The B-Side of Blackness
Searching in sound for the loudness and quiet of mourning
The following is excerpted from an essay by Zandria Felice Robinson in Issue 120 of The Believer. Illustration by Tony Millionaire.
I was so loud at my funeral. On the way down front to my casket, I paused at every third or fourth pew to wail and gnash and crumple myself up until somebody retrieved and righted me, whispering and patting me. “It’s all right, Sis Robinson. You gone up yonder to be with the Lord. It’s all right.” I responded, breathless and voice cracking, “Oh, oh, OK, Lawd, OK, Jesus,” but I didn’t even mean it at all. Because as soon as I got to the next third or fourth pew, I was down again, hollering like my insides was on fire until somebody fetched me. And so on.
The choir, all black women, most in their good wigs, beckoned me forward to view my body, clearly following the funeral director’s insistence to hurry me along so they could close up the casket and proceed with the service. They looked stately and solemn, singing “Be Encouraged,” and nary a one of them was flat. I had warned them all before I died that if their intonation was off, I was gone raise up out that casket and snatch the culprit(s) back to hell with me. Now that I had decided to attend, they knew I would come up in that choir stand.
At the front, I collapsed onto the mourning bench just before I went to view my body, my black dress, big and flowy, settling itself easy over the side of the pew’s cedar arm like an old tablecloth. I tried to spread my legs across the width of the bench to distribute the grief evenly between my two feet, swollen still from the Racist Sugar that had killed me, and leaned deep and forward, like I was gone do Ailey’s Revelations. But, psyche, I threw my head back and up to the ceiling, yelling, “Just take me now, Jesus! Take me now, Lawd!” One of the petty ushers pointed out that, as evidenced by my body up there in that casket, Jesus had already taken me. She did not whisper this observation, nor was she discreet in her gesticulations at my casket. I wanted to say, Where, Sis James? Where Jesus done took me then, since you know so damn much? But I didn’t say that, because she was still an elder, even though I was an ancestor and technically in charge now, and I shouldn’t have been calling on Jesus in vain, and she had a logical point. Still, I turned my lip up at her and went on and gathered myself to view my body.
Another, non-petty usher took my left elbow gently and raised me from the mourning bench and guided me up to the casket, where I ran a timid, trembling hand along the purple velvet. I noted that it wasn’t as soft and plush as it could have been, but it was good enough for me not to resurrect my body in protest, I supposed. I proceeded to study my burial dress, indigo and stiff, and then my tiny, fat-fingered hands, also swollen from the Racist Sugar. Wondering why the undertaker ain’t fix them better, I quick-looked around and unhooked one of my hands, totally against protocol, and held it gently, the rest of me so still, patting and pitying and loving on myself.
It was my face that did me in. At the sight of it, stilled by death, beat to the orishas, so quiet, I went on and shrieked a shriek I had kept queued up since before I died, a one-person symphony of shrieks that I had saved in a quiet box inside me for months after folks—some I knew in real life, some I knew from that internet—died. Face to face with myself at quiet rest, I drove every muscle into contorted motion, spinning away from my body to show the mourners, This is how it’s done, pee-pul. Thereafter, I hiked up my tablecloth dress and, left knee first, climbed directly into my casket with myself. The church erupted, and Mama was embarrassed, which almost gave me pause, but I kept going inside with myself. “Keep sanging! Keep sanging!” I commanded the Wigs as I descended.
I wanted to mourn loudly, for myself and for the others, just like I’d wanted to catch the holy ghost as a child, and so when I died, I did. I had often seriously considered climbing into other folks’ caskets, and dressed appropriately, in loose-fitting pants or easily raised dresses (no tights), in case the spirit moved me. But I was raised right. I decided instead to wait until I died to climb into my own. My death, like all the others, split me clean into the two sides I had been all along: those loud and quiet, out and in, A- and B-sides. Mourning, to me, was a time for percussiveness. Whether it was mine or somebody else’s, climbing into the casket seemed the ultimate form of loudness for expressing grief and anger over a loss that came too soon, too tragically, too familiarly, or far too unfairly to weep about silently. Which is how I died, and which is how most of the losses of our people came back then.
They wanted us to hush up about it, but we refused. We were in the streets again like we had been in the 1960s and the 1860s and everywhere before, after, and in between. We signed our emails and made memes with Zora’s “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” We also watched ourselves in the streets on many screens, watched ourselves die, scream, cry, and march, across multiple platforms, at all hours of the day, sometimes on two screens at a time, every day of the week. Things were, or felt, loud in a new kind of way, because the amount of grotesquerie grew in tandem with that new media, the social kind, the clicks-for-revenue variety. If one were to go back to the internet of the 2010s, one could just google “what are black folks mad about + mm/dd/201x” and see an archive of the memes, GIFs, and listicles with titles like “10 Times Black People Told Becky to Have All the Seats.” And our “bodies,” our thing-ness, made us feel louder than we really were, our dark skin and thick lips shouting and demanding, our hair so damn noisy it was illegal in some schools and workplaces. We needed to be louder, on our own terms, more strategically, to shout, “I AM A MAN” over our hypermedia thingification. We consequently required one another to make a public statement on our social media pages, telling folks we were outraged about the latest racist indignity or state-sanctioned murder, especially if the victim was a straight black man or had a 3.8 GPA. Sometimes white folks required us to make a public post or quizzed us on the details of said latest racist indignity or state-sanctioned murder to see if they were getting close to being as woke as we were despite not having the “lived experience” of growing up a “POC” from an “underprivileged” community. Everything was louder back then, to drown out the screams.
But somewhere within that raucous cacophony of shouts and stomps, beneath the constant demand to be louder, was something else—on the lower frequencies, on the B-side of our collective blackness—that whimpered and whispered and begged for us to succumb, and I was drawn to it. The cultural theorist Kevin Quashie might have called it “quiet,” “a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears.” Building on poet Elizabeth Alexander’s rumination on interiority in her 2004 essay collection, The Black Interior, Quashie’s 2012 work The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture asked us to be better readers of black life, on the page and in public, through the political space of the black interior. This was no small task. The collectivizing push seeks to reduce blackness to public resistance or a set of public lessons about “race or racism, or about America, or violence and struggle and triumph or poverty and hopefulness.” In tandem, it meant considering the work of quiet in the lives of individual black folks and the possibilities for the “terms of quiet—surrender, interiority, and especially vulnerability” to have import and resonance with the collective. It wasn’t a call for silence, nor was it being silenced. Rather, Quashie showed us how black folks had long chosen other ways to consider freedom and resistance, even as we were constructed in the national imagination as superfluously expressive or, at best, as those woeful people, “darker than blue,” doomed to be the jukebox conscience of the West and of white folks.
Quashie argued for a figurative quiet comprising words and narratives, skillfully collecting dispatches from black writers and the worlds they created inside of their characters to share with readers. He read visual texts, taking ones we had been encouraged to read as loud—like the famous photo of Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Peter Norman at the 1968 Olympics—and opened them up to show us the quiet, interior, meditative character of a display that some folks remember as if it were pre–sunken place Kanye interrupting Taylor Swift. Across black art mediums, he asked us to look for quiet, for pauses, to check the crevices and interstices, and to see their depth, capaciousness, and political possibilities. In short, he asked us to consider black folks as human beings with complex interior lives, like any other human folk. Without the hush, white folks can’t see our insides, only what’s projected on the big screen in 2-D. And without a hush, we can’t hear our own insides when they telling us something’s wrong.
I, too, had sought this quiet, but outside of myself, out in the world, in sound and music. I was looking for a literal rather than a figurative quiet, the kind that comes after somebody’s mama shushes everybody real hard, raising her hand and spraying spit everywhere, because she listening for danger. I didn’t yet have the calm or the command of interiority that Quashie’s subjects had, but I had had my fill of the loud and externally expressive. Like a black Goldilocks, in sound I looked for an elusive, just-right third space that I had heard my whole life: a still hum, underground and electric, somewhere between the A- and B-sides. I heard it as a little girl, when I first learned to tune my own violin. I heard it between Alice Coltrane’s keys and in the alternate take of Miles’s “Flamenco Sketches” and in the space John Coltrane left on A Love Supreme. I heard it when somebody white said I was good at something for a black person. I heard it in Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” and in Hargrove’s staccato fifths and fourths. And in Dwele’s Slum Village choruses and somewhere in Yusef Lateef’s Detroit. At revival, I heard it at the tail end of spirit shouts, trailing off and falling down before returning to the shouter’s chest. I heard it when I told my favoritest student that the state of Georgia was gone kill Troy Davis. I heard it in Roy Ayers’s vibraphonic hymns. After Trayvon died, I heard it when Frank Ocean left a phrase unresolved on Saturday Night Live, instead of bringing it to its proper conclusion, like on the album. After Daddy died, I heard it everywhere on Ocean’s Blonde and Endless and on Aretha’s Amazing Grace. And after I died, I remembered that I had first heard it from Ms. Mavis on “I’ll Take You There.”
Like our jazz forebears and their blues forebears, and their gospel forebears, and their spiritual forebears, and like those folks who came before them who sang and drummed inside themselves in the bottoms of ships bringing them across the ocean to build this country, I searched for that perfect blue note of mourning. I knew it existed, but I couldn’t hear it for all the noise, and for all the writing and talking and tweeting about the noise, which just made more noise. I searched for a place to turn in, to be both figuratively and literally quiet, to get still in myself so the spirit could come in and heal me. A place away from the clawing, collective necessity to regularly be in a palpable rage in order to prove I was black and alive instead of white or dead. More than I needed hope for a mountaintop future where things would finally be different for my children or grandchildren, I needed to hear something right then that would simultaneously capture that constant loss and trauma and traumatic loss and the ways we responded to that constant loss, persisting and creating and imagining elsewheres of freedom and possibility. Words, on the page or on the screen, were of no consolation. If I was really going to mourn and heal, I had to quit trying to find a quiet moment in the loudness and just get still and listen. If we were to fully reckon with, mourn for, and reconcile America and the West and their enduring and ever-present harms, we all had to learn to do the same. If we were gone be whole, we all needed the shape and tone of those sounds just below the surface of notes.
No more fire: the quiet this time.
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