On a lawn here at the Aspen Ideas Festival, covered in Alexa Meade’s paint, Jon Boogz and Lil Buck performed this piece for a rapt audience earlier this afternoon. They spoke afterward about some of the choices they made in the construction of the piece, like painting the walls of the set in calming shades of blue, cream, and purple, conjuring the image of a bright blue sky. The dreamy quality of the set makes the harshness of the outside world in the piece’s second half more vivid.

Here in Aspen, in that second half, Jon Boogz and Lil Buck danced into the crowd, searching the faces of audience members as the performance came to its grim conclusion. Unlike in the video, when they left the set, they weren’t on a cold gray street with chain-link fences and indifferent strangers, they were on a bright green lawn underneath a vivid blue sky, ringed by mountains on every side. The contrast was somehow even more lurid in this setting, the ending to the dance even more grim.

For a moment, though, dwell in the beauty of that first half. Imagine Buck’s balletic, otherworldly jookin going on forever, his body rippling like a flag on a single foot, en pointe.

Connor writes:

I'm about halfway through the podcast. I used to share some of John B's cynicism, not about the world, but certainly about the South. I grew up in Arkansas and spent a number of my more formative years in a small town of about 20,000, 30 minutes north of the Louisiana border. I hated it. I despised how disinterested people were about the world outside of our small town, how everyone seemed to lack ambition, and maybe that everyone wore too much camo. What's funny is that the town I lived in was relatively large for the area. I kind of lucked out in that way. Somebody like me stuck in a town of three or four thousand, I'd feel pretty hopeless, too. Because you're not stuck in a place; you're stuck in a mindset, and I'd argue that's even harder to escape.

Now I'm a Ph.D student in Philadelphia. I got out. I love Arkansas, but I certainly do not look fondly on my years in that small town. I got out. John B. did not.

Michael writes:

I am somewhat afraid the lives closest to those mentioned in S-Town are the least likely to seek it out, and the least likely to give it credence. S-Town is constantly grappling with … such Catch 22s. But they are real, at least in the show's initial presentation of themes and characters.

Time and again, S-Town sets up heroes to watch them fall. The most poignant moment for me was when a jovial character is described, then buried underneath their own nonsensical racist vitriol. It was a world that reminded me of the insanity I noticed growing up as a black man in the South, and which is still so rarely commented upon to this day. The twisting together of good and bad into something difficult to recognize, sometimes abhorrent, sometimes worthy of outright condemnation, but with complexities and subtleties that require more than just blanket condemnations and censorship, lest secret tattoo backrooms fester everywhere.

S-Town felt cripplingly necessary as I left the South. And as a queer Alabama native from his own shit town with its own shit people, and its own epitomization of the shit systems that make life unduly rueful, I couldn't help but be glad to learn about the philosopher king of Bibb County, with a heart so big it just doesn't seem to make sense with all the muck about it. And if anything, by the end even if you think it's crazy; that's nowhere near close to easy either.

Both of these perspectives come from listeners who left the South, and were happy with that decision. But I imagine for many of you, part of the richness of the show comes directly from the richness of its cultural setting. No phrase from the series rings in my memory more clearly or musically than this, from John’s mother Mary Grace in the show’s first episode: “Since time, I reckon.” The pixels here can’t do that utterance justice; such an evocative little twist of language could only have been crafted out of the melodies of Southern speech.

Any other reactions, readers and S-Town listeners from the South? Send them our way: hello+stown@theatlantic.com.

Here he is, advocating for voting rights in 1867:

Man is the only government-making animal in the world. His right to a participation in the production and operation of government is in inference from his nature, as direct and self-evident as is his right to acquire property or education. It is no less a crime against the manhood of a man, to declare that he shall not share in the making and directing of the government under which he lives, than to say that he shall not acquire property and education.

Writing about the limits of federal power and the importance of protecting individual rights:

The arm of the Federal government is long, but it is far too short to protect the rights of individuals in the interior of distant States. They must have the power to protect themselves, or they will go unprotected, spite of all the laws the Federal Government can put upon the national statute-book.

Here he is, chiming in on education policy:

In an 1853 letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe that exemplified his interest in vocational education, Douglass didn’t call for the creation of new colleges to serve African Americans. Instead, he sought schools that would teach "agriculture and the mechanic arts." Douglass argued that teaching vocational skills—especially industrial ones—to African Americans would help them climb the ladder from slave to integrated freeman. A prosperous, upwardly mobile African-American working class would, he thought, offer a profound refutation of many pro-slavery arguments, which held that African Americans were incapable of economic self-sufficiency.

Douglass’s interest in practical training is in harmony with the thinking behind contemporary efforts to expand economic opportunity—especially to students from disadvantaged backgrounds—by promoting vocational programs and targeted enterprises such as Project Lead the Way. But his memoirs demonstrate that practical training is hardly enough. In his 1845 autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, he chronicles his efforts to fashion an identity as a free man, offering a bracing portrait not only of the physical hardships of slavery but also of its psychological torments. "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man," Douglass wrote.

Here he is, stumping for the rights of women:

If intelligence is the only true and rational basis of government, it follows that that is the best government which draws its life and power from the largest sources of wisdom, energy, and goodness at its command. The force of this reasoning would be easily comprehended and readily assented to in any case involving the employment of physical strength. We should all see the folly and madness of attempting to accomplish with a part what could only be done with the united strength of the whole.Though his folly may be less apparent, it is just as real when one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the world is excluded from any voice or vote in civil government.

And here he is, as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates lays out, demonstrating radical empathy across a divide so enormous it seems almost impassable.

As my colleague David Graham points out:

It is a real and praiseworthy accomplishment for Douglass’s name to keep spreading. But the frequent, and often valid, critique of Black History Month is that it encourages a tokenist approach to African American culture, leading everyone from national leaders to elementary-school teachers to recite a catechism of well-known figures, producing both shallow engagement and privileging a passé Great Man (and Woman) theory of history.

There’s no use praising Frederick Douglass merely to consign him to the dustbin of history. He had plenty of things to say about the issues we’re still grappling with every day. And we’ll still be here, talking about voting rights and gender equality and cultural divides and the limits of federal power and, yes, Frederick Douglass, long after Black History Month is past.