Prelude: Portrait of Marie, Improvising
Song: “Balondo Blessing” by Jon O’Bergh – vocals by Marie Mende Nebota
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Marie stands on stage in a blue satin dress. She is improvising a West African folk melody, her voice husky, pinched tight like the satin around her torso. Her voice dips low to dance with the didgeridoo and congas, then jumps up high and skips off on its own.
Tell me your story.
I was born in a village in Cameroon, raised by my older sister and her abusive husband. He used to beat us. I was headstrong and defiant. My frustration I expressed by bullying other kids in school. As a teenager, I gave birth to three children: a boy and two girls. I fell in love with an American, who married me and brought me to the United States, but I had to leave my children in the care of relatives. My husband and I had a daughter together. After a year, though, he abandoned us. I couldn’t get a job, became homeless. My daughter was taken from me. I went crazy, lived on the streets, hunted for food in garbage bins. Until one day, God came to me and said he would help me get my life back together. I got treatment, found a job. I created a non-profit foundation to provide services to the homeless. I named it after my second daughter. They still won’t let me see her.
Marie has ambitious ideas that she gathers in a sieve; details drip through, undone. She tries to corral volunteers, stray cats she entices with cream, but they drift off independently. I try to help her prepare a grant application; the more I learn, however, the more it becomes apparent she needs someone with expertise far greater than what I can offer. She searches for a document in the piles of paper on her desk, telling me about her plan to raise funds selling food at a fair. “If we buy a booth together, you can sell your CDs,” she tempts. The document hides from her, undoubtedly intimidated. I tell her noncommittally, “I’ll think about it.”
Marie invites me over to her house for homemade stew. She calls me at work that day to ask if we can meet half an hour later. When I arrive, the house is dark and no one responds to my knocking. Lacking a cell phone, I drive to a nearby convenience store to use a pay phone to call her number, but I only get the answering machine, so I leave a message. I return to her house to wait. After half an hour, she still has not arrived, so I head home.
The phone is ringing as I open my apartment door, and I rush to answer it.
“Jon, it’s Marie.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at home cooking.”
“I thought we were supposed to meet at six o’clock.” I hear the sound of cupboards opening and closing.
“Yes. I was waiting for you at my office.”
“At your office? Why there? We were going to meet at your house.”
“I had to work on something. That’s why I asked to change the time. Dinner’s almost ready.”
“I’m not driving all the way back down there. Why don’t we reschedule?”
She is miffed. “But I bought all the ingredients, and now it’s almost ready.”
“Marie, I waited for thirty minutes. Let’s get together another time.”
She hangs up angrily, and I don’t hear from her for months.
Marie reminds me of those art projects we used to make in third grade, the egg-shaped stones glued one atop the other to make a figurine. She stands with granite solidity, but she is a cyclone of moods that threatens to break the glue that holds the stones together — morose one minute, girlishly giggling the next. Her round face is like the moon passing before the sun during an eclipse.
Marie is late, again. When she at last arrives, she emerges from her car, a quartet of bracelets sliding loosely along her wrist. Her braided hair is pulled back tightly behind her head. Papers spill from her arms as she hurries to the church entrance. This is where we will perform in a week, a fund-raiser for her foundation. A flyer is already posted in the lobby, advertising the lineup of performers for our event. She tells me she must return soon to Cameroon to retrieve her children, who are now teenagers. College officials have accused one daughter of being a witch. A classmate said he saw her sitting in a tree eating the soul of her recently deceased uncle. She has gone into hiding. Always the same story: fear of the one who is different, who must be ostracized, destroyed.
For Sacred Spaces, I recorded Marie singing a gentle folk melody she created for me in the Balondo language, along with some spoken phrases and a recitation of random words. Her language is mellifluous and hypnotic, all soft consonants caressed by long, rounded vowels. I improvise a simple, repetitive mbira and vibraphone accompaniment that loosely garbs the melodic lines of her singing. I separate her phrases into discreet sections to give more breathing room for the instruments and create a relaxed, improvisatory rhythm. Towards the climax, the mbira motive metamorphoses into an incisive rhythmic pattern in a complex meter, over which I string her pearled words.
It’s ten minutes to showtime, and only a scattering of people sit in the auditorium. I know Marie has worked hard to organize the event, but the result feels forlorn. It is clear she will barely break even. I perform first. Marie has dredged up some hippie percussionists who perform next. Their barefoot children wander the stage during their drumming. This is the nadir of my career, I think to myself.
Finally, Marie takes the stage by herself and begins to sing a capella. She was to have performed with a friend, a talented drummer who died several days before the performance. So she stands there alone, singing with focused determination, a singing that cuts through the abuse, abandonment, madness, disappointment — all the suffering of a life. I don’t know what she is singing, but the sound of the words are beautiful and strong. When she is done, the sounds reverberate in the auditorium and carry out into the night air, rising proudly into the starlit sky.
