Stand Up Straight and Sing! by Jessye Norman Page A

was really an amazing time, because although we all led distinctly individual lives, this strong sense of community bound us together. Everybody was interconnected and naturally supportive of one another. Everybody knew everybody else, what the parents did for a living, which church member failed to show up for Sunday service, and the like. There was much talk about the cooking skills of the church ladies, and everyone knew which of the women on the usher board made the best casseroles and which deaconess you could count on to bring the perfect lemon pound cake to share after Bible study. Our corner of the world was, in the purest sense of the word, a true village “raising children,” and I learned from the best the importance of protecting that village—being there for one another.
    We kids took those cues and applied them to our own interactions with one another. We moved as a unit, my little group of friends. It was composed of boys and girls, and no one gave it a second thought. We did everything together—chorus rehearsals and club activities in school, youth social clubs at our various churches, and surely in Scouts and Y-Teens. The friendships were uncomplicated because, in spite of the indignity of Jim Crow laws and the hostile atmosphere created by the desperate and often despicable behavior of whites who continued to rail against those of us “in the struggle,” we felt an unerring sense that “this was our country, too,” because our communities and our parents and our history said so. Our very lives were protected by a deep sense of belonging, by our friendships, our parents, the village. Gender differences played little role in those bonds, even when we reached the age when boys and girls started to have different kinds of friendships and some in our group began to date. The funny part was that until it was stated otherwise, we all expected to accompany the friend from our group and his or her new love interest when they went out as a couple. It seemed completely normal to us to be together and share everything. When I think of this, it is really quite hilarious. But we were innocent of any jealousy or anything of that kind; our tight-knit group was built on a foundation of immeasurable trust—the kind we saw amongst our parents and the adults in our community and in our clubs and church pews.
    My siblings and I speak of this often and wonder how the parents of the day managed it all: raising children and taking care of a home and tending to all of their various responsibilities within the community and the church and the many different organizations to which they belonged. My mother’s responsibilities as the church auditor alone took up a huge portion of at least one of her Saturdays every month. She was tasked with publishing the names of every member of the church and every club in the church and what financial support they’d contributed to Mount Calvary that month. She did this on a manual Remington Rand typewriter. I can recall so easily the smell of the typewriter ribbon, and of the red rubber eraser with the little plastic tassel at the other end. I used to marvel at how she never looked at her fingers on the keys as she typed. When I think about the technology available today, I imagine how much easier it all would have been for my mother to manage if she’d had one of these fancy word processors with the newest of software. But even using what today we consider rather ordinary tools, her reports were never late. She and my father would go over to the church on Saturday, open the glass doors that housed the bulletin board in the lobby, and post the information, page after page, for everyone to see when they arrived at church the next morning. Since you could look at this and see what every member and every club donated for the month, it was probably a good incentive to pay your tithes! But my mother’s work and intentions were concerned fully in that she had a job to do and she felt it her