Keeping Together In Time

Your editor came across this video of Louisville skate trains (h/t Tiana Reid) a few days before that city heard the news Breonna Taylor’s shooters would escape justice. The Louisville connection is probably less than perfectly synchronic. Still, in the aftermath of the state’s whitewashing of those killer cops, it seems apt to focus for a few minutes on a life-giving flow of movement channeled by Afro-Americans in that town.

The graceful restorative sensation of being together in time has deep roots in Afro-America. Ethnomusicologist Charles Keil has thought hard about how brothers and sisters make it happen through what he’s called “participatory discrepancies.” (See  https://www.musicgrooves.org/ for more on PDs. ) But he’s also aware of the need to resist racist projections on this score (per this 90s comment):

I’ve been saying for about 40 years now that the most important aspects of all musicking are the groove and the sound. But when we commonly attribute more groove and more sound to the ‘lessers/lowers/others’ in our midst or elsewhere, when we attribute more magic, more body wisdom, more ‘touch’ and more ‘feel’ to ‘them’ and give ‘them’ star status or believe in their shamanic healing powers, we honor and reward their groundedness and grooviness, but we are probably adding energy to the othering processes: the stereotyping, the racism. A persisting Cartesian mind/body dualism is at the heart of racism based on expectations that whites will mastermind and blacks will supply the muscle. In a continuing Cartesian context, ‘we’ whites (the tired old story goes) have the minds, intelligences, sensitivities to see and hear what great body wisdom ‘they’ (e.g., James Brown) have. I still think putting minds back in bodies and celebrating the unconscious processes, the wisdom of the body, etc., is one way of fighting against racist, sexist, class assumptions. But would a science of PDs, systematic measurements and panels of compared opinions, do anything to lessen, puncture, debunk the selective or excessive projections of greater grooviness on to the underclass?

Keil has been alive to how class-bound populations all over the world tend to look down on “others” who help them get their groove on. It’s true too, though, that those who believe in regular order have often managed to do their own collective thing. In his short but revelatory book, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (1997), William McNeill explored how “coordinated rhythmic movement–and the shared feelings it evokes–has been a powerful force in holding human groups together.”

Two movie scenes of white folks dancing and drilling seem right on point when it comes to what McNeill termed “muscular bonding.” The first is from John Ford’s Fort Apache; the second from Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh.

Pialat loved Fort Apache when he saw it as a kid.  Henry Fonda’s comely kick-step probably got to that French provincial even before the final drill gave him marching orders that he’d follow as an auteur 40 years later. Fonda plays a purblind superior officer who makes John Wayne seem like a man of peace in Fort Apache, but those kicks are irresistible! The scene from Van Gogh takes place in a surround that’s a long way from Wayne Territory. It comes after Vincent and his married brother have spent a dissipated night in a Paris whorehouse. French love wars vs. American imperial wars…

I forwarded both movie scenes, along with those Skate Trains, to Charlie Keil and John Chernoff–author of the classic ethnographies, African Rhythm and African Sensibility and Hustling is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl. Chernoff ‘s response was both meta and personal…

Did you guys notice any differences between the roller skaters video and the other videos?  “Fort Apache” left its residue in Ghana into the 1970s.  I used to hang with the Apaches at Apache House…

Chernoff elaborated on the African Apaches in Hustling is Not Stealing:

…during the period of time when I was in Ghana, a considerable number of young people in Accra called themselves Apaches. They evidently took the name from some movie in which the U.S. cavalry comes upon the smoldering remains of a wagon train, and the scout picks up an arrow, exchanges glances with the lieutenant, shakes his head, and mutters, “Apaches.” The Apaches, as understood by uncertified Accra anthropologists based on the ethnographic accounts of Hollywood screenwriters, are generally quiet and understanding; they can sit and watch something for hours, blending into the scenery; they are individualists with a strong sense of interpersonal loyalty; they are true to themselves and they are prepared to die at any time; they mind their own business, and they don’t like people who come around and make a mess. The urban scene is one in which people have to hang together and take care of each other to survive; they don’t have time for “tribalism” unless it’s going to help them or hurt them at a given moment. They try to avoid it in general, even to the extent of calling for themselves a celebrated heritage from thousands of miles away.

It’s tempting to think about what those post-tribal Apaches in Accra shared with urbanites in the Dirty South who skate together through this hard world.  Chernoff, unbidden, posed that question to himself. And his response to that prompt underscored the need to avoid finding “fault with the youth for their lack of political engagement.” Looking back on his time in Africa and Afro-America it was easy for Chernoff to see why black youth–“given their own powerlessness and lack of social standing”–might feel “disaffiliated and uncommitted.” On both sides of the ocean, Chernoff noted, that was almost a strategy for living since “they were all in the mess together.”