The family whistle
A whistle can be sweet like a birdcall. A whistle can be foreboding like a rising wind. Sometimes a whistle is just a whistle.
I can’t remember learning how to whistle, but I know I got good at it young. My childhood friends used to call it my “old man” whistle. They were right, if only because I learned from my father. He was an incredible whistler, but he didn’t like to do it much. Unlike me, he hadn’t learned it from his father. No, my father learned to whistle from hearing his mother.
My grandmother was born in Texas in 1902. Most of her life she worked as a cook. Even though she was born well after abolition, my father said certain antebellum expectations were still put upon her when she worked for white people. I imagined some of those expectations as mannerisms and “yessuh” and “yess’m”. Maybe a certain kind of apron. I had not imagined that one of those expectations would be whistling.
My father told me that during slavery and well after, Black cooks were required to whistle as they worked, providing active proof that they weren’t eating white people’s food.
It was no wonder why my father didn’t whistle much. Once you know something like that, once you know how deep that breath has to go before it can come out, you get a little more selective about when it hits your lips.
It’s a family story, but not only my family.
Sometimes a whistle is just a whistle.
Sometimes it’s not.
Sometimes it can’t be.