Written in Abita Springs, LA
16 October 1999

            Last night I attended a lecture/performance by composer and trumpeter, Hannibal Lokumbe, at Parker Institute in Uptown New Orleans. When I’d read in the paper that fifteen years ago he walked off a job during intermission at a club in New York where people paid $100 to hear him, and then wandered the streets, crying and “asking the Creator to find a way that [he] could be more effective with the gift that [he] was given,” I knew I had to be in his presence. As a visual artist and writer, I have that same prayer. So, despite the fact that my entertainment budget is virtually zero, I went, believing the evening held promise for healing. That proved to be true.

            Hannibal Lokumbe is an African-American man in his late forties, I’d say, who has the body of an athlete: tall, graceful, powerful, and the humility of one who walks his path hand-in-hand with Spirit. His graying, dark brown hair is braided into myriad shoulder-length narrow bands; his face is clean-shaven, his cheekbones and rosy brown skin bespeak his partial Cherokee heritage, and his broad flat nose evokes an Art Deco sculptural line by Enrique Alferez. He wore a faded green polo shirt and jeans, sandals on bare feet. A plain gold wedding band was his only adornment, yet his smile could be said to embarrass the moon for its width and brilliance. Make no mistake: Hannibal Lokumbe is very easy on the eyes.

            Now, I’ve been having a rather difficult time the past few weeks. I’ve been plagued by insomnia (a recent neurological study demonstrates that sleep deprivation causes one to lose one’s sense of humor—copy that.) I’ve not been enjoying my for-money work; rather, as the Society Photographer for the Times-Picayune, sometimes I’ve felt like a whore in the service of rich people’s narcissism; I’ve felt more acutely the existential angst of loneliness and yearning, loss and disconnection, scarcity. No major tectonic shifts, only the quotidian. They’ve just weighed heavier lately. Plus, I have ants in my kitchen, and they’re not Psyche’s helpful friends, either.

            So, there was a lot riding on my showing up at Parker Memorial Methodist Church fifteen minutes late for the event. But, as it turned out, I was right on time.

            Contemporary Arts Center director Jay Weigel introduced Hannibal and said that with their hectic schedules, they’d hadn’t had time to plan what they were going to say and that they were going to let things flow. This heartened me; spontaneity opens channels for miracles. Hannibal entered and stood in front of the altar rail where he said that the inspiration for the piece he was going to play came from what he heard while picking cotton as a young boy. Then he raised his trumpet in song, playing a slow melody that brought to mind a melding of Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

            Afterward, he took a seat and allowed Jay to lead him through layers of his story while he held his toddler son, Haille Selassi, on his lap. Haile received many kisses during this time. Hannibal spoke about his music, his life growing up in the projects of a small Texas town, how he came to receive his current name, how he was healed from near-fatal bilateral pneumonia by a Masai shaman, while the audience listened with rapt attention. He was angry, he said, very angry when he learned the history books were full of lies about his people, how there was hardly more than the merest mention of George Washington Carver or Booker T. Washington, if that much. Certainly nothing about the rich creative lives of his ancestors in Africa, or how America gained its wealth through human beings as a commodity. It saddens him to know that more Black men are in cages than in college. And he said that as a young Black man he’d had two choices: he could kill, or be killed, with that anger, or he could transform it through music. “It was the music that saved my life,” he said. He spoke of the overwhelming need for forgiveness but cautioned that forgiveness must be accompanied by atonement. Forgiveness must be earned through a path of trustworthy behavior, he added. He cited the recent example of Bill Clinton’s apology to the victims of the Tuskeegee Institute syphilis trials back in the 1930s, and how much healing had taken place for those men by that acknowledgment of wrongdoing. He also noted that so much had not been atoned for.

            After an hour of telling his story, he said he wanted to include the audience in the talking, opening the floor for questions or reactions.

            Someone asked if playing music was work. “No, man! It’s my salvation,” he said, repeating it for emphasis. Another asked about the elaborately carved wooden instrument he brought. It was covered with turtles and the man wanted to know if they had any significance. “I just gave this artist where I grew up a walnut limb and told him to carve a trumpet for me. I don’t think they have any particular meaning,” he said. “Would you give us a sample of how it sounds?” the man asked. Hannibal held it up and said that this would be his first try, and to excuse him if it took a minute for him to make the sounds come. Then he began the strenuous job of blowing it. There were no valves or holes; it was simply a heavy tube, and his trumpeter’s expansive cheeks acted as bellows. Haile looked up in thrall at the sounds, holding his small arms out wide as if to increase his potential of receiving them.

            After several more questions, a child about eight raised her hand. “Was that circular breathing you were doing?” she asked. “Go on, girl! You noticed that!” he said, slipping into the easy speech of the street. “Are you a musician?” he asked. “Well, I play the piano,” she said, sitting up straight, speaking matter-of-factly. Clearly, Hannibal was taken by her bright spirit.

            I raised my hand and said that I could tell his work was about healing, and that I suspected his own healing was an ongoing process. “You got it, sister,” he responded. Then I said that my work as an artist was about healing as well, and how I believe in the power of art in the healing process. I recalled what he said about so many Black men being in cages, and asked if he had ever taken his healing music to prisons, and what might we see if he had. Then he told of how he had done that once in upstate New York. A trustee of the prison had given him the “real tour,” not the spin-doctored version, and during the concert, the inmates stood crying most of the time because the music was so powerful for them. Hannibal lowered his face then; his body went slack as he recalled how the trustee told him that he’d never come back to play there, even though he’d played for free. “Even if you pay them, you’ll never come back,” the man told him. Hannibal was incredulous. “Why?” he asked. “Because you made us feel free, man. You made us feel free.”

            It was obvious how painful this is still for him, to know that he has this gift for healing and to be denied the ability to share it with the very people who need it so badly.

            Craig Gilliam, the director of Parker Institute, broke the somber mood at that point by asking him to play another piece. So, Hannibal picked up his metal trumpet one more time and began to play “A Closer Walk.” Now, I’ve heard that piece played many times, and I always love it. My father loved it too—he was a man who was rigid and controlling, yet several strokes had loosened him to the point that he cried whenever he heard it. But this was no ordinary version. I’m here to tell you that the Angel Gabriel came down from Heaven and entered the body of Hannibal Lokumbe in our sight, filling his lungs with Spirit, lifting those tones to the very rafters and beyond in rifts and trills and patters that journeyed everywhere, yet stayed on course. I never lost him once. He blew that horn with the very essence of his being, and then, when he was bringing it to an end, slowing it down to the point that we could almost hold the sound in our hands . . . well, that was when the miracle took place.  Because that very last note, the one that would be his final benediction, was a kiss. Literally, a kiss through his horn, blown directly to that bright little girl who sat so raptly intent in the very front row.

           And with that kiss, I knew I’d been healed. Because, although that kiss was for her, it was also for her little brother, for my two bright and talented daughters who were once just like that child and are now grown and gone, and for the child in every one of us who pays attention to such things, and cares, who has passion. And yearns to receive such a blessing. 

– Darlene Olivo