The conventional wisdom is that one learns new tasks by doing them. But that’s hard to do with spades, the very competitive four-person card game that’s a staple in many Black American gatherings. If you can’t already play when you get to the cookout, don’t expect your uncle and them to tutor you on the fly. They have winning to do.

“If you can’t play spades already, don’t sit down!” insisted comedian and author KevOnStage in a famous 2015 video called “Unwritten Black Rule: 65.” His fellow standup Trez Anderson explained on TikTok that for Black people, ”When you come out the womb, spades’ supposed to come with ya.”

There is no universal Black anything, and some people outside the community play spades as well, but its origins are very, super Black.

And I didn’t know how to play.

I remember speed-walking through the Black Student Union at the University of Maryland, College Park with my head down lest anyone ask me to participate in a round.

I recently decided it was time to learn because I wanted to add to the repertoire of games in which my son and I try to beat each other mercilessly. So I asked lifelong spades master and play cousin Derrick Pittman, a Baltimore native, to teach me. It’s complicated, but it makes more sense with cards in your hands.

He agreed, even though “there’s a reason people don’t take new people” — it’s a good way to get embarrassed.

According to a 2024 post on the site PushBlack by Tremain Prioleau II, spades, the unofficial Black card game, is the descendent of the game bid whist, itself created by Black enslaved people as a version of the games bridge and whist.

Priloleau wrote that owners of enslaved people encouraged the game so their workers could learn to count cotton barrels, but if there’s one thing Black people are going to do, it’s improvise on our pain and make something better.

Even though my dad played the game pinochle and his parents were bid whist people, I was not raised to play these sorts of card games as a kid. I was, however, schooled in the art of highly competitive and ruthless UNO under the tutelage of my father, who explained that once I learned, it would be condescending to let me win just because of my age.

I’ve passed that intense UNO-ry onto my son, Brooks, who I will stack Draw 4s on all day long, knowing he will do the same to me when possible. Stacking, which is putting cards of the same suit on top of each other in the same play, is not in the rules. But staunch proponents attest that we just don’t care. Stacks on stacks on stacks, baby!

Brooks’ UNO prowess is a case of the student surpassing the teacher and all that, but there is very little chance that I am ever going to surpass Derrick in spades. Fortunately, he assured me that even without prior spades knowledge, this sort of take-no-prisoners, stunt-on-little-kids philosophy would do me well.

“You have to have bravado,” explained Pittman, who now lives in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. “Only talk crap if you can back that crap up.”

Heaven knows I can’t! He arrived at my house with a brand-new deck of large face cards, the only ones they had at the drug store he stopped at on the way. “Don’t bring these to most games, or you will get talked about,” he groused.

To play spades, you need two teams of two. I played with my bestie Melanie Hood-Wilson; Brooks, who was supposed to partner with Pittman, bowed out so we drafted Banner photojournalist Uly Muñoz, another novice.

The rules are complicated, but basically, the goal is for players to predict the number of books — a collection of four cards, one from each player — they and their partner will win during a hand by playing the highest-ranking card; spades trump all. (Some people apparently call books “tricks,” but nobody I know.) The trick (haha) to bidding is that you can’t see your partner’s hand, Pittman explained, so you’re guessing not just how well you’ll do, but how accurate your partner is, too.

It started out rough because no one on my team had any idea what we were doing and after an initial trial hand, Pittman was not messing around; we were playing for real. The game also requires a fair bit of shuffling, and I am admittedly bad at that. (My child has been substituting for my turn doing that in games since he was 5.) So I outsourced it to Pittman. “You can’t shuffle?” he said.

BRO, I TOLD YOU I CANNOT SHUFFLE.

The most important rule is that you cannot renege, meaning you can’t lie and say you don’t have a card of the leading suit because the other cards you have from different suits are higher. “Don’t do that,” Pittman said.

At the end of the evening, I had a better idea of what I was doing, but still can’t say that I’ve mastered this game. But Melanie and I won. By a lot. I’m as shocked as you! I have no clue how, and I can’t say we ever will succeed again, though we’re going to practice online.

It seems like a good time in history to hew to your culture, to announce loud and proud that the things your people hold dear are American history.

I am not yet good enough to sit down at the cookout and best the uncs.

But I’m coming.