though one’s life depended upon it.” Or the love of the black ordinary? Or the capacity to make what we do and how we do it into sustenance and shield? What Negro doesn’t know that a few verses of song might be capable of stoking the hunger to live, might be the knowledge of freedom that leads you out of the enclosure? Brings you back from the dead or kills you a second time? Who could fail to understand seeking a way out, inhabiting a loophole of retreat, and escaping the imposed life as anything else, anything but beautiful?
