The When I Get Home screenings — which were simultaneously streamed on the artist’s Black Planet page — took place in the Third Ward, Houston’s historical epicenter of black culture, at locations chosen for their significance to black art, business and emancipation. There was Vita Mutari, the hair salon previously owned by Solange’s mother, Miss Tina Knowles-Lawson, where the artist and her older sister, Beyoncé, spent time as kids listening to the grown folks gossip and sometimes performing for tips. There was Texan Tire & Wheel, the premiere shop to get your “swangas” fixed up for the impromptu lowrider shows on Almeda Road. There was Unity National Bank, the only black-owned banking institution in Texas, and Emancipation Gym, the state’s oldest park and the only public park open to black people during Jim Crow. Whether the locations were historic or contemporary, they each represented cultural touchstones that nurtured Solange into becoming one herself.

At the screening hosted at S.H.A.P.E. (Self-Help for African People through Education) Community Center on Sunday night, Solange popped up to watch the premiere of the film, which she also directed, with a live audience for the first time. In the house, local legends OG Ron C and DJ Candlestick spun chopped-and-screwed remixes as album collaborators Metro Boomin, Cassie and Abra settled into reserved seats; Miss Tina, Solange’s husband Alan Ferguson and rappers Slim Thug, Bun B and Devin the Dude also dotted the front rows. And social media savant Zola Moon, who appears in the film (and will soon be the subject of her own), worked the room with a cup of wine while black cowboys congregated in the back wearing their Stetsons. Throughout the 33-minute showing in a rec room lit goblin-green, viewers reacted to gorgeous vignettes of Downtown Houston, black cowpokes at an Afrofuturistic rodeo, fluid choreography, trippy animations, protective hairstyles and Y2K-meets-hood-chic couture.

S.H.A.P.E. (Self-Help for African People through Education) Community Center hosted one of the nine screenings of Solange's When I Get Home film. — S.H.A.P.E. (Self-Help for African People through Education) Community Center hosted one of the nine screenings of Solange’s When I Get Home film. (Sidney Madden / NPR)

After the showing, Solange held court with art curator and critic Antwaun Sargent for the room full of personalities she’d brought together — the bad bitches, music execs, reporters, community leaders and double-cuppers. Sitting stylish in a black bra top and white cowboy boots, she explained how pivotal coming home to Houston was for her creative process after nearly a year of touring and dealing with treating an autonomic nervous system disorder. As she tells it, she quietly rented a house on Wichita Street in order to realign her body and mind — and when she felt like herself again, made music to immortalize her place of solace.

“I think anytime that you go through something like that, you crave and you yearn [for] things that remain the same,” she told the crowd. “I know at any time in my life I can come back here to Houston, to Third Ward, and have these anchors that really lift me up.” She giggled at mentions of the group chats that have kept her grounded, reminisced about producing the album while listening to Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane. She was a visibly relaxed version of herself, comfortable in a space she’d created, working in a more insular mode than on her previous record. “With A Seat at the Table,” she explained, “I had so much to say. With this album, I had so much to feel. Words would have been reductive.”

Audience members find seats before the 33-minute showing of When I Get Home inside S.H.A.P.E. Community Center. (Sidney Madden / NPR)

But that feeling is not immune to the realities that threaten to change Solange’s black-owned utopia. Recovery efforts after 2017’s Hurricane Harvey have been slower in Houston’s low-income and black communities, and gentrification in the Third Ward has dwindled affordable housing options. In that way, When I Get Home serves as much as a living preservation of the character of Houston as a sonic expansion of it. “Black skin, black braids / Black waves, black days / Black baes, black days / These are black-owned things / Black faith still can’t be washed away / Not even in that Florida water,” Solange rhymes in “Almeda.”

“It’s a snapshot of now — of life for a black woman in America, and how the black woman chooses to define herself and express herself,” Houston rap superstar Bun B told NPR after the event. Metro Boomin, who helped produce “Stay Flo,” agreed: “It’s just a lot going on in the world, a lot going on with black people, a lot going on with people coming for our culture. This just sheds some light in a positive way.”

“There aren’t that many women who produce, write their own s***, direct their own. I do that all, too, so I know what it’s like to have this maelstrom in your head,” added Atlanta artist Abra, who contributed to the song “Sound of Rain.” “Just to have someone feel you, and then be able to take that ‘I feel you’ and translate it into this [project], that’s validating.”

"Anytime you truly feel seen, you just feel a certain level of joy," Solange told the audience at a release-weekend screening of When I Get Home. — “Anytime you truly feel seen, you just feel a certain level of joy,” Solange told the audience at a release-weekend screening of When I Get Home. (BlackPlanet.com/Solange)

As much as it is an ode to this sense of place, Home is also about Solange embracing her own duality — that same duality that has made Houston famous for music innovation for years. Whether it’s string-assisted and sizzurp-soaked freestyles from Screwed Up Click, the dynamic hip-hop/jazz fusion of Robert Glasper or ominous, Auto-Tuned trap amalgams from Travis Scott, Houston reinvents without losing hold of its traditions. Solange continues that creative ethos and embraces all sides of herself in the process — pushing listeners’ comfort levels into the realm of the avant-garde, but keeping the heart of it all distinctively down-home.

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