Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Dancing On The Viking’s Grave
Posted by Red Cotton on Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 7:03 PM
My grandmomma Nina always stressed the power of dance. She’d say things like “I’m gonna dance on his grave” about someone she had beef with. Or “I’ll dance at your wedding if you go outside and bring the laundry in.” With her, dancing was always a power move, either a gift or a threat, never just rumpshaking for the sake of rumpshaking. I thought about her while watching the Ladies and Men of Unity dancing thru the New Orleans streets during Sunday’s pre-game second line parade. The club members, the crowd, the band - everyone was in Black and gold dancing furiously and chanting for the Saints. It was pure African motherland ritual, the Bamboula tradition our people maintained in the extraordinary face of 400+ years of forced labor, savage brutality, and emotional and mental abuse. If a whole race of people can come through intact after four centuries of hardship and dreams deferred, why not a team victory after a mere 47 years of patient waiting? These folks danced hard enough on Sunday to raise the dead, pound the imminent Saints victory into the street-paved primordial swampland and send the Viking’s season to its final resting place.
THIS, my people, is how you dance on someone’s grave. Nina Cotton would approve.
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