Written May, 2015

Street Drummers in Chicago.
We all find ways to pay the rent.

I am sitting on the steps of the Art Institute, listening to these bruthas play. It’s a decent sized crowd with a decidedly middle-class taint, various ages, and predominately white. Art Institute of Chicago de rigueur.

My brain hangs a hard left:
“What if these men, just as they are now, had been encountered anywhere else?
How would they be received?”

A cursory glance beyond the plastic buckets reveals a particular type of Black masculinity. The Fear of a Black Hat: A metaphor for reasons to enslave, to jail, to lynch, to castrate, or to hide the white women… which I guess you don’t really have to do, if you’re successful at those other things.

My thoughts, punctuated by 16th triplets, turn to Emmett Till, Rodney King, Amadou Diallo and others. Sometimes I envy the blithely unaware. So easy these days for folks who look like them, as I do - to find themselves incarcerated, brutalized, or dead, for “Living While Black.”

And while beat and rhythm have others happily bobbin’ their heads and stompin’ their feet, I sit, momentarily unsettled… contemplating their mortality.

To quote James Baldwin -
“I don’t know you personally, but I know you historically…”
And this is the problem.

I reconnect.
I make this photograph.

I am on these steps, surrounded by fellow humans and hooked on this pop-up performance for life’s necessities. All of us in attendance at a recital for food, clothing and shelter -
in 4/4,
in 6/8,
and sweat.

-plt