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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Jayson tells me I can’t go wrong with Cetaphil as a base. All I know is that I’ve had the good fortune of having largely great skin for three decades, with no real work put into it, and I’m looking to see what might be the fullest potential for my skin’s immortality. I come from an ageless people, after all. At most Black functions I’ve been to, someone pulls me aside, points at some alleged elder, and asks me to guess how old this elder is. When I guess too young, they throw out some age bordering on the absurd, one that seems even more foolish as the sunlight gallops across an absence of wrinkles during a vigorous dance, or a laugh that rattles the wind. I most love the mythology of the ageless Blacks, how it truly doesn’t crack unless you give yourself over to do the bidding of some evil. Like we’ve all been blessed but might have to sell ourselves to the devil, who surely will want his, and in return, the aging process starts and accelerates. Stacey Dash didn’t look a day over twenty-five when she was running in slow motion through the Chicago airport, trailed by Kanye West in a music video. But one year working for Fox News, and the people say she’s looking every minute of her age, and the decade she kept at arm’s length all that time has finally come, and lord, did it come to collect. All I know is I’m gonna be on the wrong side of thirty soon, and I’m trying to keep my skin and my spirit clean.

Lando Calrissian had great hair. I’m saying that Billy Dee Williams had great hair, and I imagine when he walked into auditions—if he even had to walk into an audition—the director and producers gasped at how his hair sat on his head. He had great action hair: the type that would barely move when he engaged in a tussle or a full sprint. Several Black actors have great action hair, which is why I think so many blaxploitation films focused on the aesthetics of things like an unmoving afro, or thick sideburns. Billy Dee Williams had both! And a cape! And he looked cool holding a gun!

Look, I am certainly not one to project Blackness onto the fictional or cartoonishly ambiguous, and lord knows I don’t want to upset the teeming masses of loud and affectionate Star Wars devotees, but it must be said that as a kid I had a sneaking suspicion that Chewbacca might have been Black, what with all the brown that hung from his body.

Many stories are told about Baker’s time in the French Resistance. One is that she joined the French guerrilla freedom fighters known as the Maquis. It is said that the group took Baker underground and taught her to shoot in the darkness of the sewers beneath Paris, until she got so good behind the scope of a rifle that she could snuff a candle at twenty yards. But what is most widely known and accepted is that Baker’s role as a spy was much like her roles onstage: she could seduce and manipulate the minds of men already eager to be manipulated. She could easily entice men in power to confide in her, in part because they viewed her as someone not intelligent enough to do more than entertain. Generals and diplomats would show her secret notes or whisper plans in her ear at parties.

I like a people to be nothing if not malleable. A people who can open their nearly bare cupboards and pantries and still find their way to a meal for a week, or a people who can choose not to code-switch and still get the job.

I want a movie cast entirely with the unspectacular but still happily living Black geniuses who have pointed me on a safer path out of the goodness of their own hearts. Perhaps scenes in whatever clothes they wear after they take off their Sunday best. I want them to be absolved, but no one else. There can be no solution without acknowledgment, and so I don’t want anyone to watch this movie and consider themselves clean. Everyone else will have to earn it.

“Gimme Shelter” is the kind of song that gets used in movies and television shows to signify that some real shit is about to happen, or in a messy and hectic montage of violence and geography, like in the opening scene of The Departed, where Jack Nicholson’s character, Frank Costello, laments the New Boston and fantasizes about the Old Boston, while clips of riots and overhead shots of the rolling and roaring city jump to the screen. The song kicks in as Costello muses on power and respect. “That’s what the niggers don’t realize,” he says. “If I have one thing against the Black chappies, it’s this: No one gives it to you. You have to take it.” And then the drums rush in.

This perfect storm is what got Merry Clayton’s phone ringing at midnight in the fall of 1969, while Mick Jagger stared at the words “rape, murder” and knew he couldn’t bring the terror of them to life. Stones producer Jack Nitzsche woke Clayton up out of bed and asked her to come to the studio. There was a group there from England, and they needed a singer bad. Clayton didn’t necessarily need the work, but her husband urged her to go. Clayton showed up to the studio in silk pajamas, with her hair still in rollers. She put on a fur coat because she refused to show up to the studio not looking at least a little bit fly. Clayton was also very pregnant. When she got to the studio to sing, a stool had to be set up in the booth for her to sit on, since it was late, and the weight of her pregnant belly felt especially heavy at that hour. She was skeptical of the lyrics Jagger showed her, but she did one take of her part and got ready to go home. And then, after a playback, Mick Jagger asked her if she wanted to do just one more and really give it everything she had. And when you can sing like Merry Clayton can sing, you don’t turn away from an offer like that.

If you have a name like my name and you get asked its origins enough, you can tell when the line between eager curiosity and skepticism is being blurred, mostly because the people who imagine themselves good at hiding the tonal difference between the two are not actually that good at hiding the tonal difference between the two. When I told people that I’m from Ohio, they wanted to know where my parents are from, or where their parents are from. It is amazing, the weapons people disguise in small talk.

James Brown had perfected his now well-known cape routine. Becoming seemingly consumed by sweat and emotion at the end of a performance, Brown would have someone throw a cape over his shoulders and begin to escort him off the stage. He would take a few exhausted steps with the cape on his back before throwing it off and running back to the microphone, straining his voice to the final levels it could reach while the audience went wild. It was the old dancer trick, which is the old beef trick, which is simply an old crowd trick: let the people believe you can’t take any more, and then give them a newer, better part of yourself.