“You are never not an educator, never not a teacher, never not a student,” Eugene B. Redmond said in a video produced to honor his recognition as Lifetime Achiever at the St. Louis American Foundation’s 2009 Salute to Excellence in Education, held Friday at America’s Center.
It was a point he made in several ways that night.
Though a professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville with many academic distinctions, Redmond asked a longtime student from one of his community-based efforts – Darlene Roy – to introduce him to the elegantly dressed audience of 1,300.
Redmond then schooled everyone in the room on some new tricks about how to deliver an award acceptance speech.
You don’t have to do it alone – he invited his daughter, Treasure Redmond Williams, to join him at the podium throughout his speech.
You don’t have to speak it – he and his daughter presented a contrapuntal, call-and-response song/chant in lieu of a conventional oration.
The body can speak it with you – he and Treasure performed the entire chant, titled “Patchin’ & ‘tachin’,” complete with choreographed gestures that amplified the language and extended it into physical space.
And the drum can speak it with you, too – fittingly, for the author of a groundbreaking study and a journal named DrumVoices, Redmond became the first Salute awardee ever to inspire repeated, impromptu flourishes from the bandstand, as the drummer simply could not resist playing along when the award reception chant quoted from popular song.
It was an expectedly unexpected performance from an elder who has taken to calling himself “Newgene.”
“Swelling with plenitude of gratitude,” he chanted with his daughter, consciously echoing centuries of West African praise song, which Redmond has been teaching in American universities as long as anyone has.
His acceptance chant did more than enlarge the physical and expressive possibilities of an award speech. It also reached outside of the ballroom and the convention center to locate the Salute on its geographic and psychic continuum.
“Longitude & latitude,” chanted the educator poet, who has documented the rivers that define this region geographically in poetry for four decades.
When he recognized the people he loves so dearly as “East-Saint-Arkansippi Trailblazers,” there were gasps and laughs of recognition from the crowd, who could discern the northern migrations of their own families in this tight phrase of Redmond’s.
As always, this archivist of the Diaspora – who became what he calls an “accidental academic” through the revolutionary awakening of the 1960s – pointed his people both back to African royalty and down to the American streets.
“Father-Kings & Mother-Queens,” Treasure chanted.
“Survivors of the Riot of Seventeen!” Redmond responded, referring to the brutal white-on-black 1917 East St. Louis race riot.
As the chant returned to the theme, “With plenitude of gratitude,” Redmond remembered the responsibility of the praise singer, which also happens to coincide with the obligation of the award recipient: to name-check the ancestors, “my mentors, my models & my monuments.”
For an eclectic, community-spirited cat like Redmond, however, this could never be a droning list of classroom teachers and administrators.
He embedded references to jazzmen (Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk, Clifford Brown, Clark Terry, Miles Davis), political leaders (Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama) and a multidisciplinary cast of s/heroes: the politician Barbara Jordan, the divas Ella Fitzgerald and Fontella Bass, and Katherine Dunham, who was a little bit of everything to the community and perhaps the greatest shaping influence on the life of this remarkable scholar, teacher, poet and man.
He was a total man, a complete man, on this special night.
He and his daughter opened the chant by chanting, “Full is in the house,” and fullness was, indeed, in the house.
Speaking to a room full of educators who earn a living, many of them, enforcing the proper academic use of language, Redmond gloried in the lingo of the streets and the streetcorners, “mastered in the swhirl of errands, shoeshine boxes, marbles, spin-the-bottle, verbal sparring, paper routes & railroad car writings” – “Homeboys doo-woofing under wee-wee hour windows.”
He was a family man. He introduced Treasure by saying, “This is my baby girl,” and proudly announced, “I lived long enough to see my daughter become a professor.”
He also included himself in the small family of The St. Louis American in a touching way that pointed toward the future, when he recognized from the stage the “not yet to be born” – the unborn child of Kate Daniel, administrative assistant to St. Louis American publisher Donald M. Suggs, who handled many details in producing the 2009 Salute while very pregnant.
“Swelling with plenitude of gratitude,” indeed.
