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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

this was the mid-’90s & so no one was really doing the moonwalk anymore & even when they did no one was doing it right & there is only one Michael

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.

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.

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.

The trees themselves weren’t particularly attractive. A mess of wiry branches and leaves that didn’t even have the decency to grow beautifully in the spring or die beautifully in autumn.

When I was young, after two or so funerals, I began to imagine the brief and structured funeral as a type of gift. A mercy placed upon someone who lived a life and now got to, perhaps, see whatever awaited on the other side of that life. I imagined the entire process of the funeral being quick as a service to the dead—to spare them being stuck here with our grief, and instead send them to the waiting arms of some heaven-like interior. Some endless sky where they sit and wait for everyone they’ve ever loved to join them, where the years feel like the mere passing of minutes.

It dawns on me now that the funeral—particularly the Black funeral—is a way to celebrate what a person’s life meant and to do it as if they’re still here. To offer gratitude for the fullness of whatever years someone chose to have their life intersect with your own.

“Well, we have two mothers,” they began to tell me. “The one we keep with us in our hearts, and the corpse we can’t put down.”

After a final lawsuit in 2016 kept the film shelved, Aretha said: “Justice, respect, and what is right prevailed, and one’s right to own their own self-image.”

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

I could tell which ones had never been around any Black people before by how they tried to imitate what they thought was cool & it is funny how easily the fake can jump out once you’ve seen the real

I think now that there is probably a difference between wanting to be Black and wanting to be down & I imagine this is a difference that echoes especially if you come from a place where you were already down & then thrown into a place where you look like everyone else who is decidedly not down

According to the rules of the Prestige, the magic trick doesn’t work if that which was vanished never reappears. If in place of the vanishing is more vanishing. I tell my friend that I’m done writing poems about Black people being killed and he asks if I think that will stop them from dying.

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 would then visit prisons and mental institutions to get a grasp on what he felt was an entryway to the human plight, and how that shifted in geographies.

Toward the end of the book, 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.

One way to make a name for yourself is to conquer the places your rivals are too afraid to touch, especially if those places do not particularly want you around.

Anyone who speaks a language inside a language can see when that dialect is presenting a challenge for someone who perhaps had to google the correct word to use and the placement of it.

Or when it is coming from someone who watched a movie with a Black person in it once and then never saw a Black person again. It would be humorous or fascinating if it wasn’t so suffocating. I would laugh if I was not being smothered by the violence of imagination.

And the thing about white minstrelsy is that it was all a lie anyway, so what’s one more.

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.

Critics and scholars struggle with the Dickens paradox: how he seemed very in line with many liberal causes and ideas but still managed to be racist, nationalist, and imperialist in his work. How he had sympathy for the plight of African slaves, for example, but still publicly supported the American South, due to being unconvinced that the North had a genuine interest in the abolition of slavery.

Consume what you can never become, and then kill it before it continues to remind you.

And so none of us deserve the metaphor here, but to say that Black performers used to wear blackface when performing for white audiences, so that nothing but the movements of their feet might be present in the room, everything else too black to be visible.

Some people on the Internet know blackface is bad but don’t seem to be entirely sure why. It’s just one of those things that white people shouldn’t do. I wonder about the benefits and failures of this: how far the country has gotten laying down the framework for societal dos and don’ts while not confronting history. If it is possible to ground a true behavioral shift without attacking the root of blackface. The fact that there will always be an audience wanting a Black face, but not necessarily a Black person.

The problem with approaching history in America is that too many people measure things by distance and not by impact.

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.

One way trauma can impact us is by the way it makes us consider a polite proximity to violence and oppression as comfort.

All of this done out of (a sometimes misguided) love. A love that tells people that who they are isn’t enough, but that they can at least perform in a way that will make others believe they are enough until an ecosystem fully embraces them. I think of this tension as a push and pull, between generations and histories and geographies. Between those who would try to convince us of a type of survival and those of us who would spend much of our adolescence detaching ourselves from those teachings, taking as many people as we could with us in the process.

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

I want to dance with somebody who loves me. I want to dance with somebody who might forgive me for my failure. I want to dance with somebody who will know, as I do, that there are songs that summon movement even out of those of us who cannot dance, and I want to dance with someone who loves me enough to lie to me, until a record stops.

I mostly want to remember when Whitney stopped herself from crying when she arrived at the understanding that no matter how much our people love us, they cannot protect us from all the pain that comes with living.

From under a campfire, my friend Kyryn said, It’s easy. The Big Dipper is right above us. And then she traced it out with her finger, but all I saw was a series of tiny explosions that never vanished.

to die in one’s sleep must be to unfold a dream that never stops unfolding & then it is hard to say where sleep ends & death begins & how close to the edge each night drags the unassuming lives it holds in a trembling palm

the moonwalk is all about trying to run from the past when its hands keep dragging you back

I think when you are young enough and impressionable enough, and you maybe don’t know much about what rests beyond the stars, you imagine anyone can just go.

Afrofuturism exists as a genre because the white American imagination rarely thought to insert Black people into futuristic settings, even when those settings are rooted in the past, like Star Wars.

When the internet wanted me to believe that Trayvon Martin deserved to die, I was shown photos that were sometimes him and sometimes not. Photos of Black boys, shirtless and raising middle fingers, or photos of Black boys posing with weapons, or a Black boy blowing smoke into a camera. The idea was that they all deserved to die, I guess. If enough of them blur into the other one, a single bullet could do the trick.

There is an idea that if Martin were still alive, he could have been a person who watched the skies and sought to climb into them. A person who looked down on the earth from somewhere above it and pointed to the state where he grew up. Or he might have done none of that. He might have gone to college and dropped out, or he might never have gone to college at all. He might have smoked and played videogames well into his twenties, working some job he hated. But he would have been alive to do it all, or not do it all.

The whole thing with the Trayvon Martin Experience Aviation photo is that to see him like this, in contrast with seeing him as only a dead problem child, was to see that he was once perhaps someone who saw some promise and possibility in a world that would kill him and insist that he deserved to die.

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. Be who you must be in the job interview or in the college admissions essay or with the elder you love but don’t respect. And then, as a reward for your survival, there may be a small world wherein you can thrive.

The world is not done with you even when you are done with it.

Sun Ra was born in a violent and segregated place, was punished for not wanting to participate in war, and decided there had to be something better than this.

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.

Still, there is a reason for this. This reckless and gasping pursuit of a world beyond this world. I am interested in what it feels like to imagine yourself as large and immovable as the sky.

For as long as there is a future, there will be Black people in it, hopefully surviving in even newer and better ways than we are now. Circles of light opening their wide arms to briefly take our bodies somewhere higher. It will appear spectacular to everyone who isn’t us.