Later on, my life briefly intersected with the Evers family. Mrs. Evers brought her children to Pelham and began working with my father, a writer, on her memoir, later published under the title “For Us, The Living”. I was too young to fully comprehend her grief, and that of her children, but the youngest boy, Van, was about my age and I was happy to have a new person my age to play with. My chief memory of that time was making a snowman with Van in our front yard. I was amazed that none of the Evers kids had seen snow before – living in Mississippi seemed as exotic as living in France to me. We never talked about his father, that I can recall – we talked about the stuff kids talk about. We talked around it, probably.

This past January, on the day of President Obama’s second inauguration, I was driving through southern Alabama, coming home from a series of shows. I heard Mrs. Evers (now Mrs. Evers-Williams) deliver the invocation. Her deep, powerful voice came through my car speakers and took me straight back to Pelham in the 1960s. I thought about what southern Alabama would have looked like back then. I thought about the fact that Mrs. Evers had lived through a horror most of us couldn’t imagine, and now here she was fifty years on, playing a major role in the inauguration of the first African-American US president. The second inauguration, which somehow, for many of us, seemed even more significant than the first. And here I was, driving through the Deep South, a place that had seemed so remote to me as a child, so different from where I grew up; and now it feels like my back yard.

Everything changes; everything stays the same. That’s a line from “Idlewild”, a song I wrote about my parents, Medgar Evers, JFK, the men on the moon – the zeitgeist of the 1960s through the eyes of an omniscient child (which I wasn’t, but that’s where creative license comes in). And it’s true: so much has changed, and so much has not – not really. Racism lives, as does sexism and several newly named (but not new) -isms. But I’m an optimist at heart. I can’t help but look back at that day in 1963 and think that we did, despite how it seemed during the decade that followed, wake up. I wish I could talk to Van Evers again and see what he thinks. We never talked about it back then.

River Music Experience
129. N. Main Street
Davenport, IA 52801
Mon: 7am-5pm
Tues-Fri: 7am-9pm
Sat: 10am-10pm
Sun: Closed

MidwesTIX
Online: www.midwestix.com
Phone: 515.244.2771