Introduction
Command Performance
An illustration captures a fate that is at once jarring and sadly familiar. A white man with an official title commits a wicked act that leads to the death of a fifteen-year-old Black girl. The image might have easily accompanied a recent newspaper story about a cop assaulting a Black teenager. Instead, the colored print by Scottish caricaturist Isaac Cruikshank was engraved in 1792. The drawing was originally captioned, “The Abolition of the Slave Trade Or the inhumanity of dealers in human flesh exemplified in Captn. Kimber’s treatment of a young Negro girl of 15 for her virjen [sic] modesty.”
In 1791, John Kimber, the captain of the slave ship Recovery, departed New Calabar, known today as Nigeria, headed for Grenada, West Indies. After weeks of torturing a young captive girl, Kimber used a whip to mercilessly flog the nearly naked teen as she was suspended in midair by a single ankle; she died shortly thereafter. British abolitionist William Wilberforce gave a speech in the House of Commons in 1792 condemning Kimber for the killing. Wilberforce’s oration led to Cruikshank’s illustration and Kimber’s arrest and trial for the girl’s death, and that of a second girl, before the High Court of Admiralty in June 1792.
The true reason for the captain’s cruelty, outlined by Wilberforce in his speech, came to light at trial in the testimony of surgeon Thomas Dowling and shipmate Stephen Devereux, the only witnesses: “The girl would not get up to dance with the other girls and women.” It was common to “dance the captives” aboard a slave vessel to keep them in shape, to provoke sexual excitement in the crew, and to offer mostly white men entertainment on the long journey to the Americas.
The demand for Black entertainment by white folk continued in the New World.
Dowling testified that the girl came aboard “in a diseased state” with a “very severe” case of gonorrhea that led to “a lethargy or drowsy complaint.” According to other shipmates, Dowling had raped and infected the girl before leaving the Calabar region. Her illness left her weary and unwilling, perhaps unable, to perform.
It should come as no surprise that Kimber was quickly acquitted of murder. The jury concluded that it was disease and not mistreatment that led to the young girl’s death. The ugly truth is as simple as it is tragic: The Black girl was sentenced to death for refusing to entertain a white audience. It was hardly the first, and surely not the last, time that Black folk had to perform because their lives depended on it.
Even before the Atlantic slave trade began, Europeans traveling through Africa were introduced to Black performance. They viewed the folklore and rituals that inspired African song and dance through a distorted lens, seeing African art as inferior and its creators as deviant. Yet, Africans were often envied for the very reasons they were despised: their freedom of movement, their sensual confidence, their enthusiastic exploration of identity, their fearless performance.
Despite their alleged superiority, Europeans and Americans neither fully understood nor completely controlled Black culture. These same whites, as stewards of Western civilization, might at times acknowledge a Black upper hand, as long as that hand could be kept from strangling white throats or stifling white identity. Blacks were deemed bad at science and society, a lot better at song and dance, though of a crude, uncivilized character, and better still at sports and sex because these demanded little motive beyond the exercise of muscles and passion.
Such thinking willfully ignored the extraordinary craft, complexity, and care that marked Black performance in different regions of Africa. And most whites were not curious about how, for example, West African dance and song evoked one’s profession, spirituality, the history of a populace, and the area’s natural resources, as well as its customs, habits, traits, dispositions, myths, legends, and wisdom.
All cultures sing about their companionship with or alienation from the universe. All peoples dance their wonder or worry about the worlds that shape us or that we create. The stereotype that Blacks in particular are born to sing and dance denies our creative intelligence and fuels the myth that Blacks and whites are inherently different. Such views make it easier to dismiss the seriousness of Black art and reduce Black folk to amusement for white eyes and ears. Black folk became an entertaining race—on slave ships, on plantations where masters competed for the most gifted performers, and, later, in freedom, when Black entertainment offered Black artists a measure of independence and financial reward as their performances were coveted and exploited by the white world.
The terms of Black performance trace back to that fateful ship and carry on in the name of that anonymous Black girl who was murdered for refusing to dance for people who viewed her movement in vulgar terms. Black performance since then has sought to heal the traumatic rift between the quality and source of African art and the violent coercion to entertain myopic white folk in the New World. Black performers forged a complex racial identity and preserved ties to a cultural heritage under relentless fire. White folk used Black art to construct stereotypes of docile Sambos, happy Negroes, witless buffoons, and classless coons, character types that populated the minstrel shows that first darkened the culture in the 1830s.
Racial paradox flooded, and united, the slave ship, the plantation, and the minstrel stage: white people yearned to be near a Blackness they mocked, that made them feel superior. White folk insisted that Blackness be staged when and how they saw best and performed in a manner that brought them the greatest pleasure. Black folk performed a sly and signifying style of Blackness that seemed to say “yes” to stereotypes even as they secretly said “no” in their hearts. Black people often rolled their eyes to parody the white belief that they were clowns or fools. Blacks who performed found the means to entertain “massa” while helping to emancipate the masses. This is most clearly heard when the enslaved sang spirituals about a heavenly destination with veiled information about escape to earthly freedom. Harriet Tubman used spirituals to signal hiding places, danger zones, and safe escape. To be sure, the genuinely gifted Black performer always stood out. But the myth of the innately talented Black person persuaded white folk to command and choreograph performance from the masses of Blacks. In an inspired example of the Kantian concept of making a virtue of necessity, the enslaved got great at the performance that was demanded of them. They routinely turned the misfortunes of color into a stronger and richer Black identity.
Contemporary Black performance carries the weight of this history, the imprint of these struggles and tensions, in both exceptional and everyday expressions. Black performance is singing or dancing on Broadway or at the local talent show, making music for the Philharmonic or the nursing home, preaching at Washington National Cathedral or taking a dry run in a homiletics class, lecturing at a prestigious university or speaking to a sorority gathering at a junior college, launching a three-pointer in the NBA Finals or shooting hoops at the neighborhood YMCA, and presiding over the wedding of Harry and Meghan at Windsor Castle or blessing the nuptials of Hakim and Monifa at a modest Baptist church.
Black performance is how Black folk greet each other, go to work, sell lemonade, bird-watch, barbecue in the park, style our hair, direct the church choir, sling slang, write with a certain flourish, stand on the porch, drive, get arrested, or even die at the hands of cops. Black folk read or ad lib from a racial script centuries in the making. Black performance is both formal and informal, standard and vernacular, professional and amateur, planned and spontaneous. It is driven by Black love, joy, pleasure, pain, purpose, grief, freedom, justice, democratic hunger, moral necessity, and electrifying experimentation. It is shaped by white terror, delight, demand, appropriation, curiosity, anger, appreciation, greed, voyeurism, dominance, hatred, control, and insecurity.
Black performance is a paradox, wrapped in a conundrum, inside a contradiction; surely there must be a key. Black folk are forced to entertain race, engage the idea of it, its social expressions and its personal consequences. But as a people forced to be an entertaining race, we are, by definition, not just performers but a performance of many sorts, of fictions and fantasies, of design and chaos, of ideals and moral sentiments, of possibility and romance and dead ends and dashed hopes and snuffed ambitions. Black performance embodies the ceaseless churn of life pitched against its lethal limits.
On the surface, the very idea of performance seems to lose its distinction and merit when tied to Black life. If every act is a performance, and every word vibrates in performance, and if every life is bathed in performance, then the word ceases to separate spheres of activity and instead is a synonym for Black breath and being. In such a view, the term “performance” might reasonably be omitted without losing the meaning of Blackness.
That may all make sense when looking from the outside into Black culture. Black life takes shape in a white world where stereotypes empty Blackness of all meaning except what benefits the broader world. That means that Black folk only exist when they are forced to adopt a narrow philosophy of life that is part Descartes, part Nas: Ut praestare, ergo sum, I perform, therefore I am.
If we go back to the ship Recovery, to the plantation, to the sharecropping field, to the southern backroad, or come forward to Central Park or Starbucks, or the urban street corner commanded by cops, it is clear that Black life is tolerated only if Black folk submit to the white will at all times. It is the white world’s demand to bow to racial hierarchy that grinds every Black limb, every Black thought, every Black word to performance inside the white world.
But Black folk found escape and solace in their own culture. Black performance fed on the inspiration that flowed in the bosom of Africa. As each generation got further away from the motherland, performance became an even greater source of identity, strength, value, and survival. This is why many Black folk who headed north in dramatic numbers in the first half of the twentieth century clung more tenaciously to communal and culinary habits than some of their southern kin. Nothing feeds the hunger for home like nostalgia and alienation. And, in a way, Black performance that was further in land and clock from its African origins became an alluring tertium quid. This is in sharp contrast to W. E. B. Du Bois’s opposition to the racist belief that “between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro.”
The Black performance I have in mind is a vibrant third thing sandwiched between its edifying African character and its greatly undervalued expression in the white world. The purpose of Black performance in the New World is to restore a Black universe and to reestablish Black humanity. The yearning for positivity is nearly absent at Black America’s African roots. Before the Scramble for Africa starting in the nineteenth century, Africans possessed the freedom to explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of Black identity. They felt no need to justify or explain their existence beyond acknowledging the ethics or deities that governed their society.
When the white world kidnapped African bodies to the Americas, elements of Black performance both traveled along and were cast overboard; Africans both adjusted and resisted. Black performers felt the need to fend off the white gaze and to re-create a sense of home while forging new expressions in the belly of a racist beast. We became preoccupied with positive representations of Black culture in a way we had not been before. We policed our own culture for fugitive expressions of Blackness that jeopardized our perception in the world. We reserved the greatest disdain for disloyal enslaved figures who dropped dime on our plans for escape or revolution.
Black folk became obsessed with the quality and character of Black American performance. They worried whether a given person was a coon or Tom whose performances were mindless updates of blackface minstrelsy or sellout behavior, on the plantation or at the political podium. This held true whether figures were fictional, like Samuel L. Jackson’s character Stephen, who was an eager traitor in Quentin Tarantino’s slavery revenge fantasy Django Unchained, or true life, like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who practices chronic betrayal from the bench.
The quest for restoration has tightened the seams in the narrowing quilt of acceptable Black performance. It was tragic that white folk sought to impose their restrictive views of race on Black culture; it was just as tragic for Black folk to promote suffocating racial visions of their own.
Thus, every Black performance carries far more weight than it should. Every film, every album, every play, every speech, every political decision, every book, every essay, every song, every tweet, every word we utter, every notion we entertain, means more than it ought to mean on the surface. This is in sharp contrast to the broader culture. There is the white given, which is the cultural starting point of knowledge. This perspective boasts an a priori manner of evaluating white ideas and actions. Whiteness is seen as inherently valid. Reason itself is a servant of the white world and endorses white experience. And then there is the Black given, in which knowledge of Black ways of being and thinking follows an a posteriori path and cannot be taken for granted. Black people must produce in each generation fresh evidence of our intelligence and humanity.
Black performance in the New World has attempted to bridge the chasm between Africa and America, between a Blackness presumed and a Blackness pressured. It has been charged with these imperatives: to recover Africa, which is to say, to reestablish the humanity and intelligence of Black folk and a Black universe as norm; to entertain the world, including white folk, while liberating Black folk; and to generate a political vocabulary specific to the circumstances of our existence in America.
Those imperatives weave through four vital dimensions of contemporary Black performance: echo, shadow, spark, and register. In each case, there is what is given to the white world—what is performed as shield, face, and deflection—and there is what is given to, and taken from, Black culture, as the exploration and emancipation of Black life.
ECHO
Echo is the sound that Black folk make as we perform our humanity by talking, singing or making music, across many centuries, cultures, and countries. Black music is the sound of Black people embracing a heritage from which we could never be completely separated. The drum is the percussive seed planted in African earth and sprouting in Black American soil. But the drum didn’t belong to Africa alone. It was used by white slavers in European colonies and the West Indies to announce the beginning of an auction “scramble,” in which buyers scurried frantically to pick and choose among newly arrived Africans in the pen where they were herded. The drum also signaled throughout the Middle Passage the enforced performance of the Black enslaved.
But Africans snatched the drumbeats to communicate. The drum blended their tongues into a percussive language that vibrated truths that transcended tribes. The drum amplified a lingua franca of rebellion and escape. That is why the drum was outlawed throughout the New World. Beyond its emancipatory effects, the drum gained a great hearing in Black America. More recently, the drum has echoed in the frenetic rhythms of James Brown and in the fierce backbeats of hip hop.
Two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson contended that Blacks are more gifted than whites with “accurate ears for tune and time,” though he said it remained to be seen whether they could compose extensive melodies and complicated harmonies. Jefferson also contended that misery produced moving poetry, and while he acknowledged that Black folk suffered great misery, he maintained that we lacked poetry. Jefferson wasn’t alone: long before Monticello’s venerable polymath weighed in, and for quite some time afterward, our music has been used to prove Black inferiority, despite the resonant echo of our musical mastery. His prejudice aside, Jefferson was at least open to the possibility that Black folk might achieve even a little of the refined sentiment and highbrow tastes of Europeans.
Black music is more than electrifying rhythms and entrancing beats, more than lyrical invention lifted by vivid imagination. Black music is even more than the glorious harmonies of the R&B girl group The Sweet Inspirations or the majestic melodies of Earth, Wind and Fire, proving Jefferson’s worries about Black melody and harmony quaint. Black music is also the sound of Black folk battling beliefs about Black savagery. It is also the aching rhythms and yearning beats that measure the passion and hunger for human affirmation.
Black music is the faithful score to a culture composed of soothing social melodies or bruising racial discord. The music of the late John Coltrane is a resonant example. Coltrane mastered, then abandoned, the mellow modulations and cool chords of modal jazz and the staccato rhythms of bebop and hard bop. He later experimented with what critic Ira Gitler termed “sheets of sound” as notes cascaded down jagged time signatures into shrieking sonic vortexes. Coltrane opted for the mood disorders evoked by violent variations of sound, shifts in timbre, and wind shears of acoustic energy that rip through self-contained notes and themes. Coltrane was playing toward a sort of unified field theory of Black sound that constructed dense improvisation from the sensual thump of random melody and brooding dissonance.
Black music in this vein might be heard as the effort to tame racial chaos by modifying sound. Coltrane’s avant-garde riffs were the perfect contrast to the melancholy of sorrow songs and the worry of the blues. If Coltrane’s musical menu satisfied a different sonic taste than the offerings of spirituals and the blues, all these sounds fed a larger appetite for the poetry of Black self-expression. Coltrane’s poetry found voice as he blew through cacophony in the quest for musical beauty that echoed the struggle to hear the sweet strains of social justice in racial disharmony. The poetry of spirituals and the blues speaks more directly in the lyrics on which their musical fates rest. Indeed, the poetry that Jefferson said Black folk lacked speaks in the hidden messages of spirituals. That poetry also echoes in the ironic and comic tones of the blues. The blues pokes fun at imperfection and invites heartbreak to dance with joy, representing the noisy diversity of Black humanity. The poetry of Blackness resonates as well in the verse and literary devices of hip hop. Rap music reflects how Black culture demands that song supply not only artistic but political satisfaction as well.
The political urge of Black music cannot compensate for our lack of power: we cannot control the white man, so we arguably fill the air with our resentful sounds. But Black music nurtures our humanity and supports our engagement with society. I learned this up close in the sixties and seventies in Detroit, the city of my birth.
When the Motown Record Corporation rolled out of the Detroit factory of Berry Gordy’s imagination in 1960, it was fueled by the goal of all great Black art: to thrill the senses and light the mind in one blessed gesture. Motown engineered its unique model of musical genius to navigate the twists of a tortured racial history and the turns of a Black culture at once accommodating, resisting, and redefining American identity. It was no small feat for an upstart Black record label to so quickly live up to its courageous and, at the time, brazen slogan: The Sound of Young America. Gordy dared the nation to deny the Motor City tunes floating from their car radios—a sound that Motown’s engineers perfected by building in the studio a small tinny-sounding radio to mimic what came tumbling from automobile speakers and pocket-size transistor radios. Gordy’s gospel of racial harmony was brilliantly exhorted by solo evangelists like Smokey Robinson, Mary Wells, and Stevie Wonder and supported by angelic choirs like the Temptations, the Supremes, and the Four Tops.
Copyright © 2021 by Michael Eric Dyson