The meaning of rupture for Black life rests mainly with the foundational violence of the transatlantic slave trade that transformed human beings into strangers, into property. Emancipation has never been a clean break, but it can/has involve/d forms of refusal that present a rupture with order. If the threat of death defines the lived experience of Blackness, then the possibility of escape is a matter of calling on the past and the future alike. There is love and joy in this, and Black is a work that, through the dance of one, summons the strength of the assembly, the joy of the chorus, the love of the streets.