Janis F. Kearney’s New Orleans Visit

January 11-13, 2023

DATE, TIME and Venue

January 11, 2023 10 am -12pm 2023 Martin Luther King Celebration

New Orleans Public Library Main. 219 Loyola Ave. New Orleans, LA 70112

January 12, 2023 6 pm - 8pm Conversation & Book Signing with the Author

Octavia Books 513 Octavia St. New Orleans, LA 70115

January 13, 2023 6 pm - 8pm Conversation & Book Signing with the Author Community Book Center 2523 Bayou Rd. New Orleans, LA 70119

Janis F. Kearney, author, teacher, public speaker

ONLY ON SUNDAYS: MAHALIA JACKSON’S LONG JOURNEY

BY JANIS F. KEARNEY

A Note from the Author

Most African Americans born in the early 50’s knew Mahalia Jackson’s music. Part of our rite of passage was watching “Imitation of Life” each year with our families. I will never forget each one of us inside my large family finding our spot on the divan or the floor close by, watching quietly, breathless, this movie that successfully pulled on every emotion we had every time we watched it. But, none like that final scene when Mahalia Jackson rises to sing, “The Troubles of the World.” Not one eye would be dry after that scene…not even my stoic Mom, or my Dad, whose hardness was always tempered with a soft spot. Still, who of us could claim that we knew anything more about Mahalia Jackson before now?

I was reintroduced to this Queen of Gospel 15 years ago in Chicago, the place she’d called home most of her life. Former U.S. Senator Roland Burris, who was also former comptroller of Illinois—the first African American to hold that position—and his lovely wife Berlean Burris, purchased Ms. Jackson’s home just months before she passed. When the beautiful couple invited us to their home for dinner one Sunday evening, we had no idea whose home we were entering. I left with an otherworldly sensation, a million questions and a new appreciation for the woman who had made us cry all those years.

Since that prophetic Sunday dinner, I have made it my intention to learn as much as I could about this giant persona through research, books and talking with those who knew her when. What I learned, deducted, intimated about Mahalia Jackson, I will share here. This book historical nonfiction told by a creative writer. It is the product of more than 15 years of a re-investigation of Mahalia Jackson’s complex life based on written and spoken stories, and from her own words as shared in interviews, books, songs and more.

I am not a historian by academic measurements. I am a journalist, author and lover and curator of stories and their roots. Why, you may ask, did I choose to write Mahalia Jackson’s story as creative nonfiction, rather than name it, biography? I am a firm believer that every story about a subject that is not his or her own—actually, even our own stories—are writers’ re-interpretations of the subject’s lives and stories. Because she is no longer here to speak with, research is invaluable oral histories shared with me by others are also important, as is the research collected by others. Yet, in the end, I am the eventual vessel through which her story must be delivered. As a southern writer, I come with my own experiences, knowledge, questions and opinions about Ms. Jackson’s experiences in the American south—and, more importantly, how that helped define America’s Queen of Gospel. There is no question that you will sense that in my writing of this story. It is one author’s interpretation of a great American’s life story. In the literary vernacular, for it is told through the lens of this writers’ own experiences as a woman of African descent who also grew up in the American south.

In creative nonfiction, writers take the liberty of imagining some of our subject’s thoughts and actions based on their patterns, their experiences, how they describe themselves and their lives. Then, of course, we lean heavily on the most objective of archival material. Even so, Creative Nonfiction must be based on truth. One of America’s most treasured poets, Emily Dickinson, wrote that, while it is important that we write with truth the best telling of stories is when truth is told, “with a slant.” This writer’s slant is her southern roots, and her woman-ness in America.

Spring 2020. More than any other time since the Great Depression, was a cross point in Black Americans’ evolution as Americans. A time of immense introspection and reassessments of this thing we call American democracy. Spring 2020 was an era of immense pain for America, but far more for Black America. A central part of that pain was the revelation that so much of the important racial and social justice work done over the last century has nearly all been undone within the last decade.

For writers of color, it was a collective realization that our stories, our histories, when told, were most times not told from our own perspectives. The stories about us lacked the slant from people of color. When we held our own archives up to the light of day, we found the annals of American literature and history sorely lacking in the rich stories of African Americans who lived, survived, and even thrived during these last four centuries.

First came the universal sigh in Black America, knowing how difficult and complicated an assignment this would be —a disruption of African American history and literature. How to address this historical problem? The mission in time became clear: telling/writing new stories of who we are, our unique experiences as multi-layered Americans; and, by “retelling,” the stories that have been told by others. 2020 was a call of action for those devoted to collecting and sharing history through the lens of our realities.

This story of the great Mahalia Jackson, America’s Queen of Gospel, is in her honor, and a step toward this new beginning to tell our stories and tell them from our slant. Finally.

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