We’ve Been Here Before: Notes on The Colored Waiting Room
(for Arthur Cleveland Neal, Jr.)
(for Arthur Cleveland Neal, Jr.)
by Mark Anthony Neal
I love trains. In another life, I might have been a Pullman porter or a big band musician, who had the opportunity to travel the country, albeit in segregated coach cars—like the one Homer A. Plessy helped transform into the legal precedent that we were forced to live with for more than half-a-century, creating the conditions for what we called the Chitlin’ Circuit.
One of my most precious childhood memories is of traveling back down south to my father’s home state of Georgia. This was 1970, riding the old Pennsylvania Central trains, a year before the government subsidized Amtrak was created. A literal child of the Civil Rights Movement, I was oblivious to about segregation and colored waiting rooms. This was a brave new world for my parents, who both had vivid memories of colored waiting rooms and colored coach cars and, I suspect that part of the interests in the trip was the chance for them to see just how much things might have changed.
At four, I was not that much attuned to my father’s gestures, but looking back some forty years later, I imagine it was quite a different experience for my dad, who had migrated to New York City only a decade earlier. Indeed this was one of my father’s first trips back to Georgia since he had left, and save his father’s death two years later, it was his last trip back down South. I recall this trip so many years later, because it was the only trip I ever took with my father to the South; I’ve spent much of the past few years since his death, wishing I had had that opportunity to return with him to the land that birthed him.
As Guthrie Ramsey well understands, those colored waiting rooms, that necessary evil of interstate travel for far too many Black folks in the years before desegregation, were a source of shame, frustration, pain and trauma, yet as a broad metaphor for the private life of Blackness—a Blackness that was underneath the veil, underground, behind closed doors; a Blackness that still gives us the tools and the resources to dream a world that some once tried to deny us and others, including ourselves, still try to get us to forget. Community. Family.
And it is in this will to forget that Dr. MusiQology Presents the Colored Waiting Room stands its ground in this remembering of remembering, this remembering of the forgetting, this remembering of the dreams, too countless to really remember, but that gets evoked with every bent note, every soulful gesture, every moan half-past the minute of midnight. A seamless travel, buttressed by clickety-clack of those trains, through a history of our emotions, where terms like Soul, Jazz, Classical, Neo-Soul, Hip-Hop, R&B, are really just names on a page, and woefully inadequate to describe the that that we feel.
This breathlessness of Blackness, where the stank air of the status quo and the suffocating stench of “all deliberate speed” gets transformed to give us the air of life, liberty and the pursuit of justice. This is what freedom sounds like. This is what freedom smells like. This is what freedom feels like. A freedom that Little London, Guthrie’s grand-daughter, intuitively understands is hers, as it was her mother’s and her grandfather’s. Yes, we’ve been here before.
