I have had this thing about stompin’- the word stomp- for a good part of my time on earth. A most valuable scholarship I received in this earth visit was the 1500 bucks the University of Buffalo gave me to go visit and write about The Congo Square in the summer 1973. I don’t know how or why but the image of very tall African women dancing in a circle, stomping the ground hard on the beat. A beat close to my soul but so away from what we all saw and heard from television and the movies.

It almost broke my heart to discover that The Congo Square was but a small bronze square on the sidewalk in New Orleans’ French Quarter. I still see myself standing there that hot summer, in its alligator thick heat. No drums, no tall African dancers. No sign or even a shadow of the stomp. Not until years later learning about The Music and Charlie Parker did I pick up on the trail of the stomp again. The stomp was in The Twist and The Pony and the Boogaloo but still invisible from Black Bottom to Foxtrot as the Black was/is. Cormac and Jack Kerouac’s roads would not exist if not for the deep blue one that made it up from Oklahoma City to Kansas City. Fascinated about Jay McShann talking about Kansas city and that Stomp. About what inside the stomp made Bird. All this I knew somehow was the truth.

So, I wondered and followed the (Lester) Young family, Walter Page’s Blue Devils, and Count Basie’s fate in the land of the stompers, eventually in Kansas City (although St. Louis would as fertile and hard). Long Before Bird left the first time for New York City and still long before Little Richard took his songs to Specialty Records the stomp behind the shack the people prayed and screamed danced. There between the jig joint and the sunrise held like rings of a tree stump held the cord (chord?). The blood cell count like percussion through Coogler’s Fruitvale and Wakanda leading into (like great composers- like Mingus or Miles or James Brown) the symphonic SINNERS. The glory of another paramount dimension of this america unveiled- the making of a secret recipe in the mix of Blues and rhythm stirred by nothing but Black Love.

The first  time I felt such a stirring to move that I remember was watching Gary U.S. Bonds sing A Quarter to Three on American Bandstand. And, honestly, like I never thought I’d live to see a man of color become president, I never imagined I’d see the motherlode of all red-light bulb basement Soul Music parties. No, not the force of Black Community like a drum never brought to its skin like a blood transfusion on the big silver screen. Oh yes, jig joints have appeared in major black movies like The Color Purple and Eve’s Bayou, but Ryan Coogler reached back and forward at the same time from the perfect texture of nightness (like Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew album cover) covering all the terror and evil sucking night riders. The Stomp on one side of the door and the devil on the other side that this brother, like they let a juju man behind the camera, took and boiled and fried cliches, folklore, and literature, into a Charlie Patton and Buddy Guy stew never see or even really tasted on this america’s greatest platform of racial myth and fascist fable. Bluntly, no one has shown movie-going america the glorious stomp of the African peoples in this america before. Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez have… and John Coltrane and Randy Weston have.

There’s something else as amazing if not more beautiful here. Mr. Coogler does something else in this epic way: he paints two scenes of Black Love- yes- moving, incomparable Love, something not seen since (for the first time on television!) Leslie Uggams and Richard Roundtree in ROOTS. The first lovemaking scene of a black man and a black woman in a major motion picture occurred in Superfly in 1972. In a bathtub while Curtis Mayfield sang “Gimme Your Love” Now the twins of SINNERS project  their individual romantics to their perspective mates. Both scenes are love making history with equal creativity and integrity. How the Voodoo sister moves when told why he came back. The brother takes off his hat and tells her he loves her… as does his brother with his woman. They both say “I love you” the same way. Coogler creates harmonies on other levels between characters in this masterpiece. In an era promoting profit from hate and fear to have a film of this critical cultural nature take us into black arms never held before and faith and superstition never told like this before gives me hope. Simple unshakeable belief that we’ll get it one day … voluntarily through art such as this high movie or be forced to by the powers interested in anything but human soulful love. How many of us will be Lot’s wife? At this point we gotta go sing with that beautiful as midnight sister (the one whose husband didn’t come to the joint that vampire night in Clarksdale) and come together as fearless souls on this fragile planet … on the downbeat stroke. Stomp!!

Paul r. Harding, poet, “They Tried to Kill Me Yesterday” (Esp Disk)