April 2024 – Jas Mardis

34 years ago this week I was known as a Poet, Writer and “Dat Boy, Dere!” around DFW. I was four years into working as Research Manager for Susquehanna Radio (KPLX & KLIF) and somehow persuaded the Program Director, Dan Bennett, to give me airtime on KLIF 1190am during Black History Month for 1 minute tributes. I chose Black Filmmakers.

You KNOW me because of those minutes!
KERA 90.1fm contacted me to contribute morning commentaries. Sam Baker & Susan (?) got gray hairs and I got a few awards.
SMU Gifted Student Institute called and I taught Public Discourse for 13 years. Matt Zoller Seitz tapped me for movie reviews and The USA Film Festival (Laura (?)) called and said, “Can you make those one minute highlights into a Film Festival program in about 30 days?

I called the Mentors: Bob Ray Sanders, Marilyn Clark, Beverly DeBase, Susan Sponsler, Curtis King, Dewayne Dancer and Ron Nance.

I got: James Earl Jones, Donald Bogle, Miss Ester Rolle, Miss Alfre Woodard, Miss Sandra Sharp, Mr. Floyd Webb, Miss Audrey Lewis, Mr. John Carstarphen m, The Great Mr. St. Claire Bourne and high praise from that year’s honoree, Mr Dennis Hopper!

Then, The Dallas Times Herald, Dallas Morning News, DMagazine, University of North Texas Press and others called. The rest is just history. It started with a minute on the radio. GOD is good!

If you’re standing on the corner at the top of the hill on Morrell Street, just across from the rail station and in front of the 82 year old Greater Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church, you should be saying a prayer for rain.

“Oh, LORD, open up your Heaven and bring down the sweet, drenching waters on me!” Pull your rain-ready hoodie down over your head and cowl your glasses. Be sure to hunch your shoulders so that the stepping raindrops walk your back with their rhythms and bounces and surrendering collapse into streams. “Oh, LORD”, as Blues Titan, Etta James warbled in “Willow weep for Me, “Why would you send”…, but this is not darkness.

When your childlike soul succumbs to the memory of rainfall and newness and surrender…let it. The LORD has sent rumbling thunder and there is humbling shaking under foot. “Bend your branches down along the ground and cover me”. This is Oak Cliff, Texas. These lanes are full of Oaks that obey wind and command, alike.

Now, peel back your cowl and see what The LORD has made. From the hill top look South toward F.D.Roosevelt High School, down and again back up another hill. Every place is fresh and broccoli stalk verdant! Give your eyes over to a rolling thunder of earthly beauty and extraordinary extravaganza. Heaven has come certainly upon the Earth in a single stretch of avenue. “Leave my heart a-breaking, and making a moan”, as Etta says within her song.

Depending on the day and hour you might hear the Church choir alluding to a hope. There is strength in the lead that holds stained glass cascades in their place during rhapsody. How else do we explain the weekly fastidious worship hour without injury, just resolve? Saints claiming victories and surrender with praise songs and wig-testing shouts! Those windows wreck the storming air with interludes of pulsing cacophony, “There’s a leak in this old building and my soul Has got to move”!

You are on Morrell Street and The LORD has brought rain to cleanse the Earth. It is always a Noah sanctioned, first rain! Behind you the train arrives with a horn that the Archangel Gabriel uses to secretly remind believers daily. You take another look…a glance…a wanton and hopeful moment back over the hills onto the land clouds of bubbling verdant Oak Cliff treetops . The thunder speaks hard. The windows hold fast. The ground accepts your weight as you settle onto your heels.

It is raining on Morrell Street. GOD is cleansing the Earth. This is where HE begins.