A few words about love.

“A hurtin’ thing,” said Lou Rawls.

A thing that “don’t love nobody” said the Spinners.

And the preacher, Al Green, testified that love is a thing that “can make you do wrong, make you do right.”

The quotes, for those who don’t recognize them, are from songs we used to sing back in the day, back when every other tune on the radio was a love song and black people still got married. In other words, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Because black folks, by and large, don’t do the marriage thing anymore. We are considerably less likely than white Americans (57 percent to 35 percent) to be currently married and similarly less likely (43 percent to 25 percent) to have ever been married. Largely as a result, 43 percent of our families are headed by single women, with all the problems of poverty and dysfunction that portends.

Granted, nuptial frequency has dropped among all Americans, but, among blacks, it has become a species more endangered than the Morro Bay kangaroo rat. There are, I am sure, many economic, social and cultural reasons for this. But I suspect there’s also another reason. I suspect we’ve lost faith in forever.

So given that February is home both to Valentine’s Day and Black History Month, I thought it might be a good time to recall that faith. To recall that once upon a time, there was a free black man who allowed himself to be sold back into slavery rather than leave his wife. And a slave woman who had herself shipped in a seaman’s chest to the man she loved. And a slave man who ran to freedom carrying his exhausted wife on his back.

The stories are told in “Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories From The Underground Railroad,” a new book by Betty DeRamus, a Detroit reporter. They are, she thinks, tales that shame the present age. “To me,” she says, “one of the clear lessons … is that we survived the worst of times by clinging to each other and understanding what power there was in that. And I think if we’re going to hope to survive this current age, we’re going to have to remember what saved us before.”

The implicit question is whether the things that saved us before still have sway over us now. Heaven help us if they do not.

“Forbidden Fruit” (Atria, $25) is an uneven book, but there is uplift in its evocation of those things, of that time, back in the era of shackles, when the arms of black men were refuge and the bosom of black women was home. Uplift, and unspoken reproach. Because DeRamus is right. If, in the midst of the greatest crucible of our history, we knew enough to cling to each other, knew how to find in one another succor, sanctuary and strength, what excuse is there, really, for failing to do so now? Why do we reject the permanence our forebears risked everything to embrace?

I am conscious of the danger of overstating the case, conscious that love abides among us, still.

But I am also conscious that young people are coming of age in a culture coarser and harder than the one that produced me, a culture where love is frequently seen as a sucker’s game. So it gives you pause when you read about a free black man who sneaked into the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War just to see his wife. Not even to take her back with him, but just for the sight of her.

Gives you pause and makes you wonder: how many of us could even begin to understand such a thing. Is understanding even possible when you have been raised on a cultural diet of “pimps” and “hos” and bling-bling values, when you inhabit an age where love never seems much deeper than sex?

It seems unlikely.

So the stories Betty DeRamus has unearthed resonate with me. They bear retelling and sharing with those among us who have forgotten, or else never knew, who we are, how we got over, and the things we did for love.

Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald.