North Philly Notes

This week in North Philly Notes, Michael E. Sawyer, author of The Door of N̶o̶ Return, writes about “Being-as-Black.”

As I live with this book, I realize that I am still learning from it.

That starts with the title. The “No” in The Door of N̶o̶ Return is stricken through. Not erased, but crossed out, remaining visible. This turns out to matter enormously, because a stricken “No” has no phonetic form. You cannot say it. If you treat it as simply deleted, you get “The Door of Return,” which misses the point entirely. If you try to say “the No-stricken-but-still-there Return,” you’ve demonstrated only how badly language can fail. The title is, strictly speaking, unsayable.

After reading and re-reading this book, I realized that the sonic version of the title, its spoken form, had been there the whole time. I just hadn’t heard it. In the text, in thinking about the discourse of Love under conditions of subjective instability, I linger with August Wilson’s Fences. I’ve always been preoccupied with the scene where the son, Cory, asks his father, Troy, “How come you ain’t never liked me?” Read strictly, the double negative, “ain’t never” produces its opposite: How come you always liked me? Wilson gives Cory language that is structurally available to him but ontologically impossible. A question that cannot be asked within the architecture of the anti-Black world pressing down on father and son alike. The double negative doesn’t cancel itself out. It creates something else: a passage. The Door of Ain’t Never Return.

The title I thought I’d written turns out to be a hieroglyph. The title I actually wrote turned out to be a vernacular utterance in Black English that had been waiting, patiently, for me to hear it.

I think about this now, in 2026, when the political landscape feels like pure foreclosure. The fortress is going up. The “No” feels absolute and permanent. What I want to suggest and what the book argues systematically, is that Black cultural production has never accepted the permanence of that “No.” Not as optimism. Not as resistance narrative. But as ontological fact: The door was never actually closed.

Toni Morrison knew this. August Wilson knew this. Ralph Ellison knew this. And on a January night in 1972, Aretha Franklin demonstrated it.

In the book, I linger with that night at New Bethel Baptist Church in Los Angeles and specifically with Aretha Franklin’s performance of “Never Grow Old” on the second night of what would find itself presented on the Amazing Grace album and in the documentary that was finally released in 2018. Viewers will recall that Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts take a break from their own recording project to be observers rather than observed that night. What the two Rolling Stones witness is the journey to the threshold of the door of ain’t never return. Aretha pulls the audience to a place where observation of Morrison’s third, if you will pardon the expression, world is possible. Where we are led to is a place of competing forces. The resistance of anti-Blackness fights its extinction, and the pull of another world seems foreign, even to those who are also participants in Aretha’s expedition to another world. Reverend Cleveland throws a towel at Aretha to disrupt the journey and Gospel icon Clara Ward has to be physically restrained from ending Aretha’s performance.

What Aretha did with that song was mine its technology to get across that barrier. She took the word “Never” and turned it, probed it, refused to let it resolve into simple negation. She built, note by note, a sonic space constructed entirely of refusal of the refusal that “never,” like the “No,” asserts, and then filled that space of negation of negation with what the refusal of refusal makes possible. When she finally has cleared the necessary sonic space, Aretha gives Toni Morrison’s world a name. Not a theoretical concept. Not a philosophical category. A name for the place: The Beautiful Home of the Soul.

That’s what this book is about. Not the Door of No Return as permanent closure that is the commonly understood consequence of the catastrophic fact of the Middle Passage and everything it created. But the door Aretha’s voice found in 1972 that Wilson’s language had been pointing toward and that Morrison’s novels had been mapping: the Door of Ain’t Never Return. The one that was never truly closed. The one that was, as Morrison wrote, “already made for me, both snug and wide open, with a doorway never needing to be closed.”

I didn’t know I’d written that title until after the book was finished. I think that’s exactly as it should be. The work teaches even its author what it’s about.

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, cultural studies, drama, Education, ethics, literature, Mass Media and Communications, Music, philosophy, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology | Tagged: Aretha Franklin, art, August Wilson, Being-as-Black, Black, books, cultural produdtion, hieroglyph, language, literatures, Middle Passage, Never, poetry, politics, race, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, writing | Leave a comment »