It’s hard to tease out one rave from another. In my mind, they all fit within one tall dark throbbing space peopled with smoke, flesh, and flashing lights. But Diego and I attend our first rave with an acquaintance of mine from work. He looks like a DJ—but is he? I can’t remember; I remember his aptitude was information technology. At this point I am the receptionist in a large San Francisco office. The first time I introduce him and Diego, I explain that we work together. A few moments later this friend corrects me: We work in the same place, but we don’t exactly work together, do we? He has coarse short hair that changes colors frequently. Yellow, green, ink black. One day, at lunch, sitting on the grass in a park near our office, he confides, So, I’m, like, an octaroon? My grandfather was supposedly half-Black? This acquaintance has invited us to meet him and his friends at the venue. Once there, he offers us each a pill that will be our on-ramp from the building where the rave is held to the psychic space of the rave itself.
When at first nothing happens, Diego pulls me aside. How much did you pay for this? How well do you know this güero? It’s been how long and I still feel nothing. If anything, I feel like I’m going to throw up. What if this stuff isn’t nothing? What if it’s something that will seriously mess us up? In his panic, we both become more emphatically aware of feeling like (and of nearly but not quite being) the sole specks of brown in a warehouse full of white (where the nearly threatens to eclipse the not quite).
Then something happens. I am reminded of the many seismic tremors I have lived through in California, instants—unannounced—when the earth has burbled beneath my feet, as if I am standing on a rug that is just at that moment being given a good shake. Something shifts. And then Diego’s wide, open, startled, relieved countenance meets mine. What we each regard is something inside visible reality that neither has ever before seen. Is it real? I want to touch it with my hands, my torso, my face. I want to move through it as if through a colored mist.
Bodies emerge from dark corners. My own body—I can’t tell if it is distinct from me, or if it has been bound more tightly to my ability to sense and feel—wanders corridors that open into large rooms pulsing with rhythm. Rhythm is everywhere. I wander out of one rhythm and into another. Am I obeying, or exercising abandon? Everyone is beautiful. This is owing to the pill. Even if you have only ever swallowed it once, however long ago in the past, the particular genius of the DJ will drum up and reconstitute whatever flicker of that once-ago glow waits in your body or your mind to be revived. I learn this at subsequent raves. For now, my mind and body are busy. They seek to help me dissolve into the music, which—I can feel it now—is herding me and everyone else, too, just past the break, just beyond the place where this track merges seamlessly to the next, a juncture I can only discern by looking back, except I can’t look back because—look, up ahead—see, there—there, now, is something—
My mind wants to release me. I close my eyes awhile and give myself over to the joy of breathing. I lean against a body or a wall, and slip beyond the borders of my skin. When I look again, a tribe of silhouettes moves toward me, necks and wrists and ankles adorned with Day-Glo collars, bangles, and cuffs. The bass tells me wait, wait, wait, wait and I hold still. It is like being moved upon by spirits. And then one kneels down, so I can see she is human, too, and says to me something so simple, so innocent it is almost holy. Gone pride, gone envy, gone deceit, gone the shackles of anger, of memory. Though it is never entirely the case that things and people are what they seem, things and people seem loving and guileless and safe.
I am reluctant to denigrate what feels like a respite from everything barbed and small. I want to believe awhile longer in the possibility of large-scale bodily and spiritual harmony, though I accept it is a trick of the beat, of the bright hypnotic lights, of the pill, of the inevitable comedown that will tumble like silent white balloons released from overhead. Still, I wonder—does everyone here feel similarly freed? Even the Free?
California’s Bay Area is diverse. It is so to an even greater degree in the years I’m remembering, at the onset of the dot-com explosion, before smart phones and streaming services, these years when email is still novel, optional, irksome to dial into more than once or twice a day. I don’t want to misrepresent these clubs, this scene, as entirely white. Not at a time—then—when so many people of color still live comfortably, affordably in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, Fremont, San Rafael, Richmond, and elsewhere nearby. In my season of raves, I glimpse older versions of the B-boys and poppers I’d known in junior high and high school, Black and Asian Pacific Islander kids in updated gear astonishing the throng with updated moves. Watching them is a flood of love never spent. But at raves, these islands of color, of distinct ethnic culture, are just that: islands. I never belong to one save for the times I am drawn to orbit, for a time, a group of strangers whose bodies—wheeling, leaping, pulsing, flowing—defy the limits of common gravity. I am always there amid and beside, often trailing behind the friends of my friend in a group that reads, more than anything else, as white. Most everyone is.
Maybe this is the reason for PLUR—Peace, Love, Unity, Respect—the phrase often used to describe the ethos of chill acceptance prized in these spaces. White acceptance. And aren’t reminders like this always in part aspirational, something that can’t yet be taken for granted? Like the doors on New York City police cars emblazoned (are they still?) with the words Courtesy Professionalism Respect.
One night, in a chill-out room, I lean beside a tall Black man about my age. What are you doing here? he asks.
Just resting. Just drinking some water, I say, taking him in through wide worshipful eyes. He’s a tennis pro and looks it: godlike and pristine. But I can feel him regarding me sharply. I can feel the rays of scrutiny traveling from him to me.
What are you on? he asks.
I’m not on anything, I know to answer, though it pains me to lie. When he asks who I’m there with, all I can do is gesture off toward I’m not sure where.
Nice friends. Clipped. Dry.
I don’t know why he is here, or why he is so adamant in his judgment of a lone Black woman in this scene, but I don’t think to inquire. Maybe he’s been dragged here on a whim by friends like mine who appear to have abandoned him.
For whatever reason I think to insist, I trust them.
Often during this season in my life, I pinch myself with the thought: If my mother were alive, I could never allow myself to live like this. This wanton bucking of propriety, as if there is no such thing as the soul, no such place as eternity.
And not without discomfort, I admit: But I need to be living like this.
You leave a rave when sobriety descends upon you. And in the years I’m remembering, you wander outside past the hundreds of others in your position, and the scores of men—many of them Black, older, especially thin—who converge on such clubs around closing. There are so many of you, and you are all so gentled, so passive, likely also encumbered by the embarrassment of residual intoxication, that these men can afford to make their transaction into a riddle, a game.
One of them will ask, What is the greatest nation in the world? And when none of you answers correctly, the man will answer for you: A donation! You’ll encounter these men over and again throughout your brief season of raves. The joke, in its familiarity, will eventually become something all of you, together, render a sad thing.
Pulling onto the freeway after what could or should have been our final rave, our headlights land upon a young woman standing beside her car on the shoulder. Her posture is sheepish, like a child who has been caught out in some mischief. A cop’s flashlight in her face adds menace to the atmosphere of shame. She is pretty, and white. She is dressed like someone emerging from a different type of club: short red dress, platform heels. Diego cranes his neck to take in more of the scene: her car, also red and somewhat new, askew against the on-ramp barrier. If sobriety is registered in degrees, I am better off than she is. But that isn’t saying much. A Black woman and Mexican man, we can’t, in our current state, pull over to make sure she is safe. We can’t make any mistakes. We drive home slowly, hours before dawn, behind a bread truck that heads, turn for turn for turn, to our off-ramp and then, uncannily, through our very intersection near the overpass in West Oakland.•
Excerpted from To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, by Tracy K. Smith. © 2023 Tracy K. Smith. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Tracy K Smith served as the poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published the collections Wade in the Water and Such Color: New and Selected Poems. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2012 for Life on Mars. Her most recent book is To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul.
