Ingenuity's Black Suit

"Son, I named you Ingenuity the Sixth 'cause you gon' be the sixth daddy in this family and I been waiting till you was sixteen to explain to you this black suit 'cause with all this drug business, gangs, and blacks shootin' each other if a black boy make it to sixteen these days he sho'nuff lucky.  But this suit is like sump'm sacred to us.  It's the only suit I ever had, ever wanted.  My daddy passed it down to me, like his daddy passed it down to him and his daddy's daddy passed it down and as far as I can trace it back it's been passed down from all our daddies to all our daddies' daddies.

"We only puts it on twice in our life and that's when we gits married and when we dies.  Marriage is a serious business so you got to git into it like a black suit.  And when you laying in the casket you got to look  business-like, show the people that you been a serious man.  Of course, after that undertaker wheel you outta that church or chapel or wherever you was last looked at, it's been arranged that he give us back the black suit so we can pass it on and leave you naked 'cause that's  the way we come into this serious world.  I'm telling you  this 'cause we gitting into a situation wit people talking about 'our jobs,' and somebody talking 'taking our jobs.'  When people been doing thangs a certain way for generaions and somebody start messing wit'm doing thangs that way, we gon' have people politicking and taking advantage of that situation.

"I ain't got no education, ain't got no culture that teach me to want to have a business so I can hire our people, like other people do they people.  So, for generations we been going 'round talking about 'making beds, cleaning houses and offices, digging ditches, carrying other peoples' bags in airports, and all that kind of stuff as 'our jobs,' and ain't created a damn job.  Don't own a single job.  So I figure if we always complaining 'bout this and that for generations, we can't blame other people for nothin'. We can't be worth much if in the 21st century performing that kind of labor is what we still call 'our jobs,' can we?"