Like Grandma woulda said, "Lawd a mercy!" I shook the envelope to make sure that nothing was left.
But for something that sounds like it would be more chaotic than a beehive in a washing machine, Yes Lawd! is seamless in the way it traces the constellations of black-music history, and almost celebratory in its weightlessness.
And as my mother would say, have mercy on us all, Lawd, for we know not what we do.
When he was 8, a backstage visit to the original production of "The Green Pastures" helped inspire him to become an actor, and in 1951 he played the lead part of De Lawd in a Broadway revival.
It ends badly, about a half an hour later, with an excursion into megalomania and a feverish trek through a swamp, during which Jones fires his gun at visions of a chain-gang boss ("I'll kill you, white devil!) and a sort of voodoo priest ("Mercy, Lawd!"), while working in a gospel number ("I done repent!).
Two years before Lawd Today!, a collection of short stories appeared, under the title Eight Men, which Wright had prepared for publication during what turned out to be his final weeks of life.
Hopefully that doesn't mean Palm's moving away from the airwaves altogether; webOS' biggest strengths are things that can be encapsulated in video in a matter seconds, and lawd knows that Palm needs more people knowing about (and more importantly, wanting) webOS.
In "Lawd Today!" (about a black man who is not only a victim of bigotry but a bigot himself), in "Uncle Tom's Children," and in the first two parts of "Native Son" he had tried to describe the conditions of life in a racist society; in the last part of "Native Son" he undertook to explain them.
Otherwise, there was only the "cesspool" of daily life described in "Lawd Today!" — an endless cycle of demeaning drudgery and cheap thrills.
She told David O. Selznick, producer of "Gone With the Wind," that she wouldn't say a racial epithet or "de Lawd," and she said to her black critics, "I'd rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be a maid and make $7".
