Preacher’s kids, from a very young age, stop being kids and start being “the help.” I got opportunities most theater kids would kill for not because I was the best, but because I was there. Churches are not businesses, but the way you get opportunities is that someone in the congregation saw you that week that had a connection to something else. For instance, ending up at one of the lead trumpet players at Clifton Middle School and sometimes a lead player at HSPVA because both Ruby Sue Clifton and Lela Blount were in our congregations at one point.
But it doesn’t make you feel special. It makes you feel like you didn’t get in on merit and don’t deserve to be there. I had extreme rejection sensitivity dysphoria at both Clifton and HSPVA because of it, but I wouldn’t trade the experiences, either. I loved them both, I just didn’t see until now that I actually was talented enough to be there….. as a trumpet player, as a singer, and they didn’t have creative writing back then, but I would have done well there, too.
That’s because I was comparing myself to the wrong yardstick. I was grieving every day that I wasn’t Robert Glasper and Jason Moran instead of focusing on the fact that I can move Doc Morgan to tears just by writing about them when they were boys. That’s what matters.
It’s funny to me that both of the musicians I mentioned are pianists without clarifying that I went to PVA for trumpet because I can’t read two rhythms at one time. Or bass clef. But my mother was my first piano teacher (and my last because I was so bad at it, frankly…. I didn’t forgive myself until I learned that my autism makes it harder for me to hold two rhythms in my head at once and that wasn’t a moral failure.
Church is a great place to showcase your artistic talent both when you want to and when you absolutely do not. If you are the preacher’s kid, you become excellent at dramatic reading, singing, and possibly playing an instrument… but you don’t “graduate” without being good at one of them. Most people thought I’d gotten into PVA for voice because I sang so often at choir shows. I wish I had, because in retrospect I would have been a shoo-in for All-State choir with the right teacher to unlock me. The ones I had in high school weren’t it, and I had several. That’s because they didn’t know how to use my voice type and tried to force me into a box that was uncomfortable. I was a lyric soprano being trained by mezzos and altos who could love my voice without being able to tell me anything technically about it.
Male voice teachers helped more because they didn’t see me as a reflection of them, and I got the voice I wanted when I was in Texas, its last gift to me.
Because I already felt like a church employee, I was fine with acting like a professional musician at 12 years old, and in fact, I did make honorariums from that time on when I did weddings, funerals, etc. It is a very specific Texas thing because church and music is a grind. You are trying to get better as fast as you can by TMEA, and keeping up your chops means practicing and performing at a very high level. That’s all tied into being hired for Christmas and Easter, a major blessing to trumpet players everywhere.
It is a true pipeline, and while you are doing that, you are also holding together your family narrative, because the preacher’s family always has two- the one that the public gets to see, and the one that they don’t. What I mean by a secretarial role is that I was answering the phone in the car for my dad when I was eight or nine. I was brainstorming with him on sermon ideas, not for each week, but just in general. I was my dad’s coprocessor because my mother was busy with toddler Lindsay.
I held it together with duct tape and bubble gum because I was masking so hard. My mother said I was fine and any deviation was a moral judgment, not “let’s find an accommodation.” I was forced into this high-level music environment but there’s a difference between having a natural talent for it and it fitting your nervous system. I am glad I got that education, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I got to meet Glasper and Moran and Mirielle Enos and Brene Brown before they were famous, but I do regret thinking that I ever needed to turn out like them to be “good enough.”
I wasn’t a preacher’s kid when I met Brene, though. We were both students at University of Houston, she was just in the graduate school of Social Work and I was in undergrad poli sci. Our crossover was that I was the supervisor in the computer lab for the GSSW, so I helped her do things like format papers and stuff. No big whoop. I knew her like I knew the others- not as their professional trademarks, but as what they were like in school.
I never got to play with Jason Moran. He was in Jazz I, and I left before that could ever become real. I even missed the one chance I had because I was too tired to rise to the moment. That’s HSPVA- sometimes everything depends on a single day. Doc never said whether he chose right or whether he was disappointed, but it’s irrelevant now. I would have made it later; I just had to transfer out. However, Robert Glasper and I were classmates in Jazz II, though he didn’t play every tune with us. All the pianists took turns.
And it’s funny how things fade…. my friends from back then don’t remember all my missed notes, just that I took after Wynton Marsalis because I was trying to be great at jazz and classical at the same time. Absent the cerebral palsy, my style is more like Lizzo, wanting to incorporate different elements of music into one piece. But I am not claiming Lizzo as heritage. She is after my time and didn’t go to PVA. She’s just from the HSPVA/TSU/UH triangle. They are all in the same area (or were back then, sorry) connected by West Alabama.
Now, HSPVA has a different vibe. It’s more corporate, less gritty. It’s like Sesame Street after they took the cigarettes off the ground, but it lost the neighborhood that made it. But I thrived in Black culture because I was in Jazz Studies, and it gave me a complete refuge because none of my friends went to my church. Going to a magnet school opened up my life because when I got into PVA, I was the only one of my friends who went there that were also from church.
My popularity didn’t depend on anyone but me. I was picked on a lot, but in a sense it felt good because I got treated like everyone else. There wasn’t this air of parental “you have to be nice to them or we’ll look bad as a family.” That’s the thing that drives your rejection sensitivity dysphoria as a preacher’s child. You have no idea whether you have real friends or not.
Am I welcome here, or I have I been invited because Mrs. So and So wants something at Finance Committee?
That is completely a thing.
And it’s how you become the help, instead of a child.
Stories That Are All True 