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life force I found in the funk of music and the fun of dancing, was linked to the death force. Looking back from an adult perspective, I now call it the death shudder.

THE BRIDGE
    T HE BRIDGE WAS A METAPHOR , a symbol of racist neglect. It was also a symbol of the fragility of life and the easy fall to death. But the bridge was also literal. It was the path that I was forced to cross over to get to elementary school every morning.
    The white kids came from the north and their road led directly to school. But we black kids approached school from the south. To get to the school building, we had to walk over a rickety bridge that looked like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark . The bridge was always on the verge of collapse. Down below was Elder Creek, where rushing water ran over jagged rocks. Not only was the bridge on its last legs, it didn’t have rail guards and wasn’t wide enough for both a car and a pedestrian. If you were walking over the bridge and a car happened to come roaring by, you’d either be run over or thrown into the creek. It was a heavily trafficked road, so nearly every day I’d face the frightening challenge of trying to run over the bridge before an approaching car reached it first. Even then I knew that if white kids had been required to use the bridge a city ordinance would have quickly passed, either widening it or appointing a crossing guard. The city had no concern for the well-being of its black kids.
    I envisioned myself falling off and cracking my skull in half. In the words of Kierkegaard, it was with fear and trembling that I imagined being struck head-on by a speeding Chrysler Imperial. The death shudder got all over me. What is the death shudder? I experienced it as a deep anxiety or dread connected to the overwhelming fragility of life in the face of death.
    Cliff tells me that I came face to face with my terror at an early age: “There’s a defining moment that shows you what you’re made of. The bridge was your moment. You were only five years old, but you did what the big kids were afraid to do. You were an incredibly brave little dude. You made it to the other side.”
    And it wasn’t just the bridge that had me shaking and tripping and thinking about this notion of here today, gone tomorrow. Though I had accepted Jesus into my heart, it was not my nature to dwell on literal notions of heaven and hell. In fact, when my Sunday school teacher, the wondrous Mrs. Sarah Ray, posed the question, “If there is only one place left in heaven, would you take it?” my answer was, “No.”
    “Why in heavens not?” asked Mrs. Ray.
    “Because I’d have to do the Christian thing, and the Christian thing would be to let someone else pass into heaven first.”
    Mrs. Ray was amazed. “And you’d choose to fall into hell, Cornel?”
    I just assumed that Jesus had promised to be with me even until the end of the world. So I just stand on his promise. I have always believed that ours is in the trying; the rest is not our business.
    So what was “nonexistence” really about then? What did it mean to lose consciousness? Years later when I was a seventeen year old at Harvard, my tutor Robert Nozick, a superb philosopher, helped assuage my shudder by saying, “Life after death is no more problematical than life before life. What do you think it was like before you existed? You were born in 1953, Cornel, but what was it like for you in 1952? That year, 1952, was certainly not a problem for you. In the same way, neither will you have a problem during the year following your demise.”
    As a child, I didn’t have the benefit of Professor Nozick’s wisdom; the death shudder would not leave me alone. In years to come, it would manifest itself differently. I’d later learn that certain figures with whom I felt deep rapport—Martin Luther King, Jr. among them—had also entertained the notion of nonexistence. As I said, the shudder came early to me—perhaps as early as age six—but to