A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Cornelius was frustrated by the lack of television venues for soul music, and the lack of Black people being their whole, free selves on television, and so he created a venue for it himself.

But you knew Don Cornelius could dance. There are people who you don’t even need to see move to know that they are one with rhythm, and Don Cornelius was one of those people, in part because he always looked so well put together, but also not so put together that he might shy away from fucking up a dance floor.

It also helped that Cornelius didn’t take himself too seriously. Like Soul Train itself, he was aiming to show the multitudinous nature of Blackness, and sometimes that meant he’d put on clown-shoe-sized basketball kicks to do a bit where he plays a game of H-O-R-S-E with a friend.

The history of the line itself was born out of the Stroll, a dance that gained popularity in the late ’50s and extended to the late ’60s. “The Stroll” was a 1958 song by the Diamonds, and it hit big on American Bandstand, where the dance craze gained momentum.

In the ’80s, Rosie Perez perfected the moves that would later serve as the opening to Do the Right Thing, her arms violently swinging at her sides, propelling her waist into short, measured thrusts.

I consider, often, the difference between showing off and showing out. How showing off is something you do for the world at large and showing out is something you do strictly for your people. The people who might not need to be reminded how good you are but will take the reminder when they can. The Soul Train Line was the gold standard of where one goes to show out.

He kept producing the show until 2006, when it finally went off the air, and then he was largely reclusive until his death.

If people could leave the world in the way they gave to the world, I wish for a path to heaven lined with Black people clapping their hands. I wish Don Cornelius at the center, all by himself, showing out with all the moves we knew he was stashing the whole time.

I haven’t found them in those videos, so I’ve imagined them. I’ve imagined all of you, too.

I play the clips of Soul Train Lines and wonder where these friends and lovers are now;

I am obsessed with this, I imagine, because of how many times I have leaned into someone or something and called it love, because it had to be.

I am in love with the idea of partnering as a means of survival, or a brief thrill, or a chance to conquer a moment. Even if you and the person you are partnered with part ways walking into the sunlight after exiting a sweaty dance hall, or spinning off-camera after dancing your way down a line of your clapping peers.

In praise of all my body can and cannot do, I wish to figure out how it can best sing with all of yours for a moment in a room where the walls sweat. I wish to lock eyes across a dance floor from you while something our mothers sang in the kitchen plays over the speakers.

I imagined the entire process of the funeral being quick as a service to the dead—to spare them being stuck here with our grief, and instead send them to the waiting arms of some heaven-like interior.

Every movement around death I’d come to understand in my youth told me that the acknowledgment of it needed to be somber and silent. Something one moves through with decorum and then never looks back on again. A funeral was a task, not something to make a memory of.

People telling fond and exaggerated stories of the life someone lived, well into the night. There is no trick to this, no deception. It is continuing in the tradition of Black Americans attempting to protect and enlarge their own narratives. A tradition that has been present since being forced into America, knowing that there were stories and history and lives to be honored beyond this place.

The length of mourning was—to that point—unprecedented. It was always a question of letting go. If the whale let her calf go, it would sink to the bottom of the ocean and become a memory.

A year when no one I love is buried still can be a bad year, but in it, I came to want to celebrate the smallest corners of my love for the people I do have love for.

In an interview as part of HBO’s 2008 documentary series The Black List, the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks used some of her time to talk about Black people and our tendency to be active participants in our entertainment, regardless of the venue.

Recalling the zeal of these crowds, Parks insisted that we need to celebrate and encourage such moments, and to treat them with as much reverence as whatever is prompting them from the stage or screen.

I like this idea—that it’s noble for Black people to react viscerally to work that is created for us, and to respond in a language we know well. There is something valuable about wanting the small world around you to know how richly you are being moved, so that maybe some total stranger might encounter your stomp, your clap, your shout, and find themselves moved in return.

With a voice like Aretha’s, the distance between soul music and music of the soul is short, so, at worst, Amazing Grace was slated to be an album of great singing that might read as a departure for some of her new fans, and a return for some of her older ones.

Aretha sings “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Mary Don’t You Weep” and “Amazing Grace,” and her renditions of these songs are not about extracting the divine for the sake of vague romanticism, but rather about finding new ways to get the divine into the bodies of each listener, even the ones who might not have been expecting it.

Aretha had never left the church. She’d been singing with the spirit the whole time.

Later, Aretha’s idol, Clara Ward, will scrunch up her face and roll her eyes back in ecstasy at one of Aretha’s impossible high notes, a gesture many of us know to mean you better go ahead—a reverent disbelief when all other emotions fail.

What is fascinating about the filming of Amazing Grace is that its makers seem to have understood that, in the gospel setting, the audience is a part of the stage. The audience, through its engagement, cannot be separated from the experience, or from the document of that experience.

I think now that there is probably a difference between wanting to be Black and wanting to be down

It took white people loving Chappelle’s Show for it to become worth as much as it was to a network, but it took white people laughing too loud and too long—and laughing from the wrong place—to build the show a coffin.

Shoutout to the things that I hope haunt you beyond whatever you might be searching for. This one goes out to the answers I do not have for you, or for myself,

Due in part to America’s comforts with slavery and violence, he stated, there is a universal distrust in anything other than individualism as a pathway to survival in the country.

when the world outside determines worth, it might be vital for the marginalized to find an arena in which they can unmistakably dominate.

Master Juba who spent half of a decade embarrassing the same white dancer over and over again, simply because the white dancer had the nerve to consider himself a descendant of a people who could truly move.

I wonder about the benefits and failures of this: how far the country has gotten laying down the framework for societal dos and don’ts while not confronting history.

The fact that there will always be an audience wanting a Black face, but not necessarily a Black person.

The thing I find myself explaining most vigorously to people these days is that consumption and love are not equal parts of the same machine. To consume is not to love, and ideally love is not rooted solely in consumption.

part. The makeup mirror and that particular song and the denial of service. That’s where all of the implication is. A demand, once again, to ask a white audience what the fuck is so funny. What, exactly, do they understand themselves to be applauding.

While I understand Vereen’s aims and effort, I am not exactly in love with the idea of attempting to use blackface as a subversive tool for a white audience for a host of reasons—but most notably because it requires trust that said audience will understand themselves to be on the receiving end of the wound and not being invited to mock the wounded.

Of course, as easy as it is to paint these actions as shameful now, and as easy as it was to be annoyed by them back then, it is just another move in a line of moves that seemed invested in safety. In retrospect, I have sympathy for this concern, when it came from elders who I knew had these beliefs because of violence they’d witnessed, or been a victim of. Things they’d been denied access to. The idea that if only they’d sounded a certain way, or dressed a certain way, things might be different.

A love that tells people that who they are isn’t enough, but that they can at least perform in a way that will make others believe they are enough until an ecosystem fully embraces them.

There are Black artists who are not just packaged and marketed to white people, but—and more importantly—to the white imagination, and the limits of Black people within it.

By that point, some Black radio stations had decided not to play her otherwise all-over-the-place hits, claiming Houston wasn’t “Black enough” for their listeners. The understanding was that if the establishment was choosing to place Houston outside the circle, she could stay outside the circle.

A better and more interesting conversation to have, I think, is the one about how we are all outside the borders of someone else’s idea of what Blackness is. To someone else Black, I am either too much of something or not enough of something else.

I am thinking often on how crucial it is to love Black people even when feeling indicted by them.

And to not, in turn, make yourself a victim of Black people for the sympathy of a white audience.

What sits atop all of this is the understanding that massive, global success—then and now—does not come without non-Black people consuming an artist’s production.

Sammy Davis, Jr., who was gifted beyond belief but who was a crossover star in part because it was known that he wouldn’t fight back. Because his relationship with the Rat Pack was fueled by his white friends being able to take the piss out of him without him throwing a fist. Dean and Frank cracking jokes about his Blackness the way white people at the bar wished they could, a consistent reminder that he was there, but only because they let him. At the Sands in ’63, Frank tells Sammy he’s gotta keep smiling, because he’s a Black man in a black suit in a dark nightclub and at least his teeth were white. And so Sammy smiled his way through an era of knives.

Whitney who had maybe had enough of whatever limits existed within both the white imagination and the Black one and had fashioned herself into a singular star.

Miss Zora, the truest of my ancestors and the only light pouring onto all of my unlit paths, says, I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background, which is true sometimes on the train and true sometimes at the birthday party and true sometimes in the office meeting.

the whole trick of pulling off the moonwalk is to spend all other parts of a dance routine training an audience to watch your feet. Before they can ask what is happening, the move is done.

It is a book, like so many of her books, that tries to get to the heart of social and class divisions, kicking around the basic questions of what keeps humans apart and what is the responsibility of those in power.