if you should read the words to Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues,” you would find no logic or progression between the verses; they are merely a series of incidents of domestic discord and defeated love thrown seemingly carelessly together. But they have a relationship stitched through their inner structure, a testimony to reality seen through Negro eyes that look at life from a position of enforced severance. What takes place, therefore, is a seeming and relative confusing of values; there is displacement, intensity, transference, inversion, condensation, over-determination, and all of the
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