It was the Beattles song. I have the dubious distinction of being inspired by the same song that inspired Charles Manson. Believe it or not, I didn’t even know the story about the Blackbird-Charles Manson connection, at the time. I was sitting at my computer, thinking about The Myth of Merula, listening to the Beattles White Album. At the particular moment when Blackbird came on, I was trying to decide what sort of character the main character would be. Would it be a man or a woman? What race? My imagination defaulted to a white, male, American astronaut as the main character. I had difficulty imagining another kind of character, but I hesitated about choosing my imagination’s default type of character. “Blackbird, fly…,” crooned Paul McCartney in the background.

As I listened to McCartney sing about flying “into the light of the dark black night”, I began to imagine a character who was a black astronaut named Blackbird. A seeker of scientific enlightenment and a pusher of the boundaries of human limitations, she had always wanted to travel into outer space. Outer space is dark but also enlightening. It is full of the countless lights of the stars. It is full of dark matter. It is truly the light of the dark black night. It has all the darkness of mystery and the unknown. It has all the light of increasing knowledge about the universe and its evolution.

As I pondered a black woman astronaut character named Blackbird, I thought to myself, What better character than a black woman astronaut to embody the tensions between the dark soil of Earth from which we evolved and the dark vastness of space beckoning us to transcend the bounds of Earth? I began to imagine her “singing in the dead of night”, telling her story upon her return from space. Her story would be sung in the dead of night because it would be unknown and suppressed at first. Yet, she would still sing it, alone; sing it through her paintings, drawings, inventions, sculptures, notes and other means of expression. Eventually, her song would be recorded by my digital storyteller narrator. The mythic juices started flowing into this Blackbird character, and they haven’t stopped since.

After telling my husband about how much I liked the song Blackbird, he made a joke about it, alluding to Manson. I didn’t get it at first. When he saw I didn’t recognize his Manson reference, he told me the story of Manson having listened to the song and been murderously inspired by it (and other songs on the White Album). Apparently, Manson thought the song was about an impending black revolution in America, and in his own twisted logic, the Tate murders could somehow further or trigger this revolution. I fail to see what black people have to do with the Tate murders, but then we’re talking about the mind of a serial killer here, so hey…Interpretation is everything, sometimes. I’m glad I listened to the song with fresh ears before becoming aware of its checkered history.