the last book I ever read (Percival Everett's Dr. No: A Novel, excerpt ten)

from Dr. No:A Novel by Percival Everett:

I think I peed a little.

the last book I ever read (Percival Everett's Dr. No: A Novel, excerpt nine)

from Dr. No:A Novel by Percival Everett:

Eigen followed me back down to the first floor and into the kitchen. An old Black man was arranging hors d’oeuvres on a platter. He looked at us with surprise, but without panic. He continued to work with the food while he talked. “Are you the ones they had tied up in the basement?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I see you got loose.”

“We did.”

“You ain’t got to worry. They never come into the kitchen. Heaven forbid one of them should come into the kitchen.”

the last book I ever read (Percival Everett's Dr. No: A Novel, excerpt eight)

from Dr. No:A Novel by Percival Everett:

“Is that a dog in that bag?” the preacher asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Jesus had a dog. Very few people know that.”

the last book I ever read (Percival Everett's Dr. No: A Novel, excerpt seven)

from Dr. No:A Novel by Percival Everett:

“What does he want?”

“He wants to make America nothing again.” I looked up at the Metro system map. “We’ll get off here at L’Enfant Plaza and take the yellow line up to the red line to Union Station.”

“You’re very capable,” Eigen said.

the last book I ever read (Percival Everett's Dr. No: A Novel, excerpt six)

from Dr. No:A Novel by Percival Everett:

Sill, Eigen, and Gloria were already seated topside at an elegant table. Eigen was dressed in a red bikini, looking like a mathematician in a bikini. Gloria was dressed in white, as she had been in Corsica. Sill was comfortable in jeans and a Parliament (the band) T-shirt. That was when I realized that I was dressed very similarly to Sill and I didn’t know how that had happened. I pulled my shirt away and stared at it upside down. Jethro Tull. I didn’t know who he was, but he looked like an old man.

the last book I ever read (Percival Everett's Dr. No: A Novel, excerpt five)

from Dr. No:A Novel by Percival Everett:

“I don’t think you understand, Wala. That money came out of my portfolio and as soon as it did it stopped earning. You would actually have to pay me back close to five million dollars.”

“That’s quite an increase,” I said.

“What can I say, crime is a high-yield investment.” He rubbed Eigen’s thigh. “Right, my dear? I’m investing in you two. I do hope I’ve invested wisely. I sincerely hope that.” He punctuated his words with a look into my eyes that might have been read as threatening or menacing by anyone who was not on the spectrum. But I am on the spectrum, and so I stared back at him.

the last book I ever read (Percival Everett's Dr. No: A Novel, excerpt four)

from Dr. No:A Novel by Percival Everett:

I grabbed her by her shoulders and shook her, remembering hearing that you’re not supposed to shake babies and wondering if it was also true for mathematicians. I also found myself thinking in ways I had never imagined, wondering, for instance, how an adversarial relationship with Sill might affect my returning to the US and, more importantly, to Trigo. Perhaps bringing Eigen out of her catalepsy was not such a good idea, at least not a timely one. I was concerned about her state, but if there were a change, might we go the way of Agostinho Aguedo, down a chute into the shark pool, so named because it was a pool filled with sharks?

“Wala,” she said, sleepy seeming.

the last book I ever read (Percival Everett's Dr. No: A Novel, excerpt three)

from Dr. No:A Novel by Percival Everett:

A better, more pressing question was how was I going to locate Eigen? I did the only thing I could think of. I wandered the halls calling out, “Eigen, Eigen,” like an idiot. Perhaps not even like, but as an idiot. Soon I was hopelessly, despairingly lost and puzzled all the more because none of the corridors led to anything that might have taken me out of the building. After coming to believe that I had covered the same hallways several times, never seeing a person or a color, I found myself standing in front of a vending machine. In it was nothing but bag after bag of barbecue potato chips. I had no change, no bills, no cards, as my clothes had no pockets. Though not hungry, I really wanted those chips, if only for the color. I shook the machine and startled myself with the noise and my own aggression. Then I shook it again, more vigorously, with equal success.

A door opened a couple of meters away.

the last book I ever read (Percival Everett's Dr. No: A Novel, excerpt two)

from Dr. No:A Novel by Percival Everett:

Infinity means nothing to me. How could it? Nothing is neither finite nor infinite. Nothing is neither a null set nor a member of that set that contains all things that are not something. Things are matter, some things matter, nothing is never matter, nothing matters. Nothing walked into a tavern. What did the barkeep say? Nothing. Why would he? Nothing walked in. Trigo told me that one.

the last book I ever read (Percival Everett's Dr. No: A Novel, excerpt one)

from Dr. No:A Novel by Percival Everett:

I am serious about my study. I am a distinguished professor of mathematics at Brown University, though I have not for decades concerned myself with arithmetic, calculus, matrices, theorems, Hausdorff spaces, finite lattice representations, or anything else that involves values or numbers or representations of values or numbers or any such somethings, whether they have substance or not. I have spent my career in my little office on George Street in Providence contemplating and searching for nothing. I have not found it. It is sad for me that the mere introduction to my subject of interest necessarily ruins my study. I work very hard and wish I could say that I have nothing to show for it.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt thirteen)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

My first job at the hip healthcare start-up was to take calls and chats from doctors and medical professionals who had questions about the healthcare software the start-up invented—a software that makes the tricky process of obtaining prior authorizations easier. On the phone, doctors asked me to spell my name twice, or sometimes three times. Upon the second or third spelling, some exclaimed, “I’m not even gonna try to say that one.” These are people who, I imagine, went through several years of school. During product demos, where I talked to a group of doctors or nurses, there were days where we spent more time on my name and where I’m from than we did talking about the product itself. If you have a name like my name and you get asked its origins enough, you can tell when the line between eager curiosity and skepticism is being blurred, mostly because the people who imagine themselves good at hiding the tonal difference between the two are not actually that good at hiding the tonal difference between the two. When I told people that I’m from Ohio, they wanted to know where my parents are from, or where their parents are from. It is amazing, the weapons people disguise in small talk.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt twelve)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

“Gimme Shelter” is one of those songs that churns and churns, invites you in and then shakes you up. It’s the perfect entry point for an album, because it is an ominous point of entry. A song that lets you know something bad is maybe coming, and it is maybe coming for you, or someone you love. It’s in the scenes where young kids get dropped into some war they don’t want to be fighting, just in time to see their best friend killed. The biggest mistake some people make about songs that open albums is that they imagine those songs should be welcoming or warm. Set a tone of comfort before jarring the foundation. An album’s opening song should be a loud and all-consuming stretch of madness. The thing that drags a listener to the edge of a cliff, holds them over, and asks them to choose what they think is safer: the unknown of floating to the bottom of some endless height, or the known chaos of solid ground. I like my albums to start by asking me what I think I can stand.

The record store dudes who put on Let It Bleed would play “Gimme Shelter” countless times before skipping to the next track. There was something about the way the drums sounded when they were beat out on a table or a steering wheel. Let It Bleed is a damn good record—particularly its side two—but there was nothing else on it that matched the sheer immersion and exhaustion of “Gimme Shelter,” for me. When these record store dudes homed in on the vocal performance of “Gimme Shelter,” they would never talk about Merry Clayton by name, only by the mercy she could offer to the music.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt eleven)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

To insist that violence and any form of bigotry isn’t American is to continue feeding into the machinery of falsehoods and readjustments that keep this country spinning its wheels and making the same mistakes when it comes to confronting the way its past has burdened its present and future. There are people who talk about Martin Luther King, Jr., as if he lived a long and healthy life and then chose to die peacefully at the end of it. There are those who treat the political landscape as if it has only local ramifications rather than the global ones it has had for the majority of my lifetime. The very concept of “choosing love” is privilege, based on an ability to have the idea that there are only two options: love and hate, as Radio Raheem had emblazoned in gold across his knuckles in Spike’s Do the Right Thing. But the very concept resting at the heart of Do the Right Thing is that all this love ain’t created equally. The love I have to give is malleable, but it has its limits. All of our love has its limits, and it should. I choose to love my people, and their people. And sometimes I might also choose love with your people. But other times, I choose whatever keeps me safe, and that isn’t necessarily hate, but it might be if it gives me a comfortable enough distance.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt ten)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

In a standard game of spades, played with the fifty-two standard cards in a deck, the ace of spades is the most fortunate of cards. The one that promises at least one way out for you and your team. If you have the ace of spades and nothing else, you can be confident that you will bring at least one trick home. There will be some glory at the end of it all, no matter what other useless weeds may sprout out of a hand, how many red fours and sixes bloom from the interior. After a hand is dealt out in a game of spades, there are few feelings like sifting through the bouquet of unspectacular pasteboards until the ace of spades appears. And so, sometime during the Second World War, the soldiers of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the American 101st Airborne Division began painting the sides of their helmets with spades symbols, or fastening the cards to their heads for good luck. Playing cards more generally began to play a role in identification during World War II. Regiments would paint varying suits on their helmets to differentiate airborne divisions during combat. But those who stuck the ace of spades to themselves were considered lucky. Promised to survive and at least bring themselves home to a team counting on them.

Another side of this was brought out nearly twenty years later, during the Vietnam War. American troops believed that the Vietnamese feared the symbolism of the spade, that they thought it signaled death and ill fortune. So the military had the United States Playing Card Company send them crates of just aces of spades and nothing else, so that soldiers could scatter them throughout the jungles and villages of Vietnam before and after raids. The dead bodies of Vietnamese were covered in aces of spades. Lands—entire fields pillaged and burned down to the dirt—were littered with the card.

Power, as always, misused in the wrong hands.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt nine)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

At the height of World War I in Paris, Black soldiers would spend some of their downtime playing instruments they’d carried over with them. Mostly horns and guitars. Tables became drums. Eventually, casual collectives formed among the soldiers, groups that would go out to the Parisian music halls and play blues, jazz, and ragtime music. Jazz had begun to reach a heightened popularity in the States but had yet to break big in Paris. Once the locals got a taste of the sound, it carried through and beyond the war. Even after many of the Black soldiers went home to America, back to a country where they were not the heroes they were in France. Back to a country where they quickly remembered that being willing to bleed for a land doesn’t mean the people of that land will require or desire your presence outside of that willingness.

Still, the impact of that brief burst of Black creation in Paris struck new chords. Paris became obsessed with American Black artistic culture, right as the Harlem Renaissance started to kick off in the States. Parisians were mimicking American Black culture, but also, after World War I, word got back to the States that Paris was a place where Black folks were treated well. Because the Black soldiers who fought in Paris were deemed heroes, the city revered its visiting Black artists as well. Black jazz musicians who couldn’t play in all parts of America traveled to Paris to do a stretch of shows. Many didn’t stay, however, which meant that Paris was left to try its best to merely mirror the experiences these artists gave to the city. Paris was ripe and eager for a Black artist to come and commit to its small artistic flourishing. Someone who could, perhaps, put their own stamp on what the city was attempting to offer.

And then, on a boat, arrived nineteen-year-old Josephine Baker.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt eight)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

Sun Ra said it was a halo of light that appeared around him in 1936. Or maybe it was 1937. He was living in Chicago, or maybe he wasn’t. There are no tactile details to the story that remain consistent. Just that there was certainly a light that consumed the body of Herman Poole Blount, who was from Birmingham, Alabama, and who was named after a vaudeville stage magician his mother loved named Black Herman. Black Herman died onstage in 1934 of a heart attack, but because one of his main acts was a “buried alive” trick, no one in the audience believed he was dead. His assistant, wanting to cash in on the act, charged admission for people to view Black Herman’s corpse in the funeral home. The world is not done with you even when you are done with it. And Herman Poole Blount was not yet Sun Ra in 1937, but he was so done with the world that he embraced the strange light that drank him in and flew on up to a whole other planet. It was one he identified as Saturn. He was granted an audience with aliens who had one antenna over each eye and one on each ear. The aliens told him that he should drop out of college. That the world was dissolving into complete chaos, and they needed him to speak through music.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt seven)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

Michael Anderson died a hero. No one insisted that he deserved what he got. No pictures circulated on the Internet of Black men who were not him. It dawns on me every time I see it that the Trayvon Martin Experience Aviation photo is so cherished because it offers him an adjacency to that dignity. It shows him in the replica of a suit heroes wore when risking their lives for the sake of curiosity. On Martin’s birthday, people circulate the photo year after year. There is an idea that if Martin were still alive, he could have been a person who watched the skies and sought to climb into them. A person who looked down on the earth from somewhere above it and pointed to the state where he grew up. Or he might have done none of that. He might have gone to college and dropped out, or he might never have gone to college at all. He might have smoked and played videogames well into his twenties, working some job he hated. But he would have been alive to do it all, or not do it all. The whole thing with the Trayvon Martin Experience Aviation photo is that to see him like this, in contrast with seeing him as only a dead problem child, was to see that he was once perhaps someone who saw some promise and possibility in a world that would kill him and insist that he deserved to die.

The fundamental flaw, of course, is in this: proving to the public that someone did not deserve to die, or did not deserve the violence that chased them down. It is the worst instinct, and one that I fight against often, when I want to clear the name of someone dead who lived a life that was undoubtedly sometimes good and sometimes bad but always a life nonetheless.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt six)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

And since we’re talking about it anyway: Look, I am certainly not one to project Blackness onto the fictional or cartoonishly ambiguous, and lord knows I don’t want to upset the teeming masses of loud and affectionate Star Wars devotees, but it must be said that as a kid I had a sneaking suspicion that Chewbacca might have been Black, what with all the brown that hung from his body. Also the way my pal’s dad would shout at the screen when Star Wars was on, about how those white folks who made the movie were trying to put one over, making the tall and incoherent beast obviously Black. And I don’t know if I bought that as much as I bought the idea that so many of the Black people I knew would shout about all of their woes but no one would seem to understand what they were saying.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt five)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

But friends, it was not Michael who first slid backward across a slick floor on the tips of his toes. The first Black man to drift on some imaginary cratered surface was Bill Bailey, who probably invented the dance in the 1920s, but no one saw it on camera until 1943. Cabin in the Sky was one of the first films with a primarily Black cast. A film that attempted to veer away from many of the stereotypes and tropes that plagued Black actors of the era. An adaptation of the stage musical of the same name, it featured Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Despite its best intentions, the film was met with mixed reviews, with Black reviewers stating that it still relied too much on Southern folklore, which meant that it trod too close to the racism it was trying to avoid.

But what did stand out was a brief dance interlude, performed by Bill Bailey, who had then garnered a strong reputation as a show-stealing tap dancer. Bailey had perfected both Bill Robinson’s upright style of tap and also the paddle and roll tap style of King Rastus Brown. At the intersection of these movements, Bailey came up with something he called the “backslide,” a move he’d utilize as a way to exit the stage. When his tap set wore down, he would slide smoothly on the tips of his toes, waving his hat as he slowly vanished behind a curtain. When he does it in Cabin in the Sky, it is the first time the move is captured on film. It happens fast but is impossible not to notice. Like Michael when he broke it out at the Motown 25 special in ’83, the whole trick of pulling off the moonwalk is to spend all other parts of a dance routine training an audience to watch your feet. Before they can ask what is happening, the move is done.

Bill Bailey performed the move for years onstage, always at the end of his set. The way he saw it, the move was untouchable. Nothing could top it, so it had to be an exit. It seems this is where he and Jackson differ, as Mike would sometimes drop it into the middle of choreography, to drive people into a frenzy before bouncing on to something else. But I like Bailey’s idea more. Providing a glimpse of something unbelievable and letting it rattle in the hearts and minds of people trembling in disbelief.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt four)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

I tell you this to tell you that I might come to you at a time when you are eager for the night to erase the memory of a conversation, friends. And I will tell you what I know, and what I know is that Whitney Houston could not dance. I have made my peace with this and I beg of you to do the same. You may not know that Whitney Houston could not dance, but I am telling you that she could not dance to save her life.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt three)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

I have had the dream where I hold Al Jolson wearing a dark coat of blackface under the water of an old bathtub. I do not know how I arrive in the scene, but I arrive with my hands on his shoulders, pushing him down below the water, which seems endless from my angle. In the dream, he’s wearing the brown suit he wears while playing piano in The Jazz Singer. That movie was in black-and-white, as is this dream, but I know the suit is brown. I know the suit is brown because I have, in my waking hours, stared at the poster from the film, which is painted in color. I know the suit is brown because on the poster, Jolson’s face is not brown. The suit is the only interruption of white on his whole body. In the dream, Jolson does not struggle when I hold his head under the water. His eyes stay open. I scrub at his face with my hands until the scrubbing becomes clawing, trying to remove the layer of caked-on dark skin, to address the man underneath. In the dream, I don’t know what I would say to Al Jolson if I could peel the mask from his face, but I keep peeling, and Jolson does not fight, even as I swipe fingers across his eyes. Eyes that, surrounded by the darkness of his makeup, gleam from underneath the water. When I push him down far enough, his face vanishes entirely, or at least I think it does. In a dream, nothing is tangible, even in a dream that arrives and arrives again. Only the smallest details remain: I know the tub is old—it’s one of those with massive claws as feet. In the background, a version of “Blue Skies” is probably playing, but in this dream, I have convinced myself that it isn’t Jolson’s version because it is being sung by a woman. Which means I tell myself it is Ella Fitzgerald. Who, I imagine, would also want me to scrub the black makeup off this white man’s face. In the dream, I think I hold Al Jolson down because if I can’t detach him from skin that looks like my skin, I at least want his eyes to stop glowing from beneath it. But the further I push his face down into the deepest parts of the water, I am left only to search the water for my own reflection, which looks dark, darker than I’ve ever been. So dark that it creeps along the water’s surface like a shadow’s dancing limbs. And then, as I lean closer to the water, I feel Al Jolson’s suit snap itself empty, and I am not holding a body anymore, and then I wake up and in the darkness of my real life bedroom, I can’t even see my own hands.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt two)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

It took Elliott two years to synchronize the film, and he had designs to release it in 2011, but Aretha, by that point in her late sixties, did not want the film released unless she was guaranteed proper compensation. When Elliott attempted to screen the film at festivals, she sued repeatedly. (Aretha wanted a large share of the profits that the film was slated to gain, and that seems fair: she was the basis for whatever success the film might have and therefore had a legitimate stake in trying to control how it appeared and got distributed.) After a final lawsuit in 2016 kept the film shelved, Aretha said: “Justice, respect, and what is right prevailed, and one’s right to own their own self-image.”

After Aretha died in 2018, Elliott was summoned to Detroit by a friend of Aretha’s surviving family members. He was asked to show her family the film, which none of them had ever seen. And just like that, the clouds that had obscured this magic for forty-six years slowly began to break.

the last book I ever read (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, excerpt one)

from A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib:

Folks who would become stars of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s had their first big on-camera moments twisting and twirling within the wall of clapping hands. Fred “Rerun” Berry from What’s Happening!! was a hit in the early Soul Train Lines. Jody Watley and Jeffrey Daniel were Soul Train Line partners before the world knew them as part of Shalamar. Columbus, Ohio’s own Jermaine Stewart lit up the line with regularity all through ’77 and ’78. Once, in ’77, Stewart and his companion popped and locked through the line in matching glittering faux tuxedos. In 1986, when Stewart was riding high on the Top Five hit “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off,” Don Cornelius introduced him to the Soul Train stage by saying, He’s made good, and we’re all quite proud of him, and there was Jermaine as beautiful as ever, his hair pressed and laid, a long and radiant black tuxedo jacket hanging off his body. In the ’80s, Rosie Perez perfected the moves that would later serve as the opening to Do the Right Thing, her arms violently swinging at her sides, propelling her waist into short, measured thrusts. When Perez was really on in the line, she wouldn’t even finish dancing all the way down. She’d stop a little over halfway through and then confidently stroll the rest of the way, locking eyes with the camera.

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.