Approaching the (Difficult) Study of Black Joy

Recent works on Black joy and pleasure, many of which are concentrated in Black and literary studies, mark how academics are reorienting scholarly interests in the direction of positive Black affect.Footnote ¹¹ This moment, then, is a fitting one to explore how the study of Black joy presents several methodological and conceptual questions for historians.Footnote ¹² What are the historical politics of Black joy? How does one highlight Black happiness without minimizing Black pain? And then there are epistemological matters—how do we know, or can we possibly know, that historical actors felt what we believe they felt in the records they left behind? The following discussion attends to these questions not as a problem-solving endeavor but to mark a range of difficulties, as well as opportunities, that accompany a seemingly straightforward and joyful scholarly exploration.

As a general matter, documenting experiences of pleasure is a complex undertaking, as no single concept of enjoyment exists. For historians in particular, feelings of satisfaction, like all other emotions, are highly subjective and difficult to assess in human interlocutors who are no longer alive. Historians often cannot ask their subjects to verify or recall how they felt. Historical records ossify inchoate, ineffable, and variable feelings in time. Archival material, especially from secondhand accounts, rarely documents how emotions evolve or how human beings reinterpret their own feelings. The evidence that historians use to make truth claims about affect poses several epistemological challenges.Footnote ¹³ As such, this essay acknowledges these challenges and presents joy not as a certain, essential feeling but as a possibility that enables us to consider how African Americans formed complex emotional communities under intense subjugation.Footnote ¹⁴

An examination of how Black people experienced joy during immense strife needs to be approached with great care. Studies on Black contentment or even “agency” pose the risk of minimizing the horrors of anti-Black violence or simplifying a more complicated racial experience.Footnote ¹⁵ Without proper historical contextualization, one may come away from such examinations believing that African American social and political conditions were more hospitable than they actually were. At the same time, studies that do not account for momentary breaks in despair risk flattening Black humanity and overlooking the natural vagaries of human emotion.Footnote ¹⁶ This article takes these risks seriously and attempts to thread a delicate needle of individual happiness amid structural torment. In doing so, I demonstrate that Black people valued their own lives enough to seek joy against racist efforts to make Black life ontologically miserable.

Writing affective histories of the modern African American past presents additional analytical challenges when attempting to grasp the politics of Black joy. For many Black people of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pursuing joy was not purely about “pleasure for pleasure’s sake.” Recreation, leisure, and experiences of delight often accompanied explicitly political imperatives like contesting segregation, struggling against racism, exercising citizenship, and quelling juvenile delinquency. Black reformers, for example, believed that “wholesome” recreation, such as gender-appropriate sports, camping, and learning games, would help develop behaviors they deemed useful to racial uplift projects. Amusement parks, places of literal enjoyment, were marked by protests for civil rights and legal battles over public accommodations. Black leisure activities, such as “negro excursions,” dance hall parties, and pool playing, became subjects of sociological study and pathological signifiers of Blackness.Footnote ¹⁷

Indeed, for African Americans, politics and pleasure have been bound together. Historians have paid more attention to the former than the latter, as pleasure, joy, and elation have not constituted primary modes of historical inquiry. But it may be possible to use our historical imaginations and ask research questions about joy that produce complex narratives of Black affect. For instance, Davarian L. Baldwin’s Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life richly examines several leisure sites like gambling halls, theaters, and sporting events to demonstrate how Chicago’s Black intellectual life was rooted in its cultural production. While Baldwin highlights some joyful moments experienced by Black Chicagoans, our attention is drawn to how recreation programs represented “larger bids for respectable new Negro manhood and national inclusion,”Footnote ¹⁸ as opposed to the felt experience of Black leisure. Respectability and citizenship certainly functioned as motivations for “proper” Black amusement in the first few decades of the twentieth century. But Baldwin’s approach, which explores recreation primarily through the prism of civic politics and national belonging, generates questions about affective motivations for Black leisure. Did anticipations of excitement also shape Black recreational life in Chicago? How did Black Chicagoans derive joy from (or alongside) the civic politics of recreation? Did African Americans in Chicago and beyond perceive bodily pleasure as fundamental to their struggle for freedom and citizenship?

Victoria W. Wolcott similarly highlights the explicitly political nature of leisure activity in Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America, noting that recreational spaces served as some of the most important, and violent, struggles for racial justice in the civil rights era.Footnote ¹⁹ Wolcott is primarily concerned with recreational activism but her work provides a guide for how we may temporarily shift away from traditional civil rights political analyses to make room for new kinds of inquiries. Although she focuses on protests of segregated swimming pools, amusement parks, and skating rinks, we can imagine how it may have felt to float in bodies of water, soar on roller coasters, and glide on skates at a time when Black people felt saddled, ensnared, and restrained by racism. We may examine the felt experience of joy alongside the lived experience of violence.Footnote ²⁰ These studies show that joy and politics live side by side for Black historical actors, and while we cannot separate politics from emotion, we can surely dwell longer in affective analytical spaces.Footnote ²¹

A few working-class labor histories demonstrate how African Americans experienced joy that enabled them to forge possibilities outside of confining work regimes. In To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War, Tera W. Hunter explores opportunities for pleasure during a time of intense labor and civil rights struggles for working-class Black women in Atlanta.Footnote ²² As a reprieve from their arduous work, Black domestics would “dance the night away” in jook joints and dance halls in ways that belied their tired, overworked bodies. Hunter notes that although the African American laboring class worked hard, they also “worked hard at having fun.”Footnote ²³ To ‘Joy My Freedom is not a book about Black affect. Nevertheless, Hunter provides a springboard for other historians to interrogate how it felt for African American laborers to “‘joy” their freedom, as conscribed as that freedom was. Robin D. G. Kelley similarly writes that working-class African Americans frequented dance halls to recuperate from their grueling work schedules and that even the hardest of Black laborers still made time for pleasurable activities.Footnote ²⁴ In the tradition of such scholarship, this article explores what it meant to have fun vis-à-vis working arrangements, physical demands, and economic challenges that constrained the ability to feel joy. Like Badia Ahad-Legardy, the current study looks to examine “new ways of black being, black doing, and black feeling that enable flourishing under adverse social and political circumstances.”Footnote ²⁵

A Bad Time to Have a Good Time: Black Articulations of Joy during the Nadir

Rayford Logan painted a bleak picture of Black life in the 1880s and 1890s that made joy seem elusive—the overturning of the Civil Rights Act of 1875,Footnote ²⁶ a decline in Black Congressional representation, increasing anti-Black terrorism, debt peonage, rising illiteracy rates, and a host of other harrowing developments.Footnote ²⁷ Considering these overlapping political and economic crises, one wonders if Black people valued pleasure or, instead, perceived joy as frivolous ambition. If some African Americans prioritized amusement, what kinds of pursuits did they find joy-producing and worthwhile? Did Black thinkers and reformers conceive of pleasure and joy as constitutive of Black progress or a hindrance to racial uplift? Some race leaders, like W. E. B. Du Bois, believed in the moral and social value of pleasure and encouraged African Americans to balance life’s hardships with small delights.

In 1897, only one year after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that undoubtedly marked a “low point” in Black social and political life, W. E. B. Du Bois addressed a topic ostensibly unrelated to this discouraging moment—amusement. Du Bois must have been mindful of the grim post-Reconstruction milieu in which he wrote, as he declared in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860‒1880, “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”Footnote ²⁸ Even as Du Bois was aware of the devastations of segregation, the terror of lynching, and the despair of the economic depression of the 1890s, he maintained that pleasure remained the rightful pursuit of Black people. Connecting enjoyment to Black well-being, he stated definitively, “the manner, method, and extent of a people’s recreation is of vast importance to their welfare.”Footnote ²⁹

In a speech delivered at Hampton Institute titled, “The Problem of Amusement,” Du Bois argued that Black communities should look beyond the church for entertainment and implored African Americans to reconsider the notion that any form of recreation outside of the church setting functioned as the “peculiar property of the devil.” With its “limited and hackneyed amusements,” the church worked to repress the “divine mission of human inspiration.” To support his argument, he defined amusement as a necessary part of life and critical to human development:

Here, Du Bois presents rest and relaxation as ordered by nature and integral to the equilibrium of life. This assertion about the balance of human existence, however, would seem out of alignment with the realities of most Black people’s daily responsibilities in the 1890s. African Americans appeared to be constantly laboring, producing, caretaking, and working toward racial uplift. Was it possible to “relax” when the threat of racial hostility loomed large? Could Black people, especially those living in the newly regarded Jim Crow South, balance a demanding work life with rest and amusement? Du Bois believed in these balancing acts. Although not quite concerned with joy, here Du Bois prepares the audience to conceptualize joy as an essential component of “life’s rhythm” and a feeling that accompanies amusement.

During this time of ceaseless work, political setbacks, and unyielding racial antagonisms, Du Bois defined pleasure as a divine right to which Black people were entitled. He worried that “even a proverbially joyous people like the American Negroes are forgetting to recognize for their children the God-given right to play.” According to Du Bois, God had bestowed Black African Americans, especially youth, with a right to diverse forms of amusement. He described Black people’s desire for fun as “perfectly natural” and “legitimate,” and counted it as a mistake to “repress the natural joyousness and pleasure-seeking propensity of young womanhood and young manhood.”Footnote ³¹ He encouraged young people to sing songs (and not just hymns), “run, jump, walk, row, swim, throw and vault,” take long walks over hills, romp under trees, and more generally, “play and play hard.” He even conceived of play as a “divine institution.” Against the conservative sexual mores held by some African Americans, Du Bois also advocated the mingling of Black adolescents to develop the “natural love they have for each other’s companionship.” He addressed an anticipated concern of his audience—that mixed-gender social interaction would prove true the “sexual impurity among Negro men and Negro women.”Footnote ³² He assured them that with proper supervision, young people could practice “honor and chastity” within the same leisure spaces, thereby discursively shielding Black people from accusations of racialized debauchery. Du Bois’s rhetoric helped to lay the ideological groundwork of Black pleasure in almost irrefutable terms—both God and nature endowed African Americans with the divine right to rest, relaxation, and joy, even during the Nadir.

Du Bois’s musings about pleasure did not exclusively reside in the realm of theory, as everyday Black people employed similar approaches to their pursuit of joy. The year 1887, which marked the Thibodaux Massacre, the beginning of railroad car segregation in the South, and de facto segregation of baseball, was also a time when Black African Americans simply wanted to enjoy a day at the beach. But pursuing a relaxing, unmolested beach day proved to be a struggle, even in the urban North. James A. Bradley, the white real estate developer and owner of Asbury Park (located on the New Jersey Shore), complained in 1887 that the presence of Black revelers on the Park’s beach was “injuring the place” and diminished its “attractiveness.” White patrons had “object[ed] to the mere presence even of well behaved and well conducted colored people to any considerable number, on a beach to which they go for recreation.”Footnote ³³ For these reasons, Bradley attempted to restrict African Americans from Asbury Park, except as low-wage waiters, boardinghouse keepers, laundresses, and “maid servants.” A Black objector, nevertheless, retorted that Bradley and his white patrons could not “keep the colored people off God’s beach.” In attempting to colonize the beach, white visitors also sought to colonize the emotional benefits of the beach—relaxation, rejuvenation, fun, and togetherness. But by framing the beach as “God’s beach,” Black beachgoers invalidated white dominion over a natural resource that afforded them these pleasures. By placing ownership of the beach in God’s hands, just as Du Bois offered joy as a righteous entitlement, Black people argued for their divine right to use it, absent laws or customs that restricted Black patronage. Black beachgoers and other joy seekers, similar to those pictured here (Figure 1), redeemed their birthright to pleasure despite white efforts to constrain or “steal” their joy, as the adage goes.Footnote ³⁴

Figure 1. Black beachgoers at Asbury Park, New Jersey, 1908. “Negroes, Asbury,” LC-B2-432-8, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Du Bois believed that joy-producing recreation allowed Black citizens to withstand the “insult” of racism, sustain some level of faith, and continue to believe in the virtue of personal sacrifice. He explained, “For believe me, my hearers, the great danger of the best class of Negro youth today is not that they will hesitate to sacrifice their lives, their money, and their energy on the altar of their race, but the danger is lest under continuous and persistent proscription, under the thousand little annoyances and petty insults and disappointments of a caste system, they lose the divine faith of their fathers in the fruitfulness of sacrifice.” He added that “true amusement, true diversion” allowed for the “re-creation of energy which we may sacrifice to noble ends, to higher ideals.”Footnote ³⁵ In other words, adults could not expect youths to invest in the struggle for freedom if they placed limitations on their enjoyment, particularly when young people were already subject to daily forms of racism that restricted Black autonomy. Seemingly, these overlapping constraints on freedom, from both Black adults and white agitators, did not have inspiring effects and provided poor lessons in Black self-determination. Indeed, thousands of compounded “annoyances,” “insults,” and “disappointments” characterized the Nadir and may have left some feeling too dismayed to perform important race work. According to Du Bois, both intraracial and interracial strictures on recreation proved counterproductive to fostering an energized Black youth that would embody “higher ideals” and not hesitate to sacrifice their lives “on the altar of their race.”

While Du Bois believed in the intrinsic value of joy for Black people, his meditation on the relationship between amusement and sacrifice points to an operational value. In his understanding of the functionality of recreation, Du Bois did not necessarily conceive of joyful amusement as resistance itself but rather as a possible facilitator of future resistance. In this case, joy is not a reaction to white oppression but perhaps preparation for it. Although he may not have sensed it at the time, Du Bois signaled to the generation that would commence the long civil rights movement to balance their fight for freedom with pauses for joy in ways that made joy seeking and freedom fighting inextricably connected (but not synonymous). Du Bois’s theorization of Black joy demonstrates that pleasure was possible, even recommended, during the dismal times of the Nadir of race relations. Joy may have very well served as a regenerating force for African Americans to survive the Nadir.

Not everyone, however, agreed with Du Bois’s position about the relationship between churchless recreation, pleasure, and sacrifice. Some believed that recreation should be deprioritized or highly conscribed for young people. An 1894 essay published in the Fisk Herald by an unnamed but religiously inclined author is a key case in point. Titling the essay “The Demand for Young Men,” the author proposed that young Black men, as the “hope of the family, the race, [and] the nation,” should develop physical, intellectual, and moral manhood exclusively through virtuous activities. “Heaven forbid,” the writer began, “that we, that any one of us should ever be the robber of an other’s [sic] virtue; that one should be the occupant of a gambling hall or the parasite of the accursed saloon! How can we, young men, lie supinely on our backs indifferent to the exigencies of our times?”Footnote ³⁶

Although the author did not demean all forms of recreation, he placed limits on pastimes that may have brought genuine contentment to Black individuals. But individual pleasure was inconsequential because the saloon “robbed immortal souls,” desolated homes, and “retarded” the “onward march to civilization.”Footnote ³⁷ The gambling hall and the saloon, places of legitimate leisure, were not just morally suspect because they were “accursed” venues but also because the “exigencies of our times” seemed to call Black men to make different choices about where to seek gratification. “Exigencies” here could refer to moral exigencies, but in the context of the Nadir, they may have also signified extant racial, economic, and political crises. In contrast to Du Bois, who held more forgiving views on leisure, this writer believed that “the salvation of the race” and “the weighty responsibilities that await us” would be profoundly compromised by the unrestricted and self-chosen activities of Black youth.

The perspective relayed in the Fisk Herald was not unique and, in reality, characterized many, if not most, Black institutions of the late nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁸ Several Black higher education establishments held that having a good time should not be the focus of Black citizens attempting to live upstanding and purposeful lives. In 1893, Nathan Cook Brackett, the once abolitionist and white principal of the all-Black Storer College, applauded young people who avoided “excursions, festivals, picnics, and many other places of amusement” as well as tobacco, alcohol and “all forms of gambling.”Footnote ³⁹ These avoidances, ostensibly, allowed students to save time and money that was better spent on their education and other presumably worthy causes. Brackett held that “diligence” and “self-denial” would produce both the best pupil and dignified Black character.

Because Storer was one of a few Black higher education institutions at the time, perhaps Brackett believed that its students should commit to more serious matters and could not afford to invest in joy. These recreational restrictions seemed to be a missed opportunity for students and a position Du Bois would challenge. Storer was located near “a popular and attractive summer resort” that Black revelers frequented for their vacations, but the students were not permitted to partake in this neighborhood delight.Footnote ⁴⁰ It must have been difficult for students to pass the resort or perhaps peer outside their windows and see a leisure site they could not inhabit. The college instituted other draconian, joy-reducing policies, such as limitations on bringing “jewelry and gaudy clothing” to campus. Storer could have integrated some recreation into the rigorous curriculum or, as Du Bois suggested, conceptualized leisure as necessary to producing balanced Black youth prepared for the racial uplift crusade. But Brackett, instead, announced forcefully that “Storer College is a place for work and not for play.”Footnote ⁴¹

What, then, did Black people do to cultivate joy in their lives? How did they create places not for work but for play? How did they offset the violence of the Nadir—and object to the prohibitions of some Black institutions—through pleasurable acts? As noted, some did revel in so-called accursed gambling halls, saloons, and dance halls, or confined their diversions to church recreations. But African Americans also pursued pleasure in spaces other than these polarized leisure arenas. They played word games, invented toys, and delighted in the outdoors to actualize their joy.

On a snowy day in February 1899, Black schoolchildren in Virginia did what many young people do in cold weather—they had a snowball fight. The children’s “snow-balling” during a particularly heavy storm “filled the youth with joy,” “great zest,” and “good humor.”Footnote ⁴² Indeed, anyone who has participated in a snowball fight can relate to these young people’s exhilaration—the sensorial pleasure of molding soft snow into a dense globe, the thrill of “hitting” your target, and the elation of watching large snow clumps burst into a cloud that covers your playmate in white dust (being “hit” could also be pleasurable). This innocent snowball fight among Black children may appear to be an ordinary amusement, but it could have felt more consequential in the context of the segregated South. The joys of “snow-balling” may have offered a momentary salve for the injury of recreational segregation or an indulgence that counteracted the bitterness of being deprived of parks, pools, and playgrounds. Perhaps the activity did not hold this kind of weighty significance drenched in racial meaning, but rather, was a simple, fun afternoon spent romping in the snow. After all, the Southern Workman reported on the occasion under its “Every Day Affairs” section of the Hampton School Record, suggesting its quotidian nature. In either case, Black children used their local outdoors as their personal playground. They stepped outside, played in nature, and produced their own joy (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Although likely staged, this image, taken in 1902, demonstrates the possibility of Black joy at approximately the time that, according to Rayford Logan, African Americans had reached a point of declension. White photographer and explorer William Henry Jackson took this photograph, possibly at Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida. “Four black boys sitting on a cannon by a waterfront,” LC-D4-30806, Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

African American children also gravitated toward pleasurable activities requiring more inventiveness. The Rising Son, a weekly Black newspaper based in Kansas City, Missouri, thought young people would enjoy making, as curious as it sounds, a “fly see-saw.” To assemble the device, children would place molasses or syrup on both ends of a strip of paper and balance the strip on top of a pencil. The Son instructed the players to wait for flies to land on the ends of the contraption, in essence creating a seesaw that served as a toy. The seesaw could be used individually or played competitively as a game, in which case the winner would be the player who accrued the most flies on their side of the device. Constructing the toy, anticipating its functionality, and watching its successful execution may have offered, at worst, a feeling of moderate satisfaction and, at best, genuine amusement. If played collectively, it could have produced a sense of shared wonder, discovery, and camaraderie. Transforming flies, often viewed as symbols of poverty, into sources of pleasure was “an amusing little trick” that the paper believed young people “would find lots of fun.”Footnote ⁴³ A simple “fly see-saw” may have momentarily combated feelings of disappointment and disenchantment experienced by Black children of the Nadir. Observing children tinker with this peculiar toy could have also delighted adults, temporarily reducing their own feelings of dismay. Activities like this did not require many resources—except for the will and affective capacity to indulge in “lots of fun” while weathering the agonies of the Nadir (Figure 3).Footnote ⁴⁴

Figure 3. Pictured are two Black girls and a Black boy using tree limbs as clubs and a pinecone as a golf ball, circa 1905. Like the young people who may have experimented with the “fly see saw,” Black children turned to natural resources for their amusement during the Nadir. “Golferinos,” LC-USZ62-77635, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Black press also offered games to adults who sought leisure and laughter at social gatherings. The St. Louis Palladium presented readers with “Telegrams,” a party word game in which ten random letters were chosen, and attendees would then create a sentence (or a “telegram”) starting with the selected letters. The example provided by the paper included the letters A, L, W, K, B, E, T, O, G, and H, in which a potential telegram could read, “Another Lad Will Kiss Before Edith Thinks Of Going Home.”Footnote ⁴⁵ One can imagine the creative, funny, or even bawdy telegrams African American partygoers constructed. If played earnestly, a word game such as this could help form new connections between unacquainted party guests, reveal commonalities between neighbors, engender inside jokes between friends, or strengthen bonds between family members.

Diversions like word games might have fostered merriment, conviviality, and a sense of collective euphoria for Black people subsisting in racist worlds devoid of these delights. African Americans, nevertheless, engaged in their own world making. Private spaces of the home may serve as investigative sites for African American merrymaking during the Nadir, particularly when popular, public spaces of entertainment, like Blackface minstrel and vaudeville shows, often elicited laughter and good feelings at Black people’s expense.Footnote ⁴⁶ These home spaces allowed African Americans to use what they had at their disposal, in this case, words, to induce joy through Black belonging and fellowship. While they suffered from and struggled against institutions of anti-Black racism, we might imagine that African Americans retreated to their homes to delight in the “divine institution” of play.

From the perspective of the Nadir, these examples—a snowball fight, a game played with houseflies, a word competition—may appear insignificant given the massive structural burdens Black people endured at the turn of the century. However, viewed from a space of joy, these instances may have generated a temporary state of well-being and a positive orientation toward the future that enabled Black sustainability and resolve. They may not have detracted from the ideals of personal sacrifice and racial progress but rather contributed to them. As Du Bois explained, these amusements and their attendant affects could “inspire us for [a] renewed effort in a great cause.”Footnote ⁴⁷

During the Nadir, W. E. B. Du Bois addressed a Black audience who worried that secular amusements would compromise moral turpitude and thought that self-denial, not joy, facilitated racial advancement. But Du Bois reframed amusement for his listeners, presenting it as a natural, God-given right that provided well-deserved pleasure for an oppressed race. At the end of his speech, he pleaded, “I beg you to strive to change the mental attitude of the race toward amusement for the young, from a wholesale negative to an emphatic positive. Instead of warning young people so constantly against [the] excess of pleasure, let us rather … show them that amusement and recreation are the legitimate and necessary accompaniments of work.”Footnote ⁴⁸ While some disagreed with the premise that pleasure constituted a worthy ideal for Black people living under the strains of disenfranchisement, others, as shown, agreed with Du Bois and indeed helped to alter the race’s attitude toward pleasure. They extracted joy wherever and whenever they could by relaxing at the beach, holding parties, playing games, making toys, and relishing nature. While not documented here, Black people experienced joy in numerous ways, from eating, cooking, playing instruments, “dressing up,” dancing, courting,Footnote ⁴⁹ napping, gossiping, and many other quotidian acts. Even under incalculable subjugation, during “the lowest point” of American race relations, Black people developed the affective capacity to cultivate, feel, and express joy.

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Charting a history of pleasure during times of racial grief might reveal that the joyful protests of 2020 are part of a time-honored repertoire of Black coping, collective care, and freedom dreaming. Turning our attention to the displays of joy during the 2020 demonstrations and the experiences of pleasure during the Nadir may allow us to appreciate the intertwined, double helix of Black pleasure seeking and freedom seeking throughout African American history. As Black feminist writer adrienne maree brown explains, “True pleasure—joy, happiness, and satisfaction—has been the force that helps us move beyond the constant struggle…. Pleasure helps us move through the times that are unfair, through grief and loneliness, through the terror of genocide, or days when the demands are just overwhelming. Pleasure heals the places where our hearts and spirits get wounded. Pleasure reminds us that, even in the dark, we are alive. Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The close relationship between joy and liberation, as brown indicates, is instructive for how we may approach historical studies of Black life. When Black people continued to pursue joy during one of the darkest periods after slavery, as they did during the summer of 2020, they may have been experimenting with how freedom might feel. During dismal times, Black people created their own joy and illustrated that Black life was valuable and Blackness was delightful—that even in racial misery, they had the capacity to feel good, heal themselves, and create an affective reality never meant for them.

Joy, then, has much to offer in how we understand Black social, cultural, and interior life. For instance, although the Nadir, as Logan conceived it, mostly concerned structural, top-down analyses of social and political defeat, we may also approach the Nadir curious about the more intimate manifestations of emotional gratification. We may learn that while misery making was a top-down phenomenon during this period, joy making occurred from the bottom-up. Exploring scenes of delight alongside everyday terror may bring to the surface the inherent ambivalence of Black joy and illustrate how African Americans endured a period like the Nadir with a profound level of emotional nimbleness and complexity. Analyzing joy might also reveal a different kind of “paradox of pleasure”—that joy is both remarkable and ordinary. Black joy is radical and resistant; it can seem especially spectacular under Jim Crow oppression.Footnote ⁵¹ But Black joy is also mundane and, in a sense, unremarkable, as Black people have often found pathways to pleasure amid sorrow.Footnote ⁵² Finally, joy may encourage us to consider periods like the Nadir as less static and fixed, and more open to different kinds of historical interpretation. When we think of, study, and write about the Nadir and other “low” moments in African American history, the counterintuitive turn to joy might offer these unexpected and rich analytical possibilities.