Shirley Childress Johnson
became a professional sign-language interpreter at a time when the number of black sign-language interpreters was vanishingly small. The work was personal: Johnson’s parents were deaf; she learned English and American Sign Language simultaneously. She was profoundly aware of the joys of deaf culture, which demands full face-to-face engagement, as well as the urgency of making basic information accessible to the community. She attended births, trials, and presidential inaugurations. She interpreted for Maya Angelou and pro bono for people she met on the street. She wrote that she took in other people’s pain deeply when she translated and struggled to “ventilate her feelings….”
She intuitively understood how to translate Sweet Honey’s music. “She had an amazing way of using her body and her hands to help people understand the rhythm of the music that we were doing,” Barnwell says.
Interpreters usually stand off to the side of the stage in a separate area. Johnson sat in a semicircle with the ensemble, moving in time with them. In concert footage that appeared in the 1983 documentary “Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock,” Reagon strolls across the stage ebulliently bellowing “Down by the Riverside” and casually goes into a riff with Johnson, as Bruce Springsteen might have with Clarence Clemons. As Reagon approaches, Johnson turns partly away from the audience to face her; Reagon lunges down, and Johnson lowers herself to match.
Johnson’s role as a full member of Sweet Honey is still unmatched. As Barnwell would lay down a bass line that seemed to be drawn from the deepest well and Reagon’s voice would go incandescent with praise, Johnson would remove the sound from the song, conveying its words and its feeling as it ran through her.
