I Couldn't Not Write This Reaction to Raise the Roof

Green Library Online Exhibit Supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement

This is important. You should visit it.

65 Stories: Say Their Names (a Stanford Libraries exhibit)

Raise the Roof by MeShell Ndegeocello (Read by Staceyann Chin)

“Raise the Roof” is a song from her forthcoming album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin by Meshell Ndegeocello. It speaks about the Black American experience. I will never, as no white person will ever, be able to know precisely what that experience is like. But this song helps me feel what’s being felt by a whole lot of people, and it makes me want to be a better ally. My reaction to the song fits somewhere in that space.

My Reaction to “Raise the Roof”

This song is a poem. A heartbreaking, compelling call to action. A demand. An overdue alarm, a siren, an earthquake desperately shaking and rousing and stirring and waking everyone up from whatever apathetic existence they’ve resigned themselves to live in, languishing in lost hope.

This song is a reminder that the past hasn’t gone anywhere.

Parks and land and trees once public are sold to devil’s red developers with too much money and too little conscience.

These men, and they are men, take everything. They bulldoze and ruin. They make a profit. A profit without investment or acknowledgment or apology. Just. Profit. Just for them.

Greedy and gorging themselves they stand on the once public property they now own. They stand in blood soaked mud, and on tree stumps, and on what’s left.

They are proud and tall lumberjacks, dismissive destroyers with shined clean boots and expertly ironed bulletproof uniforms. Their careless, heavy feet pulverize anything in their path. What is in their path is rotting, still strange fruit dropped from southern trees they saw down and slaughter.

But strange fruit still ripens and rots even when the Poplar trees are stumps and roots. Strange fruit is on the ground under a black boot and can’t breathe. Strange fruit is carrying a toy gun before a badge and a bullet do what they’re designed to do. Strange fruit is 17 years old, wearing a hoodie sweatshirt bloodied and shredded by a vigilante’s not guilty verdict. Strange fruit dies - dead - as a direct result of a system that displaces, disregards, disenfranchises one group of people and rewards another.

Lumberjacks whose killing carnage goes without consequence don’t care. They don’t need to; they’ll be acquitted. Not guilty. And they don’t care what’s in their path because it’s their path - they designed it for themselves, they built it for themselves and they see it as the only path that matters.

But it’s not the only path that matters.

Alarms are going off and the earth is stirring, quaking, awakening.

And so we are woke. We are watching. We are done mouthing minced words. We are ready.

It’s time to raise the roof on these motherfuckers. Indeed, it’s time.

Notes

Some songs move me to want to write about them - to make and create something in inspired response.

I have lots of ideas about what I want to write for lots of songs I love to listen to. “Tusk” and “Walk a Thin Line” by Fleetwood Mac. “Narcissus” by Roisin Murphy. An essay for every major song on Boys for Pele by Tori Amos.

But my OCD ADHD brain usually kicks in and then works and overworks all those ideas, dulling rather than polishing them, demotivating me and getting in my way. The ideas and inspiration get stuck. I don’t write anything.

Sometimes I hear a song that’s so compelling and important, I can’t not write about it. Like, right now. Like, I won’t be able to do anything until I write about this because I can’t do anything until I write about this.

Hyper-focus takes over and forces my fingers to the keyboard, my eyes to the screen. I start writing and words seem to know where to go - structure being more intuitive than intentional. Then it’s done and I am released until another song grabs me by the arm and tells me it’s time to write.

The song “Raise the Roof” by MeShell Ndegeocello, is one of those compelling and important songs that I can’t not write about. So I wrote. And I stopped. And I hope it encourages someone to listen to the song, and consider all the considerations that need to be considered: fascist, racist oligarchical regimes are running and ruining the country, and we need to stop them once and for all. What will your contribution be?