Though belittled and denied, however, it lives on authentically. In homes, schools, and churches, on streets, stages, and the airwaves, you can hear soul spoken every day. Most African Americans—including missionaries who, like [authors Claude] Brown and [James] Baldwin, are fluent speakers of Standard English—still invoke Spoken Soul as we have for hundreds of years, to laugh, or cry, to preach and praise, to shuck and jive, to sing, to rap, to shout, to style, to express our individual personas and our ethnic identities (“‘spress yo’self!” as James Brown put it), to confide in and commiserate with friends, to chastise, to cuss, to act, to act the fool, to get by and get over, to pass secrets, to make jokes, to mock and mimic, to tell stories, to reflect and philosophize, to create authentic characters and voices in novels, poems and plays, to survive in the streets, to relax at home and recreate in playgrounds, to render our deepest emotions and embody our vital core (p. 4-5).”