Inside, there’s more waiting to be done — for the very good restaurant, for the ladies’ room, for entry to the museum’s deep lower levels. Building waiting into the experience feels right for a place that tells the story of a people who’ve had to wait for everything else.

The anticipation for the subterranean history galleries already feels mythic. You might know, for instance, that the museum’s narrative history starts underground, and gradually brings you up — into the present, into the ample light that pours through the great glass enclosure. But that doesn’t account for the emotional toll of all the waiting and reading and thinking and connecting and feeling to come.

It doesn’t account for the experience of standing in the immense concourse and seeing the faces of the hundreds of people waiting with you, the endless hues of skin. This standing around is simultaneously boring and one of the happiest, most poignant things I’ve ever done with monotony. Here we all are, imported as Africans, standing around as African-Americans, checking our phones, laughing, talking, taking group selfies, waiting with white people from this country and from Europe, with all kinds of Latinos, all kinds of Asians, all kinds of Arabs, to interact with a version of a story of what America truly is.

During that wait for the underground galleries, natural impatience threatens to upstage the human majesty of it all. You don’t know why it’s taking so long to get there. Once you reach the entrance, you see. You’re waiting for an elevator. The Blacksonian has one pivotal conceit, one metaphorical device that you need to embrace despite its hokiness, despite its comical proximity to a set of stairs, and it’s the elevator.