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WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . .,
vera took the harmonica from his lips and sat down at the organ. And Willie began to sing.
A first clap, forlorn and naked, peeped from the thousands. Then another, and another. Then the whole sixteen thousand were clapping and moving in unison.
Willie played and he sang and he sang and he played. He played for ten minutes, twenty, thirty. Before you could think to breathe they swung into their second hour, never pausing, never resting, the same Hephaestean beat, the same haunted rhythm, with Willie piling variation on top of variation, weaving a spider web of blood-pulsing harmonics. Somehow Drivin’ Jack and Milo and Vince hung on, stayed with him.
Willie sang about the good earth and about rape, sang about young trees and sang about bate. He sang about the things man does to animals and about the animal man. He sang about man poisoning himself with envy, about dead-eyed children and too-young killers. Mostly, he sang about his people and their life and the writhing, insane alienness that was the white man’s. He cursed and he prayed and he damned and he praised.
He took that audience up to Heaven and banged their heads against the gates. He dragged them kicking and screaming down to the fiery pit.
And then, the sweat streaming off his face and his clothes hanging limp from his body, pulling him toward the ground in cpllusion with an evil gravity, he began to sing about the Things That Made no Sense, that were less and more than all that had gone before, and, in that was Madness.