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.

No one wants to be the kinda Black person that white people drag out when they get caught up in some shit & gotta carve out that wide escape route of having a Black friend

Magic tricks all have extremes, but there is so often some movement of the trick that requires sacrifice. A field of dead crows; a trashcan full of playing card fragments. Or the commitment to killing off your whole self so that another version of you can live for an audience’s approval. Until people don’t think of the physics of it all. Until the people who have been aching for a vision see only that vision and nothing else. You know that trick. I’m sure you’ve seen it a hundred times.

It took white people loving Chappelle’s Show for it to become worth as much as it was to a network, but it took white people laughing too loud and too long—and laughing from the wrong place—to build the show a coffin.

When the summer of my worst depression set in, I wished to drown myself in the shouts and jokes and card games of whatever jubilant corners I could find to keep myself alive just a bit longer.

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.

The ones I will hold close until I can pass them down to someone else who might pass them down. I have no real magic to promise any of you. I am praying for the most unspectacular of exits.

And no one knows what to make of this, really. What to do when someone has committed themselves to sympathy, but not to mercy.

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.

Congress passed the Selective Service Act in May 1917, requiring all male citizens between the ages of twenty-one and thirty to register for the draft, regardless of race. Young Black men signed up in droves, assuming that if they showed a willingness to fight and die for their country, their country might just love them back.

I am wondering always how one comes to love a country. Depending on who you are, or what your background is, or what trauma(s) you’ve inherited, it seems too complicated to unravel. It was not complicated for me to perform for a while, when I’d convinced myself in my teens and early twenties that my performance of love for a country would open itself up to some kind of safety for me and the people I held close. I also knew then, as I know now, that leaving felt immensely impractical.

I love Columbus, Ohio, and wince when I speak the name into the air.

I love Columbus, Ohio, and I say this understanding that love would be mapped onto any place that I hadn’t left, or stayed in long enough to build a shrine of memories. In this way, my love feels more like a matter of circumstance than a matter of politics, or at least that is what I tell myself.

In Columbus, the seemingly endless hands of summer are trimming autumn’s once-long hair. The sun stays hungry well into September, which has become a more common occurrence in my adult years here. Soon, I imagine, the heat will tumble recklessly into October as well. If one doesn’t think of the impending doom signaled by the rise in temperatures, it can feel like a welcome extension of our city’s summer magic—a time when the town isn’t bogged down by Ohio State students. But, as an exchange, owing to the heat and dryness, the leaves don’t change until late in October before falling to the ground hastily, almost sprinting to their demise.

Like the history of Black people in America, spades was born under one set of circumstances, but it came to life under another.

Power, as always, misused in the wrong hands.

And so of course I love a game in which a card’s value can change depending on which ancestor whispered some rules to another one. Spades isn’t a game distant enough in history to pick up this many fluid iterations, and yet here we are. I most like to think that someone was dealt a losing hand one too many times and then they changed the rules to suit the bad hands they were getting. All of a sudden, a hand saddled with twos is a type of royalty. I play my game with the ace high because I just happen to be from a place where the people don’t like to complicate a good thing as long as it stays good. Or, I’m from a place where if the people are lucky, they can live a life happily ignored without shaking anyone else’s foundation. When people ask what I like so much about being from the Midwest, I get to tell them: I know the architecture of the wind. I know the violence it blows in and out. I like to keep my survival as simple as I can. It is so delicious to set your own rules and know that anyone who walks through your door has to bow to them.

What will we do if young people continue to watch these stories and read these books? How will we survive it all?

I want a movie cast entirely with the unspectacular but still happily living Black geniuses who have pointed me on a safer path out of the goodness of their own hearts. Perhaps scenes in whatever clothes they wear after they take off their Sunday best. I want them to be absolved, but no one else. There can be no solution without acknowledgment, and so I don’t want anyone to watch this movie and consider themselves clean. Everyone else will have to earn it.

By 2016, Black people had found new ways to say “I am angry about every measure of American violence” without speaking the words themselves out loud. It became abundantly clear that the people in America perpetrating violences were aware of what was happening and aware of their role in it, and so the very presence of Black people noticing and understanding was enough to make these people uneasy. It is why, in response to “Black Lives Matter”—as a statement, not even a movement—a chosen response was to break apart the sentiment and apply it to all things. Not just different races or individuals, but foods or shoes or hair products. Commodify into silence. And so when there were Black people who decided to use their platform to not so subtly reclaim that which had been commodified and sanitized in the name of American Comfort, the pushback was often irrational, coming loudest from those who were the most afraid.

I have had many jobs and none of them can stop a bullet. I have been told how smart I am, but when I get pulled over in rural Ohio because I’m told my music is too loud, I know not to attempt an intellectual debate when there are no other cars visible for miles. I have yet to be given enough in this country that might silence the ache that arrives when a video of a Black person being murdered begins to make the rounds. I am interested most in a reparations that is rooted in the structural: abolition, reformatting and reimagining ways to build a country on something other than violence and power. But if I can’t yet have that, I just need a place to be afraid and comfortable in my fear until I can bury it with another emotion.

Pray for that which might shrink you or make you large, depending on the stage and what particular mood has gotten into the crowd on any given night.

There is a way to make fear a mirror, I think. And what better weapon is there than a mirror—that which carries back the echo of good news or bad news.

Friends, I come to you very plainly afraid that I am losing faith in the idea that grief can become anything but grief. The way old neighborhoods are torn to the ground and new ones sprout from that same ground, it feels, most days, like my grief is simply being rebuilt and restructured along my own interior landscape. There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.

And so I don’t know if I believe in rage as something always acting in opposition to tenderness. I believe, more often, in the two as braided together. Two elements of trying to survive in a world once you have an understanding of that world’s capacity for violence.

Rage to the untrained eye and ear, yes. But also a deep, deep love for anyone who knows better. Anyone in a room, shouting about burning it all down while being affirmed by the people around them. Anyone who has beaten their fists against a wall, hoping it might crack and reveal to them a place for their people to live unburdened, whoever their people might be. What else carries anyone to that type of rage but love? Or hope, maybe, though not the empty hope of ads and political campaigns. Hope for a promised land and the knowledge of what must be torn down to get there. I have witnessed a Fuck U Pay Us show, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it ever since. 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.