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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.