Trustfall

Land changing hands, Amiri alone with John Coltrane, another excerpt from my writing on the backstage and its malcontents

I was whistling all of his music when they told me he was dead, Amiri Baraka recounts, describing the day John Coltrane died. Baraka was in solitary confinement in a Newark, New Jersey jail after the rebellion that July, 17, 1967. Seven, seven, seven. The guard had heard him turning the stale and stoic air into A Love Supreme and slipped the obituary clipping under the cell door, maybe hoping the whistle would crack into scream. The recountement stops here. We don’t know if Baraka whistled more insistently until it became a blistered weeping with the air and the tongue, piercing the sloped crescendo of where he had been wounded by police and bandaged with a mound of white gauze that looked to the naked eye like an unchecked and festering unicorn antennae. You must be born to die. He became a radio nodding between off and home, rebirth’s good omen. He’d taken that blow to the head and was now struck in the soul by rebel ghosts. His only friend gone.