“I almost never danced, as much as I wanted to. I was crippled by some childhood fear of my own body. But I would watch how black people moved, how in these clubs they danced as though their bodies could do anything, and their bodies seemed as free as Malcolm’s voice.”

“All I then wanted was to write as those black people danced, with control, power, joy, warmth.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Between the World and Me.”