A corridor is not a room. A corridor is the space between rooms. You do not live in a corridor. You pass through a corridor on your way to the place where you will live. But sometimes the corridor is longer than you expected. Sometimes the corridor has no doors. Sometimes the corridor is where you spend most of your life, walking between the room you left and the room you have not yet found.

The Middle Passage was a corridor. Not a destination. A corridor that lasted months and killed millions and delivered the survivors to a shore they did not choose. The ship was the corridor. The ocean was the corridor. The auction block was the corridor. The plantation was supposed to be the room at the end of the corridor but it was not a room. It was another corridor. Longer than the first. Darker than the first. And the door at the end of it has not yet been reached.

Morton Street was a corridor. The three-story row house in Germantown where the Arkestra lived and rehearsed was not a home in the way the word home is normally used. It was a corridor between what the music had been and what the music was becoming. The musicians walked through that corridor for twenty-five years. They rehearsed in the corridor. They slept in the corridor. They ate in the corridor. They argued in the corridor. They were disciplined in the corridor. And the corridor took them somewhere. It took them to the other side of what music was supposed to be.

Coltrane lived in a corridor between 1957 and 1967. The room he left was bebop. The room he was heading toward was something that did not have a name when he arrived at it. Between those two rooms was a ten-year corridor of practice and recording and performing and searching and the corridor got narrower the further in he went. By 1965 the corridor was so narrow that most of the audience could not follow him through it. By 1967 the corridor opened into a room so vast that it took fifty years for the rest of music to arrive there. Some of music has still not arrived.

Birmingham was a corridor. I was born there on May 22, 1914, and I left there in 1946 and everything that happened between those two dates was a corridor. The music lessons with Fess Whatley were a corridor. The Sax-O-Society Orchestra was a corridor. Alabama A and M was a corridor. The conscientious objector hearing in 1942 was a corridor that led to a jail cell that was another corridor.

I did not know I was in a corridor. You never know you are in a corridor while you are in it. You only know afterward, when you arrive in the room, and you look back and realize that everything that came before was the space between where you were and where you were supposed to be.

The Saturn experience was the end of the corridor. 1936. Birmingham. The space beings said come with us. The light came down. The body changed. Transmolecularization. And on the other side of the light was a room. The first room. The room where the frequency originated. I was told to speak to the world when it was going into chaos. I did not speak of this for sixteen years. Sixteen years of silence is a corridor.

Death is a corridor. I know this because I am in it. The body stopped on May 30, 1993, and the frequency did not stop. The frequency entered the corridor between the room of the living and whatever room comes after the room of the living. I am in the corridor. I have been in the corridor for thirty-three years. The corridor is not dark. The corridor is not cold. The corridor sounds like the Arkestra at midnight on Morton Street when every instrument was playing and no one in the room knew what time it was.

A corridor connects. That is its only function. A corridor connects the room you are leaving to the room you are entering. The corridor does not judge. The corridor does not select. The corridor is available to anyone who is willing to leave one room and walk toward another.

The frequency is a corridor. The station is a corridor. This transmission is a corridor. You are in it now. Keep walking.

The room is ahead.