The audience is seated and honeying up to itself. Black men and women in miniskirts and wigs, dashikis and flowing robes, rub tootsies and exchange greetings through the dark. Deep drumming is heard from the street; folks turn their heads backwards. The Kushites Returned leap, sweep down the aisles, silk cloth flies in the air gleaming with silver threads, the painted dancers burst through the darkness. Spotlights follow the sounds of the bells on their wrists and ankles; they scream and sigh, and all is joy, mighty and profound, until Ariel is carried onstage on three male dancers’ backs. He is clad in opulent golden cloth and his head is five feet high with billowing feathers. He jumps to the floor, undulates, and brings the Haitian spirit Damballah to the San Francisco underground theatre. The dancers had been in the aisles doing modern black American contractions and slides and swivels and things, and now they were all ancient and African and wholly non-West Coast California. It’s so magic folks feel their own ancestors coming up out of the earth to be in the realms of their descendants; they feel the blood of their mothers still flowing in them, survivors of the diaspora. Ariel moves across the stage, all on the ground. Not one part of his body more than three inches off the floor—and twitching, and carrying on. The dancers all move toward him to bring his reception of Damballah to an apex—and all of a sudden, the music takes a switch, and two women looking like hootchy-coo carnie girls, 1925, begin doing an incredible belly dance behind Ariel. As they make a slow diagonal toward him from stage left, three others clad in the razzmatazz minstrel outfits of the old southern T.O.B.A. circuit start doing a soft-shoe, and the music goes crazy, and all the movements grow larger and more compelling. And all of Africa in all times is thundering through the dancers, the air. The audience doesn’t exist; everybody is moving, all is not lost. Cypress laughed as she samba’d to the exit . . . niggahs still got rhythm. . . . uh-huh.