or My Medievalism on the Freeway
by Cord J. Whitaker
Since he released his award-winning mixtape Coloring Book in May of 2016, I have
been listening to a lot of Chance the Rapper. Chano, as he is also known,
includes in his music more explicit references to his Christian faith than any
mainstream hip-hop artist has since at least 2004 when Chance’s mentor Kanye
West released “Jesus Walks.” The instrumental gospel riffs and frequent
inclusions of gospel choir vocals have been more than enough to keep this hip-hop
fan and gospel singer listening.
A few nights ago, I was driving and decided to listen to an
iTunes playlist titled Guest List: Chance
the Rapper. It is a collection of songs from other artists on which Chance
is a featured guest. My best intellectual and emotional work gets done while driving.
This night, something completely unexpected happened: I was forced to reflect
on my medievalism. Thanks to Chance, my medievalism’s roles in my emotional and
intellectual life were suddenly laid out before me like the glimmering asphalt of
the freeway.
 |
| The car I was (to my chagrin, not) driving |
My reverie began when I listened to James Blake’s “Life Round Here,” featuring Chance. James Blake Litherland is a London-based popular
musician whose work is influenced by the electronic music known as dubstep, an
outgrowth of reggae. Since the release of his first album in 2011, he
has released two more albums and gained such worldwide popularity that he has
collaborated with superstars the likes of Beyoncé. His music is notable for its haunting quality. His voice, in a
falsetto that is at once airy and manages to ground its lyrics with weight—the
conflict at times seems otherworldly—floats above the accompanying electronic
music and heavy bass. His is eminently drivable music. It inspires
contemplation, which explains why I was already grooving when one of the
chorus’s lyrics transported me to an earlier time in life.
When Blake, whose London accent is discernible in his singing voice,
sang “Everything feels like touchdown on a rainy day,” I was suddenly back on
the USAir flight that first carried me to London in 1999. I looked out over the
rolling green hills as we approached Gatwick. Farmland, then the orderly homes
of the suburbs. A gray sky that made the green hills that much greener. The tarmac
was wet. It was the first time I had ever crossed the Atlantic, and I would
spend six weeks attending the Cambridge English Literature Summer School and exploring London. I felt a mix of emotions:
excitement about my adventure, and also disappointment that my adventure had
already begun. That part of it—my first transatlantic flight at the tender age
of 19—had already become history. I was joyous and sad. It was like touchdown
on a rainy day.
Thanks to Blake’s soaring voice over heavy bass—a good metaphor for
the paradox of an enormously heavy mass of steel hurtling through the sky as if
it were as light as the air that carries it, i.e., jet flight—I was already primed for
reminiscence when Chance’s voice broke in on the second verse:
I was back in the Cambridge pubs—especially The Anchor—where I spent a
lot of time that summer. I soaked up what it was to be able to have a beer (or three)
legally since I was underage in the States. I soaked up what it was to talk
about Chaucer while punting on the Cam and to read the Miller’s Tale while walking toward Trumpington. I soaked up what it
was to make new friends from around the world while doing these things—while sitting
in a moonlit park singing and talking about Mandeville with new Swiss friends,
for instance. I bought more than one round of English ale for my pals that
summer.
But, like Chance, home—“the Land of Lincoln”—was always on my mind.
It’s not that I was homesick. I wasn’t. Instead, I was amazed at how very at
home I felt in London. Coming from Philly, one of the oldest major cities in
the United States, a town where three-hundred year-old brick buildings are
regularly nestled between steel and glass towers, London’s own mix of the
medieval, early modern, and modern felt just like home. Indeed, in London I
felt the same things that make Philly home, but even more intensely. To this day, every
time I land in London, the Land of Franklin is all on my mind.
Chance, with James Blake, reminds me what it is to touchdown on a
rainy day, to make new friends, to imagine my future by playing in the past,
and to leave home in order to feel more at home.
When the song ended, I thought my reverie had come to an end. Then the
playlist continued.
I heard Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” featuring Chance, in a way I
had not heard it before, and my thoughts shifted from how I became a medievalist to why.
With lyrics including “This is a God dream,” “So why you send oppression
not blessings?,” and “Don’t have much strength to fight so I look to the
light,” “Ultralight Beam” reminds me of my upbringing in the African Methodist
Episcopal Church. While those lyrics are delivered by West and the gospel
superstar Kelly Price, Chance delivers the most Africanist of all the lines
when he raps, “Foot on the Devil’s neck ‘til it drifted Pangaea / I’m moving
all my family from Chatham to Zambia.” Referring to St. Michael standing on
Satan’s neck, Chance explains in a now deleted tweet that he meant that he stands
on the devil’s neck with such force that it causes continental drift.
The lyric
references Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement while overlaying it with the
theory that North America, Europe, and Africa were once one contiguous land
mass. The lyric implies that African Americans should consider returning to
Africa. At the same time, it refers to a time when the lands and peoples of the
world were united. The lyric therefore suggests that African Americans have
never really left Africa.
An intellectual and spiritual focus on the united African diaspora
characterized my upbringing in a church, founded in eighteenth-century
Philadelphia, that celebrates its historical roles in the process of black
empowerment in both the US North and South—before emancipation, during
Reconstruction, through Jim Crow, and in the Civil Rights movement. At the same
time, a church ensconced in American race politics has also grown to become a
connectional organization of millions of adherents around the globe, including
on the African continent.
The AME Church’s liturgy was even more important than Philly’s mix of
the old and the new in making me a medievalist. I studied elocution in church, though
not so much in school. The church’s eighteenth-century liturgy made up much of
my material. I used to ponder why God judged “the quick and the dead” rather than the living and the dead. I found
myself fascinated by the fact that Jesus “sitteth”
at the right hand of God the father. The
‘archaic’ English that persists in the AME liturgy has been forgotten by the
United Methodist Church, from which the AME church split over racial prejudice
in 1787. It captivated me: the church preserved older forms of language in
order to show African Americans’ mastery of and claim to the history of
Methodism. It also demonstrated and claimed a history of American identity and
the English language on the whole for African Americans. The language of the
founders was, and is, sacred.
Affirming the connection between my African Methodist faith and my
interest in the English past was the fact that the only person I knew well with
a British accent was a member of the church—Mrs. Betty Martin Combs, a dear
friend of my family who had married an American serviceman and immigrated to
the US from her native Liverpool decades before. When I told her I wanted to go
to England, she put me in touch with her brother, Tom, a London-based social
worker and former football star. He and his tight-knit group of friends
introduced me to black London and have become my ‘London family.’
At home in London and with friends who are like family there, I was
not satisfied with studying the eighteenth century. I was, after all,
surrounded by that period’s legacy at home in Philly. Now in my new,
surprising, and therefore more exciting home, I wanted to know where it came
from that we use –eth at the end of a
verb in the third person singular. I wanted to dig deeper into the fact that learning
about medieval Catholicism was already giving me a deeper understanding of and
appreciation for AME doctrine, despite the latter’s direct descent from
contemporary Methodism. Most of all, mastering and delighting in a past that is
all too often considered homogeneously white—the Middle Ages—struck me as
thoroughly within the historic and radical spirit of African Methodism.
This radical spirit came to mind again when I heard Chance compare
himself to Harriet Tubman. Not one for modesty, he calls himself “Tubman of the
underground,” and invites others to “come and follow the trail.” In another
tweet, Chance refers to this as his favorite lyric of the song. Commentators on
genius.com point out that Chance has rapped elsewhere about his efforts to create pathways for underground hip-hop artists to go mainstream without
signing exploitative deals with big record labels. Perhaps Chance can back up his immodest claim. He is, after all,
taking on an entrenched business model that has been exploiting black artists
since well before hip-hop became a mainstream form. Perhaps he really is leading other artists to freedom. At very least, I
can attest that his radical embrace of his Christian faith in his now mainstream
music produces a feeling of freedom in me. When I’m listening to his rhymes
while flowing down the freeway, I do feel free. Free the same way I feel when
I’m reading medieval literature.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to follow Chance in calling myself a
“Tubman,” I will say that medieval literature is a trail worth following. And
if I happen to lead a few more scholars of color, whether professional or
amateur, to the intellectual and spiritual freedom I find in studying medieval
literature, I will consider myself having done good and faithful service.
Finally, good and faithful service is exactly what I aim to offer as
the newest blogger on In the Middle.
I am grateful to have been asked and excited to join the team. Here’s to the
intellectual and spiritual freedom this blog has been inspiring for years—and
to many more years of the same!
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