As hundreds of black-clad women gathered in a semicircle around the coffin of the Queen of Soul, serene, heartbroken and respectful, I am among them, standing near the front, when suddenly, I feel myself grow woozy.
It is a combination of emotion, heat, dehydration and sadness.
Lord, I cannot pass out during one of Delta Sigma Theta’s Sorority, Inc.’s most sacred rituals, the Omega Omega ceremony for Soror Aretha Franklin herself! So I slowly make my way through the sea of black and pearls to rest against a wall outside the rotunda at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
Instantly, a Soror, Juanita Anderson, sitting herself and holding a cane, places a hand on my shoulder.
She didn’t ask: Are you all right?
She didn’t ask: What’s wrong with you?
No, she quietly asks: “What can I do?”
This moment epitomizes sisterhood. It epitomizes the kind of womanhood, the kind of peoplehood to which we should all aspire. It epitomizes Aretha Franklin, as those who know her, love her, explain over and over in the week after her death.
She never asked: What’s wrong?
She asked her father: What can I do for the church?
She asked civil rights leaders: What can I do for the movement?
She asked her friends: What can I do to make you feel better?
And whether it was to make oxtail soup, write a secret check or host the party of the year, every year, where local unsung heroes mingled with superstars, Ms. Franklin proved how to love and how to do.
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Last week, the Queen left us with many lessons. But none was more important than teaching us how to live, and not just how to live, but how to live with purpose and live our way.
And her way was a foot in the church, a foot in the world and her heart in both.
She taught the churched how to remain in the church even as you work in a career that might defy it. She took her gospel roots with her through every lyrical journey in a musical career that spanned six decades, earned her 18 Grammys and made her the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
She showed up. And she is still teaching us, by the revelation of her actions, how to show up.
Like the times she quietly bailed ministers out of jail who were arrested while fighting for equality.
Like the times she financially carried families who had suffered tragedy.
Like the times she helped foot the bill for the civil rights movement. “When Dr. King was alive, several times she helped us make payroll,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson, her friend of more than 60 years, told me in the days before she died. “On one occasion, we took an 11-city tour with her as Aretha Franklin and Harry Belafonte … and they put gas in the vans. She did 11 concerts for free and hosted us at her home and did a fundraiser for my campaign. Aretha has always been a very socially conscious artist, an inspiration, not just an entertainer.”
Like that time her longtime friend and onetime neighbor, Ron Moten, asked her back in 2003 to visit his mother in an assisted living home to say “Happy Birthday.” She told him she’d think about it. On his mother’s 90th birthday, “Aretha showed up … with her sons, Teddy, Eddie, Brenda, Sabrina, backup singers, a full band and performed for one hour — for all the residents,” Moten recalled at her funeral Friday. “And then she topped it off by singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to my mom. You ask Aretha for a little, and she will always give you more than you asked for.”
Like the times she would show up and help other entertainers, sometimes stepping in, without credit, to appear on someone else’s records. And she could play anything.
“People don’t know that Aretha Franklin ... would come and lay piano tracks” for other entertainer’s recordings, recalled Rod Dixon, the celebrated tenor and member of Three Mo’ Tenors, who opened Thursday night’s “A People’s Tribute to Aretha Franklin” concert at Chene Park, the city’s celebrated waterfront amphitheater, that next week is expected to be renamed Aretha Franklin Park. “When you look at the clips of her playing piano when she was younger — and, of course, when you spend time with Duke Ellington, and you have time with Miles Davis and James Cleveland and all the greats who come along during her time as a young girl — they don’t know that those ears were not just germane to producing a sound. But those ears were in tune to the universality of music. You can see her playing with orchestra, big band, jazz combo …”
And she did. But even as she helped her peers, she helped others rise.
She helped Lauryn Hill teach us that “A Rose Is Still a Rose.
She helped introduce George Michael, already a superstar, to an entire new audience when he and the Queen sang “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me).”
Jenifer Lewis, the actress and singer currently appearing in ABC-TV’s “blackish,” said Thursday night that Ms. Franklin changed her life.
“Aretha Franklin was everything to me,” Lewis said backstage at the tribute concert. “I come from poverty and everything that comes from being in poverty. When there were no clothes, heat or food, there was Aretha Franklin. I had 11 45s (little vinyl records) and a pink little record player. And Aretha Franklin was 10 of them. Do you understand me? She was everything to me. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Aretha Franklin, and I’ll tell the world that.”
Lewis said a Franklin family member called to tell her that her book was the last one the Queen of Soul read.
“So honey, can’t nobody say nothing to me no more,” Lewis said. “She got to read how much I loved her and what she did for me. So all hail the Queen, and long live the Queen.”
That was the sentiment last week as tens of thousands filed past her coffin at the Wright over two days to say goodbye and thousands turned out Thursday night for the tribute concert and thousands gathered at her funeral — her last four-day engagement, where conversations were mostly about four things:
First, Aretha Franklin is Detroit. She loved Detroit, commanded attention and respect for Detroit and helped other people see Detroit for what it truly is. She, even in death, is teaching us to embrace our city with fierce pride. We have defied all those predictions that Detroit was dying. We have the last laugh.
Second, Aretha Franklin was real. She was not a hallucination, too good to be true. She was good, she was great. She was the best. But she also was a mother and grandmother and great-grandmother who was a person to her family and friends. No one explained that better than her niece, Cristal Franklin, an entrepreneur whose Eastern Market pop-up celebrates Detroit, but whose life celebrates her favorite aunt, the one who sang at her high school graduation. She thanked “every person who bought an album, who bought a concert ticket … who ever took a picture of my aunt, who ever wrote an article about my aunt and whoever loved every last song that she wrote.”
“When I was born in ’73, she was already the Queen of Soul, had won eight Grammys, had Top 10 hits,” her niece said. “But to me, she was just my aunt, the one who gave birth to my road dog, Kelf … the aunt who sang at my high school graduation, taught me my bad shopping habits and who took her granddaughters, my daughters and I to see ‘Disney on Ice,’ who taught me that emeralds were worth more than diamonds … the one who listened to me when I told her she had to have Jill Scott and Mary J on her "Divas" special and she had to go on Wendy, my aunt who chartered a bus so our family could go to President Obama’s inauguration and made sure I was front and center for the swearing-in.”
Third, Aretha Franklin was more than a singer. She was a force, a civil rights, women’s rights and human rights fighter who helped too many people to count. Her greatest lesson is teaching us how to give in joy, be involved. Several ministers and speakers at her homegoing service reminded people that the civil rights struggle isn’t over. The Rev. William J. Barber II challenged all the stars and presidents and speakers who came out to honor the Queen to come back for a revival to stir people to register to vote and get involved in black America’s greatest struggle, understanding that we must all dictate the governance of our cities, states and country. And the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., told the crowd: "If you leave here today and don't register to vote, you've dishonored" Aretha Franklin.
Fourth, people are eager to cement the Queen’s legacy in some concrete way in Detroit, not Memphis where she was born or Los Angeles, where so much glory is celebrated, but here in the city she loved.
“People are here from Australia, Great Britain, France — I just met some someone from South Africa,” Rev. Jackson said backstage Thursday at the tribute concert. “The question is: 'Now that this phase is over, the next phase is legacy.' ”
Jackson supports having a place in Detroit that honors the Queen and becomes a place where people can learn not just about Ms. Franklin, but about her Detroit.
“Our people need it,” he said. “She never left LaSalle Boulevard. She never left that church. She never left home. It’s hard to guesstimate how far she reached people. It’s not just Detroit.”
Rod Dixon, the classical singer, said if something is created to honor her, it can’t be just a museum.
“There’s a specific journey that most artists of value, those who consider themselves serious artists take,” Dixon said. Detroit should become a place where artists around the world “would come here and sit and go through the files and archives and pictures and get an idea of what her world was like both on and off the stage. It’s important that they have that. Hers is a unique career, very unique, so I applaud anyone and all of those who are championing the idea that there should be a place where people could just come and study Aretha Franklin. Period.”
John Schneider, who once starred in “The Dukes of Hazzard" and currently stars in Tyler Perry’s “The Haves and Have Nots” on the OWN Network, Ms. Franklin’s favorite show, offered the same assessment.
The actor, who came with the cast Friday to Ms. Franklin’s funeral, said he’d love to see a place where people could “learn about her, about her Detroit … a place that details not only who she was but any documentation of anything she ever said about where that comes from other than God, how in the world that voice came out of that woman. I would love to know as a singer.”
Learning about the true Aretha Franklin, the Detroiter who made Detroit proud, could teach more people to become like Aretha Franklin.
It could teach people to be as committed as she was, to be devoted to making a difference.
For years, for so many, Ms. Franklin didn’t ask: What does it cost?
She didn’t ask: Whose job is it?
She asked, “What can I do?”
And she did do, over and over. Now, the greatest gift we can do for her family, for history, for her, is to do what we can to do keep her flame burning, to ensure everlasting R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
Long live the Queen.
Contact Rochelle Riley: rriley99freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @rochelleriley. Find information about her book "The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery" at https://ift.tt/2LRthsG
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