The "Five Civilized Tribes" on the Trail of Tears weren't dressed in breech cloths. Some wore suits and dresses. They'd been neighbors--even friends--of white folks moving into the Southern states for some time, more assimilated into American culture than you might imagine. But they’d become, as all Native people were to white folks, "in the way," so President Jackson and his own Congressional hostiles moved them out to what would become Oklahoma. Of the 15,000 Creeks, 3500 were buried on the trail.
They’d all come from Dixie, where they’d owned the land they’d farmed and were often wealthy enough to own slaves they brought with them to Indian Territory. Homesick and heartsick, slaves and slave-holders alike were soon impoverished. The Omaha people lived in fear of being deported; Poncas and Northern Cheyenne flat refused, chose death instead.
A man named Alexander Reid, a graduate of Princeton, took a teaching position after seminary and was sent to the Spencer School in Indian Territory, a school for Choctaw boys. In the years before the Civil War, Reid got to know an ex- slave couple named Wallace and Minerva Willis, who had belonged to a Choctaw man, but were given to Rev. Reid for employment at the school.
I would never have heard of Alexander Reid if it weren’t for Sheldon Jackson, one of the three names inscribed on Sioux City’s Prospect Hill, First and Bluff. Sheldon Jackson’s first position after seminary was at that same Spencer School. That’s the only link there is to our own Prospect Hill monument, but when you stumble on stories this good, you just have to tell ‘em.
Old Wallace and Minerva Willis were pure delight to school boys, who loved to hear their "plantation songs," the spirituals they took along from the cotton fields. After supper, the Willises would sit together out on their porch and sing through a repertoire Rev. Reid himself grew to admire so greatly he took down lyrics and melodies because he didn't want those plantation songs forgotten once Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva stopped singing altogether.
When Reid's wife died, he left Oklahoma and returned to New Jersey, where one night he attended a concert by the Fisk Jubilee Singers--all "plantation songs." When it was over, the Fisk choirmaster told the audience where they'd be singing over the weekend, then noted that what the choir had offered that night were all the songs they knew. If people decided to attend another concert, they shouldn't be sad to hear the same songs. That’s all they had, he said.
Alexander Reid sauntered up later and told the singers he knew songs as beautiful as anything he’d heard. From memory, he taught them a few melodies from Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva, including pieces called "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Steal Away,” and more.
You’ve heard them maybe?
For decades, ethnographers have insisted that "Negro spirituals" were less "spiritual" than they were lightly disguised, heartfelt slave dreams of freedom.
I'd like to think those ethnologists are right, that "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" may be as much a wish for freedom as it is for heaven's glory. Whatever import may be in those call-and-response lyrics--"comin' forth to carry me home"—the history records that the Fisk Jubilee Singers began including Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva's blessed melodies in their concerts, including the concert they gave later in England for Queen Victoria.
From an evening hymn on the porch of two beloved Choctaw ex-slaves in Indian Territory, all the way across the pond to the royals at Buckingham Palace, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" became one of the most beloved melodies in world musical literature.
I don't know that we can tell that story often enough or hear those hymns, all about the triumph of hope on each of our own Trails of Tears.
