Growing
About 1956 I heard for the first time Harry Belafonte sing the banana boat song. The music was strange to these bourgeois midwestern ears. Calypso. Something out of the deep southern world somewhere. But it was the message that caught me.
Come mister tally man, tally me banana, daylight come and I wanna go home.
The man had wrestled his bunches of bananas to the pier, and wanted his labor tallied, so he could go home before dawn, and fall into a numb sleep. It was a sort of toil that wore the body down, along with soul and heart.
It was my first glimpse of the hard world that traps most of the human race in endless toil, the labor barely repaid, exhausted men and women carrying their staggering loads, so the rest of the world can live in comfort. That has not changed much since 1956. Quietly, invisibly, millions of mortals, children, adults, women, old men, carry their loads. Technology has not changed that. They sew for pennies an hour in Bangladesh, carry bananas into the holds of great vessels, grow yams in the grudging soil of Africa, and we consume these things that show up on the grocery shelves, and in the market aisles, wrought by grueling and dull labor.
In a way, Harry Belafonte introduced me to the real world. It took me a long time to grasp the meaning; to learn to empathize with these nameless workers whose lives spool out on plantations and factories and ports and ship bellies. They are anonymous, and but for some calypso music that fell upon alien ears in 1956, I would never have thought about them. Now, generations later, I have come to understand that it affected my writing, and gradually changed the way I perceive the world and its sadnesses.
Come mister tally man, tally me banana, daylight come and I wanna go home.
The man had wrestled his bunches of bananas to the pier, and wanted his labor tallied, so he could go home before dawn, and fall into a numb sleep. It was a sort of toil that wore the body down, along with soul and heart.
It was my first glimpse of the hard world that traps most of the human race in endless toil, the labor barely repaid, exhausted men and women carrying their staggering loads, so the rest of the world can live in comfort. That has not changed much since 1956. Quietly, invisibly, millions of mortals, children, adults, women, old men, carry their loads. Technology has not changed that. They sew for pennies an hour in Bangladesh, carry bananas into the holds of great vessels, grow yams in the grudging soil of Africa, and we consume these things that show up on the grocery shelves, and in the market aisles, wrought by grueling and dull labor.
In a way, Harry Belafonte introduced me to the real world. It took me a long time to grasp the meaning; to learn to empathize with these nameless workers whose lives spool out on plantations and factories and ports and ship bellies. They are anonymous, and but for some calypso music that fell upon alien ears in 1956, I would never have thought about them. Now, generations later, I have come to understand that it affected my writing, and gradually changed the way I perceive the world and its sadnesses.
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