Show Some Love for the World Famous Apollo Kids!
First published in CALLALOO Volume 38, Number 1
1.
Up the stairs, up the stairs, the ushers point and nod, letting us know to keep going, don’t stop, that there are no seats available between here and the nosebleeds. We snagged free tickets to a taping of Showtime at the Apollo and I can hear them pump Marvin and Tammi, above us, around us, setting the mood. I’m happy, no matter how hot August is outside, no matter how many red-carpeted flights of stairs they tell us to climb, keep climbing, still in lockstep behind those we stood behind in that line that stretched from the door to Frederick Douglass Boulevard.
Finally, the last steps, the last balcony. The usher motions us into the chamber: a clamshell containment of sound and black — no, American history, house-lit dim, with walls of gilt on cream. We downstep and try not to slip to get to the two seats near the aisle, two rows from the drop to the main floor. We sit, so aware of our heat as our bodies rest, our hearts still pounding, and we smile — for we’re here, and the rows fill up fast with we, the people. The we, you could have just opened up the theatre doors and waved-us-in people. Not just the fortunates who can regularly afford concerts and Broadway nights in NYC, and not packs of kids in matching t-shirts getting one of their yearly field trips — no, we the regular folk who happened to be walking through Harlem when hawkers gave out tickets, though maybe I’m not regular folk anymore, maybe I’m too long out of the inner city, maybe too half-white to have ever really qualified. I just know I’m part of the we who know the amateur hour that used to be broadcast late on Saturday nights, who know the lucky stump and Ms. Kiki Shepard’s liquid walk, who anticipate that when the performers take the stage, if they can sing, if they can stun, they will get the praise they deserve. But if they falter, we get to call out the truth: we never have to pretend that the offering is what we want when we don’t want it. This isn’t charity. This is honesty. We get to wave our arms and scream what we’d scream at the TV: get off the stage!
C’mon, show some love, everyone, we need to feel the energy! says the warm-up man who is coaching the audience from the stage. He tells us the show depends upon us, upon all of us, the families, the couples, the teens, and even the little kids bouncing up and down these red seats the camera will never sweep.
I used to watch Showtime at the Apollo as a young adult and I clapped from my bed if a contestant nailed it, if a singer did Luther or Mariah and made me tingle inside, made my mood soften or brighten just like that. I can’t sing well myself, but if I could, that’s all I’d do. To be on that stage, piercing the Teflon-coats of a thousand hearts — that’s the life. That’s power and love. The power of love. Though I’ve been around long enough to know that it gets complicated. Brutal. That at this level, you can’t remove commerce from the equation. But even if we did, somehow remove commerce from the equation, and zoomed in on the men and women having their moments in the audience, drinking you in, trying to drink you up, trying to take that magic home, magic that is infused through you, you blessed vessel you, what happens when the song is over? Do they look at you like you’re The Lady in Red from For Colored Girls, with your rhinestones soaked off and studding the bottom of the tub?
C’mon on y’all, show me whatcha got! And we all go ahhhhhhh!
I’m 33 and new to the City, to Harlem. Tonight I’m a participant but I’m also a listener, a witness, and yes it’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes. I ‘m not embarrassed to sing that song I know all of the words to without once downloading or stopping on the radio dial whenever I hear it’s playing. I’ve never once chosen to listen to Nelly. Not once, not ever! But it doesn’t matter. Music, like ideas, like sweat, saturates the air we breathe, comes back dripping on our heads. But don’t mistake this for a summer subway platform. There’s no funk here, just us, the soft warmth of each other, a harmony as girls rustle in front of us, working their way to the two free seats down the row.
Make some noise! Come on, Apollo Theatre…
The warm-up comedian takes the mic. He’s in a leather suit, cracking jokes. The audience laughs as he imitates Jamaicans, then Africans. When he homages the Puerto Ricans, he adds salsa hips, exulting in the joy the people conjure, dancing, and the audience laughter doesn’t feel like ridicule, feels like recognition, though I know I laugh the hardest when someone nails an imitation perfectly, even when it’s mean, but this doesn’t feel mean, this just feels real, and the comedian is doing his job: he’s warming us up inside, making us supple and ready for the show and its stars. The comedian calls out Harlem in the house? And I scream yeahhhh!
Just like the kids that surround us, so many groups of high-schoolers, younger, and older, and cheering, and watching. City kids. Around the block kids. Harlem. Brooklyn. Boogie Down Bronx. They chant. They call and a group across the way responds. The kids behind me, girls, 10, 11, in cotton mini-skirts, they’re getting up and sitting down, their bodies showing what we’re thinking: get the show on the road, please! I tell my friend S that if the past shows are any indication, there should be a national act, then the Apollo Kids’ performance, then the amateurs get their shot. S bought a frozen water from a vendor outside, and it sweats in her hands as she sips what’s melted into her mouth. S is a make-up artist, an Iraqi-born beauty, and it’s almost eerie looking at her perfectly-lined eyes, perfectly-blended foundation. There’s something painful when you look directly at beauty, when there’s no blemish to puncture the tension, to diffuse the power of a woman’s face, a woman’s body. I touch my hairline and wipe away moistness.
Ah — a pretty stagehand whispers into the comedian’s ear and it’s time. First up: the chart star, Lil’ Mama. The oooh from the crowd — her name pleases the pint-sized judges around me, for I hear the shrieks of recognition, the gasps from those who know their BET backwards and forwards, who know every hook like lullabies heard in the crib, that some of these hooks were lullabies heard in the crib. Her backup dancers file in, each carrying a school chair as a dance prop. They set the stage and freeze in position.
This is when I see the little girl. She’s down the row. I can’t help but turn towards her because she is jumping like shooting stars are bursting from her body. She must know who Lil Mama is I say to S, and we smile at her excitement. She’s a little girl, light-skinned like her mother. Eight, nine years old maybe. I’ve only been in New York City for three weeks and I can’t tell some ethnicities apart yet: Dominican? Puerto Rican? Mixed? Her long wavy hair is soaked, like she’s in a fever dream. Lil’ Mama, all seventeen years of her in her street-dance denims, takes her spot on the stage.
The first hard beats of “Lip Gloss” start and the kids go crazy! All around us squealing they’re so happy. I’m watching the floorshow, loving the dance crew dance, straining to hear the song well to tell if I actually know it. S and I are soon laughing, mouthing the oft-repeated “my lip gloss is cool, my lip gloss is poppin!” and I’m already guessing how much L’Oreal paid to put out this ditty so I miss what’s going on behind us, around us, down the row with the wet-head girl.
Until the hooting begins. I feel the rush of gaze move from the stage to just behind me and across the aisle because everyone behind me is watching this girl — not Lil Mama — but the 9 year old! The wet-head. And now so do I. I watch her dance. But the way she’s dancing, it’s hard to call it dancing. With the hard stomp beat as her soundtrack, there’s a violence to the way she shakes herself fast, her short, hard bands of vibration through her body, like she’s having a seizure standing up. She must be copying someone, or something, as seen at home, as seen on TV, and this is the best way she can recreate it, in this stunted hard way. She is throwing herself into this. Everyone cheers and points.
Even me. Lil Mama performs below us but I keep my head jerked around, watching the wet-head girl, my eyes wide, my mouth wide, too, my face looking like a smile but is just as much Oh, My, God, what is going on here? S’s face is just like mine. People all over the balcony have stopped watching the stage and are watching her. Sweet-faced teenage boys are calling out, Hey, it’s the next Lil’ Mama! I look at her real mama. She is not obese, but there’s a solid plumpness to her still young body, as if she’s already given over to a certain kind of motherhood, or she can’t fight her way out. She watches and smiles. Not in a pimp way. Supportive, it seems. I hear: she should be downstairs! She should be on the stage! And I join the trance for yes, this is a pixie dust moment folks, this is her chance for fame! For change! For the dream sequence that could pluck her from here and drop her to there. If only she could get on camera…I catch eyes with the mother and point downstairs but she says, no, the show airs at 1:00am. They don’t want to show children in the audience at 1:00am. Lil’ Mama sings my lip gloss is cool, my lip gloss is poppin’ and the gaze collectively shifts and everyone is looking above me. The three girls in their cotton miniskirts, next to two girls in school uniform skirts, how old were they? 10,11 max? Now they’re bent over, sticking their backsides out to the crowd, skirt hems just covering their precious bits, cotton crotches still flashing sometimes as they keep shaking shaking shaking and the teenage boys and girls are laughing smiling and hollering — not lavisciously, it seems, just entertained, stunned, I don’t know. Everyone likes imitation I guess. The older ones point to the younger ones. The whole balcony is looking this way while the girls keep shaking their behinds up and down, up and down, the moves I’ve seen in the videos, the fantasies of men who like their women willing, the fantasies of women who like their men wanting, the images I rarely choose to watch but see everyday on the screens at my gym, my Harlem gym that keeps these videos looped above our heads when it’s not sports or CNN. I can never dance like that, not in public. I resist, fear even, making such a display before men, before women, before anyone who could reach and grab me in a second and then accuse me of asking for what they just did. No, I can’t risk it. Aggressive displays of the body makes me slink into myself, try to hide fast. I do not know these girls personally. Why it is that they can do something I cannot. The strictest women I’ve ever known were black mothers, and maybe the mama that would have told them to sit right down didn’t bring them tonight, leaving them free to be like the sisters, the cousins, the older girls at school who love to dance as much as they can. And when the young girls copy, someone roots them on. When the young girls copy, the boys clap and cheer.
The girls have everyone’s attention. And as we laugh and squeal the voltage of our group gaze burns hotter than the stage lights below. Until, at the far end of the balcony, another girl does it. Or, a boy does it up top. And another girl, way at the bottom. So many performers have popped up in the top balcony, I can’t focus on just one anymore. I look at the wet-head girl. She keeps dancing. In ten minutes comes the “Apollo kids” segment and a girl in a big taffeta dress, or a sharp boy in his best church suit will assume center stage and sing I Believe I Can Fly, or some other big ballad that makes us call out and cry. But the wet-head girl is watching Lil’ Mama. Watching and learning what she needs to know.
2.
A girl as cute and skinny as a pretzel stick walked to the middle of the A Train car as I returned from the Bronx. Her hair fell down her back in braids and I watched her lean against the pole, keeping her balance as the train shuttled forward and I thought God, this is why I love the subway. I’m told affection for mass transit is a mark of being new to the City, but I don’t care. A hundred universes collide, merge, ricochet away so close to me everyday. A feast of tenderness sometimes, as when I see young daughters lean into their fathers, and the fathers hold them tight.
I only stole glances. I didn’t want the kids to feel stared at, to somehow get my intent wrong and feel caught in the interrogator’s lamp. There was a difference between share and take, and on this axis I danced, sitting there, watching the girl. A white-haired man had spent a few stops singing then asking for money. With him gone, a clear quiet in the car. A man, a woman, a man, a woman with spaces in-between, our thoughts invisible yet pooling in the air between us. I wanted to watch the girl, there was something insistent about my want, yet I kept pushing myself to look up at the ads, or at my own reflection in the window ahead as we sped through the tunnel.
Until the girl gripped the shiny pole in one hand, and started swinging slowly around, leaning back. She curved her back and let her head fall backwards, her braids gently swinging as she twirled left to right, left to right, in this car in motion. Then she leapt, pulling both skinny legs up — one leg bent, one leg out, both thighs gripping the pole as she tried to swivel around —
Is she doing what I think —
She tried again. I knew what the move was — I thought — and she wasn’t completing it. She twirled again, arching her upper back and letting her hair fall, one hand holding the pole, the other arm extended, and there was no doubt in my mind that she was imitating what she’d seen in thousands of videos and movies: the moves of the woman stripping on stage for pay. I wanted to bolt from my seat and say stop it! Don’t do that here! I wanted to scream it but I did not say a word. I just stared. Hard.
This girl. This child — playing. Doing what any of us still 70 pounds might try to do — fly through the air! Dance! Feel good! But somehow, this girl mimicked the illicit moves of Sin City dancers, moves that these days she could easily learn from music videos. So mainstreamed they were, aerobics teachers taught pole dancing as cardio dance. Even at the Rite-Aid cash register you couldn’t avoid the imagery. Right there, on the cover of US Magazine, were Britney Spears’s two towheaded sons, both with pitiful, about-to-howl looks on their faces: Soda in baby bottles, Mommy’s many men, Nighttime cries for Daddy’s love. Kevin battles for Sean and Jayden as Britney grows more dangerous. And in the bottom corner, an image of Britney on a stripper pole.
The girl kept swinging, slowly, leg raised. I was exasperated now. You don’t know what you’re doing. But her parents should. Her guardian. Someone. I looked for the mother and I saw a woman in her 50s, late 50s maybe. She spoke to another woman, fully engrossed. She wore a t-shirt that said, I kid you not: “The Economic Facts Are Different For Women.” I stared daggers at her. Pay attention to this child! She’s making a sex spectacle of herself. Please. Before it’s too late.
Everywhere in our culture strippers moving like girls moving like strippers that are available to be paid and touched and fucked. Not just in Thailand and Cambodia. Here in America. Here in Harlem. I walk past brownstones, tenements, new condos, with their heavy stone facades that can hide so much, almost everything, from the street passersby, hide so much painful history, so much painful now. 1 in 3 they say. 1 in 3 girls. 1 in 6 boys. In houses of the rich, the poor, and every grade inbetween. The brutal truth of school. Of coaches. Of mentors. Of family you thought you could trust. We don’t have to go abroad to find desperate children. I only need to call out, say, are you hurt? Heads will turn. Or want to turn. Once, I would have thought someone disturbed if they focused on sex in a situation involving a child. Now I can’t help myself, now that I am supposed to be a protector, by virtue of being an adult, even if I don’t have children of my own. Protectors can’t afford to ignore the possible, even if it is unlikely.
Watch her braids swing. Watch how happy she is to be watched, for now, she knows she has our attention. She is just a child, and she is happy to be held by adoring gazes, the same gazes of the recital audience, or the nationally-televised talent show, the big hands that clap clap clap together hard and the arms that open for embrace.
It is now that I remember the clawing feeling. A wound so old but thousands of years older than me.
I manually override the alarms. For the rest of the trip I keep my eyes to myself, willing that force I sent into the world to come back to me. As impossible a wish, I know, as calling back sunlight, or radiation, absorbed by the buds on branches reaching for each other from one side of the street to the next.
3.
Four years old and I’m at St. Philips’s Academy, Detroit, 1979. My young mother is at work, or at school, training to be a nurse, while my young father, at home in his La Z Boy recliner, is drinking himself to death. But I’m happy. Or I remember being happy. And right now I’m by myself at a long table, yet kids are there, they must be there. I am on a plastic scoop chair. I feel the gaze of women teachers, short-haired, in sweaters. But I don’t hear any words I just feel them watching, that energy of concern. I don’t even know how it ends, who picks me up. My grandmother. My mother. Someone else. Not my father. But as I sit on that chair, I rock. I rock my small pelvis back and forth over and over the corner of the chair. I feel pleasure intense enough to keep me making this strange movement. I keep rocking and rocking and nobody says anything.
Of course they notice. Adults notice when a young girl rubs her crotch against something. This is 1979. I’m in a Lutheran preschool in inner city Detroit. But no one stops me. No one hauls me away. If they did, I have blacked that out. And if anyone introduced me to that pleasure before this day at school, I have blocked that out as well.
Over twenty-five years later, I wake up in a San Antonio hotel bed faint from the pain in my head but I am willing everything in the dream to stay with me so I can understand.
Two words, and only those two words, said in a guttural voice fully capable of extinguishing me: bad girl. I tell my husband what I heard. He holds me and I try to relax into his arms but the headache is too much. I pull away and go for the ibuprofen in my bag, swallow the sweet pills and crawl back into his arms. He rocks me until the pain dims enough for me to fall into twilight sleep. It’s then that I remember. I know why she thinks I’m a bad girl.
I heard that voice once I was picked up from school. When I felt the coldest hand pushing through my stomach as if it were muslin curtain, reaching for something that wasn’t hers. She wanted to warn me, control me enough to keep me safe. But shame is like radiation: indiscriminate in what it kills.
If there is a universe inside us, if our creativity is linked intrinsically with our sexuality, what does it mean to be told no, to be told you are bad, if you try to seek the entrée into the mysterious that God has given us all? The stuff of our Christian origin story, yes, and it is not just a story when you believe, and it’s not just a story when you are scolded, or worse, for public displays of sexuality. Especially when everywhere we look, there are men and women using their sexuality in their art and commerce and are highly compensated, and there are those among us who are not highly compensated but look highly sexed, who look like they’ll do anything for a price when really they just want to know power and love?
I hear the voice again and I cringe. But I am sympathetic. What is an elder to do when rape is always a threat? What is an elder to do when being known as a hyper-sexualized girl is to be considered degraded, a state worthy of contempt and hurt?
4.
Consider Beyoncé’s “Drunk in love.” Beyonce hard sells her body in the song’s music video, a nighttime beach tableau and she the lone walker, writher, dancer until her husband Jay Z shows up. This performance is adapted for the 2104 Grammy Awards complete with chair dance, that classic Fosseian seduction, and Beyoncé’s choreography works overtime to keep you staring and awed by her power, display, talent, beauty, skin, hair, eyes, teeth whatever it takes —
I say “hard sell” but she is not selling her body. Not literally. For how much can be sold of her if the buyer can’t touch or take her home? One end of the spectrum says nothing, but the other end is the person who refuses to be photographed for fear of losing her soul.
When I say “hard sell” I want you to think of playwright David Mamet’s ABC: Always Be Closing. I want you to remember ABC Warehouse men in wide ties who won’t let you leave without a TV. Beyonce is no Willy Loman because she’s not old and she’s on top of her game yet she is working overtime on these sales. Every move means business. Dare you to measure that energy in a limb, in a look, that if it could, would grab you by whatever it took to keep you in her thrall.
Then it’s husband’s turn. Jay Z raps his rap and I don’t perk up until he says I’m Ike Turner…now eat the cake, Anna Mae. Words, that to a young audience, may mean nothing, though we can’t assume, given how movies are replayed on BET and VHI and TBS and any kid with cable can watch, but for us adults who have seen the Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It, and remember that scene in the diner, there’s a bit of needle scratch across the record, a what did he say?
Write it off as sexy talk, or a play for marital dominance, but how can this couple that tops celebrity power and wealth lists at an estimated net worth of $750 million reference a scene of domestic humiliation like it’s nothing, like they’re just more words as magic beans to sell? We can hear words and allow them to pass through our system undigested, untasted even but if you consider those words, this is the stuff of abuse. For when Jay Z says “eat the cake” he references the scene when Ike Turner rashly orders a whole cake and pushes Tina to eat. She refuses. Ike says that if a white man tells her to open her mouth she does. Tina Turner later said this never happened. But we know her marriage happened. We know Ike was domineering and cruel. Tina may be the moneymaker but he is the manager and he is putting her in place. And in those lines is the shiv, for packed into every waterlogged syllable is so much evil that black women have suffered for the last 400 years. How we get hate from supposed-to-be-safe quarters. The shameful indignity that her husband says something like that to her, in front of friends, in front of white strangers, in the 1960s, and everyone knows who they are, and it turns into a scene of painful acquiescence — this is the imagery that Jay Z references so casually, drops and walks away like his Bey does from that burning car in her video for “Diva”. They can write it off as a cheap reach for outrageousness. That’s fine. But that doesn’t change how much meaning has been conveyed, how much need to control, degrade has been expressed in so few words.
Now consider their career success. Twenty-first century Jay Z and Beyonce bear no resemblance to the Black American experience of men and women forced into servitude and men shut out of better paying jobs and families kept out of decent housing. Can you watch them at the president’s Inauguration, or at the MTV Music Awards, Jay Z in the crowd holding their toddler Blue Ivy, and even imagine a past where any young colored woman walking down the street was considered hot-to-trot by white passersby?
But that’s the thing: is that past even past? For every teddy Beyoncé wears on stage, for every song that references fellatio, even if it’s within the bonds of holy matrimony, her hard-sold body is part of the billion-dollar deal. And I wonder what it’s like for her the nights she doesn’t feel like performing. I wonder what it’s like for her when someone tells her she’s contractually obligated to take photos that require seduction looks, bared skin. Not that she’s forced, or doesn’t exercise a mighty agency over her career. But the fact that playing her stage persona Sasha Fierce is her job, an extremely lucrative job, and many salaries depend upon this job. The show must go on, they say. And I think about the million little girls, and boys, who mimic the moves, who learn that a body like hers moving like hers is what is most valuable. It is what will lift you from here to put you to there. And I wonder if the children believe there is protection in sex. That this is the trick that always works. A declaration contrary, of course, to the warnings of mothers and grandmothers and anyone in society telling a girl to keep her legs closed, to not be too sexual. Disobey and risk being known as the kind of girl they always thought you were.
But I can’t forget the day I walked into that Central High School English class in Detroit. Ms. M wasn’t finished with the previous class, she was still teaching a lesson courtesy of Destiny’s Child. On her boombox, she played “Independent Women, Pt. I”. What are they trying to say? Ms. M asked. A girl raised her hand: don’t be dependent on a man. Another girl replied: if you want something, figure out how to get it for yourself. These students where young — 14, 15 maybe. But as Ms. M played then parsed the lyrics, elaborated on the importance of staying in school, going to college, and being able to take of yourself and your family, I knew that something powerful was happening. The song sold more than sex and love. The song created a vision of self-reliance for listeners, especially young listeners forming their ideas of how the world works. You, yes you, can do things. Don’t believe anyone who says you’re nothing without them. And don’t eat the cake you don’t want to. Try to control me boy, you get dismissed. I think of the kids in the balcony, the subway, school. The way we listen, the way we learn. The way we just want to be seen. The way we open when we really feel love. The way we’ll try almost anything for that love.
And this is when I want to grab the microphone and beg you to love us like you’ve never loved before. This is when I sing to you that love will never tear us apart, that love is all we’ll ever need, that there ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no mountain low enough, that you’re all, I need, to get by. Then my back-up dancers join me on stage, and together, we’ll convince you we’re sincere. Together, we will close the sale.
