When I showed up for a tech rehearsal of ‘‘Black No More’’ in January,
the choreographer Bill T. Jones walked central actors through a pivotal
moment. In the novel, Max’s best friend Bunny is a Black man who fol-
lows him through the Black No More machine, but the musical’s Bunny
(renamed ‘‘Buni’’) is a Black woman who demands more of him. When the
newly whitened Max — who now goes by Matthew Fisher — abandons
Harlem for Atlanta, Buni and another friend, Agamemnon, show up at the
train depot, hoping to convince him to stay. ‘‘I see a world of possibility,
and all you see is Black... and white,’’ Max tells Agamemnon. Disgusted,
Agamemnon declares that ‘‘Harlem is better off without him.’’ But Buni
won’t abandon her friend. Watching Max leave, she retorts that ‘‘we’re
never ‘better off ’ without each other.’’ It’s a powerful assertion of Black
solidarity — an enduring community extending even to those who would
deny their Blackness, one based in a commonality of experience.
The distinct diff erence between this production and Schuyler’s novel
is the belief in cultural, rhetorical and physical ties that bind Black people
into a shared heritage that isn’t at all related to white people or white
supremacy. Jones’s choreography is key to this idea. During tech rehears-
al, Jones walked dancers through the moment just after the whitened Max
arrives in Atlanta. In the scene, Max tentatively approaches a group of
white people dancing before he is welcomed into their ranks, his white
skin fi nally giving him the entry he desires. But Brandon Victor Dixon,
the actor who plays Max, is not wearing make up; he is still Black. In
that moment, Jones’s choreography convinces the audience that these
are four Southern white country dancers, including the brown-skinned
Dixon as Matthew Fisher. Scenes like this, which present a racialized art
form only to subvert notions of who can perform it, both reinforce the
notion of distinct racial cultures while undermining the idea that those
cultures are fi xed in stone. Unlike Schuyler’s book, it holds two truths
at once: race is constructed, and no less real for being so. In this sense,
Trotter and his collaborators force viewers into a complex and sometimes
even uncomfortable conversation about the substance of racial identity.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Trotter’s lyrics.
One song features the ‘‘whitened’’ Max in his guise as Matthew — now,
improbably, the leader of a white-supremacist organization — singing
about Black people as the equivalent of fl ies. As Trotter described it to me,
the song slaps but is immensely ignorant; it had me rocking in my seat,
but made me fear what a dope beat can do. As beautiful women twerked
onstage to a crescendo of keys, Matthew unleashed the song’s hateful
chorus, referring to Black people with a racial epithet and glorifying anti-
Black violence. Still, my head bopped.
The song presents us with a set of questions: Is cringing and turning
away from a work of art that depicts persistent truths of American racial
politics the most radical thing that we might do? How can Black art provide
the background for anti-Blackness? Trotter’s lyrics don’t provide answers.
They let us sit in that formal and ethical diffi culty.
Trotter’s interest in presenting these hard questions isn’t new. You
have to look no further than to Dec. 14, 2017, for proof. That day on DJ
Funkmaster Flex’s show on the New York radio station Hot 97, he dropped
a freestyle that put the internet on notice. ‘‘I like to answer people’s
demands,’’ Funk said by way of introduction. ‘‘Black Thought is here.’’ And
then Trotter delivered something singular — a relentless amalgamation of
story and poem that becomes more cogent as it becomes more discursive.
‘‘Einstein, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Tesla, recording artist slash psychology
professor,’’ Trotter raps, suggesting the scope of his thinking. He weaves
together literary tradition, social critique, his interest in world history and
refl ections on his own oeuvre and family history into an epic that could
never have taken place within the tight strictures of a Roots album. ‘‘The
mic I spray resembling the sickle of death/It ain’t strenuous to come
from a continuous breath.’’ This was the reintroduction of the Talented
Mr. Trotter as a solo artist who challenged listeners with his breadth of
knowledge and sharp skills as an M.C. He soon began releasing solo
albums that ‘‘gave people, some of whom have been lifelong Roots fans
at this point, an opportunity to not even become reacquainted, but to
fi nally become acquainted with me personally as an artist,’’ he told me.
This version of Black Thought had big things on his mind. ‘‘How much
hypocrisy can people possibly endure?/But ain’t nobody working on a
cure my young bull,’’ he proclaimed in that freestyle.I was interested to see how the musical played to audiences — specif-
ically, audiences of the kind that would gather at Black Theater Night,
Broadway’s attempt to bring in more diverse crowds. As Bill T. Jones
reminds me, ‘‘One of the most transgressive things Schuyler does in this
transgressive novel is to imply that secretly we all want to be white.’’ What
would Black theatergoers make of that notion? Dr. Crookman introduces
the Black No More device with an in-joke that might only get laughs out
of a Black audience: ‘‘How is it, Dr. Crookman, you ask, are you able to
accomplish what the Lord Himself cannot? The answer is simple. The
Good Lord is not a Howard Man.’’ At the show I attended, the audience
laughed together. Such moments felt typical — choral call and response
and inside jokes gave the show the feel of a summer cookout. But when
Dr. Crookman explained the Black No More treatment, the laughter slowly
subsided and the tension rose. The device used to conduct the treatment
resembled a barber’s chair and sat center stage. Max’s transformation
— signaled by him constantly running his fi ngers along his arms, which
are still brown — elicited discomfort.
In contemplating how exactly to pull off this transformation to white-
ness, Trotter told me that the show’s creators considered it all — make up,
diff erent clothing, lighting — but decided on simple physical gestures. If the
audience was any indication, those gestures worked, strangely conveying
the way warped reality gives rise to warped desires. In the musical, Max
— who becomes white in part to pursue Helen, a white lover who initially
rejected him — constantly looks at his skin to remind himself and the audi-
ence of his change and of the moral quandary it provokes. ‘‘What a fi ne mess
I’ve gotten into, after everything that I had been through,’’ Max sings. But
that mess isn’t Max’s alone. The show foregrounds that ethical quandary,
forcing the audience to deal with the aftermath of Max’s yearning as well.
Schuyler himself tried to play down the messiness of identifi cation by
writing ‘‘Black No More.’’ He married Josephine Cogdell, an heiress from
Texas and a white liberal, in 1928. During the 1930s, she published journal-
ism in the Black press under various names and even, according to Carla
Kaplan’s book ‘‘Miss Anne in Harlem,’’ wrote an advice column for Negro
women under the name Julia Jerome. And she was more complex than the
depiction of any white character in the satire her husband published three
years after they married. While Helen is a vulgar racist in the novel, the
musical’s version of Helen is reminiscent of Schuyler’s wife. She becomes
a reminder that, even in 1931, race relations and the contradictions that
roiled beneath them were far more tangled than the satirical depiction of
race hustlers and Black people clamoring for ways to straighten their hair
and skin-creme their way to whiteness.
The vast range of music, lyrics and dance that the musical juxtaposes is
an argument for the existence of a Blackness independent of whiteness, a
Blackness that is also the confounding of easy racial categorization. Because
of this, the show insists on frustrating the audience: You laugh and then stop
to question if laughing was appropriate. The original ‘‘Black No More’’ is
written with the unfl inching belief that the author knows what Blackness
is and is not. The musical, though, is more searching, less certain of what
Blackness is, though far more secure in the belief that Black folks’ singular
desire is not to run from it but rather to survive in America.
There is a refrain in the musical that struck me: ‘‘If my body is my home,
and it’s built of blood and bone, and survives on, even thrives on love alone,
it’s not hard to understand how the measure of a man, is to show more
than the love that he’s been shown.’’ And if you listen closely to the lyrics
and music of ‘‘Black No More,’’ you know that the arguments all become
a case that Trotter is making, capturing so much of what it means to have
Black thoughts in this world and the sheer tragedy of running from them. The New York Times Magazine 29