Yet the Waco story does not simply have to do with a compelling theological binding of two events that would otherwise maintain distinct historical lanes of explanation. We also need to ask about the relation of these events, and consider the language of eventfulness. In other words, if, as I suggested above, Cavell helps draw out the insight that the fact of the relay made between these two disasters is conditioned by prior, shared forms of life, he also helps elicit the questions of (1) how these events are specifically related to one another and (2) what the ordinariness of their connection suggests concerning the eventful character of the history being produced. That is to ask: are both the Jesse Washington lynching and the tornado to be…show more content… The spectacle lynching of Jesse Washington, as the oral histories tell, is related the broad cultural nadir of lynching which persisted for over half a century in this region and in the US broadly. What this suggests is an everydayness of Jesse Washington’s lynching: the eventfulness of lynching—as terror, as horror—is also the everydayness of lynching. What emerges is this: the Waco tale is not simply one about a tornado negating a single moment of anti-black violence that continues to linger in the landscape; it is also a rejection or negation or undoing or refusal to let stand an unlivable ordinary, a rejection of everyday racial violence. I would like to argue that the crucial grammatical features of this story, as a story of negation, are best named as features of a story of ‘Blues…show more content… Clyde Woods has argued persuasively that, more than simply an emergent American musical tradition, the Blues must be understood as a tradition of explanation that originated in the processes of cultural construction for African Americans within and against the antebellum plantation regime. This tradition is principally concerned with social justice, working class leadership, sustainable communities, and the construction of new commons. To locate the theological re-narration of history by black Wacoans in the Blues tradition of explanation is then to argue that this story is of a piece with a broader, resilient language that conceives of organizing social life otherwise—a kind of ordinary eschatology. It is attunement to this heritage that provides the material for the kind of the projection exhibited in the tornado story. The Blues tradition may be a sort of training to stop, as Cavell says, “look[ing] away and leap[ing] around,” in hopes of the breaking new meaning into our
