The invitation to listen like an outlaw community of care (171) is a profound offering. Rangan locates listening, in this context, as a method of caretaking and as a communal act of refusal for the purposes of Black thriving in the face of structural anti-Black violence. It neither denies nor sidesteps the structural nature of this violence. Rather it attunes our ears to the lyrics of Black life, to what Campt terms the low frequencies—a sound that, like a hum, resonates in and as a vibration, or what Campt calls felt sound. Rangan’s concept asks us to listen for the felt sound of Black communities in mourning, not as witnesses or triers of fact but as caring members of a people rendered disposable and outlawed. In my own book in progress, and particularly in my chapters on oral Black testimonies and on mourning practices such as tending to sites of Black death, I have struggled to come up with a way to adequately account for what Rangan has termed an outlaw community of care. Indeed, Rangan has renewed my spirits as I return to work on my book. Here is one such example, from a chapter of mine titled “Out(side of) Law: Towards a Theory and Practice of Black Testimony.” I share it in the spirit of being in conversation.

The jurors are not done. One of them asks, “Is it typical for you to walk down the middle of the street when you went to the market or walk around the neighborhood?”{1} Johnson, almost as if throwing some shade, states, “No, sir. I walked in the middle of the street before, but it is not like I just wake up in the morning, hey, we are going to walk in the middle of the streets. It is something you do; you are crossing the street and try to stay a little longer . . . It wasn’t planned to walk in the street.” Johnson holds on. He loiters a little longer. He challenges the insinuation that Black people just wake and decide to walk in the streets, as if they have nothing else to occupy their mind and time. The juror persists, “Typically you would be on the sidewalk?” Johnson responds, “Correct.” The juror responds, “In my mind it’s an act of defiance going down the middle of the street expecting cars to go around you and pay attention to you.” Johnson responds, “Yeah, that’s correct.” And the juror retorts, “I would interpret that they are being defiant to show strength or something.” Johnson is not exhausted yet: “Correct, walking down the middle of the street could, you know, cause harm if someone had to, but like I said, walking down the middle of street” he only saw a few cars and “no one blew their horn, no one even stopped or slowed down.” The juror trudges ahead: “Eventually there might have been a driver that caused a confrontation?” And Johnson responds, “If, but it didn’t come at all, we didn’t get anyone telling us to get out of the street, you are in our way, anything like that.” And, perhaps in a sign of fatigue, the juror curtly responds, “Thank you.” Johnson goes along with this hypothetical by ending it.

 In the milieu of surveillance and policing, this staying a little longer that carries insurrectionary potentialities must be corrected to prevent the prospect of riotous behavior—the improvisation of Black life under conditions of (un)freedom. It is precisely because Johnson stayed a little longer that the jurors are confounded by his refusal of the law. An obscene act. They cannot and will never be able to understand that it is not so much an embrace of lawlessness for Black people, but a recognition that to be Black is to already be sequestered by lawlessness’s embrace. To be marked by criminality. Certainly, as Fred Moten writes, “White supremacist intellectual culture in America is committed to the regulation of disorder, the capture of the fugitive.” And so staying a little longer is not so much a reason but a decision to dwell in this zone of lawlessness and to understand oneself within what Moten calls the erotics of fugitivity. It is, of course, here that I cannot stop thinking about Pooja’s conceptualization of outlaw listening.

 By decision, I do not mean to suggest, following Sora Han, some unequalled triumph or enactment of unconditional freedom. Rather, this performative desire and decision to stay a little longer has to be understood as that which is, as Han writes, “precipitated by both complete subjection to and mediation by legal protocols that leave traces of a form of disappearance that can only be known through a desire that persists in [the] monstrous conditions of forced choices” that marked slavery and its afterlife. Geography structures Black life, as Katherine McKittrick reminds us, and influences the potential for escape and the forms that refusal might take. In the middle of streets and in the courtroom, then, Johnson’s Black testimony insists on staying a little longer and, indeed, refuses the jurors and, to a large extent, the laws of civility’s normative desire for him to have gotten on the sidewalk. The residues of Black testimonies, their felt sound, demand that we as scholars, like Johnson, stay a little longer in these monstrous archives to continue exhuming, listening for Black life’s insistence. These testimonies are precisely what we might call evidence of experience, following Joan Scott, or the evidence of Black life.

How do Black testimonies unbind themselves from the boundaries of the juridical, the legal, from normative law? What might their staying a little longer tell us if we, led by Ralph Ellison’s imperative, were to closely consult the text and read the archive against the impulse of “the evidence could not support” that shapes historical and archival methods, and hone in on evidence produced by the outlaw communities of care?