Washington glorified carpentry and ironwork, telling Negroes that vocational skills would change the way white people perceived them. Black Herman claimed that he was immortal and descended from Moses. He seemed to suggest that Negroes could elude Klansmen and their descendants by slipping the bonds of mortality and simply outliving them. Sun Ra was in Herman's camp. Reality equals death, because everything which is real has a beginning and an end.
Myth speaks of the impossible, of immortality.
Birmingham in 1940 had the largest chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Black retailers were isolated in a downtown Soweto that black shoppers could venture out of only on prescribed days. Sonny's dreams naturally focused on Terminal Station, a domed Beaux-Arts building that was the grandest station in the South. His mother and aunt worked in the terminal restaurant and often fed him there. The contrast between Jim Crow Birmingham and the free North was writ large in the station.