What if being “with” someone meant something else entirely?

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Post by Gabs Novellino

Do you fully understand the difference between what music and dance represent in White American culture versus Black American culture?

Last week, I found myself rereading parts of Steppin’ On The Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance by Jacqui Malone — a must-read book for any Lindy Hop enthusiast. When I reached page 49, I was completely overwhelmed. I ended up underlining almost the entire page, taking a photo, and sharing it on my stories.

Why? Because in that single page, Malone articulates — with remarkable precision — the fundamental differences in how White Americans and Black Americans have historically understood music and dance. It’s something I often try to explain to my students, something I return to again and again in these newsletters. And yet, until reading her words, I had never found a source that expressed it so clearly, so directly, and so grounded in history.

That’s why I decided to share these four paragraphs with you in full. I invite you to read them slowly, and to really sit with the weight of what is being said.

“Music and dance gave African Americans a sense of power and control - it had direct impact on their psychic and emotional states and allowed them to drop their masks and articulate their inner feelings. In addition, music and dance perpetuated traditions, kept values alive, and provided for individual expression. Through these art forms, slaves developed their own aesthetic standards and initiated the creation of new expressive modes.

At rituals throughout the South and North, slaves and free blacks fostered the evolution of a style of dancing that was uniquely American. The bent knees and angulated bodies of their stylized adaptations were in striking contrast to the erect spines, straight legs, turned-out feet, and rounded arms of the European-American dancing instructors. Not only the shapes and movements of the black and white dances were at variance. The perspective and approach to making and learning dances were fundamentally different. The white folkorist Bessie Lomax Hawes became aware of this difference while learning ring plays from Bessie Jones, an African American of the Georgia Sea Islands:

‘Suddenly the cultural gulf between us yawned very wide indeed. To me, as to all white Americans, I suspect, a person who is ‘with’ me must do just what I am doing, must copy my movements (and my ideas and my speech and my dress and my clappin).... To Mrs. Jones and the Sea Islanders, to be ‘with’ somebody means to respond to them, to complement and support their silences, to fill in their statements (musical, physical and verbal) with little showers of comment, to answer their remarks - to clap a different pattern.’

The slaves enjoyed spontaneity, dynamism, and improvisational flair that reached back to their ancestors in central and western Africa, while the planters believed that a dance must be performed in a precise, unchanging way. Still, white Americans were entranced by the vibrancy of these slave creations and found themselves unable to resist their magnetic pull.”

These paragraphs invite us to slow down and reconsider what it really means to be “with” someone in dance. Not copying, not overpowering, but responding, supporting, and filling in the silences together. This perspective doesn’t just belong in history books — it has everything to do with how we show up in our dancing today.

I hope you have enjoyed reading and reflecting on page 49 with me.

Gabs, for iLindy