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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

so it is safe to say that I only danced along the slick surface of my basement floor with the moon out & all the lights in the house out & the television playing hits & this wasn’t exactly practicing dance moves as much as it was learning the different directions my limbs could flail in & there is no church like the church of unchained arms being thrown in every direction in the silence of a sleeping home

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.

Even after a lifetime of hearing the voice of Aretha Franklin, to hear it again is to hear it anew. There’s a bright spark of joyful pain to see it coming directly from her body, which is no longer tethered to this fragile and faulty earth.

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

maybe the truest Black superpower is the ability to see through the bullshit & I have kept myself alive & relatively happy by peeping game from generations away

some would say we’ve all got a little magic inside & it just takes the wrong mix of people and imagination to bring it out & this one goes out to both the magic performance itself & the audience, waiting with held breath & not realizing they’re in on the ground floor of the trick.

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.

At the family reunion, there is one of these moments. Aunties and uncles, grandbabies and so on and so on, filling up a hot backyard after the food and revelry had died down, playing a version of the Cupid Shuffle so extended I was sure it had to be looped. And again, after a few rotations, there is everyone clicked together on beat until it appears there is one single body moving as one.

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.

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. Including yourself, or including a music group of Black women who wore the costume well. Including a person you love, who sang along to songs by a member of that group from time to time and surely danced to the group in a time before you were born. 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. No one I love is immune to looking upward on a clear night. Within the vast and open possibility of darkness, though, I had hoped for a people to find a home, or at least a dream.

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. Octavia Butler wrote science fiction that included aliens with dreadlocks. Nalo Hopkinson writes of a dystopian future in which Black people are trying to survive. I imagine all of these realities to be utterly possible, the same way I imagine that in an outer space civil war, there might truly be a Lando Calrissian. A single Black person in a large storyline, yes. But one around whom the story turns. One who does not die. One who instead destroys a Death Star.

I give thanks, then, for the worlds beyond this world that Octavia Butler wrote. And for how, even in those worlds, there is a suffering like the suffering I understood. That even in space, or in futuristic landscapes, there are still codes to be switched. Still suffering that grows inside a person until it becomes armor. I give thanks for Octavia Butler, who still wrote Black people as human even when they were something greater.

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.

When your mark is your own, defined by rules of your own making, you build the boat wide enough for your people and whatever you need to survive. You save yourself first.

I do love carrying the Good and Holy Name of a man who might have looked like any man. I can better explain all of the ways I have disappeared. I thought I was in love enough to stay, but then the sky opened up and I became a kaleidoscope of butterflies. I thought I might live a life in which I let no one down, but that was the other man who is not me but who I think I have seen before.

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. Arm in arm with everyone I love, adorned in blood and bruises, singing jokes on our way to a grave.

My loves, I want to know if heaven is real only if you are promised to be in it. I do not fear death as much as I fear the uncertain dark. An eternity that doesn’t include a chance for me to make amends for all of the things that kept me from holding you close while you were breathing and telling you how much I didn’t understand about love. I know now that I have always loved you and now you are gone. I am trying to love better in your memory. I am trying to have less to apologize for.

Black people shouting because there is no other way for them to hold what they know. There is no other mode of expression for understanding all of the things that have held people back from understanding freedom, and there is no other volume at which one can say to their people, I want all of us to be free, and I cannot do it alone.