Ephata

by Evan Smith

My grandmother died and the world slowly fell empty, not of people, but of a song. Her song. She did not sing to me; it wasn’t her singing that drifted away, but a song I didn’t know I’d been hearing all my life, and when she left, I heard it as it died.

I was thinking a lot about song when she died. I had just learned of the Mambai of Indonesia and their two forms of ritual song: keo and beha. In keo, they make a lot of noise; in beha, there is none. Keo is their gift to the world, which in their accounting, is silent: birds do not make music, nor does the wind in the trees. The Mambai impress the silent world with voice through keo, and the world gives them life in return. Their rituals, their places of song, show them as part of the working of nature, the spontaneous processes that require no human guidance. Without keo, they have no life, and with it, their place in the world becomes natural. The Mambai have remembered something that mechanized modernity is making us forget: our noisemaking ignores the life of nature which we have put on a rack to torture of her secrets. Instead of singing the world, we are silencing it. They hope to make her sing, while we’ve deliberately set out to make her scream. The Mambai see themselves as obliged to give and so have keo from which they receive so much more in return – an incorporation into nature. Since my grandmother’s passing, I have given far more thought to listening to the songs of life, yet it was my grandmother’s passing that led me to see song, not like the Mambai as what we give, but as a gift. The silence after my grandmother died made me face what I’d stopped hearing: certain trees and birds, a very special creek, and winds through a gully along an old dirt road in the sticks of Mississippi.

What if we are feeding off a song? What if we need to be sung to like the birds and trees of the Mambai? What if, until we are sung to, we are soundless and lifeless? What if we are sung into existence? If so, then this life, this song, that we are born out of as one of its notes or chords – how do we hear it? The eye can’t see itself nor the ear hear itself. If the answer to all these “what ifs” is “yes,” what does it take to hear the song? My hunch: we don’t know what we are hearing until the music stops, until the natural is stripped away to reveal that it was second nature, a shaping in the key of the Smith clan. And the dance we didn’t know we were dancing, if it stops as well, at last comes into view. If all this is so, we are forever making music that only others are hearing. They can’t hear their song; I can’t hear mine – until the song changes.

So, there I stood, back in a place that I had known as a boy. Yokena. In the 1940’s, my grandfather had bought this land, an emptiness off Route 61, south of Vicksburg. He worked the docks along the Mississippi, where my grandmother spotted him one day. They lived in town, upon the cliffs, the last house abutting the battlefield. In 1944, my father, their third boy, was born in that house, and in the next year, the first that Vicksburg had celebrated Independence Day since the Civil War, my grandparents packed up the family and headed to this spot. Tall loblolly pines, with their young, banana-yellow cones, once flanked what I thought was the longest driveway in the world. For many years, Rural Route 2 was nothing but a red clay road, and that driveway but an extension of its cut into the wild wood. Peach, plum, and apricot trees, my grandfather’s retirement hobby, grew on the land – and still do. This man, who hunted his forests into his 90’s, ventured nourishing a banana tree, and though Mississippi is often kind to the banana, his bunches never matured. Thinking of those ill-fated bananas, I felt my age, and my sister’s, brother’s, my parents’ and of the educational trajectories that had pulled us all apart and made returning home look like failure. What I began to hear, I think, was time collapsing in song, the song of the land and of the lives it nourished, both of ours – its transplants and grafts growing in the deserts of the city – and of hers, my grandmother’s which had just stopped singing.

They planted much in their land, and I stood looking, beneath the oaks, in the front yard, onto the former Route 2 turned blacktop-covered Wright Rd and listened and tried to hear something, and I did. I heard a silence coming over the song of that land – a song I had only just begun to hear. It was the oddest opening of my ears. What had always seemed, until then, just normal sank gently out of earshot and as it did, it became clear and bright as the song of my grandmother and my grandfather: every visit, five different dogs, each with tall tales of its battle against ticks; hiding from the hogs inside a barn; admiring the catfish pond; admiring my grandfather’s bark “don’ hep me, bo’ah,” as he shook off my or anyone’s offers to assist him. And the creek. To my boyhood mind, that vein of water through my grandfather’s land lay outside time, and no map could ever place it. We traveled along its depressed banks, with its steep cliffs blocking us from the world above, and we melted away. And there was the smell of my grandparents, my grandfather’s tobacco, my grandmother’s biscuits that she cooked every morning.

The land – an extension of the connection I felt to my family – is now, somehow, divvied up between my father and his three siblings. It’s silent to me now and fallow. I, in my deafness, tilled it as I danced and played in the song my grandparents were. Standing there, reflecting on the cutting of the land, in the silence, I heard the slow severing that time has worked on my family – and which it works, eventually, on all things – and I came to believe that we all are part of a great song, parts of which we are and do not hear until time pushes us into other chords and keys. Another pushing and pulling of our time, however, – that of the machine economy – is siphoning us, like extracted minerals, to the cities through the conveyor belts of competitive schools doling out prestige. But to have song, we need places for it – and not a threshing floor but an orchestra for the dance.