Once upon a Christian faith, I was the hand-drummer for the church band. Couldn’t swing a drumstick without hitting myself in the eye, but I could make a djembe weep. The church band did not seek adding a hand drum as part of the permanent set, viewing such instruments with a barely concealed suspicion. (It didn’t help that the former hand-drummer floated an ego about her skill that make the djembe look small.) But faith moves mountains, the congos and djembe moved people, and the pastors were quick to capitalize on that.
We started playing for other groups or for roving ministers/apostles/etc who came through. One such apostle woman wanted an all women band to play backup for her women’s only meetings. That dropped us to me, a keyboard player, and a singer. She was of the view that hand drums were more personable than “stick” drums. (In retrospect, she was also anti-phallus as hell, and viewed any stick waving as dick waving. So… *shrug*)
One small problem. Our church building was too small and too far out of the way for her target audience. She rented a bigger church building in the middle of her target demographic, but did not rent their band, because they were all men. I’m still not sure if this was a congenial agreement, or a suffering of spite, but in the fine print of that rental agreement was that no outside instruments would be allowed inside the building. The in-house band would allow us to play on their instruments, but we couldn’t bring our own. Something about some obscure insurance clause making the event a “concert” instead of a “religious gathering” and making the rates go up because of it.
Ain’t no petty like church petty.
So the singer had to use an audio set that was not tuned to her soprano range, and the keyboardist had to use a keyboard stand that could not be adjusted for her shorter height, and I had to use conga drums that were completely alien to me and had never interacted with before.
See, here’s the thing about hand drums. They’re like shoes. It takes time to fit the hand to the head, and time to learn where the sweet spots are that really make those booming sticking notes and those spots where the drum sounds like its whispering, and time to learn how to position it in your arms or which way to stand it next to you. And you’re not going to find all those neat personal, individual things in a fifteen minute warm-up session. And even if you do take the time to find all that, the drums may not “fit” you after all!
Playing someone else’s drums is like wearing someone else’s shoes. You may be able to walk down the street, but both you and the shoes are going to suffer for it.
I had learned how to play hand drums from my uncle, and even then, it was more observation than outright instruction. I noted he would always greet his congas when uncovering them, and fussed over their appearance as if they were show dogs. He called it “taking care of the things you own”. I know better now.
I followed his lead, taking water from my water bottle and a clean napkin and wiping off the thin layer of dust that had settled on the head, polished up the head lugs, and stroked the tall bodies as if to warm them. “There, don’t you look better now.” There wasn’t any time to wait for a sense of an answer. I had to quickly find the important spaces.
The first song was terrible, and my other two band members knew it. We all collectively cringed and listened to where we fell flat to know not to do that again. The second song was tolerable at the start and by the time we came to the welcoming third, we all had found our cruising gear.
Halfway through the well attended spectacle, the white apostle suddenly turned around and pointed to the black keyboardist and myself. “You! And you! How many times have you been in the background while others take the lead and the attention! How many women here are listening to me because I am white and forgetting that you even exist behind me? God has been speaking through your hands this entire evening, and there are those who have not been listening because they think that only words carry speech! For the next ten minutes, I will say nothing. Your singer, a white woman like myself, will sing nothing. You two will play as God wills your hands and we will listen!”
Um… what?
(As I think back on this day, and the timing of all that preceded and followed, I understand that this event was a lot more influential in the molding of my apostasy than I have been able to admit.)
The keyboardist, a very sheltered, very properly raised Christian young woman, looked back at me with her unspoken fearful question written clearly on her face. What if I mess this up?! She was not used to being given free reign to do anything, much less show initiative in front of a group of people she was supposed to yield to on demand. I looked down at my hands without giving away I was thinking the same question. My freshly manicured nails glinted against the dull background of the worn drum head. The apostle is supposed to be the voice of God. If she says we could then… Well, what if we don’t?
I looked up at her with all the bravado I could summon, smiled warmly at her and nodded. Without breaking eye contact, I started a “heartbeat” rhythm. Slow enough to relax to, with a break long enough to encourage improvisation. I watched her turn away from me to face forward again. I knew she had closed her eyes as she took a deep breath.
We played.
I could see a large clock over the rear doors. I often glanced at them, but ten minutes came and went without anyone noticing. Sometimes she would lead and then fade off, then I would lead a percussive chorus for a while and then fade off back into a steady beat. Piano and drum breathed into each other, played around each other, and filled the strictly ordered space with a stirring sense of life.
I noted the sound of the drum under my right hand had changed significantly, with the left drum altering just a little bit. Somehow the sounds had become softer and smoother. What would have been sharp strike to the ear when we first started became an affirming stroke that encouraged listener and player to continue.
Twenty-five minutes into the surprise “solo”, both my fellow and I were done. We didn’t signal to each other, we just both came to a proper end at the same time.
The audience remained mostly silent, though the sounds of soft weeping could be heard. The singer was unsure what to do or where to stand. The apostle remained standing off to the side of the stage. Her arms were crossed and I had the feeling she knew exactly what she had pulled from us and what the reactions would be.
The apostle called for an immediate break for “all involved”. I had meant to play an “exiting” rhythm as folks streamed out into the bright sunshine, but my fingers felt tacky against the skin of the right drum.
I looked down and was horrified to find that a nail on my right hand had snapped off over the flesh, and the cause for the shift in sound was the blood I had beaten into the drum head! The wound had stopped bleeding, but only because I had stopped moving my hand. I flexed the joint and a fresh drop of blood emerged and quivered as I turned my hand to keep it from joining the nearly dried mess on the drum.
Hoping I looked like I was only “fussing” over the drum and not panicking at all, I quickly took up some napkins and the bottle of water to wash the drum head as best as I could under the circumstances. The tacky sensation was hard to clean off, as if the grain of the skin had been lifted. But some elbow grease and some barely muttered pleading polished the drum head back to agnostic smoothness.
I did the responsible thing and spoke to the church representative about what happened while asking if anyone had a spare bandaid. She raided the first-aid kit and brought me the needed bandage while apologizing for my having suffered the injury in the first place.
Um… What?
“[Joe], the guy who plays those drums, is always getting hung up on them and scratched by them. He got a nasty gash from one of those tuning nuts last week, ripped his arm from wrist to elbow. Nothing deep, but he’s always bleeding on those things. I don’t like them. There’s no moving parts so why does it always seem to be catching on skin? I didn’t think anything would happen, but I’m beginning to think there’s something wrong with those drums and maybe they should be replaced. Or maybe just gotten rid of entirely. People use drums like that to summon spirits after all, I’m sure you know.”
Not me! I’m a good Christian woman who doesn’t seek strange visions or delight in the visitation of shadowy forces! Whatever heights my heart had lifted sunk immediately at the unspoken judgement.
I returned to the drums to clean them over one more time to make sure I didn’t have any stray droplets of blood splattered anywhere. To my surprise, there were no obvious drops of blood anywhere else. I was sure that as vigorously I had been slapping, scraping, and tapping the surface, the wetness was going to travel all about. The outpouring of blood was confined to the drum head, and after my desperate cleaning, not even the stain of that remained.
Old habits die hard, and I caught myself apologizing to the drums for the improper application of bodily fluids. I did not wait to sense any replies, as the break had ended and it was time to recall the attendees back with another call from the drums. (Besides, there’s no such thing as drum spirits, right?)
The two day event concluded with no more manicure failures as I had forcibly removed all the fake nails that night and played with very sore hands the second day, the apostle selling most of the books and prayer cloths she had brought with her, and the hosting church receiving a generous donation from the audience for hosting the event. Whatever we band members were paid was donated to our parent church, graciously of course, and we returned to our usual schedules. No time to be tired, we had practice that night with the men of the band.
That, and my whispers to the drums did not go unnoticed after all. I had atonements to make, and demonic spirits to be purged.
Time turns as it does, and the years pass. I bury this memory along with many others in several layers of intentional forgetfulness because I could not handle the memory of the bad riding along with the memory of the good. I intentionally forget how good the drum felt once I had warmed up to it, and how much the drum felt like it was singing with my soul after I had bled on it and before I realized I was feeding the head.
Then several months ago I started having flashbacks to this day. I didn’t want to face it (or what followed) so I forced myself to “change the subject”. Easy enough to do, as I was always busy doing something at work, and had lots of reading material at home.
But the scene kept coming, and after some recent events, I was not able to push it back in the jar buried in the recesses of my mind anymore. I sat down and let the memory come forward in repetitive waves.
There’s the invitation and there’s the request. There’s the instruction to use the present equipment and there’s the beginning of the first day. There’s the moment of my fellow’s challenge to her faith and there’s the moment that faith upheld her.
And then the memory slows down and darkens.
In the minutes where my eyes were closed, the minutes where I was supposed to be listening to the directives of [the Christian] God, I was visually blinded…
But I could see…
And I was not alone.
I snap myself out of the reverie, surprised at my sudden fear. Could my memory be trusted? Was it possible for me to step into that memory and see things that I was not able to see then?
Maybe that’s the wrong question. Is it possible for me to step into that memory and see the things I could and did see then, but could not acknowledge at the time because of what I believed about myself?
What if I could?
Each attempt to relive those self-darkened minutes ended with a surge of fear and a forced return to full consciousness. I was no longer consciously afraid of what followed. I concluded that I must have become afraid of what happened in between the closing of the eyes and the surfacing of my awareness. What happened when the blood fed the drum?
I reentered the memory again, but this time, not from a first-person perspective. During my Christian days, I had no greater fear than encountering spirits and/or angels, for reasons that may or may not have been justified or accurate. I reasoned if I tried to live this memory as the Christian I was, the fear would forever bar me. But if I reviewed it as the… thing… I am, as if I was reading someone else’s diary, then I should be able to face the source of that fear.
I noted I was able to tell the difference between what “stage settings” I had directly seen and recorded, and what areas I had inferred based on surrounding clues. For instance, I never did examine the assembled drum set that stood behind me completely, so sometimes I remembered it has having five drums with two cymbals, and sometimes as seven drums with a cymbal and a cow bell. The set was not something I gave attention to, and so its appearance shifted with my mood.
But the conga drums, ah, those I remember well and consistently. A shiny lacquered body of a color too brown to be red and too red to be brown. My surprise to feel organic skin stretched over the inorganic body. Six lugs held the skin in place and the lower half of the drums were scratched and nicked. The larger, and deeper voiced, drum was under my right hand. It’s brethren, was under my left.
From my new vantage point, I entered those dark moments again. I saw something twisting directly in front of me. Something like a long, thin ribbon not quite three feet in length turned rapidly in the unspace before me.
It was happy.
It was dancing.
As I played, it increased and decreased with the increase and decrease of my rhythms.
When I opened my eyes in the memory, my vantage point left unspace and I could see it no longer.
I knew I had confronted a source of fear but I was confused by it. It wasn’t threatening. It wasn’t angry. And to confuse me further, in the split moment between ceasing to play and opening my eyes, it felt sad.
I spent several days at work being completely distracted by this puzzle. The unlocking key came while I was waiting in the drive-thru for lunch. I was reviewing the now comfortable memory once more and idly tapping out the rhythms I had been playing. I suddenly felt like I was being watched. While the car up ahead continued to complicate their order, I slipped my attention sideways to check for eavesdroppers.
The ribbon I had seen in the memory was now in the present, quickly fading away because I had stopped playing. As it faded, it slimmed, and I recognized what the ribbon was.
A vertically oriented, standing sound wave.
And then I understood.
I finished up my income generating tasks for the day, and carved out some solitary time for myself that evening. I had a memory to complete confronting, and a future to debate.
I unscrolled the memory once more, from the third party point of view that was the present looking back on the past. When my awareness shifted into unspace, I paused the memory.
“Hey.”
My past self remained still, but the ribbon responded to my voice by vibrating like a struck string.
“It’s been a long while. Have you been hanging around me since this day?”
The ribbon came to stillness as if harshly dampened. It felt like a “no”.
“Did you come from this day?”
The ribbon vibrated a complicated series of shapes. Too fast for me to track visually, until I realized that was the communication. “It’s complicated.”
“But this day was the start that led to you with me in the present.”
A large vibration of a single pure note. It felt like an enthusiastic “yes”.
“Are you one of the things I left behind?”
A softer vibration of a single pure note. “Yes.”
“I don’t have a drum. I don’t have space to play a drum, even if I had one. I don’t have a vessel for you. I don’t have an audience to play for. I am free of the chains of that day, but I am also bound by so many more. I don’t know what my blood bought for you that day, but I don’t think I’ll have any more for you now. Fifteen years have changed so, so much of me.”
The ribbon remained perfectly still for a long time. It violently vibrated and burst into a new form. A wispy hand coiled around mine. A second hand covered the first. A whisper traveled up my arm. «I’ll wait.»
The memory unpaused and quickly unrolled itself to the end of the event, and with it, my attention. I found myself staring at the far wall with eyes so dry, they itched when I blinked. I was overcome with sorrow.
One by one, the skills I am recovering or have been tasked to recover are community skills. And with each one, I am confronted by the present reality that I am dangerously alone.