[Author's Note] On December 1991, while returning home from a family gathering in South Africa, Headman Shabalala, a founding member of the Ladysmith Black Mambazo, was killed in a baffling shooting.

[Preface] I have to admit, this is the part of the book I usually skip.

[Forward] It was only a dream . . .
. . . and we were in it together.

If a certain kind of camera, yet to be invented, achieved the capacity to record the instantaneous give and take between two black people meeting in the street, looking at the artifact this "camera" produces, you would see the shared sense of identity, the bloody secrets linking us and setting us apart, the names flapping in the air--Black, Negro, African-American, colored, etc., etc.--we sometimes answer to but never internalize completely because they are inadequate to describe the sense of common ground we exchange at this moment.

At two o'clock the bell rings.