Memories of Home:
Toepke & Serrano's The Language You Cry In (1998)

Purpose: to examine ethnohistorical and interdisciplinary historical method as recorded on film.

Source: Alvaro Toepke and Angel Serrano's film The Language You Cry In (1998), Sierra Leone/Spain.

Method: document the process by which a story becomes history.

[From the filmmakers:] "The Language You Cry In tells an amazing scholarly detective story reaching across hundreds of years and thousands of miles from 18th-century Sierra Leone to the Gullah people of present-day Georgia. It recounts the even more remarkable saga of how African Americans retained links with their African past through the horrors of the middle passage, slavery and segregation. The film dramatically demonstrates the contribution of contemporary scholarship to restoring what narrator Vertamae Grosvenor calls the 'non-history' imposed on African Americans: 'This is a story of memory, how the memory of a family was pieced together though a song with legendary powers to connect those who sang it with their roots.'

"The Language You Cry In traces the history of this song, a burial hymn of the Mende people brought by slaves to the rice plantations of the Southest coast [of the United States] more than two hundred years ago. It was preserved there for generations, though the meaning og the words were forgotten until a pioneering Black linguist, Lorenzo Turner, recognized its origin in the 1930s. In the 1990s contemporary scholars Joe Opala and Cynthia Schmidt discovered that the song was still remembered in a remote village in Sierra Leone. An old woman had learned it from her grandmother who made the remarkable prediction that this song would help her recognize some long-lost kinfolk. The film concludes with the moving homecoming of the Gullah family which had preserved the song in America to the Mende villagers who reenact the ancient burial ritual for them."

AMELIA'S SONG

Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay tambay
Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay kah.
Ha suh wileego seehai yuh gbangah lilly
Ha suh wileego dwelin duh kwen
Ha suh wileego seehi uh kwendaiyah.

Everyone come together, let us work hard;
the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace.
Everyone come together, let us work hard:
the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be at peace at once.
Sudden death commands everyone's attention,
like a firing gun.
Sudden death commands everyone's attention,
oh elders, oh heads of family
Sudden death commands everyone's attention,
like a distant drum beat.

(translated by Tazieff Koroma, Edward Benya and Joseph Opala)

   

Questions to Think About:

1) What are the sources of evidence underneath this detective story? Whose cooperation was necessary in order to tell this story? What challenges did the scholars (and filmmakers) face?

2) What are the implications for the representativeness of this history?

3) What are the methods employed in researching this history? What are the disciplinary origins of those methods? How are the kinds of evidence uncovered governed by those disciplinary-based methodologies of research?

4) What are the methods used in telling this story? Whose stories are told? Whose stories are still untold?

Further resources and readings:

Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Pantheon, 1974).

John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1972).

Charles Joyner, Down By the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (University of Illinois Press, 1984).

Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father's House are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Politicla Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford University Press, 1995).

Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, eds., The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (Oxford University Press, 1997).

Source for the video: California Newsreel, www.newsreel.org, 415-621-6196; Specific information about the film: http://www.newsreel.org/films/langyou.htm.

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for courses in The Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Fall Semester 2001. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
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