SOUTH dir Morgan Quaintance

[Yusef Komunyakaa] An island is one great eye, gazing out, a beckoning lighthouse, searchlight, a wishbone compass, or counterweight to the stars.

When it comes to outlook and point of view, a figure stands on a rocky ledge peering out towards an archipelago of glass on the mainland, a seagull's wings touching the tip of a high wave, out to where the brain may stumble.

[Faint crackling static]

[Melancholic solo cello]

[Intertwining string melodies]

[Melodies soaring higher]

[Melancholic cello theme returns]

[Theme soars then descends]

[Low string melodies]

[Sombre dying cadence]

[Music ends]

[Echoing footsteps]

[Audience members clearing throats]

[Piano cadence]

[Baritone sings aria in Italian]

[Singing continues, accompanied by piano]

[Dramatic climax]

[Music ends]

[Female voice] Once you can speak, you can learn to sing.

[Dramatic piano cadence]

-Oh, I began teaching in er... 1971.

-[Soprano singing in background] I returned to Vienna and then I built up a choir. But I had a forty voice choir. And this choir was so professional, they sang in about seven languages. Because I taught them to sing in German, in Italian, in French and even Russian.

So, the first thing I asked them to do, I say sing anything [chuckles].

And then when I hear where the voice is I know whether it's a low voice, or a middle voice, or a high voice; I can tell.

[Soprano and piano continues]

The power, actually, you can use in the right way. Because you don't always have to sing very loud, you can control the singing, sing softly but yet that could reach out beyond. You know.

[Soprano and piano echoes]

[Machine winding down]

[Slows to crashing halt]

[Silence]

[Sustained gospel organ chords]

[Music continues playing]

[Female voice] Uh, I met Ed when I was fifteen. And we just, we travelled around.

There was no work in this country. People were absolutely starving to death. And then a friend of mine gave me a copy of 'Grapes of Wrath'. And I read it and thought it was the most beautiful thing. It was like my life story. It was like being blind and all at once you can see. Because it just showed me a whole new side of myself and my family. I had never seen us as a people.

-[Low chords, discordant violin] -Poor people are very fragmented.

They don't tend to identify with each other.

It was like somebody was writing about me and about my grandmother, Molly Bell.

[Breathing]

[Discordant chords and violin] I know when I first became aware of my own racism was when the bus boycott was in Montgomery Alabama. I was living there at the time and I saw Reverend King knocked down and beaten and I saw grown men pick black women up and throw them into the buses to try to force them to ride. I saw things that I had never seen before.

Um, I like to think that I was human enough that when I saw some of the... violence that goes along with racism,

-that I... understood... -[discordant violin stab]

[Quavering] what it had done to me and my people, southern whites.

[Interviewer] And what do you think it was about you that made you change and hasn't made other members of your own family change in the same way?

[Shakily] I don't know. I truly don't. I wish I knew.

[Discordant chords and violin continue]

[Male voice] Is it possible to have love without justice?

Is it possible that we think too much in terms of charity, in terms of Thanksgiving Day baskets, in terms of Christmas baskets

-[High-pitched, discordant violin]

-and not in terms enough of eliminating poverty?

[Frantic, scratching high-pitched violin]

[Low, dying hum]

[Male voice] Well, most of the young patriots, they were part of a migration from the South that went to the North, looking for a job.

Uh, there were probably any given time 40,000 to 80,000 people from the South from this one community called Uptown.

Uh and that's where the people went because of the uh you know, the rent, it was pretty much, a slum neighbourhood.

Uh... And I went there when I was about 17 years old, just turned 17, I'm from Tennessee. And went there looking for a job and my elder brother, he was already there. But he had already been involved with a street gang, called Peacemakers.

And through the Peacemakers they got involved with a group from Students for a Democratic Society, called Join.

Jobs or Income Now!

We had gotten recognised for some of the things -that we had done. -[Melancholic cello begins]

And so we were approached by the Peace and Freedom Party out there from California, they were looking to run somebody for President of the United States.

[Cello continues] Uh... So they wanted to choose a black person and a white person.

They ran Eldridge Cleaver and Peggy Terry, Cleaver for the President and Terry for the Vice President, against George Wallace, a racist from here in Alabama where I'm from.

We were recognised by the Black Panthers and we started forming a coalition with them.

[Cough] And eventually set up some free health clinics and breakfast for children programme, legal services, and followed their model, police patrol units, all that.

[Cello fades]

And that's what really pissed Mayor Daley off. And so he came out with the war on gangs, criminalised us and he brought in J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO.

[Echoing twang]

[Wind whistling, faint birds chirping]

[Planes passing overhead]

[Rising cheers, applauding, whistling]

[Man on speaker]

[Junior] Freedom is something to be cherished. I mean like, we are free to a certain extent, we can have functions like this, and we can enjoy it. People have come out to show solidarity and bands have gone up there to play and show how much they care, you know.

South Africa, they couldn't have a thing like this happening.

-[Rising cheers, whistling]

-[Piano chord]

[Female voice 2] The Anti Apartheid Movement really took off in the mid 1980s and it was because of two things really. Um the first was because of the Conservative government here, led by Margaret Thatcher, who was a hugely oppositional leader although she won three elections in a row, but the international dimension of that was largely people joining in and saying we want to do something about apartheid. Linking up with anti-racist struggles here to do that.

And then the other thing was, was that the movement inside South Africa became really, really big in the 80s. And then there was a kind of eruption in like music and you know t-shirts and badges and just kind of symbols here of what you could do.

You know, it was very easy to kind of go and boycott oranges or to wear your Boycott South Africa Boycott Apartheid t-shirt and your badge. It really took off and music was a big part of that.

[Whistling and applauding]

[Sade] Erm I'm here and the band are here because we believe that what today represented was worthwhile. So I mean, that doesn't affect me, if it becomes a trend, then that's not a bad thing.

[Man on speaker] This one, true it do so much for me in the charts...

I personally I do it for Africa. South Africa.

[Female voice 3] It's a long story but I started off with an organisation called Black Action to Liberate South Africa, BALSA, which used to meet in Lambeth Town Hall in the mid ‘80s. And then I decided I wanted something that felt a bit more like it was heading towards the kind of pressure and structures that were needed, so I then joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement, nationally. And they'd put you in touch with your local groups, because by that time there were local groups all over the country. So I got put in touch with Southwark local group, where I lived.

[Female voice 2] I was very much a grassroots activist, worker bee person at Clapham Common. So what I remember is I wasn't on the big march because I had to go to the Common to help set things up and we had a tent with exhibitions because we wanted to use the occasion to show people what apartheid was like and we had this exhibition in a tent. And then what I remember most [laughs] is trying to collect some money because it was a very expensive event.

[Female 3] People now assume that Anti-Apartheid Movement was easy but it wasn’t; it took decades to get to the point where voices were heard of any sort and there were some quite good, powerful people involved. So I am really now a believer in collective voice as a mechanism to effect change.

[Final bars of 'Free Nelson Mandela', The Specials]

Free Nelson Mandela! Free Nelson Mandela! -Free Nelson Mandela! -[Cheering]

-[Final drum crash] -[Cheering echoes and fades]

[Mechanical whirring, ticking sound]

-[Distorted whirring overlaps] -[Lower tick-tock sound]

-[Ethereal distorted whirring] -[Dialogue inaudible]

[Digital reverberations]

[Sounds stop]

[Ethereal digital sound]

[Sustained bass drone]

[Sounds fade]

-[Heart rate monitor sound] -[Background hum]

[Heart rate monitor continues]

-[Heart rate monitor fades] -[Alarm beeping]

[Yusef Komunyakaa] To lie down in remembrance, is to know each of us is a prodigal son or daughter, looking out beyond land and sky, the chemical and metaphysical beyond falling and turning waterwheels in the colossal brain of damnable gods, a Eureka held up to the sun's blinding eye, born to gaze into fire.

[Loud twang]

-[Twang dies away] -[Inaudible scene]

[Eerie, elongated, pitch-bending strings] [Yusef Komunyakaa] Light edged along salt-crusted stones, across a cataract of blue water, and lost sailor's parrots spoke of sirens, the last words of men buried at sea.

[Ragged, discordant violin strokes]

[Strings edging higher and higher]

-[Heart rate monitor returns] -[Indistinct dialogue]

[Distorted voices vocalising]

[Distorted voice] The – the – the – the – stories. Stories – of – of – our lives.

[Distorted voices overlapping] The stories – stories – of our lives…

[Pitch bending higher] Of our lives...

[Faint static sound]

[Yusef Komunyakaa] After conquering frontiers, the mind comes back to rest, stretching out over the white sand.

['Could It Be Magic' by Barry Manilow] # Baby, I love you Come, come, come into my arms Let me know the wonder Of all of you And baby I want you now Now, oh now Oh now and hold on fast Could this be the magic At last And could it be magic Oh come on, come on Oh come into my arms Oh let me know the wonder Of all of you Baby I want you now Now oh now Now and hold on fast Could this be the magic At last Could it be magic, come on Come on, come into my arms Oh, let me know the wonder Of all of you Baby I want you now Now, oh now Oh, now and hold on fast Could this be the magic At last Could it be magic Come on, come on Come, oh come into my arms Oh let me know the wonder Of all of you Baby I want you now #

[Song continues]

[Strings soaring]

[Backing singers continue]

# Baby I want you! #

Subtitled by Elaine Lillian Joseph and Adriana Hoyos

[Final bars of Chopin's 'Prelude in C Minor, Opus 28, No. 20']

[Final chord fades]