Reflection on Bernice Johnson Reagon
A Song in the Time of Dying

When my children were young we lived in a large, wood frame house on the corner of Ashby and Fair streets in southwest Atlanta, Georgia. 201 Ashby Street. My husband, our daughter and son, and I lived on the second floor of the house. Bernice Johnson Reagon and her family lived on the first floor. Most of my daughter Rachel's earliest memories are from that house: Running in the backyard under the gargantuan black walnut tree with her little brother, Jonathan and with Bernice's children Toshi and Kwan. Watching the Morehouse and Morris Brown marching bands parade down Fair street at homecoming from the perfect vantage point of Bernice's front porch. Following, instinctively, the allure of the thick, warm diapasons of the women rehearsing a cappella in Bernice's living room -- the Harambee Singers.

There were always friends and relatives visiting the Reagon's downstairs. We often visited Bernice's apartment ourselves--sitting in the rocking chair or resting in her brother Junior's hammock in the sunroom. The exciting conversations drew us in quickly and the soft, laughing timbres of Doughtery and Lee county Georgia voices mixed memory and present comfortably in my head. My grandparents, my parents and most of my brothers and sisters were born less than fifty miles away from Bernice's home town. The family moved to Chicago in the early years of the Great Migration, and although I was born up north, the sounds of southern language, southern music and southern love were the sounds of my childhood. Bernice is family. And as my nephews and nieces came to stay with us at various times, they too formed their own interlaced connections with Bernice, Junior, their sister Mae Frances and other members of the extended Johnson clan.

Once, in the late 1960s, my mother's sister, Aunt Hettie, came south. Her only daughter Juanita had recently died and Aunt Hettie was taking it very hard. Hettie and her son, Billy, came first to Atlanta and then went further south to Leesburg, Macon and Albany to see old friends and family there. When they came back to our house from their sojourn in the small towns in southwest Georgia, Hettie was sitting upstairs in the kitchen and my nephew Charles asked Bernice to come up and sing some familiar songs for her. Hal-le-lu, Hal-lelu, Hal-lelu, Bernice began, in the bright-slow, lingering tones of rural black southwest Georgia congregational singing. Hal-le-lu, Hal-lelu my lord. I'm gonna see my friends again, hal-le-lu. As Bernice continued, Aunt Hettie began to hum a little and raise her hand to shake it gently now and again. "Yes, Lord," she would say softly. "That girl knows all the songs," she looked at Charles, smiling. "All them old songs!" Bernice would finish one and ease gentle into another, the thick velvet thread of her contralto lining one hymn seamless into the early moments of the next. Soon Charles added his sweet, full tenor voice to the music and after awhile all in the room slipped back into a place half-in-memory, half-in-heart. A fellowship of mending. Bernice did that for us, for Aunt Hettie, for Juanita. The power in her voice was (and is) an old power. It is a power of trees and turn-rows, of balms and boulders, of aching and making and aching some more. And it is the power of family, of our lacing and unlacing our lives, of our belonging to each other and to those who came before us and to those who left too soon. Rosemarie Freeney Harding May 2000