Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 2, 1993 TAG: 9302020329
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ADRIAN BLEVINS-CHURCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
MY SON lies, 3 days old, in a cradle-on-wheels. There's a plastic bubble over his head. He's in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of the local hospital, having been rushed here by ambulance. There are tubes in his arms and nose, there are bruises from the nurses trying to insert IVs into his uninviting newborn skin, and there's an alarm that will sound if his breathing stops.There's a baby across the room in a tent that looks something like the tents that cover the caskets and mourners at funeral ceremonies, and even from this distance I can hear her slow, rasping, infected breaths in and out, in and out. Beside my son lies a 10-year-old who's in a coma as the result of an automobile accident. He's been mumbling ever since we got here, kicking this way and that, and he's not covered by a sheet or even wearing a diaper.
I'm trembling of course, and I'm very afraid for my child and for all of these children. Still, I won't pray.
Instead, I sing the folk songs my father used to sing to me when as a child I woke from my sleep with an earache. I'd come down the stairs crying and he'd pour out a bit of his bourbon for me in my favorite cartoon glass. He'd lift me beside him on the couch and pick up his guitar. He'd sing, "Oh, the fox went out on a stormy night and prayed for the moon to give him light," until I fell back to sleep beside him.
More than just an earache disappeared when my father sang. My fear of math, of the divorce of my parents, of a sister who could do cartwheels all over the place - all of it dissipated as my father lowered me kindly and with song into a deep, comforted sleep.
I sit in the hospital with my son; despite the stares of doctors and nurses, I sing. I sing because I want him to know I'm here. I sing because I want him to feel the other side of desperation, which is hope. I sing every song I know and don't and, along about 2 in the morning, I begin it all over again. I sing until the doctors finally send my son home.
I sing today, years later, though he is much too busy to notice.
When my grandmother, 80, is recovering from her hip surgery - she's high and weird on morphine - one of the women from her church comes for a visit. I am reading beside my grandmother's bed, trying every once in a while to reassure her that the hallucinations of cats on the bed and large men in the windows will fade, when the lady from the church asks grandmother if together they can pray. Granny, close as she's been all day to another fit of vomiting, says blankly, "Hell, no."
Later, after she's much better, I tell her this story. She won't believe it. Not only is such a response unimaginable from a woman who'd grown up well-educated and mostly well-off in the congenial South - not only is such a response rude, but it is also nearly sacrilege. Or so my grandmother thinks since the morphine's worn off.
But I understand "hell, no." "Hell to prayer," to my grandmother, meant I'm not going to die, just as my refusal to pray when my son was in the hospital meant my refusal to give in to desperation.
Prayer is what most of us resort to when we feel hopeless against situations within which we have no authority and no control. When we pray, we beg for divine intervention, and I've yet to see a miracle that wasn't man- or woman-made. When we pray, we give up our own resolve to see a situation to a positive end.
If we choose, instead, to sing, we take at least a little responsibility, and we take it with our voices. It's what the slaves did, what poetry and the blues are. For us to sing, not only during a celebration but also during moments of fear and incapacity, is for us in all our absolute powerlessness to assert, for a time, something like power.
\ AUTHOR Adrian Blevins-Church is a Fincastle writer.