The Dark Prelude

Abstract

The Dark Prelude Shana L. Redmond (bio) For Robeson Cade "Dark Prelude": A Preliminary Playlist (In Order of Appearance) Leon Bridges, "Sweeter" (Gold-Diggers Sound, Columbia Records, 2021). Dawn featuring Tony Orlando, "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree" (Tuneweaving, Arista Records, 1973). Roberta Flack, "Killing Me Softly with His Song" (Killing Me Softly, Atlantic Records, 1973). The Five Satins, "In the Still of the Nite" ("In the Still of the Nite"/"The Jones Girl" [single], Ember Records, 1956). Gladys Knight and the Pips, "Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye)" (Neither One of Us, Soul Records/Motown Records, 1973). Tye Tribbet, "What Can I Do?" (Greater Than (Live), Motown Gospel, 2013). I cry a lot for what I'm learning and those things that I'm being forced to acknowledge that I already knew. I'm in the throes of something risky; every nerve has risen to the surface. Paper cuts draw blood, a pinprick might bring me to my knees. Devastation has become a companion, and for its presence "I [, like Kendrick,] grieve different." The inventory that I'm tasked with is composed of the deleted details of kin. Reading their names is enough for the corners of my mouth to turn down, inhalations through my nose to quicken, my cheeks wet. This too is a part of my process; navigation of Black Study's thick emotion. The work tonight is not an indictment of the state of the field. Like the 2022 CFP, it is an indictment of the state of the world and the state of our hearts. It's about the feelings of desire and need that guide our pens without concern for the gatekeepers and their aspirants who lie in wait. It's about what the work forces us to do and forces us to become. When you write, do you laugh a lot, love a lot, tear up a lot, liberate a lot, take cues from emcees a lot, think about the people not on the page a lot, find wonder in it a lot, get hot [End Page 203] with anger a lot, play a lot, create a better world a lot? Are those who haunt your thought hours pleased or furious for the truth you've told? Do you live with them as they live with you? I'm lingering again in the discontinuities of death named by comrade Sharon Holland.1 I'm trying to revive the details carried to graves—to write answers to the questions we don't ask. I'm trying to become an amplifier for a chorus whose bright songs have been compressed to undertones beneath the weight of symbolism and spectacle. If only all movies about Black people struggling against the machinery of this country were, instead, movies about Black people living.2 Not just the movies but the books too. So I'm writing from the unremarkable, expansive moments of repair, diplomacy, curiosity, and affection prior to the fatal execution of no-knock warrants and traffic stops in order to force a detour away from Black expiration to Black living as a visionary rehearsal for futures assembled over lifetimes, no matter how short or how long that time may be. Hopin' for a life more sweeter/Instead I'm just a story repeatin' Why do I fear with skin dark as night/Can't feel peace with those judgin' eyes3 A single F-note drone accompanies Leon Bridges's public prayer—a haunting hum that rises and falls in prominence within and between the verses, structuring the whole composition, never allowing us to know that the song could sound differently. Listeners are tethered to that pitch of song, of life, gripped by all the realities it accompanies. Is it the buzz of a hospital monitor at the end of life or the din of constant danger that structures Black life as a sequence of possible endings around every corner? Perhaps, instead, it's a buoy, a lifeline, a stable chord for listeners who know too well that of which he sings: the tears that rain down on us and the songs sung over us. He's...