The Necessity of Cumbayah Moments

I’m reposting this journal post as I launch my new website and reclaim my gifts as a song channeler and sound healer.

I was once on a workshop design call in which my co-facilitator and I asked participants what they hoped would come out of an upcoming 2-day social justice and equity workshop, as well as what they hoped wouldn’t happen. Of all the responses given, the one that stood out was “I hope we won’t just have lots of Kumbaya moments that don’t lead to anything.” 

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard aversion towards Kumbaya moments. 

I recall a gathering of leaders of community-based organizations who were envisioning how they might collaborate in their youth-led racial healing programs. After a morning of reflection on the strengths and challenges experienced in each model, I led participants in a guided meditation in which they visualized what would be happening in their communities if their programs were successful. 

As we broke for lunch, a new participant joined the group and asked what she had missed. Someone summarized the morning reflection and added, in what sounded like a mildly mocking tone, that the morning ended with a Kumbaya moment. 

From these and other instances, I gather that Kumbaya moments, for those who are wary of them, are times of building relationships, connecting with our hearts, and centering Spirit. From the skeptical, I get the sense that these practices are not considered harmful in and of themselves, but are luxuries, distractions, and indulgences given the real work of making our communities more just and equitable. 

For many, Kumbaya conjures up images of hippies around a campfire earnestly singing in unison, imploring people to just get along, while they themselves maintain distance from the impacts of racialized violence, late stage capitalism, climate catastrophes, militarization and occupation. I invite you to listen to this rendition of Cumbayah by Sweet Honey in the Rock to help disrupt this image of appropriation. 

In this recording, which features a tapestry of voicings accompanied by an infectious hand-clapped rhythm, I hear a powerful prayer that is solidly grounded in the urgency of the moment. In Sweet Honey in the Rock’s rich harmonies, each differently textured voice sounds fully and weaves intricately with the others. Sweet Honey’s embodiment of this song brings to life a vision of the community I want to live in. 

The song is also made powerful by rhythms that require no more than the human body. You can sound out this song anywhere – in the streets, the board room, the public hearing, the bank vestibule, the court room, the CEO’s front lawn, the Senate floor - not just where instruments can be set up or plugged in. 

And then there is the song’s herstory. 

While there are different versions of Cumbayah’s origin story, the one most likely is that it was a song of the Gullah Geechee people of the Sea Islands of Georgia. According to Dr. Althea Sumpter, an independent scholar who focuses on preserving the work of her Gullah Geechee elders, the Gullah Geechee culture has been “linked to specific West African ethnic groups who were enslaved on island plantations to grow rice, indigo, and cotton starting in 1750, when antislavery laws ended in the Georgia colony.” According to Dr. Sumpter, Gullah Geechee people resisted the prohibitions of enslavement and sustained ethnic traditions from one generation to the next through language, agriculture, and spirituality. (Source: Winick, Stephen. “History of an Old Song.” Library of Congress. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2018/02/kumbaya-history-of-an-old-song/)

When heard against this backdrop of herstory, Cumbayah is transformed from a naïve panacea for peace to a call for action amidst the most oppressive of conditions. 

In the earliest sound recording of Cumbayah, the song is sung by a singer identified as H. Wylie. In the singer’s dialect, which is most likely a form of Gullah, the word “here” is pronounced as “yah”. This seems to be one of many factors leading to the song’s English translation: Come By Here. 

HERE.

By the 1940’s, Cum Ba Yah was widespread among African Americans in the South. 

“Here” reveals the song’s potency given the contexts in which it was sung. 

Come by HERE at a mass march on the mayor’s office in Talladega, Alabama where students protesting police brutality are met with tear gas grenades and bully sticks.

Come by HERE in a public bathroom where Theodosia Gaither Simpson, a member of the Tobacco Workers Organizing Committee, is meeting with women workers at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem, NC  to plan a sit down strike to let management know how workers are going to be treated.

Come by HERE at the Indianola, Mississippi Courthouse where Fannie Lou Hamer stands with 17 Black citizens who registered to vote but are denied their voting rights due to an unfair literacy test.

Come by HERE where Freedom Riders on a Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama are surrounded by a crowd who hurl rocks and a grenade through smashed windows forcing the riders to leave the bus amidst flames and smoke.

Come by HERE at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro where four Black students are being served after they catalyze a wave of sit ins across several North Carolina cities. 

Far from touchy-feely, these Cumbayah moments are ones in which courage is called upon in the face of atrocity and reclamation is practiced in the face of dehumanization. 

The next time we are in the midst of a Cumbayah moment, 

a moment when the forces of oppression are bearing down on us,

a moment when we sense a power greater than us fortifying our strength and vision,

a moment when our shared humanity is illuminated by a deep sense of interconnectedness,

I hope we remember how essential these moments are to our work for healing, justice and liberation.