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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I want a Don Shirley movie that isn’t tasked with solving any problem it didn’t create.

The entire idea of “Gimme Shelter” and its chorus is that sometimes it is just the one thing. A shot fired can unleash a country’s desire for violence, or a fist thrown can incite a riot. All of us are just hanging on the edge of someone else’s lust for power. That needle moves from time to time, depending on who the “us” is and who the person eager for power is. But the entire song was driving the point home. There is no reprieve from the machinery of violence, and everyone is a tripwire away from setting off the wrong type of explosion.

I would like roses to come out of the ground somewhere any time a person’s voice cracks under the weight of what it has been asked to carry.

Power, when threatened, pulls an invisible narrative from the clouds that only others in power and afraid can see.

Even people who I decided are good, caring people, who just don’t have access to unlocking the very particular fear that exists in not only the deaths, but the country’s reactions to the deaths.

Those were the beefs that might end in a funeral, or a prolonged hospital stay, or a parent trembling under a porch light and yelling their child’s name down a dark street only to have the darkness lob their own voice back to them.