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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

How much better my time in the world could have been spent with all of the once-living people I’ve loved, still here.

The documentary Amazing Grace hadn’t yet been released widely, only in scattered theaters along the coasts, and I happened to be near one on a Sunday, and so I took myself to get saved.

I don’t know much about astrology, but I do like the idea of astrology for what it brings out in my most creative and magically inclined friends. Elissa, leaning eagerly over a table to ask me if I know the exact hour and minute of my birth, so that we might do my natal chart and finally get down to the issue of what’s going on with all my emotional rattling about. Madison, scrolling furiously through her phone over a dinner to see what phase the moon is in, or what planets are twirling ever more maniacally out of whack, so that she might explain to me why all the furniture in my heart’s most precious corners has been overturned. Still, I can’t say I’m much into what it all means, just that it means something. That we were all born under a different moon and a different sign. And I believe in it, I think. I have taken to waving a dismissive hand and telling a friend, “That’s such a Virgo thing to say,” even when I’m not entirely sure what I mean. And no one has corrected me yet, so either I’m right or I have surrounded myself with immensely kind people, which is probably a very Scorpio thing to say. And

A block-long section of Josephine Baker Boulevard was removed in 2008. It was meant, at the time, to create some additional space for Saint Louis University. The long arm of gentrification knows little of resistance. White people in Columbus walk through areas that once housed people who were displaced for the sake of an endless scroll of brick boutiques. They

it goes, I guess. The easy part plays well. 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,

All of us are just hanging on the edge of someone else’s lust for power.