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.

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.

I play the clips of Soul Train Lines and wonder where these friends and lovers are now; if they are still living somewhere watching the scenes of their past selves cartwheeling and spinning and popping and locking with perhaps some strangers rooting for them. It feels like those are the moments that make a home inside a person. Maybe they don’t, but I want for that to be the case.

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.

There is a reason the idea of white people bringing up a Black friend when faced with accountability for some small or large racism doesn’t resonate. It’s because the Black friend exists only to give permission, and then absolution. Not that this would offer absolution, but it is never about the framing of a relationship’s interior, or gratitude for having loved and being loved by, paired with grief for whatever trust has been portrayed. It is just the naming of someone who has breezed through a life in some past or current moment.

Ellen Armstrong kept performing in smaller rooms, to crowds without as much money or social capital. The idea, it seemed, was about offering a sense of wonder to those who may otherwise have been denied it. To make something small spectacular. Magic relies on what a viewer is willing to see, and what a viewer is willing to see relies on what the world has afforded them to be witness to. Ellen Armstrong was performing for some people who had seen both too much and not enough. She made a life out of this.

Despite its history and its harm and the many echoes of violence it summons, the thing about blackface that most clearly stung arrived in this moment, looking upon this scene of recklessly adorned white skin while taking delicate care to help my own dark skin flourish. This is what they think we look like.

In the dream, I don’t know what I would say to Al Jolson if I could peel the mask from his face, but I keep peeling, and Jolson does not fight, even as I swipe fingers across his eyes. Eyes that, surrounded by the darkness of his makeup, gleam from underneath the water. When I push him down far enough, his face vanishes entirely, or at least I think it does.

It is black History Month and everyone is deciding now would be a good time to admit that they, too, once wore blackface in college. At a party. Trying to dress up like a rapper, or a pop star, or some actor from a sitcom. It was the ’80s, after all. Except when it was the ’90s. Except when it was the 2000s. Except when it was last month.

There’s a difference between not being able to dance and the ability to fake being able to dance just well enough so that people won’t notice. I participate most heavily in the latter, which is why the traditional line dances are perfect for me. The kinds where the entire framework of the song relies on laying out instructions for what one should do with their feet. I’m fine on any dance floor, but I love best when a room folds together in unison. It is almost impossible for anyone with any semblance of rhythm to make a mistake if they just move in the direction the room is already carrying them in, and I suppose that is something like love, or something like trust.

Friends, I may come to you under the cover of night, after the face of a wooden table has become well acquainted with a chorus of open palms slapping it after laughter, or on beat to some tune spooling out of a single speaker. I may come to you in the moments after the party, but before sleep. I speak of this moment, and you will know I mean the exact hour where the once-cold drinks sit half-finished, gathering a warmth in their pockets, the exact hour where people surely must go home so that their friends can go to bed but also do not want the night to end. I will come to you in this hour, when sleep paces the room like an eager dog, daring someone to make the first move. In this hour where things spoken can perhaps be passed off as fatigue and forgotten in the morning. The first time I ever told a girl “I love you” was on a couch at exactly 3:45 a.m. while her eyes were heavy, and she smiled and before drifting off to sleep told me, “We have to wake up in the morning,” and we never spoke of love again.

I guess I have tricked you into reading about my mother again, and how I do not know if she wanted to go to space but how I still wanted that for her. How, from time to time, I would catch her gazing at the stars. How, of course, I’ve held that old Labelle photo close because it reminds me of a sky my mother might be occupying now, picking out her black afro until it blooms and blooms, an endless dark.

There is a way that the book is speaking to what those in vulnerable and marginalized positions have always known: survival is sometimes how to adapt until something better arrives.

I never asked to be in this country, or this city, of course. But what we end up with in the earliest moments of our lives can be beyond asking. I think now about the story of my two pals sitting down with their three-year-old only child and telling her that she was soon going to be the older sister to a new, younger child—the introduction of whom would require a halving of attention. The child took all of this information in, sat quietly for a moment, and then plainly replied, “No, thank you.”

I’d convinced myself in my teens and early twenties that my performance of love for a country would open itself up to some kind of safety for me and the people I held close. I also knew then, as I know now, that leaving felt immensely impractical. This is one of the biggest tricks of them all. You are burdened with a place, and then, by the time you realize that exit is a possibility, the options for exit can seem distant, or insurmountable.

To insist that violence and any form of bigotry isn’t American is to continue feeding into the machinery of falsehoods and readjustments that keep this country spinning its wheels and making the same mistakes when it comes to confronting the way its past has burdened its present and future.

Movies like these never approach the simplest and most honest idea: that racism is about power, and the solving of it relies—in part—on people being willing to give up power.

After Beyoncé’s appearance on the halftime show, Rudy Giuliani insisted that the performance attacked police officers, despite none of the performance explicitly angling toward a criticism of law enforcement. But that’s the trick, isn’t it? Power, when threatened, pulls an invisible narrative from the clouds that only others in power and afraid can see.

It’s easier to circle someone in an endless waltz of volume and eye contact than it is to tell them that they’ve made you very plainly sad.

The supermarket is a museum of human reaching. It was once a sprawling field of brick buildings, leaning, but strong enough to hold families of working Black folks packed into apartments. The basketball courts vanished and so the kids nailed a milk crate to the top of an old wall, but then the wall got torn down too. It is easiest to think about gentrification in terms of what once was standing and what no longer is. But I think of it more often as a replacement of people and their histories.

The horrors of returning to the world make for desirable escapes, but also a shrinking window to enjoy those escapes in. If I turn away too long, I might forget what it is to mourn. The newest thing that cloaks me in fear is the idea that I’ve become too numb to a world that increasingly demands furious engagement. I went to sleep again, and when I woke up, there were fifty Muslims dead in New Zealand and people once again arguing over who deserves to live a full life and how those people deserve to live a full life. In all of my group chats, no one really knows what to say, and so no one says anything. I have run out of jokes to break the silence with.

I am afraid not of death itself, but of the unknown that comes after. I am afraid not of leaving, but of being forgotten. I am in love today but am afraid that I might not be tomorrow. And that is to say nothing of the bullets, the bombs, the waters rising, and the potential for an apocalypse. People ask me to offer them hope, but I’d rather offer them honesty. Black people get asked to perform hope when white people are afraid, but it doesn’t always serve reality. Hope is the small hole cut into the honest machinery. The milk crate is still a milk crate, but with the right opening, a basketball can make its way through. If I am going to be afraid, I might as well do it honest.

I have no language for affection, but I do know how to throw a fist. The way my father taught me some years ago, when he took my hand in his and curled my fingers into my palm gently. This is another type of romance, I suppose. The rules of engagement handed down from a man who learned them from a man before him. Don’t leave your thumb out. Don’t hit anyone wearing glasses in the face. I was told to fight only when I had to, but who is to determine when one has to, really? I have to fight because I do not have the language for anything else but violence, and so when the boy I wanted to like me took my basketball and kicked it into the fields behind the school, I want to tell him How could you do this to me or I want for us to play videogames in silence but instead, I wrestle him to the ground and this is a demand for closeness.

At the end of the night, I hug my boys and tell them I love them. The words come out easy and the hugs linger with the knowledge of not knowing when the next hug will be given. We punch each other’s chests after hugs, lightly, before getting into our separate cabs or cars and speeding off toward a few hours of sleep before our separate airport trips. From the back of my car, underneath waves of glowing neon lights flooding into the windows, I think about how often me and the boys I knew and know were taught to love each other through expressions of violence. How, if that is our baseline for love, it might be impossible for us to love anyone well, including ourselves.

When someone loves loudly, with everything they have in them, the withholding of that loud love, even briefly, feels impossible to endure.