When Nnenna Freelon feels overwhelmed, she gets busy.
No, that’s not in the wrong order. The bigger the feelings, the more she packs onto her schedule. “My normal go-to, when I’m stressed, is to get busy,” she says. “I just do stuff. I’m a busy little bee.”
In the past six years, Freelon has experienced plenty to be overwhelmed by. In July 2019, her husband, renowned architect Phil Freelon, died of ALS; six months later, in January 2020, her sister, Deborah Pierce—a hospice and palliative care physician—died of lung cancer. In between this massive sequence of losses, Freelon’s beloved dog, Basie, passed away. Left alone in her newly quiet Durham home, Freelon, a celebrated jazz vocalist, initially wanted to pour herself into a demanding jazz tour. But then COVID-19 arrived, putting live music on hold.
At first, Freelon didn’t give up on the idea of a tour. But then, as “a couple weeks turned into a couple months turned into a couple years,” she says, she settled into a renewed creative practice. “It was the quality of the quiet that allowed me to sort of lean into writing music.”
As a seven-time Grammy-nominated jazz musician, Freelon is no stranger to life-giving creativity. But in this era of mourning, the words just kept coming. Out of this period came a Grammy-nominated album, Time Traveler, the podcast Great Grief, and, out from Duke University Press, this month, a book called Beneath the Skin of Sorrow: Improvisations on Loss.
“I wrote my way out of depression, out of a sense of ‘What is my life now? What use is it to consider myself as what I was?’” Freelon says over a video chat from her airy living room. She wrote herself through the “very uncomfortable” transition period. “I wasn’t looking to write a book, necessarily,” Freelon says, “but I was writing to save a life.”
Beneath the Skin of Sorrow is a collection of writings drawn from Freelon’s journals. It’s a bit hard to quantify, perhaps in part because Freelon herself had to find her way into a book by thinking of the process in terms of music.
The book is broken into four movements, flowing improvisationally between anecdote and poem, a sci-fi-inspired short story and a conversation with a personified Grief. Freelon admits this structure was a problem for an early editor.
Initially, Freelon says, she was resistant to the idea that the manuscript even was a book, but the more she shared bits and pieces with friends, the more they pushed her to share with the world. “I was clutching my pearls,” Freelon says. It was her story, not anyone else’s. “It was really the love and support of friends who suggested that within the individual, personal, could lie the universal.”
She then leaned into the idea of improvisation as a guiding philosophy—but still had no interest in writing a how-to book. In her experience, grief was a process you made up as you went along.
“The book itself is the evidence that this is true, that an improvisatory relationship with grief can exist,” she says. “You don’t have to be a jazz musician. People do this all the time, but they don’t call it that.”
“The book itself is the evidence that this is true, that an improvisatory relationship with grief can exist. You don’t have to be a jazz musician. People do this all the time, but they don’t call it that.”
Anyone who feels their way through grief with a sense of humility and an effort to listen to what nature or the world is trying to tell them is improvising their way through grief. She outlines some examples.
“They start a foundation for people who are in a similar situation, they volunteer with hospice. They give money to the American Cancer Society. They make a grief card,” Freelon says. “All these things are responses to the trauma of loss, and it is an improvisatory practice. But I didn’t learn it in church. Nobody said you can dance with your grief. I never heard that. Didn’t even hear it suggested as a good idea.”
Phil and Nnenna Freelon married in 1979 and settled in Durham soon after. It wasn’t too long before they became a Durham arts power couple: Phil founded architecture firm The Freelon Group and designed buildings all over the country, from the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
The couple’s three children, Deen, Maya (who provided work for the cover of Beneath the Skin of Sorrow), and Pierce, are all artists or academics who share their parents’ passions for education and the arts. In Beneath the Skin of Sorrow, Freelon describes the way Phil encouraged her musical ambitions, refusing to let her use their family as an excuse to give up on jazz, and the way her roles of mother, wife, and artist intersected with and fed each other.
Phil Freelon’s mark on Durham is undeniable. He designed downtown hallmarks like the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the Durham Station Transportation Center, and the Durham County Human Services Complex. Near the end of his life, the Freelons created the NorthStar Church of the Arts to safeguard a space for Durham’s marginalized artists amid the city’s rapid gentrification.
When I ask Freelon how it feels to share Phil’s legacy with, for example, anyone who’s ever come to a Bulls game, she muses on the way grief can change your entire outlook on time.
“I’m reminded when I see his work and his legacy of how important it is to live while blood is running warm in your veins, and how beautiful it is that his legacy exists still,” she says. “And even that is in the process of decomposing and becoming something unrecognizable in hundreds and hundreds of years.”
“Grief gives you a real wide appreciation for impermanence in all forms, geologic, the micro level, the macro level, on the universal level,” she continues. “It’s all going in the same way, from construction to deconstruction and then back up again. It’s all doing this big circle thing.”
These days, Freelon shares where she’s at in her grief as often as she needs to, and people are eager to share right back. In the middle of a performance, when she knows her singing will be hampered by trying to mask her emotions, she’ll stop and let everyone in on where she’s at, often reading an excerpt from the book. “There’s some magic going on. Honestly, magic I didn’t expect,” she says. “Seems like when you can be authentic and honest, it opens the door for others.”
“I can tell you how improvising feels. It feels like walking on a tightrope—99.9 percent of it is trust.”
When I ask if she can define improvisation, Freelon demurs. “I don’t know if I can, but I can tell you how improvising feels,” she says. “It feels like walking on a tightrope—99.9 percent of it is trust. The world teaches you not to trust and not to listen. The world teaches you to be right. That’s what’s rewarded.”
And the best way to get reacquainted with a generative, creative listening? Go outside. The book is full of messages to and from the nature that surrounds the Freelon home—meditations on the natural cycles and connectedness that we so often forget, which Freelon is quick to reiterate on our call. “I think nature cleans out your eardrums and allows you to enter a space that’s more receptive to that kind of listening,” she says.
That listening comes through. Freelon is clearly deeply engaging with her emotions throughout the book, but she’s also constantly on the lookout for messages from nature and her departed loved ones. What might that turtle have to say to her? How might her handy-as-hell husband talk her through fixing the dishwasher? As a book, Beneath the Skin of Sorrow is full of white space, and if there is a how-to, it is a call to leave space for the unexpected, despite the allure of a full, frantic schedule.
To see Freelon read from Beneath the Skin of Sorrow on October 23, reserve a ticket through the Nasher Museum of Art.
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