What good and Wilderness Plots texts - Kimberly Carballo - pianist, coach, pedagogue

What Good Have We Done?
Program Notes and Texts

The good we do
By Dr. Alice Jones
For mezzo-soprano and piano
Commissioned by and dedicated to Kimberly Carballo and Amanda Russo Stante

Program notes

In July 2022, Kim and Amanda asked me for a companion piece to another work they had programmed for a concert in October. I didn’t have any works already composed that fit their touching theme of how we know we are in a place, but I knew immediately that I wanted to write one. I was scrolling through Twitter the next day and saw an earnest LinkedIn-style post about how wise Benjamin Franklin’s efficient daily schedule was. I hadn’t thought about Franklin’s plan in years, and its shadows suddenly spoke to me—who was making his meals, cleaning his house, or mending his clothes? I sought out other personal texts in which each author implicitly answered Franklin’s driving questions: What good shall I do this day? What good have I done today? The questions are empowering, or mocking, or earnest, depending on the lives where they show up.

I’ve arranged the texts in this song cycle to let them echo and intertwine with each other, telling a single human story, even though they span an entire lifetime, from 1754 to 1832. Benjamin Franklin’s (1706-90) autobiography bears all the self-confidence and faith in reason that I have come to expect from the Enlightenment. In his autobiography, he describes the difficulty of doing the right thing every day, when temptations abound, and sets about a strict schedule to bring him closer to the 13 moral virtues he seeks in his life: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility. In immediate contrast to Franklin’s schedule is an excerpt from the diary of Mary Cooper (1714-78). A farm wife on Long Island whose six children had all died, she began writing when she was in her fifties, and every entry describes the pain in her body, the exhaustion in her bones, her unending domestic labor, the (mostly) terrible weather of the winter, and her faith. Hannah Valentine, an enslaved woman in Virginia, was savvy and strong. Hannah was taught to read and write by another enslaved woman at the estate of their master, David Campbell, the governor of Virginia. Her letter to her mistress, Mary Campbell, reveals her deep knowledge of botany, farming, and capitalism. I think of Mary and Hannah as relatively powerless women doing the best they can with what means are available to them.

The Atlantic crossing journal of John Newton (1725-1807) and the diary of Louis XVI (1754-93), two men who held great and direct power over the lives of others, are dispassionate and objective. Both men display a striking lack of agency in the events they recount. Newton began sailing and working on slave ships at age 11, and his journal comes from his time as captain of a slave ship called the African, sailing from Liberia to Antigua. Franklin’s daily questions are, in Newton’s mind, neutral, but in view of the entire system he avidly upheld, there is no good he could possibly do. On the day the Bastille was stormed in Paris, Louis XVI noted in his journal that he did not go on a hunt that day (“Rien” / “Nothing”)—his schedule only slightly interrupted by the revolution.

The cycle closes with a terrible letter from an enslaved woman, Maria Perkins, whose son Albert has just been sold, writing to her husband, Richard Perkins, who is owned by another master. Her letter is breathless, full of desperation and fear. Her position, devoid of options, is her inheritance from the powerful men who preceded her. The way they answered Franklin’s “What good shall I do this day” leaves her with a debt that can never be paid.

Introduction

What good shall I do this day?

II. Benjamin From the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 1773-1790 (Philadelphia, PA)

I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and [and what was] wrong.
Habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established.

What good shall I do this day?

5am: Rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness; contrive day’s business and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study; and breakfast.
8am: Work.
12pm: Read or overlook my accounts, and dine.
2pm: Work.
6pm: Put things in their places, supper, music, or diversion, or conversation; examination of the day.

What good have I done today?

10pm: Sleep.

III. Mary From the diary of Mary Cooper, 1768-1769 (Long Island, NY)

What good have I done today?

This day is forty years sinc[e] I left my father’s house and come here, and here have I seen littel els[e] but harde labour and sorrow, crosses of every kind. I think in every respect the state of my affairs is more then [sic] forty times worse then [sic] when I came here first, except that I am nearer the desired heaven.

What good have I done today?

It has beene a tiresom day to me. It is now bed time and I have not had won minuts rest today.
We are cleaning the house. I am tired almost to death.
I am drying and ironing my cloths til allmost brake of day.

What good shall I do this day?

The early songsters warbling their notes and all nature seemes to smile, but a darke cloud hangs continuly over my soul and makes the days and nights pass heavily along. The sun shines warm. Oh, may the sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.

IV. Hannah A letter from Hannah Valentine to Mary Campbell, May 2, 1838 (Abingdon, VA)

What good shall I do this day?

The strawberry vines are in full bloom, and promise a good crop of fruit. I should like to know what you wish done with them. If you wish any preserved, and how many. If you do I will endeavour to do them as nicely as possible. If you have no objection I will sell the balance, and see how profitable I can make them for you…. Please let me know if you would wish me to make any currant jelly, and if you would like me to bottle the gooseberries. I would u my dear Mistress to give me especial directions about every thing you want done.

V. John Atlantic crossing journal of John Newton, from Liberia to Antigua, May 26-July 15, 1754

What good have I done today?

Sunday: In the evening, by the favour of Providence, discovered a conspiracy among the men slaves to rise upon us.
Tuesday: They still look very gloomy and sullen
Sunday: Buried No. 86
Wednesday: Buried No. 84
Thursday: Buried No. 47
Sunday: Some of the men slaves had found means to poison the water.
Monday: Buried number 92 and a crew member raped No. 83.
Friday: By the favour of Divine Providence made a timely discovery today that the slaves were forming a plot for an insurrection.
Tuesday: At daylight made Antigua right ahead and very near.
Friday: This is likely to prove as good a market as any of the neighbouring islands; we have had the men slaves so long on board that their patience is just worn out, and I am certain they would drop fast had we another passage to make. Monday is appointed for the sale.
Monday: Sold all.
Wednesday: Buried one of the remaining slaves, a man (No. 52)

What good shall I do this day?

Monday: Began to take in sugar.

VI. Louis From the diary of Louis XVI, July 14, 1789

What good have I done today?

Mardi, le quatorze
Juillet
Today
Rien.

VII. Maria Letter from Maria Perkins to Richard Perkins, October 8, 1852 (Charlottesville)

Dear Husband, I write you a letter to let you know of my distress my master has sold Albert to a trader on Monday court day and myself and other child is for sale also and I want you to let hear from you very soon before next court if you can I don’t know when I don’t want you to wait till Christmas I want you to tell Dr. Hamilton or your master if either will buy me they can attend to it know and then I can go afterwards I don’t want a trader to get me they asked me if I had got any person to buy me and I told them no they took me to the court house too they never put me up a man by the name of Brady bought albert and is gone I don’t know where they say he lives in Scottsville. My things is in several places some is in Stanton and if I should be sold I don’t know what will become of them. I don’t expect to meet with the luck to get that way till I am quite heart sick nothing more I am and ever will be your kind wife.

What good….?

What good today?

Wilderness Plots
Text by Scott Russell Sanders
Adapted by Christopher Alan Schmitz
Aurora
When Mister and Misses Job Sheldon reached Ohio in Eighteen Hundred, with seven children, two oxen, and a bulging wagon, they were greeted by a bone rattling thunderstorm. The children wailed. Misses Sheldon spoke of returning to Connecticut. They camped. More precisely, they spent the night squatting in mud beneath the wagon. “No land’s cheap if you perish before setting eyes on it,” she said. Next morning, it was hard to tell just where the wagon track had been, there were so many trees down. They decided Mister Sheldon should go fetch help from Aurora, their destination. But the actual place turned out to consist of a surveyor’s post topped by a red streamer. So Mister Sheldon walked to the next village, which fortunately did exist, and there he found eight men to help him clear the road. Dry at last, Mister and Misses Sheldon carried their lantern through the forest that would become their farm. Their family was the dawn of dawn.
Poverty
Unlike the cells for murderers, the cells for debtors were provided with iron-barred windows. The poverty of Gallipolis Jennings had been honestly arrived at, with the benefit of every calamity you might imagine, including a mud slide and a bank failure. His family boarded with neighbors while he studied the grain of the timbers in his cell. He signed his plow, wagon, and horses over to the creditors as security, for which sacrifice he was allowed to spend the daylight hours outside jail. But he was never allowed to wander further than four hundred and forty yards, in any direction from his cell. Four hundred and ten yards from the jail was a saddle maker who agreed to hire Jennings, but at a bargain wage in view of his criminal status. In eighteen oh five the prison bounds were reduced to four hundred yards. So Jennings had to hunt a closer job. His wife and children moved back to Rhode Island. His horses aged in the paddocks of his creditors. He learned blacksmithing, laboring the first six months without pay on account of his inexperience. When the blacksmith moved his shop to a brick building some five hundred yards from the jail, beyond the legal limit, Gallipolis Jennings took advantage of a moonless night to quit Ohio altogether and go see what Indiana had to offer.

Bones
Every time Jeremiah Needham turned his plow to avoid the burial mounds in his field, he regretted the waste of soil. One spring therefore he decided to scatter the mounds with a shovel. His spade soon clacked against bone. Being a superstitious man, he brushed the dirt away...cautiously,...eventually disclosing a human skeleton some seven feet tall. In the jawbone there were three teeth of silver; on the wrists, bracelets of copper; in the cavity of the chest, the iridescent bits of a seashell. I am a rich man, Needham thought, loading bones into his wagon for carrying to town, where he would consult with the teacher and doctor. The doctor whistled. Needham had uncovered a giant. The teacher peered at the skeleton in amazement. This, he declared, was surely one of the ancient people who had raised the mounds of earth and stone. “By law,” said the teacher, the mounds are state property.” “Like hell,” Needham declared, and drove his wagon and his skeleton back to the farm. But that night, as he lay scheming how to use his money, he heard the clack, clack...clack, clack...of shovels against bone. Whenever he carried his lantern and gun to one part of the field, the sounds of shoveling would arise from another. Within a fortnight, the mounds were leveled, and the gigantic skeletons were gone.
Healing
Even if Moses Byxbe had never heard of your ailment, he would swear that his sulfur waters should cure it. If you were not healed in a fortnight, all you had to do to retrieve your money was hunt through the Ohio valley until you found him that is, if whatever ailed you had not already killed you. For Moses Byxbe kept moving on, ladling water from his vat on the horse cart into the waiting cups and pails of those who came to him in search of health. Many came. Out of the woods limped every manner of bodily and spiritual infirmity. This daily sight so moved Byxbe that after a while he stopped selling his waters, which he knew to be useless. But the sufferers, lured by stories of miraculous cures, tracked him down and pestered him for relief. And so he refilled his vat at the sulfurous spring and creaked forth again into the roadways only now he gave his water away.
Hogs
You can take a humble Massachusetts barnyard hog, turn it loose to forage in the backwoods of Ohio, and inside of twelve months it would show up with bristles along its spine, blood on its gums, and mayhem in its eyes. This disturbed Christian Cackler’s sense of order. Hogs had no more business reverting to savagery than men did. What to do? First, shut them off from wild beasts with a log barn and rail fence. Then feed them only corn and silage, no more forest food. Breed them carefully, always selecting the fattest and most peaceable. Within a few years, while his neighbors let their own swine run wild, Cackler produced hogs that were as docile as any sheep. You could set a yawping baby in front of one (as Cackler did for an experiment) and the pig would not so much as bare its teeth. However, he found the beasts were too lazy to walk the hundred miles to Pittsburgh. Forced to butcher his ponderous hogs in Aurora, Cackler cured as much of the pork as he could, and peddled the rest door-to-door. Neighbors who bought some complained of the fat.