For Us Too

Whitney Houston still wins. But two other voices taught me what this song is actually for.

Tomorrow the country turns two hundred and fifty years old. There will be flags on porches in Roser Park, fireworks over the bay, somebody’s cousin setting off illegal ones in a Publix parking lot at 11pm. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, someone will stand up and sing the national anthem.

I need to say this first because it will never change. Whitney Houston’s Super Bowl rendition in 1991 is the standard. It is not up for debate in my house. No one has come close to the way she lifted those notes, the way she took a song written for a fife and drum and turned it into gospel. I have heard hundreds of national anthems in my life and I measure every one of them against four minutes in Tampa that I wasn’t even old enough to remember watching live. That will never move. I want that on the record before I say anything else.

But something has been happening to me over the last several months when I hear this song, and I want to try to name it.

My friend Allison, who lives here in St. Pete, was asked to sing the national anthem at the mayor’s State of the City address. I remember talking with her in the days before, and she was in real turmoil about it. Not nerves about the notes. Turmoil about the words. I remember her saying something like, how do I sing this in a way that inspires people when my own heart is broken, when there is so much going on in this country that grieves me. She wasn’t performing a crisis of conscience for effect. She was actually wrestling with whether she could stand up and sing about a land of the free while she was sitting with all the ways it isn’t, for so many people, still.

What she landed on wasn’t triumphant. It was haunting. Beautiful in the way a held breath is beautiful. She sang it like a woman naming something she still believes in even while she is standing inside the wreckage of it not being fully true yet. I have thought about that performance for months. It didn’t resolve the tension in the song. It let the tension be the song.

Then more recently I watched Jennifer Hudson sing it at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, standing next to nothing but a piano, with President Obama and Michelle and their daughters sitting a few feet away. And I felt the same thing all over again. The weight of it. The freedoms that were fought for and bought at a price nobody should have had to pay. The ones that feel like they’re slipping through our fingers again right now, this year, this month. A kind of ache for a time that felt more possible than this one does. And underneath all of that, still, a refusal to let go of what the song is actually asking us to believe.

I noticed something about myself watching both of these. I am no longer moved by whether a singer can nail the big note at the climax. That used to be the whole game. Can she hit it. Can he hold it. Now I don’t care about that at all. What moves me is whether the person singing seems to understand what they are asking the room to believe, and whether they believe it themselves, and what it costs them to believe it.

Here is the theory I have been developing, and I hold it carefully because I know how it sounds - some of yall my want to come for me (but take it to yo momma instead, saints (with love)):

I think when a Black person sings this song, specifically, they are singing it from a place that is different than pride alone, different than gratitude alone, even different than the plain love of country that anyone can feel when a song moves them.

I think we are singing it from a place of promises broken and ideals not yet delivered, at least not to them, not fully, not yet. And I think that is exactly why it lands the way it does. Because the song is not being sung as a report of what already is. It is being sung as a claim on what was promised and has not yet arrived.

Every lyric becomes something to be believed anyway, and fought for anyway, and rallied around anyway, for everybody, including the very people singing it.

It is a strange thing that any display of loving this country right now gets read as a partisan act. That’s a loss, and I feel it as a loss. I understand the anger a lot of people carry toward the ones currently in charge, and honestly, I carry some of it myself. But for so many of us, so many who look like me, our patriotism was never contingent on the government getting it right. It was founded a long time ago, in the middle of everything getting it wrong, on the stubborn insistence that we too hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. We have been fighting for that sentence to be true since before we had the right to vote on whether it was. So when that note crescendos at the end, land of the free and the home of the brave, I don’t hear a victory lap. I hear a war cry. I hear generations of people saying it louder because it hasn’t been true for them yet, saying for us too.

I don’t know exactly what to do with all of this on the day before we turn two hundred and fifty. I know I’ll still put Whitney on tomorrow, probably more than once. But I think I’ll also sit with Allison’s version, and with Jennifer Hudson’s, and let them do what they’re actually doing, which is holding grief and hope in the same breath and refusing to let either one win. That might be the most honest way to celebrate a country still becoming what it said it would be. Not with certainty. With a held note and an aching, stubborn hope.

For us too.