There are some indelible images that seem to exist out of time. They’re the pictures that take on such a sacred, repeated ritual that they could be happening to anyone in the past or the future. One of these images is a family at the dinner table, breaking bread, a communion of laughter, joy, and devotion. In James Baldwin’s 1974 novel “If Beale Street Could Talk,” the dinner table is the dream that the Black artisan Fonny reveals to his pregnant girlfriend Tish, while he’s awaiting a trial for the rape of a woman, a crime he did not commit.

“Baby. Baby. Baby,” Fonny says to his wife behind the glass partitions of a prison visiting center. “I love you. And I’m going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks going to be eating off it a long, long time to come.”

Tish stares at him, seeing their dreams of a future slip away from reality. A horrific idea slowly crawls into Tish’s mind: she might wait forever in vain for Fonny to be free. She narrates her feelings of fear, along with those of her child.

“From my chair, I looked out my window, over these dreadful streets,” Tish says. “The baby asked, Is there not one righteous among them? And kicked, but with a tremendous difference, and I knew that my time was almost on me.”

Fonny, like so many Black men in this country’s history, is forced to take a plea deal because his family cannot afford bail. The novel ends with the birth of Tish and Fonny’s baby, ushering in a new era of parenthood and incarceration for the young lovers.

Readers of Baldwin’s novel might wonder what would become of the family. Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation provides one answer. The film ends with a time jump, showing their baby now as a toddler. The three family members say grace at a prison’s visitor center for their humble meal of potato chips, while guards watch under fluorescent lighting. Garret Bradley’s 2020 documentary “Time,” now nominated for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars, provides another answer. A Black family also gathers around a dinner table, this time decades after their patriarch’s incarceration, holding a cardboard cut-out of the absent father so that he might hold some space in their home. As audience members, the message in both films is clear: incarceration has already stripped away this family from so much, and it will only continue its damage into the future, the past and future mercilessly looping into each other.

“Time” opens with a montage of family home videos. One shows Fox Rich, a young Black woman staring into the camera, explaining that her husband Robert is in jail, and cradling her belly swelling with twins. Another video shows Rich treating the camera footage as a love letter to her absent husband. 

“Do you see this smile, Robert?” Rich says, not able to suppress her happiness thinking about her lover. “Do you know how hard I’m gonna be smiling when you come home? N—— oh… N—— what? Smiling? Me and all my children are probably gonna walk like this all day…Fox did what? I feel like a champion.”

When this reverie of nostalgia and hope ends, we see Rich in the present day: older, still holding out hope, still in the same situation she was in before. We see her directing and producing a commercial for her car company, with the kind of exacting vision and determination that can’t be taught at film school. It’s in this scene that I realized that as much as “Time” by director Garrett Bradley, who shot all of the contemporary scenes, it is also Rich’s film. Realizing how absent Robert would be from their children’s lives, for decades Rich has treated the camera as a surrogate her husband. So that one day, her husband might watch all of what he deserved to see. 

The details of the Rich family’s predicament start to emerge not with a sense of investigation, but rather with the trust of a family telling the story of their life. Fox Rich was born in 1971 (three years before Tish and Fonny’s baby in “Beale Street”) to a Louisiana family with a steadfast belief in the American dream. Robert and Fox were high school sweethearts who quickly got married, purchased a home, and put money down to start “Shreveport’s first hip hop clothing store.” When they were unable to make ends meet and became desperate, the couple robbed a credit union and were caught. Fox took a plea deal and gave birth to twins Freedom and Justus before spending three years in prison; Robert didn’t take a plea and at the time of the filming is still in prison. 

“Time” is a film that resists clean narrative arcs, instead diving into contradictions and keeping the audience in a state of suspense. Justice for the Rich family is hinted at, but never completely delivered or dissolved. After Bradley had completed filming the Rich family throughout the late 2010s, she was gifted with an archivist’s holy grail: two decades of homemade films that chronicled the Rich family. Bradley’s choice to cross-cut between the present-day and the home videos, connecting them through the use of black-and-white, creates a kaleidoscopic look at the struggling but persevering family. The past and the present meet each other in the film. In real-time we are watching how the Rich family yearns, hardens, and becomes adamant about prison abolition over a substantial portion of their lives.

“Time is when you look at pictures from when your babies was small,” Fox Rich says in a voiceover as the camera pans over Freedom and Justus’s adolescent bodies. “And then you look at them and see that they have mustaches and beards. And that the biggest hope that you had was that before they turned into men, that they would have a chance to be with their father.” 

Immediately after these words, Bradley cuts to footage of the twins at a young age, their bright eyes staring into their mother’s. Like the time jump in “Beale Street,” we ache at the knowledge of how many formative moments will never exist for these children, but find a spark of hope in their mother’s love for them. In fact, the intercutting between past and present draws attention to the chasm between both times, while also revealing and how America has stayed the same. The indelible image of the Black man behind bars may exist constantly within time, but it also cleaves families out of the time with those they love. For Black families like the Rich family, time is not a straight line, but instead a constant loop. They exist in a space where hope arrives from faded memories, where the absence of fathers and sons and children haunts the future, where families mourn every second lost with their loved ones as they continue to age, thriving and withering.

As much as“Time” is about the painful ripple effect that one action can have on a family, it also serves as character study of Fox Rich herself. A montage of Rich giving speeches in various communities about her life journey—at churches, family gatherings, and college campuses—highlights Rich’s carefully developed skills as an orator. She plays to the audience, whether they’re watching in stunned silence or engaging in call-and-response, and you can’t help but feel her strength as a performer. But as much as the Rich family appreciates her endurance, Fox Rich remains burdened with trying to save the love of her life. In a rare moment when Rich’s facade of resilience slips, she’s unafraid to call out the institutions that have devastated her life.

“Just hang in there, cause when you get him home, they gon’ pay, they gon’ pay, they gon’ pay,” she says, nervously laughing before her voice betrays her actual disgust. “They gon’ fucking pay. Goddamn! He could’ve been home, been home with his family. Just cause they bullshitting. Ain’t no hurry. ‘Oh just some n——s coming home from the penitentiary. All of them will be trying to come out’…Do you know that’s what they told our lawyer?”

I can’t help but think of all the people who didn’t end up like Fox Rich. The American families whose fathers and sons were incarcerated, who didn’t have the communal support or resources to remain together, or who can’t find the resilience that Fox Rich somehow channels every day. As multiple members of the Rich family state, incarceration is nothing more than slavery. No one would be faulted for not acting strong in this situation. 

The slavery stories America likes to tell itself usually have happy endings: flights to the North, white saviors swooping in, manumission. These narratives usually tend to ignore the ways that systemic racism has shifted into new institutions, and these stories erase any suffering experienced with a pat “all’s well that ends well” message. Scholar Frank B. Wilderson has argued that Steve McQueen’s 2013 film “12 Years a Slave,” attempts to have a definitive narrative arc, with suffering supposedly concluding at the end of twelve years and a poignant return home.

The entire runtime of “Time” I was praying for Robert Rich to be released from prison, yet I was wary that the filmmakers might mimic McQueen’s cinematic choices, ignoring the horrifying afterlives of oppression and the millions of still-incarcerated Americans. Although there are genuine moments of exuberance at the end of the film, Bradley has a critical enough eye to not allow the audience to forget all the lost time that will never be regained. In the film’s final montage, she reverses the home video footage, and we watch children jump out of swimming pools and beds, walk and then crawl, and see Fox and Robert kiss before pulling away. Time has not progressed as much as it has broken, and we stay in this mess of memory, remembering a period of this family’s life that seems unending, unlimited, but not unscathed.

—

Time is suffered through, chopped and screwed, and appreciated in another recent work attempting to understand the long history of Blackness in this country: Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay collection “A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance.” Abdurraqib is a multi-hyphenate writer, known for music review collection “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” along with his poetry collection “A Fortune for Your Disaster.” Abdurraqib’s essays follow in the literary tradition of James Baldwin, utilizing personal memoir, historical research, theory, and cultural analysis in order to vividly depict and critique Black life in America. “A Little Devil” sees Abdurraqib turning his methodology to the performances that happen in everyday life and on-stage for Black artists and audiences alike.

Divided into five movements, Abdurraqib’s definition of performance is capacious enough to include a wide variety of subject matters, but unified through his sincere voice and focus on performances created under duress. Movement I explores death through marathon dances and the funeral of Aretha Franklin; Movement II engages list form essays such as “Sixteen Ways of Looking at Blackface” and “Nine Considerations of Black People in Space.” 

Abdurraqib takes on many roles as a writer, unafraid to jump between genres. His writing about Josephine Baker is so thoroughly researched that the book momentarily becomes a biography. Sometimes he comes off as a music stan, pouring through his records and insisting you listen to Merry Clayton’s performance on “Gimme Shelter,” or the Black punk-rock band Fuck U Pay Us scream about reparations. He’s also not afraid to venture into fiction, as when he speculates what successful movies could portray the Black classical pianist Don Shirley instead of the disappointing “Green Book.”

What’s clear is that Abdurraqib is singing the praises of Black America, for Black America. Often he localizes stories to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, even calling his readers “friends,” “beloveds,” “loves,” or “my people.” Abdurraqib isn’t interested in presenting an ethnography of his life’s world for outside viewers. Since his intended audience is his friends, he refuses to name Rachel Dolezal when discussing her blackface and doesn’t explain the rules to spades. He supplies his community with recognition, and for others he generously gives curiosity. 

The literary world has tried to place writers like Abdurraqib into genres: personal essays, auto-theory, braided essays. But the strands of thought Abdurraqib is weaving together are so dense and entangled that anyone would be hard-pressed to separate them. In his essay on space, Abdurraqib writes about his mother’s love of the moon, Labelle’s astronaut outfits, Trayvon Martin’s NASA t-shirt, Billy Dee Williams in “Star Wars,” astrology, and more. The purpose isn’t to literally connect the dots between each reference into a constellation, but to marvel at the broader cosmology of cultural production surrounding Black people looking in wonder.   

“I don’t want to go to the moon, but I do want to go to the place where Black dreamers stare at the moon and remark loudly about signs and stars in a summer that feels as endless as those old summers, which pulled me from the paltry responsibilities of youth,” he writes. “…For as long as there is a future, there will be Black people in it, hopefully surviving in even new and better ways than we are now. Circles of light opening their wide arms to briefly take our bodies somewhere higher. It will appear spectacular to everyone who isn’t us.”

In this passage, we also see Abdurraqib’s playful interpretation of the phrase “There Are Black People in the Future,” popularized by the artist Alisha Wormsley’s billboard in Pittsburgh. Abdurraqib reminds us that speculating better or different futures has been passed down across generations in the Black American community, that there were always Black people in the future. By combining modern cultural products to the histories of jazz, sports, dance competitions, and even blackface minstrelsy, Abdurraqib creates a loop in time in which Black performers repeat acts in a continuous repetition, fresh and exhausted at the same time.  

If there’s any metaphor for Abdurraqib’s writing, I wouldn’t support braiding imagery as much as I would call his writing an audio feedback loop, endlessly generating a polyphony of sound. It reminds me of playwright Michael R. Jackson’s usage of what philosopher Douglass Hofstaderl calls “a strange loop,” a model of identity with no fixed sense of self but a set of abstract symbols, being dominant for a short period of time, and winding around to be repeated. If “Time” uses the language of cinema to argue that time itself loops for one Black family, Abdurraqib goes even further in positing that Blackness and identity itself can loop alongside time.

Each motion of “A Little Devil in America” begins with an essay entitled “On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance,” short variations on the same theme. In his most stylistically distinct choice, Abdurraqib writes many of these as run-on sentences by utilizing polysyndeton, the repetition of the same conjunction to create a rhythmic, percussive effect. His first essay of this style describes his anxiety entering a dance floor in his youth before falling down the stairs.

“& 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,” Abdurraqib writes.

Baldwin uses the same poetic technique when ending “Beale Street,” having Tish imagine the birth of their child as her husband is finally free to work on the family table.

“Fonny is working on the wood, on the stone, whistling, smiling,” Tish says. “And, from far away, but coming nearer, the baby cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries, cries like it mean to wake the dead.” 

For Tish, Fox Rich, and Hanif Abdurraqib, time goes on and on and on, unrelentingly slow and rushing forward too quickly. The only reprieve these Black Americans might feel is that if the past, present, and future all loop into each other, then the distinction between self and collective, memory and speculation, and fear and love might fall away. A child’s cries might not need to wake up the dead, if the dead were never given a proper rest to begin with.

 

Nathan Pugh can be reached at npugh@wesleyan.edu.