Awash in the ghastly video mosaic shot by black people’s cameraphones, I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink. Then a lyric gave me strength.

Critic’s Notebook: “The most urgent filmmaking anybody’s doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones,” WesleyMorris writes.

Awash in the ghastly video mosaic shot by black people ’s cameraphones, I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink. Then a lyric gave me strength.

We’ve been trying to make this country great, but you won’t let us.Black Americans have come in peace, they’ve come armed. They’ve just been trying to mind their business. Disappointment awaits, regardless. Anytime the racial temperature goes up and hell pays a visit to earth, the disappointment takes a holiday. And you fight. You fight because you’re tired. Yet you’re tired because you’ve been fighting. For so long. In waves, in loops, in vacuums, in vain.

ImagePatti LaBelle performing in Illinois in the 1980s.Credit…Paul Natkin/Getty ImagesI suppose this is all how I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink on Sunday, bawling into a bowl of greens, a knife in one hand, the other gathered into the loneliest fist that hand had ever made. I was doubled over because Patti LaBelle had wrecked me.

Now, somehow, Patti’s not for everybody. And I don’t mean white people (although I’ve heard the complaints). My mother was a black woman from Philadelphia just like Patti and her feelings remained mixed. Not something you need to know about my otherwise perfect mother; it’s just to say that Patti LaBelle is an unsettled matter. And her unorthodoxy — as a cookbook author, a vocalist and someone who believes that a black woman’s hair ought to be a wonder of the world — makes her all the more beloved to her partisans.

The last song on her 1985 album, “Patti,” is a live cover of a classic written byKenny Gamble and Leon Huffand released in 1972: “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.” Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes recorded the raw, plangent definitive version; Simply Red the comparatively subdued hit 1989 incarnation. Both are excellent. It’s a perfect song that

LaBelle moves into and refurnishes. She flips and flexes every syllable. The word “eye” is elongated so that suddenly there’s an “o” in there. Pure Patti. The chorus — “if you don’t know me by now, you will never, never, never know me” — is left to the men doing her backing vocals, while LaBelle spreads icing all over their cake.

This version is arranged as a march that keeps cresting: big drums, wagging piano, bass that vamps. After four minutes, the band offers her a clearing to do some trapeze work. And this is the moment — in the middle of a pandemic, with the country in some of its worst-ever shape, with protesters on my street damning the police, with black America at yet another wit’s end — that I heard a song I’ve listened to a hundred times like I’ve never heard it before.

“I thought you knew me by now,” she sings, “but you don’t.” She’s off-book as they say, working on mood, instinct and fatigue. “Heh, heh,” she says with a weary laugh before she starts talking to the room.“You break your back, you break your legs and you break your face, trying to make these people know you in life. But somehow they just don’t wanna

tryto,” she says and goes on to wonder, “Is it the way I look?” In her story, she’s talking about a man and has a mirror moment. “Self,” she asks, “is it worth it?” And, in her four-alarm soprano, she lets out a naying, “Uh-uh,” only with more “uhs” than I could count. “I’m not going to try to prove myself no more,” she proclaims as her singers back her, firm yet softly, with that chorus (“never, never, never”). For half of the remaining 90 seconds, she is knocking everything off the emotional table she’d spent the previous five minutes setting.

This is not a protest anthem. It’s a lovers-at-a-crossroads jam. But LaBelle is working this crowd. She’s preaching about something that, at my sink, at a crossroads, along with millions of other black people, sounded like a much bigger love. Her exasperation felt transcendently real and timelessly final.

Enough.I heard a woman declaring her value. George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we’re monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don’t know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he’s screaming for ghosts — or fears he’s in the process of becoming one; if you don’t know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don’t know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you —

by now? — you will never, never, never …