At A Time Like This: Twinkie Clark's Gospel Of Everyday Blackness

We don't think of flowers and Black folks together enough. But it is the Black church, and Black art, that tell us about the sound of flowers.

In 1965, James Cleveland, the late "King of Gospel," released his definitive version of "Give Me My Flowers" with The Angelic Choir in Nutley, N.J. Originally by The Consolers, the song bespeaks the necessity of offering flowers to those you cherish while they are alive, such that they can sense the beauty such gifts produce. It is a plea towards the sensuousness of color and odor and touch, a plea toward recognizing that delight is something Black folks can, should and do cultivate, and that this cultivation is a spiritual practice. More recently, the poet Hanif Adburraqib was watching a Black peer offer words about the beauty of flowers at a reading shortly after the 2016 election, when he heard a white person behind him ask, "How can Black people write about flowers at a time like this?" The moment set him off on a path to talk, precisely, about flowers as a poetics, in a series of poems named for the overheard question. Recounting the story in an interview last year, he asked, "What is the Black poet to be writing about 'at a time like this' if not to dissect the attractiveness of a flower — that which can arrive beautiful and then slowly die right before our eyes?"

What Cleveland's choir hints at through singing, what Abdurraqib writes about, is the absurdity of thinking Black life is or can ever be devoid of sensuality, of beauty unfolding and flowering. Black folks are given attention in moments of spectacular crisis, but in our world there is always a crisis. Since at least the 15th century and the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Europe, this supposed new world the crisis. It is easy to forget, then, that Black creative verve and drive are not only, not