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.

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.

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.

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.

Depending on who you are, when your Black friend goes to Africa, you don’t ask what part. You maybe just wave them off, talk about the continent as if it is a city.

If there is some kind of loophole in the rules of magic, it might be this: the one where a person is able to be invisible until they are desired. Where they are an echo of nonexistence until they can fulfill a need, or tell a story, or be a thread in the fabric of someone else’s grand design. The flawed magic of desiring a body more than an actual person. The magical negro is so replaceable that there is nothing left of them to mourn.

Dickens writes about slavery and violence as the two most major flaws in the fabric of American society, insisting that slavery corrupted both whites and Blacks, and that the free states were happily complicit in the system because of their inaction. 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. The path to success for the American, he observed, meant to carry a healthy desire to set oneself apart from the ideals of others.

There are historians who say that Fagin was based on Henry Murphy, a free Black Londoner who was known in the time of Dickens as Henry the Child Stealer. Murphy, like Fagin, would hold children at a hideout and send waves of them into the streets, forcing them to beg or steal, then return the profits to him. There are historians who say that Henry Murphy was Fagin in real life but that Dickens, out of whatever sympathy he held toward Black people, decided to make the Fagin of Oliver Twist a Jewish villain.

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.

Everyone putting on different masks for different worlds and calling it freedom.

The people who loved Green Book got to feel good about their America for a little while, and with enough of those good feelings strung together, it might be easy to forget that there was ever a fire, or that the fire can still burn.

I have wanted to die enough times in my life to understand the idea that wanting to die is not a foolish thing.