Black Cool

I gotta, gotta keep my balance
High or low
Whether you’re high or low
You gotta tip on the tightrope

As Fu-Kiau Bunseki remarked to me, “Every time there is a break in a pattern, that is the rebirth of [ancestral] power in you.”

—Robert Farris Thompson

The women in my family never met a riff they didn’t like. Even their names are stories improvised from experience: Olive aka Wuful; Mavis; Jaye; and Olive aka Big Olive aka Munner aka O.G. (yes). They would sit in the kitchen talking through the night about everything from relationships to revolution to who Robert Johnson met at the crossroads to Mahalia Jackson singing “The Upper Room” to Johnny Mathis’s and Grace Jones’s performances of gender and race. The concept of the break and the accompanying shimmering vertigo of falling into the crossroads where the freedom of invention cuts in resonates with me, because I was raised by four women who lived their entire lives immersed in Black vernacular, respecting it as an inexhaustible source of spontaneity, irony, intellectual insight, and joy.

The break, that point where a song stops for a drum or other instrumental interlude or improv, is a trademark of African diaspora music. The break adds a new element that challenges the structure of a composition, as in the original contemporary crossover example of James Brown’s “Cold Sweat”: “Give the drummer some! . . . Give the bass player some!” This is where assumptions are overturned and narrative arcs change. Grey Gundaker points out in Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs that African break patterning activates double voicing, double vision, and cross-rhythms that challenge the status quo, “challenging seemingly fixed relations between top and bottom, high and low, foreground and background, and the framing of events themselves . . . It also amounts to the claim that real mastery . . . means knowledge and movement in all directions—down, around, under, and through, not just up and over, not merely in the ruler lines of alphabetic text.” The break, whether in music or other forms, sets a condition of vertigo in motion that tests mastery and movement in all directions at once.

From an African or neo-African perspective, exercising grace and skill under the intense pressure of being in vertigo— whirling, spinning, falling at the same time, in chaotic undifferentiated space—is the product of iwa rere, ethical behavior, and iwa pele, compassion. In Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson notes that such graceful skill can restore the balance that is itutu, the power of mystic coolness, the balance of reason, sanity, and gentle character that provides “critical focus” for human action. Thompson remarks that through itutu, “we find the confidence to cope with all kinds of situations. This is áshe. This is character. This is mystic coolness. All one.” The break is always an opportunity to demonstrate itutu.

James Brown said “make it funky,” and his use of the break gave birth to funk and hip-hop, genres that along with electronica at their core support progressive social change by inspiring what critically acclaimed DJ, producer, and cultural activist Garth Trinidad identifies as “thought that drove dialogue among youth . . . a powerful tool that could incite emotion, desire, and intelligent thought about current events.” After he introduced artists such as Meshell Ndegeocello, Jill Scott, Les Nubians, Floetry, Kelis, M.I.A., Van Hunt, Gnarls Barkley, King Britt, Res, Sa-Ra, and J*DaVeY to the mainstream, the program format of Trinidad’s long-running L.A. radio show, Chocolate City (KCRW), motivated the Grammy Awards’ introduction of the Urban/Alternative category in 2003.

In response to people who ask for “something I can dance to” on the basis of a limited musical range shaped by mainstream airwaves, Trinidad “would love to press pause in a moment and take them into a parallel universe and teach them about why they need me to play something faster so that they can feel more comfortable . . . The experience can be stressful, annoying and wonderful.” Trinidad’s video self-portrait, Sound and Vision Intro, depicts a diasporic subject who is completely still, alert, and calm, coolly stationed in the urban vertigo of a fragmented landscape. Dark glasses signifying double vision, he engages the viewer from shifting locations marked by broken lines, angles, ragged thresholds, speeding bodies and vehicles, and voids.

In a 2007 blog post titled “Anatomy of a Zombie,” Trinidad situates the DJ’s role as cultural worker in an ethics of break culture, theorizing “a responsibility to break new ideas and push music forward without alienating the audience . . . to generate balance.” That the break has been electronically altered, digitized, and amped into the sample and compound editing of the cut attests to the survival of a sense of democratic agency in hip-hop that affirms artistic innovation and a radical social critique.

The break in African diaspora music and cultural expression is a transformative technology that mirrors the vitality, dissonances, and underlying coherence of diasporic cultural processes. As a metaphor—and in performance, insofar as it represents a step out of the familiar structure of a song or dance into another consciousness that is different from but still part of the narrative arc—the break is a kind of possession that intervenes on, but does not invalidate, the communal links on which it depends. The break, the crossroads, and the void signify the potency that haunts the space between forms (as hidden genealogy). Vertigo is a signal aspect of the literacy of itutu, an epistemology of undifferentiated space that holds strategies for negotiating cultural trauma, disruption, dislocation, and hybridity in pointed resistance to colonial erasure. Everything is possible in the break.

That is the space of cultural resistance in which slaves are able to imagine freedom from dominance. The dominant consciousness has always produced a monologue dedicated to serving white male privilege and property. Double consciousness, W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory that Black subjectivity is always watching itself move through a society constructed by racism, asserts a break or fracturing of that monologue that makes other kinds of movement, and decolonized subjectivities, possible. A collaboratively constructed, critically informed vernacular social reality is the invisible ground on which double consciousness floats, so to speak, as a healthy response to the annihilating impulse of racism. Because the dominant culture is still organized on the assumption that the mental constructs of colonized and indigenous people lack theoretical and critical value, the “native” is still a Caliban in the dominant view, assigned the task of embodying limitation and the past. The critical substance of indigenous systems of thought has scarcely been regarded as knowledge, though collected and catalogued as artifact. It’s time this changed, and, to paraphrase Nigerian musician and composer Fela Kuti, music is one of the weapons; understanding the poetics and politics of the break is another.

Here’s a story: My great-grandmother, Munner/O.G., had nine brothers and sisters. They lived in Georgia. Her mother was Black, Indian, and white, and her father was Haitian. When they went to the movies, O.G. and her darker-skinned sister, Lena, sat in the Colored section while their siblings passed to get White Only seats. When the brothers and sisters started passing full-time, O.G., Lena, and a younger brother, Kenny, left for Missouri, stayed Black, and, as far as I know, never spoke to the rest again.

In recalling this story, I focus on epistemic rupture: fragmentation (of family, of self), transgression (of racial lines), improvisation, and insistence on surviving as Black people in a society bent on erasing all signs of Black self-worth (especially the vernacular Blackness associated with being dark, poor, and from the ghetto or “country”). Freefall became the path to reinvention and healing. As a matter of fact, my family never ran into an epistemic break they couldn’t handle; vernacular sensibility and double consciousness saw them through many a crossroads moment, with the view that you could live to laugh about it and, by the way, work the crisis in to make a way out of no way.

The soundtrack of my family’s world was “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do”; they listened to red, gold, and black 33s and 78s by Etta, Dinah, Esther, Nancy, Shirley, Carmen, Billy, Lionel, and the Count. They had 1920s black-and-white photos of themselves in beaded headbands and sequined gypsy skirts, playing ukuleles and clarinets, standing on flatbeds pulled by mules, and pictures of their grandmothers standing by fences with shotguns. They had other pictures of themselves standing next to Satchmo by the railroad tracks, and in the chorus line at the Regal Theater. In my mother’s lifetime, Aretha, James, Prince, and Chaka were added to the playlist. Outsiders might describe my family as survivors; but survivor doesn’t begin to convey who these people were in the world.

They were consummate practitioners of their own Black female vernacular ways of reading, and nothing was beyond interpretation. This practice reflected their values, spiritual orientation, and aesthetic. Certainly flawed, they nonetheless defined themselves by aspiring to love and civility instead of hate. In a racist world, they refused to practice racism, while at the same time confronting the realities of race. Though often disappointed by men, they refused to scapegoat anyone. While tipping on the tightrope of poverty, they never considered themselves poor, or anyone’s inferior.

They were downright ecstatic about the possibility of never being trapped by someone else’s rigid definition of their abilities. These women saw no reason to apologize for themselves, and if other people couldn’t deal with them, they didn’t mind that, either. They taught me, by example, about being shape-shifting Black women, human beings capable of maintaining the narrative of themselves with integrity and coherence while traveling multiple paths through multiple personas, roles, and circumstances.

This began my education in vertigo: standing by Louis Armstrong on the train tracks, making music on mule-drawn wagons, whispering with your mother’s ghost in the middle of the night. They sang to me in French and Japanese and taught me the perfect jêté, the steps and words to “Ballin’ the Jack,” and the meaning of “Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy.” They made us know about having African and Native American roots, why white America tried to distort and destroy those memories, and the importance of recalling and honoring all our ancestors.

My great-aunt taught me multiplication and poetry in a house full of women who called each other “witchy” because they predicted babies, made ringworm disappear by soaking a copper penny in vinegar to place on the afflicted cheek, picked up the phone before it rang, called wild birds to feed from their palms, and routinely conjured their desires through intention and prayer. They had no fear of the unexpected, and so were irreverent, eccentric, artistic, self-invented, contrary, and subject to show up, or leave, in the middle of the night. When the rug was pulled from under, they were still on it, diving into freefall until they came up with something new or old or both, and workable. They could do this because they had their own spin; they held an intention to stay resilient and keep valuing one another na matta what. They were women defined by movement and resistance, and while they could function well enough in one place, they taught me to resist ever being put in my place or held captive by someone else’s plans.

My mother’s scene was Esther Phillips “Live at the Parisian Room,” hanging with Chi-town friends from our old neighborhood on Budlong, or walking the shoreline at Venice Beach after midnight. She was an artist whose passion was sidelined by administrative work in a government office and by being a divorced single parent to three kids. We often moved with the flow of money.

Some of my childhood was accordingly spent in that part of South-Central L.A. known as The Jungle—acres on acres of 1960s-era tropical and glittering space age–themed apartments turned ghetto, as if Robert Goulet and the Jetsons had premonitions of poverty and Black people and forgot to move in. The streets are lined with palm trees, but everybody knows this place is called The Jungle because the police and the white parts of the city believe this zone is inhabited by savages. It’s an urban reservation, a funkified break in the Botoxed facade of La-La Land, where the walls are the whispering tires of police cruisers. The flat-roofed apartment buildings of The Jungle are painted with large identifying numbers for the convenience of patrolling police helicopters known as “ghetto birds.”

Those times when my mother spirited us out of an apartment in the middle of the night because she couldn’t afford rent that month even while working full-time, we always had a place with family. This movement was turbulent, but the women in my family were people prepared for any and every eventuality, who reserved the right . . . the right to say yes to their own imaginings, the right to say no, the right to change directions or leave in the middle—of plans, of allegiances to men, of sentences.

My family’s ability to navigate existential freefall, a condition I now recognize as cultural and personal vertigo, amounts to an ethos and critical strategy inspired by a vernacular lens on the world. Blending wit, irony, and double consciousness to navigate shifting and change is in fact a stabilizing methodology. Vernacular suppleness produces an inner stability that exists independent of external circumstance. That suppleness was constituted by a collectivist, improvisational relationship to language in all its guises—not just written and spoken, but extended even to the visual and visceral. They read their world with an agency supported by collective vernacular logic. It fortified their resistance to the pathological chaos of racism, sexism, and class warfare that constantly threatened to intern their desires and horizons. They revered knowledge and practicality, and the imaginative landscape they constructed was an endlessly fascinating mundane world whose foundation was firmly anchored in their awareness of spirit. They knew without doubt that everything had a spiritual component, and they found this fact hilariously entertaining and gravely important.

I am unapologetically vernacular, and my upbringing was an education in learning to manage epistemic rupture, rather than fear it; the break inspires possibilities and improvisations. I didn’t think of it as being raised “in vertigo” at the time—that language came later—but the condition was one of turning, shifting, and constantly changing, nonetheless. For my family, the vernacular was/is not an exotic oddity, a marginal condition, simple entertainment, or a source of shame; it is an ethos, a locus of consciousness, a stabilizing force, and a critical method rooted in the collective memory that coolness of the soul comes from balanced compassion, will, and wit. Their vernacular worldview did not, as they saw it, conflict with aspirations to education, careers, or social freedom. Vernacular wisdom informed their ethical views, sense of community, and democratic values. My family’s acclimation to vertigo kept me from fearing the abrupt motion that life sometimes was, and sometimes called into play.

When my mother died suddenly of heart failure at the age of fifty-nine, I was jolted sideways, through imperceptible holes in a suddenly fluid material world. No perception was accurate, because the constant was random, unpredictable change. Life became a roller coaster of panic attacks and spatial disorientation, and the one word that described it all was inescapable: vertigo.

I healed by placing my sense of being in a personal diaspora in relationship to the collective African diaspora, and the diasporas of Native Americans and other indigenous people. There are collective subjectivities and individual imaginative landscapes at stake in the formation of diasporas. Diaspora shapes the body that finds itself, or faces the task of finding itself, in sudden, traumatic motion (think Transatlantic Slave Trade, Middle Passage, colonialism, genocide, refugees). The motion intrinsic to diaspora means that imaginative horizons are perpetually shifting, that the subjective, conceptual aspects of diaspora are as significant as geographies and material practices. Psychological landscapes of diasporas are all borderland, composed of thresholds upon thresholds; in the landscape of shifting borders, centers are ephemeral, not meant to hold because they are illusions in the first place.

As citizens of diaspora, we live in vertigo, and it is our vernacular knowledge that provides itutu, cool: the metaphors, language, and practices that reclaim, remix, and decolonize this break we call home.