"A Little Devil In America"

[fiefoe]

Hanif Abdurraqib's essay collection weaves together tributes to African American performers and his own life experience into a rich tapestry.

• & this wasn’t exactly practicing dance moves as much as it was learning the different directions my limbs could flail in & & there is no church like the church of unchained arms being thrown in every direction in the silence of a sleeping home
• still with the girls at the Islamic Center standing in line for the water fountain I thought Now is the time & I was decidedly not in the dark of my basement anymore where I knew the floors & I understood every corner of the architecture & I slid back on the top of my toes & no one even turned their eyes toward me & so no one could tell me about the stairs I was sliding toward & so no one saw my brief moment of rhythm before it unraveled & just like that I was in a pile of discarded shoes & it is safest to say that there was no girlfriend for me that summer or the summer after & the cable at my house got cut off the year my mother died.

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'On Marathons and Tunnels'

• Dance marathons began in the 1920s, largely in farm towns. As carnivals and fairs began growing along the American landscape, Americans became more obsessed with the impossible. Feats of strength, or human endurance.
• Her triumph sat directly at the intersection of the era’s many fascinations: with excess, with endurance, with testing the limits of the country’s tolerance for more liberal sexual expression.
• In one hand, Cummings holds the shoes she danced in. A hole is blown clean through each of them, near where a foot might strike the ground during a spirited movement. Both holes, wide as two open mouths, in awe, in horror.
• Even among the desperate, there was a class divide. The people who were down and out but not down and out enough to subject themselves to the rigors of a dance competition would come and bear witness to the people who were even worse off than they were
• The Black dancers who Lindy Hopped in segregated ballrooms or casinos were about celebrating their ability to move like no one else around them could move, for whatever time they could. Pushing themselves to the brink of a short, blissful exhaustion, as opposed to a slow, plodding, death-defying one. <> After all, what is endurance to a people who have already endured? What is it to someone who could, at that point, still touch the living hands of a family member who had survived being born into forced labor?... It was about having a powerful enough relationship with freedom that you understand its limitations.
• try to shake ourselves free from the confines of school, or parents, or sports, or any of the other responsibilities that we would later come to see as gentle winds in the oncoming hurricane of adulthood.
• It occurs to me now that this was the real joy of dancing: to enter a world unlike the one you find yourself burdened with, and move your body toward nothing but a prayer that time might slow down.
• Beyond all of his aesthetic cool, Cornelius was a poet speaker, toying with melody and syntax in his introductions and interviews. At the start of each episode, the voice-over would introduce Cornelius as the camera zoomed in on him smiling easy. Then he’d take a deep breath before unfurling a long, winding sentence along the lines of
• 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.
• He busts a funky chicken, and then an ill-fated attempt at a split that still managed to look effortless and somehow magical. It was a tithe—another thing to add to the list of generosities Cornelius gave.
• if they are still living somewhere watching the scenes of their past selves cartwheeling and spinning and popping and locking with perhaps some strangers rooting for them. It feels like those are the moments that make a home inside a person.

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'On Going Home as Performance'

• Nearly a year after the funeral, I went to put on the dress shoes I wore the day of her burial. There was some banquet I had to attend and I had to look nice doing it. When I pulled them out of the top of my closet, dirt from the graveyard fell from the sole and landed on my right cheek.
• when michael jackson died, in the early summer of 2009, it was the kind of celebrity death that my particular generation has become especially used to in the past two or three years: a hero central to our childhood suddenly gone, unexpectedly and out of nowhere. Death simply opening its mouth to a wide yawn and drinking in a life that certainly had more to give.
• And so I’m saying that the heat in Columbus was unforgiving on the day Michael Jackson died. I’m saying that everything in the air had bad intentions.
• there wasn’t enough space for the bodies to do anything except dance with the dance partner claustrophobia chose for them, and sometimes that was the wall, and sometimes you couldn’t lift your arm to wipe your sweat, and so sometimes you just shook your sweat off onto whoever was in front of you or behind you, and that person didn’t mind because I think what Michael meant when he sang “Don’t stop ’til you get enough” is that a river must be built out of what the dancing can offer so that we might float once again off grief’s island.
• When all of the preaching had been preached and almost all of the songs had been worn down to echoes and every memory had been rebuilt wide enough for every listener to crawl into, there was Stevie Wonder, Aretha’s dear old friend, singing one last tune before she was carried out of the church and on to her final resting place.
• Once, I had a conversation with a poet who also lost their mother. As we charted out our shared grief, the poet told me something they had learned from another poet. “Well, we have two mothers,” they began to tell me. “The one we keep with us in our hearts, and the corpse we can’t put down.”
• I have fallen so in love with the leaves, who do the duty of making their death beautiful, bursting from otherwise unremarkable branches before the cold browns them and grinds them to dust. May the performance of each funeral be like the leaves on the trees outside my apartment this late November.

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'An Epilogue for Aretha'

• I like this idea—that it’s noble for Black people to react viscerally to work that is created for us, and to respond in a language we know well. There is something valuable about wanting the small world around you to know how richly you are being moved, so that maybe some total stranger might encounter your stomp, your clap, your shout, and find themselves moved in return.
• On night two of the recording, Aretha shows up to the church in a glorious sprawl of a fur coat, and the beams of light from above trip over themselves in an attempt to light her path to the stage.
• Aretha was one of those singers who sang with her whole face. Her face was generally stoic (and maybe a bit nervous) during the parts where she had to hold back, and when she sang, her cheekbones rose into small mountains that the corners of her mouth attempted to scale but never quite succeeded.
• Clara Ward, will scrunch up her face and roll her eyes back in ecstasy at one of Aretha’s impossible high notes, a gesture many of us know to mean you better go ahead—a reverent disbelief when all other emotions fail. Then there’s what some may think is the end of the song, but real ones know is just the middle, when audience members—who, by this point, might as well be choir members—begin flooding the aisles and holding on to the edge of the piano to keep from passing out.

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'This One Goes Out to All the Magical Negroes'

• This one goes out to all of the magical negroes who helped their wayward white pals find love in the vicious underbellies of romantic comedies. To Dave Chappelle, who helped Tom Hanks catfish Meg Ryan through both capitalism and America Online.
• But it was a bond formed through a need for survival. A bond like that isn’t always substantial enough to transform into something extraordinary beyond the boundaries of wherever surviving takes place.
• So many of them, who had made a fantasy of an idyllic America, or who cheered in March when the president declared war, now seeing themselves in a group of rappers who looked the part from afar, and only from afar. No one listened to the songs as much as they loved the refashioning of age-old iconography into something that was newly dangerous for them. Iconography that, for me and some of my Black homies on campus, had been dangerous for years, in its original form.
• Magic tricks all have extremes, but there is so often some movement of the trick that requires sacrifice. A field of dead crows; a trashcan full of playing card fragments. Or the commitment to killing off your whole self so that another version of you can live for an audience’s approval. Until people don’t think of the physics of it all. Until the people who have been aching for a vision see only that vision and nothing else. You know that trick. I’m sure you’ve seen it a hundred times.
• Ellen Armstrong was performing for her people. Black people who worked hard and believed enough in miracles to trust a magician to make some coin appear. The magic of it all. The literal magic, that which exists to give a suspension to belief. That which exists to wash away the knowing of a wretched world and replace it with another. What appears when there was once nothing. What miracles a love for our people bends us toward.
• The idea, it seemed, was about offering a sense of wonder to those who may otherwise have been denied it. To make something small spectacular. Magic relies on what a viewer is willing to see, and what a viewer is willing to see relies on what the world has afforded them to be witness to. Ellen Armstrong was performing for some people who had seen both too much and not enough. She made a life out of this.
• If there is some kind of loophole in the rules of magic, it might be this: the one where a person is able to be invisible until they are desired. Where they are an echo of nonexistence until they can fulfill a need, or tell a story, or be a thread in the fabric of someone else’s grand design. The flawed magic of desiring a body more than an actual person. The magical negro is so replaceable that there is nothing left of them to mourn.

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'Sixteen Ways of Looking at Blackface'

• (Dickens:) Due in part to America’s comforts with slavery and violence, he stated, there is a universal distrust in anything other than individualism as a pathway to survival in the country. The path to success for the American, he observed, meant to carry a healthy desire to set oneself apart from the ideals of others.
• Anyone who speaks a language inside a language can see when that dialect is presenting a challenge for someone who perhaps had to google the correct word to use and the placement of it. Or when it is coming from someone who watched a movie with a Black person in it once and then never saw a Black person again. It would be humorous or fascinating if it wasn’t so suffocating. I would laugh if I was not being smothered by the violence of imagination.
• there are a lot of things white people get wrong about blackface, but the one I think about is the way they slather the makeup on their faces, as if they’ve never seen a Black person before, usually pitch black and wildly uneven, or smeared haphazardly over the skin, with no attention to detail. I have thought before about how this feels like an additional insult positioned atop the obvious one. How even an attempt to mimic cannot be done with enough care for the skin of the mimicked.
• There are historians who say that Henry Murphy was Fagin in real life but that Dickens, out of whatever sympathy he held toward Black people, decided to make the Fagin of Oliver Twist a Jewish villain. <> And no one knows what to make of this, really. What to do when someone has committed themselves to sympathy, but not to mercy.
• I wish we could get down to the bare bones of it all and talk about how blackface, beyond everything else, is such a horrifying look. When done with careful precision, the way it was done in the old days, in the black-and-whites. Black-and-white films interest me most when I think about how darkness is a currency.
• While I understand Vereen’s aims and effort, I am not exactly in love with the idea of attempting to use blackface as a subversive tool for a white audience for a host of reasons—but most notably because it requires trust that said audience will understand themselves to be on the receiving end of the wound and not being invited to mock the wounded. Bert Williams collapsed to his near-death on a stage and a white audience laughed. Ben Vereen attempted to honor Williams and indict the institutions and structural racism that had plagued his life, and a white audience got their laughs, and then cut the cameras off. If there is nowhere for a joke to land, it floats and floats and then is forgotten.

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'On the Certain and Uncertain Movement of Limbs'

• I think of this tension as a push and pull, between generations and histories and geographies. Between those who would try to convince us of a type of survival and those of us who would spend much of our adolescence detaching ourselves from those teachings, taking as many people as we could with us in the process. <> Everyone putting on different masks for different worlds and calling it freedom.
• But if Blackness and the varied performance of it are to be embraced, then what also has to be embraced is the flawed fluidity of it. How the performance is sometimes regional, sometimes ancestral, often partially forged out of a need to survive some place, or some history, or some other people who didn’t wish you or your kinfolk well. And yes, sometimes forged out of an ambition to appeal to the limited imagination of whiteness. The problem is that there is no way to prove oneself Black enough for every type of Black identity in the States, let alone the world.

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'Nine Considerations of Black People in Space'

• & to die in one’s sleep must be to unfold a dream that never stops unfolding & then it is hard to say where sleep ends & death begins & how close to the edge each night drags the unassuming lives it holds in a trembling palm & there are news anchors saying Michael Jackson is dead on television today & I am late to work because it is 2009 & I overslept again
• & I’m wrecked with sorrow & not here to mince words & the moonwalk ain’t got shit to do with the moon & how it hangs lazy & split into white beams over a hood where the streetlights flickered off once & never came back on <> the moonwalk is all about trying to run from the past when its hands keep dragging you back & I have slept myself into exits & still woken to tell of each one
• I think when you are young enough and impressionable enough, and you maybe don’t know much about what rests beyond the stars, you imagine anyone can just go... Including a person you love, who sang along to songs by a member of that group from time to time and surely danced to the group in a time before you were born. I guess I have tricked you into reading about my mother again, and how I do not know if she wanted to go to space but how I still wanted that for her. How, from time to time, I would catch her gazing at the stars. How, of course, I’ve held that old Labelle photo close because it reminds me of a sky my mother might be occupying now, picking out her black afro until it blooms and blooms, an endless dark. No one I love is immune to looking upward on a clear night. Within the vast and open possibility of darkness, though, I had hoped for a people to find a home, or at least a dream.
• He had great action hair: the type that would barely move when he engaged in a tussle or a full sprint. Several Black actors have great action hair, which is why I think so many blaxploitation films focused on the aesthetics of things like an unmoving afro, or thick sideburns. Billy Dee Williams had both!
• To combat this, people began to circulate an image of a younger Trayvon Martin, at Experience Aviation in Florida, from 2009, just three years before he was murdered. In the photo, Martin is wearing a replica of the blue uniform that the astronaut Michael P. Anderson wore in his official NASA photo.
• The Black people who try on the aesthetics of outer space, or who slide backward on a white floor until the white floor resembles the cratered rock, or the Black folks who write or sing or perform our lives into newer, better planets. Reminders that there is some place that lives in the imagination.

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'On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance'
__ When I saw Obama had won, I held a small and silent celebration. I texted my folks back home in Ohio, I messaged the Black kids I grew up with. I reveled in what it all meant. <> In 2019, at a table in Memphis, I can no longer unlock that part of myself, but I still want to honor it. I’m thankful to be surrounded by this optimism, coming from these people. People who have likely seen worse than I ever have in my lifetime but have definitely seen more. Convinced that their nation is just one good person away from dragging itself up from the depths and putting out all of its fires.

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'The Josephine Baker Monument Can Never Be Large Enough'

• a country is something that happens to you. History is a series of thefts, or migrations, or escapes, and along the way, new bodies are added to a lineage.
• (WWI:) America drank in the enthusiasm of Black men to serve, and then took in even more beyond the enthusiastic. If some were willing to fight, it seemed, then they all had to be. Black men were drafted at rates far higher than their white counterparts.
• 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.
• I love Columbus, Ohio, and I say this understanding that love would be mapped onto any place that I hadn’t left, or stayed in long enough to build a shrine of memories. In this way, my love feels more like a matter of circumstance than a matter of politics, or at least that is what I tell myself. <> I do envy Josephine Baker, who left America before it could persuade her to fall in love with it.
• When she attempted to perform in Vienna, for example, churches rang bells during the concert, a signal to the audience that they were committing an act of sin by seeing Baker.
• Here she was, beaming with pride, but also too proud to pass up the opportunity to put the people of the city in their place. <> To look a familiar place in the eye and detail all of its old and unattractive blemishes—that, too, is a type of love for a place. A love not wedded to permanence or wrapped up in the memory of times past, as so much of my love is foolishly wrapped up in. To return to the site of the world coming into focus for you and offering newer, better eyes.

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'It Is Safe to Say I Have Lost Many Games of Spades'

• 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.
• pick up—one that comes, largely, with watching and paying attention. Or having someone who loves you show you the ropes at some point. Because it’s a card game and so many of the Black people I know learned card games at the feet of an elder, not to know one’s way around spades can seem like a reflection on their entire lineage. It is never that serious, of course. But the tells of the person who can’t play spades but doesn’t want to admit it are among my favorite subtleties of the game
• but I remember the moment when Trevor jumped across the table to wrestle Josh to the ground while they threw lunging punches at each other, missing wildly each time. And there was John himself, joining the fray to split up the brawl, which, by this point, resembled one of those cartoon tornados of arms and legs. Everything else was a blur until the exact moment when the cluster of boys collided with the entertainment center and the television resting atop it trembled a bit before beginning its long descent to the ground.

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'My Favorite Thing About Don Shirley'

• by the start of the ’50s, Shirley came to the realization that there might be a lack of upward mobility for Black musicians with a deep investment in classical music (stick to jazz, he was told), and so he went off to study psychology at the University of Chicago, and then he worked in the city as a psychologist.
• And so, in a time of national panic about young people listening to the wrong things and watching the wrong things, Don Shirley set out to see if he could stem the tide of crime by playing the instrument he knew how to play in a small room with young people watching. And it was in this way that Shirley fell in love with music again. By 1955, he released his first album, Tonal Expressions
• But the mere idea of the project relied on a special type of musician. One who was willing to attempt the unknown, and be comfortable walking away with a problem unsolved. For that, I love this small sliver of the life Don Shirley lived. That in a country still obsessed with Black people solving problems they didn’t create, Don Shirley walked away, answering only to himself and his own musical curiosities.
• It seems, instead, that there is a love for these films because they make Americans believe that racism being fixed is something that can happen with a journey through some idyllic half-retelling of history. That it is a matter of proximity, or the shared need to solve some problem on the periphery of racism. Movies like these never approach the simplest and most honest idea: that racism is about power, and the solving of it relies—in part—on people being willing to give up power. But that doesn’t make for as much of an interesting film as having a white person joke with a Black person about chicken.

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'I Would Like to Give Merry Clayton Her Roses'

• 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.
• I would like the roses to be luminescent shades of red, or yellow, or white, or whatever color reminds Merry Clayton most of the churches she learned to sing in. I would like to do this now, before she is again relegated to the nameless and faceless tragic backup singer. I would like to scale some mountaintop and hold stacks of her solo records in each hand, like a messiah summoning the deprived masses to drink in what they’ve been missing. I want Merry Clayton to live forever, but I will settle for people speaking her name when they speak of what impossible force blew through “Gimme Shelter.” I will settle for people not being able to walk from the wreckage of that song without an immovable haunting.
• There were people who thought Clayton’s great flaw was that she could never pull away from her instincts to take people to church, no matter what a song’s content was asking of her. Imagine that, your greatest flaw being that you sing every word as if it were delivered to you by God. <> “Gimme Shelter” required the divine.
• I would like to bring roses to the doorstep of the house Merry Clayton walked out of at midnight in 1969 and I would like to lay roses on the stool where she sat, her pregnant belly hanging over the edge while she sang murder, murder, murder. I would like roses to come out of the ground somewhere any time a person’s voice cracks under the weight of what it has been asked to carry. I would like to do this while the living are still the living, and I don’t want to hear from any motherfucker who isn’t with the program. I would like roses for Merry Clayton to fall from the sky whenever a gunshot echoes above and I would like roses for Merry Clayton in the hands of whoever could throw the first punch but doesn’t.

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'Beyoncé Performs at the Super Bowl and I Think About All of the Jobs I’ve Hated'

• But that’s the trick, isn’t it? Power, when threatened, pulls an invisible narrative from the clouds that only others in power and afraid can see. <> The Super Bowl is not a radical platform, no matter what performance of radical politics can be projected onto it for a brief spell. And so it was also hard for me not to think of Beyoncé’s moment at the 2016 Super Bowl as a conscious decision about how to show up to work.
• I could find a job one or two clicks away from where I found a dodgy but useful old couch. It was like a one-stop shop for wayward desires, and I simply had to adjust my expectations accordingly.
• 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.
• In the moments after these shootings, when Black people say, “I am afraid the country is trying to kill me,” a rebuttal from people without this particular fear is often rooted in what the country has given, and not what it can take away without consequence.
• Bree Newsome scaled a flagpole to take down a Confederate flag with her bare hands because the alternative was living underneath its vile shadow for another day and there had already been enough days. Beyoncé got five minutes as a supporting act at the Super Bowl and donned gold bullets and had Black women pick out their afros and adorn themselves in black leather because the alternative was America’s comfort. A Black person leaves their loved ones or their own personal space of comfort to go into an office where their ideas aren’t taken seriously, but they show up the next day still, and the next day after, because the alternative that capitalism has made for them is a lack of security, or the inability to pay for whatever small freedoms make them feel more human at the end of it all.

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'On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance'
__ & so I’m saying I am of a particular hairline & it deserves all of the affection I couldn’t give the women who blessed me with it & I tell my barber There are people who are both Black and gay though man and he just says Nah I ain’t with that bullshit & I don’t know what that bullshit is & my fist is still clenched & he is still tracing a line along my forehead with a sharp blade & maybe now is not the time to fight & we contain multitudes is all I was saying like how I can want to fight with this nigga but also know it’s the only trustworthy cut in town... & it is never the women who walk in the shop or work in the shop & it is never this part where everyone under a shop’s roof is expected to bend toward the politics of the person holding a head in their gentle palms

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'The Beef Sometimes Begins with a Dance Move'

• Like any good audience in a schoolyard escalation, they could dictate the arc of a night, or a whole life, right in the moment. It can be argued that no roomful of people should have this much power, but the crowd of largely Black people was there to give mostly Black performers what they needed: honesty from their kinfolk.
• When he figured out dance as a career alternative to boxing, he tried to glue sandpaper to his shoes or to his dancing mat, in an attempt to reproduce the sound of his shoes moving around the boxing ring. When that didn’t work, he sprinkled sand on flat platforms to create soundboards. This was in the ’30s, when movement was king, and sound and the body were becoming one. Tap dancers like Sandman carried shoes with them everywhere they went, and if they spotted someone else carrying shoes, one dancer would throw their shoes down on the ground, initiating a challenge, which would take place right there in the middle of the street.
• Expectedly, free from the cover of the wall she was hiding behind, she is hit with a stream of bullets, each painting a small red burst along her cream-colored suit. She collapses to the steps, and Nino Brown survives. It is the part of the film that most clearly articulates that power—particularly for men—means having access to bodies that are not yours as collateral. Countless options for remaining unscathed.

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'Fear: A Crown'
__ Buster Douglas lost his mother, Lula Pearl, twenty-three days before the fight. Those who don’t understand death may not understand how it flushes the system of any fear that might exist. Even before I’d buried anyone, I knew.
Friends, I come to you very plainly afraid that I am losing faith in the idea that grief can become anything but grief. The way old neighborhoods are torn to the ground and new ones sprout from that same ground, it feels, most days, like my grief is simply being rebuilt and restructured along my own interior landscape. There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.

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'On the Performance of Softness'

• I gotta stay fly because I don’t feel like myself without a fresh cut. Let me try this again. I don’t feel like myself without something that makes me desirable to people I don’t know, and to know this is to know that the future of masculinity is probably not in the shape people want it to be.
• Brothers store things. Especially ones who rely on each other for a livelihood, or a verse, or an appearance. There are endless places to tuck damages to the ego when the performance of love is how you and yours get your checks.
• I found myself trying to fill the space of violence born out of discord. I didn’t particularly understand the calm of harmony that blanketed the oldest relationship I knew, and so I found chaos elsewhere.
• I define loneliness by the way the water between my brother and I grows, and becomes more treacherous.
• Still, nostalgists and hip-hop heads got some comfort in seeing the gang back together again. The performance of appearances. They all seemed to love one another for just a little while longer. It is funny, the things that give people comfort. Even a group of men gritting their teeth and tucking in long-held resentments can bring joy to people who don’t even know them but have built a monument to their closeness in their heads... these were the first men I knew who weren’t afraid to love each other loudly and publicly, even as messy and unrefined as it was, and I’m trying to learn a better way. I’m trying to reach across the shallow expanse of gendered rigidity and walk the walk of affection rather than just live the highlights of it.

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'Board Up the Doors, Tear Down the Walls'

• As punishment, he’d often hand us massive, dog-eared books, or give us large research projects to undertake, sometimes themed to fit whatever it was we had gotten in trouble for. If I got caught stealing candy, for instance, I might have to research the history of that candy and write a paper on it.
• There is something about the way that rage interlocks with love, which interlocks with a need to protect. To protect the people you care for, but also to protect yourself.
• Throwing my body around in a mass of bodies didn’t do much to bring me to some emotional resolution when it felt like the people around me didn’t always see me as one of them and therefore cared less about damage. Even in my fucked-up youthful understanding of violence and rage as catharsis, I knew that it was best felt when the perceived enemy had some level of respect for, or understanding of, my personhood.
• When you find yourself chasing the tail of representation at all costs, you’d be surprised what speeds past you while you aren’t even looking. And you’ll be surprised by what you’ll accept for yourself when you get the narrowest idea of representation fulfilled.