The sound is like velvet unfolding, big, gorgeous notes. It’s soaring ceilings, sunbeams through windows, the songs of angels.
“No! No! No!” yells Leona Lowery, screech-halting the gloriousness.
(Sarah L. Voisin/ The Washington Post ) - The choir at Northwestern High School is trying to raise money to perform in South Africa.
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“Don’t get too happy, altos,” she pokes at one side of the risers.
“And not too chesty,” she jabs at the other side.
“I see heads down. I don’t understand,” she excoriates. “What are you waiting for? Me to levitate? I asked for a crescendo!”
This is choir practice at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville. And for a moment, it feels like football hell week.
Lowery is a tyrant. For 15 years at Northwestern, she has demanded more than excellence from the choir. She wants perfection.
In front of her are nearly 50 teenagers. There are faux-hawks and braids, piercings and snarls. Stubble and wild, hell child ’80s eye shadow. And they all stand taller, more defiant as she berates them.
There are rewards for this. Northwestern is the only high school choir selected to represent the United States in the Ihlombe! South African Choral Festival this summer.
Wow. Flying all the way to Africa with 50 friends. Singing for the world. A dream come true, right? Except it would cost $100,000 for all of them — along with their music teachers and chaperons — to go.
“When she first told us about the trip, all I could be was sad. Because I knew we couldn’t go,” says Jasmine Cador, 17, a mezzo-soprano who plans to join the Navy when she graduates.
Between now and July, each student has to come up with $1,200. Might as well be a million for some of these kids.
Because this high school in Prince George’s County isn’t the kind of place where parents say, “Yippee!” and book the whole family to make a safari adventure out of it. These kids know what it is to struggle.
There’s the soprano whose family lost its $600 in savings when an uncle with no life insurance died and the relatives had to pay for his burial. There’s the baritone whose family’s finances are in crisis after a brother had another run-in with the law. There’s the soprano with nine siblings whose family just lost its home.
Nearly every member of the choir qualifies for a federal lunch subsidy — that’s code for kids who are on the edge of abject poverty.
“They live their lives in day-to-day struggles, roof-over-their-head kind of struggles,” Lowery says.
As they unspool the silken notes in a French song, “Dirait-on,” it’s easy to forget all that.
“C’est ton intérieur qui sans cesse,” they sing, with a sublime bass anchoring the swirls of words in a sound so rich it seems that it will physically take shape any minute. “Se caresse, dirait-on, dirait-on.”
And then the screech of reality.
“I don’t want to hear ‘tahN!’ ” Lowery says, karate chopping. “It is dirait-ogh. No N.”
At 16 and 17, these kids are fighting to dream. So, few of them can even bring themselves to say, “We’re going to South Africa.” “If” is the word they all use before talking about it. “If we go.”
They have been baking, selling cookies, selling fruit, singing their hearts out for churches that give them some cash. They’ve managed to scrape together $40,000 in the past two years. They need $60,000 more. Their Facebook fundraising page asks for just $10 from each person who listens to their music and wants to help.
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