Nashville
By Francis C. Macansantos
If anything can make me long to return to Nashville, it would surely be the memory of the homes bordering the very first waves and frills of its outskirts. Each dwelling there is so exquisitely designed, so discreetly spaced off from the rest – by at least two car-lengths of lawn or arbor – they surely were planned with sensitivity and taste. They became icons in my memory, each a fitting emblem of the good life.
Often as not, particularly after a harrowing, seemingly fruitless day of research, the slanting rays of the late afternoon Nashville sun would find my wife and I taking a leisurely walk along the lanes lined with these very houses. After all, we lived in an apartment from which a few of them were visible. The beauty and charm would never fail. We would walk and watch till footsore, or till dusk overtook us. The power of these man-made dwellings to enchant us seemed never to diminish. No two looked exactly alike, and when two happened to have a similar design, they were set apart by a couple of houses.
The first time we took these walks, the mansions suddenly looming before us bordered with towering Arcadian elms simply took our breath away. However, our delight was often tinged with sadness and longing. Like most of us in the country we call home, my wife and I do not yet have a house of our own, much less one that would fit in among the rows of splendor arrayed before us in Nashville.
Under the spell of such sights, each graced by the peace and privacy of its own apportioned space, I began to understand the essential reason why immigrant Filipinos love America. The country affords self-respect. The very absence of fences in American communities, that at first sight shocks the Filipino in us with its seeming laxity, in the end fills us with admiration for the air of trust and mutual respect that it so subtly helps to establish. What at first seems anomalous turns out to be a form of positive reinforcement. Mutual trust among neighbors? Incredible. But it does seem to be a way of life, despite all the news reports of crime. For Filipino immigrants, the decision to stay comes, likely, in the form of a radical conversion. The contrast between dignity in a foreign land and squalor at home must often be much too stark for them to simply ignore. The goal, surely, is not mere economic sufficiency but essential well-being.
Strangely, though, in our family’s nearly half a year’s stay in Nashville, we met few Filipinos, really no more than the number of fingers on one’s hand. So it’s really an open country out there, and should be great for Filipino troubadours, who are all over the world anyway. Moreover, Nashville is America’s music city, counting among its residents several who have made it to the country music hall of fame. The original Hard Rock Café is housed in an enormous brick building in downtown Nashville. Other venues in other cities may dispute its authenticity as the original site, but embossed on its wall facing the street is a plaque of recognition from no less than the American Historical Institute. So there – and though the brick hulk does not seem to resound from within with anything resembling a musical earthquake, it does, indeed, look like the rock of Rock. And, being the compleat Music City, Nashville is no less than the capital, too, of Folk – which makes me really wonder why we Flips, so enamored of Elvis, Kenny Rogers, and Patti Page should so neglect Nashville as a place of pilgrimage.
Nashville, the first big city to be seen if one travels north (north, anyway, of that thick-set behemoth Houston in the southernmost state of Texas) has a token number of sky-scrapers that somewhat suffices to allow its inclusion among cities of size in America. The Cumberland River meanders through, and on its slow, brown stream, a tourist steamboat providing musical entertainment cruises at its leisure. Occasionally, the sound of its lonely horn can be heard rising from the Cumberland Valley. All around the city is a wide expanse of wooded hills. Country terrain surrounds it and extends far beyond sight.
I saw Tennessee for the first time from the plane taking me into the state from Detroit, my entry-point into America. Viewed from the air, Al Gore’s Tennessee seemed nothing more to me than interminably hilly. To one whose boyhood imagination had been captivated by the Davy Crockett song that begins with the lyric “Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,” the eagerness for a view of tall peaks died. Just another Hollywood hoax, I thought to myself. Surely the lyrics were just as false as the self-serving heroics of the doomed land-grabbers of Alamo infamy, including, of course, Crockett himself. But don’t quote me in Tennessee!
All in all, for me no sight in this southern state is more beautiful and memorable – memorable because it warms the heart so – than the dreamlike stream of houses flowing past me as I walked: The unattainable, the place where – to refute Robert Frost – no fences make good neighbors.
(I had been to America before. I had lived and worked in Delaware for more than half a decade in the nineties. Were the sights in Tennessee really so uncommon in the rest of the U.S.A.? Why had I been less charmed then? Perhaps I was too homesick up there in the snowy north, and still so full of eagerness to return to the home country, to apply myself to the continuing task of expanding the new democratic space now made available by the downfall of Marcos. Then, I had felt truly exiled in America. What made things worse was that most of the Filipino friends I had back then were dismissive, even contemptuous of the homeland. I found their enticements to immigration ridiculous, merely a ruse from lonely exiles whose misery craved company. I was not looking at the houses in Delaware with any kind of longing or even envy. Perhaps that is the reason why I don’t remember them with any appreciable vividness. To speak plainly, I had not been fascinated.)
An invitation from old friends to revisit Delaware and its neighbor, Pennsylvania, came midway through our stay in Tennessee. That set me to wondering if the houses up north would captivate me with their beauty just like those in the south. Well, the answer did come soon as I flew in. Yes, I was enthralled. I had new eyes, after all, transformed by a new longing. Of course, once in a great while, I would see a fence, but they were to keep pets from wandering.
Soon enough, in the homes of friends up north – Filipinos or Filipinas married to Americans, or Filipinos married to Filipinas, though both already American citizens – I found such blends not incongruous with fresher eyes. Indeed, they seemed to augur an even greater promise of openness and sharing. Had I been blind to the evidence of such marital felicity back then? We visited, too, the home of a Filipino couple who have stayed together longer than some Filipino partners back home. That human values had unexpectedly survived humbled me – but also filled me with joy – and in the flow of fellow feeling among such friends, I found myself oddly nostalgic, longing for my Delaware days, as though the foreign land were my true home.
I had not known back then that I was in for a blow – a trumpet-blast, perhaps from no less than Dvorak’s New World Symphony, particularly that overarching hymn-like oboe passage that plaintively evokes the vast, endless land. The word that seemed to sing in me was immigration – and that pestiferous lyric couldn’t be shooed away even as I returned to Music City and, hand in hand with my wife, walked once more among those houses. Squalor back home. Indeed, the desire to live as Americans do, without water or sewage problems, with easy financing and jobs that sustain the lifestyle – such mundane considerations attain the level of poetry to the deprived, and fuel the massive departures from our native land – and from other native lands.
Were immigration rules as lax now as they used to be before 9/11, I might have taken the popular Filipino option. After all, only America can give humanity both freedom and bread – right? Of course, in the movie based on E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, the naive European anarchists, newly arrived in the Midwest, get blasted to pieces by U.S. army artillery (the scene filmed in slow motion, accompanied by the discordant strains of another section of the aforementioned Dvorak piece) and end up splattered like manure on the very soil they had hoped to till. That scene of massacre is based on an incident in history, and should be fair warning to any would-be freedom-fighters who would persist in their ways long after arriving in America.
Once, long ago, America did become the land of immigrants – immigrants from England – and by the ancient right of conquest. The main “obstacles” were Asiatics, inhabitants of the Northern continent (and the Southern continent as well). These Asian peoples had settled the Americas centuries before any European ships touched their shores. Ignorant of geography, the British immigrants who later fashioned themselves as “Americans” mistook the place for India, and called these Asians “Indians.” Remember the movies and comics with cowboys and Indians in them? That was history, Hollywood-style, hero and villain roles reversed. But of course, the white invaders really did defeat the “Indians.” They had superior fire-power and logistics. What is more, the diseases they carried in their own bodies (Small-pox, TB, VD, etc.) did more than superior fire-power to decimate the native inhabitants, whose pristine physical state had no natural ability to combat this early form of biological warfare.
With the British settled in America, could the rest of Europe be far behind? But well before that, the Spanish and their colonized natives from Central and South America had settled nearly a fourth of the area of what is now the U.S.A. The names alone already elicit their Spanish colonial origins: Arizona, California, Colorado, Montana, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas. Of course, most of the state names are of Native American origin (e.g., Massachusetts, Arkansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota) and we all know why. But the Spanish and Latinos were in North America long before the English – long before Hollywood’s Ricardo Montalban and Carmen Miranda – and they are back there now, accounting for the highest number of immigrants from a single cultural origin. Already the instruction signs in the buses, public buildings, streets, and public libraries are accompanied by translations into Spanish, as though mandated. By their sheer numbers they have forced the hand of the U.S. bureaucracy.
In Nashville, the Latinos are in the buses and cars, and along the sidewalks they keep the lawns trim and the flowering bushes fresh. Mexican grocery stores, restaurants, and various other shops phalanx the spaces that line the major roads and block the view of the woods behind them. The pall of their geopolitical reconquista seems to descend everywhere. Remember the Alamo? Well, this must be Gen. Santa Ana’s revenge, right in the heart of Davie Crockett country.
Can Asians be far behind? Well, if they could cross the Bering Strait back in prehistory to what is now America, count on them to return in great numbers in the age of globalization. In Nashville, they are not yet rock or folk music stars, but they are in the universities as students and researchers. Indians from the sub-continent make their presence felt – the Chinese, too, of course, and no longer merely as coolies or operators of restaurants. Who knows, perhaps the Asians are unconsciously working for a reconquest, too. Eventually, they may even get to liberate their fellow Asians from the so-called Indian reservations. Somewhere in the back of my mind a little bird is chirping that perhaps, at least in America, democracy is an idea whose time has come.
But my wife and I did have our moments of peace – and they were blissful, believe it or not – in this southern town. For one, waking up after our very first night in Nashville was like being reborn into an enchanted realm of peace. We had spent the night before in the hostel of the Scarritt-Bennet Center. Formerly a college, with grand structures that resembled castles, the center was surrounded by wide, tranquil lawns lined with arbors whose tops hovered above even the tall stone churches. The early morning air held a chill in it that seemed to promise an early onset of autumn. Unaffected by human presence, squirrels leaped about in slow, hypnotic arcs. From the topmost branches of a petite tree that ornamented the courtyard of the center’s main office, a bird of scarlet plumage surveyed its realm. Other birds, of the same, or other, colors – some deep blue, a few gray, flitted in and out of the trees and hedges. Fearlessly, I mused, as I sat on a bench watching in great wonder. I recalled with somewhat amused rue that in my home country, this communion between bird and beast (the latter class represented by the squirrel and myself) would be impossible, surely pre-empted by juvenile hunting. Most urban spaces were treeless, anyway, and therefore inhospitable to birds.
In Nashville, an arbor canopy for houses is more the rule than the exception. Some trees cast their shade from such a height they surely must have antedated the dwellings. But most seem so deliberately spaced apart that they could only have been planted and protected by the human hand. The lustrous, broad-leafed Magnolia, that Southern belle, looking always ready for the ball, makes her presence felt everywhere, showing off her broad, delicately ornate white blooms. But on our late afternoon treks my wife and I saw mostly walnut trees, which bore hard, solid fruit that looked like little buds or bells. The tree-trunks have cavern-like holes that serve as apertures to squirrel dens. It is easily identified by its multifoliate leaf, which, by the way, serves as the central icon of the Canadian flag. Its shape closely resembles that of a type of camote. And by the way, the camote plant, particularly the variety that has light-colored leaves of yellow-green, is a popular ornamental in Tennessee.
But if any of the four seasons can be called an ornament, it would be autumn – and the walnut leaf is its signature, its emblem, coming out in practically all the possible variations: brown, yellow, gold, effulgent orange, gleaming indigo, and (to plagiarize Shelley) hectic red. But it is also the melancholy season, when the very leaves say good-bye, each like a hand, each like a handkerchief waving farewell – literally or metaphorically, who can say? – and in their best holiday attire like that, the better to make us miss them, the gesture and the gesturer all one and the same, mourning and mourned. In autumn, Time’s emblems appear and pass in beauty.
Ideal autumn though, to me, would be – if impossibly – the season in its fullness, with all the leaves in vivid colors, and not one leaf yet fallen. But no such full-dress miracle ever happened in Nashville. Each tree had its own schedule, and every row of trees displayed the gradated shades of changing time. One tree would just be starting to glow while another had started to fade and to let go of its leaves.
My wife and I already had our schedule set for us, and were to leave – as fate would have it – in Margaret’s very season of “unleaving,” and I wished in my mind during that time I could say goodbye from the halls of the Scarritt-Bennet Center itself – the scene of our first magical morning in Nashville, full of birds and squirrels, and a deep silence abroad in the world. For the Center had become, in time, our Arcadia, our spiritual refuge. We both had been born and raised Catholic, and some good years of our lives were spent in Catholic schools. But the Nashville Catholic Church was much too far away from where we lived – and we were car-less. Besides, after a while, the sermons the priest delivered there did seem just a bit too stodgy.
By marked contrast, worship at the Wightman Chapel at the Center was uniquely endearing. An ensemble of three (a wind instrumentalist, a pianist, and a bassist) played hymn music in the engaging rhythms and in the startling mode of improvisation peculiar to jazz. Between the pieces were interspersed readings from scripture, from religious meditations of theologians, philosophers, and mystics. The words of Meister Eckhart, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rheinhold Niebuhr fortified us. But it was jazz that provided the key to the religious experience. (Easily the most memorable piece played by the gifted trio was a jazz rendition of Handel’s Messiah.)
To one side of the brick path that leads to the highly-vaulted stone structure that is the Wightman Chapel is a simple commemorative marker put up by the American Historical Commission which gives the date when the Rev. Martin Luther King, passing through Nashville on his long and arduous march to eventual martyrdom, paused to speak of the rights of men to the congregation. The respect shown at a historical moment for the great man by the pastors of the Wightman congregation – courageous in a time and place where the racial integration of churches was anathema – moved me deeply. And the music of that historic church, merging the narrative of two exiled and captive peoples – one Semitic, the other African – was compelling. It spoke to the soul of the right to be free and the joy of deliverance.
Of all immigrants to America, it was the African who was most unwilling. He never wanted to leave his homeland. He had to be brought to America in chains, and practically dragged away to the cotton and the cane fields. It is no wonder that in the narrative of the Chosen People of their deliverance from captivity, and most of all in the story of Jesus – himself a suffering servant – the African slave would find comfort and hope. The Messiah had promised, after all, that he who is last shall be first. But the journey to freedom was arduous and long. The only way out of the agony of existence was to sing – and sing the Negro did, with soul, in the rhythms of the lost homeland: percussive, powerful. Often the Black Church was so filled with joy by the promise of deliverance that the entire congregation danced and sang. The frenzied African-Americans made the walls shake. They rocked and rolled. They transformed American music forever.
And yet, despite the array of memorabilia to legends of Rock such as Elvis, Rock in Nashville exists like a token gesture. That here, as elsewhere in America, a lingering form of cultural suppression continues to segregate black from white music is seen in the way in which the latter is called folk music, as though African-Americans were not “folks like you and me,” and African-American music not an essential ingredient of mainstream American music. Such a mode of deception is similar to and closely allied with the cowboy legend spawned by Hollywood, which portrays the cowboy as invariably White. Nothing could be further from the truth. Historical research has shown with finality that most cowboys were African Americans who had escaped from slavery in the South to seek freedom in the Western frontier. It also has been established that Hawaii, being a top producer of beef before the annexation of the islands, also had Polynesian cowboys aplenty, often comprising the team to beat in America-wide rodeo competitions.
Where the White American cowboy legend lives on, American folk music flourishes, and both help perpetuate the illusion that African-American music is not music of the folk. This is an insidious kind of segregation. But African-American music runs deep in the mainstream of American music – no one can extract it from there. In all likelihood, the songs the real cowboys sang were – in spirit – African-American. Nashville the Music City would even have us forget Memphis – reputedly squalid but only three hours away by car – birthplace of the great white belter of African-American music, Elvis Presley. His hip-swinging effigy remains on display on a portion of sidewalk in Nashville – but he is no king there. He is impure – not an authentic member of the volk, stranded like an unwelcome prodigal son. Even the Hard Rock Café, built of brick, and walled-in like a sprawling mausoleum, does not appear to be much of a draw.
For my wife and I, the true Rock of Ages (the Anglican hymn goes: Rock of Ages, cleft for me/Let me hide myself in Thee) was the stone-built, high-gabled Wightman Chapel of the Scarritt-Bennet Center, farther off from downtown and right by the university area. Its blend of music – like its humane, liberal theology – seemed just right for us. It provided refuge from the inflammatory political rhetoric which stoked all around us by ignorance and intolerance. Built of stone, it recalled to us images from Isaiah: rivers of water in a dry place... the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
America is unique among nations in that it has endeavored – by an act of conscience, in the main – to create a microcosm of the world. Unlike most ancient nations like China, Japan, or even Israel, America is multi-racial and multi-ethnic.
Given its humane, cosmopolitan outlook, America, the new kid on the block of nations, often a bully, is showing signs of breakdown. The isolation of the individual is turning it homicidal. In a year’s time, several massacres of innocents were perpetrated by unlikely Herods demented by loneliness. Greed – that demonic spawn of individualism – is making America incapable of the self-abnegation needed to save the world from the effects of irreversible climate change. The exemplar of civic virtues has morphed into Public Enemy Number One.
I am back in the homeland now, but my mind returns often to Nashville, pursuing tentative responses to musings that this sojourn has provoked. My wife is awash with nostalgia for the infinite reach of its libraries, for the overabundance of research opportunities her fellowship had offered only just a peek. As for myself – can I help but have recurring visions of those alluring houses? Yet I must constantly remind her and myself that the spread of knowledge must be global, or it is unjustly appropriated – that every nation must be given the wherewithal to develop its very best minds and to keep them for its own – though ultimately also for the world, America included. Of course, I begin thus to sound like the crack-pot idealist that for the most part I am.
I flail about for random notions and clutch at one of them as for dear life: the curiously amazing way the Philippines heroically dare to make the multi-ethnic, multi-racial democratic experiment, too, even on its own poor ground. True, horrible deviancies from the democratic norm, such as the gruesome Ampatuan massacre, are disheartening. But consider what the European democracies had to suffer in the Second World War, when the Jewish race was threatened with extinction. And who can forget the horrible agony a disunited America had to go through barely a century before – in a war misnamed “civil” – in order to resolve the contradiction of slavery persisting on democratic soil?
True, the continuing Philippine diaspora weakens the social fabric, and we may be coming apart at the seams. But the heartening, mind-boggling thing is that the Philippine experiment in democracy, too, is that which expands globally, Filipinos having gone all over and become part of the democratic space available elsewhere. Even if and when these expatriates return to the homeland, their attitudes will tend to reflect the belief in freedom as an inherent and inalienable right. As for those who are constrained to make a living under hopelessly despotic regimes, at least they acquire a better appreciation of the rights they enjoy back home. It should not surprise us if a Filipino Martin Luther King will lead a revolution somewhere in the world where it is needed. Whichever way we move, to or from the country, freedom should spread.
Francis C. Macansantos has won awards for his poetry (Palanca Memorial Award for Literature and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts Writers Prize). He has four books of poetry: Snail Fever (University of the Philippines Press, 2016, given the National Book Award for English Poetry in 2017), The Words and Other Poems (UP Press 1997), Womb of Water, Breasts of Earth (NCCA 2007), and Balsa: Poemas Chabacano (NCCA 2011). He suddenly passed away in July 2017. In his lifetime he also wrote fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in his native Chabacano and Filipino. His daughter, Monica S. Macansantos, assisted with the final edits for this piece.