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  • Writer: Wade Bell
    Wade Bell
  • May 10
  • 2 min read

by

Wade Bell

This piece originally appeared in The Typescript


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Aritha and I last met as we were leaving Shelf Life Books in Calgary after a reading. We hadn’t talked in years but we constructed a street corner conversation as if continuing one from the moment before. She’d read my latest book, she said. First lady of Calgary letters, a writer and scholar whose body of work is rivalled by few, mentor to several students who have gone on to have literary careers, Aritha finds time to keep up with Albertans’ writing.

I knew she liked my work. On the strength of my slim first book of stories she found a phone number for me. I was out of town working. Getting back, I discovered a message inviting me to the inaugural meeting of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.

The meeting was held in an office in Edmonton’s warehouse district. Executives elected and our business concluded, we found ourselves in a nearby strip club. I don’t know which pied piper among us engineered that escapade but I think I can guess. Anyway, for a posse of writers, watching two nude ladies contorting together on an intimate stage proved to be a lesson in fiction as dance.

Oh, and I remember the Porsche. The famous Porsche. “Novel One” was the tag, wasn’t it? Her novel one, Judith, had captured the huge Seal prize. I once saw her driving that sleek speedster around Calgary. She was already a legend.

I don’t think I ever thanked her for including my stories in the anthologies she edited so I do so now.

Little does Aritha know but we may have a slender connection going back to childhood. Growing up in Edberg, AB, she would have been familiar with the charms of the village’s general store. That emporium belonged to my aunt and uncle. As a wee one visiting from Edmonton, I recall thinking that it was a very big place with many cans of different sizes. The cash register dinging and a number popping up behind a glass pane brought laughter from me so my uncle made it happen over and over. I imagine Aritha knew that magic well.

Edberg is a microdot on the prairie. Revered acts come from prairie microdots. Joni Mitchell, kd lang, Buffy Sainte-Marie. Rock bands hated or loved. Aritha van Herk.

 
 
 
  • Writer: Wade Bell
    Wade Bell
  • May 10
  • 1 min read

for Connie, Raz and Gordon

by Wade Bell


Waterfall distant

Silence primal

Scat upon the path

Lone tree yellow

In a twilit field

Sings the song of itself.


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  • Writer: Wade Bell
    Wade Bell
  • Sep 9, 2023
  • 3 min read

Updated: Sep 21, 2023

For my family, Piper, Abbey, Jesse, Emma, Jenn, Julia


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We have an ancestor who was directly responsible for the shape and sound of the music that brightens our mornings and lightens our nights.


She did this by ensuring that the songs American slaves created in the tobacco and cotton plantations were not forgotten when slavery was outlawed.


These songs came to be called gospels. That is, music born of gospel stories sung by forced laborers to provide rhythm for their backbreaking work.


And to help keep them hopeful for everlasting happiness, or at least relief from toil and pain.


Our ancestor was the daughter of a Christian missionary and educator named Milo Cravath. Milo grew up playing host to runaway slaves at his parents’ house in New York State.


Before the Civil War freed the slaves, their house was a station on the Underground Railway. Not a real railway, of course. This one took the escaped slaves from safe house to safe house, usually by night, across the Southern States to freedom in the Northern States and Eastern Canada. The journey could be thousands of miles.


The savage Civil War (more people killed than in any other U.S. war) lasted from 1861 to 1865. Milo Cravath was an army chaplain for the northern forces in battles in Tennessee and Ohio.


Following the war, with slavery outlawed, Milo and two other men established Fisk University, the country’s first university for black people.


Milo purchased land in Nashville, Tennessee and a building was built. He was its initial president and remained president for twenty years.


But back to Milo’s daughter. (I wish I knew her name) Listening to the first Fisk students sing their work songs, she thought to start a choir. She named the choir the Fisk Jubilee Singers. It was made up exclusively of former slaves, some still in their teens.


Milo’s daughter was a go-getter. She toured the choir ambitiously. Skeptical white audiences who attended performances for their novelty value were quickly won over.


The choir was a great success. It toured Europe. Everywhere they went the singers were celebrated for the rhythmic power, vocalizations and profound emotion of their field songs and hollers, and as representatives of the first black university.


Her Fisk choir established gospel music as an American art form. Today it can be heard enlivening congregations, those primarily black and those primarily white.


So, in the cotton and tobacco fields gospel was born. Out of gospel came the blues. Out of the blues evolved jazz, soul, rock and pop. Mixed with traditional British folk ballads brought by settlers to the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas, gospel also developed into country.


Our ancestors played an influential role in the development of America’s music. As educators, they played roles in the struggle for human rights throughout the United States.


Milo Cravath and his daughter were antecedents of Margaret Cravath, your great and great-great grandmother. Their conduct and attitudes influenced Margaret to study to be a teacher. In 1900 she became the first woman to graduate from the University of North Dakota.


I knew her well. She would have been extremely proud of you.


Fisk University still exists. The latest incarnation of the Jubilee Singers still tours the world. To hear them and to learn more about Milo Cravath, search Wikipedia or Google Fisk University’s history.


And as you listen to your music, whatever style fits you, give a thought now and then to our family’s gift to it.


Addendum: Now I know her name. It was Bessie (Elizabeth). The information in this blog post comes mainly from family documents.


 
 
 
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