those Saturday mornings in the
living room, neglecting chores
to gape at the whirling people
on our television: the shapely
and self-knowing brownskinned
women who dared stare straight
at the camera, the men strong,
athletically gifted as they
leaped, landed in full splits.
No black people I knew lived
like this—dressed in sequins,
make-up, men’s hair slicked
back like 40’s gangsters,
women in skin-tight, merciless
spandex, daring heels higher
than I could imagine walking in,
much less dancing. And that
dancing!—full of sex, swagger,
life—a communal rite where
everyone arched, swayed, shimmered
and shimmied, hands overhead
in celebration, bodies moving
to their own influences, lithe
under music pumping from studio
speakers, beneath the neon letters
that spelled out SOUL TRAIN—
the hippest trip in America.
I’d try to dance, to keep up,
moving like the figures on
the screen, hoping the rhythm
could hit me in that same
hard way, that same mission
of shake and groove, leaving
my dust rag behind, ignoring
the furniture and the polish
to step and turn as they did,
my approximation nowhere near
as clever or seductive, faking
it as best I knew how, shaking
my 12 year old self as if something
deep depended upon the right move,
the righteous step, the insistent
groove I followed, yearning to get
it right, to move like those dancers—
blessed by funk, touched with rhythm,
confident in their motions, clothes,
their spinning and experienced bodies.
