They call me. I'm driven back. It really is a compulsion. It's where the energy comes from. If I were to set myself out to try to describe some of the salient features of African-American culture, I would start with something like time, and try to articulate how some ways of experiencing time have become embodied in everything from the way people walk and talk to the music they make and the stories they tell.
Time is a kind of leitmotif.
It's a kind of index to the culture. I've learned a lot from a book by a man named John Mbiti called African Religions and Philosophy. It's like a river, like the sea, and we kind of swim through it. It is the medium that holds everything. You are just as likely to bump into someone from fifty years ago as bump into someone you saw the day before.