kingdom, discovering nature and letting my imagination run as fast as my legs could carry me. I climbed trees and communicated with every being in the real and imaginary kingdom of which I was the queen.

Ever since my first field trip to Namibian and Mozambican refugee camps in Zambia in 1987, I have been surprised to see how easily refugee children are able to laugh and play after being forced to flee their homes, having witnessed horrific scenes of violence and living with an uncertain future. The resilience of children is powerful; it gives me hope.

My grandfather Johnny and his wife were grandchildren of slaves and part Choctaw Indian. The Choctaw tribe came originally from Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana around the Mississippi River, and some members intermarried with freed slaves. Most likely my Native American ancestors were from nearby Louisiana.

I have no recollection of much in Stephens other than a gas station and a general store that sold everything from flour to heavy farm equipment. I loved to be on my maternal grandparents’ farm and was proud that I had been born there. This subsistence farm barely provided for my grandparents’ basic needs.

My parents were living near Stephens in Magnolia, some miles from the Louisiana border, not far from Emerson, where my father was raised and where his parents, Maggie and Clayton Hendricks, continued to live. I do not know if there was any particular reason that my mother chose to come home to her parents on that day but I am happy to have come into the world in the presence of my grandmother Tumaie, who herself had given birth to sixteen children. My mother was her eldest daughter.

I always looked forward to visiting them in Stephens, to going into the barn and climbing into the hayloft and lying there daydreaming. I would sit on the parked wagon, pulling at imaginary reins and pretending to give orders, Giddy up and Whoa … I tried to imitate exactly what I had seen my grandfather do when I rode with him in the wagon drawn by his two lethargic horses. He was a gentleman and never raised his voice to his animals or to us. He was always very caring to my grandmother, who for as long as I can remember was ill and mostly bedridden until her death. I do not know the cause of her infirmity but I would think that after sixteen pregnancies and births, one would be a bit worn out.

I don’t have any photos of that farm or of my grandparents; unfortunately a camera was too much of a luxury item for our household. But I remember with tenderness and warmth the times that I spent there until my grandmother’s death when I was about eight years old.

These memories are infused with myriad smells and sounds of the outdoors as well as the savory aromas of cooking that wafted from the kitchen out into the yard. I remember the feel and even the sight of the heat of the late summer days, the waves of humidity undulating in the air. When we came for Christmas the temperatures were much colder but we never had snow. Many of my uncles, aunts, and cousins would then gather around an abundant dinner table. We all brought our particular specialities and enjoyed them together with the dishes that my grandfather’s farm provided: fried chicken, the Christmas ham, and a cornucopia of homegrown fruits and vegetables that had been preserved and canned in the fall. For breakfast we had bacon and sausage accompanied by delicious hot biscuits and gravy or cornbread that my mother made. I was especially proud that I had helped to churn the butter that melted on those mouthwatering biscuits. Today the smell of fresh fruits, especially oranges, and the sight of bowls of nuts remind me of Christmas because we never had them at any other time of the year.

My grandmother joined us in the dining room on the rare occasions when she had the strength to leave her bed. Whenever I took her something I would linger and sit with her for a little while. I loved her very much and cherished the moments that I could spend at her bedside. She was a picture of gentleness and serenity, propped upon pillows in her bed, her salt and pepper hair, more salt than pepper, braided and attached in a circle on the top of her head Indian style; to me she looked like a queen with a braided crown.

After her death, however, our family reunions ceased. My grandfather, unaware that his land had oil on it, sold it for a price well beneath its value, and the farm was torn down and oil rigs were put in its place. He later met and married a wonderful woman who, like my mother, was an elementary school teacher. Her first name was Ethel and my mother always called her Miss Ethel, so we did too.

I liked Miss Ethel very much. She was tall with a very noble bearing, articulate and cultivated. And she made the best hot-water cornbread I have ever eaten. Unfortunately my uncles and aunts were not as tolerant and supportive of my grandfather’s new wife as my mother was. So my cherished family gatherings never resumed. We visited my grandfather and Miss Ethel whenever we were on our way to and from Emerson but less often than before. I missed the farm terribly as there was not so much to do in their new home. After my grandfather died I continued to have occasional contact with Miss Ethel; we corresponded regularly while I was in college, and her sincere interest in me was an enormous encouragement.

Clayton and Maggie Hendricks were also poor subsistence farmers. They lived in a white wooden house outside of Emerson, very near the Louisiana border. My father, Malvin, was one of eleven children and his mother, Maggie, was a very authoritative woman. Her white skin and completely straight hair stood in stark contrast to the copper-toned and burnished complexion of Tumaie, whose warmth was also a contrast to the cooler ambience that I found on my father’s side of the family. My father’s brothers and sisters and their families often visited my grandparents and it was there that I met many cousins who came from as far away as Colorado as well as from nearby Louisiana. During my first ten or twelve years we attended the annual family reunion in the month of August and the revival at the country church where my father, the local boy, was often invited to be the guest pastor for the week.

During the revival entire days were dedicated to prayer, preaching, witnessing, and invoking the presence of the Holy Spirit. The wooden church was alone in the woods, with nothing but two outhouses nearby. Cars and pickup trucks arrived full of worshippers anxious to meet one another and to catch up on the news of those who lived far away. It was so hot that we had to roll down all the windows of our black Ford in hope that the warm breeze would cool us off a little. We arrived in our best Sunday clothes and hats covered with a thin layer of dust that had blown in from the dirt roads. We greeted each other with joy and enthusiasm. Parents rounded up children who were already running around and playing outside and we followed meekly behind them into the small white church that seemed to me at the time a towering cathedral. As soon as we were seated the church was inundated by the vigorous susurration of cardboard fans; the advertisement from the local funeral home printed on the back seemed to swoosh and swirl to the rhythm of the singing and praying. These fans were passed out to all, but it was mostly the women and some elderly men who used them. The fanning was a part of the ritual and it helped us all cope with the suffocating heat and humidity in the packed church. And those fans also came in handy to help revive some of the worshippers, mostly women, who were overwhelmed by their emotions and the fervor of the service. Sometimes they would shout and cry or run up and down the aisles and it would take several strong men to subdue them.

Men seldom gave vent to their emotions in such an open manner. It did happen—but it was extremely rare and probably not acceptable. Some of the ladies, the regulars, you could always count on to release their demons and sorrows this way during every service. When I was around nine or ten, we children would wait for these moments with great expectations, but we avoided sitting too close for fear of being hit with a stray handbag.

And of course we had to hold ourselves in check because if we were ever seen laughing or making fun of these pious souls we could expect to receive a severe punishment when we returned home. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou describes a similar scene so vividly that when I read it I laughed until I cried. She, however, could not hold back her laughter and was punished.

It was always very moving when the pastor gave the invitation to those who had decided to end their lives of sin and to give themselves to the Lord by becoming a member of the church. The entire congregation trembled with emotion and joy as the timid souls marched slowly to the altar accompanied by the congregation’s choruses of Amen and Praise the Lord. Even at a young age I could feel the fervor of their worship and see that their renewed faith comforted them and gave them strength to bear their suffering.

During these emotion-filled services, tears of sorrow and joy flowed freely and gave way spontaneously to songs of hope for a better life, if not here on earth then in the afterlife. Our voices rose and the sound filled the church and the surrounding fields and pastures. The congregation harmonized naturally, swept up in a collective catharsis.

The texts and music of these simple songs first taught me about our history of slavery and its inherent injustice. In Africa, song and literature were passed on orally, and this tradition came with the slaves to the New World. The Negro spiritual, America’s richest musical heritage, was born of slavery. It combines a very simple expression of sorrow with Christian belief. Unfortunately, many of the spirituals that were sung in the early Negro churches of America were never notated and have been lost forever. Those that I heard and sang as a child constitute the backbone of my musical passion and inspiration.

When the service was finished the congregation streamed outside, hoping to catch a little cooler breeze. All the emotion had built up hardy appetites. In no time at all the entire field around the church was filled with tables set with homemade goods from the farm. The beds of pickup trucks were transformed into the most inviting tables. Those who had brought food shared their delicacies with those who had not. There was always enough to go around. There were many excellent cooks in the congregation, and eager visitors lined up at the tables of the ladies who were best known for one specialty or another. I was particularly interested in the cakes and pies. I liked my mother’s cooking, but I also passed from table to table enjoying what I was offered. Since I was the pastor’s daughter I was never refused. The good food nourished my body while the songs and the singing resonated in me, nourishing my soul.

As I grew older I became very interested in my own family’s history, but unfortunately my parents never considered our past important enough to tell us about it. I tried once to make a family tree but I was not able to get very much farther than my paternal great-grandparents. My father sometimes spoke about his grandmother Harriet so I managed to gather some information about his family but little or nothing about my mother’s. My parents did not have time to answer my questions. They were more occupied with making ends meet at the end of every month and preparing us for the future. They did not speak at length about slavery or even the segregation that we lived with daily.

I began at an early age to wonder why I was alive. I assumed that there must be some purpose and felt that the answer was somehow connected to the stories told in the spirituals that I sang because they touched me so deeply, so viscerally.

There were also some hidden, political connotations in the songs that the slave masters failed to detect. The singing of a certain song could be a coded message to those slaves who were planning to escape to a free state. Steal Away signaled that the time was approaching for those who were to be stealing away to freedom with the Underground Railroad. When I sang words such as before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave it awakened my imagination about this time and brought me closer to the plight of the slaves and the dynamic power of the human urge to be free. The policies of the slave owners were particularly cruel. Immediately upon birth a slave baby could be separated from her mother, put on the auction block, and sold away from her family, her culture, her history, and all that could contribute to her identity—and thus her psychological, emotional, and social development. This was truly a process of dehumanization. A newborn slave was an object, not a human being. She had neither roots nor a past. Her future was the same as any other piece of property to be used at the whim of a cruel master who considered her of less value than the most common farm animal.

Nearly a hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery in 1865, American society still suffers from the side effects of its inhuman practices. In the segregated schools that I attended our teachers made a point to teach us about the slave trade, slavery, the Civil War, and segregation. This filled in the blanks and supplemented the emotional history that I had imagined from the spirituals. We learned about heroes and heroines such as Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, and Harriet Tubman, as well as the many Negro inventors, artists, and scientists whose contributions still affect us in a very integral way. Our teachers taught us to be proud of our ancestors. Every year, the second week of February was observed as Negro History Week (Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln were both born then). This helped us to understand our place in the cruel history of Western civilization, and complemented the American history that was taught to us from the hand-me-down books we received from the white schools after they had received their new editions. Not only did those books leave out the cost in lives and suffering of the slave trade, but they also ignored the importance of the contributions of slave labor to the building of the richness of our country. Of course, the white students in their separate but unequal schools did not celebrate Negro History Week and did not learn about Negro heroes and heroines.

After the civil rights movement, Negro History Week evolved into Black History Month. There should come a time when this month will not be necessary and my history will be incorporated into a history that all Americans can own. But the week was important for those of us growing up in the 1950s and ’60s. And the word Negro holds a special place in my heart because I am so proud of the time when that is what we called ourselves. The many Negroes who fought and died for freedom and equality made it possible for me to be who I am today.

As my father advanced within the CME church we continually moved from rural communities to bigger towns. We lived in the parsonages, which were usually next door to the church. Thus my perimeters were rather small. Going to school was my first step outside them. With each passing year my space continually expanded to include new teachers and students. But most social and community events took place in and around the church. The slaves had been forced to convert to Christianity and found great solace in the life, teachings, suffering, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. They identified with the tribulations of the Jews in the Old Testament, and when they sang, Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, then why not every man, it gave them hope that they would also be delivered. Going to church and gathering together to worship was one of the only freedoms that the slaves were allowed. This freedom would later prove to be a very important pillar of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

After abolition, Negro churches sprang up everywhere and in many different denominations. The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church began in 1870 in Jackson, Tennessee, and became the Christian Methodist Episcopal in the 1950s. The church was the center of the official society of the colored or Negro community and the pastors played a very important role because of the moral authority that position gave them. The pastors led, from within the church, the revolt of Negroes throughout the South from the beginning and throughout the civil rights movement.

My father was an electrifying preacher whose oratorical talent was more important than his theological knowledge. He intuitively conceived his sermons like a theatrical monologue and was known for converting many sinners from a life of transgression. His depictions of heaven and hell were so vivid that as a child I was often frightened by his sermons. The congregation hung on his every word, punctuating his phrases with their interjections of Amen, Praise the Lord, and the like. I was very proud of him and the admiration that he inspired in others.

These highly emotional church services and even stronger musical-spiritual experiences were my first contact with theater. They were in no way faked or make-believe, but they had all the elements of a theatrical experience. My father’s first churches were in rural communities and the congregations were too poor to buy a piano or an organ. So the Negro spirituals and Methodist hymns were sung unaccompanied. The African tradition of spontaneous harmonizing made the sound colorful and rich. I can remember a song beginning with a single voice rising out of the silence, and after the first phrase the other members of the congregation, myself included, would intertwine the melody with harmony and fill every space with a joyful noise to the Lord.

Years later on Sunday morning, May 8, 1994, I arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa, from Paris to attend the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela as the representative of Federico Mayor, the director general of UNESCO. I held an unpaid post with the secretary general as consultant for intercultural relations, which involved giving my opinion and working on projects that would emphasize the importance of culture as a tool for conflict prevention and healing during reconciliation. We wanted to combat the more common use of culture as an excuse to incite war, barbarism, and destruction. The French ambassador met me at the plane upon my arrival and said that she planned to attend a mass in Soweto and added that if I wanted to come along we would have to go there directly from the airport, as the service was soon to begin. There was no time to go to the hotel to shower or change clothes. I was already overwhelmed that I could witness this historical event and I was not about to hesitate to visit Soweto, the scene of the brave student uprising in 1976. I still remembered the images of the brutality of the police against unarmed young students. Their struggle had finally triumphed after so many years of suffering. I felt that the new adventure facing the country would certainly present a very difficult task but in the long run would have repercussions not only for the neighboring countries in southern Africa, but also for the entire African continent.

We arrived at the Catholic church shortly after the service had begun and tried to slip surreptitiously into the seats that had been reserved for us. Soon after our arrival the choir began to sing unaccompanied and then the congregation joined in. I was stunned. I did not know the music but recognized immediately the way of singing and harmonizing that I’d heard so many times in my father’s rural churches. Near the end of the mass, the French priest Emmanuel Lafont, who had served this parish for many years, introduced his guests to the congregation and shyly asked me if I would sing something for them. After a ten-hour flight and very little sleep I was certainly not in optimum shape, but I wanted to respond to the warmth and openness with which we had been received. I cleared my throat, stood before them with great humility, and sang two spirituals, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child and Glory Hallelujah. They showed their appreciation by answering me with high-pitched sounds that resembled birdcalls whenever I sang in a higher register. In just a few moments, as the church filled up with the sound of my voice interspersed with those echoing birdcalls, I was able to make a trip that spanned two centuries and crisscrossed an ocean from Africa to America and back again. This deeply moving musical conversation I will never forget.

I had become interested in the struggle against apartheid while a university student in Nebraska. Then, in 1986, Vogue Paris asked me to be the guest editor of their December–January issue. Along with photos of myself in the world’s major opera houses where I had sung and articles on musicians and artists such as Riccardo Muti and Maya Angelou, I insisted, against much resistance from Vogue’s editors, that they include a letter that was to be sent through Amnesty International, a letter I had written to South African prime minister Pieter Willem Botha asking him to liberate Sister Bernard Ncube, a prisoner of conscience. Back in Nebraska I never thought that I would live to see the end of apartheid, and certainly could never have imagined being in Soweto singing with these freed people.

But I have been singing about freedom since the first time I joined in with my parents at church. Both of my parents had good strong voices and often led the singing in church. As soon as I was able to make an intelligible sound I joined in with great enthusiasm. I cannot say now—because I did not I think about it then—if they had beautiful voices or not. They were so present in every service that it was like the sun rising in the east—a given.

My sister Geneice and my brothers Malvin Jr. and Michael joined in when their turn came to participate in the church services. When they were older we even sang as a quartet. But this did not last and I became the family soloist for church services, baptisms, weddings, and a lot of funerals.

Even though my talent was noticed in church at a very early age no one ever bestowed any special attention on me. That would have gone against the strict Protestant teachings of my parents. They believed that a child should be seen and not heard and was like virgin clay that they should shape according to the teachings of the Bible. To praise a child for a God-given talent would have been detrimental to her development, feeding one of the seven deadly sins, pride. This very narrow point of view didn’t really keep me in line and most likely contributed to my natural rebelliousness over the years.

I was born curious and have always kept my eyes open, trying to learn as much as I can about the world and in turn about myself. I wanted to find my place. I did not know then that I was searching for freedom. My insatiable curiosity has never abated. I have always asked What is the truth? because I had learned in Sunday school that the Truth shall set you free. I have always questioned the boundaries set for me by others and never allowed them to stifle my need to go further.

As early as age four it seemed to me that grown-ups had secrets about life that they were reluctant to share but that were written down in books. If I wanted to obtain the key to the chambers of knowledge, then I had to learn to read. My mother was an elementary school teacher who had not yet finished her university studies. It would take her many years of study by correspondence. She finally received a bachelor’s degree in education in 1967 at age forty-four, the same year that Geneice graduated from college. I was impatient and benefited from the proximity of a private teacher whom I begged to teach me to read. When I entered my mother’s first grade class in 1954 at the age of five I could already read, count, and write.

I read everything that I found printed at home and at school. I even read my parents’ private papers and would play games with them to see if they had any idea that I was privy to information that I shouldn’t have known.

School was a wonderful place. I rarely missed a day and had to be too sick to get out of bed to be convinced that I couldn’t go. By the time I turned six that November my mother decided that I was too bored in her class. I was causing trouble for the other students, and it was good for neither me nor her that I remain. So I was placed in second grade with another teacher where I had a bit more of a challenge.

Aptitude tests were given to us in school on a regular basis to help determine our progress and in which direction we should be guided. I always scored very high in science and mathematics, so my teachers and my parents encouraged me to continue in that direction. I not only had an aptitude for mathematics, I also truly enjoyed it. I felt at home with the seeming certainty of numbers.

I always sang in church and became a member of the school choir at the age of twelve. Without ever considering a career in music, it was just a given that I would forever sing. But it was extracurricular.

I eventually learned that the certainty of mathematics was filled with grey areas and that constant searching often engendered a humbling doubt. I began to see the artistic aspect of science in my evolving quest for truth and meaning.

One day when I was in fourth grade, I was sitting quietly at my desk listening to my teacher explain something to the class and I had a revelation. It was as if a small voice inside me was warning me not to lose myself by allowing school to stifle my own questioning and reasoning. Education should help you to learn to reason and to think for yourself. I knew that my teacher wanted the best for all of us, but when one of us thought outside of the conventional box, nobody took it seriously. School was responsible for teaching children the rules and protocols of civil society. So I kept my little secret to myself. I will follow the program as best I can and be the best student I can be, but I will always protect my freedom to question, analyze, and think for myself. This gave me a small sense of some responsibility for myself, knowing that I would not follow before trying to answer the question, What do I feel in my heart and what is the truth? To know myself and to be true to myself became my quest and credo.

At home my scholastic success certainly did not go unnoticed, but it was never the object of any overt praise; my achievements came to be expected. Only when I performed below expectations did my parents make comments, such as to question why I had received a B in one class and not all A’s. Their attitude probably contributes to the fact that I am always a bit suspicious of too much overt praise or flattery. Not being easily flattered has been a real strength.

My father’s position in the community led him to try to make his family a living model of what he preached from the pulpit every Sunday. He was authoritarian, strict, and at times severe and uncompromising. My mother believed that he was basically right, but during his absences she was much more tolerant of our failings.

For several years we lived in Magnolia, not far from my maternal and paternal grandparents, in a house that my father built himself; he was so proud of that house that he kept the plans for it many years after we left. We lived in a Negro community, but in many rural areas the Negro and white communities overlapped due to a shared poverty. Before I started school I played with white children who lived on the edge of our neighborhood, but these were the only white persons with whom I came in contact. We were oblivious about our racial differences, too young to care about the color of our skins. But the Jim Crow laws forced us onto separate paths. We were not even able to drink from the same water fountain. My parents protected me quite well from the ugliness, pain, and humiliation of segregation until I was nearly nine. But after September 4, 1957, it would have been impossible for me to remain ignorant of the terrible reality of segregation in Arkansas, as well as the existence of racial inequality in the rest of the country. My innocent and protected childhood came to an end on that day.

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

—Emma Goldman

In November 1956 my father was assigned to the Miles Chapel CME Church in North Little Rock, across the Arkansas River from Little Rock. My mother had already begun working in the Jefferson County School District the previous school year and we lived in Pine Bluff, not far away. We traveled in our little black Ford to go to church on the weekends until the end of that school year. Our family had expanded by this time to include my younger brothers, five-year-old Malvin Jr. and four-year-old Michael. We spent the summer in North Little Rock, and I made friends and sang in the church choir. Then we began preparing for our return to Pine Bluff with my mother. I was eight years old and was to start fifth grade at the same rural school where my mother taught.

I do not know why we were still in North Little Rock on September 4, 1957. It could be that the Jefferson County schools started their 1957–58 school year later than the Pulaski County schools. But what happened at Central High School, Little Rock, on that day would become a milestone in our country’s history.

In 1955 the Little Rock School Board had decided to implement the 1954 Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that declared racial segregation of schools unconstitutional. They chose to do so in the 1957–58 school term. Desegregation was to be done progressively in order to avoid problems. The Little Rock School Board chose Central High School as the first candidate. This choice was not made by chance: Arkansas was considered to be the most progressive of the southern states and it was thought that desegregation would most likely succeed there. Even though many segregation laws were still in place, Arkansas was not known for racial extremism and was gradually changing some of those laws, such as seating arrangements on the buses.

My parents would have known about the plans of the local NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) because nothing was a secret within the Negro community. They certainly knew Mrs. Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas chapter who, together with her husband L. C. Bates, owned the Arkansas State Press, a black newspaper. Before the end of the previous school year, all of the Negro students who were about to go into the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades were given the opportunity to volunteer to enroll in Central High School for the coming school year. Many students applied but only ten among the most brilliant and emotionally solid were selected. Mrs. Bates was responsible for guiding and advising them through their long and difficult ordeal. They could not have imagined they were about to be immortalized in American history alongside Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the students was fourteen-year-old Gloria Ray. She later told me:

My father was born in 1899 and his father was born a slave. All of the children in my family except me graduated from Tuskegee University in Alabama, the oldest Negro university in America. He studied there under Booker T. Washington and was the laboratory assistant to George Washington Carver, the great Negro scientist. I was in ninth grade and was about to finish junior high school when a paper was sent to us in the spring stating that Central High School had been ordered to desegregate the schools starting the following school year 1957-58. We had to sign up to enroll in Central High School or the all-Negro school, Horace Mann High. I did not hesitate for a second. I signed up for Central High because it was considered to be one of the best schools not only in Arkansas but also in the nation. I, like the other nine, wanted to go to Central not because I wanted to desegregate the schools but to get the best education possible.

Central High School was in a beautiful five-story building with a pond at the entrance and marble staircases. It covered two blocks and, most important, had the latest textbooks and laboratory equipment.

Gloria is a remarkable woman. After leaving Little Rock she was a brilliant student at the Illinois Institute for Technology in Chicago where, like me, she received a bachelor of science in chemistry and mathematics. She was in a class with the first women and Negroes to be admitted to the school. While there she was confronted with another kind of discrimination than what she had dealt with in Little Rock: sexual discrimination against women, which forced her to confront the obstacles facing both Negro and white women who wanted to pursue a higher education. She also met her future husband, Christer Karlmark from Sweden, there.

When I was remembering and researching information about the Little Rock students I recalled that my Swedish mother-in-law, Margareta, had given me an article in a Swedish newspaper about Gloria turning sixty. She lived in Stockholm. I read the article with great interest and thought, I hope to meet this great lady sometime. I contacted Gloria and invited her and her husband to a concert that I was singing in Stockholm’s Konserthus. We met briefly after the concert and I was so moved. We sat face to face, just two little girls from Little Rock. I told her that I was writing this book and asked if they would like to come for lunch and tell me about her experiences in 1957. She agreed and they arrived on a mild winter’s day, their arms full of clippings and a scrapbook of the events. She and I sat around the table reminiscing about our similar childhood experiences. I felt like I had found a lost sister, and my husband, Ulf, discovered facts about life under Jim Crow that he couldn’t have previously imagined had occurred so recently. Gloria and I shared similar memories and fears about traveling through Mississippi and playing with white children with whom we could not go to school or sit next to at a coffee counter. Suddenly I was transported back more than fifty years and the past came back to me so vividly. I saw the same faces twisted with hatred and the terrifying cries from the mob as Gloria told me her story:

I was the youngest in my family and was very protected by my parents. Carlotta Walls and I had already registered for the school in August and that had not been a problem so we were looking forward to our first day in school.

The principal was against the desegregation of his school and when it became clear that some Negro students seriously intended to come, segregationists from all over the South decided to organize against it. They felt they had to stop this from happening because it would signal the end of their way of life. The media sent out fearmongering messages about desegregation such as, Do you want your daughter to marry a Negro? Governor Orval Faubus, who was a moderate and who had not been against desegregating the schools, saw the writing on the electoral wall. In a televised address made the night before the first day of school he declared that integration was impossible and ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround the school and to keep all Negroes out. He was up for reelection.

This move surprised everyone at the NAACP, especially Mrs. Daisy Bates, who would have never imagined that Faubus would defy the Supreme Court ruling to desegregate schools with all deliberate speed. The first day of school should have been September 3 but we did not go to Central High because it was completely surrounded by the soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard. That evening Mrs. Daisy Bates was very concerned about our safety; she called a white minister, Rev. Dunbar Ogden, a supporter of integration, to help to devise a plan for the next day, September 4, that we hoped would be our first day of school. It was decided that we would go to the school but that all ten of us should go together. So we—Ernest Green, Jane Hall, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, and I, accompanied by Reverend Ogden, his son who was also a minister, two Negro ministers, Reverend Driver and Reverend Bass, and Mrs. Bates—arrived together at the school. Melba Pattillo and her mother did not make it to our meeting place because they were accosted by some white men and chased back to their car, barely escaping with their lives.

During the summer and especially after registering for school I had everything to look forward to because of the quality of the education that I would receive. My head was full of the dreams that I would have a life like the white girls that I had seen in television series. But it was not to be so.

When we arrived the soldiers blocked our path to the entrance, but when a white student came to the entrance they would open the way and let them enter. Ernest, who was the oldest asked, Does this mean that you aren’t going to let us go to school today? And the answer was a simple yes. The image of the Arkansas National Guard blocking us at the entrance and the mob of angry whites that surrounded us was seen around the world.

But Elizabeth Eckford was living a worse nightmare: she arrived alone at the school on the corner that was nearest her home. Mrs. Bates and Reverend Ogden had spent many hours trying to convince several white and Negro clergymen to accompany us but without success. In the wee hours of the morning Mrs. Bates called all of our parents to explain the plan to meet the next morning. Elizabeth’s family did not have a telephone and it was too late to go to her home so Mrs. Bates had planned to go there before the meeting to inform her. She was in her car on the way to the meeting when she heard the news on the radio that one of the Negro students was completely surrounded by a mob screaming lynch her, lynch her. She had forgotten to inform Elizabeth.

Elizabeth said, They moved closer and closer…. Somebody started yelling…. I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd—someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.

Fortunately another white woman ushered Elizabeth into a bus, which probably saved her life. The images of poor Elizabeth Eckford being threatened by the white mob shocked the nation and the world. After the confrontations that day the parents of Jane Hall, who had registered in my class, pulled her out under pressure and enrolled her in Horace Mann High. Thus we became the Little Rock Nine.

Word spread quickly throughout the Negro community that the nine Negro students who had tried to enter Central High School that morning had been turned away by the Arkansas National Guard. We did not have a television at home and I found myself that evening seated in front of our next-door neighbor’s television watching the news with my parents. I had previously been allowed to watch children’s programs on Saturday mornings with their children. I do not know why I was permitted to come along; maybe in the fear and confusion my parents had not noticed that I had followed them. I don’t think that they had expected the scenes that we saw. We sat in North Little Rock, watching the unbelievable black-and-white images that were so compelling it felt as if everything were happening in that very room. The proximity of the events made it all even more chilling.

I could never forget what I saw and heard, the visceral hatred and the overall menace of ugly violence. I had always enjoyed being in school: even before the end of the summer vacation I began to be eager for the new school year to begin and looked forward to the first day. It was a place of peace and security for me. But what I saw on that day turned my world upside down.

The following days and weeks we listened to the radio and watched the television, following with fear those courageous teenagers whom I did not know but with whom I identified so strongly.

Gloria recalls:

We did not return to the school, and while the National Guard stayed posted around it, NAACP lawyers led by Thurgood Marshall, who had argued the case of Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court and would later become the first Negro Supreme Court justice, led the court battles. They were finally granted an injunction that prevented Governor Faubus from using the Arkansas National Guard to block the entrance to the school. He took them away and replaced them with the Little Rock City Police.

We had been waiting nearly three weeks not knowing when or if we would go to school. We gathered together to study so as not to get too far behind. On the twenty-third of September, three days before my fifteenth birthday, we went into the school for the first time, but by a side door. When we arrived in our first classes some white students left the building. There was a horrible mob outside composed of segregationists from all over the South, many from Alabama and Mississippi. I could hear the noise of the crowd and, as I was curious, I went to sharpen my pencil—the sharpener was near the window. I saw the mob below and I was petrified to see their angry faces and to read the hateful messages. It was the most frightening day of my life.

When the mob heard that we had entered the school they went mad. The city police was not going to be able to contain them. We went to our classes but after two or three hours we were all called from our respective classes