Joshua Gone Barbados

I cannot remember when the practice began and therefore, for how long this custom has been occurring or for how long it will in the future continue, but whenever I hear 4:24 PMom Rush’s version of Eric von Schmidt’s song “Joshua Gone Barbados” I text my younger daughter. I say, “I’m looking for Joshua. Do you have any idea where he might be?” Or some absurd version of that query. Within minutes she responds, “He’s in Barbados!” Or some absurd version answer to my query.

And that is it. That’s all—with her response the event is over and we both return straightaway to whatever ongoing activity in which either of us had been engaged. She never listens to any version of the song but only responds to my attending! But somehow in the interchange we have defined and confirmed a relationship that stretches over our years and that brings the past into the present. Probably AR first heard the song while driving in the car on our weekly trip to Eau Claire for violin lessons. To entertain the children on this excursion I would prepare a CD of music and comedy routines (mostly from Monty Python), and one week I included “Joshua Gone Barbados,” a song I must have recently heard on one of the streaming stations to which I subscribe. I appreciated the song’s perspectives, it’s implied criticism of capitalism and the anti-Union bent it supported. Joshua had been the head of the government and had advocated for a labor strike in the sugar cane fields in the demand for higher pay, but when the strike was called and conflict arose Joshua departed for a comfortable hotel in Barbados and left the workers to an ugly fate. “Joshua gone to Barbados, he don’t care at all.” (I’ve been watching the Select Committee hearings . . . no, he didn’t and still doesn’t care at all!) The owners brought in scabs to break the strike: “Bring in a bunch of fellows . . . Strikers can’t do nothing. Strike be all in vain.” The police maybe killed a worker or two, and Sonny Child, the overseer, went walking through the cane fields with a pistol in his hand and the workers attacked him with a cutlass. But Joshua remained safe in distant Barbados. None of that is the content of our communication.

In the car we did not talk about the politics underlying the song; I knew that as a family our politics was happily embedded in a left-wing orientation—my daughters have learned enough to correct me, at times, at the rapidly changing social and political landscapes—and so the partisanship of the song didn’t need explaining. They knew. But, well, I liked the song, Tom Rush and the sentiment the song expressed, and as with other items in my portfolio, desired to share these with my children. Because I loved them. Both became social workers and advocates for the more oppressed in our contemporary iteration of the Caribbean cane fields.

In the car that day I probably pushed repeat a number of times and continued to replay the song until finally AR demanded, “Stop! Enough!” I accordingly acquiesced and we moved onto the next selection. But thus was begun an event that over the years became a connection and relationship that I renew and cherish every time I hear the song. I recognize that we are no longer in the car on the way to violin lessons, and that she lives in a faraway city, and is no longer a child though she is still mine. In her life she listens to different music and doesn’t even have an attachment to the specific song as I do. Though in and by her response she suggests an acknowledgment of something important in our relationship that occurs through our interaction at the song’s appearance and which connection continues to strengthen the bond between us. 

I have been considering what is it that underlies the connection here: why do I continue to ask about Joshua’s whereabouts though I know for certain that he is in Barbados. And why does she not ignore the inanity of my question and tell me to just stop! I cannot answer for AR, but I think that in the event of my inquiring about Joshua and in her responding the two of us call up and then unpack a history that is embedded in the words we use, which history offers far more than the words’ literal or even figurative meaning. In the call and response we bring all of the history forward, and even the history that preceded the particular connection that was established when we first heard the song—to her interminably—riding to Eau Claire on 94, and even before the question and response began, and we acknowledge our continuing and loving relationship that exists not in the song but in our response to each other. And in the call and response that hearing the song has inspired we acknowledge the history of our relationship that includes not just the good parts but the unhappy and unpleasant aspects of it as well. There is hope.

Isn’t that what ritual means: to bring the past into the present, swelling the present with the complicated and complex past, thereby infusing the present with memory and preparing the present for the future. Because there is history to discover in the song that we haven’t yet discovered, but we know we’ve got time. 

Ah, Joshua gone to Barbados . . . I hope he stays long there.

He Was Wearing a Hat!

A little boy and his grandmother were taking a walk along the rocky seashore when a huge wave appeared seemingly out of nowhere and swept the child out to sea. The horrified grandmother fell to her knees and looking up at the sky pleaded, “God, please return my beloved grandson. Please I beg you. Send him back safely.” And suddenly and out of seemingly nowhere another huge wave washed in and deposited the little boy on the sand at his grandmother’s feet. She picked him up, looked him over, and, looking back up at the sky, said, “He was wearing a hat!”

I have laughed at that joke for almost twenty years, and I was wondering on my walk today what draws me to it. (To help me fall asleep I sometimes read a joke book!) I think the humor in the above joke derives from the incongruity of the grandmother’s response to the child’s return: she expresses not gratitude as one would expect but plaint: the child who has been returned should be the same child as the one who had been taken: he had been wearing a hat! The joke seems premised on the propensity of human beings to be never completely satisfied with their lot and to always find something about which to complain: what they have is never enough. (Admittedly, there are too many who have not enough and this is the shame of government and greed!) The book of Bamidbar in the Hebrew bible recounts a series of events in which the Israelites having been freed from onerous slavery in Egypt and having journeyed in the wilderness headed toward the Promised Land, time and again bemoan their condition and complain to Moses and Aaron about the hardships the people suffer: they have not enough water, food, shelter, safety, etc. Moses castigates the people, “For you have rejected the Lord who is among you, by whining before God and saying, “Oh why did we ever leave Egypt!” In a startling rebuke to the complaints God tells Moses—who is also exasperated with the grumbles,—to tell the people, “The Lord will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall eat not one day, not two, not even five days or ten or twenty, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you.” The people seem never satisfied with what they have but would rather complain about what they do not have than accept the reality of their current situation. Ironically, in Bamidbar Moses and God, too, complain. Moses grumbles to God that the task of leading the people is too much for him and Moses bitterly wonders why God had assigned him that responsibility? And then God has whined, “How long will this people spurn Me, and how long will they have no faith in Me despite all the sings that I have performed in their midst.” God even threatens to destroy the people and start anew. Fortunately, Moses talks God out of the planned destruction. 

In the joke, the grandmother complains that God has not done enough: her grandchild was returned but when he was swept away he was wearing a hat but he was returned without it. Where is his hat?? This world portrayed here is one in which God is not good enough. Or else in this world God is inscrutable: else what rationale can be offered why the child was returned without a hat! Or perhaps grandmother is mistaken, and it is chance and not God that returns her grandchild. The loss of the hat is merely fortuitous.

The presence of complaint implies a complainer, and that complainer portrays him themselves as somehow oppressed and victimized. Complaints posit a world that oppresses and resists desire. Complaints posit a world more powerful that any individual, and over which the individual has little control. Complaints maintain the person in stasis: when I complain I regret my present state rather than work to change it. I bemoan conditions and engage in nostalgic reverie of a long-past Eden. “He was wearing a hat!”

            But perhaps there is another level to the joke’s appeal for me. Because what appears at first to be complaint could be understood as an act of defiance. The grandmother’s insistence that he was wearing a hat suggests that God has send back an unacceptably incomplete child and she demands that God return the same child earlier taken, hat and all!