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The flow of his storytelling revealed what Zora Neale Hurston wrote about in Dust Tracks on the Road: that research was the blessing through which I could formalize the curiosities that emerged on Mr. Johnson’s porch, and that if I got out of the way, Black people would tell their stories how and when they wanted. It was not my job to dictate which stories should be told, but if I let them, Black storytelling would lead me places that I had not planned to go. (Reese 2019, pp. 2–3)

Reese exemplifies the power of listening to generate theory. Although she “had not planned to go” where she ended up, she had, undoubtedly, made a choice to respect people’s experience. And so she entered the field with a fundamentally exploratory question: What is going on here? Her decision to listen allowed people to define what matters on their own terms; her job, then, was to “formalize the curiosities that emerged.” Reese did so primarily using methods that prioritize discovery: participant observation, archival research, and semistructured interviews.