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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

After all, what is endurance to a people who have already endured? What is it to someone who could, at that point, still touch the living hands of a family member who had survived being born into forced labor? Endurance, for some, was seeing what the dance floor could handle. It did not come down to the limits of the body when pushed toward an impossible feat of linear time. No. It was about having a powerful enough relationship with freedom that you understand its limitations.

It occurs to me now that this was the real joy of dancing: to enter a world unlike the one you find yourself burdened with, and move your body toward nothing but a prayer that time might slow down.

A people cannot only see themselves suffering, lest they believe themselves only worthy of pain, or only celebrated when that pain is overcome. Cornelius had a vision for Black people that was about movement on their own time, for their own purpose, and not in response to what a country might do for, or to, them.

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.

And I think this is how I would most like to imagine romance, friends, or should I say lovers. 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 want us to find each other among the forest of writhing and make a deal. Okay, lover. It is just us now. The only way out is through.

I was reminded, once again, that our grief decides when it is done with us.

I’ve run out of language to explain the avalanche of anguish I feel when faced with this world, and so if I can’t make sense of this planet, I’m better off imagining another.

History, both the arm holding down the drowning body and the voice claiming the water is holy.

But I inherited a desire to make myself too fast to be touched. All pain inflicted upon this body must be earned.

G