In the context of Black cultural life, writes English professor Freeburg, “soul is the one-word answer to this question: How did enslaved Africans turn America’s infamous failure into the greatest moral occasion of modern Western life?” Soul involves the formation of community, self-care, and self-help; delivering aid to others; and finding meaning in life—all enabling “survival in hostile environments that enslaved Africans and that, later, second-class citizens were forced to call home.” Freeburg identifies four pillars of soul: resonance, revelation, resilience, and transcendence. The first “underscores how Black people connect to each other inside their homes and institutions,” while the second concerns finding and creating community and extended family. Resilience is self-explanatory, though it has an element of self-effacement; one of Freeburg’s exemplars is the great singer Nina Simone, who “believed that her voice was so significant to the mourning and struggle during the 1960s and 1970s that she sacrificed her own health and family relationships.” Another exemplar is the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who was encouraged in her art by Langston Hughes and other writers and editors and who also returned the favor by nurturing other aspirants. Finally, transcendence involves overcoming difficult, even seemingly impossible, obstacles to individual and social progress. Here Freeburg holds up the example of Jewel Thais-Williams, a model of intersectionality—gay, feminist, Black—who owned a popular Los Angeles nightclub that provided a home for LGBTQ+ people: “It was a Black club, and it was queer, but Jewel made sure that, above all, everyone felt invited and welcome.” Freeburg deftly joins historical figures, such as Frederick Douglass and Phyllis Wheatley to contemporary ones such as Barack Obama, to illustrate his welcoming assertion that “affirmations of self, in a chosen community or a community chosen for you, define soul.”
