The Party is Over

FAI 2020 is over.  We'll be writing about it here for the next couple of weeks.  Last night the party didn't end until after 5 am.  We went to bed around 4 am.  The above picture is our room just after we got it set up.  This is Eric of Nefesh Mountain in the picture.

This is how it looks this morning.  The party is over.  We have a few days to enjoy New Orleans, so that's what we're gonna do.  To everyone who played in our room . . . you were awesome!  It was great to meet all of you and we look forward to meeting again somewhere down the trail. 

We are pretty much exhausted for now.  We are staying with friends from Tacoma In New Orleans for a few days.   It is my first trip to the South in a lot of years, and old memories keep springing to the surface.  I can’t help that, but I am reminded that the North is not necessarily a better place if you are black.

I had someone contact me on Facebook and ask me if I am the same Steve Nebel who used to loudly proclaim “higher, higher, HIGHER!” as he came up the stairs in the barracks in Goeppingen, Germany.   I told him that sounded just about right for those days.  I didn’t recognize his name but memories keep flooding back.  I will never forget the woman telling me “We don’t serve the colored with the white” in the barroom just over the border in South Carolina from Georgia.  I will never forget the little shacks out in the countryside of Georgia and someone telling me that “That’s how black people like to live.  They probably have a colored TV in that shack and you see the Cadillac parked by the house?”  It made me weep then, and remembering it and being in the South still does affect me that way.

So yeah.  I’m that guy.  It always hurt too bad and I was always looking for a pain killer.  In Germany I was still a Vietnam veteran.  Now that’s not an identity that I carry with any pride. It is not an identity at all for me.  If you think I can come down here to the South and just forget how I feel, you don’t know me.   I won’t pretend to be any kind of exemplary human being of any kind.  I can only tell you what my experience is and how I feel about it.  When I am told that New Orleans is not the “real” Louisiana, and everything is just OK here . . . well in Tacoma, WA things are not “OK” as far as race goes, and I don’t believe things that people tell me that I don’t see.

Well, in the meantime . . . we had a great FAI Conference.  We saw a lot of people from Far-West, and people from FAI that we only see once a year a well as meeting a lot of really fine songwriters and musicians in our private guerilla showcase room.  It is an excruciatingly white event though, and although there was an effort to make the event more diverse, it was still really white, and easy to sense the discomfort of the participants who were not.  There were a couple of things that happened in our room.  On Thursday night a young black man came into the room and sat through some performances.  Before he left he introduced himself to me and said he would get back to me.  He didn’t, but I found myself looking for him in the crowds at the hotel hoping that I could have a conversation, which I could not in a room where performers had five minutes between performances that were meant to give them an opportunity to connect with potential presenters, managers, and booking agents.  He did tell me, however, that he was a singer/songwriter and his stage name was “Tru”, and that was written on his badge by his given name.

Last night, at the end of the night, a young black woman came into our room.  She introduced herself as “Joy”, which was the name on her badge as well.  I was engaged in conversation with the last singer/songwriter who performed in our room, and also with a couple of other musicians.  We were just blowing steam at the end of a long weekend.  Joy was just kind hangin’ around, not saying anything until some of the guys left and then she asked if she could use our bathroom, and in fact explained (unnecessarily) that she wasn’t “drunk or anything”.  So that told me that she didn’t feel very welcome at this white event.  I don’t know how many white people came into the room (which was open to all) and used our bathroom during the four nights that we had a PGS room, but none of them asked, or doubted that it was OK touse our toilet.

These are not comments about New Orleans, or the South.  We had a conversation with some black women from Canada, just a “hi, how are you?  Enjoying the conference?” kind of a conversation. When we first tried to talk with them (waiting for the elevator) they ignored us.  When we finally engaged them they were relaxed, and easy to talk to about their home province of Alberta.  I have been glad to see that the conference is being more inclusive, and making an effort to make itself so.  Nonetheless I feel the presence of an elephant in the room. It is a big room, and it is a huge elephant.

I don’t know that I try hard enough to not be part of the problem.  I can smell the large hairy beast, and I hear him bellow.He is too many places.  When I smell him my eyes begin to water, and I have to cover my face to not show the world that I am weeping.  On the other hand it reminds me that I am human, and that is not always a bad thing.