My husband told me not to take it personal, but I couldn’t help but feel violated in some way. All I wanted to do was sing, but that wasn’t going to be that easy. Let me give you a snapshot of what happened to me a couple of days ago.
I had found a Senior Center that offered a choir program I could participate in once a week. It was going to be fun because the choir wasn’t professional, so I could relax and just sing. The day I started with the G-Notes group was a little darning. I wasn’t for sure how the group would receive me since I was the only person of color present.
“What do you sing,” the pianist/leader asked me.
“Mezzo-soprano with some high notes,” I said.
The women in the Altos section welcomed me to sit with them. By the second meeting, I had earned the respect of the sopranos and joined that section. Lucy was the diva of the three women that sat on the back row.
Most of the women were nice, but hesitated to be acquainted. I remember asking Marion, one of the back row sopranos, a question. Her response was, “Just do what you’re told,” in a commanding voice. I didn’t take her remark personally, and by the end of the year, I felt the back row and the lesser sopranos in front had come to accept me.
In my second year with the choir, the first order of business was to reorganize the choir into sections. I was supposed to sit between Lucy and Marion, moving the third soprano to the front.
After the assignment of seats, I came into the room the following week to find Lucy’s sunglasses and a small purse in my chair. To avoid a conflict, I moved Marion’s book into my chair and took Marion’s seat. All I wanted to do was sing, nothing more then that.
At our first concert, some of the lesser sopranos remarked, “Some of us are singing too loud!” I asked the tenor, who sat next to me, if it was me. Eric said no, that the choir needed strong voices. So, I continued to sing in my same voice at rehearsals and thought no more of it.
At our second gig, after our performance during the social hour, Lucy and one of the lesser sopranos commented again, “We were too loud.”
Marion noted that this was good because most seniors can’t hear. Since then, a number of incidents took place, which pointed to the fact that they were talking about me!
Finally, during a rehearsal a number of coincident occurred. Last week, I came into the room and found no seat for me. This week, as we began to rehearse songs, one of the lesser sopranos informed the choir that Lucy was doing a lovely job of singing the upper notes, but was drown out. The four lesser sopranos in front of the back row all agreed. Now I had to figure out what I was going to do.
After being "isolated" from conversations, and enduring eye rolling episodes, I decided to do nothing and hope the new director would give structure to the choir. Until then I would sing softly but carry a big stick against a problem that looked and felt like discrimination. As I said, all I wanted to do was sing. I have to take it personal.
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- New to the writing world, I live with my husband of twenty years in Chicago, Illinois. I have been retired from the work force for fifteen years doing small jobs to earn money and keep constructively busy. I love to garden and have been painting and drawing all of my life. Although challenged with the English language, I found comfort when writing came into my life in the form of rhyming verses. Poetry was an outlet for emotions I needed to express, and because I am dyslexic, this form was easy for me. Later, after 17 years of research, I wrote and published my first book called People of Difference, which is a paternal genealogy study. It was after writing People of Difference that I decide to try my hand at actually writing a short fictional novel. In 1983, I wrote and published Moments of Feelings – a fictional story about a young girl starting life on her own. I received so much pleasure from writing Moments of Feelings that I decided to learn the trade of writing. Although I haven’t written a lot of poetry since I’ve started my ‘late in life endeavor,’ I am hoping the world will keep me on my toes in developing the skills of writing.