Lecture Notes: On Trust: Rance Allen, Twinkie Clark, and Ashon Crawley
For Rance Allen and Twinkie Clark, trust is a major factor in belief. Trust is in many ways the condition of belief. And belief is about refusal to accept whatever in this world might cause doubt. Whenever doubt or concern seep in, there is a reservoir of hope, made real by this entity that one could trust, that one could depend upon. What is this confidence, the nature of this almost arrogant disavowal of the plans of evil? And what does it mean to depend on some force that you cannot see or feel?
Or perhaps they could. Maybe we are looking at the question of rationality and belief all wrong. Rance and Twinkie come from spiritual traditions where they believe, where they indeed know that God is real. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about this kind of knowing near the end of chapter five of Black Reconstruction in America, a chapter he titled the “Coming of the Lord.” He reminded us that to the newly emancipated, God was real.
When you know that you know that you know, one moves in the world differently. A gift of knowing is of course present in the sound of that confidence, resplendent in what Richard Iton calls the minor-key sensibilities that structure the idea that there is such a thing as “the Black fantastic.” Politics do not capture this tradition. No matter how hard we try force it. It evades the closure of the political. It is a sensibility, it is a knowing, it is what Ashon Crawley means he gathers together what he calls the “aesthetics of possibility.”
When Rance Allen unexpectedly passed away, it hurt. Something about him moving from this realm left us bereft. We felt his transition as if he were family. The way he sang, the way he danced, the calling he fulfilled. He was family.
The oh so familiar sound of his voice was present for me long before I knew its owner, long before I knew its meaning. It resided in the migrations of Africans who ended up in Detroit—a place known for both its working-class radicalism and its blues, its labor militancy and its gospel. There’s something about Detroit. There’s something about Black Detroit’s belief. It is a space that that also produced the Clark Sisters. Their sound forever immortalized in the belief of a Mattie Moss Clark. And in her elevation of a sound she heard somewhere, probably in Alabama, among people who had to work in places where no humans should have to toil. She made it into a form, that it could be performed and then passed down—her gift, a three-part harmony of trust. The Clark Sisters, like the Rance Allen Group, then made it available to us. And we are transformed, filled with the confidence that they had. We know that we know that we know.
When I saw this video shared on Twitter it resonated deeply with me. Something moved. I want to try to talk about that something while introducing you to the main ideas of Blackpentecostal Breath. It shows us the possibilities of Blackpentecostal aesthetics.
It begins with Twinkie’s playing. There is mode of inhabiting the space created by her playing. It is like an arrival of a presence. But that presence is there for us, not for her. She is not playing for herself. Earlier this year, Crawley actually wrote about her, making this known to me in more ways than one. It is one thing to experience it live or on video, but another to see it again through another’s narration. In his NPR Music essay, he writes:
“Twinkie is pedagogy: She is a way we can understand something about Black women and performing in an inhospitable place. She gives us the sound of flowering and blooming, not against white supremacy but as a practice of Black love.”
This is a radical practice that does not map neatly on to politics. And that’s fine. The point is as Crawley writes, to be “propulsive.” To be made and to make something happen. To make a different kind of thing happen. Blackpentecostal aesthetics is about doing something in the world. Twinkie’s gift is to make sound. She is a Black woman fully in command of the space of articulating something we must do and be. She is giving us something we need and may not even know that we need. It responds to our times. Because it is responds to eternity.
The lyrics come through. She offers the first verse, words written by Isaac Watts, but clearly given a different kind of life. And as the choir sings, their collective response to her propulsion is evident. They bring in Black language, Black words, to implore us to try Him. To try to be open to Him. The invest “Him” with a meaning and relation that in truth betrays most theological assumptions about the nature of the Divine. But you have to listen for it to understand that. You have to listen for the different relation.
Twinkie then invites Rance. This is the scene that drew me to the Twitter post. Because the author of the post’s framing of this kind of invitation, as depicting what was a mainstay for those who grow up in the Black church: the guest singer. The surprise. It reminded me of choir anniversary programs. These were occasion of great importance. Musicians from across town and region came together to sing all the newest songs, in celebration, in community. It was different from regular service. There was a different kind of gathering. You did not know who or what pop in on us. Or what they would do. You just expected the spirit to be there. That’s what I saw in the video.
There is the improvisation. Rance begins sight-reading the song. Then something new is added. That kind of performance is resonant to all who have experienced what Nathaniel Mackey calls “Black churchicality.” There is no fear of not being prepared. There is no question of practice. Because your whole life has been about preparing and practicing, being ready for an invitation. So it is invitation that welcomes the spirit into the place. And because of that invitation, the energy is shared. And the whole thing collapses. Or as we say, it goes down. Or as the folk say, de sperrit cum down.
Invitation reminds me of something John Coltrane said. Something I have repeated a lot. He was talking about the practice of playing together and how bands coalesce. In response criticisms of the music, he said simply “you have to be invited.” And there’s the easy response to think of this as closure. As a kind of elitism. That is, if you don’t know Coltrane. That is, if you don’t know that he too was brought up in that tradition that created Rance and Twinkie. And so I think of what he is saying as akin to the invitation—what church folk call an “invitation to discipleship.” An invitation to be transformed.
Rance was just as moved as we were moved by him. Because he was invited to come into the place. And his invitation opened the way. Improvisation, the scatting, the noise-making—we literally see it moving through his body. The collective movement of the choir returns, and they move into the soul-clap, the double clap, into the bridge and reprise. Into the confidence of “I know He will.” And we bask in the spirit. We let it fill us. As Crawley writes, we are sent out. And into (p. 5).
Crawley calls Blackpentecostal aesthetics a resource. And it overflows. It cannot be contained. And that’s why it is so special. In his book, he asks us to think about what we do with this resource in a moment where Black life is in endangered.
Is it never not so?
Eric Garner’s killing is an occasion to think about breath, what it means to breathe. And what kind of society denies someone that basic human function. But breath is also a practice inherent to Blackpentecostal aesthetics. We can do things with breath, we can do what Rance and Twinkie did. So there is something about the breathing, the tarrying, the shouting, the speaking in tongues that makes us. It is an invitation, that is for Crawley, “plenteous.” We invite each other and we withhold very little. That is, these practices are arrayed against everything that we fight and live against. Racist heteropatriarchal capitalism is about closure, exclusion, and denial. It is about possession and control. Blackpentecostal aesthetics breaks free of constrictions. And to experience that does not require a doctrinal loyalty to Christianity. Because the reservoir that Twinkie and Rance tap into is much larger than the conversion experience.
Crawley’s work asks us to think alongside these aesthetic traditions and the conditions of knowledge in which they manifest. There is this practice of Black Study, which is about thinking beyond the limits of the received and given. The forms of thought that are given— the present order of knowledge—create “categorical distinction.” Black Study is study and thinking against that distinction. Moreover, the ideas of theology and philosophy are complicit. They are redolent of this present order of knowledge. We have to think beyond them. Crawley proposes Blackpentecostalism as a-theological, as a-philosophical. That too, resonates, because by trying to free us from the grips of those traditions he is also offering an invitation. It is to a Blackness a “social, traditioned, anoriginal force of change, resistance, pleasure, and love in the world” (p. 8).
It is announced in the Blues as a force of enfleshment, a manifestation of a real thing. Something that Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell and Aretha Franklin spoke to. In James Baldwin, Crawley found someone who experienced that realness and knew that there was a force to it. Something to be dug back into. The Blues ain’t nothing but gospel by another name. And it can be played in what we call “jazz.” So Crawley introduces us to how those forms coalesced in Charles Mingus’s “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting.” It all moves toward a moment of gathering of being together, to make it all come out. To make the spirit come down.
So I am back to thinking about trust. A concept our people have held onto when have reason not every to trust in anything. Trust shows up in material ways. In how we live. In how we think. In how we love. One of my favorite songs ever is Herbie Hancock’s “Trust Me.” He recorded it twice. Once as “Trust Me,” and again as the song “Sonrisa” he recorded on a solo album. Robert Glasper plays it often. He, by the way, also has a song called “Trust” featuring Marsha Ambrosious and John P. Kee—no doubt a singer in the tradition of Rance Allen. Then there is “Trust Me” written and recorded by Richard Smallwood, one of the most brilliant composers in that tradition. I do not know what it means that all of these songs make me feel the same way. Maybe it is that trust might be a thing to hold onto in this moment.
Trust and belief. Crawley’s engagement with Blackpentecostal aesthetics is about what can be made from the domains of belief. Or to paraphrase Anna Julia Cooper we should ask again a basic question: “what can be gained from a belief?” Whatever it is, we must know it, and feel it. And know it through feeling it. Rance and Twinkie feel it. And they offer it to us. It is beyond categorical distinction.
