They found hope in the stoic determination not to be defeated by the pain and suffering in their lives. James Baldwin called this hope an “ironic tenacity”! “I’ve got the blues and I’m too damn mean to cry.” “The blues,” as Ralph Ellison put it, “is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”[26]
