That we are burying children seems not to be the point; in the moment of Renisha, Jonathan, Eric–we’re all innocents—ain’t no saint and sinners in this, only dead Black bodies. That these are presumably sister and brother—collateral damage in wars never designed to save their lives, even had they lived—provides clarity after a summer of “my brother’s keeper” and “my sister’s keeper.” They were not in need of belts, bow-times, appropriately-lengthened skirts and caring adults in their lives. They dance in death, because it is the only place they are, quite frankly, allowed to live, recalling Lawrence Fishburne channeling an early cinematic rendering of Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson in the film The Cotton Club: “the White man ain’t left me nothing but the underworld, and that is were I dance.”
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