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Today, I will be sharing my review of Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me.

Introduction

Hi, welcome back to Black Star Reviews—or I should say welcome, because this is my very first review ever! I’ve been looking forward to doing this, and now it’s finally happening. My name is Anastazia X, and I am a Black star. You’re a Black star. We’re all Black stars.

Dedication

We’re dedicating this episode to two people, two elders, two ancestors: John Witherspoon and Bernie Mac. As I get into the review, it will become abundantly clear why I’m reminded of them. I just want to give them their Black stars, their Black roses, for their specifically bombastic style of storytelling. The way they were able to make us all laugh by being so over the top, the way they represented masculinity, and the way they shared their stories, laughed through their pain. I hope they found healing and rest when their lives came to an end. So, “bang, bang, bang” to John Witherspoon [and Bernie], because “I ain’t afraid of you.”

Context

Today, I will be sharing my review of Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me. If the title was not already calling my name, I actually saw a review of it in The New Yorker. It was reviewed by Vinson Cunningham, of whom I’m a huge fan. I love his cultural critique work. Just some quick things from what he said: he described it as a variety show, a history lesson, and almost a spiritual re-embodiment all at once. To be honest with you, when I read Vinson’s review, I didn’t know what to expect. I was like, “Okay, sure.” But I checked it out. It was taking place at a venue called The Performing Garage, and the tickets were super cheap. So I thought, “Let me go see what it’s about. I know I’m going to see something new, Black, and I know I’m going to see some art. I know it’s super, super off-Broadway.” It’s in the off-off-Broadway category, so I figured at the very least I would get a story out of it. And I definitely did.

The show is just two people. There’s a guy who does most of the vocalizing, and then there’s a drummer. Their names are Eric Berryman—he’s the speaker, the storyteller—and Jharis Yokley, who’s the drummer.

But wait, y’all, this is Eric Berryman, and I spent the whole show thinking, “Where do I know him from? Maybe I went to college with him? Maybe he’s my cousin?” Y’all, this is the man from the Goofy Movie episode of Atlanta! When I tell you I was floored when I got back home and figured out who he was… ah, he was so good. Anyway, back to what I was saying: the percussion really supports the rhythm of the show. Of course, it supports the rhythm, but it keeps the show moving. The amount of effects he’s able to do with the drum was very impressive. I wish I had a better view of him, but from where I was sitting, I couldn’t see him that well. The seats, when you get in there, are a mix of chairs on the stage and stadium-style bench seating. At first, I went up into the benches, but then I was like, “Oh, back support!” So I came right back down and sat on the chairs on the stage. But it wasn’t weird or anything like that. Actually, I had a really great view.

Let me get into my review: First, you only have until February 3rd to see it, so haul ass—don’t wait! Go see it tomorrow. It’s up every day except for Sunday and Monday. You can get tickets for as low as $39, which I think is pretty unheard of.

My Thoughts

I have a lot of thoughts about this show, some of which are about the show itself, and others are really more about the cultural contribution of this show to the Black canon. One of the things I’ve learned about Black history and history in general is that it’s not just the historian’s job. It’s actually the responsibility of all of us to record it. The dominant narrative will be recorded—don’t you worry, that will find its way into the books. It will be archived. Pieces of it, clues of it, will become really valuable in time. Those things might even become monuments or other sorts of national artifacts. But outside of that dominant narrative, nothing else will be preserved in the official record.

It reminds me of that saying from Gil Scott-Heron, “The revolution will not be televised.” Black history—which is American history, we’re all clear on that—well, some of us understand that it doesn’t fit into the dominant narrative. It has always been our job to push it onto the calendar, to shove it onto the syllabus, and to correct its many misrepresentations in media. They can tell you that it never happened, but we’ve carved history into walls, and those walls have crumbled. We’ve written it into books, and books can be burned. We can air it on TV, but TVs can be disconnected. The only thing that can’t be destroyed—the only thing that can’t be destroyed, though it can be distracted or diverted—is collective consciousness.

What I mean by that is just a shared understanding of what really happened, a shared understanding of what’s actually true. The way we create collective consciousness is by telling and retelling and deeply knowing our stories as we live them. Down the line, people who are curious will find our accounts, but no one is going to make it easy for them to find those stories. So since we know it’s not going to make it into the history books, since we know it’s not going to make it into the dominant narrative, we have a responsibility to tell our stories to each other and future generations. So that when people are looking for our stories, they can find them. But if we just trust that because it happened, someone will remember, or because it was on the news, or because it became a law, we might believe that because those things happen, they’ll never unhappen. If we lean on that too much, the things we treasure most about ourselves and our community could be erased. It’s happened before, and it could happen again.

Think about when Columbus terrorized the people who were already in America. They recorded that. There are accounts of what happened, and yet it’s still not in the history books. People told Arturo Schomburg that Black people had never made art before, that Black people had never written books. He amassed an entire collection of books that’s now part of the New York Public Library. But they tried to tell him that it didn’t exist in the first place. We’ve also heard that people who’ve died at the hands of police were resisting arrest, they were fighting back. Then we see a tape where innocent people were murdered, and we find out that the truth they told us was actually not true. Oral accounts, libraries, tapes, recordings—those things could all be forgotten within a century.

That’s why it’s so important to tell each other the truth over time. Tell and retell. Because if we don’t, the real truth will get twisted and resold to us as a fantasy. The idea that Black people are free in Wakanda, and that they have valuable natural resources and all this technology—that’s sold to us as a fantasy, even though it’s based in real history and reality.

I don’t mean to get all conspiracy theory about this, but I’m just urging us to build collective consciousness by documenting what’s happening in the time that it happens and sharing it with someone other than just your circle, which is what I’m trying to do with Black Star Reviews. So I appreciate your support.

But back to the show. In the 60s, a guy got a grant to record these stories, these oral narratives he had grown up hearing. He wrote them all down as a book and defined them as a genre. He seated them under the tradition of Black folk storytelling, but they were unique in their own way. Harvard paid the bill for this, and I’m sure there’s a story there. The story wasn’t expressed in the show, so I won’t get into that. But Harvard gave him the grant to write down these stories, to get them on paper because they had never been recorded before. A few years later, he came out with a CD that brought the written version of these toasts to life so that people could actually hear them. The book, the CD, and the show are all titled Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me.

I should tell you, the title is actually a quote from one of the toasts. It’s about a Black guy who works on the Titanic. He tries to tell [the other passengers], “Hey, the ship is going down. It’s sinking! We need to get out of here!” They told him to get back to work. His name is Shine. They told him, “Get back to work, Shine. Get back to work.” So he hopped off the boat and started swimming. Obviously, this is not a true story because the Titanic was in very cold Atlantic waters, and he wasn’t going to swim to shore. But suspend reality for a moment. Just focus on the point.

He jumps off the boat, and they start realizing, “Oh my God, the ship is going down! We need help!” They call him: “Shine, help us, help us, please!” He looks up and down from the boat and says, “There’s nothing I can do for you.” What he actually says is, “Get your ass in the water and swim like me.” I think many of us, Black and non-Black, have been there: when people say, “Help me, help me,” and the best thing you can do to help yourself is to do what I’m doing and get out of the situation.

But to get into kind of the depth, the depth of the pieces, like it is a composition of seven—the program says seven, but you actually get eight, eight stories, eight toasts, eight Black folk accounts, specific to men, specific within like the realm of masculinity. Many of them rhyme, they’re set to some music and drumming, like I said, and they are both poetic and enthralling. Like, he starts a story and you don’t know where it’s gonna end, right? But somebody is gonna get a foot in their ass. I think that happened in every single one of the toasts, right? So we have a deep tradition of breaking off shoes, but we knew that.

Another thing that I’m thinking is that this show, these stories are a part of the hip-hop story, right? But we haven’t heard this before, because when people tell us about the story of hip-hop, they tell us, they tell us this musical story, right? Hip-hop came from the blues, and all, and I’m not saying that that is not true, but what I will say is that hip-hop is not just a story of music, hip-hop is a story of culture, specifically of Black culture. And I think that’s why people have all of these strong reactions when they see white people making hip-hop music because they’re like, “That’s our culture.” Yes, and you don’t have to exclude people from it, but hip-hop is both a musical tradition and a cultural tradition.

When I went to go see Hip-Hop Til Infinity over the summer during the 50th anniversary of hip-hop — it turned 50, y’all. Hip-hop is middle-aged. Hip-hop is wearing a Kangol hat. Hip-hop is taking guys’ trips to the DR. Hip-hop has come of age. But Questlove was in there, it was a recording of Questlove talking about the history of hip-hop, and he was going a little bit deeper than I had ever heard before. And I want to share with you something he said because I almost immediately saw the connection between this toast culture and what Quest describes.

So there were these, there was this tradition, like, in Jamaica, where you would spend all your money on speakers and drive around playing music, and you would have basically the equivalent of an MC rapping, talking over the music, and giving what was called a toast. And it was kind of like playing the dozens, right? Like, “I’m this, I’m this, my team is this, we’re all this, y’all wish you could, but you can’t,” right? And then there was another truck, right, from the opposite team, doing the same thing. And what I didn’t know growing up in the States was that DJ Kool Herc and a lot of the early hip-hop people, the people who are credited with the birth of hip-hop in the Bronx — they were the children of or actually themselves Caribbean immigrants, so they brought toast culture from the islands to the United States. But we also have toast culture in the U.S. under the umbrella of Black American history, right? So in my mind, toast culture is rooted in Caribbean culture as well as Black American — what I want to call — “man storytelling.”

Now, “man stories,” I know they’re like not a thing, I don’t think you could Google it, it’s probably not even in Urban Dictionary, I might have coined a term. But “man stories,” like you know what they are at the family reunion, in the barbershop, in the usher’s room at the church, all those places where men tell stories to other men. So imagine, like, the Black version of the locker room. Remember when Donald Trump was like, “Oh, it’s just locker room talk,” right? And women were horrified, and men were like, “Oh, yeah, not all men, some men were like, ‘Yeah, locker room talk, I get it.'” Right, so we talking Black locker room talk. And back when women really had to stay at the house, like, could not be anywhere else, men would be in bars, in pool halls, they would be at war in the trenches, right? Women definitely weren’t there. [Men] would be shooting dice on corners, and they would be telling man stories, what I’m calling man stories now. These were (we still have to hear man stories today) these are wild exaggerations about themselves, about their peers, and even about people that they’ve never met.

And these stories were the vehicle for discussing manhood. There is so much conversation about, like, you know, how do men relate to each other, how do they communicate? One thing that we do know is that men will tell stories often before they’ll tell you what they are really going through. They’ll tell you a story about somebody else.

And one of the quotes from the show was, “A community creates the heroes that it needs.” The heroes of man stories, in my experience, as well as in the show, they’re wild, they’re crafty, they’re slick-talking, they’re strong, and they’re vicious in the bedroom. Like, to the point of being violent, but the women are always satisfied.

Now, some of these toasts that men were telling in their man caves made it out into the light of the Black family, into the light of the Black community, to be told and retold. And I think about, like, John Henry. I grew up hearing this story about John Henry and how he was, you know, he was a coal mining machine, right? He could plow through a mountain, and they said, “John Henry, you’re not faster than this brand-new machine we made to cut through mountains.” And John Henry was like, “Yes, I am.” And so, they decided they’re going to have a race, right? They got John Henry on one side, they got the machine on the side, one, two, three, go. John Henry beats the machine and dies at the end. He worked himself to death.

Is John Henry an imaginary person? Because if so, this is a man story. And if he’s not an imaginary person, this is still a man story because of the exaggeration and because of what John Henry represents.

And then I start thinking about all the other stories, right? All the other Black stories. Trickster stories, hero stories, Black diasporic stories — about Anansi, about Br’er Rabbit. And just so y’all know, Br’er is just a contraction of brother, so Brother Rabbit really changes the game when you change his name to Brother Rabbit. He makes a lot more sense.

So some of those stories crossed over, but some of those stories stayed in man world. They needed to stay there because they were not for anybody else. Barely appropriate for the men, if you ask me. But you didn’t ask me that.

So, these toasts are poems, ballads, traded over liquor in dark rooms. What does that sound like to you? Sounds like hip-hop to me. Sounds like being in the studio to me. Sounds like a cipher to me. If you give a man a microphone—and this is, I’m not anti-men, but just I think y’all will agree with me—if you give a man a microphone, he will tell you a story. He will probably embellish that story. He might even make that story rhyme. He’ll preach a sermon. And, if you give a man a microphone, he might make a podcast.

But if there’s anything that I’ve learned from this show, which I just love the name of it, I’m going to say it one last time, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me—it’s that nothing is new. Right? Hip-hop is not new. One-upping is not new. Storytelling, Black storytelling, man storytelling, man stories—they’re not new, but they can be forgotten. But just like anything can be forgotten, it can be remembered. So, the fact that these were a part of Black men’s collective consciousness and eventually gave birth to hip-hop, which is something that we can all participate in present day as Black people—and that it was erased and then written down in the 60s and then nobody talked about it, and now it’s back in the form of a show—anything that can be forgotten can be remembered and added to the collective consciousness.

Review

Okay, so I know I’ve talked a lot about the show, but I haven’t actually given it my three-part review. So, who would I recommend this show to? Let me tell you who I wouldn’t recommend this show to: children! There is a lot of explicit content in this show. They’re saying p-words, d-words, f-words, a-words, all of them. They’re talking about big, huge, huge ones swinging around, knocking people over. They’re talking about war. They’re talking about relationships between pimps and sex workers. So we are not taking children to this show. It is explicit.

We are also not taking people who are sensitive to any of those things to this show. I don’t think that they would be able to look past it enough to enjoy it because it is pretty pervasive. Also, because these are historical folk stories, there is some language directed at specific ethnic groups—specifically Japanese people—that are not appropriate. Weren’t appropriate then, aren’t appropriate now, but are used within the context of the time, so that’s something else to keep in mind. One other group of people that I would not take to this show: I would not take anyone to this show who would use this as ammunition for the war against Black men. I would not take anyone to this show who would be like, “And that’s why Black men ain’t okay.” So because this is historical, and this is an oral tradition, I would not take anyone who would use this as fodder for putting Black men down.

But let me tell you who I think would like this show. I think Black men, between the ages of 18 and up until that point where they get so like… to that age where they can’t take a joke anymore, whatever that cut off is—men within that, they would like this show. I would also take anybody who loves like a dirty story. Anybody who likes dirty jokes. Anybody who had a favorite uncle and that uncle used to tell them stories. Anybody who has a relative who earned a Purple Heart, I would say that. A barber—I’d take any of those people from those groups to go see this show, and I think that they would enjoy it.

Okay, so where would I go after the show? After the show, I would head to Butterfly Soho. I would make sure I had a reservation for cocktails and just talk through some of the outlandish, outrageous folk tales that you would hear that night. And overall, I am going to give this show three Black stars. And I want to be clear: one Black star does not mean I hated it. One Black star is, “Thank you so much for your contribution. We need this.” Right? The community needs this. And so, what three Black stars means is this show was thoughtful, it was artistic, it was telling a story that needed to be told that’s rarely told. I hadn’t heard it before. I think it really snuck up on you in its intimacy, and I would go see it again… with a barber.

So, three Black stars and a bouquet of Black roses for Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me. And so, in that same spirit, I want to make a toast to man stories. A toast to those sacred masculine spaces that men need. And, I may regret this, but also a toast to men with microphones. Sending blacklove and starlight to you all. See you next time.