Bodies. Let us think bodies. Let us think not at bodies, as if we could rise to a lofty, disembodied position of safe neutrality and thence with weightless eyes, without history or passion, “fix [them] in a formulated phrase.” Rather, let us think in, through, with, by, and for bodies. Let us think as if bodies could never be counted out, brushed aside,“pinned and wriggling on the wall,” abstracted from a discourse, one, say, that attends to a soul just 19 months dead. Let us with the children of ancient Israel imagine that we are tasked to think not in the gray organs farthest in us from the earth and closest to the ether, but from the heart, not of impulse and sentiment, but from the pounding center of these muscles and blood and skin and bones, from the chest that heaves and aches when it is forced to make bricks without straw in Pharaoh’s Egypt or cuts, crushes, and boils sugarcane in early American Louisiana or lies in humiliation and terror under grunting, flushed, pale, heavy flesh in a Mississippi plantation bedroom or grieves in antebellum Virginia—the Mother of Presidents—grieves the loss of a daughter or son who’ll fetch top dollar from markets in the expanding western frontier or runs in Jim Crow Indiana on a moonless night from baying Klan bloodhounds or struggles in a police headlock in 21st century Staten Island. Bodies. Let us think bodies.