SHALL, v. This word has been on my mind because my kid adopted it. A couple days ago, he asked for more strawberries and when I told him the box was empty, he said, “Shall we go to the store?” like the world’s most prescriptively correct almost-two-year-old. He says “shall” all the time, always as part of a question. Shall we read this book? Shall we find the little firetruck? Shall we go outside?
I have a question: where the heck did he learn this? While I can remember being taught in school that proper English requires “I/we shall” and “you/he/she/it/they will,” I was about nine or ten by that time and it was too late for me. My critical period was over. Like most US English speakers, I say “I will” and “we will.”
My beloved says he sometimes produces “shall we” in questions, so he may be the one who taught our kid this adorable little mannerism. Or it’s possible that our kid is conflating “shall” and “should,” the latter of which is harder to pronounce.
The rule about using “shall” with first-person pronouns dates to the middle of the seventeenth century, per the OED, and has always had exceptions. I couldn’t find good information on when “shall” began its long, gradual fall from fashion, perhaps because the varied exceptions undermined the rule from the start. Today Wikipedia has this to say: “This rule is no longer commonly adhered to by any group of English speakers, and will has essentially replaced shall in nearly all contexts.” Wikipedia also notes that the United States government has taken an official stand against “shall” in legal documents.
The reason to avoid “shall” in legal documents is that a shadow of its original, Old English meaning still follows it: once upon a time, this verb meant “to owe,” and its connotations of “ought,” “must,” and future by divine decree still echo. The most famous “shall” in English is the translation of the Biblical commandments, especially the King James Version’s “thou shalt.” All at once, that phrase means you will, you ought, you must. Such layers of meaning are undesirable in modern legal documents. If you mean “must,” say “must.” Outside of the strictures of legal documents, we’re free to luxuriate in the fullness of a word’s meaning. Ambiguity is the hallmark of literature, after all.
The most famous “shall” in US English is the one in the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” and the history of how it got there is fascinating. Folk songs often inherit pieces of their melody or their lyrics from many different ancestors. Here’s the Kennedy Center on this one’s lineage:
“We Shall Overcome” has a long history with input from many people and places. Part of the melody seems to be related to two European songs from the 1700s, “Prayer of the Sicilian Mariners” and “O Sanctissima.” Enslaved Black people in the U.S. mixed and matched similar tunes in the songs “I’ll Be All Right” and “No More Auction Block For Me.”
After 1900, it seems the lyrics of another gospel song, “I’ll Overcome Someday” by the Methodist minister and composer Reverend Dr. Charles Tindley, were added to the musical mix—though the music was very different. Around 1945, gospel arrangers Atron Twigg and Kenneth Morris apparently put together the essential pieces of the now-famous words and melody.
“No More Auction Block For Me”—are you ever struck fresh by the horrors of US history? I am.
Per Wikipedia, Tindley’s published version of the song
bore the epigraph, "Ye shall overcome if ye faint not", derived from Galatians 6:9: "And let us not be weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not."
And his first stanza underlines that idea of not giving up even when defeat looms. Victory is not merely possible, but certain:
The world is one great battlefield,
With forces all arrayed;
If in my heart I do not yield,
I'll overcome some day.
So in 1945, a group of predominantly Black women workers go on strike at an American Tobacco Company cigar plant in Charleston, South Carolina. They are striking for better pay and treatment and against racial discrimination that prevents them from getting better jobs at the segregated factory. This strike is notable because it eventually, after a long fight, becomes integrated—the labor union starts holding integrated meetings and white workers join the strike—and because one of the Black women organizing the strike, Lucille Simmons, leads the picketers in song. She changes Tindley’s “I Will Overcome” to “We Will Overcome” and adds a verse, “we will win our rights some day.”
In 1947, two of the workers who went on strike with Lucille Simmons teach the song to Zilphia Horton, the music director at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, which trains social justice organizers. Horton starts using the song in workshops. She’s the one who teaches it to folk musician Pete Seeger. Sometimes he’s cited as the person who switched “We Will” to “We Shall,” but this NPR piece quotes him as giving that credit to a Black woman who worked at Highlander, Septima Clark.
This song is imbued with Biblical language from so many of its different origins, but that “shall” really stands out to me as the invocation of a higher power. It’s an obligation, a requirement, a commandment. The modern “We Shall Overcome,” in its anthemic boldness, doesn’t name the forces arrayed against us; there’s no need. Whoever they are, no matter how much power they hold, whether they run a cigar plant in Charleston or the whole damn United States, it doesn’t matter. They’ve already lost. The future belongs to the singers.
A white-and-gold vinyl record cover featuring recordings from the 1963 March on Washington. The text “We Shall Overcome!” is repeated six times in all caps. In between the lines of large print text, smaller print lists the performers in order of appearance: Joan Baez, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Marian Anderson, Odetta, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Bob Dylan, Whitney M. Young, Jr., John Lewis, Roy Wilkins, Walter Reuther, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph. Source: Discogs.
Shall we talk about some small-r romance novels? Here are two recent reads that I loved.
Play to Win (demisexual? m/bi f, both cis, contemporary) by Jodie Slaughter. Miri and Leo got married young even though everyone in their small South Carolina town told them it was a bad idea. Then they couldn’t make ends meet, their marriage fell apart, Leo ran away and Miri hid in shame, and now it’s been eight years since they’ve spoken. They’d go on like that forever, but Miri just won the lottery. She calls Leo to offer him some money in exchange for his signature on the divorce papers—except it turns out he still wants to be married, and maybe she does, too. This is such a tender, hopeful portrait of two people who really hurt each other trying to figure out if they can be brave enough to try again. In their course of their reunion, they also realize how much their estrangement separated them from their other friends and family, and it’s touching to see them repair those relationships. I recently saw someone post on Bluesky that they were looking for working-class characters in contemporary romance, and I think many of the best examples are in Black romance. Miri is a nail tech and Leo works construction. They both grew up in poverty. It really shaped them. Having no money made their youthful marriage much harder, and Miri’s sudden lottery wealth doesn’t instantly change her personality—she’s still a person who worries about money, because a lifetime of worries is hard to shed. She eases into accepting good things for herself, like love and money, and then she gives back to others. I loved how delightfully queer this whole thing is. Miri is bi. Leo is probably somewhere on the ace spectrum, maybe demisexual (the word isn’t used, but I think it fits with how he describes himself as having no interest in sex unless he feels a deep emotional connection, and feeling alienated from a culture that tells him he should want casual sex). Many of Miri and Leo’s friends and family also turn out to be various kinds of queer, and part of the key to saving their marriage is realizing that it doesn’t have to be “traditional” in the way they were taught. This is so satisfying. It’s simultaneously fantastical wish fulfillment and a very real, grounded love story. And I haven’t mentioned yet that it’s fun and funny and sexy, but it is all of those things.
Consort of Fire (m/f/f, all cis and bi, fantasy, erotic) by Kit Rocha. If you read Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart at an impressionable age and have carried it in your heart ever since and/or you’re a bisexual who loves horny fantasy books, you should read this. It’s less political intrigue and more sex, and not quite as kinky (though it is kinky), and there’s a dragon. I could say more, but the people who need this review have already stopped reading and bought the book.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read another fantasy novella by Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates, which was very different but still as wonderful as the last one. It’s a moving reflection on grief, on going through your loved one’s things and finding some small, unexpected object.
I also read Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz, an inquisition into why people come together in cities and why they disperse, touring through Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia, and lastly, San Francisco in our climate catastrophe. This one was sorta for novel research, for a nebulous project that hasn’t quite coalesced, but even if said novel never becomes any less hypothetical, I’m glad to have read this.
I absolutely loved Five Ways of Translating Li Qingzhao’s Poem《蝶恋花 – 晚止昌乐馆寄姊妹》by Yilin Wang and Vivian Li, which contains a grid-format “literal” word-by-word translation of the poem, several different text versions, and a version set to music. It’s so fascinating to see translation presented this way in all its multiplicity.
I am still and always thinking of Palestine, and on that note I recommend this incredible poem, “Reflection,” written by Asmaa Azaizeh and translated by Lena Tuffaha, and Mary Turfah’s essay “This Is What They Call It Now,” on the village of Salha, where her grandfather fled a massacre in 1948.
And I have thought a lot about Adan Mansbach’s powerful personal/historical essay “The Bottom of the Funnel: On Blacks, Jews, Whiteness, Conspiracy, and Hip-Hop,” and perhaps even more about a 1967 James Baldwin New York Times piece that Mansbach linked, which is also about the relationship(s) between Blacks and Jews in the US:
The ultimate hope for a genuine black-white dialogue in this country lies in the recognition that the driven European serf merely created another serf here, and created him on the basis of color. No one can deny that that Jew was a party to this, but it is senseless to assert that this was because of his Jewishness. One can be disappointed in the Jew if one is romantic enough—for not having learned from history; but if people did learn from history, history would be very different.
If people did learn from history, history would be very different. As much as that sentence caused me an immediate pulse of “fuck, that’s true,” I am romantic enough to be disappointed in my fellow Jews and everyone else who has not learned from history. I still, in my hopeless (but hopeful) recalcitrance, want to believe we could. We shall.
That’s all for this Sunday. I’ll be back in your inbox on March 3rd.