By Cody Yarbrough, Contributing Writer
Spades are a part of the Black identity that I have very little history with. I think Barack Obama was still president the last time I played a full hand. It’s not that I’m bad at it or I don’t like playing. The truth is that, for one reason or another, the game hasn’t been relevant to my social life. Despite the strong cultural significance Spades has had on Black American culture for more than a century now, I’d found myself completely content being divorced with this part of the Black experience. That is until I got an email invite to a Spades night.
It was a closed event at a small business where I knew the owners. No outsiders, no gambling, just some casual cards and maybe some tea. The image on the digital invitation looked more like a young people’s event at a church than a card night in Detroit. Yet despite how laid back the get-together seemed, I couldn’t help but feel taken back with surprise. It had been years since I had even seen a game being played, and that was when the older folks played a few hands at the last family gathering on my father’s side.
There was a disconnect between me and this part of my culture that was hard to put my finger on. It was something that the older generations didn’t seem to feel. Learning Spades was a part of life that had just happened to every Black person up until my generation. I wanted to understand it, and moreover, I wanted to be a part of it.
My mother once told me about the first time she learned how to play spades. She was raised in the Black church in the ’70s and ’80s, meaning that anything that could lead to sin was a sin. Playing card games could lead to gambling, so my mother and her siblings weren’t allowed to play cards. By the time she arrived at Grambling State University in the late 80s, she didn’t even know how to play Go Fish. When the friends she made there heard this, they were appalled. They quickly took her under their wing and taught her the rules and strategy of the game. Before long, she was up to speed and joining her fellow classmates in games between classes and boning with Black people from across the country over a single shared game.
I didn’t have that experience. There had been a new Black student union that started at the school where I was studying. Thank God. The college was mostly filled with upper-middle-class white kids, and the few Black people I did bump into seemed more interested in fitting into the lightly veiled racist culture of the school than building community with each other. When I joined the BSU, it was filled with Black people like me. Politically minded, culturally Detroit, and unapologetically Black. We bonded quickly through games of Uno, Chess, and Tunk, and we got to know each other better. It was basically a social club, but to us, it was a safe haven in a hostile environment.
Then, one day, someone asked, “Y’all tryna’ play Spades?” There were about 12 people in the room, and we all turned and looked at him like the kid who reminded the teacher about homework. About two people shrugged their shoulders and said they were down. Me and a couple of others mentioned that we knew how to play but would need a refresher. But the other half of the room had no idea how to even play. Still, there were enough people to put a game together. We got into improvised pairs and dealt out the cards. Those who knew how to play bumped heads over localized rules. I and the others who were rusty desperately tried to recall the rules and strategies our families had taught us years ago. And the other half of the room, who didn’t know how to play, watched bewildered as the players struggled to put together a coherent hand. In all honesty, I don’t even know if we finished the game. If memory serves me correctly, we went back to playing Uno after that.
That seemingly small moment in my life has always stayed stuck in my head. If we were trying to play Poker or Euchre, then I probably would’ve forgotten about the whole thing by now. But it was Spades. A game that, as a Black man, I should’ve known. Or, at the very least, a game that someone from my culture should’ve been able to teach me like they did my mother. Instead, I found that it was a piece of the Black identity that was starting to become irrelevant to my generation. It’s not that we didn’t have the attention spans for it or that we didn’t play card games; we simply had no connection to the game and felt no urge to reach out to it.
Maybe that’s why the tournament invitation caught me so off guard. Most people would see it as nothing more than a simple get-together between friends, but for someone like me, it was a chance to partake in a part of a Black American tradition that is dying with the Gen Zers.
One could write a book on the many reasons things like Spades, recipes, and old songs are fading from the Black community. Some blame the previous generation for failing as teachers. Some blame the youth for being disinterested in their heritage. There are even a few who blame it on some secret government conspiracy. No matter what the cause of the disconnect is, I decided that I wanted to be one of the people who help preserve that part of the culture.
I went back to the email and messaged them back, telling them that I’d be there at the card night. Even though I’ll be rusty and probably the worst player there, I’m excited to attend and participate in a game that’s lasted generations. Because even if the culture failed me in
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