peregrination

A jaunt to the Waffle House across the street required a peregrination across a hot ocean of tarmac.

Appearing as track No. 2 on her pivotal “Black Christ of the Andes” album, her post-Catholic conversion masterpiece, Williams’s cover of the “Porgy and Bess” trickster-villain Sportin’ Life’s ode to religious skepticism eschews the original’s vaudevillian flash in favor of offering a brooding ramble, a gently swinging peregrination that traverses hills and moves in and out of dark valleys to the rhythm of philosophical questioning and questing.

This extravagant peregrination of a novel wanders back and forth through three decades of cruelty, violence, corruption, blackmail, debauchery and lust for revenge.

Finding community and disagreement in a space in which talking to strangers might be more welcome than at, say, my local coffee shop is particularly alluring peregrination.

Amal’s performance that night, with its narrative of a weary child’s peregrination through Dumbo to the glass-walled carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park, should have been delicate and gorgeous.