We Were Transformed into Angels

This is how we must have seemed to Mrs. Hopkinson on that strange day.

It was in the middle of my eighth grade year, at a time when Clarence and I had been friends for almost two years, that Mrs. Hopkinson decided to teach the class to sing barbershop harmony. The voices of the boys had changed sufficiently so that there were several baritones, if not basses, if the parts did not go too low.

The girls were to sing soprano, and the other boys were divided into altos and tenors. As with all of Mrs. Hopkinson’s projects, we all refused to sing, and the singing we did do was not enough to really drown out the ceiling fan.

I think Mrs. Hopkinson chose barbershop harmony because it is constructed from such a simple sequence of vertical chords. All the singers just hop together from one chord to the next, unlike actual part music such as a madrigal where the lines weave in and out and each has a specific identity.

Mrs. Hopkinson overlooked two aspects of barbershop, however, that doomed her project to failure from the start. The first was that the music was the music of our parents' age and we perceived it as stupid and mawkish. The second was that the chord progressions are dissonant for long periods of time, and then end in sickeningly sweet chords. The harmonies were gibberish to a child. The fact was, even if I exerted all my little singing skills to rescue Mrs. Hopkinson and give her a success she so wanted I could not have done it. Barbershop was not going to happen in music class at Hughes school, 1958, Utica, New York. No, something rich and strange was shaping up, no one could have expected it.

There was no school bus in Utica in 1958. School was a mile from my home. School was also a mile from Clarence’s apartment in the new low-rent housing project that had been built in the South end. Each day Clarence and I would meet at the corner of Sunset and Arnold Avenue and walk to school. We would walk home at lunch, return in the afternoon, and then walk together to the same mailbox in the evening.

We were kids, and our conversation was circumspect to the point of being cryptic and coded. We didn’t read books, we did not have opinions about things, we did not have much to say. We walked together shoulder to shoulder. A fragment of conversation might have been, on some bitterly cold winter day:

“If somebody tells you to put your tongue on a mail box, don't ever do it.”
"Why not?”
“Because the saliva on your tongue will freeze to the box, and your tongue gets ripped out.”
"Do you know anybody who ever did?"
"I said never do it.”
"Do you think a woman's parts hang down like a man's parts, but have a slit in the end like Mike says?”
No answer.
“Do you think Mike and his father really went fishing on Saturday and lassoed a hundred pound turtle?”
“Mike doesn’t have a father.”
Clarence informed me that Mike, who lived in the projects and made himself an unwanted third on the way to school with us sometimes, was a congenital liar.

One day Clarence said, “Can you sing a bass line?”
“Yes,” I said, “can you?”
He replied in the affirmative, and I asked him how he could be sure he could sing a bass line.
“I sing the bass line in the hymns in church every Sunday.”
“Let’s sing the shit out of the bass line in Mrs. Hopkinson's class this afternoon.”
It was going to be our Star Spangled Banner.

But it was not barbershop that Mrs. Hopkinson handed out that day. It was Negro spirituals. The first was "Over Jordan.”

We sang it through and then Clarence and I began to sing in a mock basso profoundo, emotional way. But neither of us could keep it up. We were so deeply and tearingly wrought up by the sound of it that we began to truly sing. The rest of the class became completely silent, and Clarence and I sang the entire work as a bass duet. Then another. Then another.

Feebly at first, the other parts began to enter in, trying to find the key, trying to see if they too could put their heads into the Nirvana that Clarence and I had found. And they did find it. Gradually the classroom was filled with the most stupendous music one could imagine. Kids, singing about suffering and death.

The music room produced such a volume of sound that twice during the class the door opened and other teachers and the principal himself looked in.

Class ended. Class was dismissed. Mrs. Hopkinson said, gesturing to Clarence and I, “Just a minute.”

We went over to her desk and she said, “I want to thank you boys for giving me the happiest day of my life.”

So that is why I say that Clarence saved me in eighth grade. But I know my reader might object and say that that is just a contrived way of looking at it. After all, it was my father who had saved me really. It was he who had given me the skills that made that day so memorable. And you would have thought I would have rushed home to tell him about it but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

He had been dead already for a year.