Bill T. Jones Talks With Bill Moyers about Race and Revolution, George... (1)
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to MOYERS ON DEMOCRACY. Bill Moyers talks with the remarkable Bill T. Jones, the artistic giant who revolutionized modern dance. The son of migrant farm workers in the South – the 10th of 12 children – Jones grew up to win two Tony Awards, receive the National Medal of Art and a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, to be honored by the Kennedy Center and widely recognized for his advocacy for human rights. You may remember the documentary Bill Moyers and his colleague David Grubin produced about Bill T. Jones landmark work STILL/HERE.
BILL T. JONES: (excerpt from STILL/HERE) I thought when I was making STILL/HERE I wanted to affirm that there is that which is profound and beautiful in all that is life and in particularly those moments when it's dark. So STILL/HERE was trying to tell people that there is always reason to sing and dance.
ANNOUNCER: In the days just after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 Bill Moyers would seek out Bill T. Jones for another conversation.
BILL T. JONES: (excerpt from 9/11 CONVERSATIONS) Could I go now and dance at that site? I could. I could dance. I could dance with respect. I could dance with grief. Fierceness. I would dance and hopefully invite grieving people and we'd all dance together.
BILL MOYERS: Do you believe there's wisdom in the body?
BILL T. JONES: I do believe there's wisdom in the body.
BILL MOYERS: What is it? How do we find it?
BILL T. JONES: Well, listen to the body and take care of it. Reclaim the body. Start moving around. Just start moving. And don't judge. Just try it. An then I dare you to do it with a group of friends. And that you all look at each other, crying and moving, without judgment, and with infinite compassion. Be brave.
ANNOUNCER: Here now, in the middle of another crisis, is Bill Moyers, with Bill T. Jones.
BILL MOYERS: It's really good to be with you. Fancy it being in the midst of a pandemic.
BILL T. JONES: In the middle of two pandemics if you think that the police brutality and the killing of George Floyd, which has turned into a whole generational political movement on top of COVID, the social protesting that's so frightening to many.
BILL MOYERS: Are you more politically inclined this year than previously?
BILL T. JONES: I think I'm more interested in how the political and the spiritual, if there is such a thing, come together. I've become a big fan of Hannah Arendt a real thinker about totalitarianism, a real thinker about group think, and a thinker about thinking. I trust her to be with me in those moments of intellectual, spiritual confusion because she is so clear in her intellectual pursuit of ideas. MEN IN DARK TIMES, THE HUMAN CONDITION. Speech. As you know, this is a big issue right now. What are we allowed to talk freely about? And should some things just not be said? And there used to be a time I used to say it was everything should be said. But now I'm cautious. I'm thinking a lot about that right now. Of course, I'm really angry at the present administration. I'm outraged by it. And it makes me, well, that's why we have the “Vote” on the front of the building right now.
BILL MOYERS: I saw the picture of you standing in front of your building with those large rainbow-colored letters: V-O-T-E.
BILL T. JONES: And, we decided to participate in something called #OpenYourLobbies, when all the protests were going on, so people are coming in and out, and I thought, well, why don't I do an action? So, I did an action. First time out of my house and I did a reading action, which is I read for five hours everything from Toni Morrison and her Nobel lecture to Richard Pryor's biography, all things that, in obvious and not so obvious ways, are speaking to me about the moment that we're in. And that moment is, is there a “we”? I was so sure about the “we.” “We shall overcome.” “We the people.” The pursuit of the “we.” I don't want to be a cynical shell of who I used to be. But I want to be an honest one. So is there a “we”?
BILL MOYERS: Do you think that “We the people,” in the Constitution, written as it was in the time of slavery, was “We the people” a metaphysical piety expressing a political aspiration – you know, “One nation, indivisible” – or a charade enabling the strong to thrive at the expense of the poor?
BILL T. JONES: Are you messing with me Bill?
BILL MOYERS: I'm messing with you Jones.
BILL T. JONES: Well, like every other young person– I'm born in '52, right? And I remember the time when we did prayer in the morning, and every assembly program we would stand up with hand on heart and my temperament, I wanted to believe in big, unifying ideas. “We're all God's children,” says my southern Baptist mom. And then you have Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King telling us that in the words of the Negro spiritual we will hold hands. So, I was ready for it. I loved Malcom X, but I had difficulty embracing him in the way that I did Martin Luther King, because I thought there was something spiritual, metaphysical about the fact that even though we all look differently, we are at base, in our hearts we are the same. And every enlightened human being should be trying to work for that. Then this sort of cynicism begins to seep in as one gets older, as one maybe owns things, or one goes out and gets their head cracked, or one feels a sense of injustice. And I think that it made me very confused. And I wanted to turn off the world. I wanted to turn it off. Don't try to resolve the questions that have gnawed at you about why did your father, Gus Jones, this powerful man, when the white state troopers come around, why did my dad begin to move differently? He would drop his eyes a bit, the tone of voice would change. What's going on here? I'm getting signals. Now, is this a cynical man saying this? Always there's the levers of power, oligarchy pulling those. And sometimes I feel that the good liberals need a Zen slap. It bothers me when I hear Martin Luther King's I HAVE A DREAM speech every Black History Month. Black History Month, right? I'm saying this is so cynical. It placates liberal guilt. And I didn't want to be part of that. So, when I say that, when he says “we,” even Martin Luther King, I am challenging his Christian theology that teaches us that we are all God's children. I want to believe it. I have to believe it. But I believe that it should be questioned, it should have to renew itself and stand up with new language to convince me.
BILL MOYERS: You mentioned your father. You were born in Florida, right?
BILL T. JONES: Yes, he decided to be a Black Yankee and moved to the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.
BILL MOYERS: I see.
BILL T. JONES: I was about three years old when we moved to the Finger Lakes region.
BILL MOYERS: I didn't realize that you had moved there that soon. So, he never felt the stark fear of seeing you leave home and worrying if you'd get back? Is that right, when you were growing up?
BILL T. JONES: Are you kidding me? The earliest stories that we heard was my mother talking about her mother trying to go from the plantation they worked on– they were sharecroppers. Her daughter was pregnant on another plantation and the farmer, the white farmer told my grandmother, “Anna, you can't go.” My grandma tried to sneak away. He catches her, brings her back, puts her over a bale of hay, and he had a thing called a man handler, which is a giant strip of leather. He made Anna Edwards, Big Mama, my grandmother, lean over that and her five children had to line up and watch him beat her. Now, you're telling this to a six year old? It's dangerous to be Black. That– are you kidding?
BILL MOYERS: How did you handle this?
BILL T. JONES: You just– how do you handle it? Oh my God. I don't know. Imagine a potato field that goes on for maybe a mile, one row, and your job is– your mother's down on her knees picking the potatoes, yours is to run ahead and shake out the dust, and the DDT, 'cause they were spraying everything, and all day long, because she's trying to get to the end of the row before noon, and it's good money because it's .12 cents per bag. Now you know what 12– 100 pound bags of potatoes you get paid .12 cent for, and that was good money, and you– she's trying to support a family on that, boy, you better get out there and work. You better carry that field. “When I was a child,” my mother says, “and we were picking cotton in Georgia, we were there at dawn, and my mother would whip us if we didn't lead the field.” What is all this expectation, right, this expectation that you've got to– you cannot be like the kid you go to school with. You know? I'm sorry I get so excited but this pulls me away from the Black Lives Matter era where you've gotta give the talk to young Black men that they want to kill you. It was just understood. They want to kill you.
RELATED: Arts & Culture BILL MOYERS: When I talked to you after 9/11, remember I called? You came in from the country and we did a conversation about how you were responding to the atrocities of 9/11, and about the spirit of survival, and here's something you said to me then:
BILL T. JONES: (excerpt from 9/11 CONVERSATIONS) There's a touch of madness, I think, in most artists. I think in myself that madness I attribute it to something I saw that was wild in my mother when she was praying when I was a child. It's when you strip yourself of all that supports you, your ego, and your world, and then you try to talk directly to– I don't want to call it God. I'll call it destiny. Try to talk directly to the circumstances of your life.
BILL T. JONES: It's insane, isn't it? And now as a country we're supposedly reckoning with it. That's really hard for me to have the generosity of spirit to allow people this long to catch up. When I hear people saying, “I didn't know. I had no idea. I had no idea what it was like.” It took I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, James Baldwin, or it took Nina Simone, and people are now saying, “I had no idea,” and it's hard to be generous enough to say, “Well, why didn't you know? You know me. You– you couldn't–this is my white friends, right? “But you're different, Bill. You're different.” And then I feel degraded and silly. Oh, so you've been acting another part to be accepted in the white avant-garde? You've been acting another part so as not to– there's a term now called rescuing white people. When people are trying to deal with white fragility, and they're feeling, “Oh, I'm so sad,” and all, and you have the way of coming in and saying, “Oh, it's okay. It's okay. We're alright. You know, it doesn't matter between us.” That's called rescuing white people. And I'm a champion rescuer.
