Afro-Caribbean Women's Writing and Early American Literature 1793606676, 9781793606679

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Afro-Caribbean Women’s Writing and Early American Literature

Afro-Caribbean Women’s Writing and Early American Literature Edited by LaToya Jefferson-James

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jefferson-James, LaToya, 1981- editor. Title: Afro-Caribbean women’s writing and early American literature / edited by LaToya Jefferson-James. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Afro-Caribbean Women’s Writing and Early American Literature is both pedagogical and critical. The text begins by re-evaluating the poetry of Wheatley for its political commentary, demonstrates how Hurston bridges several literary genres and geographies, and introduces Black women writers of the Caribbean to some American audiences”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022023523 (print) | LCCN 2022023524 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793606679 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793606686 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean literature (English)—Women authors—History and criticism. | Caribbean literature (English)—Black authors—History and criticism. | American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. | American literature— African American authors—History and criticism. | Race in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays. Classification: LCC PR9205 .A68 2022 (print) | LCC PR9205 (ebook) | DDC 810.9/928709729—dc23/eng/20220706 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022023523 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022023524 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Preface: The Work of Black Women Writing Communities

vii

Acknowledgmentsxiii Introduction: The Continued Relevance of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers LaToya Jefferson-James

1

1 Doing the Work of “Nobler Womanhood”: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, N. F. Mossell, and Victoria Earle Matthews LaToya Jefferson-James

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2 Yours for Humanity: An Examination of the Life and Work of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1856–1930) Verner Mitchell

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3 Plagiarizing Blackness: Racial Performances and Passing in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted Tajanae Barnes

49

4 New Nation, New Migration, and New Negro: A Reading of Aftermath, Rachel, and Environment Shubhanku Kochar

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5 When Madness Makes Sense in Early Black Women’s Drama Regis Fox

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6 Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road as Literacy Narrative LaToya Jefferson-James

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v

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Contents

7 Karen Lord: Situating the Caribbean Female Space Jacinth Howard

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8 A Retrospective on the Literary Influence of Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey Alison D. Ligon

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9 A Laying on of Hands: Healing the Diasporic Body in Colonized Spaces in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John Joyce White

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10 Authoring Discourse: Black Feminist Theorizing in Michelle Cliff’s Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise 161 Alexandria Smith 11 So Eager to Bloom: Reframing Images of Adolescent Protagonists in Edwidge Danticat’s Behind the Mountains and Untwine Alison D. Ligon Conclusion: Beginning at the Beginning: Teaching Morrison through Stewart and Hurston through Marson and Conde

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Index213 About the Contributors

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Preface: The Work of Black Women Writing Communities

The genesis of this portion of New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers was rather depressing and uncanny—to say the least. This portion of the project, which features the very earliest Black women polemicists, creative writers, and Black women Caribbean writers, was conceived partially as a result of the many rejections I received from academic publishing houses for my first book-length project, Masculinity Under Construction: Literary Re-Presentations of Black Masculinity in the African Diaspora (2020), and a recurring dream about my maternal grandmother, Mrs. Elmira “Too Sweet” Williams Jefferson. I was rather depressed because the myriad rejections I received seemed to recognize masculinity as a gender, but did not want to risk publishing a work featuring Black male writers in conversation about masculine identity at all—let alone a conversation that spanned geographical, linguistic, and religious boundaries. Clearly, the primary works and several historical conferences supported my theory, but would academic audiences reward such a view with sales, especially by a first-time author with no academic reputation or backing by a more prominent academic. During the lowest moments being rejected and feeling dejected, I began to dream of my maternal grandmother, and these dreams were frightening. I had never seen my grandmother in person. She died a full five years before my birth, and I had only ever seen her in grainy photographs. I heard many stories about her from my mother, aunts, and uncles. She apparently loved flowers and fruit trees and cooking. Some of the trees that she planted still live in Centreville, Mississippi, today if no one has taken the fool notion to chop them down. I grew up admiring one of her pink Camellia trees and eating cling peaches and purple plums from trees that she used for canning before her untimely illness and death. My love of home decor, cooking, and flowers is “evidence” to older family members that I “took back” and developed vii

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personality traits from her. So, through stories and remembrances, this grandmothe who was never with me physically, is always present. The very first time I dreamed of her was a time of total dejection. I remember after one very inhumane rejection, I decided to retire my manuscript and move on. I had written the dissertation as a book draft with hopes of revision, but not many academic presses welcomed dissertation drafts and were not investing in first-time authors, anyway. Plus, I did not have many connections in the academy. I thought maybe I should wait until I meet a publisher at a conference and pitch my book proposal then. Satisfied with that late-night rationalization, I fell asleep. Then my grandmother appeared full of life with the sun gleaming off clean, pine hardwood floors behind her. She was standing in the doorway of a little white wooden A-frame house, telling me that she would not help me prepare my flower beds for the rhododendrons that I desperately wanted. I begged her to please help. She looked at me and said, “No. turn your own bed over. Nobody knows the soil like you.” No matter how much I begged and pleaded with her, she would not leave that porch. In my dream, I began to work until sweat beaded and rolled down my face. The next morning, I awoke with sweat rolling from my forehead. There was work to do. I had to turn over the “soil” of my draft and make it better. I rolled out of bed and began revising my draft again for yet another book proposal. The sun would not rise for another three hours that morning. As I researched, rewrote, and revised that first project, I noticed words like “freedom,” “nationalism,” “oppression,” and “liberation” were always synonymous connotatively with “masculine” or “manhood.” Always. Furthermore, even when astute critics analyzed colonial/anti-colonial/postcolonial literature as works of art in revolutionary moments, the theorists and artists were almost always male or the theoretical language was always masculinized. Why was this so? When the critics charged the writers of committing egregious rhetorical/artistic errors, for example, essentializing experiences of Blackness, the offender was always male. The offensive identity was male. Black identity in anti-colonial/postcolonial literature throughout the African Diaspora was crafted as male. The limiting effects of white supremacy were cast in phallic term like “castration,” or “impotency.” Why? Were men the only oppressed people on earth? Even when I read in terms of the “New Negro,” whether that “New Negro” was caricatured horribly in scientific racism or being redefined in race tracts, I knew that the Negro being talked about, one way or the other, was a male. This was and is disconcerting for me as a practicing teacher and academic. It is disconcerting for me personally, for I stand witness to Black women’s hard work. Why was not the identity ever crafted as a woman? As I sifted through the primary and secondary texts, I began to wonder if critics, especially Black critics, seriously close-read and analyzed Black

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women writers? I mean, do they take Black women as serious artists and sometimes, warrior-writers? Or, were Black women writers treated and continue to be treated in much the same way that T. S. Eliot claimed critics of his day treated the Metaphysical poets? Are Black women writers, like the Metaphysics, pigeonholed into academic labels and the implications that come with those labels, then tossed aside academically without the analyses that their works deserve? This was Eliot’s complaint about literary critics of his time concerning the earlier Metaphysical poets. They were labeled as difficult, antiquated, or both then casually disregarded by the English writing and critical communities. Similarly, I see that the work of Black women. For Black women writers have been doing this hard work of writing. Personally, there were those quiet moments, moments when I was not writing or feeling sorry for myself as a rejected writer and a perpetual parttime professor, when I thought of my grandmother and her whole generation. My grandmother was born on November 10, 1922. Though my grandmother was gone, her friends and family populated my childhood and comforted me in lonely hours. How those women worked. It seems their whole lives were spent in present tense active voice. From the rising of the sun until the going down of the same, there was always something to do: picking greens, shucking corn, canning pears, shelling peas, sewing quilt tops, pulling okra, blanching vegetables, digging worms, putting coffee grounds in the garden soil, repotting plants, or sitting and crocheting a new hat. They had no time for idle gossip and certainly did not engage in “mess.” They did not tolerate “half-doing” anything and laziness was a sin. Life was for living and the subjunctive mood was for fools. In fact, they had a favorite saying, “If a frog had legs, he wouldn’t bump his ass.” And they would laugh themselves to tears behind this little cliché of theirs (it took me years to understand this). In addition, during my quiet reflections, I realized that the most important thing about their work was how they accomplished it. They did almost everything together. They may not have had much in the way of material goods (not by our standards), but they had one another, and that was more than enough. They shared food, quilting materials, childcare tips, recipes, heartbreak, grief, and victories large and small. They raised their children together and buried spouses, too. In short, they were a community, these women who talked to me about my grandmother (who loved to fish and only ever used lived bait), life and the strange natures of men (“Menfolk do wonders,” they said), and the very hard times they had back in 1932 (there was absolutely nothing harder than the times of 1932, according to my grandmother’s cousin). They were cooks, nurses, artists, gardeners, fisherwomen, doctors, life coaches, marriage and family therapists, preachers, historians, Sunday school teachers, and interior decorators! Together.

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As an academic, I applied the personal to the professional, which is something that we are trained to avoid in the academy. With the example of my grandmother’s peers in Centreville, Mississippi, I began to re-read early Black women writers with a fresh set of eyes. The men of my community worked hard, but so did the women. Black men writers wrote and fought for freedom, but so did Black women, too. What were Black women writers attempting to communicate to the world? Who was their audience? What drove them to pick up the pen, especially when it was considered socially/ politically disdainful for women to enter the public sphere? What type of community did Black women writers form in support of one another when they faced backlash for their public conversations? Contrary to popular portrayals of Black women on television, Black women do and have always supported one another. Circumstances may have prevented early Black women writers from conducting the famous salons of Suzanne Curchod, and they most certainly would not have had her resources, but they did read one another’s works, pioneer and share social working techniques within their respective communities, offer one another encouragement, and even publish one another’s works when they could. They considered their writing as work in the service of general racial uplift and as the creation of what they called a “nobler womanhood” for Black women specifically. In fact, the more I read earlier Black women writers, the more I am surprised by the depth and reach of their community. Theirs was a transnational community before that term became an academic buzzword. The earlier works provide a bridge that links the United States to the Caribbean via the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Una Marson. Zora Neale Hurston did extensive research in the Caribbean. Una Marson pioneered social working techniques in Jamaica, became the first Black woman to edit and publish a periodical on the island, then traveled to England where she continued to write, edit, and advocate for the poor. If not for her radio program, Caribbean Voices, at the British Broadcasting Corporation, the world may not have known about the authors who contributed to the Caribbean Artists Movement. Furthermore, Una Marson is included in early volumes of African American poetry and participated in several social uplift events in the Washington D.C. area at one point. When reading the earlier works of Black women writers, I realized that it is important to rescue Toni Morrison pedagogically from a concept outlined by Madame Germaine Necker de Stael. Madame Necker de Stael warns us in her critical writing about “exceptional women.” This can be difficult, since Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in literature, and Nobel Prizes are given to artists because they are, well, exceptional. Yet, Madame de Stael does not formulate exceptionalism in this way. Women are intelligent and talented, and are part of a tradition. Morrison the writer is part of a centuries-old tradition of Black women writers. Her only short story, “Recitatif,” which

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focuses on racial tension in America’s industrial North, links her to the first Black woman writer and the first Black woman to speak to a mixedgendered audience as a political essayist, Phillis Wheatley and Maria W. Stewart, respectively. Both of these women spoke against racism, prejudice, and oppression in America’s industrial North. The geographical location of the story also links Morrison to Black women Caribbean writers who bypass America’s South as the cite of America’s most inhumane sins. Both Paule Marshall and Maryse Conde produce landmark texts that feature the Northeast as the sight of America’s original sin. This idea of early Black women writing in communities as work is not one that I can claim credit for alone. It developed over a series of years, memories, thoughts, and phone conversations. First, though this may sound odd, I am thankful for the many rejections that I received for my first book project. They alerted me to the fierce objections of even the thought of Black writers working as communal units. Black writers carry on conversations together. Black women work and fight as hard as men—together. Writing, in the Western world, is a solitary event supposedly, but this is not the case with many writers of color. Second, I am in debt to the women of my grandmother’s generation, because they demonstrated to me on a daily basis that most work is accomplished with greater morale and in a more efficient manner if done as a community rather than as an individual. America may sell the lone hero mythology, but that is just not pragmatic for most people. Why should we view writing any differently? And as I read the early works of women like Mrs. N. F. Mossell, who quoted Ida B. Wells-Barnett and even kept newspaper clippings of Wells-Barnett’s trip to England on the now-famous anti-lynching crusade, my ideas were confirmed. Third, I am ever grateful to my colleague and friend, Dr. Alison Ligon of Morehouse College. Her erudite knowledge of Black Caribbean writers and critics made the second half of this volume possible. She has been very generous with her time and knowledge over the last three years as we have ironed out where to place certain critical pieces and how to condense very complicated concepts. For there is always much to say about Black women writers and seemingly never enough space. In this volume, I have contributed more chapters than the previous one. It is not to obtain more recognition. The work must go on. In this case, the more that I learn about early Black women writers, the more I want to learn. As Eliot warned in “The Metaphysical Poets,” they deserve more than labeling and being casually pushed aside because they may be considered difficult or politically irrelevant. There is artistic and social merit in these writings that are yet to be discovered. And it is my hope that the chapters in this volume of New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers are a start.

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume. It was not easy. Thanks to all of my colleagues who read drafts and listened to me talk things through. I would like to thank Dr. Maryemma Graham and the History of Black Writing Project for creating a gathering space in the name of Hurston. A million thanks to Dr. Deborah Plant. Her conversations have been like prayer. Truly. To my maternal grandmother, Elmira “TooSweet” Williams Jefferson and the community of women. To my mother, Virginia Jefferson Gibson and that practical problem-solving way.

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Introduction The Continued Relevance of NineteenthCentury Black Women Writers LaToya Jefferson-James

When Phillis Wheatley dipped her pen in an inkwell and committed her first poems to parchment, she not only began the Black belletristic tradition, she simultaneously began the Black woman literary tradition. In addition, she committed acts of ontological and epistemological violence that drove her to England in search of a publisher, even though she had proven that those poems were, in fact, the products of her intellectual and creative labor alone. Furthermore, Wheatley began a tradition of Black women who generally transgressed the restrictive gender codes that forbade women from speaking about “manly” subjects (these would include topics such as voting, the economy, or any other topic that was not directly related to the home) and in public places to mixed-gender audiences (mixed-gender audiences were seen as “promiscuous” and were generally off-limits to women speakers). Even during this uberconservative, proscriptive Victorian-era America, Black women writers, literary daughters of Phillis Wheatley, continued to use their voices and pens to decry the plight of African Americans. For example, the first woman in America to leave us a collection of political essays and speeches was an African American woman from Boston, Maria W. Stewart. Stewart, whose activism and writing predate Isabella Baumfree (Sojourner Truth), declared that her authority to speak in public before promiscuous audiences in the masculine language of the King James Bible on wide-ranging, political topics came not from men, but from God—particularly the God of the Old Testament prophets. Though traditionally, contemporary critics do not analyze Wheatley’s poetry for its political content, Wheatley’s book of poems, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (1773), represents an apocalyptic moment of verition (coined termed by Aimé Césaire in the 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) for those Euro-Americans (at this time, pre-Revolutionary, many white men saw themselves as European citizens who lived in colonies 1

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of a European metropole. The term “Euro-American” is used by the theorists Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjorgo in the text, Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture [1998]). Wheatley’s poems swept clean the entire idea of European superiority, which was supported with the Euro-centric construction, The Great Chain of Being. In this configuration, Africans were animalistic due to their lack of a written language. In addition, Wheatley’s book explodes the myth that women lacked the rational capabilities to learn Latin and classical forms and to reproduce them in any sort of independent creative form. Wheatley’s poems are politically and philosophically controversial because they evoked a radical paradigm shift from those that were heavily invested in European male superiority. And she was resisted fiercely. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, accused Wheatley of mere mimicry without originality while he praised Ignatius Sancho, a Black male contemporary of Wheatley’s who lived in Great Britain. Instances like these are why it is imperative that we think intersectionally, even when studying writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gender, race, and class in early America were inseparable, colluding forces used to oppress all aspiring women writers. Recognizing the ontological and epistemological implications of Wheatley’s poetry, abolitionists grafted her name to their causes and celebrated her poetry. After slavery’s legal end and into Reconstruction, Black women writers continued to celebrate Wheatley. After Reconstruction, it is demonstrable that Black women writers read, supported, and critiqued one another’s writings and read works by white women as well, even as they continued to think of Wheatley as their literary foremother. In The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894), Gertrude Mossell (writing as Mrs. N. F. Mossell), the writer begins the chapter, “The Afro-American Woman in Verse,” by praising English woman poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She states in the essay that “that we, too, of the African race have equally shared in the gift of the muses, having had sweet singers born among us, I have chosen them for my theme, ‘The Afro American Woman in Verse.’”1 The, author then discusses the literary achievements of Phillis Wheatley. She links the accomplishments of Wheatley to British women writers like Browning (who also faced and overcame tremendous, gender-specific obstacles in order to obtain an education and have their writings published). Of special note, is Mossell’s autobiographical information on Wheatley. It is common knowledge now for everyone studying early African American letters that Wheatley married someone named John Peters. However, there has been an academic mystery surrounding Wheatley’s death that Mossell clarifies: But not being a gentleman, except in seeming, he soon grew jealous of the attention his wife received, and by his abuse and harsh treatment shortened her

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life, her death occurring December 5th, 1784, in the thirty-first year of her life. She was the mother of one child.2

In other places, including popular anthologies, historical essays, and pieces written by literary critics, the circumstances surrounding Wheatley’s untimely death are lost at worst and hazy or ambiguous at best. I once read that Wheatley may have died from an asthma attack. Mossell’s account is the only place where I have ever physically seen the name and occupation of Wheatley’s husband, though records of who owned her have been meticulously kept and re-presented for audiences. In 1973, there was a Phyllis Wheatley festival held at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) hosted by Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander (author of the novel, Jubilee, and the heavily anthologized poem, “For My People”), who was the founder and head of the Institute for the Study and Culture of Black People (currently the Margaret Walker Alexander Center) in celebration of Wheatley’s 200th birthday. There were over twenty poets in attendance—including Nikki Giovanni, Carolyn Rodgers, Mari Evans, and June Jordan. The four-day festival also included a play based upon Wheatley’s life by playwright Vinie Burrows and a bronze sculpture of Wheatley by Elizabeth Catlett. In a New York Times article about the festival dated November 9, 1973, Dr. Walker gave a pedagogical reason for the festival, stating, “Black women,” Dr. Walker said, “have always been tokens in the publishing world. The textbooks haven’t included them, no matter how received or critically acclaimed they were. And this is one of the reasons we’re having this festival.”3 As aforementioned, Wheatley’s act defied not only racial expectations and stereotypical “scientific” tracts concerning Black intelligence but also gender biases. As late as the 1920s, British feminist writers such as Virginia Woolf made allusions in their writings to the misogynist overtones of leading philosophical, religious figures such as Samuel Johnson. Johnson is recorded to have said on July 31, 1763, that “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It’s not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”4 Johnson was a poet, playwright, and lexicographer. He published one of the first, if not the first, dictionary of the English language in 1755. It was a remarkable feat of scholarship—seeing as how Johnson worked alone while his French counterparts had as many as forty people working simultaneously over multiple decades on its first dictionary. Johnson’s accomplishments often shielded him and other Anglophone male writers from criticism when they perpetuated the sexist views of the British society that sponsored brilliant male writers while denying all women, regardless of class, even basic education.

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Lest we forget, early colonial America—at least its British colonies— was modelled on the mother country politically and culturally. And no matter how much we all believe in the myth of American exceptionalism, Victorian culture, with its exaggerated gender roles, belief in European (particularly British) superiority, and push for urbanization and mechanization dominated the globe during the second half of the 1800s and early 1900s. The same religious, class, and gender restrictions that dominated England followed emigrants to the new land. The fact that Wheatley, a woman and an African, wrote at all, when British women of the upper classes were denied university entrance, is a marvel. The fact that Maria W. Stewart spoke on political issues and left behind a volume of political essays as proof of her acumen concerning public, masculine affairs when British women had not yet begun their Suffrage Movement seems almost miraculous and improbable. Yet, America distinguished itself from Great Britain and in that distinction created the occasions that made it necessary for Black women to speak. Rather than focus on colonial expansion, the United States maintained a system of rigid, race-based slavery that pervaded and permeated every facet of its society well into and after the Victorian era. There is no part of American society free of the tentacled grip of slavery and the phenotypical racism that undergirded it. This includes literature. Post-Emancipation, Black women writers wrote in response to racially motivated violence that devasted their communities in the guise of hooded, domestic terror. The metanarrative is that the Klan, the U.S. domestic terror organization that was founded in 1867 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by former Confederate soldier, Nathan Bedford Forrest, was a Southern phenomenon: that is historically false. “Although it first caught on in that Southeast, where Georgia was its citadel and Atlanta its holy city, the Klan was national phenomenon.”5 This prompted a national and international response from Black women through writings and lectures. For example, Ida Bell Wells’s crusade against the practice, a transnational effort that took her to Great Britain twice, was one in which the pen was the most formidable tool wielded. She wrote for her own newspaper, the Free Speech, in Memphis; was a correspondent for several white newspapers; and sent newspaper articles to the United States as an international correspondent while she lectured there. Fiercely outspoken and known to pack a pistol, Wells tabulated statistics from newspaper accounts. Many readers do not know that Wells used the stories from Southern, white newspapers from wherever the violence occurred in order to condemn white Americans for their lawlessness. When white journalists attempted to counter her charges both at home and abroad by stating that she was a liar and grossly exaggerated her stories, Wells simply referred them to their own newspapers—sometimes to their own stories!

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Lesser-known are Wells earlier writings, when she took on the pseudonym, “Iola.” Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells’ father was instrumental in founding Rust College, which is still in operation today and recently hired its first woman president. Wells lost both of her parents and a sibling to a yellow fever epidemic that swept through the town in 1876 (The epidemic was so devastating in Holly Springs that the exact numbers of the dead are currently unknown. There is a Yellow Fever Martyr’s Church and Museum of Holly Springs. Their website, yellowfevermartyr’s.com/victims lists recorded names from marked graves only. Most people, particularly Black people, did not have marked graves. The museum is located within walking distance of the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum Find more about the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum at www​.idabwellsmuseum​.org). Wells, at the age of fourteen, being the eldest child, left her schooling at Rust College and with the help of a grandmother and aunt, cared for the rest of her siblings. She became a teacher, first in Holly Springs, and later secured a job in Memphis, Tennessee. Wells, a highly intelligent young woman, soon found teaching tedious and monotonous and found writing was her outlet. By today’s standards, to call a Black American “country” is an insult. When Wells began to write, she purposefully chose a pseudonym that sounded older and “country.” She wanted her writings to serve a practical purpose and to be taken seriously as a journalist. While in Memphis, she writes in her unfinished autobiography, I worshipped in the first big, fine church I had ever seen and watched the crowds, and I wondered why the preachers did not give the people practical talks. I had already found out in the country that the people needed guidance in everyday life and that the leaders, preachers, were not giving them this help.6

Writing under her chosen pseudonym, she commented on racism and politics and gave practical life advice. Furthermore, “Iola” offered an alternative to the rigid gender divisions of Victorian-era America. According to Iola, Black women should commit themselves to working—not toward the white, middle-class, “true womanhood”—but toward dignified Black noble womanhood. As the “brilliant Iola,” Wells also wrote two short stories, her only surviving works of fiction. Other Black women writers and activists of her time, Victoria Earle Matthews and Gertrude Mossell, dedicated their journalistic efforts and creative endeavors to the cause of “nobler womanhood” as defined by Wells. Moving toward the end of the 1800s, most scholars of African American literature study the short stories of Charles W. Chesnutt. He was a creative writer with prodigious output and was the first writer with successful didactic fiction. However, one of his contemporaries, Pauline Hopkins, wielded

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influence that has yet to be fully explored academically. As editor of Colored American Magazine from 1900 to 1904, Hopkins published an extraordinarily diverse range of Black authors and content. The periodical served as a turnof-the-century publication vehicle for Black creative writers. Artistically, Hopkins’s style is a testament to the influence of the British Victorian culture. Her short stories, with their beautiful women, heinous villains and Gothic overtones, read like Romantic (Romantic in the sense of the era and not the genre) thrillers. This type of content greatly diversified the range of African American literature. Hopkins is included in this selection of essays, along with a picture of her school roster. In addition, Black women began to create dramatic pieces as well. This collection of essays features an analysis of the Harlem, Rachel by Angelina Weld Grimke. While many students are introduced to women writers of the Harlem Renaissance through popular anthologies, rarely do they understand the full range of Black women writers. And since other artists like Maude Cuney Hare are not anthologized at all, her works remain understudied and untaught. Unfortunately, there were no submissions for Hare in this volume. Perhaps someone may cover her if there is a second edition? On the other hand, there is a discussion of a little-known play written by Mary Burrill, the partner of famed Howard University educator, Lucy Diggs Slowe. And still there is another playwright, Mercedes Gilbert. Neither Burrill nor Gilbert has been studied at length (though Gilbert was known for playing Sojourner Truth and authored a novel with a foreword by Langston Hughes, Aunt Sara’s Wooden God [1938]). In addition, Shirley Graham Du Bois is no longer “the wife of W.E.B. Du Bois,” but an accomplished playwright alongside Grimke, Burrill, and Gilbert here. Because Zora Neale Hurston has been lionized, scholars may think that we have said all that there is to say about her writings. In this collection, Hurston serves as the segue from the Harlem Renaissance to the beginning of the explosion of creativity in the Black Caribbean. The academy today uses the buzzword “transnational.” Oddly, I have not seen that label applied to Zora Neale Hurston (though I am sure that some scholar has applied it). Long before transnational became an academic trend, Hurston and her Jamaican cohort, Una Marson, were transnational, creative and academic writers. During the most productive years of her life, Hurston travelled to Jamaica and Haiti in order to collect information about voodoo. It was during this time, acting as an anthropologist (Hurston was academically trained as an anthropologist), that she wrote about voodoo practices, legitimizing it as a religion, and produced her least studied novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). This novel syncretizes voodoo lore with Hebrew scripture of the Old Testament. Una Marson of Jamaica, became the first person to defy strict Victorian religious standards and use African drums on stage, alluding to

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voodoo ceremonies, in a publicly staged play. The play Pocomania (1938) takes its name from the derogatory name given to voodoo worship by upperclass Black and white Jamaicans. After Marson emigrated to London in 1932, she secured a job working for the British Broadcasting Corporation, eventually. Her thirty-minute radio show, Caribbean Voices, served as a platform for Black Caribbean writers the same as African Americans had smaller outlets like Colored American Magazine. Without Marson’s platform, the world may not have had a Caribbean Artists Movement at all. Therefore, like Hopkins, her influence extends well beyond her own creative output. And like Hopkins, scholars have recently begun to explore the ways in which Marson helped shape the creative direction of Black Caribbean letters and her pioneering social working techniques influence Black sociology there. Currently, Black Caribbean writers, particularly Black women writers of the Caribbean continue to forge new grounds creatively. Merle Hodge’s unsettled/ing ending of Crick Crack Monkey (1970) speaks to the colonial/ postcolonial condition of many island societies. Though the islands are nominally free of European rule, some were culturally dominated by their former colonizers and facing imperial encroachment by the United States. For some, it is a linguistic insult that the word “America” is synonymous with the United States and does in no way include the home of the Arawak and Caribs, which was the first point of contact for Europe and the New World. Though Zora Neale Hurston is lionized today, we should not let our exceptionalism of Hurston remove her from the community of writers and scholars that produced her. Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, while dismissed by most academics, links her to the past and the present if we are willing to view it as a literacy narrative that extends the concept past the authentic African American slave narratives and predates Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir, Educated (2018). Furthermore, Black women writers of the Caribbean currently complicate ideas of oppression and the site of oppression. Like Morrison’s only short story, Conde and Paule Marshall do not relegate racism in the United States to the slave state South, but they located the nation’s original sin with the New England colonies, when the New York City was actually the second-largest slave port in America. And while scholarship on the Caribbean may be novel in certain areas of the United States, contemporary women writers of the region keep driving and pushing the literature—with its interior journeys of identity exploration/ formation—ever onward and outward. As scholars work fervently to teach, analyze, and “discover” the literary communities of early Black women writers of the Caribbean, I know that this volume is only a beginning. I expect this to be the first edition of several. As I type this introduction, there is a National Endowment for the Humanities

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workshop for faculty members devoted to the works of Zora Neale Hurston. The Library of Congress recently featured two of her lesser-known short stories, “Spunk” and “Fire and Cloud,” introducing her to readers outside of African American literary studies. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. just edited and released a collection of Hurston’s political essays, You Don’t Know Us Negroes (2022). In addition, Peepal Tree Publishers has gathered and published the plays of Una Marson (though some parts are missing due to damage from the manuscript). In short, there is still much work to be done, and the literature deserves the work that we do in the classroom and through publication. I wonder what my students will say when they learn that Morrison withheld the racial identity of her characters in A Mercy (2009), because most Americans do not know and/or do not understand how much the Puritans and Quakers hated one another, regardless of color.

NOTES 1. Mrs. N. F. Mossell, The Work of Afro American Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 67. 2. Ibid., 73. 3. Charlayne Hunter. “Poets Extol a Sister’s Unfettered Soul,” The New York Times (New York), November 9, 1973. 4. Leon Aaron. “Dr. Johnson’s Dog,” The New York Times (New York), January 1, 1985. 5. David Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 3. 6. Ida B. Wells, Alfreda Duster and Michelle Duster, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970, 2020), pp. 20–21.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aaron, Leon. “Dr. Johnson’s Dog,” The New York Times, New York, January 1, 1985. www​.nytimes​.com. Braxton, Joanne. “Introduction.” In The Work of the Afro-American Woman, xxvii– xlii. Oxford: Oxford UP, reprinted in 1988. Chalmers, David. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1986. Hunter, Charlayne. “Poets Extol a Sister’s Unfettered Soul.” The New York Times, New York, November 9, 1973. www​.nytimes​.com Matthews, Victoria Earle. Aunt Lindy: A Story Founded on Real Life. New York: J. J. Little & Company, 1893.

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———. “The Value of Race Literature.” In The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett, pp. 287–297. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Mossell, Mrs. N.F. The Work of the Afro-American Woman. Oxford: Oxford UP, reprinted 1988. Wells, Ida B., et al. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 2nd edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. ———. The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.

Chapter 1

Doing the Work of “Nobler Womanhood” Ida B. Wells-Barnett, N. F. Mossell, and Victoria Earle Matthews LaToya Jefferson-James

In the closing decade of the nineteenth century, Black women were astoundingly productive in their literary output. As journalists, activists, polemicists, and creative writers, they confronted the racial and class boundaries that defined white feminism and responded to white male academics who hid behind the “objectivity” of historical studies while they cast aspersion on the moral character of Black people in general and Black women especially. In their speeches, essays, and journalistic writings, they called for Black Americans to produce more fiction as historical records and social commentary. Black women, no matter their station in life, these mighty writers of the nineteenth century believed, had a moral obligation to devote their energies to racial uplift. Historian Paula Giddings in the introduction to her landmark study When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984 reprinted in 2006) states that “in the racial struggle—in slavery and freedom—they fought every way that men did” (quoted in Braxton xxvii).1 I agree with Giddings when she writes that for Black women of that time, “her participation in the work force, and her sense of independence made her more of a woman, not less of one (quoted in Braxton xxvii).”2 While there were many Black women writers, journalists, and activists of the late 1800s, this chapter focuses on Ida Bell Wells, Gertrude Mossell, and Victoria Earle Matthews. As journalists, essayists, and activists, these three women typify the Black woman warrior as the twentieth century

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dawned. They formed a writerly community that offered economic support and racial uplift through club activities. When students encounter Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, they more than likely read the fiercely outspoken, anti-lynching crusader who produced the pamphlet, A Red Record, with meticulously tabulated statistics of extra-legally murdered African Americans during the late 1800s.3 Excerpts of this pamphlet have been anthologized for a number of years and appear in several major anthologies of African American literature. Yet, Ida B. Wells was a journalist, reformer, and club woman who published nationally before the publication of the pamphlet. Writing under a pseudonym, Iola, Wells published a nationally syndicated column dedicated to combatting race and class implications encoded in Victorian-era gender codes. As a teacher, journalist, and writer, Wells belonged to a community of Black women writers that included both Gertrude Mossell and Victoria Earle Matthews. Michelle Duster, the great-granddaughter of Wells-Barnett, professor, author, and activist discovered her grandmother’s activist/writing community and writes about it in the second edition of Wells-Barnett’s unfinished autobiography. Our students discover, semester after semester, that these women articulated an alternative vision of womanhood and stressed the importance of fiction and creative writing to Black American women at the turn of the century. More importantly, they read one another’s works, supported one another socially and financially, and collectively crafted an alternative vision to a Victorian-era idea of womanhood. When studying Black women writers of the nineteenth century, it is important to study them within the context of the Victorian-era “cult of true womanhood” and the gender restrictions that were imposed on all women, in addition to the classism and racism that effectively excluded Black women from the workforce while denying them any real womanhood.4 Allow me, Reader, to take a brief aside here to discuss the Victorian era cult. Since this chapter is based on women who spoke out against the cult, it is essential to know what the cult meant. THE CULT OF DOMESTICITY AND BLACK WOMEN When studying Black women writers of the nineteenth century, it is important to study them within the context of the British Victorian Cult of True Womanhood (sometimes written as the Cult of the Lady or the Cult of Domesticity), gender restrictions, and white American racism. It is helpful to return to Barbara Welter’s 1966 American Quarterly article, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” Welter surveys and analyzes

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almost all of the women’s magazines published for more than three years during the period 1820-60 and a sampling of those published for less than three years; all the gift books cited in Ralph Thompson American Literary Annuals and Gift Books 1825-1865 (New York, 1936) deposited in the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, Columbia University Special Collections, Library of the City College of the University of New York, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Public Library, Fruitlands Museum Library, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Wisconsin Historical Society; hundreds of religious tracts and sermons in the American Unitarian Society and the Galatea Collection of the Boston Library, and the large collection of nineteenth-century cookbooks in the New York Public Library and the Academy of Medicine in New York.5

Welter did extensive research for this article and summarized the main tenets of the Cult from her research. As Paula Giddings states in When and I Enter, the Cult of the Lady was not new to America. It had its history in British conduct literature. White American women of the early 1800s were still culturally linked to their British counterparts and consumed this type of literature routinely. Conduct literature consisted of periodical pieces and entire maleauthored manuals that “schooled” women of the upper and middle classes on the social graces and moral aptitude of their class. Fiction in that genre often featured “fallen” women protagonists. The disaster that befell these characters acted as warnings for women to maintain their purity and submissiveness to male authority figures. Of course, lower- and working-class women were excluded, since they worked outside their own homes and could not pragmatically enjoy the protection of an ever-present, benevolent patriarchal figure or kinsman redeemer. Since men telling women how to behave using manners that benefit them financially, socially, and politically was not novel to English or AngloAmerican women, there was something distinguishable enough during the Victorian era that caused it to stand apart from eras proceeding and seceding it. Something changed: “What had changed was the cult idea, the elevation to a status symbol, as feminist historian Gerda Lerner points out.”6 The Victorian era was one of vast industrial/colonial expansion, mechanization and rapid urbanization. Fortunes rose and fell with extreme rapidity while the geographical face of many locales changed seemingly overnight as people emigrated from the countryside to the cities in search of work and social upward mobility (at least in America where the class structure may have been socially sanctioned but not legally practiced for white Americans and immigrants of Western European descent). In this socioeconomic climate,

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In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same—a true woman was a true woman wherever she was found.7

This cult anchored the middle and upper-class white woman to the home while freeing white men to make or lose fortunes in the public arena. And while the present and future livelihood of all Americans was uncertain during those perilous times of war and rumors of war, one thing was a constant: the subordinate place of white women in the capitalist economic structure. While nineteenth-century white Americans boasted of gubernatorial and economic independence from Great Britain, white American culture—at least the upper and middle classes—was still dominated by the British. With the white woman securely imprisoned in the home as a neutralized threat to white men’s fragile, frenetic, industrial activities, the superiority of Western Europeans and continuity with the former metropole was all but guaranteed. White women became more than the “weaker sex” to be shielded from the vicissitudes of economic and political life, in the tenets of the cult, they became domestic teachers with the charge of acculturating the next generation and instilling white boys and girls with solid, middle-class Victorian values. For women, The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society could be divided into four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman.8

In Victorian-era America, none of these categories included the African American woman. According to Welter, Lerner, and Giddings, the cardinal tenets of true womanhood were domesticity (keeping a tidy and orderly home), submissiveness (the husband was a home’s central authority figure/ protector and his word was to be obeyed by wives, children and servants as lord and master), piety (a woman’s faith should be strong enough to cover a man’s weak belief and bring wayward husbands and sons into the fold of God’s salvation and grace), and purity (a man’s sexual nature made him almost bestial; therefore, a woman’s piety and purity acted as civilizing influences).9 According to Giddings, “Failing to adhere to any of these tenets—which the overwhelming number of Black women could hardly live up to—made one less than a moral, ‘true woman.’”10 Excluded by skin color and discriminated against by class standards, the Black woman could never be considered a “true woman.”11

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During enslavement, Black women’s bodies were used and exploited by powerful white men to satisfy lustful impulses that genteel mannerism prohibited with white wives. Reproducing the labor force in doing so was serendipitous for such clandestine relations. Black women, classified outside of the human race, could be “dirtied” sexually. Because Black women worked outside the home, even under extreme oppression and coercion, performing labor as physically grueling as any man’s, she was not respected as a “lady” or “true woman” before the idea of true womanhood was elevated to cult status during the Victorian era. And as white immigrant working women, who were also left out of configurations of the cult, began to elevate themselves by agitating for better working conditions and more political rights, Black women—who often worked subservient jobs as domestics—were still left out of the dominant national conversation. As early as the 1830s, Maria W. Stewart, a political essayist, complained about employment discrimination in a “free” city like Boston, Massachusetts. According to Stewart, Black women were always relegated to the most menial of positions—which included domestic chores in white women’s homes. As Giddings states, when white women were elevated in the working sphere, Black women were further denigrated. And instead of reaching across color and class boundaries to form much needed alliances that would have advanced both the Populist and suffragist movements, white women adhered to racist boundaries encoded in Victorian sensibilities and closed the doors of opportunities for Black women.12 Shut out of white feminism, Black women began to challenge the Cult of True Womanhood even as they seemed to accept some of its virtues as measures of acculturation. In addition to white women shutting Black women out of feminism unofficially and through many formal organizations in the South and North, white men physically and sexually assaulted Black women with impunity even after slavery while they lynched Black men under the pretenses (many of them false) of protecting white womanly virtue. These verbal assaults were not from “lower class” white men, but from those white men with the education, authority, and resources to legitimate racial discrimination with pseudoscientific discourse published through veritable periodicals for academic and popular public consumption. For example, Philip A. Bruce, a Harvard historian, wrote for popular periodicals and for academic consumption. Frequently, his subject matter was “the Negro problem in America” specifically and the divided South in general. This noted historian routinely attacked Black women as the source of all Black familial dysfunction; thereby alleviating white male policy-makers of their culpability in creating the poverty and despair that contributed to the break-down and break-ups of Black families. In Bruce’s writings, there was an acute focus on marital infidelity: “In this respect, the women were said to be even less advanced than the men; they

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were represented as exerting a mischievous influence because of their licentious nature.”13 This “licentiousness” in Black women led to frequent absenteeism of Black school children and a roving, restless spirit in Black men that made them despise working and the sharecropping system, according to Bruce. Paradoxically, the Black woman’s retreat to her own community after slavery and the decrease in mixed-race children led to dire results, according to white historians and social scientists. Without the “civilizing influence” of white blood mixing with Black offspring, Bruce laments, Black Americans would revert to their “barbaric” African heritage. This behavior would undoubtedly carry over into the church where the Black man’s religion would devolve to sheer emotionalism. The shame of it all, according to Bruce, belonged to Black women because they refused to give white men easy access to their bodies sexually. The book concludes that a “Solid South” was needed, lest Black Americans realize the strength in their numbers and ruin white American men politically, economically, and (sadly) sexually. This text, with its pessimistic outlook on Black people and vicious attacks on Black women, was one of many, many postbellum social science/historical/ scientific justifications for lynching Black men and exploiting Black women.

IDA B. WELLS, “THE BRILLIANT IOLA,” TAKES ON THE CULT OF DOMESTICITY Against this backdrop of exclusive white womanhood and selective feminism, Ida Bell Wells of Holly Springs, Mississippi began her career as a journalist and activist. It was as “The Brilliant Iola” that Wells challenged the Cult of True Womanhood, challenged white academics’ assaults on Black womanhood, and crafted an alternative “nobler womanhood.” Victoria Earle Matthews articulated the value of crafting and collecting African American literature. Gertrude Mossell not only addressed the Cult of True Womanhood directly but pointed out how the idea of it held women responsible for men’s shortcomings. In an era when Black women were relegated to menial labor, racial discrimination against Black men in the job market necessitated their economic contributions for the survival of their families. Mossell viewed journalism and writing as work and advocated that Back women have a room of their own to do the work. It was important to racial advancement, and Ida B. Wells was her “proof.” Before becoming “The Brilliant Iola” or the antilynching crusader, Ida B. Wells was a student at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi14 when she was cruelly initiated into Victorian-era racial and gender codes. After using both her parents and a sibling to the yellow fever epidemic that ravaged Holly Springs, young Ida B. Wells strengthened her resolve, and along with her grandmother and an aunt, decided to keep the remaining siblings together.

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This went against the desire of some older members of the community, who felt it best that the children be placed in separate homes. Wells refused. Meanwhile, Wells’ father, James Wells, left money with a white doctor, Dr. Gray, whom he assisted until he died from the epidemic. Wells writes in her autobiography: Of course as a young, inexperienced girl who had never had a beau, too young to have been out in company except at children’s parties, I knew nothing whatever of the world’s ways of looking at things and never dreamed that the community would not understand why I didn’t want our children separated. But someone said that I had been downtown inquiring for Dr. Gray shortly after I had come from the country. They heard him tell me to tell my sister he would get the money, and bring it to us that night. It was easy for that type of mind to deduce and spread rumors that already, as young as I was, I had been heard asking white men for money and that was the reason I wanted to live there by myself with the children.15

This was a vicious, nasty rumor that implied Wells, in asking a white man for money that she was rightfully entitled to as her father’s oldest child and trying to mother young siblings as an adolescent, was a mistress to an older, white gentleman. This assault on Wells’ character, perhaps initiated by the Black Mason (s) who wanted control of James Wells’ money, pushed Wells away from Rust College and Holly Springs, in general. After serving in the country school district of Marshall County, Wells took a job teaching in Memphis. She did not enroll in Rust as a college student but completed her teaching degree at Fisk University when the opportunity arose (James Wells helped to establish Rust College and his children attended. Rust operated an elementary school until the 1970s). Years later, Wells revisited Rust. In a diary edited by Miriam DecostaWillis, she recounts, The day has been a trying one to me; seeing old enemies, visiting old scenes, recalling the most painful memories of my life, talking them over with those who were prominent actors during my darkest days. They counsel me to forget, to cast the dark shadows out and exorcise the spirit that haunts me, but I forgetting the vows that I had taken on myself to forget, and the assurances I have made that I was glad because my Father saw fit to send these trials & to fit me for his kingdom—clenched my hands darkly and proudly declared I would never forget!16

Here, Wells struggles with the New Testament concept of forgiveness for the assault on her character by Black men in her community who knew what their

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rumors and implications meant at the time. This unprompted attack on her character may explain why Wells did not marry while in the South. As a teacher in Memphis, Wells began to write under the pseudonym, Iola. She unflinchingly wrote about topics that women did not, or were not, supposed to write on, according to the gender standards of the cult. “Iola” commented on the political elections, qualities of good leadership, racism within the ranks of white feminism, and the fickleness of Black Americans toward T. Thomas Fortune. Iola, always willing to speak the truth about the wrongs of her day, first began publishing for the Living Way, a Black Baptist weekly. Soon, her column was picked up in other Black national weeklies, and Wells became known as “The Brilliant Iola,” and “Iola, Princess of the Press.” In addition to issues traditionally considered masculine and public, she addressed women pertaining specifically to Black women. Rather than restrict her rhetoric to the domestic advice and general conduct for women, Wells publicly addresses the continuous verbal (and sometimes physical) assaults on Black women’s bodies and integrity by white men; thus, Wells publicizes and politicizes Black women’s issues! In one of her earliest writings, Wells wrote an article for T. Thomas Fortune that equates the power of women with that of men. In the article, she uses Old Testament authority, beginning with the Garden of Eden, calling God, “The Grand Architect of the Universe,” and then extends the analogy to include how women have influenced much of the world’s history, including the abolition of slavery. With the essay, that begins biblically, Wells articulates what she calls “nobler womanhood.” She writes, The masses of the women of our race have not awakened to a true sense of responsibilities that devolve on them, of the influence they exert; they have not yet realized the necessity for erecting a standard of earnest, thoughtful, pure noble womanhood, rather than one of fashion, idleness, and uselessness.17

In a later essay, she compliments a white, former Union General, G. P. M. Turner, for defending those Black women of Memphis, “who have attained a true, noble, and refining womanhood.”18 What did “nobler womanhood” actually consist of? Writing “The Model Woman,” for The New York Freeman on February 18, 1888, Wells writes that the nobler woman must first and foremost protect her reputation and virtue, since white male historians like Bruce blamed Black women for the degrading conditions of Black people. Wells writes, “For the sake of the noble womanhood to which she aspires, and the race whose name bears the stigma of immorality—her soul scorns each temptation to sin and guilt.”19 In addition, the noblewoman

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must have a positive attitude, cheerful disposition, and disdain for gossip. Lastly, and most importantly, the noblewoman must not shy away from work: She regards all honest toil as noble, because it is ordained of God that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. She does not think a girl has anything of which to be proud in not knowing how to work, and esteems it among her best accomplishments that she can cook, wash, iron, sew and “keep house,” thoroughly well.20

Wells acknowledges that this woman does not actually exist. She wanted to put forth a prototype, something for young, Black women to aspire to, at the time. And this nobler womanhood has no class divisions. Black women of all incomes, in seeking to work in their own houses and display good deportment in public, uplift their entire race, according to Wells. Her modeling of nobler womanhood extends to the few creative endeavors we have of Wells. Writing for the Fisk Herald in 1886, Wells published one of her only two surviving short stories, “A Story 1900.” It is a brief, semiautobiographical piece about a young woman who became a teacher in the South. This young woman, “She was born, reared and educated in South. Consequently the sentiments regarding, and the treatment of, the Negro were not unknown to her.”21 This teacher had to reluctantly admit that African Americans, an ex-slave people, lacked moral fortitude and a deeper understanding of the scriptures that would have come from their ministers, even if they held advanced degrees. It became the duty of the Black American teachers of the South, many of them women, to instruct students and their families on moral issues and pragmatic problems. In the story, the teacher spends half the class time on academic instruction and the other half on moral instruction. She followed through her moral instruction with home visits. The teacher begins to see the intellectual growth and emotional maturity of her students. The narrator concludes by stating “that the many teachers of the race may not be content simply to earn a salary, but may also use their opportunity and influence. Finally gentle reader, that you and I ‘may go and do likewise.’”22 Though Wells elevates the plight of Black women to the public realm, she does not end her political commentary with Black women. As Iola, Wells excoriated a Black bishop for supporting false white journalism in its cry of “rape” as an excuse for lynching Black men. She supported T. Thomas Fortune when he challenged the Republican Party, causing an outcry among African American leadership at the time. She lost her job as a school teacher for criticizing the white and Black leadership at Shelby County Schools. Always unafraid to speak truth to power, but aware of the danger she faced as a petite (by all accounts, Wells was not over five feet tall) Black woman,

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Wells advocated gun ownership for Black Americans and was known to pack a pistol. Her only other known piece of fiction “Two Christmas Days: A Holiday Story” was written for A.M.E. Zion Church Quarterly, 4.2 and debuted in January 1894. Wells tells the story of a serious young woman who falls in love with the only Black attorney in Memphis. When the protagonist learns that her love interest, George, is prone to drinking, she chastises him. Emily, the protagonist, uses language similar to Wells’s articulation of nobler womanhood, saying, “The model man—my model man is in deed and truth, in body and mind, master of himself (emphasis Wells).”23 Though Wells is alluding to the temperance movement and addressing a man, she challenges the Cult of True Womanhood indirectly by placing the burden of modest behavior and sobriety on the man. The protagonist refuses to marry George until his behavior has changed. When George displays his commitment to sobriety, Emily reverses the gender roles and proposes marriage to George. At that time (and some would say in these times), it was highly unusual for a woman to propose marriage to a man. Furthermore, in articulations of the cult during that time, piety and good deportment were the sole burdens of women. As aforementioned, women were supposed to espouse enough faith, submissiveness, and docility to bring a wayward, reckless, misbehaving man into the fold of believers. With this story, George immigrates to the West, removing himself from the immediate circle of Emily and building alone in order to “prove himself” manly and sober, according to Emily’s, and not society’s, definition of model manhood. Though Emily initially articulated her expectations to George, the story demonstrates that the burden of change is solely on the man. Wells would not be the last of her peers to challenge the cult in this way.

GERTRUDE MOSSELL, OR MRS. N. F. MOSSELL, AND NOBLER WOMANHOOD The “Brilliant Iola” was not the only woman of her age who felt that the Cult of Domesticity restricted women and unduly burdened women with the behavior of adult men. Writing as Mrs. N. F. Mossell, published The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894) with a direct challenge to the Cult of Domesticity included. This book is part creative writing anthology, part polemics, and an expansion on Ida B. Wells’ articulation of nobler womanhood. First, it is of note that Gertrude Mossell published this book under the name, “Mrs. N. F. Mossell.” To be clear, Gertrude Mossell had a history of working and writing under her own name. As written in the “Introduction” of the book by Joanne Braxton, “By this strategy of public modesty, the author signaled her intention to defend and celebrate black

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womanhood without disrupting the delicate balance of black male-female relations or challenging masculine authority.”24 While Gertrude Mossell takes on the Cult of Domesticity for its exclusionary practices against Black, working-class women, she spurns white, racist stereotypes of Black women as “unladylike.” Black women who rejected Victorian-era gender types by speaking in public could remain “ladylike” while doing the work of racial uplift. It meant choosing race over gender and class. In essence, Gertrude Mossell meant to typify the “race woman” with her text. Next, the inclusion of creative writing alongside critical essays in this collection theoretically and physically obliterates the strict class divisions that the Cult of the Lady and Victorian-era culture sought to create and replicate in African American culture as well. All classes of women, those who worked in white-collar professions and those who toiled away in bluecollar professions, had a responsibility of Black racial uplift, according to Mossell. In her chapter, “The Opposite Point of View,” Gertrude Mossell directly takes on the Cult of Domesticity by attacking the journalistic source and perpetuation of it. She writes, “For several years, every paper or magazine that has fallen into our hands gave some such teaching as this: ‘The wife must always meet her husband with a smile.’”25 Mossell opposes the Cult of Domesticity on the grounds that its teachings are simply impractical. Women must not be blamed because they are not equal to the self-sacrifice of always meeting husbands with a smile, nor the wife blamed that she does not dress after marriage as she dressed before; child-birth and nursing, the care of the sick through sleepless, nightly vigils, the exactions and irritations incidents to a life whose duties are made up of trifles and interruptions, and whose work of head and heart never ceases, make it an impossibility to put behind them at all times all cares and smile with burdened heart and weary feet and brain. Small means, constant sacrifice for children prevent the replenishment of a fast dwindling wardrobe. Husbands and fathers usually buy what they need at least most mothers and wives will not even do that while children need anything. (Emphasis Mossell’s)26

Simply put, if even upper-middle-class women were expected to be dutiful, self-sacrificing mothers and nurses, how were they to be fashionable and happy as well? Self-effacing nurses are notoriously hardworking and not known as fashion horses, so to speak, and neither are busy, overburdened young mothers. Perhaps the roaring 1920s, with its flappers and breaking of sexual taboos, was not simply the “Jazz Age,” but an outright rebellion against this type of oxymoronic, stiff Victorian-era gender “teaching” as Mossell calls it.

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Furthermore, the Cult of Domesticity placed the responsibility of the husband’s personality, bad behavior, and temperament on the wife, who was subsequently ordered to change her husband’s behavior through her own, self-effacing, saintly behavior and devotion to God. The Cult of Domesticity, then, explicitly stated that a wife was an amateur psychologist and an unofficial nurse. These are very difficult professions to balance alongside mothering and modeling—and all for no pay! This is a fact that magazine writers seemed to gloss over, according to Gertrude Mossell. She writes, The man who wants to lead a reckless life, will complain of his wife’s bad housekeeping, extravagance, the children’s noise or, if not blessed with offspring, still complains that this fact makes home less interesting; but let me tell you, friend, it is all an excuse in nine cases out of ten.27

Mossell points out that men are not held responsible for “fallen” or wayward women in that same way by journalist or conduct literature writers. As an alternative to the Cult of True Womanhood, Mossell believes that a woman should have a “balanced” temperament. She quotes an article by Mrs. Frankie Leslie (a white female journalist) in the Sunday Press (quoting other journalists, many of them white journalists, was a strategy that Ida B. Wells employed frequently), who shared her belief that the Cult was illogical and absurd. Mossell ends the essay by stating that a peaceful home should be founded on Christian principles. When read by today’s standards, this essay may seem like a harmless document. However, by nineteenth-century standards, Gertrude Mossell’s essay was radical. In much of the literature published in Great Britain and the United States, the success of the family was placed solely with women. Mossell completely countered by emphatically insisting throughout her essays that no adult can influence or change another adult. Since psychology was a young science and it would be decades before objective science could confirm or deny her statements, this is quite extraordinary. Mossell was equally dauntless in holding the press accountable for its role in society. A free press, since the Restoration era, was seen as a “fifth institution” in a democratic society, but the press, during this time and shortly after, often stoked the fires of societal outrage in order to maintain the reigns of racists, classist, sexist regimes. Writing decades before Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), Mossell highlights the work of Black women and advocates that Black women writers be given space to hone their crafts in the essay for which the collection was named, “The Work of the Afro-American Woman.” Mossell details and summarizes the antilynching, journalist work of Ida B. Wells: “Perhaps the greatest work in philanthropy yet accomplished by any woman of the race is that of undertaken and so successfully carried out at the present hour by Miss

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Ida B. Wells.”28 In addition to Wells’ antilynching crusade, Mossell places the work of Black women in public within a historical context. Not only does she mention well-known abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, but she extends her historical analysis to 1774 when “Happy’ or Kate Ferguson, born a slave, opened a Sunday School in Dr. John Mason’s Murray Street Church, in New York City. . . . She secured homes for forty-eight children, white and black.”29 In addition, Mossell features a Revolutionary-war era woman soldier, Deborah Gannet, who actually fought as a man in the war “under the name Robert Shurtliffe, serving from May, 1782, until October 23, 1783, discharged the duties of her office and at the same time, preserved inviolate the virtue of her sex, and was granted therefore a pension of thirtyfour pounds.”30 While Gannet was white, she was an indentured servant. Her status as an indentured servant and a valiant soldier was positive proof that women can rise from lower depths and perform the same duties as men in public. After a career in the military, Gannet went on to become a public lecturer, one of the first women to do so in America. The Victorian era gender restrictions, when seen from the annals of history, are again impractical and serve no purpose. In the “Introduction” section of the book, Joanne Braxton writes that “The Opposite Point of View,” “Taken as a whole, this essay stands as a valuable document of the sexual politics of black America” (xxxvi). That is true of not only the eponymous essay but this entire collection. The last half of the book contains verses written by Black authors who otherwise may have gone unread. Several of the verses were penned by Mossell, displaying her versatility as a writer. Though the inclusion of creative pieces in a book of cultural essays may seem extraneous at best, Mossell makes a case for it with her essay, “A Sketch of Afro-American Literature.” It begins by stating, The intellectual history of a people or a nation constitutes to a great degree the very heart of its life. To find this history, we search the fountain-head of its language, its customs, its religion, and its politics expressed by tongue or pen, its folklore and its songs.31

This sentiment would be shared famously by Zora Neale Hurston and reiterated by editor James Weldon Johnson in the introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), one of the first anthologies of exclusively Black (though not all of the authors were African American. Una Marson, for example, was Jamaican) poetry to be published. In order to reinforce her point about the necessity of writing, reading, and publishing African American literature, Mossell follows this essay with another, “The Afro American Woman in Verse,” that exclusively outlines and analyzes Black

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women poets. This chapter presents Black women poets who may otherwise go unread. And there is still another chapter titled, “Our Women in Journalism.” Taken together, these three chapters alone make the case for a decidedly feminist tradition of African American writing without disparaging African American men. This is a sharp contrast to literary critical traditions that would occur in the middle of the 1900s when the Black belletristic tradition would be masculinized by literary historians/theorists without the mention of a single woman writer or journalist. VICTORIA EARLE MATTHEWS, AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN, AND THE GREAT AWAKENING Though officially employed as a journalist for most of her career, Victoria Earle Matthews was known for her fiery speeches and lectures. She not only spoke against the Cult of Domesticity but linked it with slavery and the laws of her time. Like, Mossell, Matthews cast Black women, regardless of class boundaries and types of work, as valiant troops marching forth in linguistic/ legal/moral/Christian/racial combat against the harsh, licentious stereotypes leveraged at Black women by white men. Like Wells-Barnett, Matthews also wrote fiction and valued its collection and production. Her novella, Aunt Lindy, published in 1893, is actually a response to a popular, white-authored poem, “Voodoo Prophecy,” that charged African Americans would use voodoo in order to cause an uprising and take revenge on white Americans for slavery. On July 11, 1897, Victoria Earle Matthews gave one of her most famous speeches before the Annual Convention of the Society of Christian Women in San Francisco, California. It was called, “The Awakening of the AfroAmerican Woman.” Born a former slave in Georgia to a Black woman and the man rumored to be her master, Victoria’s mother gained custody of her two daughters and escaped to New York shortly before the Civil War. While Victoria, by all accounts, was a very good student in school, she was forced to end her education due to family financial difficulties. She continued to educate herself and began working as a journalist for various newspapers. Within this speech, Matthews charged that American culture was ignorant of what Black women endured during slavery. Without hesitation, she spoke, but the lamentable truth is, that the womanhood of the United States, of the World, knows absolutely nothing of hope and aspirations, of the joys and sorrows, of the wrongs, and of the needs of the black women of this country, who came up out of the efface and debasement of American slavery into the dazzling sunlight of freedom.32

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Because of the “polite” conversational restrictions surrounding the Cult of Domesticity and Puritanical attitudes about sex in the United States, many slave narrative writers such as Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth (Truth’s narrative was written via amenuensis) did not write candidly about their sexual experiences during enslavement. As was the convention during their times, women slave writers implicated it with their language, but they did not explicitly state in detail what happened to them. Thus, one of the functions of the neo-slave narratives such as Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams or Beloved by Toni Morrison is historiographical: filling in the unspeakable gaps left by the original slave narrative. Likewise, Victoria Earle Matthews, speaking in Victorian America, implies gendered politics in the United States when she says of slavery, “It had destroyed, more than in the men, all that a woman holds sacred, all that ennobles womanhood. She had but the future.”33 If one of the tenets of the Cult is sexual purity (and this tenet applied to women only), what of Black women, whose bodies remained at the behest of white men? A Black woman’s virginity/sexual purity held no cultural value in the plantation marketplace, and her womb was linked to the stock market; therefore, her virginity/sexual purity was economically discouraged during slavery. Working as domestics post-Emancipation, Black women certainly withstood the ravages of sexual harassment and the daily terror threat of rape at the hands of a white man who would suffer no legal consequences from the government or social shunning from his neighbors. In the face of slavery, according to Matthews, Black women should have been commended for the effort to combat the demoralization of their characters, and not blamed for the degradation of Black people. Matthews said, “They have not only made Christian homes for their families and educated 50,000 Sunday school workers, but they have given to the State 25,000 educated school teachers who are today the hope and inspiration to the whole race.”34 Black women, through churches, clubs, committees, and various organizations, supported hundreds of schools public and private that provided educational uplift and outreach for Black children and adults. It was Victoria Earle Matthews, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Gertrude Mossell and others who provided necessary funds for Ida B. Wells to continue her crusade. And though the history of Black women is often studied through the clubs and other organizations (these women left behind remarkably, well-organized records), Black women worked outside these organizations in all strata of society, crossed racial lines when possible, and sometimes risked their lives (hiding pistols in the booths in beauty shops while they talked to their customers about voter registration, for example) for the betterment of their families and respective communities. Perhaps Matthews’s most egregious charge against the Cult is a legal one. She said, “As the laws now stand, they are the greatest demoralizing forces

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with which our womanhood has to contend. They serve as the protection of the white man, but they leave us defenseless.”35 As a journalist, Victoria Earle Matthews witnessed firsthand how “labor agents” in the North participated in thinly-veiled human trafficking of Black women (and sometimes, white immigrant women) from the South. As a former slave who had a white father, she would have known how the laws of the United States protected white men and devalued the bodies of Black women. Moreover, many men, Black and white, condemned Black women for their mixed-race offspring. Post-Emancipation laws and cultural mores continued to protect white men while stigmatizing Black women. Matthews boldly spoke on this: “A slave regulation should not be allowed to prevail in a free government. A barbarous injustice should not receive the sanction of a Christian nation.”36 While white men killed Black men extra-legally for a slight implication of a sexual liaison with white women (whether it was consensual or not), white men in the post-Emancipation American South could rape Black women without moral compunction or legal ramification. In addition to the unspoken legality of raping Black women during slavery and post-Emancipation, the destruction of Black women’s moral character and virtue were carefully encoded in apologetic historiographies written by well-known, white male academics. Ulrich B. Phillips published one of the first systematic studies of the Southern plantation system in America. In American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (1918) and Life and Labor of the Old South (1929), Phillips, a Southern “progressive,” explains to those outside of the South that Black men needed the regulation of the plantation system, because white people acted as mature guardians to a people who were in a perpetual state of adolescence. To Phillips, Black people were the “happy darkies” who lived simple lives. This type of “progressive” attitude from a son of Georgia who would become the nation’s foremost historian on Southern plantation systems and later a professor at Harvard is exactly the type that Zora Neale Hurston, writing a generation after Wells-Barnett, Mossell, and Matthews, would artistically refute with her own version of Black life in the rural South. While Phillips seemed to attack Black people as a whole, an admirer and colleague of his, Philip Alexander Bruce, differentiated between the sexes when he offered the first analysis of the “Negro problem” of the South. In The Plantation and the Negro as a Freeman (1889), Bruce agrees with his predecessor that Black American males were perpetually childlike, prone to stealing, and seemingly allergic to an honest day’s work. He agreed with Phillips in claiming that Black withdrawal from the white gaze into the sanctity of their own homes and communities caused a mental regression. According to both Phillips and Bruce, Black people, when they self-segregated from whites

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post-Emancipation, allowed them to return to their African ways, which were “naturally” inferior to those of Euro-Americans. However, Bruce extends his analysis and offers a plausible reason for the uncontrollable Black men who despised the sharecropping system: Black women. According to Bruce, Black women’s lack of moral fortitude, their sexual licentiousness, and their irreverent attitudes toward marital bonds were to blame for the roaming Black male who would rather seek sexual pleasures than work. Black women, sexually promiscuous and negligent mothers who failed to properly inculcate their children with strong moral character, were to blame for their own sexual exploitation and possible domestic abuse. In other words, white male academics simultaneously provided the Cult of Domesticity legitimacy by denying Black women the ability to be “True Women” sexually and absolved all white sexual harassers, rapists, and would-be rapists of any responsibility for violating the sanctity of Black women’s bodies. It is within this cultural, social, legal, and academic context that Wells, Mossell, and Mathews perform all-out guerilla combat with their journalism, creative endeavors, and social activities. Somebody had to defend Black women’s right to exist without the daily terror threat of rape. With the death of her sixteen-year-old son, Lamartine, Matthews founded the White Rose Industrial Association in New York City for migrant women coming from the South. She was helped in the venture by women such as Alice Dunbar Nelson and Hallie Quinn Brown. This community of women offered job skills training, education, Black history, entertainment, an open library for the women, as well as much needed protection from the “labor agents” that Matthews warned about in her speeches. Like Mossell and Wells, Matthews had creative output as well. Remarkable for her time, Matthews was not afraid to publicly address the misinformation put forth by white male writers and academics. Maurice Thompson, who penned the poem, “Voodoo Prophecy,” envisioned an America where post-Emancipated Black Americans would seek vengeance on white people for slavery.37 Thompson, using an ex-slave first-person narrator, declares in the poem, “I am the prophet of a dusky race/The poet of wild Africa” (Lines 1–2). Thompson, using the conventions of poetry, then has the speaker state in a few lines what Phillips and Alexander present in their voluminous studies: free from the influence of oppressive white tutelage, African Americans would revert to their “savage” African natures: “From the green jungle hear my Voodoo song/A tropic heat is in my bubbling veins/Quintessence of all savagery is mine” (Lines 12–14). This narrator prophesizes that the “savagery” of Africa, coupled with a knowledge of Voodoo, would aid Black Americans in taking violent revenge on former white masters.

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Matthews’ Aunt Lindy is a creative answer to Thompson’s prophecy. After a horrible fire in the small town of Fort Valley, Georgia, a white man is severely burned. The local people call for the greatest healer that they know: a former slave woman named, Aunt Lindy. Once the stranger was placed comfortably in the cabin that Aunt Lindy shared with her husband, Joel, Aunt Lindy realized that it was her former master, who had sold off her children. Matthews takes great pains in order to show the psychological torment that affected Aunt Lindy. The narrator reports, The quick vengeful flame leaped in her eyes, as her mind, made keen by years of secret suffering and toil traveled through time and space; she saw wrongs which no tongue can enumerate; demoniac gleams of exultation and bitter hatred settled upon her now grim features. (14–15)

Matthews makes clear here, that the wrongs of slavery have envenomed Aunt Lindy’s thoughts until they affect her countenance. Matthews does something else here: she allows the reader a glimpse into the intensely private, mental anguish of a woman wronged. Aunt Lindy is not a “happy darky,” type as put forth by Phillips. Aunt Lindy is an individual with a thought life and private heartbreak. Aunt Lindy is not a surface-servile, sexually licentious wife or a negligent mother. She is a faithful wife to Joel and the two of them passionately yearn for the children who were taken away during slavery. By crafting the story this way, Matthews’s novella, her only creative writing that academics are currently aware of, is a fictional refute of white male academics and creative writers. Aunt Lindy is thoroughly human and in possession of the human range of thoughts, emotions, and the power to express them. In her righteous anger, Aunt Lindy demands that the sick former master reveal the location of her children and calls the former master an old devil. With his life securely in her hands, Aunt Lindy has the power and the motivation to murder. Yet, she chooses restraint. Instead, she finds her way to the prayer meeting, where she is reminded that retributive justice belongs to the Lord. Aunt Lindy chooses to spare a life and not take it away—regardless of how justified she may feel in committing homicide. Matthew call to Black writers to put forth more fiction and other creative works as a record of the interior of Black Americans was repeated and amplified by Pauline Hopkins, in Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life in the North and South (1900). Hopkins writes in her introduction, The colored race has historians, lecturers, ministers, poets, judges, and lawyers—men of brilliant intellect who have arrested the favorable attention

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of this busy, energetic nation. But, after all, it is the simple homely tale, unassumingly told which cements the bond of brotherhood among all classes and all complexions. (Hopkins 13)38

Hopkins would go on to significantly shape the conventions of the African American short story with her publications in various Black American magazines. Before Hopkins, however, came these brave Black women warriors who chose the pen as their weapon and journalism as their battle strategy.

NOTES 1. Giddings quoted in the Introduction to The Work of the Afro American Woman. 2. Giddings quoted in the Introduction to The Work. 3. I use the term “extra-legally murdered” because when most audiences read or think of lynching, they think of white mobs hanging Black men. Lynching is being murdered in retaliation for an offense or a perceived offense without due process of the law by people who are neither law enforcement officers nor part of the judicial system. It is not restricted to hanging nor was it done to Black men only. There are instances in the American West where white men were lynched and records of Black women being lynched, though the numbers of these victims do not equal that of Black men. 4. This is sometimes seen as the “cult of the lady,” or the “cult of domesticity.” 5. This is from Footnote 2 in the original article. 6. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Amistad, 1984), 47. 7. Ibid., 151–142. 8. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 152. 9. Please see Gerda Lerner’s, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972). 10. Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 47. 11. I would be remiss here if I did not mention Nell Irving Painter’s Southern History Across the Color Line (2002). Painter contends that the Black slave woman made the ultimate “true woman,” as she had no political rights to her own body, no economic claim to her labor, and the husband of the manor really was her master to be obeyed with fear and reverence. Temporally, Painter is describing slavery as the “patriarchal institution,” and I am addressing Black women’s domestic and public lives Post-Emancipation. 12. On one of her tours of Great Britain, Ida B. Wells complained against white women suffragists and temperance leaders for their racism. She specifically targeted the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. 13. L. Moody Simms, “Philip Alexander Bruce and the Negro Problem, 18841930,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 75 (1967): 351. I am

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writing, specifically of the primary text authored by Bruce, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman: Observations on His Character, Condition, and Prospects in Virginia (1889). In this text, Bruce characterized the presence of Black men in the South as a “problem,” because as a voting bloc, they had a numerical political advantage over white men. 14. Rust College is still in operation and has recently appointed its first Black woman president, Dr. Ivy Taylor, former mayor of San Antonio, Texas. 15. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 15. 16. Ida B. Wells and Miriam Destoca-Willis. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells: An Intimate Portrait of the Activist as a Young Woman (Boston: Beacon Press 1995), 24. 17. Ida B. Wells, “Woman’s Mission,” in The Light of Truth: Writings of an AntiLynching Crusader (New York: Penguin, 2014), 15. 18. Ida B. Wells, “Our Women,” The Light of Truth, 21. 19. Ibid., 25. 20. Ibid., 25. 21. Ida B. Wells, “A Story of 1900,” in The Light of Truth: Writings of an AntiLynching Crusader (New York: Penguin, 2014), 17. 22. Ibid., 19. 23. Ida B. Wells, “Two Christmas Days: A Holiday Story,” in The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader (New York: Penguin, 2014), 156. 24. Braxton. “Introduction,” in The Work of the Afro-American Woman, xxviii. 25. “The Opposite Point of View,” in The Work, p. 118. Barbara Welter’s famous essay, “The Cult of Domesticity,” details a very lengthy footnote detailing how many magazines from the nineteenth century were surveyed in order to produce that article. Due to the age of Mossell’s writing, she confirms Welter’s painstaking research. Mossell is a writer closer to the age that Welter would have been studying. 26. “The Opposite Point of View,” in The Work, p. 121. 27. Mossell, “The Opposite Point of View,” in The Work, p. 122. 28. “The Work of the Afro American Woman,” p. 32. 29. Mossell, The Work, p. 26. 30. Ibid., p. 26. 31. Mossell, “A Sketch of African American Literature,” in The Work, p. 48. 32. Mossell, “The Awakening of the Afro American Woman,” in The Work, p. 6. 33. Matthews, “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” p. 6. 34. Matthews, “The Awakening,” p. 9. 35. Matthews, “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” p. 11. 36. Ibid., p. 11. 37. The Library of Congress now has a complete version of Thompson’s original poem. See https://www​.loc​.gov​/resource​/lcrbmrp​.t0b13/​?sp​=4​&st​=text 38. Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrated of Negro Life North and South (Boston: The Colored Cooperative Publishing Co, 1900; Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Co, reprinted 1969).

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WORKS CITED Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Harper Collins, 1984. Hopkins, Pauline. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. Boston: The Colored Cooperative, 1900; Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Co, reprinted 1969. Lerner, Gerda. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. Matthews, Victoria Earle. Aunt Lindy: A Story Founded on Real Life. New York: J. J. Little & Company, 1893. ———. “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman.” An address delivered at the annual convention of the Society of Christian Endeavor, San Francisco, July 11, 1897 ———. “The Value of Race Literature.” In The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett, pp. 287–297. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Mossell, N. F. The Work of the Afro-American Woman. Oxford: Oxford UP, reprinted 1988. Sims, L. Moody. Philip Alexander Bruce and the Negro Problem, 1884-1930,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 75 (1967): 171–183. Thompson, Maurice. “Voodoo Prophecy.” https://www​.loc​.gov​/resource​/lcrbmrp​ .t0b13/​?sp​=4​&st​=text Wells, Ida B. et al. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 2nd edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. ———. The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. ———. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells: An Intimate Portrait of the Activist as a Young Woman. Ed. Miriam Decosta-Willis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Chapter 2

Yours for Humanity An Examination of the Life and Work of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1856–1930) Verner Mitchell

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins distinguished herself at the turn of the nineteenth century as a biographer, editor, singer, playwright, essayist, and novelist. For much of the twentieth century, her life and work (like that of most early Black women writers) were neglected and largely unstudied. Now, however, all of her novels and essays are in print and easily available, and she is beginning to be recognized as “one of the United States’s important great experimental novelists.”1 Of the four novels, the inaugural work, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, is best known and most acclaimed. Hopkins designed the book to sway public sentiment and generate social change; she inscribed it, “Yours for Humanity.” Given her pioneering accomplishments as an activist, author, and performer, this chapter examines her life and oeuvre, both to correct factual errors and to argue for her as an exemplar of African American literary and cultural achievement. I begin with a biographical overview, tracing her genealogy and then her stage career, and end with an analysis of her 1901 short story “Bro’r Abr’m Jimson’s Wedding.” For years researchers have tried and failed to determine such basic facts as the identity of Hopkins’s close friends and associates, the nature of her contacts with other writers, and the names of her relatives. We are now able to fill in many of the empty spaces surrounding her life. Hopkins was an only child raised with cousins in an extended family that valued music, literature, and the arts. Precocious, she won prizes for her writing at an early age and drew heavily on family history for the plots and incidents in her work. She enjoyed a privileged upbringing and took pride in her unique situation as a Brown Bostonian. Despite her elevated status, Hopkins was 33

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socially conscious and wrote about racial inequities and issues of discrimination and prejudice. She worked in various genres, though she is best known for her novels and journalism. However, her creative expression was not limited to writing, as she frequently performed on stage, singing and acting.2 Hopkins was aware of the political and artistic contributions of several of her ancestors, on both her father’s and her mother’s sides of the family, as she makes clear in her December 1905 “Address at the Citizens’ William Lloyd Garrison Centenary.” Her 1914 essay on Mark De Mortie (1829– 1914), an Underground Railroad conductor who migrated from Virginia to Massachusetts prior to the Civil War, hails him “a race man of distinct individuality.” He and his friend Joseph Paul Whitfield, a “New England black man, who had located in Buffalo, New York, and accumulated about sixty thousand dollars in money and real estate,” had been the Sutlers (or supply officers) of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Troops, commanded by Col. Robert Gould Shaw.3 In her essay, Hopkins omits the fact that Joseph Whitfield was her granduncle and the poet James Monroe Whitfield’s younger brother. She is less reticent with regard to her links to their sister, Elizabeth Whitfield, her maternal grandmother. There is much confusion about the identity of Pauline’s father, partly because she deliberately obscured unpleasant facts about her family. Hopkins’s illegitimate birth and her parent’s dysfunctional marriage and acrimonious divorce in staid Boston undoubtedly account for Pauline’s silence in her early years. Pauline’s mother Sarah, unlike her twin sister, Annie Pauline, lived her entire life in New England. She gave birth to her only child, Pauline Elizabeth, in August of 1856 in Portland, Maine. Sarah named Pauline for her sister Annie Pauline Allen-Pindell and their mother, Elizabeth Whitfield Allen. Pauline’s father is often incorrectly identified as Northrup Hopkins, a Virginian who moved to New England prior to the Civil War. However, on June 16, 1857, in Boston, Sarah wed Pauline’s father, Benjamin Northrup. Northrup was “a member of one of the most politically active and established African American families in Providence, Rhode Island.”4 Six years later, Sarah filed for divorce, alleging infidelity. She was granted permission to resume using her maiden name and given custody of the couple’s minor child, Pauline Elizabeth. This surprising discovery by literary scholar Lois Brown clears up much of the confusion surrounding Pauline’s early years. For example, as a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl she won a prize of ten dollars in gold for her essay “The Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedy.” She signed the manuscript “Pauline E. Allen,” which many had assumed was a pen name. Her school records show that she would continue using Allen into her twenties when she took the surname of her stepfather, William A. Hopkins (figure 2.1).

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Figure 2.1  This Is a Page from Hopkins’s School Records. In the section marked “1872,” the name clearly states “Allen, Pauline E,” confirming Hopkins’s use of her mother’s maiden name.

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Pauline Hopkins’s stepfather, William, originally from Alexandria, Virginia, arrived in Boston in 1857 and lived at 31 Garden Street, in the heart of historic Beacon Hill. The 1860 Directory lists him as a hairdresser living at 189 Grove Street, a boarding house near the church Pauline and Sarah attended, the Twelfth Baptist Church, which was then on the corner of Phillips Street and Grove Street. Hopkins and the first pastor of the church, Rev. Leonard Grimes, had both emigrated to Boston from Virginia prior to the Civil War, and it is possible that Hopkins met Sarah Allen at the church. In May 1860, Hopkins enlisted in the U.S. Navy; he served for two years, first on the USS North Carolina and then on the USS Niagara. After battling Confederate forces in Charleston, Pensacola, Mobile Bay, and New Orleans, he was honorably discharged in June 1862.5 Upon his return to Boston, he rented a room at 42 Grove Street and resumed work as a barber. On Christmas Day 1864, young Pauline watched as Reverend Grimes married her mother and William A. Hopkins. The Christmas wedding was twenty-eight-year-old William Hopkins’s first marriage and thirty-year-old Sarah Allen’s second. William Hopkins, “a kindly man who was protective and indulgent of both Sarah and her daughter, Pauline,” would play a pivotal role in his stepdaughter’s life.6 Evidence suggests that Pauline and her real father initially remained in contact, although she eventually wrote him out of her biography. Much like Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West, Hopkins freely edited her family history to conform to the public image she wished to project. In an autobiographical sketch published years later in The Colored American Magazine, no mention is made of Northrup and she claims William Hopkins as her father: Pauline E. Hopkins of North Cambridge, Mass., was born in Portland, Me., but came to Boston when an infant; subsequently she was raised a Boston girl, educated in the Boston public schools, and finally graduated from the famous Girls’ High School of that city. Her father, the late William A. Hopkins, a G. A. R. veteran of the Civil War, is a native of Alexandria, Va. He is a nephew of the late John T. Waugh of Providence, R. I., and a first cousin of the late Mrs. Anna Warrick Jarvis of Washington, D. C. By her mother Miss Hopkins is a direct descendant of the famous Paul brothers, all black men, educated abroad for the Baptist ministry, the best known of whom was Thomas Paul, who founded St. Paul Baptist Church, Joy Street, Boston, Mass., the first colored church in this section of the United States. Susan Paul, a niece of these brothers, was a famous colored woman, long and intimately associated with William Lloyd Garrison in the anti-slavery movement. Miss Hopkins is also a grandniece of the late James Whitfield, the California poet, who was associated with Frederick Douglass in politics and literature.7

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Here she omits the fact that in 1864, father and daughter lived a block apart on Beacon Hill: Benjamin Northrup resided at 150 Russell Street while eightyear-old Pauline lived at 67 Joy Street, with her mother and stepfather.8 Thus, although carefully crafted and edited, Hopkins’s statement captures her literary heritage and her family’s distinguished record of activism, racial uplift, and patriotism, aspects of her personal narrative of which she was especially proud. Still extant, Twelfth Baptist is a direct descendant of the First African Baptist Church, founded in 1805 on Belknap (now Joy) Street by Pauline Hopkins’s great granduncle, Thomas Paul. After Rev. Paul’s death, family members eventually joined Twelfth Baptist, which was established in 1848 by a group of parishioners who had separated from First Baptist. Reverend Leonard Grimes, then living in New Bedford, Connecticut, was chosen as the church’s first pastor. He served until his death in 1874; the membership, observes Hopkins, had grown from its original 23 to over 600. Hopkins documents the connection between her family and their minister in her essay, “Men of Vision: II. Rev. Leonard Andrew Grimes.” She reveals that during the antebellum period, Twelfth Baptist was known as the Church of the Fugitive Slave. Among its members were the celebrated fugitives Shadrach Minkins, Thomas Sims, and Anthony Burns. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Burns and Sims were arrested and returned to slavery. Minkins and over forty others, with Grimes’s help, escaped to Canada. He then “collected money and bought the members of his church out of slavery that they might return to the United States without fear.”9 After the Civil War the church counted among its members the pioneering physician and lawyer John Swett Rock; the legendary abolitionists Lewis and Harriet Hayden; Judge George L. Ruffin, the first African American graduate of Harvard Law School; and the civil rights activist and clubwoman Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Hopkins’s girlhood Sunday school teacher.10 Hopkins would continue to center her life on religion, social justice, and spirituality. At the age of fifteen, she won an essay contest; years later she revealed that her first effort was made at the age of fifteen, when the Congregational Publishing Society, Boston, offered a prize of ten dollars in gold, through Dr. William Wells Brown, for the best essay on the “Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedies,” to the colored youth of Boston High Schools.

She “won the prize, and received a warm letter of encouragement.”11 In addition to her family and her church, Hopkins was strongly influenced by the schools she attended, Wells Primary, Wells Grammar, and Girls’ High. The latter, a highly selective institute, was established in 1852 to provide girls with an “English classical education.”12 Pauline’s stepfather stressed the

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importance of education and introduced her to a socially progressive artistic community. In 1866 the family moved six blocks west, to a house at 1 Allen Place, near the Massachusetts General Hospital. Ten-year-old Pauline apparently remained enrolled in the Wells Primary School, a coeducational facility on Blossom Street in Beacon Hill; she later transferred to the all-girls Wells Grammar School. Black children had been attending Boston’s public schools since 1855, but by 1865 there were only five enrolled in the high schools. Because the numbers were somewhat better at the lower levels, with 103 in the grammar schools and 263 in the primary schools, Pauline likely benefitted from having a critical mass of African American classmates. She excelled in her studies and in the spring of 1872 passed a rigorous examination which won her admission to Girls’ High School; it was then the female counterpart of English High and Boys’ Latin, since Girls’ Latin (which Dorothy West and Helene Johnson attended) would not be established until 1878. The four-part exam tested mastery of arithmetic, grammar, geography, and history, and included tasks such as “Extract the cube root of 27054035008”; “What does the past tense of the potential mood express”; and “Describe the overland route from London to Bombay, stopping at Malta and Alexandria.”13 School records show that she enrolled at Girls’ High on Monday morning September 2, 1872, under the name Pauline E. Allen. Her age was sixteen years and one month.14 William A. Hopkins, a barber, is listed as her parent, and their residence is 1 Allen Place. The school, an impressive fivestory brick building situated on a lot extending from West Newton Street to Pembroke Street, offered a three-year curriculum. Pauline studied algebra, botany, chemistry, drawing, English literature, Latin, and rhetoric in her first year; chemistry, drawing, English literature, French, history, Latin, and physiology in her middle year; and physics, history, astronomy, Shakespeare, drawing, ethics, and music in her senior year. As might be expected, she generally fared best in the humanities, with a ninety-five in English literature, a ninety-five in drawing, a ninety-one in rhetoric, and an eighty-nine in Shakespeare, though she also received a ninety-five in chemistry. She graduated in September 1875, at age nineteen, and made her professional debut as a singer with the Progressive Musical Union. The following year the family moved to a building at 15 State Street, where William worked as a janitor. Pauline was still living with her parents and using the surname Allen when she returned to Girls’ High in 1878 and completed a six-month course, probably in stenography. Perhaps no biographical inaccuracy has been more prolific than Hopkins’s age. Critics tend to use early assertions and repeat them, without any original research, in their own work. Much of the confusion apparently was created by Hopkins herself. Like Jessie Fauset (1882–1961) and Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), who were a generation older than most other Harlem

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Renaissance writers, Hopkins was sensitive about her age. Sensing that older women would be taken less seriously, they all felt uncomfortable revealing their ages. Although the librarian and historian Dorothy B. Porter gave Hopkins’s birth year as 1856, most scholars, including Hazel Carby, John Gruesser, Ira Dworkin, Lois Brown, and Hanna Wallinger followed Ann Shockley’s lead and cited 1859. Porter however is corroborated by the Girls’ High School records, the 1865 Massachusetts State Census, and the 1870 U.S. Census. Even before completing her studies at Girls’ High, she had begun her forays into artistic life and the public sphere. During her senior year in March of 1875, she sang with the Progressive Musical Union, a group organized by her cousin Elijah William Smith, Jr., a grandson of Reverend Thomas Paul. His daughters, Anne Smith Simms and Harriet Smith Burrell, were among Pauline’s closest friends. Two years later in March of 1877, she played a leading role in the musical Pauline, or, The Belle of Saratoga, performed at Boston’s Parker Memorial Hall. An advertisement promised that the play would be performed “with elaborate costumes and full scenic effects” and that it would be judged “the most amusing and interesting entertainment of the season (emphasis mine).”15 Pauline’s relatives Elijah William Smith and William Hopkins helped produce the play and served on the Committee of Arrangements. Judging from press accounts, the performances were well-received and bolstered her reputation as a singer and actress. In fact by 1882 when she turned twenty-six, she was known as “Boston’s Favorite Colored Soprano.”16 But her “great desire,” she later revealed, “was to become a playwright.”17 While in her twenties she authored at least three plays: Aristocracy—A Musical Drama in Three Acts (1877), Winona, a five-act play copyrighted in 1878, and the musical Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad, A Musical Drama in Four Acts (1879), which she later titled Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad.18 An additional work, “One Scene from the Drama of Early Days,” is frequently labeled juvenilia and a play, but it is actually an 800-word essay, written when she was living at 15 State Street, and still using the name Pauline Allen. Hopkins begins the account of Daniel and the lion’s den by urging dramatists to survey the bible as a powerful source for their art and to “draw inspiration from the hero, who uplifted on the cross, breathed His blessing upon us.” Enacting her theory, she shows King Darius sentencing an unrepentant Daniel “into the den of lions.” When the scene changes to the following morning, “a mighty shout bursts from the assembled multitude, as the beloved of the Lord steps forth, unharmed.”19 The piece captures Hopkins’s early love of drama as well as her lifelong belief that just as God saved Daniel, he was willing and able to save Blacks living in the “American lion den.”

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Of her three plays, only Peculiar Sam has survived. Program folders show that Hopkins and her parents performed in the play in July 1880 at Boston’s Oakland Garden, as members of the Hopkins Colored Troubadours, a family group organized by her stepfather. William, Pauline, and her mother, Sarah, formed the nucleus of the group, and they were frequently joined by Annie Parks, James Freeman, James Henry, and George Tolliver, all singers, and Carrie Alden, a popular vocalist and pianist. Sarah and Pauline sang, while William sang, played the guitar, and handled most of the advertising and travel arrangements. Between 1879 and the late 1880s when the group disbanded, the Troubadours were well-known in regional musical circles; they gave concerts as far north as Ayer, Massachusetts, and as far south as Providence, Rhode Island. In January 1882, a reporter for the Malden Press announced that despite the unfavorable weather the Hopkins Colored Troubadours had a very good audience at the City Hall last Sunday evening. The programme was an appropriate one, and excellent in all respects, consisting of solos, duets, piano and guitar renderings, and chorus singing by the entire company. The company has left behind a very good impression, and will be heartily welcomed whenever they choose to visit our city again.

James A. Roberts, a Bostonian who hired the ensemble several times, recommended them to societies, since “no meeting of this kind is complete without good music.” He singled out “Miss Pauline Hopkins, the soprano,” noting that she “has a sweet voice, and is a favorite wherever she sings.”20 Hopkins’s accomplishments as a singer, actress, and playwright have received little attention from scholars, although contemporary press accounts show she was quite popular and reached a wide audience. Peculiar Sam “catapulted her to the forefront of nineteenth-century African American theater culture.” During 1879 and 1880 an eleven-person acting company took Peculiar Sam on a national tour, performing in major cities of the Northeast and Midwest such as Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and St. Paul. In addition, the company “combed the Midwest exhaustively, moving through New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri, playing one-and two-night stands in any place that offered accommodations, and returning by request for repeat performances to St. Paul, Chicago, and some of the larger towns.”21

Sam Lucas (1850–1916), the veteran actor, singer, and songwriter, starred as Peculiar Sam; the famous Hyers sisters, Anna Madah and Emma Louise, played the leading female roles. Hopkins held the sisters in high regard and

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wrote that they were Californians who made their debut at Sacramento’s Metropolitan Theatre in April 1867. “Never,” she observed, “until undertaken by these ladies, was it thought possible for Negroes to appear in the legitimate drama, albeit soubrette parts were the characters they portrayed.”22 As a member of the Hopkins Colored Troubadours, Pauline starred in Peculiar Sam, singing soprano and playing the role of Virginia. In doing so she became, as Lois Brown notes, “the first American woman to perform publicly in her own play.”23 It is somewhat ironic that a groundbreaking play so popular in its own day, at the end of the nineteenth century, would be virtually unknown in ours. Much of the difficulty undoubtedly comes from Hopkins’s jarring and ultimately unsuccessful use of southern Black vernacular. Zora Neale Hurston, commenting on Richard Wright’s similarly vexing use of Black vernacular, termed his writing “puzzling” and “tone deaf.”24 Unlike Wright and Hurston, however, who were born and reared in the South, Hopkins was a daughter of New England. In fact, evidence suggests that the furthest south she ever traveled was New York City. At bottom, Peculiar Sam’s linguistic challenges prove a major impediment to students and scholars alike, often preventing them from moving beyond the play’s dialect to its underlying themes and arguments. By the 1890s, as Pauline Hopkins entered her fourth decade, changes were occurring in the private and public spheres that affected the Hopkins family. With the dissolution of the Hopkins Colored Troubadours in the late 1880s, as an aging William dealt with old war injuries, Pauline lost her primary source of income. To support herself, she took a hiatus from writing and beginning in 1892 worked as a stenographer, first for Massachusetts State Representatives Henry Parkman and Alpheus Sanford, and from 1895 to 1899 for the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics. In part because she was no longer singing or acting, the 1890s would prove her most active decade as a public orator. Many of the speeches resulted from her activities with the women’s club movement; other invitations came from church groups; and others, such as a Memorial Day address in 1892 to the Robert A. Bell Post 134, G. A. R., stemmed from her stepfather’s membership in the Grand Army of the Republic and other veterans organizations. As a naval veteran of the Civil War, William Hopkins was both civic-minded and well connected, and he was able to introduce Pauline to luminaries from the entertainment, political, veterans, and literary communities.25 During the 1890s, Hopkins’s work as a public speaker coincided with a spike in racial tension as Jim Crow laws, vigilantism, lynching, and mob violence spread across the South. She protested the state of affairs in her preface to Contending Forces: In these days of mob violence, when lynch-law is raising its head like a venomous monster, more particularly in the southern portion of the great American

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republic, the retrospective mind will dwell upon this history of the past, seeking there a solution of these monstrous outbreaks.26

The violence was likely precipitated by the Compromise of 1877, awarding Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in exchange for agreeing to remove federal troops from the South, thereby restoring “home rule” to the region. The Compromise effectively ended Reconstruction and all federal protection for the four million former slaves and slave descendants living in the South. In the wake of the Compromise, the Ku Klux Klan and other southern-based hate groups rapidly increased in popularity. Determined to re-assert white dominance, southern mobs lynched 85 Blacks in 1890, 113 in 1891, and “an all-time high of 161 in 1892.”27 In response to the lawlessness, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar opined, “Ah, Douglass, we have fall’n on evil days, / Such days as thou, not even thou didst know.”28 In Memphis, journalist Ida B. Wells reacted to the March 1892 shooting and hanging of her friend Thomas Moss and his business partners Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart by launching a nationwide anti-lynching campaign. She described the incident in her newspaper the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, explaining that the men, “three of the best specimens of young since-the-war Afro-American manhood,” were murdered “in a shockingly brutal manner” because a white grocer considered their flourishing grocery business too profitable and damaging to his.29 She applauded those Blacks who denounced the lynching and left Memphis “by thousands, bringing about great stagnation to every branch of business,” and she urged all others to follow, since “the appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.”30 Whites reacted by burning her newspaper office and threatening to kill her if she ever returned to Memphis, which resulted in her relocating permanently to Chicago. For Hopkins, no reformer of the nineteenth century “stands more powerful than Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett.”31 Both women, prompted by increased discrimination in the North, the wave of violence sweeping the South, and a passionate desire to uplift the race, became active participants in the Black women’s club movement. After moving to Chicago, Wells continued her crusade against lynching. Crisscrossing the country, she spoke at numerous rallies and established anti-lynching societies from Californian to New York. She also edited the Chicago Conservator newspaper, and in 1893 founded a Chicago women’s club organized for “civic and social betterment” and later renamed the Ida B. Wells Woman’s Club in her honor. Wells’s anti-lynching campaign provided the impetus for the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), initiated in Boston in July 1895. When Missouri journalist James W. Jacks wrote a letter attacking Wells and asserting that most Black women were “prostitutes, thieves, and liars,” Josephine Ruffin,

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president of Boston’s Woman’s Era Club, summoned women’s groups from across the country to Boston. Over 100 delegates from 14 states convened at Boston’s Berkeley Hall on July 29, 1895. Hopkins was a member of the host committee and observed seven years later that “this great Association is now of powerful growth, adding yearly to its roll of membership Federations from every Southern State.”32 As a writer, Hopkins merits special praise for her incisive critiques of common nineteenth-century American ideas about intelligence and beauty. Lutie Johnson of Ann Petry’s 1946 novel, The Street, is generally considered the first female character in American fiction to embody an alternative to white standards of beauty. Yet Hopkins, a half-century earlier, had already begun to reconstruct images by discussing “differently” the concept of beauty. Consider, for instance, her 1901 short story “Bro’r Abr’m Jimson’s Wedding: A Christmas Story.” Set in a populous, unnamed New England city, the narrative spans the nine-month period from early spring to Christmas day. The action starts in church on a Sunday morning. The choir sings, the deacons pray, and the preacher, having brought the parishioners to a high, descends into the congregation and invites visitors to become members of the church. Soon all eyes are fixed on a young woman who, upon rising from her seat, answers the preacher and makes her way, ever so slowly, up the main aisle to the front of the church. “The girls in the choir-box,” seated strategically, and now leaning over the railing, “nudged each other and giggled.” “She’s a stunner,” chimed in the men. “There was no denying the fact,” even the narrator agrees, that she was a pretty girl; brown of skin, small of feature, with an ever-lurking gleam of laughter in eyes coal black. Her figure was slender and beautifully molded, with a seductive grace in the undulating walk and erect carriage. But the chief charm of the sparkling dark face,

the narrator asserts, “lay in its intelligence, and the responsive play of facial expression which was enhanced by two mischievous dimples pressed into the rounded cheeks by the caressing fingers of the god of Love.”33 The young woman’s good looks are not missed by “the man of God” who, after collecting himself, introduces to the eagerly awaiting congregation twenty-year-old “Sister Chocolate Caramel Johnson,” newly arrived “from our sister church in Nashville, Tennessee.”34 Appropriately named, as every syllable of the passage imparts, this sparkling, undulating, dark-faced woman, caressed by the very god of Love, beams with womanly allure . . . and intelligence. The passage is a direct challenge to racist and sexist stereotypes of black women.

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Although she left no direct descendants, Pauline Hopkins lived a long, productive life. She contributed to the race not only through her art but also through the Black philanthropic and social organizations to which she belonged. An exemplar of African American literary and cultural achievement, through her lifestyle, creative works, and activism Hopkins offered inspiration to future generations of Black women writers. NOTES 1. Elizabeth Ammons, “Winona, Bakhtin, and Hopkins in the Twenty-first Century.” In The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, ed. John Cullen Gruesser (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 214. 2. Alisha Knight characterizes Hopkins as a “renaissance woman whose stage and lecturing experience taught her how to draw in an audience, and whose periodical editorial experience taught her to give readers what they wanted to read without compromising her own principle.” Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 100. 3. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Mark Réné De Mortie.” In Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, ed. Ira Dworkin (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 363, 365–366. 4. Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 34. 5. Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, 61–64. 6. Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, 46. Records of the marriage are available at the Boston Public Library’s microfiche room. We thank Tess Vismale for locating this document for us. 7. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Autobiographical Sketch.” Colored American Magazine 2, no. 3 (January 1901), 218. 8. Donald M. Jacobs, ed. Courage and Conscience: Black & White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 228; and Boston City Directory for 1865. 9. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Rev. Leonard Andrew Grimes.” In Daughter of the Revolution, 371. For more on Twelfth Baptist Church and the Reverend Paul, see Roy E. Finkenbine, “Boston’s Black Churches: Institutional Centers of the Antislavery Movement.” In Courage and Conscience: Black & White Abolitionists in Boston, 169–189; and George W. Williams, History of the Twelfth Baptist Church, Boston Mass, from 1840-1873 (Boston: James H. Earle, 1874). 10. Roy E. Finkenbine, “Boston’s Black Churches,” 180–181. For more on Rock, the first Black lawyer certified to try cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Ruffins, see Adelaide Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), and Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000).

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11. Hopkins, “Autobiographical Sketch,” 218. 12. Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston, 1865 (Boston: J. E. Farwell), 34. 13. Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston, 103, 188. 14. Hopkins’s high school records, including the Girls’ High School Ledger for 1872–1879, are housed at Boston’s Dearborn Middle School. 15. Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, 90. 16. Hannah Wallinger, Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 37. 17. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Autobiographical Sketch,” 218. 18. Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, 107–109. 19. Pauline E. Hopkins, “One Scene from the Drama of Early Days,” in Daughter of the Revolution, 7–8. 20. The “Hopkins Colored Troubadours” Program containing these quotes is reproduced in Hannah Wallinger, Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography, 37. 21. Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, 109, 111–112. 22. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Phenomenal Vocalists,” in Daughter of the Revolution, 119–120. 23. Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, 140. 24. Zora Neale Hurston, “Stories of Conflict,” Saturday Review of Literature 17 (April 2, 1938), 32. 25. For example, William Hopkins helped organize a program to celebrate the passage of the fifteenth amendment, ratified on February 3, 1870, to grant the franchise to African American men. Military units, civic organizations, and veterans groups convened in the Boston Common on April 14, 1870, and walked the half mile to Faneuil Hall for the 3.00 p.m. program. Participants included Rev. Leonard Grimes, the Hopkins family minister; U.S. Senator Charles Sumner; abolitionists Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison; attorneys Robert Morris and Edwin Garrison Walker; Stephen S. Foster; and novelist William Wells Brown. Pauline and her mother may have attended the ceremony, since William Hopkins served on the Committee of Arrangements, and they may also have met William Wells Brown. The flyer “Boston Celebration of the 15th Amendment, Thursday, April 14th, 1870” is owned by the author. 26. Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 14. 27. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 205–206. 28. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Douglass.” In The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ed. Lida Keck Wiggins (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1907), 287. 29. Ida B. Wells, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” In Southern Horrors and Other Writings; The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 18921900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (New York: Bedford, 1996), 64–65. 30. Ida B. Wells, “Southern Horrors,” 68–69.

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31. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Some Literary Workers,” in Daughter of the Revolution, 144. 32. Dorothy Sterling, Black Foremothers: Three Lives, 2nd edition (New York: Feminist Press, 1988), 93, 96. 33. The Colored American Magazine (December 1901), 104. 34. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Bro’r Abr’m Jimson’s Wedding: A Christmas Story,” 104.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ammons, Elizabeth. “Winona, Bakhtin, and Hopkins in the Twenty-first Century.” In The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, edited by John Cullen Gruesser, pp. 211–219. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston, 1865. Boston: J. E. Farwell, 1865. Boston City Directory for 1865. Brown, Lois. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Cromwell, Adelaide. The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class, 1750-1950. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “Douglass.” In The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, p. 287. Naperville, IL: Nichols, 1907. Dworkin, Ira, Editor. Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Fikenbine, Roy E. “Boston’s Black Churches: Institutional Centers of the Antislavery Movement.” In Courage and Conscience: Black & White Abolitionists in Boston, edited by Donald M. Jacobs, pp. 169–189. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Gatewood, Willard B. Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000. Girls’ High School Records, 1872-1879. Dearborn Middle School, Boston Public School System. Gruesser, John Cullen, Editor. The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Hopkins, Pauline E. “Autobiographical Sketch.” The Colored American Magazine, 2, no. 3 (January 1901): 218. Hopkins, Pauline E. “Bro’r Abr’m Jimson’s Wedding: A Christmas Story.” The Colored American Magazine, 4, no. 2 (December 1901): 103–112. Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, 1899. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hopkins, Pauline E. “Mark Réné De Mortie.” In Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, edited by Ira Dworkin, 363–368. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

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Hopkins, Pauline E. “Rev. Leonard Andrew Grimes.” In Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, edited by Ira Dworkin, 369– 376. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Stories of Conflict.” Saturday Review of Literature, 17 (April 2, 1938): 32–33. Jacobs, Donald M., Editor. Courage and Conscience: Black & White Abolitionists in Boston. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Knight, Alisha R. Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream: An African American Writer’s (Re)Visionary Gospel of Success. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012. Porter, Dorothy B. “Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth (1856-1930).” In Dictionary of American Negro Biography, edited by Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, 325–326. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982. Registry of Marriages. Boston Public Library, Microtext Room. Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide. New York: Meridian, 1989. Sterling, Dorothy. Black Foremothers: Three Lives, 2nd edition. New York: Feminist Press, 1988. Wallinger, Hannah. Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Wells, Ida B. “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” In Southern Horrors and Other Writings; The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, edited by Jacqueline Jones Royster. New York: Bedford, 1996. Williams, George W. History of the Twelfth Baptist Church, Boston Mass., From 1840-1874. Boston: James H. Earle, 1874.

Chapter 3

Plagiarizing Blackness Racial Performances and Passing in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted Tajanae Barnes

Well, Captain, when a man’s been colored all his life it comes a little hard for him to get white all at once. Were I to try it, I would feel like a cat in a strange garret. –Frances E.W. Harper, Iola Leroy

Traditionally, racial passing is understood as the act of mixed-race people claiming and professing whiteness while simultaneously dismissing any ethnic connections they possess of African American culture. These individuals move throughout the world hiding their Blackness in hopes of accessing opportunities not normally afforded to Black people. Some of these individuals are, unfortunately, depicted as hopeless, pitiful, and needing to be rescued: essentially, the tragic mulatto is born. This passing narrative has been, and continues to be, the focal point for the discourse of creative works within the African American literary canon. Many scholars and critics interpreting authors such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Nella Larsen, and Danzy Senna tend to develop a discourse that insinuates passing is synonymous with the tragic mulatto trope. While it is convenient to recognize this literary trend, Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1893) does a different type of work and introduces a topic that is often neglected: passing for Black. We have been instructed that passing, or race change, is “‘a cultural performance whereby one member of a defined social group masquerades as another’ in order to enjoy the privileges afforded to the dominant group.”1 So with Eurocentric traditions creating a dominant presence of whiteness as the acceptable way of life, what privileges are afforded to persons who 49

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pass for Black? This is the question to ponder as we dissect, interpret, and understand Iola Leroy in 2022 while “transracial sensations,” such as Kim Kardashian and Rachel Dolezal, plague the media waves with their passing efforts.2 With the definitions of words constantly changing and re-developing, we are forced to ask ourselves if this modern “passing” is actually a disrespectful performance of a culture that holds their ethnicity sacred. Crossing racial lines, in its historical sense, was used as a means of protection and to gain unfathomable opportunities, we may consider that even in the nineteenth century “becoming” Black always ends in disrespectful minstrel-like performances that further tarnish Black people as a collective. Iola Leroy (1892) introduces us to the Leroy family: a quaint “white” family hiding the dark and silencing secret of Marie’s matrilineal lineage and connections to African Americans. This secret is revealed after Eugene’s death and the family is thrown into slavery, a fate only Marie knows, we see both Iola and Harry Leroy “become” African American, which is a culture they have merely imagined by way of the slaves their father owned. Both Iola and Harry are presumptuously white children attempting to exist within their newfound Blackness. The narrative Harper attempts to make by having them profess their Blackness is pride for one’s culture and courage to survive and persevere no matter the circumstances. However, while Harper attempts to illustrate some sort of “race pride” by violently throwing her characters into slavery, she further contradicts contemporary narratives that assert Blackness is often associated with struggle, strife, and cultural indifference. The characters experience anxiety, depression, poverty, and familial separation until everyone is magically reunited and lives happily ever after. Harper’s fairytale ending illustrates her push to eradicate the tragic mulatto, but she blurs the lines of passing and performance as she unintentionally introduces the notion of “double passing.”3 In reading this novel through a more contemporary lens and understanding the twenty-first-century controversy of passing for Black, one must consider the psychological discrepancies developed from passing and passing narratives brought to life. In order to answer this inquiry, I analyze Harper’s use of double passing, her understanding of traditionally canonized Blackness where struggle is often romanticized, and her illustration of passing performances that are masked as pride and acceptance. Additionally, I work through what it looks like to teach this novel in a contemporary classroom where personal identification is taboo and, sometimes, difficult to discuss. TO LIVE AND DIE Although many mixed-race people conceptualize passing as a survival tactic, many of them put themselves in harm’s way and revoke their own agency

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by silencing a piece of themselves. Townsend et. al. state, “Phinney (1996) defines ethnic identity as a sense of belonging and attachment to group membership.”4 By engaging in passing practices, many mixed-race people are detached from a true ethnic identity which, in turn, places them in the position to experience separation and group anxieties. With no place to truly belong and no one to openly talk to about these troubles and confusion, these individuals are often alone and fear entering new groups of people thinking they may say the wrong things. Racial passing forces many mixed-race people to smother and suppress their desires in order to reach the goal(s) they originally set out to obtain. Take, for instance, Marie Leroy—the matriarchal protagonist of the novel. When we are introduced to Marie, it is explained that she is harboring a life-threatening secret. Marie is, in fact, a mulatto slave woman who is bought by Eugene, is given a Northern education, and portrays a woman of refined status and dignified stature who later marries Eugene. Marie understands that her husband loves her, yet she feels voiceless and alone in her own home. She states, “I don’t mind the isolation for myself, but the children. You have enjoyed silence on me with respect to their connection with the negro race, but I do not think we can conceal it from them very long.”5 Marie longs to speak up, but she does not have the words to do so. Harper confirms this fact by writing, “Leroy had always been especially careful to conceal from his children the knowledge of their connection with the negro race. To Marie this silence was oppressive.”6 Marie thought she found a way out of the demise of slavery. However, she merely transfers her oppressive energy from one source to another. With the realization that she and her children are technically classified as African American slaves, Marie states, “I sometimes lie awake at night thinking of how there might be a screw loose somewhere, and, after all, the children and I might be reduced to slavery.”7 Marie attempts to work through this complication and hopes to relinquish her children of the oppression she copes with daily. Harper illuminates both the psychological discrepancies Marie develops and the challenges she faces attempting to parent through adversity and confusion. Today, many parents are faced with various and diverse ways to raise their children. Actions as simple as forcing children to attend church every Sunday and/or not allowing them to participate in sleepovers snatches a child’s agency and opportunity to self-identify. This is the mentality and image Harper creates of Marie. Where Marie assumes she is protecting her children, she is actually endangering them by allowing them to remain ignorant of their ancestral history. This, in turn, throws the family into a whirlwind of complex emotions and confusion when Eugene Leroy suddenly passes away. In this instant, Marie’s words—“Think how dear these children are to me; and then for the thought to be forever haunting me, that if you were dead they could be divided among

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your relatives”—come true.8 Marie’s lineage is exposed, and she and her children are not even given a moment to grieve before they are viciously thrown into American slavery. Although, during his time alive, Eugene wholeheartedly believes, “If it is cruel to debase a hapless victim, it is an increase of cruelty to make her contented with degradation,” it is partially his fault his family faces their demise and must endure slavery.9 This not only alters the tone and expectations of the novel but also challenges the tragic mulatto trope. Here I do argue that Harper complicates her characters’ agency and self-identification by allowing Marie and Eugene to determine how their children should live, and having Eugene (re)create Marie in an image that better suits his familial dream, and I also realize that Harper’s works diligently does not allow these “black” women to be rescued by white men. In challenging this trope, however, Harper redesigns the unnatural behavior of a “strong black woman.”10 After Eugene’s death, Marie sends immediate notices to her children to stay away from home unless they desire to endure the hardships of being an African American. Here, Marie is depicted as a hero to her children for keeping them out of harm’s way. However, this may be difficult to discuss in a contemporary literature classroom because it provokes mixed emotions of “a mother’s love.” The topics of love and parenting, as they relate to slavery, are often misunderstood and complex to interpret. In many instances, the belief is that death—as it was for Sethe’s children in Toni Morrison’s Beloved—is much better than living in slavery. On the other hand, some women—like Great Gram and Gram in Gayle Jones’s Corregidora—want their children to survive the turmoil so that their family history can live on, and people after them can attest to their strength for survival. For Marie, casting her children away was one of the strongest tasks she could do. However, in some way, this can also be seen as an act of slow death placed on young Iola and Harry. While Marie works to ensure Iola and Harry do not endure slavery, she is still not present to parent and protects her children from other possible tragedies. With the social climate of the United States placing blame on parents instead of the environment for how children are developing and matriculating throughout life, getting students to recognize the cause of Marie’s behavior may present some difficulties in discussion. While Marie hopes to save her children, Iola is unfortunately lured back “home” to mourn her father’s death.11 Upon her arrival, we are once again expected to consider what it means to be a strong Black, and this time also Christian, woman. When Iola realizes the fate she has stepped into, she exclaims, “I wish I could die myself.”12 In response to this, Marie states: Oh, Iola, do not talk so. Strive to be a Christian, to have faith in the darkest hour. Were it not for my hope of heaven I couldn’t stand all this trouble. . . . Some

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of the most beautiful lessons of faith and trust I have ever learned were from among our lowly people in their humble cabins.13

Marie speaks of faith, honor, and strength, yet her true feelings are also exposed at this moment. This, in turn, illustrates that Marie essentially teaches Iola and Harry how to plagiarize Blackness instead of embracing it. By calling her fellow Black slaves “lowly people,” Marie insinuates that she and her family are not equal to the other Black slaves. There is still a separation between the slaves and the Leroys that Marie cannot ignore. Marie wants readers to believe that she is one with her Blackness, but she negates this notion of belonging and all of her desires to expose her children to the truth by subjecting Black people to terminology such as “lowly” and “humble.” This shows us that she does not, necessarily, aspire to be Black. Rather, Marie enjoys the idea of what it means to be prideful in one’s heritage, and almost fetishizes Black culture. Oftentimes, those who are granted certain social privileges have an intense “fear of missing out (FOMO)” regarding other cultures. Marie does not necessarily want her children to be deprived of their Blackness, but she also does not want them to be completely submerged in it. Both Harper and Marie illustrate that “the very notion of a ‘hidden blackness’ illuminates the contested and paradoxical space that race occupies in American social life.”14 Race consumes a vast majority of Marie’s oppression, and this hidden Blackness causes Iola and Harry to experience a new fate. While Harry is given the option to choose Blackness or not, Iola is not as fortunate. The treatment of Iola is vaguely described, but we can assume that her role as “house servant” is synonymous with a concubine.15 Iola initially conceptualizes slavery as something good. Before learning of her father’s death, she states: Slavery can’t be wrong . . . for my father is a slave-holder, and my mother is as good to our servants as she can be. My father often tells her that she spoils them, and let them run over her. I never saw my father strike one of them I love my mammy as much as I do my own mother, and I believe she loves us just as if we were her own children.16

When Iola is sold to the highest bidder, she quickly realizes not every slave owner is like her father. When she is rescued by Northern soldiers during the Civil War, Iola has two choices. She can become the Black woman she was forced to be, or she can become a white woman once again. Readers may assume that because Iola’s only experience as an African American is that of a “house servant,” she would stick with the latter. However, Iola chooses to grasp her Blackness. With the understanding that passing is utilized in order to reap the benefits of another race, it makes sense

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to ask why Iola chooses to completely dismiss her whiteness. Why choose Blackness when a majority of her life has been socially situated around whiteness? Why submit to a culture that has only shown subjugation, oppression, and depression? The psychological submission Iola endures while enslaved forces her to desire to “protect” Black people. Iola recognizes that “being a light-skinned African American able to pass as white is a ‘handicap’” and that “the only passing that is prevalent is from white to black.”17 For Iola, it is white men who “protect” her, and it is white men who have subjected her to hardships she endures. However, Black people have—presumptuously—kept her whole and alive. For this, Iola suggests that it is her duty and responsibility to repay Black communities. But, is this complete dismissal of her whiteness appropriate and respectful to African American culture? In order to discover the answer here, we must analyze how the self, for Iola, exists both on the surface of the skin as well as in the eye of the audience?18 What this means is, how does Iola live within her truth while simultaneously appeasing a public idea and perception? As we may see by fully reading the novel, Iola experiences many internal battles while attempting to live her truth. For instance, Iola consciously chooses not to date or fall in love with Dr. Gresham because he is white. After her tenure in slavery, Iola feels it inappropriate to date outside of her race—even though she is both Black and white. This is problematic because Iola is not making a decision based on personal preferences. Instead, her decision is guided by social stigmas and public perception. I say this because Iola eventually marries Dr. Latimer—a mixed-race doctor who is, ironically, passing for white. Iola refuses to marry Dr. Gresham because he is “naturally born” white and expects Iola to (re)capture her whiteness. Yet, she marries Dr. Latimer, who passes and desires the opportunities Dr. Gresham possesses. Rosenthal argues: Rather than further etiolating her bloodline, Iola makes a self-conscious decision not to marry white. Instead, she and Dr. Latimer devote themselves to uplifting their race. Perhaps acknowledging both the esteem of marrying white and any distaste her readers might feel if Iola were to marry a very dark black man, Harper compromises her heroine’s racial vision by having Iola marry a very light-skinned man who passes for a white doctor.19

Instead of Iola being rescued, she is saving Dr. Latimer. The two of them work together to provide their race with hope for better fortunes and opportunities. Harper desperately attempts to work this strong Black woman narrative, but by having Iola marry a man who is everything she did not want, we can confirm that Iola is masquerading Blackness.

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We are supposed to believe that because Iola is “consciously embracing a ‘Black’ identity, [she is] immediately bonded to a shared cultural, racial and ethnic experience.”20 However, Harper’s development of Iola and Dr. Latimer’s relationship illustrates that Iola is still far removed from true African American culture because she can only associate Blackness with struggle. Iola does not want to be a Black woman who marries a Black man and has Black children. She wants to save Black people from their demise and fix the problems she presumes they possess. This is typical of many people who enter Black spaces. Much like Europeans felt they were saving Africans from themselves, many Americans of almost every race—even other Black people—feel as though Black communities need saving and fixing. This mentality is one that is still prevalent and may be difficult to argue in many contemporary classes depending upon the classroom demographic. I recently taught a world literature course where I placed primary focus on women writers. While reading texts that situate Black women, the students articulated varied opinions. In particular, there was constant rebuttal concerning the opinions developed regarding Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The diverse opinions surrounding this text allowed me to assess how Iola Leroy are received. In order to ensure the novel’s ideas are not completely cancelled out, I ensure that the students have a grasp of what it means to appropriately and effectively blend cultures without assuming someone needs to be rescued. This allows the students to ask, what are these people being rescued from for this character to act in such a way? Once everyone realizes that the rescue mission is developed because of presumed cultural beliefs on the saving party’s end, we analyze and prove that Iola is masquerading Blackness and presenting a dysfunctional “double passing,” which is a derivative of W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness. Kathryn Rummel argues that double passing explodes “the myth of the racial binary that organized earlier passing narratives” and opens “readers’ eyes to a more complicated racial identity that is only possible in a postethnic world.”21 Many people would like to assume that race is no longer a factor that determines people’s identities and social status. However, Harper illustrates that even after slavery is supposedly eradicated, race controls everything. Iola unintentionally passing for white and eventually attempting to pass for Black illustrates that “skin color is the visible sign that makes the performance believable.”22 Essentially, we can only believe Iola is not masquerading Blackness if she has darker skin. Her actions are unbelievable to readers because she is too fair-skinned. What Rummel argues is that skin color determines actions. However, I argue that upbringing, environment, and social status determine whether or not someone “plagiarizes” another culture’s ethnic

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traditions. Iola clearly displays and practices stereotypical traditions that are continuously set forth by individuals that are not a part of African American communities. For example, Iola becomes so obnoxiously prideful that she almost degrades others. In a conversation with Dr. Gresham, she states, I have too much self-respect to enter your home under a veil of concealment. I have lived in New England. I love the sunshine of her homes and the freedom of her institutions. But New England is not free from racial prejudice, and I would never enter a family where I would be an unwelcome member.23

While I can clearly see Iola explains that she does not want to date Dr. Gresham because of the expectation of possibly silencing her Blackness, she has an abrupt tone that illustrates her speaking to Dr. Gresham almost in disgust. It is a social belief that Black people are “too prideful,” and this is the primary tone Iola exudes when speaking to non-Black people. This is also the case for Harry Leroy. QUESTIONING PRIDE When Eugene passes away, Harry is fortunate enough to receive the notification to stay North. Since he is notified of the threat his family faces, Harry is given the option to choose whiteness or Blackness. With much thought, Harry finally chooses to claim his African American heritage. Harper writes, His father was dead. His mother and sister were enslaved by a mockery of justice. It was more than a matter of choice where he should stand on the racial question. He felt that he must stand where he could strike the most effective blow for their freedom.24

Harry, much like Iola, feels he owes it to African Americans to claim his Blackness. However, Harry seems to also want revenge against white people. This idea of possible revenge is confirmed as we see Harry decide to join the war and fight within the “colored” regiment.25 Harper allows us to visualize the confusion that Harry develops. She writes: The officer looked puzzled. It was a new experience. He had seen colored men with fair complexions anxious to lose their identity with the colored race and pose as white men, but here was a man in the flush of his early manhood, to whom could come dreams of promotion from a simple private to a successful general, deliberately turning his back upon every gilded hope and dazzling opportunity, to cast his lot with the despised and hated negro.26

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This train of thought is normal for the officer because, as I previously stated, not many people expect to pass for Black. Despite this confusion, Harry states, “I am a colored man, and unless I can be assigned to a colored regiment I am not willing to enter the army.”27 It is concerning that Harry immediately chooses to profess his Blackness and join the “colored” regiment because he has only just discovered his relation to African Americans. In fact, before he makes his decision, we see Harry experience some indecisiveness as well. Harper writes, Since Harry had come North he had learned to feel profound pity for the slave. But there is a difference between looking on a man as an object of pity and protecting him as such, and being identified with him and forced to share his lot.28

Harry recognizes that slavery is a heinous act that he does not want to be subjected to. However, he also realizes that “racial passing instigates different reactions on each side of the color divide,” and he has to make a decision that affects both himself and the people around him.29 His uncertainty allows readers to visualize the psychological complications in which he experiences. Harry clearly internally battles with what it means to be an African American, and this confusion causes him to make rash—and slightly irrational— decisions. Harper wants readers to see Harry’s love and appreciation for Blackness. The reader/students only see poorly planned retaliation fueled by anger, discomfort, and displacement. Harry’s narrative is short and vague, but his placement in the novel allows us to further understand Harper’s romanticizing of Black struggle. Both Iola and Harry choose routes they are not accustomed to in order to prove that they are proud of their mother’s heritage and that the family is strong in spite of the circumstances. Moynihan argues that representations of racial passing—in whatever form(s) they may take—return at those moments in which there is a renewed interest in the mixed-race body as an entity that may both defy and shore up racial boundaries. The mixed-race figure is this the locus, to paraphrase Bost, of both fear and celebration.30

Marie, Iola, and Harry are internally perplexed. They desire to live in their truths but are unsure how to exist within either race. This causes the masquerading performances we witness throughout the novel. I am interested in further examining how all of the concepts of the novel play out and are understood in a contemporary classroom. As I previously stated, race concerns are often taboo in many college classrooms. Although we like to assume that race is no longer a sensitive topic of discussion, there are still some instances where students do not speak up in order to not offend

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anyone. However, it is vital to have these conversations because race is still a pressing issue for many Americans that plagues the way people navigate throughout different social settings. Additionally, it is imperative that we interpret passing narratives for the stories and illustrations they offer us. For many Black writers, “narratives of passing . . . serve as powerful meditations on authenticity and social authority.”31 For instance, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) protagonists illustrate what it looks like for mixed-race people to crave social authority. Both Clare and Irene marry men of high status; however, Clare marries a racist white man while Irene marries an African American man. Through conversations with Irene, we learn that Clare fears having children because of the possibility of them having darker skin. Clare suppresses her happiness and desires in order to possess the social authority, public respect, and personal riches she currently has. Likewise, Charles Chesnutt’s “Wife of His Youth” (1898) iterates the complexities one mixed-race man deals with in order to sustain his social power. Iola Leroy is no different. We are shown what great lengths Marie goes through in order to maintain the social status and well-being of her family . However, we are also able to visualize the Leroy family’s struggle to become their authentic selves. Additionally, we are able to consider Harper’s stance on passing and desire to adjust African American’s public and literary representations. Gafford quotes, “To write about blackness, then, [is] to write about desire. But to write about blackness [is] also to avoid desire altogether, for the black figure represents both sexual desire and childish innocence.”32 The narratives surrounding Black culture, communities, and bodies are often hypersexualized and fetishized, especially of Black women and children. In an effort to challenge this hypersexualization and alter passing narratives, however, Harper introduces inauthentic beings and romanticizes African American stereotypes.

STRUCTURE Harper’s attempt at developing characters who do not uphold the tragic mulatta trope essentially backfires. Although both Iola and Harry are supposed to represent the mixed-race people of the century who cannot be tragically affected by social and racial structures within the United States, both characters become psychologically damaged and settle for lives in which they are emotionally and physically forced into. Harper hopes to portray the beauty in self-discovery, but she fails to do so as her writing is plagued with remnants of the white male gaze. In agreeance with this claim, Vashti Lewis argues:

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The novel is written in the popular form of the late nineteenth century and is a sentimental romance peopled with handsome men and beautiful women. Because Harper wrote to please a particular reading audience, her near-white genteel heroine serves a dual purpose—she can illicit sympathy from whites, whom she physically resembles, while simultaneously appealing to the strong sense of pride of a black upper and middle class.33

Harper purposely utilizes this traditional form of sentimental writing to trigger emotional responses from her readers. She hopes to cause effective and influential change regarding slavery, racism, and discrimination in the United States, yet she illustrates “dialectal ignorance” and allows her characters to be equally prejudiced and discriminatory. With the performances of Iola and Harry confirming Black stereotypes, readers may visualize mixed-race people in a magical, fairy-tale lens. The protagonists possess no flaws and the conclusion of the novel is magically unrealistic. However, because Marie, Iola, and Harry are mixed-race, they seem to behold certain privileges other African Americans merely dream of. Rosenthal argues that “Harper’s narratological strategies for deploying miscegenation themes parallels [her] desire to address such issues as character psychology, social mores, racial heredity, and generic form.”34 While Harper does address these concerns, she never truly dissects and/or explains them. Rather, her strategies exploit these issues and allow readers to pass judgement on many Black communal cultural normalcies both Iola and Harry pretend to uphold. It pains me to discover the amount of “traditional writing” Harper utilizes to expose the social concerns and psychological crises many mixed-race people face. With writers like Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville controlling the literary scene, it is quite explanatory why Harper utilizes the writing style she exudes in Iola Leroy. Although mimicking traditional Western writing styles is a common tactic to gain respect and validation for many authors, utilizing sentimentalist methods coupled with white male gaze takes away from the message Harper essentially hopes to articulate. The literary trend of 1892 makes it easy for Harper to write sentimentally because she does want audiences to recognize the harsh discrepancies of being able to live a life determined by race, but the messages also become vague, unsupported, and mythological. Current contemporary college students can interpret Harper’s writing style in one of two ways. Students either enjoy the happy ending she presents, or they are puzzled as to why Harper creates the novel and its narratives at all. In order to bring awareness to a sensitive topic and pull at people’s heartstrings, writers must be honest in the narratives they develop. However, Harper is more political than realistic. Rosenthal states, “Harper freely and

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openly draws upon the strengths of the romantic and sentimental tradition in order to politicize her realist social critique” of U.S. slavery and the practice of passing.35 She recognizes the sensitive nature of her topic choice, but she does not truly elaborate on the psychological strife, the emotional pain, or familial loss developed throughout the novel. Instead, she allows readers to assert their personal interpretations of African American lives and communities. Admittedly, Harper omits a lot of information in regards to the emotional and psychological stability of her characters. For example, Harper explains that after Eugene Leroy passes away, Marie suffers from hysteria. The buildup to this traumatic instance is merely brushed over as a casualty of war. The scene is supposed to be very powerful and life-altering, but it is very cut and dry, and we are only able to witness Marie go from sad to positively Christian. Additionally, when discussing the effects of Eugene Leroy’s death, Harper rarely expresses Iola’s true feelings around the sadness she is experiencing. Harper writes: Iola sat in a large, lonely parlor, waiting for the servant to show her to a private room. She had never known a great sorrow. Never before had the shadows of death mingled with the sunshine of her life. Anxious, travel-worn, and heavyhearted, she sat in an easy chair, with nothing to divert her from grief anxiety which rendered every delay a source of painful anxiety.36

Harper illustrates Iola as more physically exhausted from the confusion than anything else. Iola, in this moment of great sadness and grief, is challenged to remain strong through the adversity that has overpowered her family. This again institutes the strong Black woman notion. Iola must uphold the dignity of the family by her own strength no matter how much she is breaking down and crumbling inside. It is vital to unpack this strong Black woman notion because the idea is one of the most consistent narratives in African American literature. Additionally, this narrative often causes the masquerading of Black womanhood and Black cultural experiences that unfortunately take place. Many Black writers develop Black women characters who must uphold themselves as esteemed individuals while also coping with adversity, tragedy, and trauma more frequently than anyone else, and Harper is of no exception. Once readers are able to grasp this tradition and analyze why it frequents African American literature, they are able to more effectively dissect the hidden agendas of both the author and their developing characters. Additionally, readers are able to assert that while the authors’ intentions may often be good, sometimes they miss their own mark and cause more damage to the social issues they hope to illuminate. For example, Iola Leroy is often praised for its ability to illustrate mulatto characters who are not ill-fated and possess the strength to demolish the mold

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of social stigmas previously created for them to follow. This is a beautiful critique for most people who have read the novel superficially. However, Harper allows her characters to be strong on the outside and feeble on the inside. This idea is explored with Iola’s choice of love. Although she does not choose to marry a white professional, Iola marries a man who is of the exact resemblance. Instead of allowing Iola to truly be happy with her decision to choose a path for herself, Harper creates a love story that shows Iola does not choose herself because she wants to help keep the Black race alive. In essence, Harper forces traditions on Iola that are not naturally her own. This illuminates the complexities that Harper may be exposed to. From this, readers may unfortunately question whether or not Harper has removed her own experiences from the novel’s contents. If she has not, the novel is rendered ineffective and allows a deflection of its intended purpose. Although Harper is not mixed-race, she does strive to fight for the protection and freedom of all Black people. The depictions of African Americans in literature have rarely been the most inspiring or uplifting. Harper’s issues with this visualization of Black bodies are displayed in Iola Leroy, but she does not effectively explain how this literary tradition affects African American psyches. Lewis argues: Despite the significance of new literary ground broken in the use of the nearwhite female in different roles, the novel is not so effective as Harper had hoped it would be. . . . It fails precisely because the popular fictional image of the nearwhite black woman is incongruous with the action in the novel: i.e., the action reflects the black experience while the image that conveys the action is white.37

Iola is essentially living with an additional mask as she perpetuates the ideologies that are consistent with the imagery Black culture illustrates for some people. In recognizing these characteristics, readers may assume that Iola works to serve in the role of, what Mary Helen Washington calls, the emergent woman. Iola is “greatly influenced by the political events of the Sixties and the changes resulting from the freedom movement” and she is “coming just to the edge of a new awareness and making the first tentative steps into an uncharted region.”38 However, the way Iola approaches her efforts to make change is almost belittling to the people she hopes to assist. CONCLUSION With this knowledge of the novel’s in-depth complexities weighing on students, they are able to develop the capacity to see the text as more than

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simply a beautiful piece of literature that emulates the struggle and triumph of mixed-race people in the United States during the antebellum and postbellum periods. Instead, readers are able to envision all of the complexities fermenting within a person and understand that no one experience is generally specific to one group of people—as the Leroy family exemplifies. The struggles of one person can most certainly become similar to another person, but that does not ultimately define the overall experience of another person or their race. What Harper chooses to do with this novel is quite inspiring. However, in focusing so much attention on what it means to be strong in America, she eliminates discussing the side effects that can cause psychological and emotional strife, double passing, and race masquerading. With the social climate of the United States increasingly becoming more like antebellum slavery, it is vital to focus on how we—as a national collective—can move forward without the judgmental ways we have become socially adjusted to. Harper presents to us a hero who is, essentially, unable to save herself. The adversity that brews in everyone deserves to be recognized and worked through as much as the beauty is. NOTES 1. Kimberly Leary, “Passing, Posing, and ‘Keeping It Real,’” Constellations 6, no. 1 (1999): 85. 2. With social media having more of a presence, it has become more popular for people to appropriate Black culture. Kim Kardashian and Rachel Dolezal are just two people who are going through claiming Blackness when it seems to be most convenient for them. Kim Kardashian fetishizes Black aesthetics that will give her body more voluptuous features. Rachel Dolezal fetishizes the poverty that is often casted onto Black communities. Both women are appropriating Blackness in order to gain access to something important to them in order to fulfill their fetishes. 3. Double passing is an idea discussed by Kathryn Rummel in regards to the attempt to pass for more than one race by characters in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia. This idea explains that mixed-race people will attempt to pass for whatever race is convenient for them at the time it is needed. Additionally, Rummel explains that double passing poses a threat to a person’s identity and development because of their physical and psychological removal from one certain group of people. 4. Tiffany G. Townsend, Torsten B. Neilands, Anita Jones Thomas, and Tiffany R. Jackson, “I’m No Jezebel; I Am Young Gifted and Black: Identity, Sexuality, and Black Girls,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 34 (2010): 275. 5. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (Philadelphia: Garrigues Brothers, 1893), 70. 6. Ibid., 72. 7. Ibid., 70. 8. Ibid., 70.

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9. Ibid., 62. 10. There is a social stigma that all Black women possess strength beyond measure. No matter the circumstances, Black women should be able to stay calm and poised through it all. As explained in “Teaching Black-Eyed Susans,” this is the emergent woman. She endures the pain of all Black women before her, yet she is able to change her perspective and outlook on life to achieve greatness and not let anything/ anyone hold her back from accomplishing her goals. 11. “Home” is in quotation marks for this essay because none of the characters ever have a physical or mental place of home. They are nomadic beings who shift from place to place because upon where they happen to be at that moment in life. Additionally, there is a belief that many African Americans do not have a technical, physical home because of the uprooting and breaking apart of families that has been caused by slavery. 12. Harper, Iola Leroy, 90. 13. Ibid, 90. 14. Leary, “Passing, Posing, ‘Keeping it Real,’” 86. 15. Traditionally, mixed-race slave women who were lighter skinned were “privileged” to be in the home as house servants instead of outside as field hands. These servants had various duties. One duty, for the more physically appeasing slave women, was to serve as the master’s sexual concubine. As a “house servant,” these women were used to please the master at his whim and they could not deny his advances. 16. Harper, Iola Leroy, 83. 17. Sinéad Moynihan, “History Repeating Itself: Passing, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and The President’s Daughter,” Callaloo 32 (2009): 811. 18. Leary, “Passing, Posing, ‘Keeping it Real,’” 87. 19. Debra J. Rosenthal, “The White Blackbird: Miscengenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and ‘Babes of Romance,’” Nineteenth Century Literature 56, no. 4 (2002): 514. 20. Tia Gafford, “‘Split at the Root’: The Reformation of the Mulatto Hero/ Heroine in Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy,” 1. 21. Kathryn Rummel, “Rewriting the Passing Novel: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia,” The Griot 26, no. 2 (2007): 3. 22. Ibid., 3. 23. Ibid, 97. 24. Harper, Iola Leroy, 104. 25. As it is politically incorrect to use “colored,” the word will be in quotation marks for the duration of this piece. The correct terminology is now “people of color;” however, it is necessary to utilize “colored” to illuminate the language that is used in the text to further explain African Americans and their diverse communities. The only time “colored” will not be in additional quotation marks is if it is being used in a quote from the novel or any cited sources. 26. Harper, Iola Leroy, 105. 27. Ibid., 105. 28. Ibid., 104. 29. Leary, “Passing, Posing, ‘Keeping it Real,’” 89.

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30. Moynihan, “History Repeating Itself,” 810. 31. Leary, “Passing, Posing, and ‘Keeping it Real,’” 86. 32. Tia Gafford, “‘Split at the Root’: The Reformation of the Mulatto Hero/ Heroine in Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy.” 33. Vashti Lewis, “The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy,” Phylon 45, no. 4 (1984): 316. 34. Debra J. Rosenthal, “The White Blackbird,” 512. 35. Ibid., 512. 36. France Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy, 87 37. Vashti Lewis, “The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy,” 317. 38. Mary Helen Washington, “Teaching Black-Eyed Susans: An Approach to the Study of Black Women Writers,” African American Review 50, no. 4 (2017): 556–557.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Gafford, Tia. “‘Split at the Root’: The Reformation of the Mulatto Hero/Heroine in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy.” Harper, Frances E.W. Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted. Philadelphia: Garrigues Brothers, 1893. Leary, Kimberlyn. “Passing, Posing, and ‘Keeping it Real.’” Constellations 6, no. 1 (1999): 85–94. Lewis, Vashti. “The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy.” Phylon 45, no. 4 (1984): 314–322. Moynihan, Sinéad. “History Repeating Itself: Passing, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and The President’s Daughter.” Callaloo 32, no. 3 (2009): 809–821. Rosenthal, Debra J. “The White Blackbird: Miscegenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and ‘Babes of Romance.’” Nineteenth Century Literature 56, no. 4 (2002): 495–517. Rummell, Kathryn. “Rewriting the Passing Novel: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia.” The Griot 26, no. 2 (2007): 1–12. Townsend, Tiffany G., Torsten B. Neilands, Anita Jones Thomas, and Tiffany R. Jackson. “I’m No Jezebel; I Am Young, Gifted, and Black: Identity, Sexuality, and Black Girls.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 34 (2010): 273–385. Washington, Mary Helen. “Teaching Black-Eyed Susans: An Approach to the Study of Black Women Writers.” African American Review 50, no. 4 (2017): 554–558.

Chapter 4

New Nation, New Migration, and New Negro A Reading of Aftermath, Rachel, and Environment Shubhanku Kochar

“Nation” and “migration” are interrelated terms. When one migrates, one crosses geographical boundaries and enters into a different nation. Migrant communities are often confused about the concept of the motherland as their responses shuttle between two nations. The present chapter is an attempt to understand three plays from Harlem Renaissance chiefly: Aftermath by Mary Burrill, Rachel by A. W. Grimke and Environment by Mercedes Gilbert from the said perspective. The aim is to revisit Black history in America from the lens of migration and to situate these plays in the larger history of multiple migrations undertaken by Black people in the last 400 years. The concepts of migration and nation are intertwined and how it is further complicated by the idea of the New Negro is also the thrust of this chapter. The Black experience in the New World is a story of violence, deprivation, torture, segregation, and resistance. However, the entire history of Black presence in the United States can also be revisited from the lens of migration or displacement. To quote Ira Berlin, For more than four centuries, people of African descent in the United States have been on the move, re-enacting the timeless drama of migration: the abandonment of the familiar, the trauma of transit, the confrontation with the new, the embrace—however reluctantly, tenuously, and, perhaps, unconsciously—of place. (12)

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It may seem obvious in the first place that as Black people were brought from Africa, they were displaced straightaway. But the matter is not as simple as it looks. Multiple layers demand close scrutiny. The migration that Black/ African people had to undergo was neither linear nor one-dimensional. It was never smooth. It was destructive and complex. It entailed pain and suffering. It was repetitive. It demanded Herculean effort on the part of the Black people to accept it as something integral to their stay in the New World. The impact felt by the African Americans of it was not simple physical movement, but psychological as well. To begin with, Africans were abducted from their motherland by Europeans as potential slaves for the New World. From that time onward, one observes movement at work for Black people. As Marcus Rediker argues in his comprehensive book, The Slave Ship (2018), the entire process from Europe and America to the African coasts and then back to America and Europe was welldefined and well-organized. First, Africans were brought from the interior of their nations to the coast. This journey would last for more than three or four days. At times, it would take many weeks or months to reach the trading posts on the coasts. This was the start of migration for the inhabitants of Africa. The journey from the heart of the continent to the mouth of the sea was far from being easy. According to many estimates, as Coombs also details, around 30 percent of the kidnapped would perish along the way. The remaining would arrive on the coast with heavy limbs and where they were kept in chains in the trading posts until the appropriate time. Here, they were medically examined and branded with hot irons by their respective buyers. The trading would transpire at six major ports mainly: Senegambia (modern day Senegal and Gambia), Biafra (part of modern day Nigeria), the Gold (modern day Ghana), Benin, Congo and Angola. Rediker enumerates the causes and patterns of kidnapping and handover of Africans by both white and Black men. For Rediker, the wars in Africa undid her countrymen the most. Whenever there was a war fought between two tribes, the prisoners of war were often exchanged with slave catchers for guns and European produce such as wine, trinkets, and clothes. Various kingdoms in Africa made slave exchange their official export because they had no other reliable source of income. For more than two hundred years, native kings kept waging slave catching wars with their own inhabitants so that they could demand guns from Europeans. It was more of a compulsion than a choice. If they would not take it, others were ready to do that. In order to survive, they needed guns and cannons which resulted in capturing of hundreds of Africans thereby, giving birth to one of the largest forced mass migrations. At other times, Rediker continues, Africans who were convicted of any crime like murder, adultery, theft, or cheating were also directly given to the white men as punishment. Sometimes, innocent citizens who were merely

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boating or fishing near the coastline were attacked and abducted and brought aboard. On many occasions, many chiefs and greedy businessmen helped the slave catchers and participated in the destruction of their own villages. These human devils would often assail the village either at midnight or midnoon when most of the grownups would be in the fields working. Olaudah Equiano, a well-known writer of the late eighteenth century was also brought to the New World when he was playing with his sister at noon when elders were working out in the fields; he and his sister were picked up by three strangers and handed over to the traders. The major victims of these slave catching wars were young men and women. The old people and children were either killed or left to suffer alone. From here, the second phase of migration would start. All the captives would be bound with chains chiefly hands with hands and foot with foot in pairs of two or three, as part of a chain gang. Africans were made to walk long distances before they reached the coastlines. Many would die before reaching the big ship either because of hunger, fatigue or because of heavy whipping. The coffle would walk through woods avoiding the main path. On reaching the trading station, they would be examined by a doctor. This was a time of humiliation for the Africans. They were required to stand naked in a row with men and women hurled together. After the examination, they were branded with burning iron rod to give them a unique mark or a new identity. Though, as Rediker opines that toward the close of the eighteenth century, this practice died out, the misery of separation and departure from one’s motherland continued till the end of the Civil War. The human cargo would be loaded into ships that were specifically designed for this very purpose. Africans would be shelved two or three together in a single block as if they were animals. On these ships, they would spend around five or six months under dismal circumstances. The entire journey from Africa to the United States was commonly known as the Middle Passage because it was the middle of two journeys undertaken by the same ship chiefly; Europe or America to Africa and America to Europe with the produce of American farms after unloading the human cargo. As Franklin puts it, “Literally bound for the New World, chained and shackled Africans crossed the Atlantic as unwilling participants in what would be the largest intercontinental migration until the late nineteenth century” (48). Rediker terms this journey as tragic drama. He states that the Slave Ship was a big and dirty stage and there were four major characters chiefly: the captain who was like a mini monarch of his moving dungeon. The crew was mainly the helpless poor whites who were forced to become sailors; the Black kings and traders who wanted guns, wine, and European clothes; and the captives who became victims of greed and need of both whites and other Africans. The script was written in Europe and North America. The producers

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and directors of this human drama were rich industrialists and landlords who controlled everything from their privileged positions. According to Rediker from 1700 to the end of the Civil War, more than 70 percent of the slave ships were owned by Britishers and North Americans. Alex Haley, too, in Roots (1976) demonstrates how Africans were treated during the journey. The central character in the novel, Kunta Kinte, is a classic example of the response to this forced migration. Kinte revolts in his own way. Like him, many chained Africans exhibited tremendous courage and endurance. They would not eat or drink. They would plan insurrections. They jumped into the waters. They committed suicide. They were mutinies aboard slave ships. Slaves formed a community of shipmates despite coming from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Most of the men would be kept in fetters because of the fear of insurrection, but women and children were mostly kept free and had greater access to upper deck and other places. As a result, these supposedly harmless beings would help men to unchain and fight by supplying tools and weapons stolen from either kitchen or the carpenter’s tools. These captives preferred death over bondage; hence, they made life difficult for slave-ship captains and sailors alike. Whenever any disturbance would happen on board and if any Black man or woman was found to be the cause of it, the captain made sure to make an example out of rebellious slaves through the most terrible punishment, but the brave Africans were not deterred. For them, the love of liberty and motherland was such that they preferred death over humiliating existence. The following descriptive lines from Hayden’s “Middle Passage” ring true of the conditions on slave ships: 10 April 1800— Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says their moaning is a prayer for death, ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves. Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.

After enduring excruciating hardships, one sunny day, they would arrive on the Caribbean shores. Here, Africans were “seasoned” for their new life in the Americas. Coombs records in this context that this brief stay in the Caribbean islands was chiefly to benefit the United States. Whereas the islands were run and controlled by absent landlords with the help of their overseers, the United States was largely populated by families. So, the planters were never in favor of letting Africans come face-to-face with their families without “seasoning.” After this brief interlude, the newly, psychologically-conditioned slaves would be brought to the United States. Once again slaves were taken to different landscapes. Whatever community they formed on the slave ships were broken. For six months on the ships, Africans remained in chains, but

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there was still a consolation: they had some sort of community. It was like being with their own people back home. The ship was not only the symbol of cruelty and torture but the emblem of an imagined nation. This nation was also snatched from Africans when they reached the shores of North America. They were bound to travel in different directions with the highest bidders; hence, entering into yet another layer of migration. Once settled in new homes, African Americans formed another kind of community. They started learning the ways of white folks. They started having their own families. Though slavery proved to be a curse in its attempt to rob all humanity from its victims, there was some hope. For some time, slaves were together in one location with family and friends. However, this stability was not everlasting. Slaves still endured forced migration from one place to another. For example, it was quite common for the masters to sell their servants when they became unmanageable or the masters were in debt. The death of the masters was yet another factor behind the scattering of slave populations. Damian Alan Pargas in his ground-breaking study Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (2014) provides a comprehensive account of this kind of migration. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, slaves across plantations were afraid of auction blocks, slave speculators, chain gangs, and hiring days. Slaves began to “migrate” willfully. As Pargas records, slaves ran away from their masters—some with families and some alone. Some slaves ran to “free” states of America’s North and some moved even farther into Canada. Canada, under Queen Victoria, was a safe refuge for the runaways. This migration toward freedom changed the demography of the land because of mass migration before the Emancipation Proclamation. Again, as the slaves moved, they left their communities behind, again they left families, and again they were undone by the hostile circumstances. After manumission, African Americans were hopeful about their future in the United States. They were even assured of forty acres and a mule to each family. After the failure of Reconstruction signified by the departure of the federal troops, African Americans were again subjected to discrimination. The system of sharecropping coupled with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan made it impossible for African Americans to survive. In response, African Americans packed their bags and left. This time, they went toward the West in search of new land. In the year 1879, as Sanders notes, around 1,500 people arrived in Kansas in a single year. The chief states that attracted the migrants were: Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. The new populations of Black people toiled hard to develop this part of the United States as well. However, conditions did not improve in the Deep South. Black farmers often lost their land through trickery or outright violence. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers were not given due amount of their hard work. Then there was

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lynching to make the matters worse. Farah Jasmin Griffin in her study “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African American Migration Narrative (1995) argues that where ever there was lynching, the place became quickly unoccupied. Then World War I came, and African Americans enlisted. When Black soldiers returned after fighting for democracy, they found that their family members were being lynched. Many Southern Black families heard about the industrial development in the North. They heard that there was plentiful work for everyone there. So, once again, Black people packed their belongings and moved northward. Multitude after multitude left the South in order to reach a new nation that they thought would provide plentiful employment, housing, and schools for their children. Before this migration, almost 85 percent of the African American population was rural. For the first time in history, African Americans became urban. Harlem became known as the Black mecca. Very soon, the idea of North being race-friendly began to fade. African Americans discovered that the North was not free of racial slurs. African Americans began to call it “up South.” The Great Depression was the final blow. Again, African Americans were let down, and again Black people moved. Some returned to the South. Some remained in the North. The scope of this chapter, the three plays chosen, cover the oppression of slavery, which is where I began the chapter. Their concern is chiefly with the great migration of 1920s. For example, Aftermath (1918) by Mary Burrill unfolds the circumstances in Deep South that propelled Black people to migrate. Rachel (1920), by Angelina Grimke portrays the saga of African Americans living in the North after the first Great Migration and constantly reliving the memories of the South. Environment (1931), by Mercedes Gilbert, focuses upon the return-migration of those Black people who found the North as a facade and a disappointment. In a nutshell, the three plays analyzed here depict different layers of a single event of mass exodus. The presence of the New Negro in all of these plays makes them intriguing and complex. Having come thus far, it is important first to understand the concept of the New Negro. In order to understand the New Negro, one must understand the idea of the old Negro. The old Negro was the product of the institution of slavery. The slaveholders needed complete domination over their human subjects. Their aim was to produce more and more, for this they wanted puppets who would obey without any resistance. To achieve their target, they deployed lash and gun. Anyone who dared to retaliate was punished mercilessly. There was a strict Black Code throughout the South. Black people were regularly monitored and kept under surveillance. The entire economy of the South depended upon this system of chattel slavery, so the Old Negro was necessary. They brought more money for

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masters in slave markets. The psychological method of creating the Old Negro contained a component of religious control. Blacks were repeatedly told that they were “backward” and willed to be slaves by God. Slaves were made to believe that Africa was a cursed land. Slaves were strategically kept ignorant of the world around them. Their docility was rewarded, honest service was appreciated, their faithfulness was endorsed and their acceptance of their lot was desired. Everywhere this objectification happened: in literature, politics, religion and mass media. This codification gave birth to the stock figure of the “Uncle,” “Mammy” and “Aunty.” White writers and artists constantly propagated the stereotypical myth of laughing and contented slaves. Their portrayal of Black types was in tune with the demands of the State. However, emancipation ushered African Americans into a new era altogether. Finally, free, Black people in America started testing their freedom by attending schools and by becoming more politically active. Still, times were far from being favorable. There was rampant violence unleashed by radicals and lynching became a new weapon to keep the Old Negro in place. The year 1895 proved to be extremely fruitful for Blacks in the long run. First, it was the year that Booker T. Washington delivered his famous Atlanta Compromise. Then it was W. E. B. Du Bois received his Ph.D from Harvard. Third, the great orator Frederick Douglass died after shaking the entire American society with his rhetoric. Paul Laurence Dunbar also gained national prominence in the 1890s. The Old Negro was effectively dead. The New Negro was not passive. He could speak. He could stand for his rights. He could question. He could think. He could do whatever he wanted to. He was brave. He was educated. He could understand his surroundings. Gone were the days of inferiority. His race became his pride now. His color proved to be sustenance for him. His life became the subject matter of his creation. More importantly, the white gaze did not disturb him. The New Negro was more bothered about his own people and their problems and their misrepresentation in art and society. To quote Alain Locke: This is what, even more than any “most creditable record of fifty years of freedom,” requires that the Negro of to-day be seen through other than the dusty spectacles of past controversy. The day of “aunties,” “uncles” and “mammies” is equally gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on, and even the “Colonel” and “George” play barnstorm roles from which they escape with relief when the public spotlight is off. The popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is time to scrap the fictions, garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts. (5)

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After understanding the history of Black migration in the United States along with the concept of the New Negro, it is pertinent now to apply these ideas to the selected plays. Aftermath was originally published in 1919 and is set in South Carolina. It is about the homecoming of John, a veteran of World War I. When the play starts, Millie, John’s sister and Mam Sue, John’s Grandmother are waiting for John’s arrival. John left them a couple of months back to participate in the Big War. While away, his father has been lynched by whites. John’s sister and grandmother have concealed this from him. Lonnie, a young man from their neighborhood, reports to them that he has received a call from John. He informs them that John is coming back from the battlefield and will be staying for an hour or so with them before leaving for Charleston. Both Millie and Mam Sue are confronted with a serious situation. They start convincing each other about who will tell John about his father’s death. In the meanwhile, John arrives and gives them gifts. He enquires about his father, but Millie is able to manage the situation by telling him a concocted story. They do not want to spoil his journey. Inadvertently, Ms. Hawkins, a next-door neighbor, tells John the dismal news. John is utterly befuddled by this. He is enraged by the thought that when he was on the front, his family members were being lynched. He remembers very clearly that they were told to fight in the name of democracy and patriotism and his father did not get a chance to defend himself. He leaves with Lonnie carrying two guns to teach a lesson to the culprits. The play comes to an end with impending strife and murder. In the first place, the lynching of John’s father, the murder of the white man responsible for the lynching, and the subsequent lynching of either John or his friend take place off-stage. Before the curtain rises, John’s father has already been killed by the mob. Second, John’s act of taking revenge takes place only after the curtain falls. It is impossible for John to sit silently as he has fought for his nation in the name of democracy. He had some expectations from his nation like his white counterparts. He was born in the South. He had grown up in the South. He had gone to fight, hoping that his participation in the national cause will make the South a better place for Black people. Like any other Black youth of his time, John might have imagined that whites would certainly mend their ways after noticing the patriotism of the African Americans. John fought bravely in the war and had not cared about his own life. For him, his nation and his duty had prevailed. He had received wounds on his body while defending his post in France and as a result, he had been awarded a medal by his commanding officer. When he returns home and is told of his father being lynched by the white mob, he feels betrayed. John feels disillusioned with the romanticism that is associated with war. He utters in disappointment:

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This ain’t no time fu’ preachers or prayers! You mean to tell me I mus’ let them w’ite devuls send me miles erway to suffer an’ be shot up fu’ the freedom of people I ain’t nevah seen, while they’re burnin’ an’ killin’ my folks here at home! To Hell with ‘em! (Burrill 151)

His grief and anger are quite evident in his remarks after he is informed about the tragedy that has befallen his family. Under such circumstances, one is forced to think about other options. John is a trained soldier. He possesses two guns. When John leaves home, he is not alone this time; he has insisted Lonnie, his friend, accompany him. When John is leaving with Lonnie, his words reveal not only his fury, but a desire for revenge, “Whatever they do! I ain’t skeered o’ none of ‘em! I’ve faced worse guns than any sneakin’ hounds kin show me! To Hell with ‘em!” (Burrill 151). He aims to kill the man responsible for his father’s death. If he is not caught by the sheriff and the mob, John plans to move out of South Carolina with his family and merge into the crowd flowing toward North. The second possibility is that he and Lonnie may both be caught and lynched by the mob; in that case, his sister Millie and his grandmother Mam Sue may escape safely with all the others. The third probability is that his grandmother may not be able to bear the news that after her son, her grandson has also been lynched and she may die as well. In that case, Millie may migrate to the North alone. Whatever the situation, migration seems inevitable. No one can undergo oppression forever. Anything bottled up for so long is bound to react one day or the other. As Farah Jasmine Griffin states, migration narratives usually move from south to north. These narratives often have a character who is either himself an ancestor or shares a connection with the ancestors and his roots. This play can also be termed as a migration narrative in the making. Here also, migration seems inevitable. Either all or some of the members of Mam Sue’s family are bound to move out of the South as per the circumstances presented in the play. Here, Mam Sue is the old character who as per Griffin, plays the role of an ancestor. If she moves out with her family, she will constantly remember the South as her roots are buried deep. She is very old when play begins. She is quilting with multicolored scraps; continuing the legacy of her grandmothers and great grandmothers. She is the product of the Deep South who despite suffering, never gives up her religion. When the curtain rises, she is seen singing: O, yes, yonder comes mah Lawd, He is comin’ dis way Wid his sword in his han’ O, yes, yonder comes—(Burrill 139)

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She is like those countless women of slavery days who accepted Christ. By doing this, they were able to unburden their heart and were able to live with peace and hope. Her mother and grandmother are buried there, despite whatever the South is and was, it is the place of her ancestors. She is bound to take this legacy with her as she migrates. If she decides not to move out with her grandchildren or dies because of either heartbreak or natural factors, she will serve as a link between north and south for her grandchildren. As it happens in migration literature, as Griffin states, there is always a link between present and past, between old and new home. When Millie says that it seems to her that God has forgotten them Black folks, her answer is, Heish yo’ mouf, Millie! Ah ain’t a-gwine to ‘ave dat sinner-talk ‘roun’ hyeah! (derisively) Gawd don’t tek no keer o’ yuh? Ain’t yuh bin prayin’ night an’ mawnin’ fo’ Gawd to sen’ yo’ brudder back f’om de war “live an” whole? An’ ain’t yuh git dat lettah no longer’n yistiddy sayin’ dat de fightin’s all done stopp’t an’ dat de blessid Lawd’s done brung yo’ brudder thoo all dem battuls live an’ whole? Don’ dat look lak de Lawd’s done ‘membered yuh? (Burrill 139)

Grandmother was someone who had witnessed the final decade of slavery, the Reconstruction and its subsequent failure, sharecropping and its horror, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. She had also witnessed the lynching of her son and she saw her neighbours leaving their homes and moving out of the South. Despite all this, her faith in the Almighty is unflinching. Likewise, Rachel deals with the issue of migration and nation. Grimke uses irony and sarcasm to unlock the troubles of Black families living in the North. The Loving family has migrated from the South. There are three members in the family: Mrs. Loving, Rachel Loving, her daughter, and Thomas Loving, her son. They were living peacefully in the South. Mr. Loving was a newspaper editor. He was an honest man. He was a hard worker; he always stood for the oppressed. When he married Mrs. Loving, she was already a widow. Though nothing is told about her first husband, it can be presumed that he was also lynched by the mob. Mrs. Loving maintains a cryptic silence about it. One day an innocent man was killed by the white mob. Mr. Loving could not endure this and he published it in his paper. He received admonitions regarding the article. He was instructed to revoke the piece but in vain. As a result, the mob entered into his home and dragged him and his son and lynched them both. Mrs. Loving decided to escape the South with Rachel and Thomas. She arrived in a supposed safe haven for her children. In the North, she started stitching clothes for her living. When the play opens, one encounters Mrs. Loving, who is busy sewing. By the end of the first act, she

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narrates to her children the story of the lynching of their father ten years before. Before this narration, readers are made to believe that the play has nothing to do with migration. But the ending of the first act explains that the Loving family has also migrated like others. Their hopes and dreams were frustrated in the Deep South. Like the Lovings, the Strongs have also migrated from the South. They are the neighbors of the Lovings. Their experience in the North is like that of the Lovings. Rejected by the South, they are also disenchanted by the North. John Strong, the son of the family, has to accept the post of a waiter. He rises up only by waiting upon others. There is no other way for him. His education leads him nowhere. A nation is supposed to safeguard the dreams and aspirations of its people, but here, first, the South disappoints Black people, and the North where they had been hoping to uplift their lives is also a disappointment. Thomas and Rachel are both educated, but they do not get the jobs of their choice. Thomas is forced to become a waiter like John, and Rachel takes up sewing as her vocation. Yet another character, Mrs. Lane, questions the utility of providing an education to children. She believes that when their nation is not going to accept their children in respectable jobs, then what is the need of spending too much on education? Her daughter, Ethel, had been victimized by whites in an integrated school. So much so that, she thinks that the blind dog is her best friend because if the dog will start seeing, it will not love her because of her color. She is traumatized in such a way by her classmates that she enters into self-imposed loneliness. Even Jimmy, the adopted son of Rachel, has to confront racism. One day, while coming back from school, he is taunted by big boys. They call him “Nigger.” They run after him. They pelt stones at him. He is hurt so badly that he asked Rachel to explain to him the meaning of “Nigger.” Rachel, in one of her bedtime stories, narrates a parallel tale of migration and torture. Though her story is about two boys leaving the land of trouble and reaching the land of safety, on a subterfuge level, similarities can be found between Black experiences in the United States in the 1920s and the happenings in the tale. She narrates how once two boys were so poor and so under-nourished and ill-treated that they decided to leave their nation under the guidance of a magical old lady. They travelled together for many days and months. They had nothing to eat and drink. They relied upon strangers for everything. They had to sleep in open fields and barns at night. They were even lured by unfamiliar faces to come to their territories. But they were determined to gain entrance into the city of laughter. They were so tired of their life back in their hometown that they kept walking to this new city of laughter and joy. Having travelled for many days and months, they were finally able to reach their destination and able to live happily forever.

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Historically, some Black people left their hometowns in utter poverty. For some people, they had no food or water and because of segregation and nowhere to stay along the way. They were given food and shelter by unknown people. Their travel may have lasted for many months. After traveling for many days or even months to a supposed city of laughter and joy, Black people often encountered crime, unemployment, overcrowded streets and racism—not comfort and pleasure. The ending of the tale told by Rachel is positive, because she does not want Jimmy to lose hope. But, in reality, Rachel and many others like her could not find much respite and hope in Harlem and its vicinity. In the play, Rachel is so disturbed by all the unfortunate happenings that she decides that she will never marry and will never have children of her own. Toward the end of the play, she declines John’s marriage proposal, citing the failure and frustration of Black people in the United States. She blurts with pain and grief a love song to her unborn children: “I shall never see you now. Your little, brown, beautiful bodies I shall never see. Your dimples everywhere your laughter your tears the beautiful, lovely feel of you.” (Grimke 96)

All her dreams are shattered. All her wishes are trampled. Initially, she had a desire to have children of her own. She had thought that the world could never be hopeless because there were children: Ma Dear, if I believed that I should grow up and not be a mother, I’d pray to die now. I’ve thought about it a lot, Ma dear, and once I dreamed, and a voice said to me oh! it was so real “Rachel, you are to be a mother to little children.” Wasn’t that beautiful? (Grimke 15)

But as time would teach her that the life of a Black child is not stable in America. Anytime, he could be forced to move. Anytime, he could be tortured and lynched. Anytime, he could be expelled from his school or office. Anytime he could be disowned by his own nation. Considering all this, Rachel decides not to marry. Her tale enshrines not only her suffering but also the suffering of her countless brothers and sisters of her time and of her place and of her hue. Her saga is that of the saga of Black people and frustrated dreams and desires by the very nation whose foundation was laid by their blood and sweat. Environment by Mercedes Gilbert takes this concept of migration forward in a new direction. It tells the story of African Americans moving back to the South. This trend was also anticipated by Paul Laurence Dunbar at the turn of the century in The Sport of the Gods (1902). There, the Hamilton family fails to find peace in New York. Feeling lost and disenchanted by the urban North,

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they come back to the South broken and disappointed. In Environment as well, the North proves to be negative for the Black characters of the play. As a result, they are forced to undertake another migration. As Farah Griffin also observes, in migration literature, the journey back home is as much probable as the journey out of the home. In the play, the Williams family has arrived at a New York neighborhood in the wake of the first Great Migration. By the time of the play’s action, it has been one year since they settled there. They had to sell their land to undertake the journey. For some time, they lived in a clean neighborhood, but as their money was spent, they were compelled to shift into a poor locality. This does not suit them at all. Mr. Williams takes to drinking when he is not able to find a job. Later, he is convicted of murder and taken to jail. His son, Henry, is also convicted of participating in dacoity and is incarcerated. His daughter, Edna, is entrapped by Jackson, a lawyer and a drug smuggler, and becomes a drug addict and, later, she is hospitalized. His wife, Mary, has to agree to take care of the house where Jackson keeps his drugs. She agrees, because she has no other way to save her son. The urban North that one encounters in this play is totally opposite that of the migrants’ expectations. It is the land of criminals. It is the land of prostitutes. It is the land of thieves. It is the land of wicked men and women. There are no fellow feelings in anyone’s heart. People cheat on each other easily. Human life is very cheap and to destroy someone is very easy. One can easily empathize with the poor Black migrants who came to escape the violence and corruption of the South. This city dampens their spirits. Mrs. Williams expresses her disillusionment with grief and disappointment: Sometimes, I feel so afraid for her here. I don’t know why; but this dreadful place has done us so much harm. Just think, only one year ago we came to this city, and since we have been here, just look how our lives have changed. My poor James, he is no longer the man he was, and Henry, why, I hardly know the boy. He keeps all kind of late hours, and his companions are just street ruffians, and I am so tired. (Gilbert 206)

When they left for North, they might have thought it as attractive and full of opportunities. They might have come with countless others in the hope of a better present and future. The North proves disappointing and disastrous. The family decides to go back to the South. Once they arrive back in North Carolina, things start becoming better. Mr. Williams was cleared of his charges and Edna recuperated completely from her addiction. Mrs. Williams begins running a singing group for her church. Henry finds a job and gets promotions regularly. He finds Margret, his lady love, and plans a wedding. Jackson also comes back, though, initially he tries to threaten Henry and

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Mary Williams but later relents. He is Margret’s father and is ready for her marriage with Henry. Having undergone so much, one is sure to rethink his nation and his place in it. African Americans left their home with dreams and desires. They had dreams of equality and unbiased treatment from everyone. A nation is supposed to safeguard its inhabitants, but in many cases, neither region, North nor South, lives up to the nation’s promises. People, as a result, were compelled to rethink their decision of moving out of their homeland. Some went to Europe and got settled there. Some came back to the South and some continued living as they were living with shame and torture in the north itself. However, it is not just the Williams family that is bent on going back. In fact, in the beginning, the Williams family was never ready to go back. It was only later that they decided to move back. When the play starts, it is Carl Winters, Edna’s boyfriend who is actually moving back to the South. He tries to convince Edna to come with him: CARL: Goodness only knows. Edna I do wish you would listen to reason. I’m leaving tonight, and I have talked to you for three whole days, and haven’t been able to make you see that it’s all wrong, your staying here and— EDNA: Now, Carl, please don’t start all over again. I’ve told you it’s impossible for me to leave them like this, when they need me so much. CARL: But don’t you see dear, that, there is no earthly reason for you, to sacrifice yourself like this. (Gilbert 205)

In the beginning, Williams are reluctant to go back, but as time passes, they relent. As Farah Griffin remarks, in the migration narrative, however bad the past was, it is always redeemed by something positive. There is always something good about it that present starts playing before it. Carl, in the play also observes it: EDNA: I won’t deny that, but, mother wouldn’t admit it, and she wouldn’t leave him. And then she has her pride. CARL: Pride? in these environments. How long will pride last? It will affect you too Edna, just as it has your father and brother. Even your mother has changed, she left home a beautiful woman, full of hope, and now; she is broken in health and mind. (Gilbert 206)

It is this hope and beauty that gives strength to Mrs. Williams that she finally decides to turn back and restart again. The play is connected by two movements. One, at the beginning where Carl migrates back to the South; he is a doctor. He also came to the North with hope and aspirations. He is also disillusioned by the North, as a result, he migrates back to the South. The second

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movement is the movement of the Williams family that takes place in the last act. First, Mrs. Williams and her son, Henry, go back, and finally, they are not only joined by Jackson and his daughter Margaret but also by Edna and her father. This play ends like a Shakespearean tragic-comedy; where all is well in the end. All come back, lost is found and suiters are married. What connects these three plays beyond migration and nation is the aesthetics of New Negro. As these plays were produced at the time of the Harlem Renaissance, they are bound to conceptualize the idea of the New Negro. As that was the time of racial awakening and pride, these dramas encapsulate the idea of an active Negro. Black characters in these plays are not puppets or clowns. They are not manipulated by whites. They have a voice of their own. They can react and reject what they do not want to accept. They have the capacity of uttering their heart out. They are thinking beings who think for themselves. They are not dependent upon whites for their identity and voice. For example, John in Aftermath is as agile as any white man of his age. He does not approve of his father’s lynching. He has fought bravely in World War I. He has seen the outside world. He has the experience of fighting in the most hostile circumstances. He is adamant to punish the perpetrators himself. Likewise, in Rachel, Rachel can decide for her own self. She is an educated girl. She can understand the world around her. She has her own way of life. She has her own likes and dislikes. When Rachel decides that she does not want to marry, it is her calculated decision. She has seen children suffering in the hands of the whites; she does not want to increase the number of victims. She loves children very much yet she denies herself the chance of becoming a mother. It is her unique way of revolt. Environment also presents an idea of the New Negro. The characters in this play are fighters. They fight for their future and come out victorious. For instance, Mary keeps working hard when her husband is not able to find work. She keeps on rejecting the advances of Jackson, who wants to be intimate with her. She knows how to defend her honour. When she is offered a job of caretaking a home that houses illegal things, she initially hesitates to the point of refusing. Even after picking up the job, she makes sure that she does not remain there forever. She saves the life of Millie from ruffians and leaves the job with her son to come to the South. When Mr. Jackson threatens to harm her and her family, she stands firm and challenges him to face the consequences. As a result, Jackson softens and agrees to marry his daughter, Margaret, with her son, Henry. To conclude, it can safely be argued that migration and nation as concepts are interlinked. Since the beginning, humans have been migrating from one place to another. As they have traveled, they have defined and redefined their concept of nation. In the case of African Americans, migration has remained a constant phenomenon. They have been thinking and rethinking about their

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loyalties toward their motherland time and again in different contexts and settings. Though, they have undergone multiple migrations, the plays selected for the analysis, focus upon one migration that is mass migration of 1920s with its causes and implications. WORKS CITED Berlin, Ira. The Making of African Americans. Penguin, 2010. Burrill, Mary. “Aftermath.” In The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938, ed. Leo Hamalian and James V. Hatch. Wayne State UP, 1991, pp. 137–151. Casteel, Tom. Human Migration. Nomad Press. 2016. Coombs, Norman. The Black Experience in America. Start Classics, 2013. Franklin, John and Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. McGraw-Hill, 2011. Gilbert, Mercedes. “Environment.” In Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 19201940, ed. Leo Hamalian and James Hatch. Wayne State UP, 1996, pp. 203–226. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. Who Set You Flowin? Oxford UP, 1995. Grimke, A. W. Rachel: A Play in Three Acts. The Cornell Company, 1920. Hamalian, Leo and James V. Hatch, eds. The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938. Wayne State UP, 1991. ———. Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940. Wayne State UP, 1996. Hatch, James V. and Ted Shine, editors. Black Theatre USA. Free Press, 1996. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier. New York UP, 2000. Khory, Kavita. Global Migration. Springer, 2012. Locke, Alain, editor. The New Negro. Touchstone, 1997. Napier, Winston, editor. African American Literary Theory: A Reader. New York UP, 2000. Pargas, Damian. Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South. Cambridge UP, 2014. Randall, Dudley, ed. The Black Poets. Bantam Books, 1985. Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship. John Murray Press, 2007. Sanders, Nancy. A Kid’s Guide to African American History. Chicago Review Press, 2007. Shillington, Kevin. History of Africa. Macmillan Palgrave, 1995.

Chapter 5

When Madness Makes Sense in Early Black Women’s Drama Regis Fox

“Within the long history of Black literature,” writes Therí Pickens at the outset of Black Madness: Mad Blackness, “madness surfaces not solely as pathology or as part of a holy fool tradition, but also as a viable alternative to engagements with white racism even if it does not result in increased agency.”1 Arguably, from the earliest iterations of African-American Vernacular Tradition to late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century neo-slave narrative, Black literature unsettles seemingly fixed boundaries between rationality and absurdity, offering increasingly nuanced visions of Black identity and experience, despite ongoing practices of dehumanization and oppression. Black imaginative worlds, I would add, also conjure productive theories of madness as performance. That is, across a wide array of texts, Black thinkers deploy characterization in which popular perceptions of age, maternity, sexuality, grief, and/or rage are manipulated—by way of a strategy I term “playing crazy”—both to forge intra-racial community and to evade white supremacy. This chapter locates early twentieth-century African American theater, in particular, as a critical genre in which terms of black subjectivity are negotiated in relation to racialized and gendered definitions of able-mindedness. More specifically, “playing crazy” entails a bevy of activities and behaviors discharged by historically disempowered groups to alter, even if temporarily, existing terms of intra-racial belonging. A variable mode of expression, “playing crazy” may also influence interracial dynamics of control. By playing down, playing up, or materializing previously unforeseen evidence of an unsound mind, practitioners maneuver their bodies as means to index sanity and wellness. “Playing crazy,” a sensory experience, generates ways of being outside of dominant racialized, gendered, and ableist standards of normalcy.2 In the pages to follow, I draw attention to elements of early twentieth-century dramatic arts worthy of additional scrutiny—namely, to habits leveraged 81

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by “mad” women characters in bondage in order to rework, often fleetingly, the material conditions of their lives. Symptoms of “playing crazy” surface most readily perhaps in the fictional Grannie Lou, a character in Shirley Graham’s one-act play, It’s Mornin’, produced at Yale University in 1940. Graham (1896–1977), a writer and activist whom biographer Gerald Horne describes as yielding “a reputation as probably the leading playwright among African American women” of her era, authored nine plays over a twelveyear period from 1930 to 1942.3 Transitioning from her role as Director of the Negro Unit of the New Deal’s Chicago Federal Theater Project, Graham served as a fellow at the Yale School of Drama on full scholarship from 1938 to 1941. Acknowledging the ways in which “even this advanced training could not overcome the triple jeopardy of Jim Crow, male supremacy, and general economic distress nationwide and globally,” Horne situates Graham’s time at Yale nonetheless as a space of deep immersion in research and within the craft of theater, an experience cultivating creativity that would serve her well in more widely recognized roles later in her life as an NAACP organizer and as adviser to the Nkrumah government in Ghana.4 Set on “A plantation in the Deep South” on “The night of December 31, 1862,” It’s Mornin’ features a slave community, hampered as they are by routine degradation, unknowingly on the cusp of formal Emancipation. As Kathy A. Perkins observes, Graham conceived It’s Mornin’ in part in the style of Greek tragedy, with a group of slaves serving as chorus and with death taking place primarily off stage.5 Indeed, the title of the play exploits a plethora of meaning inherent in the term “mornin’” itself, from temporal location to methods of black memorialization and grieving. The threat of sexual exploitation, a circumstance faced by Cissie’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Millie, advances the action. Grannie Lou is referenced by Graham in the character list as “The Oldest Slave On The Plantation, Considered A Little Crazy.” Generally, Grannie Lou evokes awe, infantilization, and anger, while mocking others, mumbling to herself, and seemingly shifting in and out of comprehension and awareness throughout Graham’s piece. Her performance relies on commonplace expectations of elderliness, senility, and dementia. Other Black folk in her midst soothe and seek not to disturb her, simultaneously positioning her as excessive and disposable. Repeatedly, Grannie Lou issues shrieks of uncurbed amusement, from time to time mimicking humor displayed by other slaves, and occasionally employing cackling as a vehicle for critique. Significantly, she upsets perspectives of Christianity as singularly salvific as it pertains to patterns of racial domination at the heart of chattel slavery. Ultimately, I offer that we might understand Grannie Lou’s characterization as an occasion of “playing crazy.” In other words, Grannie Lou merely assumes an affect of instability in order to approximate a measure of freedom.

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Notably, her resistive potential is not actualized in the form of geographical relocation or the overthrow of plantation culture in the U.S. South. Instead, her performance demonstrates commitment to improvisation upon increasingly circumscribed conditions. Departing from more mainstream dramatic approaches evinced by playwrights like Angelina Weld Grimké, Shirley Graham engages spoken and unspoken conceptions about madness and its effects.6 Importantly, characters like Grannie Lou reveal craziness as a source of racialized and gendered stigmatization, as well as of potential resistance, undermining neat distinctions between notions of insanity-as-epithet and insanity-as-refuge. Early African American theater, then, illustrates how performances of madness work both to constrain and to free Black women.

RACE, GENDER, AND THE DRAMATIC ARTS Kathy A. Perkins’s theorization and anthologization of Black women’s drama pinpoints the 1920s as a defining moment in American theater, as well as in African American theater, one which would give way to meaningful, if overlooked plays by figures such as Shirley Graham in the 1940s. In the twenties, Black male activists and professors W. E. B. Du Bois, Montgomery T. Gregory, and Alain Locke created previously unforeseen publication and production opportunities for a range of Black women’s literary works. Many of the latter corresponded to the rubric of “native dramas” within the Little Negro Theatre Movement. According to Perkins, “race or propaganda plays”—a subgenre of “native dramas”—“dealt with the issue of racial oppression as experienced by black people” and “were written primarily to effect social change.”7 A major proponent of “race or propaganda plays,” Du Bois supported and advocated for the critical address of interracial violence, black involvement in the U.S. military, and the politics of revolution, in plays cultivated by artists including Regina Andrews, Marita Bonner, May Miller, Myrtle Smith Livingston, and Ottie Graham. At Howard University in Washington, D.C., Gregory and Locke provided professional training to students as they developed a second subgenre of “native dramas” called “folk plays,” which “sought to depict the black experience without focusing on the oppressive issues blacks faced daily and racial tensions,” in order “to educate and entertain without offending its audience.”8 “Folk plays” by Eulalie Spence featured black love and showcased elements of suspense, while Ruth Gaines-Shelton took up comedy. Though Gregory’s and Locke’s sphere of influence included Shirley Graham, Black women playwrights often blurred boundaries between the seemingly disparate subgenres in their treatments of virtue and faith.9 Overall, shortcomings, including lack of capital, of technical know-how, and of experience, plagued Black women’s earliest dramatic

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undertakings, hampering the quality of written material, as well as processes from directing, to acting, to production.10 Though attention to Graham’s legacy today often prioritizes activism following her marriage to W. E. B. Du Bois in 1951, her early plays demonstrate (and, to a certain extent, defy) New Negro ideology, articulating concrete visions of Black people as agents of their own lives. Writers in Alain Locke’s pivotal volume The New Negro, such as Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston, alongside other like-minded artists of the period, were deeply impacted by the racial and ethnic diversity of cities like Harlem in the wake of the Great Migration. Energies derived from radical organizing across the globe in the wake of World War I, too, cultivated even more expansive perceptions of diaspora. Rather than representing blackness bound exclusively by locality or national origin, or by histories of interracial oppression, artists explored various complexities of race and class in relationship to experiences across the African continent and throughout the Caribbean. Arguably, Graham aligns more closely with thinkers of the period such as Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman, and Langston Hughes, who were known to espouse but also to subvert New Negro doctrine in their creative works.11 Given her willingness to explore languages and experiences of “the folk” in It’s Mornin’ and in earlier dramatic works like Tom-Tom (1932), Graham endangered characterizations of authentic Blackness as narrowly rooted in middle-class norms. As Graham’s oeuvre attests, plays readily functioned as vehicles for internationalist consciousness-raising, articulating fuller definitions of freedom and democracy. Usefully, theater scholars Lisa M. Anderson and Elizabeth Brown-Guillory identify matters of racism and lynching as primary thematic emphases of Graham and her contemporaries in their short plays. The consequences of self-hatred, color politics, and internalized racism likewise attain significant focus, as do those of poverty, unemployment, class discrimination and exploitation in both urban and rural landscapes. With intention, playwrights also foregrounded Black women’s and girls’ experiences of mental and emotional abuse, and the prevalent realities of rape, miscegenation, and passing. As Brown-Guillory determines, “dramatists concerned themselves with women struggling to define their roles in society,” with the relationship between gender norms and racialized terror, and with decisive sacrifices associated with black motherhood.12 Able-bodiedness and—mindedness, too, I suggest, function as objects of implicit and explicit preoccupation within the genre, from structure to characterization, and in forms yet to be fully accounted for within contemporary literary criticism.13 Finally, as the aforementioned scholars make plain: African American women’s short plays in this era often centered Black women’s sense and struggle within the specific context of Black women’s space. According to

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Perkins, “The action for the most part occurred in a domestic setting—the kitchen, dining room, or living room, and the play usually opened with a woman sewing, cooking, cleaning, or praying—rarely outside or far from the home.”14 By situating the majority of her play within the interior of a slave cabin, Graham dignifies enslaved Black women’s worldviews and ways of being. However, Black women’s perceptions and beliefs are not monolithic or romanticized. Instead, female characters propagate theories of self and methodologies of care at odds with the boundaries of plantation culture and interracial domination. Though by no means an uninhibited space, Cissie’s slave quarters grant bondwomen temporary leverage and authority. They grant intimacy and comfort, white judgment and gendered responsibilities notwithstanding. INTRA-RACIAL RELATION THROUGH MADNESS Could Grannie Lou’s disability be performative? Could her senility and forgetfulness reflect intentional selectivity? In which moments might she be “playing crazy” and in which might she be “playing well”? A central aspect of my argument here is that the outcomes of “playing crazy” can be situated into at least two groups. One group pertains to the creation of crucial experiences of Black relation, with crucial referring less to proximity to apparently substantial plot points, and more to processes of enabling intra-racial community. Ultimately, “playing crazy” precipitates flashes of Black consideration and loyalty. Therefore, in response to a bondwoman named Aunt Sue’s tentative question about Graham’s Grannie Lou, “We allus calls huh crazy but who knows?”, we might identify performances of madness as sources of personal and familial connection.15 I contend that Grannie Lou mobilizes madness as a distinct revelatory practice with intra-racial effects. In Brown-Guillory’s published version of Graham’s play, Graham notes Grannie Lou’s “shrunken frame” and “black, wrinkled face,” while “between her lips is stuck an old corncob pipe.”16 The stage directions featured in Perkins’s published version elaborate further, explaining, She is shrunken and frail as a withered leaf. Her face is very black and wrinkled, her hands are bony and twisted. The bandana fastened about her head fits tight and smooth as a skull-cap, but it is a pleasing bit of bright color as she moves about. Between her toothless gums is stuck a lighted corn-cob pipe.17

Published just a year apart, both appear to corroborate scholar Trudier Harris’s understanding of dramatic representations of elderly women characters in this era. Harris historicizes dangers associated with rendering Black

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women, like Mam Sue in Aftermath (1919) and Sue Jones in A Sunday Morning in the South (1925), in ways Graham has: Their voices are stereotypically old as they are simultaneously not stereotypically strong. Wrapping these women in the aura and mannerisms of the elderly, in spite of their chronological ages, reflects a perception of black female representation that influenced these playwrights in spite of themselves. They perceived of black female characters from the point of view of predominant (white) popular imagination and literature.18

Furthermore, “Head scarves and aprons abound,” Harris avers, “the women are more dottering than not, and the dialect [. . .]—no matter how realistic— is descended from the plantation tradition.”19 This interpretation suggests that, for these playwrights, the racial symbolism of impairment supersedes attentiveness to the particular lived experiences of figures like Grannie Lou. However, given the dissonance Harris locates within dramatic works of the period, I assert that Grannie Lou’s performance may serve another purpose. It places her within the bounds of temporary intra-racial community. Toward the beginning of the New Year’s Eve festivities down in the slave quarters in It’s Mornin, an aged Grannie Lou discloses, “Da jack done call in the moonlight, an’ da young gal’s love come down,” making particular note of fourteen-year-old Millie’s budding sexuality.20 Subsequently, she links liability associated with Millie’s pubescent development—epitomized by an exquisite, if sure-to-be-snuffed-out singing voice—to a parallel phase in Cissie’s life, much to the surprise of those assembled. “Cissie! Sing?” query the other bondwomen. Yes, Cissie! She war beautiful! Black as a berry an’ lovely as da night. Slender an’ swift as a young colt. She nevah’ walk, jes’ prance an’ run about the place. Ah seen da buckra eyein’ huh, an’ she jes’ laf. Den come a day when she war very still, Ah dunno why, til one night seen huh slippin’ t’rough shadows like a hounded coon crawls tuh his hole to lick his bleedin’ wounds.21

Despite those in her midst who appear skeptical of her wellness and of her wholeness, Grannie Lou recovers Cissie’s deep Blackness as a site of loveliness, her body as one of grace. She informs them of the previous life of the surveillance and exploitation now faced by Millie, an intergenerational threat met at the outset by Cissie’s interior joy and defiant laughter. Put another way, Grannie Lou’s words prompt precarious Black gathering. She voices sexual trauma specific to Cissie, but which surely touches the lives of other Black women and girls bound to Tilden land. Grannie Lou, nor Cissie in this memory from her youth, appear helpless, as the former speaks

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to Cissie’s subjectivity beyond the domains of stigmatization and shame. Grannie Lou refuses the isolation and silencing which would fix Cissie as little more than routine prey of “da buckra.” She acknowledges Cissie’s confidence, understanding, and sense of self-worth, motivating her to imagine safety and healing for her daughter that Cissie may have never thought possible. To be sure, Grannie Lou’s fleeting alliance with Cissie does not garner lasting protection from intra-racial othering or interracial persecution. Nevertheless, this scenario displays significant meaning-making and information-sharing on the part of one perpetually rendered meaningless. Through memory, Grannie Lou observes Cissie’s vibrancy and takes notice of her marked stillness in its wake, and her facade of feeble-mindedness facilitates her ability to bear witness. Though Graham refrains from characterizing Grannie Lou’s physical or mental state in the context of her recollection of Cissie (whether or not, for example, Grannie Lou herself experiences sexual violence at the hands of that “buckra” or some other), it remains that Grannie Lou monitors fellow bonds people as they live and as they labor. While those subject to Grannie Lou’s scheme often regard her with animosity and gestures of infantilization, Grannie Lou scrutinizes slaves’ shared contexts of pain while proposing remedy and recourse. As Grannie Lou navigates normative expectations of neurodiversity, she simultaneously constructs a framework of intra-racial connectedness. In opting for a persona which elicits denigration and deference, Grannie Lou proceeds to expose a vital history of Black woman’s resistance. Remarking “Ah ain’t so ole dat Ah don’ membah!”, Grannie Lou imparts a second story, a tale of one likely deemed crazy in her own right.22 She summons the story of an unnamed African slave woman, one who decapitated her three sons rather than permit her master to sell them. According to Grannie Lou, when whites suggest that the young men will “bring [a] good price,” her mother “say dey nebbah go. Da white folk laf, but niggahs dassent laf . . . dey see huh face. She don’ say not’in’ mo, but go away.”23 As with the memory from Cissie’s youth, Grannie Lou draws attention to the African woman’s Black body, to the ways it could be harnessed for excruciating work, but also to the ways it might evade containment. And yet, though Grannie Lou emphasizes the African woman’s unprecedented strength and imposing physical stature, it is the notion of the song which unites the misery of Cissie’s antebellum present with the pride and resilience of a compelling, if somewhat vague ancestral past. “She ustah sing out in da fields,” Grannie Lou calls to mind, naming Black women’s intergenerational creativity in the face of terroristic conditions. Continuing on, Grannie Lou assures Cissie, urgently: “She [Millie]—don’—hab— tuh—go!”24 In conveying stories of bygone times, Grannie Lou fashions

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provisional association between Black women and girls rooted in fraught legacies of violence, pain, and subversion. Part of a heterogeneous network of intra-racial relation effecting unlikely modes of companionship, she extends ways of knowing and being which trouble governing rationalities of gender and faith. In fact, It’s Mornin’ was not Graham’s first exploration of themes of Black resistance, or of Black women and motherhood, on the professional stage. Just a few years prior to the production of It’s Mornin’ at Yale in 1940, Graham worked on plays including Little Black Sambo (1938) and Tom-Tom (1932). As scholars such as Jodi Van Der Horn-Gibson have explored, the production of Little Black Sambo in Chicago permitted Graham to “plac[e] this controversial icon against traditional African motifs”: “she confronted and reappropriated the racist imagery” and “added to the deconstruction of the minstrel notion of ‘blackness’ in order to reconstruct an image based on a sense of African nationalist consciousness and identification.”25 Furthermore, Van Der Horn-Gibson maintains, “Even though she was criticized, Graham’s focus on fostering a self-defined identity and consciousness in the diaspora cannot be mistaken in this production, and her other work both on and offstage.”26 Another such work encapsulating New Negro-era philosophies of global Blackness was Graham’s opera Tom-Tom. Addressing matters of racial diversity and collective healing, Tom Tom features a Mother who kills her child rather than have her sold away to another plantation in its second act.27 The connectedness of this moment in Graham’s two plays evidences her preoccupation with strategies by which Black women claim their minds and their bodies (and/or those of their children) to manipulate their circumstances. As one critic points out, Graham consistently engaged with “the positive, if not liberating effect of embracing ancient African customs” in her work.28 In It’s Mornin’, it is Grannie Lou who acquaints Cissie with the value of oppositional praxis derived from a broader Black past. Grannie Lou’s revitalization of histories of diasporic resistance simultaneously displaces the authority of the Christian faith, and spotlights existing barriers to intra-racial relation, including Othering on the basis of spirituality. Notably, this revitalization is expressly linked to a mask of Black madness and cackling as a vehicle for critique. As fellow bondwoman Phoebe rocks back and forth and begins to petition her Lord in prayer in view of the seeming hopelessness of Millie’s situation, Grannie Lou loudly disrupts the other woman’s call for mercy with “high pitched, crazy laughter.”29 She proceeds to mock and snicker, undermining the sacredness of the moment. By “playing crazy” through glee, Grannie Lou illustrates her perception of the limitations of Christian allegiance.

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That is, through their reliance on an invisible (male) God and a local preacher (“Uncle Dave,” who the slave women subsequently summon to convince Cissie not to take her daughter’s life), Phoebe and others downplay their own resourcefulness and ingenuity in the midst of crisis. Grannie Lou’s spectacle of merriment seeks to incite a shift away from potential surrender and obedience to the dominant patriarchal order, toward other tools of agency and (impermanent) change. Grannie Lou invites other Tilden slave women to turn inward, to let the power and the import of their own stories help them overcome their current predicament. In the end, Grannie Lou’s perspective suggests that Christianity does not hold exclusive purchase over spheres of Black hope and possibility in the 1860s. Without fully accounting for the answers it may well provide women like Phoebe, or identifying the specific contours of her own position of faith, Grannie Lou leverages laughter to introduce alternate answers. Grannie Lou’s “playing crazy,” by way of witnessing and mirth, configures fleeting circumstances of Black re-invention.

BLACKNESS MADNESS AND INTERRACIAL VIOLATION Significantly, a second consequence of Grannie Lou’s performative mode is the prospect of “playing crazy” as means to disrupt systems of white power. Though complete escape from physical bondage constitutes the result of few slaves’ performances of madness, several of these acts modify the endowment and the efficacy of white rule.30 Disability representation in early African American theater forwards critical insight into how and why “playing crazy” undoes normativities imposed by dominant culture. Remember: according to the stage directions, Grannie Lou is only “Considered a Little Crazy.” Thus, Graham invites a reading of Grannie Lou’s lunacy as partial at best. From the start, then, Graham orients actors and audiences to the possibility of Grannie Lou playing up traits of elderliness, only to pierce mirages of apparent nonsensicality with opportune expressions of lucidity. Without a doubt, Grannie Lou’s deportment coincides with common notions of aged status in physical and mental terms. She falls asleep periodically throughout the day, and long before other slaves carousing nearby on the night at the heart of Graham’s play.31 Other times, she totters and stumbles, perhaps lacking full ambulatory control.32 In general, she mutters quietly to an audience no one else can see, and reacts exuberantly to the remarks of those who can be seen. Some conversations with Grannie Lou meander, before abruptly breaking off in their entirety. Down in the slave quarters, others coddle and cajole her, displaying care in the name of seniority, while encouraging her to stay out of the way.33

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Still, Grannie Lou “plays crazy” in order to subtly contest the control of her white mistress, in particular. On one occasion, Grannie Lou admonishes her white slave mistress, Mrs. Tilden, for her sudden appearance down at the slave quarters at night. On the surface, Grannie Lou chastises her out of concern, urging Mrs. Tilden to come out of the cold, and later, to get closer to the fire. An impetus toward protection on the part of the slave women coincides with theater scholar Brown-Guillory’s assessment that in It’s Mornin’ “Missie is depicted as a caring, pitiful woman who is as much at the mercy of the white patriarchy as is Millie.”34 Similarly, bondwoman Aunt Sue invokes the by-now-familiar trope of the “feeling” slave mistress, declaring: “Ah knows now why ole Missie cry all day. Dat man give huh no peace; he say he will hab Millie gal else t’un us out tuh starve. An’ Missie too.”35 In this sense, Mrs. Tilden’s display of emotion endeavors to decrease the divide between her experience as a married white woman of the land-owning class and those of the bondwomen in her possession. Yet, the actions of the presumably absent-minded, frail old woman likewise place her superior into a position in which she must account for the fact that it is she who has sold Cissie’s adolescent daughter to an obviously lascivious trader. “I’m an old woman. My heart is breaking with your pain, but I’m helpless. Oh if this war would only end—if our men would only come back! They don’t know what it’s doing to us. They don’t know,” laments Mrs. Tilden.36 But the mistress’ justification, promises to buy Millie back, and attempts at establishing terms of shared victimhood appear empty to slaves Fess and Cissie, as evidenced by the latter’s averted gaze, low and dull intonation, and posture in which she “sits like stone” and “does not lift her head.”37 Interspersed within conventional expressions of deference and submission by Mrs. Tilden’s slaves, then, are misgiving and distrust of her authority. Unable to stand the heat that an apparently disoriented Grannie Lou has ushered her into, Mrs. Tilden promptly gets out of the kitchen. Before Mrs. Tilden’s hasty departure, though, the element which seems to astound her the most is that Millie and her companions are seemingly immersed in celebration on the eve of Millie’s descent “down da ribbah” with the slave trader. Raucous music and laughter abound, as a feast engenders collective pleasure and delight. “Oh, Cissie! But I don’t understand. You . . . a party. They’re dancing and singing,” Mrs. Tilden exclaims in exasperation.38 The gladness which Cissie permits her daughter utterly confounds the slave mistress. In Mrs. Tilden’s view, it appears antithetical to the harsh reality of Millie’s ensuing violation and abuse. While Black joy makes little sense to Mrs. Tilden, Cissie understands the immense value of ensuring that “Millie’ll be happy one time mo’.”39 Common benchmarks for worth in Mrs. Tilden’s world are product and profit. As a result, the depletion of her family’s cotton crop indicates

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white defenselessness and vulnerability. To protect herself, she “must” sell Cissie’s child. “There’s nothing else,” Mrs. Tilden remarks, regretfully.40 Nevertheless, Cissie realizes precisely how Black ecstasy problematizes systems of currency and white logics of exchange. Though her choice may not produce material gain, she creates space for mobility and overindulgence for Millie. Because Cissie recognizes ways in which the institution of slavery functions to eradicate Black girls’ songs, she consents to Millie’s boisterousness, and thereby, conspires toward her freedom.41 Grannie Lou exposes Mrs. Tilden to a Black slave mother’s perspective of power which the mistress renders excessive, but which Cissie establishes as beautiful and necessary. Grannie Lou’s performance likewise circumvents white rule in the final moments of the play when a Yankee soldier arrives at daybreak to deliver the news of Abraham Lincoln’s famous Proclamation to slaves in the area. Graham portrays the soldier, an agent of the Union, as an embodiment of white masculine authority, and does so audibly through the commingling of sounds: his galloping horse, his loud knocking and command to open the door, and the tone of “disappointment” in his voice when he believes that someone has managed to alert local slaves of their salvation before he has had the chance.42 Cissie’s emergence with the limp body of the daughter she has killed to avoid sale somewhat distracts the soldier from elaborating on the purpose of his visit, but he quickly commences with his mission. He tries to clarify for Cissie—in formal, legal terms—that she is free from bondage. However, before he can convey his message, Grannie Lou issues a wild cry of amusement, impeding the soldier’s revelation of juridical truth, his demonstration of definitive governmental authority. Grannie Lou’s final disruption operates on multiple levels. Of particular interest is that her “hysterical” laugh undercuts the soldier’s leadership. Quite palpably, it solidifies the futility of his words. In fact, the pronouncement does little to alter the stark realities of living in bondage to the Tilden family, and it cannot alter the circumstance of Millie’s demise. Consequently, Grannie Lou’s rather protracted length, a symptom of “playing crazy,” reverberates. It suggests, following Saidiya Hartman, that “the stipulation of abstract equality produces white entitlement and black subjection in its promulgation of formal equality.”43 Therefore, Grannie Lou’s laugh alludes both to the power of Cissie’s act, and to the likelihood of additional sacrifices to come. This scenario reflects the “double bind of Emancipation,” as Hartman has theorized: the need to “acknowledge the illusory freedom and travestied liberation that succeeded chattel slavery without gainsaying the small triumphs of Jubilee” (12). Grannie Lou’s laugh gestures toward Cissie’s attainment—slave traders and owners will no longer be able to exploit Millie’s body for the purposes of white pleasure and drudgery. Simultaneously, it trivializes symbolic acts of inclusion predicated on (and precursor to) more insidious Black violation.

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Certainly, Mrs. Tilden and the Yankee soldier are not one in the same; their asymmetrical relationships to matters of gender, class, and institutional power matter. Within the context of Graham’s play, Mrs. Tilden and the Black people her family owns likely share a complex web of emotions, ranging from duty and fidelity to fear and pain. For his part, the Yankee soldier aims to embody a spirit of patriotism and promise for the future of the nation. Despite their differences, however, they enjoy privilege and control which bind and restrict Black subjectivity. Grannie Lou marshals popular indicators of madness to frustrate their influence over her life and the lives of those around her. Though the effect of her performance may be momentary, and though it may not spare her from subsequent interracial or intra-racial suffering, Grannie Lou maneuvers within conventional interpretations of elderliness and of neurodiversity-as-excess, to oppose white domination.

CONCLUSION Should the Tilden family, slaveholders on neighboring plantations, white enlisted soldiers, or for that matter, whites without any legal control over Black people at all, learn of Grannie Lou’s duplicity, the consequences could be severe. As historical archives confirm, Grannie Lou risks prejudice and rejection, as well as considerable humiliation and disgrace in intra-racial and interracial settings. Her claims to madness by way of “playing crazy” may incite punishment, impediments to necessary care for herself or others, and could very well bring about her death. Her heightening of characteristics commonly attributed to elderliness and dementia reinforces racialized perspectives of objectification, perspectives preoccupied with Black disposability.44 Certainly, Grannie Lou experiences privilege associated with mobility and witnessing, but Grannie Lou’s performativity costs. A less romanticized view of her actions must acknowledge the loss attending appropriations of insanity, despite intermittent personal and collective gains. Conditions faced by Grannie Lou and imagined by Graham, then, certify Pickens’s idea that “madness (broadly defined) and Blackness have a complex constellation of relationships” and “this set of relationships has, makes, and acquires meaning in the various spaces they occupy without necessarily guaranteeing emancipation or radicality” (3). In thinking about the relationship between Blackness and madness, Pickens attests, “Blackness and disability have the potential to destabilize the rhetoric of normalcy that holds them as abject, but they are curtailed in doing so when mislabeled as agentive.”45 We do not know what happens to Grannie Lou in the wake of the performances detailed in these pages, or what might happen should she venture to “play crazy” again. Yet, her conduct creeps in between the cracks

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of regimes of antebellum power, spotlighting dehumanization based on race, gender, class, and ability. As outlined above, Grannie Lou’s tactic of “playing crazy” bears important intra-racial effects in that it permits her to craft communal space for Black women in bondage to honor their bodies, acknowledge their pain, and cultivate unconventional strategies of opposition. Grannie Lou’s performance pivots upon precisely timed revelations whereby she links Black past and Black present, making visible routine experiences of gendered violence alongside the persistence of Black joy. Her madness generates temporary affiliation through which Black women and girls, including those in Graham’s 1940s audience, might name their trauma. Likewise, it occasions an opening, fleeting as it may be, for Black women and girls to defend and encourage, as well as care for and sustain one another. Despite the judgment and bias she faces, Grannie Lou also manages to thwart white authority in small, yet meaningful ways throughout It’s Mornin’. While it may be tempting to cover over critical distinctions between Black and white women in the U.S. South in the 1860s, or to situate them as immersed—equivalently so—in conjoined systems of slavery, patriarchy, and capitalism in this period, Grannie Lou’s endeavors shore up understanding of pivotal disparities in power. “Playing crazy” requires Mrs. Tilden, the wife of a white slaveholder away at war, to confront her complicity in Black exploitation, rather than permit her to overplay her singular victimization. And in disputing the decrees issued by a white Union soldier through her overlong laughter, Grannie Lou undercuts the nation-state’s narrative of itself as triumphant and just. Graham’s short play demonstrates just one of many ways in which modern African American authors, across genre, often return to the era of slavery to examine nuances of intersectional identity and experience.

NOTES 1. Pickens, Therí Alyce, Black Madness: Mad Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 14. 2. Historians have established the ways in which Black people in bondage assumed characteristics of madness accepted by those in power over them to revise their living conditions. See the following works: Boster, Dea H, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 18001860 (New York: Routledge, 2013); Fett, Sharla, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and White, Deborah Gray, Aren’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999).

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3. Horne, Gerald, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 82. 4. Horne, 71. 5. Perkins, Kathy A, Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14. 6. On Grimké, see Mitchell, Koritha, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 56. 7. Perkins, 3. 8. Perkins, 3. 9. Perkins, 7–8. 10. Perkins, 16–17. 11. West, Genevieve, “Introduction.” In Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, edited by Zora Neale Hurston (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), xxii. 12. Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth, Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by AfricanAmerican Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), xiv. 13. To take one example: Ann Fox [no relation to this author] looks to the period in which Graham is working to locate what she terms the “fabulous invalid,” or “a paradigm for understanding productive tensions in theater, for refusing to reject a given representation of disability as politically ineffectual just because it may seem to contain elements of the conventional or stereotypical, and for reclaiming those aspects of disability representation that do important aesthetic and political work.” Considering characterization in plays by Georgia Douglas Johnson, for example, Fox mobilizes the “fabulous invalid” to ask: “What, then, do the multiple identities of this figure offer as they intersect with disability, enhancing and enriching our understanding of how disability functions to make drama more fabulous in its very querying and queering of multiple social structures?” And yet, it seems that Graham and Grannie Lou fall outside of Fox’s parameters for “important aesthetic and political work,” with the latter seemingly relegated to the domain of cliché. Spotlighting the ways “disability serv[es] in some works as a powerful metaphor for race oppression without being engaged in its own right,” she cites “plays like Jean Toomer’s Balo and Shirley Graham’s It’s Morning [which] both prominently featured elderly disabled characters as Tiresias-like seers (indeed, one is literally blind), prophesying the outcome of each play.” For Fox, the richness of early African American women’s drama facilitates intervention into socially constructed norms pertaining to womanhood and to embodiment, even if individual plays like Graham’s It’s Mornin’ primarily reinforce them. Fox, Ann M. “A Different Integration: Race and Disability in Early-Twentieth-Century African American Drama by Women.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 30, no. 1 (Jan 2013): 151–171. doi: 10.5250/legacy.30.1.0151. See also: Hagood, Taylor, Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers (Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2010); and Harris, Trudier, “Before the Strength, the Pain: Portraits of Elderly Black Women in Early TwentiethCentury Anti-Lynching Plays.” In Black Women Playwrights: Visions on the

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American Stage, 25–42, edited by Carol P. Marsh -Lockett (New York: Garland, 1999). 14. Perkins, 2. 15. Brown-Guillory, 89. 16. Interestingly, minor discrepancies exist between Elizabeth Brown-Guillory’s and Kathy A. Perkins’s anthologized versions of Graham’s It’s Mornin’ and their respective depictions of Grannie Lou as raconteur. Brown-Guillory, 85. 17. Perkins, 212. 18. Harris, 33. 19. Harris, 39. 20. Brown-Guillory, 86. 21. Brown-Guillory, 86. 22. Brown-Guillory, 90. 23. Brown-Guillory, 90. 24. Brown-Guillory, 90. 25. Van Der Horn-Gibson. “Dismantling Americana: Sambo, Shirley Graham, and African Nationalism.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-Present) 7, no. 1 (Spring 2008). http://www​.ame​rica​npop​ular​culture​.com​/journal/ 2008280284, 9. 26. Van Der Horn-Gibson, 9. 27. Bettina Aptheker asserts that “the dramatic scene in Act II [. . .] comes directly out of the historical record” (267), ultimately referencing the experiences of Margaret Garner. Aptheker, Bettina. “The Passion and Pageantry of Shirley Graham’s Opera Tom-Tom.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. 18, no. 2–4 (2016): 263–270. doi: 10.1080/10999949.2016.1230812. 28. Schmalenberger, Sarah. “Debuting Her Political Voice: The Lost Opera of Shirley Graham.” Black Music Research Journal 26, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 39–87, 48. 29. Brown-Guillory, 89. 30. This does not mean that permanent liberation from the Tilden plantation never occurs to Grannie Lou. As the Black women huddle together in their quarters lamenting Millie’s impending sale to a slave trader, the aforementioned Phoebe calls out to Jesus for mercy, and to her Christian Lord, for help. Sue suggests making arrangements for Millie’s departure on foot. Immediately, Grannie Lou halts their speculation, asserting unsanctioned topographical know-how instead: “Da ribbah’s high, da rain dat fall las’ week make all da ma’shes t’ick wid mud an’ deep” (Brown-Guillory, 90). Indeed, Grannie Lou may access local terrain with limited regulation by way of her projections of senility and madness. Though dismissed as increasingly forgetful, in this instance, she clarifies unanticipated obstacles to flight based upon pertinent land claims and broader familiarity with environs beyond her cabin door. 31. Brown-Guillory, 91. 32. Brown-Guillory, 92. 33. Jake, on the other hand, referred to in the character list as “A Crippled Banjo Player,” garners prestige within the Tilden slave community due to the ways his bodily ailments interfere minimally with his musical triumphs. Grannie Lou’s

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perceived mental debility only compounds the devaluation accompanying physical dimensions of her advanced age. 34. Brown-Guillory, 83. 35. Brown-Guillory, 89. 36. Brown-Guillory, 88. 37. Brown-Guillory, 88 and 89, respectively. 38. Brown-Guillory, 88. 39. Brown-Guillory, 88. 40. Brown-Guillory, 88. 41. On the eradication of Black girls’ songs, see Brown-Guillory, 91. 42. For stage directions, see Brown-Guillory, 94. 43. Hartman, Saidiya, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116. 44. See sources listed in Footnote 2 above. 45. Pickens, 35.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Lisa M. Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Aptheker, Bettina. “The Passion and Pageantry of Shirley Graham’s Opera TomTom.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. 18, no. 2–4 (2016): 263–270. doi: 10.1080/10999949.2016.1230812. Boster, Dea H. African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860. New York: Routledge, 2013. Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African-American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Fett, Sharla. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Fox, Ann M. “A Different Integration: Race and Disability in Early-TwentiethCentury African American Drama by Women.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 30, no. 1 (Jan. 2013): 151–171. doi: 10.5250/legacy.30.1.0151. Hagood, Taylor. Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2010. Harris, Trudier. “Before the Strength, the Pain: Portraits of Elderly Black Women in Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Lynching Plays.” In Black Women Playwrights: Visions on the American Stage, 25–42, edited by Carol P. Marsh -Lockett. New York: Garland, 1999. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Horne, Gerald. Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

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Mitchell, Koritha. Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Perkins, Kathy A. Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Pickens, Therí Alyce. Black Madness :: Mad Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Schmalenberger, Sarah. “Debuting Her Political Voice: The Lost Opera of Shirley Graham.” Black Music Research Journal 26, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 39–87. Van Der Horn-Gibson. “Dismantling Americana: Sambo, Shirley Graham, and African Nationalism.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-Present) 7, no. 1 (Spring 2008). http://www​.ame​rica​npop​ular​culture​.com​/ journal/ 2008280284. West, Genevieve. “Introduction.” In Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, edited by Zora Neale Hurston. New York: HarperCollins, 2020. White, Deborah Gray. Aren’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Chapter 6

Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road as Literacy Narrative LaToya Jefferson-James

Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), heavily edited by her publisher in order to eradicate any political statements that would cause discomfort, however slight, in a white reading audience and then released and marketed as a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches American tale, needs critical reassessment. In the ongoing search for “clues” to Hurston’s irreducible personality and a hyperfocus on the mendacities of the text, those of us who are practicing critics and teaching professors have failed to devote critical attention to the complexities of this text and glossed over a vital function of the story as literacy narrative. With this chapter, I plan to present a comparative reading strategy and a new method of interpretation for Dust Tracks. First, Hurston, as author and narrator of her own artistic journey, has presented us with the portrait, or various portraits, of an artist and social scientist in the making. In that sense, I am comfortable comparing Hurston’s autobiographical text with James Joyce’s fictional text, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916). In her search and quest to become a college graduate, I am comfortable comparing Hurston’s individuation to that of another fictional, semiautobiographical character, James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916), for this is what Hurston has given us: a portrait of herself as a serious academic and an artist, dedicated to writing and publishing the light genius and the dark underbelly of her own people. Like Stephen, Hurston listens to the talk—political, philosophical, racial, and religious—of the people around her, absorbs, and yearns to re-present it to the world with clarity. Like Stephen, the fictional character that Joyce returns to in Ulysses, Hurston is an individual, but her individuation does not develop at the expense of her community. Though Hurston traveled far from the confines of all-Black Eatonville, in her writings, she never manifests a sense of cultural-social exile nor does she ever express 99

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an intention to excise herself from the culture that she loved. Like Stephen, much of Hurston’s autobiography takes place in school or while she is walking around. Her education is pivotal to the formation of her personality. I believe Stephen’s words, crafted in first-person narration, at the end of the text is far more instructive than reading Hurston’s autobiography. Stephen refuses to commit himself politically or religiously. He confesses to a friend, I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.1

By the end, Stephen is finally a college degree holder and is leaving Dublin with the intention of writing. He announces: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”2 If we are serious students and teachers of Hurston, are not these goals apparent in Hurston’s writings, both fictional and nonfictional? Did not she try to express herself as honestly as she could, even it if meant speaking what is truthful rather than what is politically popular? Did not she dedicate her life to forging a positive conscience for her own people and the folk culture that they gifted to America? Second, rather than viewing Dust Tracks as Hurston’s worst piece of fiction, why not discuss this book as a literacy narrative in the tradition of Frederick Douglass, who went from self-taught fugitive slave to the world’s greatest orator? Why not write about it and discuss it in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, who once slept under a sidewalk in his quest for education? Why not discuss this text as a Black woman’s Herculean struggle to become educated in the face of legally-sanctioned, skin-color-based educational discrimination in a sexist society that still believed in women’s intellectual inferiority? Why not discuss Hurston’s accomplishment in spite of the regional discrimination from her own race that she faced as a rural Southerner? Hurston, skirting the racism of America-at-large, the openly sexist discrimination of her times, and the elitism of the Harlem Renaissance literati, faced down that hill, picked up her boulder, and rolled it up steadily and repeatedly. Even in her darkest hours, she remained hopeful that she would become a college graduate. In her late thirties, Zora finally received her college diploma. In that sense, Hurston extends the literacy narrative tradition from slavery to the twentieth century. Hurston’s narrative predates by almost eighty years, the best-selling, celebrated literacy narrative by a white woman trapped in the labyrinth of poverty, racism, religious fundamentalism, and discrimination, Educated (2018) by Tara Westover. Dust Tracks anchors

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Hurston within a community of Black writers past and present and lends validity to her controversial rejection of the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision. HURSTON’S SELF-PORTRAIT Before moving on, let me just state that I would be remiss and render my ideas insignificant if I do not mention the work that Deborah Plant has done and continues to do with Hurston’s autobiography and literature. Plant, who is a preeminent Hurston scholar, has never been dismissive of Dust Tracks and devoted several scholarly works to exploring the text as literature and historical/political document. In addition, the late Cheryl Wall was instrumental in reintroducing Hurston in the halls of academia, and Valerie Boyd wrote a biography, as opposed to a literary biography or expose, of Hurston’s life and the meaning of her work to America. Every day, scholars continue to devote more theoretical and pedagogical attention to Hurston’s works. For example, John Lowe has published at least two volumes of work devoted strictly to the pedagogical aspects of Hurston’s work. Yet, Dust Tracks (along with two of Hurston’s fictional works, Moses Man of the Mountain and Seraph on the Sewanee), remains under-read and undertheorized. It has narrative value, as well as some important kernels of Hurston’s complex political thought, even in the edited version originally published in 1942. In Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston (1995), Plant reminds us that Hurston is writing from her own, “philosophy of individualism.”3 Hurston, first and foremost, is an individual who has the power, since it was her autobiography, to write and narrate her own life story as she saw fit. In that sense, I found it helpful to read the voice of Dust Tracks as one of the author-narrator, a term and concept borrowed from author and critic Bernard W. Bell.4 As an authornarrator, the small, white lies of Dust Tracks were neither mishaps nor lapses in memory nor a coy writer engaging tongue-in-cheek rhetorical trickery. Coupled with Hurston’s struggle for an education, her political views, and her upbringing in an all-Black town, away from the deleterious effects of the hostile, white American gaze, this narrator is remarkably reliable. On the one hand, our search for the “truth” in Dust Tracks is a bit of unconscious sexism on the part of modern academics. The search for validity and veracity in the sexually explicit, sometimes masochistic Confessions by JeanJacques Rousseau, a text that was banned for its psycho-sexual and personal honesty when it was first published in 1782, is missing. Furthermore, no scholars challenge the ability of the self-taught orator, Frederick Douglass, to confidently tell his own story in either of his three autobiographies.

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On the other hand, perhaps our search for the truth instead of the story is a by-product of how Hurston was re-introduced to modern readers. Alice Walker first “rediscovered” Hurston at Jackson State University while auditing a course taught by writer and professor, Margaret Walker Alexander. It was through Walker’s efforts that the Hurston’s books, long out of print by the 1970s, would begin selling again and studied seriously at universities across America. Writing about Their Eyes Were Watching God, Walker testifies that “there is no book more important to me than this one (including Toomer’s Cane, which comes close, but from what I recognize is a more perilous direction)” (emphasis Walker’s).5 In general, Walker praises Hurston’s fiction and nonfiction work, expressing disdain only for Hurston’s autobiography. She writes, “For me, the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote is her autobiography. After the first several chapters, it rings false.”6 Walker blames Hurston’s falsities on the author’s economic dependence. By now, it is wellknown that Hurston spent the majority of her writerly life depending on the kindness of white strangers and fellowships. Even those white Americans who she deemed as “friends” maintained a cool, formal distance between themselves and Hurston, obeying the laws of personal and emotional segregation for white and Black Americans, no matter where in the country they may have been located. Hurston addressed them formally while they used her first name. For example, Hurston considered novelist Annie Nathan Meyer a personal friend, but referred to her formally as, “Mrs. Annie Nathan Meyer,” in personal letters. This formality is carried into the book dedication in, Of Mules and Men. Hurston was careful to maintain the rigid separation and an attitude of deference toward her wealthy, white patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, who insisted that the host of Black artists who depended upon her generosity call her, “Godmother.” Like many newly minted college graduates, Hurston found herself without a job and was grateful for Godmother’s good graces. It came with a price: Mason entangled Hurston in an exceptionally restrictive contract for collecting folklore. Hurston, as stipulated by her employer, reported her every expenditure (even for personal hygiene items such as sanitary napkins), and the fruit of Hurston’s difficult Southern labors, a treasure trove of Black American folklore, became the property of Mason. During the turbulent, Depression-era 1930s, when Hurston was desperately trying to make her way as a playwright and anthropologist, letters show that Hurston was constantly at “Godmother’s” economic mercy. According to Walker, Hurston’s economic dependence on these transitory “friends” is to blame for the lackluster writing in Dust Tracks. In one of the first serious studies of Hurston’s literary career, Robert E. Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977), similarly dismisses Dust Tracks. Before dismissing the text, Hemenway does admit that Black American autobiography is unique in that the books are often

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autoethnography—a personal story that functions as the voice of the entire community that produced the author. Black autobiography displayed a complex, personal individual who is part of a group of people who were reduced to two-dimensional, heinous stereotypes by white American imaginative output, legal system, and academic publications. Their struggle was just one struggle of many to maintain some form of human dignity in the face of the most inhumane racism. Conversely, white autobiography is often a story of a single individual against his/her own inner turmoil—as is the case with the aforementioned, scandalous Confessions.7 After Hemenway both defines and describes the unique qualities of Black autobiography, he highlights Hurston’s “problem of voice,” and states that this problem of the narrative voice is “a major reason the book should not be taken as the definitive statement of her character.”8 He suggests that Hurston’s character and statements of it are best found in her body of creative works. Hemenway does not consider Hurston’s position as a Black woman in a racially segregated, sexist society. I agree with Lorraine Bethel when she writes, “Black women writers have consistently rejected the falsification of their Black female experience, thereby avoiding the negative stereotypes such falsification has soften created in white American female and Black male literary traditions.”9 Hurston dispenses with passionate advances by men who declared she was absolutely “burning up” (emphasis Hurston’s) or that she was a “walking furnace”10 by stating: “Often when this is whispered gustily into my ear, I am feeling no more amorous than a charter member of the Union League Club.”11 This recasting of overtly sexual “whisperings” eradicates any traces of casual sexual encounters initiated or responded to by Hurston. Images of Black women’s sexual deviancy, as outlined in an earlier chapter, still dominated American thought and Hurston rejected that stereotype outright! Writing several decades after Hemenway in 2003, Valerie Boyd “corrects” the reading audience, academics, and critics for the sexism and the emphasis on Hurston’s supposed falsities. Boyd writes in Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, To jettison the book so glibly, however, is a mistake. Zora played fast and loose with the facts, to be sure. But readers cannot dismiss Dust Tracks unless they also are willing to dismiss Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea and Richard Wright’s Black Boy—two other autobiographies published in the 1940s in which black writers engage in myth-making about their lives. Often, the critical tendency has been to excuse or ignore this “will to adorn” when the perpetrator is a black man, but to vehemently attack Hurston—one of the few black female autobiographers of the first half of the twentieth century—for doing the very same thing. Truth be told, Dust Tracks on a Road is an “imaginative

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autobiography,” a term Wright applied to Black Boy. And every so-called lie in Hurston’s book is an avenue to the truth.12

In other words, when the writer is a man, we simply dismiss anything not totally factual as a slight faux pas. Hurston has not received as much mercy. Boyd admits that Hurston ignored certain external facts, mainly the racism and segregation of the Deep South during the time, which caused many critics to write scathing rebukes of Hurston’s book. Boyd, unlike Walker, does not blame Hurston’s falsities on white people. Instead, Boyd emphasizes the fact, which is documented, that Hurston was reluctant to write an autobiography in the first place. Next, her publisher, “Bertram Lippincott took the slash-and-burn approach to editing Hurston’s manuscript, cutting out whole chunks of it.”13 In their zest to market Hurston as a “self-made woman,” Bertram Lippincott removed two entire chapters: “The Inside Light—Being a Salute to Friendship,” and “Seeing the World as It Is.” Her chapter, “The Inside Light,” was a virtual roll call of people who had helped Hurston along the way. “Seeing the World as It Is,” was a sharp critique of America’s institution and racism. Nobody was safe. Hurston plainly spoke that she preferred individualism to any kind of nationalism, including the burgeoning contemporary nationalism of her peers. She certainly disdained Communism and pointed out the hypocrisy of American church members. In addition to removing those two candid chapters, the editors also removed any other statements that a white reading audience may have found offensive. This led to a botched, incomplete manuscript that was in no way as politically complex and forthright as Hurston really was. Still, Hurston cloaked some of her views and they escaped the editor’s sharp eye. Part of Hurston’s small seditious acts in literature was to refuse to privilege white people or white racism in her own life story as author-narrator—a fact that Boyd carefully points out in her chapter on Dust Tracks. At Boyd’s and Bethel’s insistence, I offer an alternative, comparative reading of Dust Tracks. At this point, I am about to commit a literary sin and fully expect to be taken to task by my colleagues. I suggest that Hurston, in Dust Tracks, has given us more than an autobiography. She has given us the making of an artist as a woman—a Black woman—in America. Hurston, whose mother died when she was a teenager, who became an orphan at fourteen, and who was the only Black student (period) at Barnard College, was hewn from rough stone. But she survived to bless the world with her anthropological and artistic genius. Given the silences, cloaked political references, and the chronology of Hurston as authornarrator of her own story, I am quite comfortable comparing Dust Tracks to Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Before attacking me, colleagues, hear me out: I know that it may be sacrilege to cross genres, races,

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genders, and an ocean in order to stretch this comparison, but Hurston demonstrates artistic genius unmatched. Her portraiture is clarified without sacrificing the humanities of others in her community. There are no flat, two-dimensional, dualistic representations in Dust Tracks. Ever. Hurston is not the one, bright star whose shine is inhibited by the dull intellectually limited pallor of a country town. Instead, her small town and its talk are liberating and enlightening. The porch dwellers and their explanations of everything from the cosmos to love to politics become the raw material of her fictional masterpieces. Personally, Hurston adeptly describes the contentious relationship with her father without dehumanizing him. She relates at least two broken love affairs without the bitterness of a jilted lover. As a community member, the South is not a place to escape and the North is not a promised land. All white folks are not evil, and some Black folks are no saints. There is an evil stepmother, a sexually-licentious boss and his jealous wife, and unrequited love of a teacher. Can we find any autobiography or her time, even Hughes’s and Wright’s, in which the author-narrator’s story is as complex or fluid? So, I turned to fiction as a point of comparison (Honestly, I could have chosen Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, here as well). There are several points of comparison between Dust Tracks and Portrait. First of all, the Christmas dinner scene in which Stephen’s family members engage in a war of words over the fallen and deceased Irish nationalist politician, Charles Parnell is now famous. That dinner was formative to young Stephen’s political and religious consciousness. Likewise, the author-narrator, Hurston, includes a dinner scene that demonstrates to the reader how her early conscience, as a child who was destined to be different, formed. Unlike Stephen, who was shocked into political and religious awareness by his father’s impassionate speech in support of Parnell and against the authority of the Catholic church, Hurston’s awareness is made explicit by the absolute nature of her father’s rejection. Until that scene, Hurston only hints at her father’s displeasure with her temperament: “He predicted dire things for me. The white folks were not going to stand for it. I was going to be hung before I got grown. Somebody was going to blow me down for my sassy tongue.”14 In the chapter, “I Get Born,” Hurston uses comedy to deflect the pain of her father’s rejection. She writes coyly, “I don’t think he ever got over the trick that he felt that I played on him by getting born a girl. . . . He didn’t tie me in a sack and drop me in the lake as he felt like doing.”15 In the next chapter, Hurston makes no hints or jokes about her father’s feelings toward her. The Christmas dinner scene at the Hurston house is as contentious as that of the Dedalus house. At the table, Hurston’s father asks what each child wants for Christmas. Hurston loudly demands a horse and white saddle. Her father responded explosively, “It’s a sin and

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a shame. Lemme tell you something right now, my young lady, you ain’t white. Riding horse!! Always trying to wear de big hat. I don’t know how you got in this family nohow.”16 Hurston did not consider herself a child of John Hurston. Her parent, the sole source of her validation as a person with academic promise and budding storytelling capabilities, was her mother, Lucy Potts Hurston. While Zora Neale Hurston’s universe is centered around her encouraging mother, Stephen walks with his father while his mother remains nameless throughout the narrative. Yet, Stephen, as the family’s finances decline, there is a tension between father and son that results in violent rejection. When preparing for school one morning, Stephen’s father rejects the son outright. He asks the sister, “Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet?”17 The family is at its lowest economic standing in the narrative, living next to an asylum for mentally ill nuns, and the father is resentful of Stephen’s choice to attend college rather than contribute to the family’s finances. It was the father’s own instability and poor decision-making that caused the downfall of the family. When Stephen’s friend, Cranly, asks about his father’s occupation, Stephen replies that his father was, A medical study, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past.18

Stephen tries to economize by purchasing all of his clothes from a pawnshop, but the sacrifice is lost on his father, who sees his son as a failure for choosing to become a writer and poet. As Portrait opens, the narrative voice is all third person. By the end, Stephen has become an individual, but not a lone individual. Stephen, an aspiring poet and writer, understands that he is part of a family (no matter how dysfunctional), a community (no matter the squalor), and a race of people who have been oppressed. While Catholicism may have consumed his earlier thought-life (Stephen seriously thought about entering the priesthood as a young man), Stephen, as a mature individual is aware of how history and political/linguistic/religious oppression continue to shape the Irish present and to mould the Irish into a race of people. The narrator relates, The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.19

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Yes, Stephen is aware of the history of oppression of the Irish by the British, and he is aware that this oppression, in a way, galvanizes the Irish people, but Stephen plans to live as an individual. As Stephen walks the city, regardless of the squalor of it, he envisions and narrates the city in poetic terms. Likewise, Hurston closes her narrative as an individual, but on loving terms for her race. Hurston the narrator-author does not build a shrine for herself as a unique individual with her story: “If tough breaks have not soured me, neither have my glory-moments caused me to build any altars for myself where I can burn incense before God’s best job of work.”20 Hurston is not unaware of the history of enslavement that Black people endured in America. She mentions it, but dismisses the notion that she should bear its burden, writing, From what I can learn, it was sad. Certainly. But my ancestors who lived and died in it are dead. The white men who profited by their labor and lives are dead also. I have no personal memory of those times, nor no responsibility for them. Neither has the grandson of the man who held my folks.21

Hurston’s view of slavery is not as ill-informed as some of her critics may have believed. Hurston was an anthropologist who learned about African slavery and the role that Africa played in New World slavery and ongoing enslavement in many pockets of populations throughout the world. Similarly, the fictional Stephen Dedalus does not naively dismiss Irish nationalism toward the end of the narrative. His dismissal is informed by Dedalus’s knowledge of both religion’s role in oppression and how many nationalists deserted Parnell in his final days. Many of Parnell’s supporters felt his involvement in an adulterous affair was an affront to their Catholic beliefs. Stephen learned, during the Celtic revival of his time, that Catholicism was an imposed religion that the Celts adopted. According to Stephen, if nationalists were as fervent for their Celtic roots, they would not abandon those leaders as quickly. In the nonfiction work, Dust Tracks, Hurston explores the motivations of greed and materialism. She writes, “There has been no proof in the world so far that you would be less arrogant if you held the lever of power in your hands.”22 As a member of a race, Hurston leaves a tribute to Black people, “My kinfolks, and my ‘skinfolks’ are dearly loved. My own circumference of every day life is there. But I see their same virtues and vices everywhere I look.”23 This view, that Black people were no better or worse than any other people, frees Hurston to view people as individuals and not as groups. She does not want to essentialize African Americans. For a woman writing at that time, this tendency to deessentialize the African American experience as the experience of oppression or Blackness in the African Diaspora anticipates scholars of Africana studies

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by decades (emphasis mine). Hurston was not interested in Europe, nor was she interested in the race racing of her male peers at the time. When Dust Tracks opens, Hurston does not describe the conditions of her birth. She describes the founding of her home, Eatonville, Florida. Then, in the next chapter, she describes her parents’ courtship, marriage, and emigration from Alabama to Florida. After two full chapters, Hurston describes her birth in the first person. Only after firmly establishing the fact of her vibrant Black community and an in-tact family, does Hurston allow herself entry into her own self-narrated story (emphasis mine). Hurston, like Stephen, is an individual who is part of a community. Just as Stephens has these visions while walking around the refuse of his city streets, Hurston begins to have visions while at play. She reports, “I do not know when the visions began.”24 According to Hurston, there were twelve scenes, and some of them were bad tidings, that she had to endure. These visions, Hurston felt, set her apart from others: “I never told anyone around me about these strange things. It was too different. They would laugh me off as a story-teller.”25 After the visions revelation, Hurston immediately takes the reader from the individual to the community. Tellingly, the very next chapter, which occurs only a halfpage after Hurston’s vision confession, opens with the men who sat on Joe Clarke’s porch: “The right and the wrong, the who, when and why passed on and nobody doubted the conclusions.”26 She begins the chapter with the daily conversations, which involve mainly men, and expands the conversation through the weekend, where men and women, participated in gossip, gameplaying, and other forms of entertainment. There are other points of comparison between Hurston’s story and Stephen’s, but I would like to briefly point out a point of contrast. While Stephen’s launch into the world begins with a loving mother who neatly packed his clothes, Hurston’s wanderings began with the death of her beloved mother, and essentially becoming an orphan. And while Stephen Dedalus suffers mentally to reach individuation, he is a white male (though an ethnic one) in the early 1900s (and this is fiction). The barriers facing Hurston would be removed for Stephen in the United States. I am not unaware of this. I merely used Portrait in order to demonstrate the complexities of Dust Tracks and why we should not be so quick to dismiss the author-narrated Hurston in favor of the fictional character, Janie, in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Other points of comparison in these two works include Stephen’s voracious reading habits. Zora, likewise, even in her darkest hour, read as often as she could. Furthermore, there are multiple voices and perspectives presented in Dust Tracks and Portrait. There are recorded conversations, arguments, children at play, and the deep recesses of a child’s thoughts as both Zora and Stephen try to make sense of the world around them.

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READING DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD AS LITERACY NARRATIVE I can think of a few harsh comments regarding the technique used in the previous section. Yes, I am aware of how it looks. No, Hurston does not need the framing of a white man in order to validate her genius. However, I am concerned, here. In spite of the recent fervor for Hurston’s scholarship, journalism, and creative works, “Hurston, like many Black women writers, has suffered ‘intellectual lynching’ at the hands of white and Black men and white women.”27 Would I, a practicing teaching professor with an active research agenda, have felt compelled to write such a comparison of Richard Wright’s Black Boy with some other writer who the academy deems complex and academic? And I did purposefully choose Joyce because of his perceived complexity. Is there ever a need to justify Hughes and the mendacities that he may have encoded in The Big Sea? As aforementioned, much of Hurston’s autobiography centers around acquiring an education that would allow her to fully express the beauty (and not-so-beautiful) of her people’s art. When Hurston turns to individual introspection, by Chapter IV, called, “The Inside Search,” roughly 50 percent of the chapter is devoted to education and reading. Of the unedited, restored Library of Congress edition of Dust Tracks, roughly 25 percent of the narrative is centered around obtaining an education, Hurston’s voracious reading habits, and research. For Hurston, writing is not just a job or a paycheck, it is akin to a religious calling. The unedited version of her narrative has fifteen chapters and four of them center around schooling formally, and one details her research. The focus that Hurston puts on education and literacy requires us to take Dust Tracks seriously as a literary narrative. Before moving on, I think it helpful to provide a formal definition of the literacy narrative here. A literacy narrative is not just a paper that practicing academics assign to freshman composition writers. It is the story of how we became literate and how that newfound literacy influenced our personal development and our external lives.28 There is a particular power in the ability to express oneself freely and completely. At the end of her literacy narrative, Tara Westover, born to Mormon survivalist in Idaho who did not believe in public education, writes that her road to literacy and education was a foray into selfhood, and she defines that selfhood by ending her memoir with: “You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.”29 For ex-slaves and the descendants of former slaves, becoming literate was a Herculean feat, because if philosophers such as Hegel declared that Africans were not quite human because they were not literate in the Western sense, American state laws guaranteed the continued inhumanity of Black people by making it illegal for them to

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learn to read. For slave and ex-slave writers, particularly women like Harriet Jacobs, becoming literate and educated is more important than becoming a wife. This is also true of Hurston’s narration of herself in Dust Tracks. To dispel Hurston’s focus on her education is to take the text out of its historical context and misinterpret Hurston’s political misgivings about Brown. When reading Hurston’s autobiography, “Literacy provides the critical-interpretive focus for reading the texts, as well as suggesting methological-theoretical schemas and, in doing so, dispels the confusion of realms, art and propaganda.”30 Hurston, while admitting that she admired the strength of Hercules in her autobiography, details the struggle for education that she, and millions of other Black children in the American South, faced in post-Reconstruction America with educational discrimination. Long before the Plessy decision of the late 1890s, the legislative bodies of the American South decided on separate schools for African Americans. And in those laws, most states explicitly demanded that African American children attend schools that would not be equal to those of their white counterparts. As early as 1862, laws like the Morrill Act, detailed in Adam Harris’s The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—And How to Set Them Right (2021), provided funding and land for elementary and high schools attached to land-grant, agricultural colleges for white students while failing to even mention Black children. Before the Morrill Act, as Black people tried to educate their children with church funds, Black women writers like Anna Julia Cooper, in her A Voice from the South, detail how white men harassed white women for educating Black children, sometimes with physical violence and at other times by burning down churches that were designated as schoolhouses for Black children. Black children were often located in one-room classrooms, donated by their local church congregations, with inadequate supplies, light, and heat. States refused to fund Black students co-equally with white ones. As late as 1952 in Hurston’s home state of Florida, “white schools received $195.01 per pupil, while Black schools received $153.24.”31 This was a pattern throughout the Deep South, where Hurston, though she resided in all-Black Eatonville, lived. In an effort to update facilities for Black students, Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, brokered a deal with the CEO of Sears and Roebuck, Julius Rosenwald. Rosenwald, a philanthropist, agreed that he would help Black Southerners build state of the art facilities across the South if those respective communities would bear a percentage of the financial burden for building. It was a collaborative project that would change the face of education in the American South for Black children: “By 1928, onethird of the South’s rural Black school children and teachers were served by Rosenwald schools.”32 Some of those structures still stand today. Zora Neale Hurston attended Hungerford Normal and Industrial School. Plant writes,

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“The school was modeled from Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and was named to memorialize the deceased son of Edward and Anna Hungerfod, benefactors of the school.”33 Throughout the South, the desire for knowledge by Black parents for their children was explicit. Check Booker T. Washington’s description of his first night school in Up from Slavery. Education, to many African Americans in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was a path to freedom. Plant links the zeal for freedom with education: “In twenty-four years of freedom, African Americans sought every path to full citizenship and full human expression. Education was the path in which they firmly believed.”34 The Hungerford school was the only school for African Americans in central Florida at the time. Like other, progressive African American women of her time, Lucy Ann Hurston believed firmly in education as a liberatory path for her children. In Dust Tracks, Hurston describes her mother’s zeal for education before describing her own birth (emphasis mine): “After supper, we gathered in Mama’s room, and everybody had to get their lessons for the next day. Mama carried us all past long division in arithmetic, and parsing sentences in grammar by diagrams on the black-board.”35 Lucy Hurston believed in education strongly enough to challenge her children. Lucy Hurston impressed upon her children that education and intellect would level the American playing field and act as the catapult to upward economic mobility. This view often put her at odds with her husband, who felt that she was setting Zora up for a lynching. Lucy’s mother, who had seen slavery, also feared for Zora’s life and saw the child’s imaginative tales as nothing more than lies. Hurston’s first validation comes from her mother, of course, who loved her inquisitive nature. The second affirmation of her selfhood comes from the Hungerford school. The school was rather progressive and the faculty and students were accustomed to visitors, Black and white, who wanted to observe it. One day, some white ladies unexpectedly came to Hurston’s classroom. The class was reading an exceedingly difficult story that they were unfamiliar with, but Hurston read it with ease. Zora was asked to visit the two young ladies in nearby Maitland, and two months later, they sent her a box with used clothes and books. Zora, who triumphed for once, says, “My chums pretended not to like anything that I had, but even then I knew they were jealous.”36 Hurston goes on to describe the books and the pleasure that she received from reading them. Oddly, Hurston relates neither her father’s nor her maternal grandmother’s reaction to her educational triumph. The narrative is silent here. After the triumph at school and its two-month extension, Hurston immediately reveals her reading habits. After Lucy Hurston’s death, Zora’s father sent her to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. For any child, coping with a parent’s death is difficult.

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And Hurston, who was unaccustomed to segregation and explicit white racism, found the social/racial adjustments difficult. However, she did excel academically. Hurston’s father soon abandoned her at the school and stopped paying the tuition. Hurston was told that she could not stay and was sent home. After attacking her stepmother, Hurston left her father’s home for good. Even though she was only about fourteen or fifteen years old, she was determined to make her own way, and lived with friends in the community. The most disheartening part of this orphan experience was the lack of schooling. Hurston reveals, “I was in school off and on, which gave me vagrant peeps into the light, but these intervals lacked peace because I had no guarantee that they would last.”37 As a teenager, Hurston was expected to contribute financially to her foster households. Even when Hurston found a job as a domestic worker, they would never last long, “No matter how I resolved, I’d get tangled up with their reading matter, and lose my job.”38 Hurston was not lazy; she just wanted to read. Like Douglass and Washington in their narratives, Hurston reveals an intense desire for formal schooling, but must work and that is one of the many hardships that oppressed or impoverished children face.39 Hurston emphatically declares, I wanted books and school. When I saw fortunate people of my age on their way to and from school, I would cry inside and be depressed for days, until I learned how to mash down on my feelings and numb them for a spell.40

When Bob, one of her older brothers, sent for her, Hurston was elated. She believed that Bob would send her to school once more. Hurston’s dream of school did not materialize at Bob’s home in Memphis. She ran away from that home and joined a theatre company. Traveling with the theatre was a type of education, especially since Hurston had access to stage techniques and books. After the theatre job ended, Hurston found herself in Baltimore with a menial job and no money. She still had a desire for formal education, though she was well into her twenties at the time. Hurston addresses the reader directly, “How then did I get back to school? I just went. I got tired of trying to get the money to go. . . . So I went to the night high school in Baltimore and that did something for my soul.”41 Here, Hurston’s “camouflage” of her age has been discussed by biographers and academics has been discussed ad nauseam. As Boyd points out, Hurston lied about her age out of legal necessity. During that time, “The Maryland Code—the document that codified the state’s general laws—provided for free admission to public schools for ‘all colored youth between six and twenty years of age.’ In 1917, Zora was twenty-six years old.”42 With no money and almost no clothes, Hurston could not afford to enter a private school. She deliberately misrepresented her age in order to gain access to high school education. From there, Hurston went to college. She began first at Morgan and went on

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to Howard. Hurston would have completed Howard but had to leave due to illness and lack of financial support. Later in her life, her brother Bob apologized for not taking Hurston’s efforts to gain a college education seriously. After Hurston won an award for a story, she found herself in New York with almost no money and hope for continuing her college education. Fannie Hurst and Annie Nathan Meyer sponsored Hurston to be the only Black student at Barnard College (emphasis mine). Though we like to place Hurston with the Harlem Renaissance for academic purposes, Hurston’s literary output was scant during that time. In the 1920s, when the Harlem Renaissance reached its zenith, Hurston was like any other college student: attempting to balance work, studies, and pay the exorbitant rent of racially segregated New York. She often wrote to Meyer or Hurst for financial support.43 Hurston, though always anxious about money and the only Black student at Barnard, felt hopeful. Hurston completed Barnard as the first and only Black person at the time to graduate from Barnard College. She received her diploma in 1928 when she was thirty-seven years old. Much historical ado has been made about the first African American male scholars to graduate from hallowed ivory halls. However, academia remains contemptuously silent about Hurston’s historical educational accomplishment. She went from being orphaned in Florida to being the first African American to attend and graduate from Barnard College. Her feat was remarkable for the times in which she lived. As Boyd points out, “In those days, higher education for Negroes was a rarified thing: in 1917, only 2, 132 black people were enrolled in college nationwide.”44 Rather than elaborate on this point, in academia, we focus on her purposeful age regression. Women of the Harlem Renaissance routinely lied about their ages for various reasons. Hurston falsified hers in order to achieve a diploma. Furthermore, Hurston’s college studies transformed her from an unknown orphan to a nationally recognized folk specialist and internationally known writer. Studying under Franz Boas gave Hurston the language that she needed to express how she felt about her formative years in Eatonville. Hurston’s work in the field of anthropology, not just literature, cement her position as a progeniture of African American Studies. Even during her Baltimore days, Hurston went on to demonstrate that she was a capable teacher as well. Hurston writes, “When Miss Clarke, our English teacher, was absent, I was put in charge of the class. This happened time and time again, sometimes for a whole week at a time.”45 Hurston held several teaching posts in her lifetime, though they did not last for long. She once taught at North Carolina Central University and Bethune-Cookman College. Her only complaint was that the colleges lacked the funding to provide her with the equipment that she needed to successfully teach theatre,

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and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, at that time, were much too conservative for Hurston’s colorful personality. Even as a published author, Hurston attempted to further her education. Like so many other Black college students, she was limited by lack of financial support. As a published author, Hurston seriously considered enrolling in Columbia in order to complete her graduate education. First, her long-time patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, would not consider Hurston for a doctorate. The Rosenwald Foundation promised Hurston a fellowship with a monthly stipend for graduate work. Once Hurston enrolled in graduate school, the scholarship was rescinded. In Dust Tracks, is a separate chapter devoted to Hurston’s research. The chapter, “Research,” contains one of Hurston’s most-often quoted definitions: “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”46 As a graduate, Hurston immediately set about using her newfound skills. Hurston put herself at great peril in order to collect the raw material of African American Studies that we now study. When her peers of the Harlem Renaissance decided to turn to “the folk” at last without shame, where did they retrieve the material? By way of conclusion, I think it is revealing that Hurston chose not to become a doctor’s wife. Had Hurston decided to remain with her first husband, Herbert Sheen, his income as a doctor would have more than supported their family. It is revealing that Hurston ran away from a secure home in Memphis with her brother, Bob, though he seemed to have turned her into a domestic without pay. It is revealing that Hurston chose not to remain in the conservative confines of the Black colleges that once employed her. However, how can we know what Hurston is revealing if we refuse to look? Hurston’s Dust Tracks is a complex text—as complex as a Joyce novel. It is a literacy narrative that hearkens back to the days when Booker T. Washington slept under a sidewalk in pursuit of an education. It is about high time that we look at it seriously and understand what Hurston tried to tell us about herself, the family and community that produced her genius, and her own people. NOTES 1. Joyce, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, 268–269. 2. Ibid., 275–276. 3. Plant, Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom, 20. 4. Bell, The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches, 8. 5. Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, 86. 6. Walker, Gardens, 91. 7. Rousseau’s Confessions produced a scandal when it was first published, because it was one of the first texts to allow readers a voyeuristic view of psychological

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divisions and sexual longings of a child. Until its publications, most autobiographies in Europe were public in nature—often repeating facts about public figures that were already widely known by the general reading audience. They revealed almost nothing about the psychological/emotional interior of the writer. The only intensely personal autobiographies available to the reading public were religious conversion narratives such as St. Augustine’s Confessions. 8. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, 280. 9. Hurston, “Love,” in Dust Tracks on a Road, 751. 10. Ibid., 751. 11. Ibid. 12. Boyd. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, 355. 13. Boyd, Rainbows, 357. 14. Hurston, “My Folks,” Dust Tracks, 573. 15. Hurston, “I Get Born,” Dust Tracks, 577. 16. Hurston, “The Inside Search,” Dust Tracks, 584. 17. Joyce, Portrait, 189. 18. Joyce, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, 262. 19. Ibid., 220. 20. Hurston, “Looking Things Over,” Dust Tracks, 765. 21. Ibid., 767. 22. Ibid., 769. 23. Hurston, “Looking Things Over, Dust Tracks, 769. 24. Hurston, “The Inside Search,” Dust Tracks, 596. 25. Ibid., 596. 26. Ibid., 596. 27. Lorraine Bethel, “‘This Infinity of Conscious Pain’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition,” in All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, 176. 28. For a full explanation of the literacy narrative, please the pedagogical website: https://writingcraft​.commons​.gc​.cuny​.edu​/literacy​-essay​-examples/ 29. Westover. Educated, 329. 30. Gates p. 54 in Lindon Barrett, “African American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, and Authority,” 417–418. 31. Lynn Moylan, “A Child Cannot Be Taught by Anyone Who Despises Him,” in The Inside Light, 218. 32. See https://savingplaces​.org​/places​/rosenwald​-schools#​.YfQOuOrMLrc 33. Plant, Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit, 12. 34. Plant, Spirit, 12. 35. Hurston, Dust Tracks, 572. 36. Hurston, Dust Tracks, 593–594. 37. Hurston, Dust Tracks, 635. 38. Ibid., 636. 39. Recall, in Washington’s Up From Slavery, that his stepfather expected him to work in the mines of his hometown. Washington wanted to attend school. Eventually, Washington was allowed to attend night school after working in the mines all day,

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sometimes for fourteen hours. In Douglass’s narrative, he bribes poor white children in the neighborhood with a piece of bread in exchange for reading lessons. 40. Hurston, Dust Tracks, 644. 41. Ibid., 667. 42. Boyd, Rainbows, 75. 43. Please see the letters of Zora Neale Hurston published by Caplan. 44. Boyd, Rainbows, 79. 45. Hurston, Dust Tracks, 671. 46. Hurston, “Research,” Dust Tracks, 687.

REFERENCES African American Cultural Heritage Fund. Washington, DC: Rosenwald Schools; 2022 (accessed December 16, 2021). https://savingplaces​ .org​ /places​ /rosenwald​ -schools#​.YfQOuOrMLrc Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Root and Modern Literary Branches. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Bethel, Lorraine. “‘This Infinity of Conscious Pain’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition.” In All The Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, 2nd ed., edited by Akesha (Gloria T.), Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. New York: Black Feminist Press, 1982 reprinted in 2015, pp. 176–188. Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003. Harris, Adam. The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—And How to Set Them Right. New York: Ecco & Harper Collins, 2021 Hemenway, Robert. E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Dust Tracks on a Road.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, edited by Cheryl A. Wall.. New York: Library of America, 1995, pp. 561–808. Joyce, James. A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. London: Huebsch Inc., 1916; New York: Penguin Books, reprinted 1992. Moylan, Lynn. “‘A Child Cannot Be Taught by Anyone Who Despises Him’”: Hurston Versus Court-Ordered School Integration.” In “‘The Inside Light’”: New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, edited by Deborah G. Plant. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010, pp. 215–224. Plant, Deborah. Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. ———. Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. Orlando: Harvest Books, 1983.

Chapter 7

Karen Lord Situating the Caribbean Female Space Jacinth Howard

Karen Lord’s fiction is central to West Indian speculative fiction and represents the inclusive future of science fiction, especially when juxtaposed with the contrasting history that science fiction is traditionally regarded as a primarily “white, male genre” as if science and technology “were inherently masculine endeavours” (James and Mendlesohn 241). Scholar Helen Merrick claims that because of this assumption, the “masculine” field of science “naturally excludes women” (241) though, ironically, sci-fi is ripe for exploration of feminist themes. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which Lord’s work performs subversiveness and centres the Caribbean within the sci-fi genre. Just as Blackness often coincides with marginal existence in both fictional and real-world contexts, there are many sci-fi portrayals of “the other” that parallel challenges faced by women. In order to convey the nuance within the Anglophone Caribbean context, the protagonists of Lord’s work are West Indian Black females. Lord’s characterization is one of the most important tools in establishing a particularly feminist standpoint within her work. FROM FEMINISM HISTORICALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY TO CARIBBEAN FRAMES In order to claim that Lord’s work is feminist and outline how her work effectively performs subversion from this angle, feminism must be operationalized. To this end the next few paragraphs briefly articulate the historical and literary (both generally and within sci-fi) marginalisation of women which necessitates a feminist response. Feminism acts as the theoretical backbone of this chapter, fundamentally articulating the interest and championing of women’s rights to equality in every sphere. It opposes the prejudice which 117

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operates on the premise that there is according to Lefanu “a God given sexual difference” (Location 1565) between men and women. Delmar points out that “feminism becomes defined by its object of concern—women—in much the same way as socialism has sometimes been defined by an object—the poor working class” (30). The general ideology signifies that women should be allotted equal rights with men economically, politically, and socially. Historian Rosalind Delmar proposes that although feminism is frequently expressed in this way, beyond that, it “immediately becomes more complicated” (Mitchell et al. 27). Over the years, feminism has developed as a multi-disciplinary approach to sex and gender equality understood through social theories and political activism. Historically, according to feminist scholar Lisa Day, feminism has evolved from the critical examination of inequality between the sexes to a more nuanced focus on the social and performative constructions of gender and sexuality. (Day, par. 1)

Therefore, feminism transcends the recognition of the fulfilment of women’s basic needs and ranges from deep-rooted problems such as domestic abuse to seemingly more frivolous matters such as the policing of women’s clothing and their “image” (Delmar 28). The policing of women’s activities has a longstanding past beyond the use of the body and domestic space. In terms of writing, the evolution of women’s rights follows a similar trajectory. American feminist academic Elaine Showalter claims that inhibitions among female writers are tackled via three phases of female tradition in A Literature of Their Own namely the feminine, feminist, and female phases. During the feminine phase of the 1800s women could not publish as themselves as no one would read their work and writing was dominated by men. When they could write publicly, they were only allowed to discuss topics confined to feminine experiences dictated by social expectations. In order to gain intellectual regard and counter gender discrimination, women during this period began publishing with monikers. This proved successful with the Bronte sisters who initially presented as Action, Currer and Ellis Bell. Even Mary Shelley, who is credited with founding the field of science fiction, published her novel Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus in 1818 anonymously to escape the blight attached to women’s writing at the time. The tactic of anonymity and moniker use extended for the next few centuries when Nelle Harper Lee authored To Kill A Mockingbird under the name Harper Lee. Within the heavily white and male-dominated genres of science fiction and fiction, it was doubly necessary for women to publish with disguised identities. American 1960s sci-fi author, Alice B. Sheldon used the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. for similar reasons. In Asimov’s Science

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Fiction, she indicates that “a male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation” (qtd in Crockett, par. 21). More recently published sci-fi/fantasy writer J. K. Rowling had to present a moniker which appeared male to appeal to a young male readership. These instances evidence that though female writers have made important inputs into the genre, they remain disadvantaged among readership because of their gender, necessitating feminist science fiction. C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett also successfully concealed their identity as women during the 1960s, the peak of pulp sci-fi. According to Lefanu, acceptance was obtained by women in science fiction, solely by bearing the disguise of a “female man” or to becoming “one of the boys” (Location 92). As a result, “women-identified women as writers and readers” were unheard of for much of the twentieth century (Location 92). Fortunately, ideals in sci-fi have developed such that independence and individualistic thought on the female experience have become more valuable. As a result, the voices of female writers and their viewpoints are more often validated without inhibitions of gender, race, or background. These sci-fi female writers include Susan Wood, Tanarive Due, Nnedi Okorafor, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Madeline L’Engle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Octavia Butler, Connie Willis, Nisi Shawl, and others whose work advocates the liberties of all women and perhaps in the future there will be a realisation of bell hooks’ dream in Feminist Theory from Margin to Center: guaranteeing “the end of all oppression” (hooks 42). Considering feminism’s extensive lineage, when applied broadly it undermines the inclusivity that it claims to champion. Consistently, women of color and other intersections have claimed that feminism predominantly represents the interests of white, middle-class woman notwithstanding the several waves of evolution over the years and other variations such as radical feminism. As a result, other branches such as Black feminism, postcolonial feminism and womanism have developed to articulate the particular concerns of women who are not white. In view of Lord’s underrepresented position as a Black, West Indian female science fiction writer talking about Black, West Indian female experiences, I have chosen to undergird the discussion with an intersection of methods. While frameworks for feminism in the Caribbean are still developing, there are a number of feminists contributing to the discourse and movements such as the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action, as well as the Caribbean Women’s movement making strides in distinguishing concerns of women regionally from other forms of feminism. Feminism in the Caribbean according to scholar Rawwida Baksh-Soodeen pivots on Caribbean women’s relationship with notions of race, class, nation, and an imperialist past (50). She goes on to point out that subjects such as

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matrifocality, Afrocentricity and violence against women are central to how these women construct identity and navigate challenges. These are subjects I broach in Karen Lord’s work as she approaches them plainly in her novels. Baksh-Soodeen also posits that Caribbean feminism is developing into a contemporary movement but it is framed within the context of international feminisms and a post-independence reality (57). Similarly, Carole Boyce Davies notes that the Caribbean feminist movement is “strengthened by contact with outside feminism” (15). As a result of the undeniable influence of outside feminisms, the discussion feature insights from postmodern feminism, postcolonial and Black feminism which I see as the closest kin to Caribbean feminism. Still, the voices which articulate the lens through which I read Lord’s work are primarily regional ones. This chapter then features Lord’s use of reverse defamiliarization in the following ways: the occupation of female space within the space opera and dystopian subgenres using The Best of All Possible Worlds and the occasional reference to the sequel The Galaxy Game.

OCCUPYING FEMALE SPACE WITHIN SPACE OPERA SUBGENRE IN KAREN LORD’S NOVELS George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise is probably the most popularly recognized example of the space opera. Gene Roddenbury’s Star Trek’s mammoth success highlights similar aspects between the two universes which make them identifiable within the subgenre. It is, according to sci-fi critic Gary Westfahl, “the most common, and least respected form of science fiction” (qtd. in James and Mendlesohn 197). Its influence is so far reaching that many use space opera and science fiction interchangeably. This type of conflation has resulted in its vilification among scholars who describe it as “lacking merit and damaging the reputation of sf” (197). The term space opera was coined in 1941 by Wilson Tucker, an American science fiction writer whose time travel novel The Year of the Quiet Sun was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards. Space operas were inspired by soap operas, the daytime serials viewed by housewives and sponsored by soap-powder companies. The name was then generalized to any “corny, domestic drama” while Westerns became “horse operas” (Stableford, par. 1). Karen Lord’s work is arguably space opera because of the grand adventures and the interplanetary travel context. However, she subverts the popular subgenre by replacing the typical, All-American male, white protagonist with a spunky female. This is a useful change within a sci-fi variant often described as a “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn spaceship yarn” (qtd. in James and Mendlesohn 197). Lord’s adjustments derails the “formulaic plots and

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mediocrity” (197) even if the work retains some quintessential corniness and epic style. She narrates the stories with a deft command of scientific patter but articulates science on strictly female terms throughout. Adventure is a mainstay of the space opera genre along with interstellar conflict. Much like Captain Kirk’s Enterprise journeys through the universe, Lord’s Delarua sets off on several adventures with a team of researchers and the Sadiri who remain in search of a suitable home from the Ta’Sadiri, to the Kir’tashg Islands to the Faerie Queen’s realm, among others. In space operas there is usually one or several intergalactic conflicts. For example, the main conflict in Lucas’ Star Wars occurs in an interplanetary realm with the use of technologically advanced weaponry in the form of laser guns and light sabers. The Galactic Empire seeks to oppress the universe and is successful without opposition except for the efforts of a small rebellion. In Lord’s novels, the main conflict is localized in contrast to the intergalactic setting of Star Wars as the Sadiri seek refuge, reeling from the destruction of their planet by the Ainya. There is serious unrest between the two races emphasized in the first novel. There comes some division in how Lord articulates adventure when compared to typical space operas, she does so with tactics frequently associated with women. For instance, author and software engineer Eric Raymond, in his review of the space opera, opines that good space operas evoke “heroism, adventure, villainy, courage, adversity, betrayal, and triumph; the worst are over-predictable and mindlessly violent” (Raymond, par. 7). One can argue that Star Wars is an example of this as Hans Solo’s attire resembles that which sheriffs don in Horse Operas and his obstinate nature is fitting for a genre known for shoot-outs and bravado. There are several iconic duels with laser guns and light sabres such as the climactic point between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Vader, Luke’s father and a wayward Jedi who becomes a Sith is undeterred by bloodshed as is the Palpatine Empire which perpetuates the war in the franchise. On the other hand, while Zhinuvian cartels pose an imminent threat to the other people groups because they steal dangerous, advanced technology during Rafi’s Wallrunning adventures, diplomacy is used to resolve intergalactic issues. Having emerged from a set of planets which is already “loosely represented” (The Galaxy Game 257), except for Zhinu A, the small Zhinuvian populace feels pressured to resort to tactics and tricks to succeed. Their swindling, chaos and looming threat of advanced weapons culminate in an issue of pandemic proportions. Yet, instead of a response using warfare, the issue is prioritized at a broad forum responsible for handling matters which could have an interplanetary impact called a Galactic Consortium. This meeting, along with several previous “meetings with representatives of global, interplanetary and galactic bodies” (The Best of All Possible Worlds 236),

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represents an effective alternative means of interplanetary conflict resolution. Instead of warfare or hand-to-hand combat, issues are settled by diplomacy. This is not a greatly emphasized trait of space opera to handle imperialism and war, but when such methods are utilized in the Star Wars franchise, for example, they are venerated in female characters like Princess Leia and her mother Padme. In Best of All Possible Worlds, there is a brief fight scene during an opera that appears “mindlessly violent” or excessive and unnecessary. However, the commentary it offers on the subgenre refutes any claims of purposelessness entirely. Lord entitles the chapter in which it transpires: “ridi pagliaccio” or “Laugh, Clown” in Italian, also alluding to Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera Pagliacci. The opera comments on the space opera genre and literature generally. Readership, like the audience at the opera, observes the story for entertainment when there is a more crucial allusion to significant issues plaguing society. Such a contrast is evident in the gravity of an actor’s pending murder (144), suspended within the hilarity of an entertaining opera setting. Delarua’s intervention at the knife attack represents more than the sharpening of her telepathic abilities. Her vigilance highlights the unpredictable turn that the neo-opera was about to take. She states: “I didn’t expect anyone to take my yelling seriously” (149). Similarly, the merit of space opera commentary is historically reduced to blanket terms such as “hack science fiction” (Seed 12) based on the observation that Space Opera was repetitive, predictable, and devoid of resonance necessary for worthwhile study. Regardless, as illustrated, the insight exhibited in Lord’s work support the meaningfulness and potential of the space opera. Violence is not included for bravado but for rationalized purposes while adding suspense to the plot. As with most science fiction genres, aliens feature ubiquitously in space opera. Lord’s articulation of alien presence is particularly interesting because she presents future descendants of Black, West Indian people with the experiences of a Caribbean community. While aliens are commonly described as “sentient extraterrestrial beings” (Killheffer, par.1), Professor David Seed additionally posits that aliens refer to “familiar human groups, animal species, or machines” (27) if otherness and differences are pinpointed. Further, Seed claims that reading aliens in terms of feminism and race preceded reading them as otherworldly. The protagonist of the two social science novels, Grace Delarua is figured at the intersection of these two concepts. Delarua, a product of the mixed ancestry on Cygnus Beta, exemplifies another frequent trope in seminal West Indian fiction, namely, hybrid identities. While contact between two alien races usually results in conflict, hybrid identities are not new to science fiction novels in terms of the treatment of aliens. One such example is in Octavia Butler’s novel Lilith’s Brood where the alien race, the oonkalai, interbreed with humans. Another is in The Best

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of all Possible Worlds where the Sadiri hopes to procreate with Ta’Sadiri. When there is an interaction among these species, human and alien, bonds and understanding bring them together in kinship which discards the bipolar construct that there must either be one or the other. While Delarua’s mixed ancestry appears to be a disadvantage at first, her “impure” blood becomes the source of her power as she accesses various unknown abilities from her gene pool. This is an inspiring way to think about the Caribbean mixed identity and interrogate the special characteristics which have been inherited by virtue of regional identity. In tandem with racial identification, Lord also constructs the female self as alien within the novel universe in a way that brings attention to feminist concerns. Within the overlapping areas of identity namely racial, sexual, gender, and postcolonial many experiences “stereotyping, objectification, infringements of human rights” or gender or sexuality-based oppression (Day, par. 4). These are underscored by Lord, for example, objectification is highlighted in the selection process of the ideal woman by the Sadiri male in Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds because they choose wives based on physical traits valued in their culture and downplay the value of individualism. Dllenahkh announces that in order to repopulate the Sadiri, “the Science Council of New Sadira will as a priority select for a greater number of females to be born as soon as possible. Given our lifespan it is possible that they may be our future wives” (17) to resolve the dilemma of their male surplus. Delarua identifies his objectification of women by protesting “how distressing and strange, to spend decades on some kind of genetic backroom shelf waiting one’s turn to clinically contribute to the expansion of the species!” (17). This alludes to various instances relating to the region where women feel objectified, domestic abuse, for example, a key focus of Caribbean feminism involves treating women like possessions without rights and liberties. They are treated as de Beauvoir’s second sex, valued only for partnership and procreation. In spite of the disheartening issues which arise from investigating the female as alien, Lord also depicts positive alien images. One of the most striking ones is her expression of the quintessentially alien trait intelligence as a particularly female characteristic. Aliens are frequently portrayed as “creatures from other worlds endowed with reason, consciousness, thought, intelligence” (Killheffer, par. 1). They are expectedly “capable of thinking” and “purposeful activity” (“Extraterrestrial Intelligence”). Thus in a real-world context there is space funding allocated to discovering extra-terrestrial life before they discover Earth upon the assumption that other lifeforms are more intelligent than humans and must be dealt with swiftly. Wells speculates in his novel The War of the Worlds that there are brilliant men on Mars “across the gulf of space” with “minds that are to our minds as ours to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” (1). In Ender’s

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Game Scott-Card’s Colonel Graff assumes that the Buggers intend to destroy the Earth because “they can’t stand the thought of other intelligent life in the universe . . . they don’t think we are intelligent life” (255). On the other hand in the West Indian context of Lord’s work, the aliens are depicted as protagonists instead of savage outsiders and the Sadira dominate in the category of alien intelligence. They belong to a subcategory of “human beings . . . God created” and “grew to revere and develop the powers of the mind” (5). Their abilities become so advanced that they use their psionic abilities to pioneer mindships. Further, the utility of the mind is also in the stressed telekinetic abilities of some Cygnian descendants. Dllenahkh informs Delarua that the Sadiri came to Cygnus Beta because “here are strong psionic and proto-psionic strains in your ancestry” (15) which is manifested in the ability of her brother-in-law to manipulate her emotions and thoughts as well as her sister’s. Rafi shows the same gifting in The Galaxy Game where he is forced to attend a psi-school. There his brain is crudely analysed, and his psionic ability becomes helpful while playing Wall Running, a game paramount to the female-driven society of the novel. His aunt Grace tries to handle her own newly discovered psionic ability throughout The Best of All Possible Worlds. Dllenahkh later explains to her as she becomes more practiced in her strengths that “telekinesis is a natural consequence of intensive psionic development” (112). Psionic ability is denoted as the skill to use the mind in order to communicate mentally with others or perform preternatural functions. An emphasis on the psionic suggests that intelligence is more than recollection of facts and focused objectivity and that the mind is capable of doing the improbable via virtues more frequently allotted to female identities namely empathy and communication. It is rooted conceptually in the field of psychology commonly perceived as a more feminine discipline within the soft sciences when measured against hard sciences. This striking contrast is depicted throughout Lord’s social science novels. For instance, the stoic, clinical nature of Sadiri’s intelligence conditions Dllenahk uses his psionic abilities to defend and protect his people, he is less in touch with emotional expressions of love such as kissing which he finds “unhygienic” (212), and using affective phrases like “I love you” (285). Meanwhile, Delarua excels simultaneously in the affective as a result of the feminine Ntshune part of her ancestry and eventually with the communicative power of her thoughts. The adventure and romance components promoted by Space Opera also indicate some of Tucker’s pre-requisites for the sub-genre forming the yarnlike adventure story portion of the phrase. Space operas are consequently referred to as “space-adventure stories which have a calculatedly romantic element” (Stableford, par. 1). The final “romantic element” stipulated in the initial definition of a space opera can be found in the relationship which

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blossoms between Dllenahkh and Delarua. This union is constructed in a calculated fashion in that it escalates similarly to the relationship between Han Solo and Princess Leia in the Star Wars series. At first, there is an acknowledgment of attractiveness followed by stiff and sharp interaction between the two parties and then a forced confession of attraction. Delarua’s free, relaxed nature is like Solo’s and Dllenahkh’s proud and regal demeanor is evident in Leia’s deportment. The contrast in personalities breeds conflicts followed by chemistry. Both storylines remain true to the “corny, domestic drama” (“Space Opera”) oft associated with the genre. The romances in both stories do reflect a panache of chick fiction, happily-ever-after, fairy tale, and romantic comedy cliché. Grace recognizes this when she describes their relationship with the phrases “superhero catches falling girl. Rick says goodbye to Ilsa” (210) alluding to Superman and the romantic drama Casablanca. This is further corroborated by the fact that Dllenahkh has been watching these films and developing ideas about typical Cygnian romance. Dllenahkh begins then to find value in developing social and emotional intelligence. Unsurprisingly, the soft science features associated with the female self pervades most of Lord’s novels. Her background as a researcher is evident in the anthropological detail of the creationist origin mythos associated with the different post-human races of The Best of All Possible Worlds. Like standard soft sci-fi, the work is “character-driven, with emphasis on social change, personal psychology and interactions” (Allen, par.13) in contrast to hard science fiction “scientific realism” (Allen, par. 7) is highly prioritized. Conventional hard sci-fi novels like Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves revolve around framing a legitimate context for the existence of the impossible isotope plutonium. After conducting several experiments and obtaining an unusual result with the plutonium behaving like tungsten, the conclusion must be that “if you made a measurement, that’s it. Don’t argue with facts” (Asimov 7). In hard sf, the improbable is made possible and basic details can be skipped over so long as “the basic explanation is correct given what’s been established so far” (“Mohs Scale of Scale of Science Fiction Hardness”). Alternatively, Lord’s work is less inhibited by dominant physical laws and permits more possibilities. While there are several instances in the jargon of a science-based background the work focuses intently on interrogating sociological and psychological issues. The commitment to evoking emotional intelligence evident in Lord’s work is reminiscent of the subversive use of “sentiment” in feminist science fiction. Historically, female sci-fi writers faced the drawback that their work would be disrespected for reflecting dangerous “sentiment.” Sentiment refers to the expectation that female writing would lean heavily on the emotional such that it disrupts objectivity which is paramount in quintessential sci-fi. Scottish academic and sci-fi writer Sarah Lefanu points out in her 1988

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nonfiction work Chinks in the World Machine that “traditionally feminine values” (Location 1557) oppose science fiction norms and run the risk of causing SF to “slip too much sentiment and become ghettoised precisely as ‘women’s SF’” (Location 1557). This reinforces the perspective that sentiment introduces subjectivity to SF and should be dismissed in favor of more meaningful objectivity. Nevertheless, with fiction, subjectivity is inevitable. Lefanu states that writers like Doris Lessing made a significant mark in SF as an “authoritarian sentimentalist” (Location 1565) because of her focus on feminine social expectations such as perfect marriages and what Lefanu determines to be typically feminine signs like assigning feeling and intuition to animals such as horses. Likewise, the use of psionic abilities to communicate in Lord’s work and to pick up on and dissect complex emotions is emphasised as a useful gift instead of an inhibition. This is a similar evocation to the divine feminine, a necessary complement to the scientific to achieve complete knowledge. Sentiment is also a significant component in social science fiction, a genre often employed by female writers. Despite its marginalization, Philosophy Professor Lorraine Code reminds us of its importance. She advocates that it is “dangerous to ignore questions about subjectivity in the name of objectivity” (Alcoff and Potter 27). Subjectivity is made up of individual differences, convictions, volition, and other factors which influence behavior. Many social science novels show that these internal factors in tandem with measured behavioural observations by scientific method assist in detailed studies of societies and cultures. Similar to sentiment is the use of a “woman’s sentence” as a form of feminist resistance in literary text. Some wrote about traditionally feminine subjects, but others desired to challenge the status quo. According to Lefanu, American writer and literary critic, Mary Ellmann suggests that “contemporary women writers” should be looked at “in terms of their relationship to authority and power, suggesting that their best writing comes from an anti-authoritarian position” (Location 1450). Virginia Woolf understood that in the nineteenth-century British context, women were still expected to be silent. As a result, she created the concept of a “women’s sentence.” Ellmann offers a revision of Virginia Woolf’s sentence by adding specifics. Women could write using the characteristics they have been given, specifically “rashness, modesty, and irony” from a position on the “sidelines” (Location 1460) while simultaneously rejecting the “cloak of male authority” (Location 1461). The irony is usually an element in stories about matriarchal societies and writers like Ursula LeGuin in the novels Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed comment on gender inequalities without even using female characters. The use of the woman’s sentence is evident in Delarua’s positioning as a spokesperson and defender of women throughout the novel when

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faced with sexism and discrimination. This attitude is also transmitted to the matrifocality of the sequel The Galaxy Game. Lord’s articulation of the spaceship signifies a fundamental aspect of the space opera subgenre. According to Seed, spaceships remain “one of the key icons of sf” (15). On the surface, the mindship is a necessary implement in building the typical space adventure story. There is the evocation of nautical imagery as inspired by Jules Verne’s prototypes such as the Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea entirely powered by electricity, constructed with iron, and seen by Captain Nemo as a “battery” (Crisafulli). His fascination with “emerging technology” (Crisafulli), led to the transference of images such as “a US nuclear submarine, cruising aimlessly around the Pacific” (quoted in James and Mendlesohn 165) to the space guns in From the Earth to the Moon and the space ships later in George Melies’s A Trip to the Moon. These fictional visions have manifested themselves in the realworld space context where Verne’s Space Gun became a prototype for the rockets now used by NASA for space exploration by astronauts. In fact, his scientific assertions were so precise that “he foresaw that there would be three astronauts, a Florida launching pad and his guess for the weight and cost of the vessel was off by a tiny margin.” At the point during which Verne wrote, Westfahl notes that the distance between the earth and the moon was a space for “journey through uncharted realms” (quoted in James and Mendlesohn 197) using the space gun the Columbiad. He is not the only novelist who has contributed meaningfully to the scientific investigation of spacecraft. Apollo 11’s moon landing “made it no longer possible to ignore science in the narratives of space exploration” (Seed 20) demonstrating again the prophetic influence of fiction on science. NASA now daily utilizes SF material in its Space Technology educational facility and hosted a debate on “terraforming Mars” which included the input of famous British Sri Lankan sci-fi novelist and undersea explorer Arthur C. Clarke. Perhaps it is for these crucial opportunities, that hard sci-fi advocates remain adamant that hard sci-fi is the only genuine sci-fi and make rigorous efforts to synthesize “narratives with known scientific advances” (21) simultaneously functioning as authors and scientists. Now that space travel has become possible, more recent space operas represent travel across greater distances. For example, the necessity for “nearby spaceports, creating possibilities of departures to or arrivals from other worlds” (James and Mendlesohn 197) emphasised by Westfahl, is displayed in the grandeur of George Lucas’s Death Star. In the Star Wars universe, this is a large, military battle station constructed for the Empire’s use. ScottCard’s Ender’s Game sends a ship into space by the name of Battle School which is “for training future starship captains and commodores of flotillas and admirals of the fleet” (20). The ships they hope to navigate are specifically

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used as war vessels to terminate their alien enemy and similar ships are used to transport the children “from world to world” (Ender’s Game 323). The articulation of feminized intelligence extends to Lord’s construction of the mindship which is the key form of space and time travel in the novel. By definition it meets the standards of a typical spaceship: A mindship can travel in space and time. For most interstellar journeys, a pilot plots a short cut through the unseen dimensions of space-time in order to travel swiftly between distant points in the visible dimensions. It is also possible to plot a course which makes use of a second dimension of time, but it is a rare and still-experimental practice which is only done far from the usual shipping routes as our scientists continue to assess and document the effects. (The Best of All Worlds 222)

Still, there is an actual relationship between the mindship and its pilot, evoking an emotional bond typically associated with the feminine quality of empathy. The mindship is more than mechanics, it is very much a living thing with feelings. Before mindships can land at docking stations in a particular orbit, passengers are sedated particularly for long journeys (280). They travel as if in an ecosystem rather than a machine. Like Verne’s submarine it runs with electricity but like an organism is propelled by strong tendrils (Galaxy Game 121). The ship responds to psi ability when bonded to a pilot instead of prompts and commands (typically the pilot is Sadiri). Instead of a mere machine comprised of parts, “mindships are not a single organism but a colony” (Galaxy Game 197). They have their own “nerves” (123) and are capable of “spawning” and “licks” (123). The connection which exists between the ship and pilot is as between two living things. In contrast to conventional user interfaces, like Siri and spaceship portrayals, there is interdependency and coexistence between two forms of intelligent life. This portrayal of spacecraft is especially significant considering the masculine ideas which dominate science and technology within sci-fi, it feminizes the space both literally by providing a model for female sci-fi ideas but also by equating the idea of space to female attributes. Importantly, the mindship is exhibited equally as an implement of escape for Delarua and Dllenahkh within a subgenre that typically uses spaceships for the escape of men and captivity of women. One of the main functions of a spaceship as indicated by literature is that of escape. Seed calls the spaceship a tool “promising freedom and escape” (15) and writer Gwyneth Jones calls it “an inevitable symbol of energy and escape” (James and Mendlesohn 163). The 2009 apocalyptic sci-fi film 2012 concludes with an escape from the crumbling planet Earth on spaceships. According to Seed, E. E. “Doc” Smith’s 1928 space opera novel The Skylark from Space, is a good example

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of using spaceships for escape in the sci-fi novel form. The protagonist Richard Seaton pursues his archenemy in order to rescue his girlfriend Dorothy and his spaceship is used for their escape (14). Seed describes the adventures which follow as having used “Burroughs’ formula of captivity and escape” (14) which refers to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ repetitive motif in the novel A Princess of Mars where the protagonist John tries to get away from Martians and rescue Princess Dejah from danger. More recently there are more empowering portrayals of female autonomy using the escape trope. We witness Rey escaping in a spaceship in The Last Jedi and Mar-Vell provides escape for the war-ravaged skrulls on a spaceship in Captain Marvel. There are specific implications of the escape trope from an Afrocentric, West Indian perspective. While writers like Butler revisit historical events during the enslavement of Africans through time travel, Karen Lord revisits them through a rewriting of the transatlantic slave trade in the form of space opera/planetary romance. It is addressed similarly to dystopian fiction in order to convey the severity of history and the longstanding effects. Novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and George Orwell’s 1984 present a stratification in which the societies are inflexibly ruled by dictatorship. Lord’s novel, instead, portrays a “plot of a people rebuilding their lives after their world has been destroyed” (Edison 1270). The characters do not live under dictatorial rule but have mobility in space to re-establish their livelihoods. It is therefore more precise to say that Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds, possesses dystopian attributes instead of labelling it dystopian fiction. Dystopian fiction tends to convey a world falling apart. Lord’s novel portrays a world that has already fallen apart and a difficult migratory process that follows. Consequently, there is irony in the name The Best of All Possible Worlds. Although the title of the novel appears utopian, it is reminiscent of German Gottfired Leibniz’s theodicy. Leibniz “set down his ideas on divine justice, particularly on the problem of evil, arguing that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds that God could have created” (“Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz”). He advocates with optimism that everything occurs for the best, however, the conception of a “tumbled world” (Lord 7) is far from reassuring. Although in dystopian fiction freedom of speech and thought is generally prohibited, the characters in The Best of All Possible Worlds, specifically the Sadiri, adhere to regulated behaviour out of respect for and the desire to have preservation of their customs. They regard themselves as “the epitome of morality and tradition” and “savants” (Lord 9). The Sadiri believe that they are the pinnacle of human civilization and see Delarua’s home planet Cygnus Beta as “a galactic hinterland” (8). They also have no immediate appreciation for the lands they consequently encounter. Despite, their homelessness and displacement, the Sadiri’s autonomy in their situation exempts them from the

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dystopian features of dwelling “in a dehumanised state” and having a “fear of the outside world” (Shinas, par. 3). Their experience after the destruction of Sadira by the Ainya is better summed up by a category of dystopia called Disaster fiction. In this subgenre, catastrophe occurs whether by natural means or by the intervention of others. Although they can freely get around, the Sadiri do experience what sci-fi critic Rob Latham refers to as “the sense of helplessness—geographic, economic, military, and so on—reinforced by catastrophe scenarios” (387) as they cannot ever return home. Lord compares the expulsion, devastation, and attempted genocide to the holocaust, where the Sadiri are especially targeted and most of them perish in the tragedy. Like the surviving Jews running from the cataclysm caused by the Nazis, the escaped Sadiri find liberty in other lands but escape with little of their heritage and no way of return. The events of the novel fittingly parallel what is known as Post-Holocaust. PostHolocaust involves stories set in the aftermath of catastrophe, whether the upheaval is a natural Disaster or a human or Alien-caused Holocaust. In the longer term, as generations pass and memories of the actual catastrophe fade and blur, post-holocaust settings merge almost seamlessly into the gentler, often rustically stable society. (Nicholls, par. 1)

Similarly, after the holocaust of Sadira, the remaining people set about dealing with the aftermath by consulting with the Interplanetary Council and seeking a new planet, eventually New Sadira. More details on rebuilding occur in The Galaxy Game as a subplot. The process of stability is a gruelling one. The Sadiri struggle initially to adapt their way of life to their new circumstances. Dllenahkh points to a surplus of men resulting in “terrible incidents” where there are “men fighting over women, assaulting women, harming themselves even threatening mass suicide” (285). Even with the prospect of New Sadira the “society is breaking down” (Lord 285) before it begins to settle. Like in most dystopias, the destruction which takes place within this futuristic setting poses implications for our own society. For example, writer Robert Edison Sandiford gives another historical reading on the events of the Sadira holocaust. He posits that the destruction and forced relocation of the Sadiri is an analogy for the mass movement initiated by the transatlantic slave trade (1270). He suggests that it alludes to how the Africans were involuntarily and traumatically removed from their home and then made to survive in a new antagonistic environment. Dystopias customarily accentuate the possible consequences of our current actions on the future. The annihilation of the Sadiri reflects on and represents the loss of culture and the need to re-establish it via acculturation and compromise for the sake of survival.

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As a result, the backward time travel attempts in the novel hold a different significance than average. While typical Alternative Histories involve traveling back in time for practical and for reasons of preservation the attempts in The Best of All Possible Worlds are driven by deeply emotional ties to one’s people reminiscent of Black West Indians (and the diaspora) attempting to resolve the pain of the middle passage. In her works, Lord’s time travel is not conducted along cyclical routes. Duncan posits that although time travel is the most common sf mechanism for an Alternate History, parallel universes are sometimes employed (qtd. in James and Mendlesohn 213). According to Science Fiction Encyclopedia, a parallel world is another universe situated “alongside” our own, displaced from it along a spatial fourth Dimension (parallel worlds are often referred to in sf as “other dimensions”). Although whole universes may lie parallel in this sense, most stories focus on parallel Earths (“Parallel Worlds”).

Multiple parallel universes are referred to as a Multiverse. The idea based on Quantum Physics was conceptualized by American physicist Hugh Everett. I argue that Karen Lord’s novel uses similar features to an Alternate History by employing the device of the Parallel Universe in two different ways. First, Lord touches on both Alternate History methods, namely time travel and parallel universes, in a conversation between Dllenahkh and Delarua. Delarua is informed that “a mindship can travel in space and time” (Lord 222). The mindships by a pilot’s command can “short cut through unseen dimensions of space-time in order to travel swiftly between distant points in the visible dimensions” (222). This use of shortcuts across dimensions is also widely-known in science fiction as going through wormholes. Unlike Butler, Lord creates a form of instrumentation for journeying across space and time in the form of the mindship in keeping with conventional time travel tales. Although the Sadiri possessed the technology to take trips to the past, they have never been able to reach their own past. Instead, Naraldi, the only pilot to attempt travel to the past, moves from the timeline of the novel (T1) to parallel timelines (T2). Within these timelines, he is able to travel to their pasts and futures, but according to Dllenahkh, never his own (223). Like many time travel stories, Naraldi’s purpose for attempting to time travel backward was to change history. The Sadiri wish to go back and prevent Sadira from being destroyed. Yet, there was speculation that if he was successful, a separate timeline where the Sadiri survived would be created instead of adjusting his current timeline. Thus, there appears to be a crossover between the existent parallel universes and travelling through time. Travelling back through time may be travelling to another dimension instead of back through a linear passage, iterating a notion of quantum physics that

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time folds on itself instead of running in a linear fashion. This perception makes both methods of facilitating Alternate History inseparable, therefore to go back in time can mean going to a different dimension. This is particularly so if Novikov’s principle of self-consistency cannot apply. This principle states that any changes to the past would be impossible because a paradoxical future would result in inconsistency. As a result, in a novel like Kindred the past remains in the same timeline as the future is sustained. On the other hand, in returning to the past, Naraldi was never successful in negating the destruction of Sadira. Similarly, Afrofuturists are aware that they have no ability to go back to the past and change it, they must find a way to live with it and build the future despite the present. The limitations Lord attaches to time travel also allude to the pervasive historicity of imperial control on our present day, postcolonial societies. While she does not employ the cyclical route of time travel, the cycle emerges in the repeated pain Neraldi experiences with each failed attempt. Equally, each uncovering of Caribbean history in relation to the Atlantic repeats the inevitable pain associated with it; however, like Naraldi’s journeys, it is necessary for obtaining lessons for cultural knowledge expansion and effectively approaching the future. The world Lord creates in this novel presents another method of rewriting history through a parallel universe. The events of The Best of All Possible Worlds, can be used to comment on the slave trade and its repercussions. The destruction of the Sadiri’s home planet and the resulting displacement, homesickness and futile efforts to reassemble a lost culture is interpreted by one critic as a “Caribbean analogy” (Sandiford 1270). Like slavery, the wounds are irreparable as the Sadiri are forced to relocate (as a result of the destruction of their home) to a “hostile environment” (178). They were not kidnapped, but like the slaves, are forcibly displaced from their homes. The Sadiri have very distinctive practices and desire to retain them. Their refusal to compromise makes it challenging to live alongside the Ta’Sadiri, their distant family. The Ta’Sadiri with whom they hope to identify, have their own specific ways of living which are to a degree incompatible with the proud, intelligent, and rigid Sadiri. Sandiford expresses that there is a parallel between the Sadiri experience and the African diaspora where there lies a “hope of finding an embrace, a lapsed connection with distant cousins” (1271). In Lord’s universe, each group of human civilization has evolved into new, separate populations and societies on different planets. Asante’s optimism about African descendants is represented here. Although they all come from different planets, they recognize their ancestral connections. Likewise, although the African diaspora is made up of several, separate people groups with different cultural experiences, they all have common ancestry and therefore sensibility which links them. Asante expresses that “the Afrocentrist

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does not question the fact that there is a collective sense of Africanity revealed in the common experiences of the African world” (9). This sense of commonality helps to unite people of African background. Similarly, a sense of commonality helps the Sadiri to acculturate. In The Best of All Possible Worlds, Dllenahkh tells Delarua that they sought out Cygnus Beta because of the similarities/ancestry between Cygnians and Sadiri (15). One of the strongest evidences of this effective merge is represented in Dllenahkh willingness to put aside sociological differences in order to fall in love with and marry Delarua. Acculturation is essential to Caribbean history where a majority of African descendants have merged cultures with European, Amerindian, and Asian practices to form a melting pot. Cygnus Beta, a civilization made up of displaced people, is symbolic of the Caribbean’s multicultural existence. When the Sadiri arrive on Cygnus Beta, they emerge at a port, reminiscent of the displaced slaves who were forcibly removed from their homeland and relocated to a foreign place. Upon their arrival, Delarua observes that “a lot of things had been broken past repair and sometimes it makes more sense to create something new” (8). The Sadiri could not undo the destruction to their home and had to learn to resettle effectively. Likewise, the Africans of old could not undo their traumatic past and were forced into a colonial society where they learned to survive. The parallel can also be applied to Afrofuturism mission. While they cannot repair the atrocities of slavery, they can create new stories to rewrite the past in order to write the future. Lord’s insertions of Caribbean history within the text are numerous. The racial composition of the people groups are similar as Delarua describes them as looking “almost Cygnian—eyes, hair, and skin all somewhere on the spectrum of brown” (8). This is parallel with Afro-West Indians who, as a result of the process of creolization (that is mixtures between people of different races), have become people on a spectrum of brown. Lord mentions that in creating her characters, she wanted to represent the world around her with people she was used to seeing: a majority of brown people. There are other allusions to Afrocentric history specific to the Caribbean when Lord references slavery (174) in the form of child trafficking within the Kir’tahsg islands in The Best of All Possible Worlds. Although this instance can refer to the current global problem of human trafficking, it also highlights the inhumane treatment and ownership of human bodies in the Caribbean more than 200 years ago. Also, Delarua calls the islands the “genetic and cultural equivalent of a vacuumsealed flask” (160) which could be read as a historical reference to the untouched Antilles, where the Amerindians lived, before the arrival of colonialists. With the discovery of the New World, some of the natives, like the trafficked of the Kir’tahsg islands, were forcibly transported from their homes to England for exhibition. The resulting indignation

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and helplessness shared by Delarua are reminiscent of the response of those in the diaspora when confronted with the indignities and atrocities of transatlantic slavery. Still, Lord points out that the island’s name comes from an old Cygnian word meaning “invincible” (161). Invincible points to the ruggedness of the Kir’tahsg landscape but also to the strength and resilience of the people. The rugged terrain is reminiscent of many of the Caribbean islands such as St. Vincent and Dominica where Carib presences remain, and the hilly topography is determined by the volcanic makeup of the islands. Concerning Lord’s work, I would like to revisit a previous assertion that time travel may be more than just a journey along a linear set of occurrences. If time can be seen as something that folds on itself instead of running in a linear stream, then time travel can be interpreted as moving from one fold or dimension to another. Time travel can accommodate the component of spatial travel. This movement across space can occur in dimensions of the mental, physical, spiritual, etcetera. Science fiction theorist Mark Rose notes that time in these fictions is projected spatially either as a tangible series of strata or as a measurable distance between planets. This transformation is possible because we normally conceive time as a medium analogous to space, freely substituting the one for the other, as when we say we have not seen someone in a “long time” or when we speak of one place as being “ten minutes away” from another. Our metaphors for time are spatial, just as our metaphors for space are temporal. Time and space are complementary hemispheres in a single, closed conceptual system. Thus, time can be freely substituted for space in the production of science-fiction stories. (Rose 100)

Likewise, Lord’s mindships are created to travel through both space and time, separately and simultaneously. As a result of the latter, there are occurrences such as Naraldi aging “fifty years in only a few months” in The Best of All Possible Worlds (Lord 224). In relation to movement across time and space, I think that other observations can be gleaned from The Best of All Possible Worlds. There is a comparison in the allegory of the slave trade in the evolution of culture. In both the novel and the historical instance, culture is transmitted, over time, from a physical to an intangible space. As a very proud people, the Sadiri “carry their village with them” (“Interviewing Karen Lord”). In other words, although their tangible planet is utterly destroyed, they still retain their value system, beliefs, and customs. This aligns with Samuel Delaney’s observation of West Africans transported to the Americas. He notices that although many ethnic groups have suffered forced migration, such as the Jews during the Holocaust, apart from the Africans, “no other group endured such a massive cultural destruction” (191). The Jews managed to salvage artifacts from their homes

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by taking them. Others had been preserved in museums. Although the Sadiri suffered forced migration like the Jews, their separation from tangible items representing their history and culture is more like the Africans. They have not had the opportunity to take anything with them. Delaney’s observation is substantiated by Ghanaian futurist, Kodwo Eshun’s note that the only culture transported across the Atlantic was mental. Everything that could be built, used or erected was left behind. There was an entire erasure of tangible identity and in order to retain anything, one had to rely on memory. Thus, everything that was passed down upon arrival in the Americas came from memory, perhaps reinforcing such an oral culture within the African diaspora. Work like Kamau Brathwaite’s evidences this emphasis on keeping culture alive via mental recollection and reveals that storytelling as an art has become a vital part of African diasporic writing, particularly in the West Indies. Lord’s labelling of the Sadiri’s time/space machines as “Mindships” offers several figurative meanings. The mind is powerful enough to govern a ship and transport its passengers through space and time. Similarly, the mind acts as a time machine via memory, shuttling African culture to the future where African descendants could have access to it as it is passed down from generation to generation. It again acts as a time machine or a portal for these descendants to re-enter their past via their imagination. Much of critics’ disdain and the lowly regard for space opera’s calibre occur because of its affinity for mass production. Still, its base formulaic nature makes its material identifiable for the multitudes. Though scholars find it tiring, its strategies are reused because they are consistently effective. The advantage here is that with each instalment, the multitude of followers expands dramatically providing enough enthusiasm and financial support to continue production. Space operas also tend to outspread into a variety of media forms aside from novels and films. These include comics, toys, television series, cartoons and in the case of Star Wars, it became a matter of “bringing space opera into a new medium, video games” (James and Mendlesohn 205) as well. The potential in Space Opera influence does not end there. A formulaic consistency of a narrative may result in boredom and predictability, but it also enhances the ease with which it can be copied. Westfahl explains that “Star Wars engendered various successors, including inferior imitations such as The Black Hole (1979), Starcrash (1979), Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), and tv series Battlestar Galactica (1978-9) and Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century (1979-81)” (205). Another illustration of this comes from expansions in the form of Japanese Anime such as The Gundam Mobile Suit series which again spins off into American animated film Titan A. E (205). The Gundam franchise lives up to the reputation of Space Opera, progenerating a number of successful on-screen offshoots such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Gundam Wing, Gundam Seed, and Destiny among others, from the eighties up to 2016.

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This excessive reproduction is also apparent in the conversion of books to film such as Scott Card’s Enderverse. Lord’s two novels The Best of All Possible Worlds in tandem with its follow-up Galaxy Game suit the criteria Gary Westfahl describes as “almost any well-received space opera generates sequels” (198). While Lord does not manufacture an endless assembly line, she ends The Galaxy Game on a hopeful note from which another narrative can continue the yarn. Rafi “gazes . . . crying for a place he has never seen” and “wonders, if maybe, someday, in a distant tomorrow, a stranger will hear of his story and cry on his behalf” (321). The lament for the old Sadiri planet runs from the first novel into the second, and perhaps a third if Lord continues, based on this premise. A new problem arises in the second novel which “goes beyond the first wave of stranded Sadiri after the biosphere disaster” to “a second wave of refugees from New Sadiri . . . traumatised by new unexpected crises” (Galaxy Game 16). Sadiri women seek refuge because their scarcity places them in danger and high demand. This was an already established problem becoming an increasingly worse calamity, which is still not resolved upon the conclusion. Therefore, Lord opens an opportunity to continue her extensive inter-related storylines and complex, thorough, sophisticated worldbuilding. Still, there are telling signs of difference in Lord’s work which signify a subversion of the subgenre. The social structure of the planets, peoples and their origins still inhabit much of Lord’s storytelling, although more socioanthropological focus is placed on the Zhinuvians, Ntshune and Punarthai in the second as opposed to the Sadiri and Cygnians (Terrans) of the first. The mass formulaic appeal and world-building remain central in her spec-fic as they do conventionally; however, her recreation of the icons aliens and spaceships and her iteration of the Black Atlantic point Caribbean readers to deeply reflect on our past trauma and present identity.

WORKS CITED Alcoff, Linda, and Elizabeth Potter, eds. Feminist Epistemologies. Routledge, 1993. Allen, Moira, and Marg Gilks, eds. “The Subgenres of Science Fiction.” Writing​-world​ .co​m. Moira Allen, 2003. www​.writing​-world​.com​/sf​/genres​.shtml. Accessed 16 Sept. 2015. Asante, Molefi. An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Resistance. Polity Press, 2007. Asimov, Isaac. The Gods Themselves. Kindle ed., Bantam Books, 1972. Baksh-Soodeen, Rawwida. “Issues of Difference in Contemporary Caribbean Feminism.” Feminist Review, vol. 59, no. 1, June 1998, pp. 74–85. doi: 10.1080/014177898339460.

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Crisafulli, Michael, and Karen Crisafulli. “All by Electricity.” Verne’s Nautilus. Vernian Era, 1997. www​.vernianera​.com​/Nautilus/. Accessed 3 Dec. 2015. “Extraterrestrial intelligence.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, Encyclopædia Britannica, 2015. www​.britannica​.com​/science​/extraterrestrial​-intelligence. Accessed 17 Dec. 2015. “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online.Encyclopædia Britannica, 2015. www​.britannica​.com​/biography/ Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz. Accessed 15 Nov. 2015. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. South End Press, 1984. “Interviewing Karen Lord for Literatura Fantastica RBA.” La Biblioteca De Ilium, 6 Feb. 2013. www​.ilium​.qdony​.net/​?p​=3258. Accessed 2 Sept. 2015. James, Edward and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2003. Killheffer, Robert K J, Brian M Stableford and David Langford. “Aliens.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute et al. Gollancz, 9 Mar. 2019. www​.sf​-encyclopedia​.com​/entry​/aliens. Accessed 10 Sept. 2015. Lefanu, Sarah. In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction. Kindle ed., SilverWood Books, 2012. Lord, Karen. The Best of All Possible Worlds. Kindle ed., Jo Fletcher, 2013. ———. The Galaxy Game. Kindle ed., Jo Fletcher, 2016. Mitchell, Juliette, and Ann Oakley, eds. What is Feminism? Blackwell Publishers, 1986. “Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.” TV Tropes, 2015. www​.tvtropes​.org​/ pmwiki​/pmwiki​.php​/Main​/MohsScaleOfScience Fiction Hardness. Accessed 17 June 2015. Nicholls, Peter, John Clute and David Langford. “Post-Holocaust.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute et al., Gollancz, 31 Aug. 2018. www​.sf​-encyclopedia​.com​/entry​/post​-holocaust. Accessed 30 May 2019. Ratcliff, Clancy. “Postmodern Feminism.” In The Enclyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology,” edited by Eileen Trauth, Information Science Publishing, 2006, pp. 1018–1022. Raymond, Eric. “Review: Space Opera.” Ibiblio​.org​. Armed and Dangerous, 6 Nov. 2014. www​.esr​.ibiblio​.org/​?p​=5852. Accessed 15 Nov. 2015. Rose, Mark. Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction. Harvard UP, 1981. Sandiford, Robert Edison. “The Best of All Possible Words by Karen Lord (review).” Callaloo vol. 37, no. 5, 2014, pp. 1269–1272. Seed, David. Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2011. Shinas, Valerie. “Dystopia: Definition and Characteristics.” Read Write Think. NCTE/IRA, 2006. www​.readwritethink​.org​/files​/resources/ lesson_images/lesson 926/Def​i nit​ionC​hara​cter​istic​s​.pdf. Accessed 18 Apr. 2015. Stableford, Brian M, and David Langford. “Space Opera.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Edited by John Clute et al. Gollancz, 21 May 2019. www​.sf​-encyclopedia​.com​/entry​/space​_opera. Accessed 10 Sept. 2015. Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books, 2013.

Chapter 8

A Retrospective on the Literary Influence of Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey Alison D. Ligon

In 1970 Merle Hodge was recognized as a promising young female writer of color from the Caribbean after she successfully published her first major work of fiction. Crick Crack, Monkey, her debut novel, utilizes a coming-of-age story to examine the residual impact of colonialism on Tee, the book’s young female protagonist, her family and friends. Notably, over five decades after its initial publication, Crick Crack, Monkey, continues to strike rich, resonant chords with audiences around the world. It is an exemplary novel that has rightfully enjoyed critical favor since its publication. Hodge wrote Crick Crack, Monkey with a gifted authorial hand. Through it, she created a transformative space that not only broadened the Caribbean bildungsroman but also made way for the emergence of novels by other Caribbean women writers such as Zee Edgell, Beka Lamb (1982); Michelle Cliff, Abeng (1984); Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (1985); Merle Collins, Angel (1987); and Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). Although these novels will not be considered here, it must be noted that their authors, like Hodge, received resounding and lasting critical acclaim for their novels that explore questions of historical, cultural, social, and political significance from the vantage points of young female protagonists. Even though Charlotte Bruner does not reference any of the previously mentioned novels, she observes, Today’s changing world for men and women everywhere brings recognition that women and men play an active role as agents of social and political change in a new society. Girls do become women. Girlhood is a valid and provocative theme for literature today. Some women express it well. (“First Novels of Girlhood” 338) 139

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One may find that such an assertion reflects how challenges that emanate from colonial retentions rooted in classism, colorism, and racism are effectively explored in Crick Crack, Monkey. Furthermore, Simon Gikandi, in considering the broader impact of contemporary Caribbean women writers’ efforts offers, the emergence of the Caribbean woman writer in the post-independence period . . . forces us to reconsider the very definition of modernity and its concordant discourse on national identity. . . .Caribbean women writers compel us to examine the relationship between national identity, gender, and subjectivity in Caribbean discourse. (“Writing After Colonialism” 198–199)

Through this, Gikandi points to the far-reaching, transformative efforts of Caribbean women novelists. In recent decades, these writers have broadened the scope of the Caribbean novel to include coming-of-age stories that symbolize the tandem development of several islands and youthful protagonists in the postcolonial era. For that reason, the countries and the young fictional characters that represent them can be seen as symbolic analogues. Arguably, the spadework for such progressive writing was completed decades prior. Paule Marshall’s Browngirl, Brownstones is a signal novel that issues forth pointed commentary on the social order of its day. Even though Browngirl, Brownstones was published in 1959, and it predates Crick Crack, Monkey by over a decade, the novels may be viewed as landmark texts. Together, they ushered in a new generation of women of color from the Caribbean writing about individuals’ and communities’ challenges as expressed from the perspectives of children and young adults. Additionally, the popularity of the novel of childhood is the most prevalent instance of . . . the dominant form [of] autobiographical naturalism. [It is] perhaps embedded in the plural natures of Caribbean societies. Here, the complexities of difference issue a tough challenge to the writer to try to find ways of representing the workings of whole societies, across boundaries of class, ethnicity and gender. This is a challenge that has been attempted by only a minority of writers (Peepal Tree Press, “Childhood and Youth” np).

Hodge belongs to this august group of authors. What is more, Hodge’s breakthrough novel continues to enjoy special favor throughout the Caribbean. Crick Crack, Monkey is held fondly in the hearts of many ranging from students studying for Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) standardized exams to high school, college, graduate students, literary scholars, and cultural critics. Through Hodge’s informative writing, readers can effectively appreciate the realities of colonialism’s imprint upon the lives of individuals

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in the Caribbean whose lives have been impacted by the intrusion of foreign cultural and value systems. Although Hodge wrote Crick Crack, Monkey when she was a young university student as a form of personal catharsis and social critique, fortuitously, the book grew into a classic coming-of-age novel that has continued to captivate readers. Scholarly responses to Crick Crack, Monkey have also documented the novel’s enduring appeal. For instance, in 1989, Kathleen Balutansky interviewed Professor Hodge nearly two decades after the novel’s initial release. Hodge revealed then that she was intrigued by the endurance and impact of Crick Crack, Monkey: I’m very often asked if Crick Crack, Monkey is a feminist response to the male novel in general. It is not. I didn’t know anything about feminism at the time. I didn’t even know that word. That was a hundred years ago! That was the sixties! And I was very innocent: I was a university student. What is very interesting is that so many people, not just in the Caribbean but also in Africa. . . . have chosen that device of the child narrator or protagonist. Those novels were produced under the colonial situation. [Besides,] . . . these novels aren’t really about children. Crick Crack, Monkey wasn’t necessarily about the child, Tee . . . [it was about the social conditions in which she lived.] Well, anyway, in the case of Caribbean writers—but maybe this extends to African writers as well—I saw that [using a child protagonist enabled a] form of stock-taking in the face of the non-recognition of our culture and our environment. (“We Are All Activists” 653)

Just as Hodge pointed to the Caribbean and African authors’ use of youthful narrators, several years prior, in 1986, Geta LeSeur remarked, “Black women writers in the United States and the Caribbean are beginning to utilize the Bildungsroman to tell their stories and their sister’s stories. While there seem to be more female writers in America using the form, only Hodge, Edgell, and Kincaid so far have written novels of girlhood in the West Indies” (“One Mother, Two Daughters” 27). Although LeSeur identified three of the Caribbean women novelists mentioned here, one may find that she was shortsighted when asserting “while the black American writer’s Bildungsroman becomes a platform for protest, the West Indian’s operates out of the child’s consciousness, thus she is primarily apolitical” (“One Mother, Two Daughters” 27). It is plausible that precisely the converse is accurate given Hodge’s preceding assertion. Instead, the strength of Crick Crack, Monkey is derived from its references made to matters of historical, sociopolitical, and cultural import; it is not an apolitical text. On the contrary, one may find that political matters are subtextually integrated into the novel, and Hodge, in so doing, with a spirit of youthful optimism, grafted new life into the discourse that enabled Crick Crack, Monkey to broaden the bildungsroman and clear

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fresh literary terrain. Hodge noted in her discussion with Balutansky that such progress may be seen as emanating from [a] child protagonist as a symbol, as a represent[ation] of the Caribbean culture in its infancy. So the impact of the educational system on the child is really an exploration of the impact of the educational system on the budding culture, because the culture is new, and it hasn’t been given a name and it didn’t get recognized as a culture. Of course, for a novel to be interesting and for it to be meaningful it has to deal with the impact of all these things on human beings. So it’s the impact on children, but ultimately the idea behind that is that we see the child as a representative of the culture. (“We Are All Activists” 653–654)

Hence, Hodge’s cultivation of a novel about maturation was innovative because she altered the literary space used to explore the history of Trinidad’s educational systems and social structures. In turn, in the decades that followed the publication of Crick Crack, Monkey, more Caribbean women authors writing in this manner—such as those mentioned earlier—made their own lasting impressions on the genre and offered commentaries about their natal homes through their young characters’ voices. Yet Hodge’s unique authorial imprint, now spanning five decades and counting, remains unmatched. When reflecting on the decade when Crick Crack, Monkey was initially published, C. Rhonda Cobham-Sander (also referred to here as Rhonda Cobham) remarks, “[t]here was a huge cultural ferment in the Caribbean during the 1970s, a sense that you were living through the emergence of a major literary tradition. It was in the air” (Syllabus for Childhood, np). Such an allusion to Caribbean literature’s expansion also encompasses the era when the sister islands of Trinidad and Tobago were experiencing forward political momentum. The islands gained their independence from Great Britain in 1962. In 1976, they permanently severed their ties with the British Monarchy when they became a republic within the Commonwealth. Conceivably, Hodge used her earliest novel to describe Trinidad and Tobago during their nascent years following colonial rule. One may also find that the novel’s title, Crick Crack, Monkey, evokes a popular Caribbean children’s play yard rhyme—“Crick Crack?” “Monkey break ‘e back on a rotten pomerac!” This clever satirical device suggests both Caribbean and African Diasporic connections to call and response patterns. In this way, Hodge’s evocation of these cultural nuances in titling the book exposes ruptures and imitations found in individuals’ identities—fissures that stem from colonialism. Cobham maintains that Crick Crack, Monkey has been an unrivaled example of progressive Caribbean literature because it “appeared far in advance of any recognizable Caribbean feminist tradition . . . and [because] it shares with the nationalist

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novels of the late 1960s and early 1970s a sense of postcolonial angst, even despair” (“Revisioning Our Kumblas” 46). Despite that, Hodge’s novel is not stymied by its characters’ ambivalence about their postcolonial conditions because the characters are forward-thinking and humanistically focused. Nonetheless, it appears that Hodge, in her modesty, would not accept credit for causing such a literary paradigm shift even though Simon Gikandi affirms that Crick Crack, Monkey marks the crucial transition from nationalist discourse to postcolonial writing in the Caribbean. Such an effort evinces Hodge’s positive authorial effort to present the lived experiences of real people. Hodge herself, one may find, seems to agree with such an assertion. She maintains in an interview with Gikandi: “We never saw ourselves in a book, so we didn’t exist in a kind of way and our culture and our environment, our climate, the plants around us didn’t seem to be of any importance─we overlooked them entirely. The real world was to be found in books” (“Writing After Colonialism” 201-202). Hodge makes palpable the pride and validation felt by readers of Caribbean descent who “see” relatable characters and settings depicted in Crick Crack, Monkey. On balance, Merle Hodge is remarkable for extending literary boundaries with her first novel, and Crick Crack, Monkey continues to be a gift to readers around the world for its uncommon relevancy. It is a significant work of fiction that gives voice to young women who, like Tee, are wrestling with questions of self-definition. Yet, even though the novel concludes in an unresolved manner teeming with questions, one can only venture to speculate about Hodge’s authorial intention. Nevertheless, the novel remains ripe with possibilities for future consideration because of its non-definitive ending, and readers are left to determine what the future may hold for Tee. Even so, it is inevitable that readers emerge from reading the slim volume transformed by the experience; therein lies the enduring beauty of Crick Crack, Monkey.

WORKS CITED Balutansky, Kathleen M. “We Are All Activists: An Interview With Merle Hodge.” Callaloo, no. 41 (1989), pp. 651–662. Bruner, Charlotte. “First Novels of Girlhood.” CLA Journal, 31, no. 3 (March 1988), pp. 324–338. Cliff, Michelle. Abeng: A Novel. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1984. Cobham, Rhonda. “Revisioning Our Kumblas: Transforming Feminist and Nationalist Agendas in Three Caribbean Women’s Texts.” Callaloo, 16, no. 1 (1993), pp. 44–64. Cobham-Sander, C. Rhonda. Syllabus for Childhood in African and Caribbean Literature. Department of English. Amherst College. Amherst, Massachusetts.

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Spring 2020. https://www​.amherst​.edu​/academiclife​/departments​/courses​/1920S​/ ENGL​/ENGL​-318​-1920S. Collins, Merle. Angel, Seattle: The Seal Press. 1987. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory, New York: Vintage. 1994. Edgell, Zee. Beka Lamb. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1982. Gikandi, Simon. “Writing After Colonialism: Crick Crack, Monkey and Beka Lamb,” in Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, edited by Simon Gikandi. Cornell UP, 1992, pp. 197–230. Hodge, Merle. Crick Crack, Monkey, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1970. LeSeur, Geta. “One Mother, Two Daughters: The Afro-American and the AfroCaribbean Female Bildungsroman,” The Black Scholar, 7, no. 2 (1986). pp. 26–33. Marshall, Paule. Browngirl, Brownstones. New York: Random House, 1959. Peepal Tree Press. “Childhood and Youth.” https://www​.peepaltreepress​.com​/discover​/inner​-being​/childhood​-and​-youth. The author would like to thank Dr. Melvin B. Rahming, Janice Ayer Jackson, and Dr. Cindy Lutenbacher for generously providing editorial assistance with this essay.

Chapter 9

A Laying on of Hands Healing the Diasporic Body in Colonized Spaces in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John Joyce White

At the end of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, Ntozake Shange posits a radical idea about the “colored” girls within the text: they are divine. The words of the lady in red reveal this celestial prophecy: “i found god in myself/ & i loved her/i loved her fiercely” (Shange 1997, 63). Similarly, like the lady in red, these colored girls, who have considered suicide as a means to end the perils of lived experiences, possess within their very hands the divine power of healing. Their divinity is found within the act of “a layin on of hands/the holiness of myself released” (Shange 1997, 62). What is truly radical about these girls at the end of their rainbows, is that they find healing, a healing the world could not or would not proffer them, in the palms of their hands. Thus, it is from within this spatial reality that For Colored Girls ends and begins. Reaffirming lady in red’s prophecy, the other colored girls create, from the repetitious chorus, a song that is first offered to the collective circle of their bodies, and moves outward to the audience, or, as is the most frequent case, the reader. The cyclical nature of the words and bodies of the colored girls allow them to transcend the reality of the day, to a spiritual plane where they can tap into their divinity as a means of healing self, community, and audiences that engage the text. But, where, exactly, is it that Shange’s colored girls go? And, where is it that they, through extended word and hand, lead the audience or reader? The clue resides within Shange’s contextualization and evolution of lady in red’s words, “After the song peaks the ladies enter into a closed tight circle” (Shange 1997, 64). The circle the ladies form is punctuated by the lady in brown’s declaration that the girls in the text, and ostensibly, through proximal interaction, the audience engaging, move to a point at “the ends 145

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of their own rainbows” (Shange 1997, 64).1 Shange’s text imbues the circle with the symbolic and philosophical underpinnings of the cosmogram.2 At the crossroads of life and death, the girls, who have considered suicide, traverse the limitation of life and page. Thus, whichever point the girls find at the end of their rainbows leads them to the point of healing. For some, it is death or rebirth, while for others it is birth or higher consciousness. Robert Thompson underscores this idea with his discussion of the cosmogram: “The combined force of singing words and tracing in appropriate media the ritually designed ‘point’ of ‘mark’ of contact between the worlds will result in the descent of God’s power upon that very point” (1983, 110). Moreover, it is through the intersection of their words and bodies that these girls collectively possess the power to move from the realm of their current reality to the realm of healing, all the while possessing the infinite power of the divine within their very hands. Shange’s For Colored Girls is part and parcel of a repetitious chorus of words formed by a circle of Black women writers who audaciously position texts and characters at the “ends of their own rainbows” in order to provide the space and place for healing in worlds where this reality is not readily available. One only need to conjure foremothers such as Walker, Morrison, and Angelou to understand the rich legacy of women-centered healing that even their texts rest upon. Just as Shange’s For Colored Girls, Black women’s texts, fiction and nonfiction, place Black women at the center of self and communal healing and the source of this divine power within their hands. For Mary Kolawole, the reasoning for Black women occupying this role is apparent: Many women writers emerged in the African diaspora largely because of the need to correct errors in history, which made many Africans unsure about their heritage. Women writers have occupied the front burners in this attempt to rekindle true self-retrieval of Africans in the diaspora through literature. (1997, 181–182)

Correspondingly, the intersection of Black women writers cyclically, simultaneously, and spatially spanning both past and present, here and there, reinscribes into the collective body of this literary cannon the power inherent within the ancestry called upon and the “textual healing” sent forth.3 Jamaica Kincaid, and her first novel Annie John, finds a home within this literary landscape and it is within this context that the analysis for this essay will take form.4 On the surface, Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John seemly chronicles the coming-of-age of the titular character in Antiqua. The novel begins with Annie recounting the paradise-like beginnings of her exclusive childhood

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with her mother. Although Annie’s world revolves around her mother, and her mother’s world revolves around Annie, the beginnings of the separation between them is brewing from the novel’s inception. Commencing with Annie’s first experience with death, the demise of a girl, Nalda, who ironically dies in the arms of Annie’s mother, Nalda’s death foreshadows the deteriorating dynamics between mother and daughter. Annie cannot reconcile that her mother’s hands prepare Nalda’s body for burial: “For a while, though not for long, I could not bear to have my mother caress me or touch my food or help me bathe” (Kincaid 1985, 6). Moreover, it is during adolescence, a time when most teens seek to define the world on their own terms and turf that Annie’s relationship with her mother completely sours. Initially, Annie does not understand her mother’s insistence on separation. As the novel progresses, Annie’s lack of understanding grows into an intense resentment and defiance that seems to cement the chasm between mother and daughter. The early paradise of Annie’s childhood contrasts with the isolation of Annie’s adolescence as she begins to exhibit secretive behavior, doing things she knows her mother would disapprove of. Most of the remaining parts of the novel find Annie alone and left to deal, internally, with the disappointment and consequences that come from her mother finding out her secret doings. That is until Annie’s unexplained and sudden illness. The road to Annie’s recovery ostensibly recovers the fractured relationship between mother and daughter. However, the novel ends with Annie sailing away from her mother and Antigua for what seems like forever. Below the surface of a simple coming-of-age novel, Jamaica Kincaid delves deep into the depths of African-centered spirituality. Through representations of African Órìsàs, Kincaid utilizes the feminine as a conduit to the liminal space between past and present, place and space, and here and there. Specifically, the characters Ma Jolie, a local Obeah woman, and Ma Chess, Annie’s grandmother and Obeah woman, act as living embodiments of ancestral spirits and African ancestry present within the colonized place and space Antigua represents. As a body representative of the dis(ease) attributed to the cultural hybridity of African diasporic bodies in colonized places and spaces, Annie John succumbs to a sudden and inexplicable illness. Western medicine and knowledge not only fail to identify or treat Annie’s state of being, but her illness also separates her from her mother and father. Annie’s dis(ease) requires the spiritual nourishment and healing of what Venetria Patton calls, “other mothering” that only Ma Jolie and Ma Chess can access and offer to Annie (2013, 34). At the crossroads of life and death, Annie’s illness creates a world within a world for Annie to exist within. This liminality provides the symbolism of the cosmogram via the crossroads and enables the healers, Ma Chess and Ma Jolie, to access ancestral knowledge, customs, and traditions, in order to heal the diasporic body of

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Annie within colonized spaces. While most critics read Annie John through the lens of postcolonial studies or a Caribbean version of the Bildungsroman trope, this essay asserts that Annie’s transformation, while aligned with maturation, is a spiritual maturation and movement from the limbo of hybrid identity plaguing the African diaspora in colonized places and spaces, to an all-encompassing diasporic body imbued with the healing power of African cultural ancestry. Popular approaches to Annie John often do not fully address Annie’s healing through African-centered spirituality. Yet, in spite of the futility of Western medicine and knowledge in Annie’s healing, many approaches rely upon and utilize Westernized and Europeanized tropes and tenets as a basis for analysis. Myopically, they attempt to address Annie’s illness without regard to her healing. Maria Karafili in “Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the ‘Bildungsroman’ in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John” offers a Bildungsroman analysis of Annie John arguing, “Thus, in a sense, Cisneros and Kincaid ‘colonize’ this literary form and reverse traditional lines of power by controlling representation instead of passively being represented by the dominant culture” (1998, 65).5 However, within the literary tradition of Black diasporic women writers, the idea of colonizing the colonizer is an incongruent notion to healing the diasporic body. Audre Lorde’s famous emancipatory declaration, for example, provides a resounding chorus to the prophecies of the lady in red in Shange’s For Colored Girls and the long litany of diasporic Black women reclaiming the divine power of healing they hold within their hands. Lorde argues: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (2007, 112). Healing, like the “genuine change” that Lorde references, is an act, a transformation, stemming from the hands of those who seek and require it. The tools of healing Africana diasporic bodies, thus, should derive from an Africana-centered source. Toni Morrison echoes this sentiment in her essay “Home”: I knew from the very beginning that I could not, would not, reproduce the master’s voice and its assumptions of the all-knowing law of the white father [it] seemed to confine me to his terrain, in his arena, accepting his house rules in the dominance game [and] became imperative for me to transform this house completely. (Morrison 1999, 4)6

Lorde’s tools and Morrison’s construction plans formulate a directive for the decolonization of spaces Black diasporic bodies occupy, calling not for revision, but complete reconstruction. Lorde and Morrison are examples of the way Black women writers clear the space and lay a foundation for a place

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where the healing of the diasporic body can occur. The imperative of this space and place, what is at stake for those who seek healing in colonized spaces, is a matter of survival. Thus, true healing requires, as an approach, a theoretical or methodological framework that shifts the foci from revising Westernized approaches to one utilizing Africana diasporic approaches. Clenora Hudson Weems in Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves, adds to this framework by reaffirming Lorde’s and Morrison’s assertions with a Womanist and spiritually derived methodology to healing: “In the area of health care, she [the Black woman] frequently goes back to folk medicine and spiritual healing, such as the laying on of hands, which entails . . . healing. . . . It is through spirituality that this quest for wholeness and authenticity is realized” (1995, 70–106). Utilizing a decolonized space and Africana-centered spiritual tools provides Africana bodies in colonized spaces access to complete healing. Soldering together these concepts, Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John illuminates the apparatus and mechanism of healing the diasporic body, where the form of the decolonized body is, then, able to achieve the function of healing. With Annie’s (dis)ease manifest, the laying on of hands becomes the tool Kincaid utilizes in order to heal the decolonized body of Annie John. Although the remaining chapter focuses on Annie’s illness and healing within the chapter “The Long Rain,” to set up the context for Annie’s impending illness, the mother-daughter dynamic present throughout the text must first be addressed. The fusion of the mother’s diasporic culture and colonial power establishes a duality within the nature of Annie’s maternal mother. Subsequently, the mother imposes and enforces these contradictory identities upon her daughter, perpetuating a cycle of oppression and dominance, acceptance and denial, approval and disapproval, which serve to confuse and distance Annie. For example, in “The Circling of Hands,” Annie stumbles upon her mother and father engaging in sexual intercourse. While one expects Annie to exhibit shock and awe, what one does not expect is Annie’s reaction to her mother. She expresses disinterest in what her parents were doing, however, Annie’s focus is on her mother’s hand circling her father’s back. Annie recalls: “But her hand! It was white and bony, as if it had long been dead and had been left out in the elements. It seemed not to be her hand, and yet it could only be her hand, so well did I know it” (Kincaid 1985, 30). The circling of the mother’s hand is symbolic of the patronizing relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and, in essence, Annie and her mother. The circling hand seduces the father and emphasizes his adoption of Western beliefs. The disembodiment of her mother’s hand also emphasizes the beginning of the novel and the loss of paradise for Annie. Nalda, representative of the diasporic body, dies in the arms, the hands, of Annie’s mother. However, it is after her mother prepares Nalda’s dead body that Annie’s repulsion of her mother’s hands begins. The hand is the part of

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her mother that Annie cannot explain or reconcile because of its incongruence with her mother’s body. Further, Annie’s reference to the hand being white underlines the insidious and pervasive hand of colonial rule in the lives of the African diaspora in Antigua. The hybridity of her mother whose body and being are Black, but whose hand is white and active, undergirds the complexity of a hybrid existence. Annie’s mother is unable to fully occupy a decolonized space because of the constancy of her hybridity and duality. The constant fight for power and dominance is ever-present and ongoing. Kolawole adds: “The search for meaning and relevance in a multicultural environment is a continuous process for the African in the diaspora” (Kolawole 1997, 189). The mother’s hand is able to seduce, make love, chastise, and, even, prepare diasporic bodies for death. However, the healing of diasporic bodies, including Annie’s, is unattainable for Annie’s mother, and is out of her hands. As a foil to the mother’s hands, to who healing is inaccessible, Ma Jolie and Ma Chess perform a vital role in the healing of Annie’s (dis)ease. Through the practice of Obeah, Ma Jolie and Ma Chess, are able to access and tap into the only tools relevant to Annie’s healing: African-derived spirituality. In “Obeah and Hybrid Identities,” Karla Frye defines Obeah: Obeah is a belief system divided into two broad categories. . . . The second involves healing through the application of knowledge of herbal and animal medicinal properties. Obeah, thus conceived, is not a religion as such but a system of beliefs grounded in spirituality and an acknowledgement of the supernatural. (Karla Frye 1997, 199)

As a belief system, Obeah provides access to and application of knowledge steeped in divine and supernatural powers. In “Somewhere, Belgium,” Annie muses about the growing discontent in her life. Annie recalls: “My unhappiness was something deep inside me, and when I closed my eyes I could even see it. It sat somewhere—maybe in my belly, maybe in my heart . . . a small black ball, all wrapped up in cobwebs” (Kincaid 1985, 85). The chapter’s title referring to another source of colonial rule over Black bodies, like the earlier chapter reference to Columbus in “Columbus in Chains,” undergirds Annie’s inexplicable depression taking the shape of a “small black ball, all wrapped in cobwebs” being a reference to the past and present fettering of Black bodies to the chains of colonial rule (85). As the novel progresses, Annie’s discontent grows to a (dis)ease that requires a source of power outside of what Annie’s parents, and Western medicine, can offer Annie in the unfettering of self. Symbolic of the captive bodies of those enslaved by colonial powers, and the discontent of the diasporic body still fettered to colonial dominance, Annie John gives shape to the source of dis(ease) and offers a curative strategy.

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Kincaid’s use of Obeah as the apparatus and mechanism of Annie’s healing centers African-derived spirituality as the healing balm for diasporic dis(ease) in colonized spaces, as they return to the cultural and ancestral source both frees and heals the people. Thus, Annie’s illness in “The Long Rain,” illuminates and reifies the need for this return of the diasporic body to an Africanacentered space, if it is to survive. As a symbolic return, the landscape of Antigua in “The Long Rain” experiences a drastic change from a drought-ridden island, to a water-laden island teeming with life. Through the representation of spiritual elements, like water, Kincaid utilizes African concepts of nature and nature rituals as a trope, for example, water’s fecundity, in order to reimagine, restore, and regenerate the indigenous origins of the diasporic ecosystems Antigua represents. Annie recalls: “The sea had risen and what used to be dry land was covered with water, and crabs lived there. In spite of what everyone said, the sea never did go back to the way it had been” (Kincaid 1985, 109). Sea water submerges the landscape of Antigua, and symbolic of life-giving gestational fluid, the sea transforms the ecology of the island, forging a new body, utilizing femininity as a conduit to the rebirth of a landscape and a people. The water acts as a liberating element, allowing the dry barren land to become fertile. Representative of nature’s fecundity, the water provides a womb whose nature is congruent to the cultural existence and preservation of the African diasporic body of Antigua. In lieu of land barren from drought, the fertility of the island symbolizes its ability to birth generations of people who embody a nature divergent from the nature of the Island’s colonial past. In this regard, nature delivers the vital link in the re-membering of the cultural self. As the rain continues to pour down and transform Antigua into a fertile landscape, Annie’s health continues to deteriorate and, as she notes, “pressed me down in my bed, bolted me down” (Kincaid 1985, 109). Immobile, Annie’s sensory functions begin to fail her. As if underwater, Annie sees things occurring around her but becomes unable to respond to them. For example, Annie notes that her parents are talking to her, but the words they speak are inaudible. Seemingly, Annie’s illness plunges her deeper and deeper into a fetal state, moving Annie closer to the womb. However, clearly outside of her mother’s womb, Annie requires a surrogate one. Water, again, acts as a conduit and provides Annie with the space and place to rebirth herself. As the novel portrays, Annie dreams of heat and fire and walks toward the ocean. Thirsty, Annie ingests all of the ocean water until her actions expose the dry seabed. Annie recalls: “All the water from the sea filled me up, from my toes to my head, and I swelled up very big” (Kincaid 1985, 112). In her dream, Annie’s develops cracks in her body and water pours out of her, like a pregnant woman’s water breaking, and reforms the ocean.7 Through the ingestion of the ocean water, Annie’s body serves as the surrogate womb she requires.

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Annie ingests the island’s fertility and is able to rebirth, through the breaking of her birth water, a fertile land congruent to the nature of the people. Thus, the water provides Annie with the ability to rebirth a diasporic self within a new diasporic landscape. From the outside of Annie’s new world, Annie seems to have wet the bed. Her parents coddle her like a new infant. Annie recalls: “I was fifteen years old, but the two of them handled me as if I were just born” (Kincaid 1985, 113). Annie’s occupancy of a new world, outside of her parents’ physical reality, creates two distinct spaces of existence functioning within the novel. Annie’s liminality, between here and there, places Annie in a space within a space, a crossroads, and locates her parents on the outside. The separation between Annie and her parents represents the separation necessary to heal the diasporic in colonized spaces and reaffirms that the remedy to diasporic dis(ease) is through the use of African-derived spirituality. At a crossroads about how to help Annie’s condition, her parents begin down two divergent pathways toward healing. Together, they take Annie, her father carrying her in his arms, to Dr. Stephens’s office. Unable to determine the exact cause of Annie’s illness, Dr. Stephens says that Annie is suffering from exhaustion and needs rest. Dr. Stephens’s diagnosis does not completely convince Annie’s mother, and she calls on Ma Jolie to examine Annie, to which the father responds, “Very well, but count me out; have her come where I am not here” (Kincaid 1985,110). The two divergent paths Annie’s parents take to heal her, reemphasize their hybrid identity and inability to heal Annie. Even the medicinal remedies Ma Jolie and Dr. Stephens prescribe, provide a poignant example of this. At first side-by-side in the medicine cabinet, they are rearranged because of the father’s objections. The mother rearranges the bottles with Dr. Stephens’s medicines in front of Ma Jolie’s. The arrangement of the bottles is symbolic of the prominence of Western ideas and ideals, like medicine, instead of practices steeped in cultural and ancestral knowledge of the Africana diaspora. This scene also echoes the earlier narrative about the death of Annie’s Uncle Johnnie. Pa Chess, her maternal grandfather, insists on having a Western doctor treat Johnnie, instead of honoring Ma Chess’ knowledge and expertise in the use of Obeah for his healing. Ma Chess acquiesces to the demands of Pa Chess, and the Western medicine and doctor fail to properly diagnose and treat Johnnie. He dies as a result of this failure. Because Pa Chess dismisses the Obeah knowledge Ma Chess offers to heal Johnnie, Ma Chess never acknowledges Pa Chess, and all he represents, again. Both, Annie’s father and grandfather, forgo cultural and ancestral healing and reestablish patriarchal and colonial rule. However, Jamaica Kincaid rewrites Annie’s future through the infusion and use of African-centered spirituality within the novel. As the barren drought-ridden landscape of Antigua transforms into a fertile one, Jamaica Kincaid also transforms the narrative body of the novel into a

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fertile space conducive for Annie’s healing. The novel’s first illness and dismissal of African-centered spirituality results in the death of Johnnie, so the narrative reform for Annie is a matter of life and death. Annie’s impending doom is rewritten by the arrival of Ma Chess. In addition, the arrival of Ma Chess serves to rectify the past and Johnnie’s death. If the narrative remains the same, then Annie’s demise would have been inevitable. Here, Kincaid establishes the matrilineal line as an imperative element in the healing of the diasporic body. Annie’s mother, while a part of the matrilineal line, is ineffective because of her hybridity. Thus, Annie requires “Other mothering” (Patton 2013, 34). Inserting forms African Órìsàs directly into the text, Kincaid relocates the foci of the narrative from hybridity to a narrative that embodies African-centered spirituality. The introduction of the mythical figures into the text also introduces the myths, characteristics, and essences of the Órìsàs into the text and imbues the language with elements of Africancentered spirituality. Toni Morrison argues in her essay “Home” that, “Since language is community, if the cognitive ecology of language is altered, so is the community” (1999, 8). In this regard, myth extends the narrative body to exist both within the structure of the novel and outside of it simultaneously. Like Shange’s colored girls exist within the text and at the ends of their rainbows, so too, do the characters in Kincaid’s text that prescribe to the African-centered spirituality the text offers as a source of healing. Thus, the introduction of Órìsàs invites textual creation and transformation, doubling the narrative, and creating a story within a story, a textual crossroads. Ma Jolie’s presence and function in “The Long Rain” illumines the inscription of the crossroads into the narrative body by her application of the crossroads onto Annie’s physical body. Annie recalls: “She made cross marks on the soles of my feet, on my knees, on my stomach, in my armpits, and on my forehead. She lit two special candles and placed one over the head of the bed and the other near the foot” (Kincaid 1985, 116–117). Drawing four points above Annie’s waist and four points below, and placing candles above and below Annie, Ma Jolie creates two distinct spheres replicating the physical and spiritual realm of the cosmogram. The core of Annie’s body becomes the central point and functions as a crossroads, while the candles Ma Jolie places above and below Annie, with the marks made on the inside of her armpits, creates the four points of the cosmogram—death, rebirth, birth, and higher consciousness. As the illness kills the Annie of the past, the chapter begins with Annie symbolically rebirthing herself. Annie’s movement toward healing will also follows the remaining points. Ma Jolie transforms the physical space of Annie’s room and body and readies the space and body for healing. Ma Jolie’s application of Annie’s bodily cosmogram serves to open communication between the physical and spiritual spheres, joining them in divine and cosmic conversations of

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healing. Thus, Annie’s body exists in the two realms concurrently, doubling Annie as a symbolic crossroads and a living sacrifice to the crossroads deity, Légbá.8 In an African-centered context, a healing ritual must begin with the opening of the realms. As the crossroads is indicative of the point where the physical and spiritual converge, paying reverence to Légbá, the deity of the crossroads, is necessary, as not appeasing Légbá can “prevent the offering from reaching the Órìsà, or he will confuse or muddle the purpose of the offering. He is appeased first because the offerer wants to make sure that the ritual is done properly” (Edwards and Mason 1998, 16). Légbá ensures clear communication between humans and the divine, the only kind of communication that can lead to healing. Safe passage of those messages to and from the divine ensures an auspicious result, and, in this case, healing. Ma Jolie pays further reverence to Légbá by placing white and red candles throughout Annie’s room and by placing a black sachet, a healing amulet, under Annie’s nightgown.9 The colors red, black, and white are representative colors of Légbá, and imbue Annie’s room and body with his divine power. “The red stands for life and for blood, the black stands for death and the unknown, and the white stands for clearness. He is able to bring life and death into clear focus, thereby giving people a clear view of reality.” (Edwards and Mason 1998, 18). To bring the reality of Annie’s movement to healing into focus, Kincaid uses photographs to illuminate Annie’s movement and next position on the cosmogram, birth. When Annie’s parents leave her for the first time since the onset of her illness, photographs neatly arranged on a table plague Annie. The photographs are of Annie and her family—Annie in a “white dress school uniform,” the wedding party at her “Aunt Mary’s marriage,” her father in a “white cricket uniform,” and Annie in a “white dress” for communion (Kincaid 1985, 118). All of the pictures represent institutions of whiteness and colonial rule that plague and create dis(ease) within the Africana diasporic body. In addition, the upholding of the institutions and ideals the pictures serve to represent, buttresses the structural and systemic dominance of colonial rule. Annie describes them as “keeping beat to a music I was not privy to [and smelling] unbearable to me” (Kincaid 1985, 119). The unpleasing smell of the pictures compels Annie to bathe them in water. The element of water acts as a ritualistic cleansing agent and eliminates all signs of colonialism. Through the ritualistic cleansing, Annie completely decolonizes herself, giving birth to a new form ready for healing. The only clear image that remains in any of the pictures is Annie’s face or the shoes she picks for herself. Annie recalls: “When I finished, I dried them thoroughly, dusted them with talcum powder, and then laid them down in a corner covered with a blanket, so that they would be warm while they slept” (Kincaid 1985, 120). Although Annie cares for the pictures like a newborn, when Annie’s mother

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returns, the pictures are in a ruined heap. As a precaution, Annie’s mother rearranges her life to not leave Annie alone again. The mother’s intrusion into Annie’s healing seems to thwart Annie’s progress. However, the rearrangement sets into motion the final push for Annie’s healing. The delivery of all supplies to the house that the mother arranges, invites others into the home. In particular, the delivery of fresh fish, provides the opportunity for Mr. Nigel to visit. He brings Annie what he thinks is her favorite fish, and, as he stands in the doorway of her bedroom, saying some pleasantries to her, Annie speaks the first audible words during her illness. She tells Mr. Nigel that he reminds her of her father. As Mr. Nigel begins to laugh at the prospect, his laughter consumes Annie. She recalls: “Mr. Nigel’s laugh . . . went all the way down until every empty space in me was just filled up. . . . In this state, when I looked up at him I could see all sorts of things” (Kincaid 1985, 121). Mr. Nigel’s visit disrupts the narrative and changes the course of Annie’s healing. Not only is it the first time Annie audibly speaks since the onset of her illness, Nigel’s presence introduces another Órìsà into the narrative, Olókun.10 While the waters of the earth represent Olókun, the deep waters of the ocean are said to be the domain of his kingdom. The idea of the dark kingdom implies untold secrets, and Olókun can be called the Keeper of Secrets [and] holds the keys to the mysteries about history of the trans-Atlantic passage, in which lies the ancestral links between African people in the diaspora and on the continent of Africa. (Edwards and Mason 1998, 80)

Pointedly, Annie’s visions resulting from the penetrating laugh of Mr. Nigel, begin with her father’s great-grandfather who curses God for his inability to be a prosperous fisherman. In return, the great-grandfather is cursed, becomes ill, and dies. Mr. Nigel’s laughing incites Annie to give voice to her visions. Annie says that Mr. Nigel, “took it all in” (Kincaid 1985, 123). Through Annie’s vision and confessional-like chat, Mr. Nigel unlocks the narrative pathways of the past and allows the rectifying of the ills of ancestors whose disregard for cultural and ancestral spirituality caused illness and death. In essence, Mr. Nigel cleanses Annie’s ancestral line through the confessional. Kincaid, again, underscores the power of the matrilineal line in healing, as it is Annie’s father’s great-grandfather who is cursed by the Órìsàs. Mr. Nigel’s cleansing of the ancestral lines puts Annie’s healing back on track, as the cleansing calls forth the final element in Annie’s healing, Ma Chess. The mysterious arrival of Ma Chess allows for the creation of a new narrative of healing. The day she arrives, no steamer is set to dock. With no one at the jetty, there are no witnesses to how Ma Chess even gets to Antigua. However, upon her arrival, Ma Chess assesses the severity of Annie’s illness.

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Annie says, “she poked me in the same way Ma Jolie had. Then she said to my mother, in French patios, ‘Not like Johnnie at all’” (Kincaid 1985, 124). Her insertion into the narrative of healing that surrounds the family, creates a new beginning. Annie’s father will not interfere because of his disbelief in her power, and clears the way for the matrilineal healing Ma Chess can offer. As such, Ma Chess takes over both Annie’s space, sleeping and eating at the foot of her bed, and the role of Annie’s mother. As the mother of the mother, or the Grand Mother, Ma Chess embodies the spirituality and divination of Mami Wata.11 “In the diaspora, Mami Wata offers a way to reconnect with African ancestral spirituality, and it also provides personal healing” (Asante 2009, 404). Annie bears witness to the power of her grandmother saying, “Whatever Ma Jolie knew, my grandmother knew at least ten times more” (Kincaid 1985, 123). Within her role as healer, Ma Chess utilizes the medicinal powers of Obeah. Further, Ma Chess physically helps Annie to give birth to a healthy self. She feeds her, clothes her, and changes her bed. Sometimes, when Annie feels like she is falling back into a darkness she would not be able to escape, Annie says, “I would lie on my side, curled up like a little comma, and Ma Chess would lie next to me, curled up like a bigger comma, into which I fit” (126). Without interruption, Ma Chess provides Annie with all the care she needs to birth a healed self. As the rain wanes, Annie’s illness “mysteriously” disappears. Mysteriously absent, too, is Ma Chess. Just as she comes one day, she goes “on a day when the steamer was not due in port” (127). Although Annie’s illness is healed, she still experiences discontent within her life because she has yet to reach the final point of the cosmogram, higher consciousness. The only place where Annie seems to be happy is within the newness of self. However, there is a profound change in Annie John after her illness and healing. Annie considerably grows taller, and she also develops a “strange accent—at least no one had ever heard anyone talk that way before” (Kincaid 1985, 129). She relishes in the newness of her strange tongue and receives attention and praise for her newfound attitude. If anyone causes her discontent, Annie removes herself from their company. Annie lacks happiness in an Antigua that seems to have returned to its normal state. As such, Annie must leave Antigua in search of a future. In the final chapter, “A Walk to the Jetty,” Annie begins by naming herself: “My name is Annie John” (130). The novel ends with Annie leaving Antigua to sail to England. Annie’s sailing to England is often read as a failure, that Annie becomes a nurse and lives a life of constraint as she did in Antigua, that there is no resolve to her dis(ease). However, the power of African-centered spirituality cannot be overlooked within this context. Annie will sail to Barbados first, change ships, and then sail to England. Annie says that “I did not want to go to England, I did not want to be a nurse” (130). Instead, Annie offers an alternative narrative to all

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the things she never wants to experience in Antigua again. The insertion of a new Annie in a new place with a new life mirrors what Annie experiences in her process of healing. Moreover, it can be read that as the “Mother of the Waters,” Ma Chess, heals Annie, she also begins the initiation of Annie into the priestesshood of Mami Wata and the spiritual practice of Obeah. “Future devotees often experience a crisis that requires the assistance of a mamisii [priestess]. In the past, villages would initiate a young girl who would then be responsible for maintaining their shrine to Mami Wata” (Asante 2009, 404).12 If healing is Annie’s first step in the initiation process, then her next place, presumably Barbados, will be the first stop to Annie’s education as a healer. The future, as is healing, is in Annie’s hands.

NOTES 1. To form a cosmogram, each of the girls form a spectrum of color creating their own personal arc, that when combined with the other girls, creates a rainbow with all the colors replete. The audience engaging the text mirror the girls, and a double rainbow forms a complete circle, encasing both the girls and audience in colored beams of light that illuminate the space above and below the rainbow and etch out the place in the middle where the girls and audience meet. 2. For further explanation of the cosmogram’s points and movements see Robert Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit, pp. 101–158. 3. “Textual Healing” is a terminology taken from Jasmine Farrah Griffin’s article “Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, The Erotic Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery.” 4. The term “Black” also denote the African/Africana diaspora throughout the essay. 5. Although Karafili expresses her use of the term “colonize” is not defined as dominance, the idea of colonizing the colonizer, as an act of reversing the power dynamic, fits within the context of a Bildungsroman analysis. 6. Toni Morrison in her essay “Home” deepens her sentiments about the master’s narrative positing, “Nor would I substitute his voice with that of his fawning mistress or his worthy opponent, for both of these positions (mistress or opponent)” (4). 7. Drewal quotes Frederick Lamp to discuss water as amniotic fluid: “Frederick Lamp notes, “water is the gestation fluid of rebirth called, in the esoteric language of initiation, ‘mother water’” (69). 8. For further discussion and definition of Légbá’s characteristics see Edwards and Mason’s Black Gods—Òrìṣà Studies in the New World, pp. 11–20. 9. Molefi Asante describes an amulet used for healing and medicinal purposes in an entry in The Encyclopedia of African Religion: “There is also the amulet used for healing purposes. It might be a medicine that is carried in a belt, on a chain, or connected to the body of the person with leather or string. Such a healing or medicinal amulet is usually organic and is made of plants or animal parts” (44).

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10. For further discussion and definition of Olókun’s characteristics see Edwards and Mason’s Black Gods—Òrìṣà Studies in the New World, pp. 78–84. 11. Mami Wata refers to an ancestral water deity who received many alternative names when reimagined in the Americas by enslaved Africans. Yemoja and LaSirén are among the most noted of these names. However, Mami Wata is all-encompassing of all of the water deities. See Henry Drewal’s Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas for further explanation. 12. Henry Drewal furthers the notion of Ma Chess initiating Annie in to the priestesshood of Mami Wata: “Mami Wata “presides over female initiation rites . . .” Young Sande/Bondo girls are said to “go underwater” during the first part of their initiation” (67).

WORKS CITED Asante, Molefi Kete, and Ama Mazama. 2009. Encyclopedia of African Religion. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Drewal, Henry John, Marilyn Houlberg, and Fowler Museum at UCLA. 2008. Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas. Los Angeles, CA: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 60–83. Edwards, Gary, and John Mason. 1998. Black Gods—Òrìṣà Studies in the New World. Rev. 4th. Brooklyn, NY: Yorùbá Theological Archministry. Frye, Karla. 1997.”An Article of Faith”: Obeah and Hybrid Identities in Elizabeth Nunez Harrell’s When Rocks Dance.” In Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, edited by, Fernández Olmos, Margarite, and Lizabeth ParavisiniGebert, 195–215. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Griffin, Jasmine, Farah. 1996. “Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, The Erotic Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery.” Callaloo 19, no. 2: 519–536. Hudson-Weems, Clenora. 1995. Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves. 3rd rev. ed. Troy: Bedford Publishers. Karafilis, Maria. 1998. “Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the ‘Bildungsroman’ in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘The House on Mango Street’ and Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Annie John.’” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 31, no. 2 (January): 63–78. Kincaid, Jamaica. 1985. Annie John. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Kolawole, Mary E. M. 1997. Womanism and African Consciousness. Trenton: Africa World Press. Lorde, Audre. 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Revised ed. [The Crossing Press Feminist Series]. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Morrison, Toni. 1999. “Home.” In The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today, edited by Lubiano, Wahneema H., 3–12. New York: Vintage Books.

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Patton, Venertria. 2013. The Grasp That Reaches Beyond The Grave: The Ancestral Call in Black Women’s Texts. New York: State University of New York (SUNY) Press. Shange, Ntozake. 1997. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow Is Enuf: a Choreopoem. 1st Scribner poetry ed. New York: Scribner Poetry. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1983. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy 1st ed. New York: Random House.

Chapter 10

Authoring Discourse Black Feminist Theorizing in Michelle Cliff’s Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise Alexandria Smith

When Jamaican American author Michelle Cliff was asked in a 1994 interview to confirm whether or not her 1980 prose-poetic text Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise was autobiographical she answered, rather obliquely, “some places are close, others are rough.”1 Neither denying autobiographical influence nor affirming the text as a purely or primarily faithful account of her life, Cliff’s ambivalence marks Claiming as autobiographically indeterminate. Across the multiple literary genres she employed throughout her career—novels, short stories, essays, lyric, and prose poetry— Cliff incorporated elements of her lived experiences, with varying levels of factual accuracy, within her narrative material. If we take as a given that autobiography, particularly autobiography written by Black subjects in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, should never be assumed to be “factual” representations, we are free to focus on how an autobiographical or semiautobiographical text invites its readers to perceive and understand the author as literary subject, and how the narrative situates the political, cultural, and social context within itself.2 Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (henceforth referred to as Claiming) is a book-length collection of episodic lyric and prose poems organized around themes of how socioeconomic class position, skin color, and gender inform movements through trans-Atlantic cultural and national spaces; how the violent commitment to silences, invisibility, and withdrawal from community shapes family legacies; and how the histories of British colonialism and U.S. imperialism continue to shape Jamaican culture and society. 161

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This chapter examines how the performance of self-referentiality— through the use of the first person and the corroboration of personal narratives across multiple literary sites—is central to the critiques of colonial knowledge production and identity construction that characterize Claiming and Cliff’s body of work more broadly. In other words, Cliff’s novels, short stories, poetry, and essays selectively and strategically engage elements of Cliff’s familial histories, memories, and other lived experiences as one source of imaginative material among others. Consider, for example, one of the more obvious and frequently cited elements of autobiographical and literary crossover in Cliff’s writing: the similarities between Cliff herself and Clare Savage, the protagonist of her novels Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven.3 Both Michelle Cliff and Clare Savage are light-skinned queer women identified as having Creole heritage, born and partially raised in Jamaica to economically privileged families, and were educated abroad in the United States and Europe. Reading these novels in conjunction with Cliff’s collections of prose, poetry, and essays reveal that beyond similarities of appearance and background, Clare Savage and Cliff as author articulate similar critiques of the racial and class hierarchies of late-colonial and postcolonial Jamaica.4 Through her use of narrative strategies across multiple genres to enact these critiques, Cliff’s writing illustrates links between heteronormative notions of gender, violent constructions of whiteness and Blackness in the Americas and the uses of British literary and cultural traditions to maintain social inequalities. However, in light of these apparent connections, Cliff’s discussions on the topic of autobiography in her work ranged from ambivalent—as in the Adisa interview cited above—to fiercely critical of what she understood as the depoliticization that Western critics imposed on Black and Caribbean women’s narrative writing. In an essay called “Sites of Memory” from a collection titled If I Could Write This in Fire, Cliff reflects on an experience participating in a conference dedicated to “Transitional Identities” at the University of Mainz in Germany. She writes, My particular problem with the literary participants of the conference is their determination that they read my fiction—and other Caribbean fictions—as autobiography, diluting and undermining the politics of the narrative. They want to reduce the collective to the individual. They want to define who we are: What are “transitional identities” anyway? None of the organizers seems able to respond. Are we seen as lone riders between the rainforest and the Black Forest, the island and the metropole? I am not a metaphor. My place of origin is not a metaphor. I inhabit my language, my imagination, more and more completely. It becomes me. I do not exist as a text. I am spoken into being—as Léopold Sédar Senghor said of the

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world. I speak myself into being and with that speech my place of origin. I use this speech to craft fiction, which is not a record of myself, which is self-​consc​ iousl​y—sel​f-con​fiden​tly—p​oliti​cal. I do believe in the word, that a new world may be spoken into being.5

Cliff asserts that critics’ insistence on naming Caribbean fiction as autobiographical when it is not marked that way functions within and is reinforced by an assumption that autobiographical writing lacks political intention. Edward Said, for example, dismisses what he terms the “post-imperial testimony” within the literary criticism written by (post)colonial subjects regarding British literature.6 The suggestion is that testimony, linked to autobiography through their shared production of highly personalized narratives, is not only inferior to but also incompatible with more robust “theoretical discourse.”7 For Cliff, writing within this postcolonial academic context, the equation of one’s literature to autobiography has the effect of “diluting and undermining the politics of the narrative” as is modeled by Said’s mischaracterization of testimonial writing. Cliff then turns to an assertion of how her politics, as an author and an individual, are grounded in her capacities to fashion language. By asserting that neither she nor her place(s) of origin are metaphors Cliff articulates opposition to being transformed into a symbol, a figure, or a representative of some other object or concept. By contrasting the accusations of metaphor with an assertion of inhabiting her language and imagination, Cliff equates being metaphorized with a hollowing out or an evacuation of meaning. In opposition to static and externally authored definitions—being a metaphor, being a text, existing as a single and consumable record of one’s life—Cliff claims a dynamic process of becoming and creating oneself. The use of speech to craft self-consciously and self-confidently politicized fiction is a manifestation of Cliff’s belief that “a new world may be spoken into being,” confirming the relationship between acts of literature and language and the processes of constructing reality. Michelle Cliff’s body of literature is thus simultaneously invested in generating a new world through incisive critiques of our present world, and in utilizing lived experience as one resource for narrative material among others. This study shares with existing scholarship on Cliff an understanding of this author as committed to challenging colonial domination through her fictional narratives of Jamaican history and identity. Scholars such as Judith Raiskin, Angeletta Gourdine, and Nada Elia have traced the constructions of creole identity, including queer creole identity, in Cliff’s fiction.8 Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley departs from other scholars’ primarily triumphant readings of Harry/Harriet, a genderqueer trans woman character in No Telephone to Heaven, in order to interrogate the limits of Cliff’s engagement with queer

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Caribbean identity.9 Others, such as Heather Russell, Noraida Agosto, and Abid Labidi Larbi, center their readings on Cliff’s myriad interrogations of dominant colonial histories and received notions of a history/fiction binary.10 Sally O’Driscoll’s writing directly examines how the critical perception and engagement of Cliff’s authorial identity is dependent on both the geographical and cultural identity locations of her critics.11 A theme less explored by critics of Cliff’s writing is the role of the autobiographical in her work. For example, M. M. Adjarian is one of few critics who explicitly takes up questions of autobiographical methods in Cliff’s writing, but does so primarily to claim that Cliff insists on maintaining distance between herself and her literary constructions.12 The emphasis on the fictional rather than the autobiographical or selfreflective in Cliff’s work is evident in the relative lack of critical attention paid to Claiming in comparison to Cliff’s novels, particularly Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, and Free Enterprise.13 My analysis of Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise presents a revision of the way most scholars approach questions of genre and autobiography in Cliff’s work. A significant exception to this pattern is Carole Boyce Davies’s brief discussion of Claiming in her book Black Women, Writing, and Identity, which describes Cliff’s text as a “somewhat autobiographical exploration of identity” in which “personal history, family history, and people’s history and culture all converge.”14 Davies’ cogent précis of Cliff’s text names many of the themes I examine within Cliff’s work, including “gender, heritage, sexuality, and the sense of place defining that identity.”15 Building on Davies’ approach, my study prioritizes an examination of the anti-colonial and feminist critique enabled by the combination of autobiographical reflection and politicized analysis used in Cliff’s memoir, rather than a preoccupation with identifying the presence of autobiographical influence in fiction. My reading is grounded in a framework I term sensual worldmaking, a style of Black feminist self-oriented narrative writing that uses embodied, sensuous experiences as the basis of its theorizations and critiques. Using sensual worldmaking as an analytic frame identifies how the embodied experiences of Black women literary subjects are narrated in ways that generate knowledge about the self, intimate relationships, and how their bodies are positioned within structural power dynamics.16 Sensual worldmaking is used, for example, to identify disconnection as a theme of Cliff’s childhood. Various passages in Claiming are set on the plots of forest and farmland owned by Cliff’s maternal grandmother in Jamaica. Reflecting on a childhood experience of watching women wash clothes in the river on this land Cliff writes, This is our land, our river—I have been told. So when women wash their clothes above the place where I swim; when the butcher’s wife cleans tripe on Saturday

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morning; when a group of boys I do not know are using my pool—I hate them for taking up my space. I hate them for taking up space; I hate them for not including me.17

In this passage, Cliff describes and alludes to places that her body inhabits in order to illustrate the sense of ownership she feels about this collectively used land. Being told by family members that the land is “ours” serves to create, as this passage’s emphases illustrate, an exaggerated contrast between those within the “my” and “our” of Cliff’s family, and the other inhabitants of this land who are excluded from “our.” Unsurprisingly, this will to exclude and the class differences between Cliff’s family and their “others” result in both physical and social distances between Cliff and the other people she observes at the river. Cliff thus vacillates between feelings of superiority and entitlement and the frustration of disconnection from the community. This passage enacts sensual worldmaking through its use of embodied experiences and memories to give insight into how Cliff and her family are positioned within the larger structures of white supremacy and classism in Jamaica. This tension and Cliff’s different forms of reckoning with it pervade Claiming. Given the fluidity of Cliff’s narrative methods and her skepticism of autobiographical labels, one could argue against a reading of Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise as autobiographical. After all, by no means are all texts which employ and prioritize the first-person “I” are necessarily reflective of the author’s lived experiences. However, the consistent use of “I” in Claiming constructs and invites a kind of relation between the narrative author and the narrative subject. Renée Larrier’s notion of autofiction—defined as Caribbean prose texts with first-person narrators—is helpful here because it analyzes first-person narratives from the perspective of their narrative construction.18 While autofictional strategies are found across works published as memoir, autobiography, and fiction, Larrier notes that this analytic does not reproduce the obsession with “authenticity” or “separating fact from fiction” which have plagued readings of Caribbean first-person texts.19 Larrier claims that the narrative I is privileged in Caribbean literature as “one direct response to [the] particular historical circumstances” of Western colonial and imperial domination in the Caribbean.20 Within this broad context of Caribbean literature, the use of the narrative I “inscribes subjectivity, making the previous object of discourse, the subject.”21 In this way, the “I” of Caribbean autofiction is a political strategy concerned with contesting colonial erasure through narrative construction.22 Building on the analysis of autofiction Larrier offers, my reading for the ways that Claiming strategically manipulates autobiography prioritizes the political positioning of the text’s narrative I.

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Through my analysis of sensual worldmaking in Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, I intend to contribute close attention to the role that narratives of lived and embodied experiences play within Cliff’s larger critical project. In the next section, I position Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise and sensual worldmaking within a genealogy of Black feminist politicized writing that uses narratives and theorizations of lived experience as the anchor for political critique. I then explore how Cliff critiques the structures of white supremacy and heteronormative gendering through narrations of her relationship with her mother. Finally, I illustrate how Cliff uses Claiming’s textual space to narratively create Black feminist community, in contrast to the absence of connection with Black women narrated elsewhere in the text. PERSONAL AND POLITICAL BLACK FEMINIST NARRATIVES Claiming mobilizes first-person reflections not for the purpose of presenting a knowable record of Cliff’s life, but in order to critique the narratives and terms of colonial knowledge production. Cliff’s use of self-reflective writing across genre is part of a long trajectory of Black feminist writing.23 The politics underlining this tradition are aptly stated in the Combahee River Collective’s coining and definition of the term “identity politics” in their “Black Feminist Statement.” For the Collective, identity politics named their understanding of Black feminism as emerging from “the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual black women’s lives.”24 The Collective produced the term identity politics to describe their belief that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of [their] own identity.”25 They articulated themselves as situated within multiple marginalized social identity categories simultaneously. The Collective recognized that as poor and working class Black people, Black women, and Black lesbians, they had neither “racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess any one of these types of privilege have.”26 By identifying the lack of dominant conversations examining “the multilayered textures of black women’s lives,” the Combahee River Collective assert the need for articulating their particular experiences as multiply marginalized subjects.27 Building upon this emphasis on articulating experience, Black women writers’ use of lived experiences within their writing serves as a means of correcting the historical pattern of under-examining Black women’s—particularly Black queer women’s—lives and perspectives.28 The Collective’s

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theorization of this notion of identity politics emerged from genealogies of Black women writers in the United States, across genre, who invoked various forms of self-referentiality in their rhetoric. Cliff engages this Black feminist concept of identity politics by situating marginalized subject positions— Black, creole, woman, lesbian, postcolonial subject—as positions from which knowledge has been and currently is produced.29 Claiming therefore simultaneously critiques colonial forms of knowledge production and demands that readers recognize Black and Caribbean women’s textual, narrative, and discursive authority. Across multiple sections of Claiming, Cliff reflects on the different ways that the light skins and mixed creole heritage of the Cliff family signify within Jamaica, the United States, and Europe. A key critical method within Claiming is the literal juxtaposition of colonial literary and cultural narratives with Cliff’s embodied experiences and family background, both real and imagined. Cliff therefore uses her narrative authority within the space of Claiming to signify upon texts in the (post)colonial canon, therefore contesting their cultural authority. In the eponymously titled section of Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, Cliff invokes the character Bertha Mason Rochester of the 1847 Charlotte Brontë novel Jane Eyre, as well as that character’s revision as Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. This invocation of Bertha resonates on multiple levels: Cliff acknowledges the formative role that colonial literature has played in her cultural and academic education, she positions herself within a larger tradition of Caribbean authors “speaking back” to colonial authors, and she uses Caribbean white creole identity as a site for constructing an imagined family relation and shared heritage.30 Cliff uses a first-person address to bring herself, as author and speaker, into relation with this fictional character: “To imagine I am the sister of Bertha Rochester. We are the remainders of slavery—residue: white cockroaches white niggers quadroons octoroons mulattos creoles white niggers.”31

Cliff foregrounds the commentary on whiteness and racial hierarchies within the British colonial context which is ostensibly latent in Jane Eyre, then made more visible in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. By imaginatively aligning herself with Bertha under the umbrella of “remainders” or “residue” of

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slavery, Cliff likens Bertha’s white creole madness and Rochester’s necessity to sequester it in the attic with the Cliff family’s need to hide, obscure, and fail to confront their non-white heritage. In so doing, Cliff both illustrates colonial literature’s construction and perpetuation of white supremacist categories and hierarchies, and explicitly names her own family history as a site for examining the impact of colonial identity narratives. Through close narratives of embodiment, Cliff explores her personal and family history as a history of conflicts over the ways that identity is understood, negotiated, and talked about. Within this section of Claiming Cliff negotiates tension between her white skin and the privileges it grants her in Jamaica and abroad, and the Blackness of her family heritage. Indeed, the very titling of the text as well as its firstperson address attempts a “radical act of renaming and redefining the self.”32 Claiming is an effort to reclaim a specifically Jamaican as well as broader diasporic Blackness and a simultaneous reckoning with the social, cultural, and familial disconnections which the social privileges of whiteness require. Relatedly, throughout Claiming Cliff narrates a fraught relationship rooted in a frustrating lack of intimacy with her mother. This relationship pattern can be read as a function of the disconnection from self and others which the Cliff family’s legacy of aligning with whiteness has demanded and rewarded. Cliff describes the experience when, at twenty-two years old, she confronts her mother about the fact of their family’s Blackness. Her mother responds: You don’t know what it was like when we first came here. No one wanted to be colored. Your father’s family was always tracing me. And these Americans, they just don’t understand. My cousin was fired from her job in a department store when they found out she was passing. I stopped seeing her because your father was always teasing me about my colored cousin. Things are different now. You’re lucky you look the way you do, you could get any man. Anyone says anything to you, tell them your father’s white.33

According to Cliff’s mother, the stakes of the negotiating racial identity are clear: being, or being read as “colored” makes one vulnerable to various forms of anti-Black racism. Being aligned with Blackness generates ridicule, mocking, and loss of income and economic opportunities. Perhaps what Cliff’s mother feels that Americans don’t understand is Jamaica’s complex, yet still fundamentally anti-Black racial and color hierarchy, which operates somewhat differently than U.S. racial logics. Relatedly, this passage reveals that Cliff, her mother, and her father are each differently positioned with respect to their ability to pass for white. Cliff’s father’s family may have been “tracing” her mother due to their suspicion that the mother was not sufficiently “white,” or at least not as “white” as they were. Cliff, on the

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other hand, is reassured by her mother that if she is ever questioned about her identity she can respond by asserting that her father is white. With this statement, Cliff’s mother positions her daughter and Cliff’s father as having a visual claim to whiteness different than her own. Within the space of the United States, the social privileges of whiteness are achieved at the cost of negating Blackness within oneself, one’s family, and the broader society.34 For Cliff’s mother, claiming whiteness demands separation from family members and maintaining silence about the full truth of one’s heritage. This silence extends to one’s children, hence Cliff’s formal encounter with this family heritage once she is already an adult. Cliff’s mother’s comments reveal how her investment in white supremacy is simultaneously an investment in heteronormative gendering, generating an additional level of silence that disrupts the relationship between mother and queer daughter. In this passage, Cliff’s mother’s assessment of Cliff’s saving grace is that Cliff’s appearance will allow her access to “any man,” with a presumed emphasis on white men. In her mother’s eyes, heterosexual coupling and reproduction with a white man would allow Cliff and her assumed future children more secure and less tenuous access to whiteness. This future which Cliff’s mother imagines for her daughter makes Cliff’s queer desires an impossibility. For Cliff, then, ascribing to whiteness and its social privileges would require a negation of her Black heritage as well as her queerness. Reading Claiming through the framework of sensual worldmaking reveals how Cliff narrates these layered silences and emotional distance as manifested through her feelings of unfamiliarity and lack of intimacy with her mother’s body, as a child as well as an adult. Cliff writes, “A space is left where knowledge of her body should be. I fill this space with a false knowing: I mis/take my flesh and contours for hers—my voice speaks for those parts of her she cannot reach or show.”35 In the absence of knowledge about her mother’s body Cliff narrates a “false knowing” of this body through perceiving her own body, voice, and subjectivity as representing that of her mother. This projected representation produces the appearance of knowledge of her mother’s body, yet it is unable to resolve the crisis produced by the lack of intimacy. The lack of access to the intimacy and honesty that knowledge of her mother’s body would necessitate requires that Cliff herself attempt to voice the aspects of her mother which her mother is unable or unwilling to show. More specifically, Cliff’s efforts to claim an identity she was taught to despise is in large part an effort to claim the Blackness that her mother wears like an open secret. Cliff’s use of both literal and metaphorical embodied experiences in order to theorize her maternal relationship is an enactment of sensual worldmaking within this text.

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Claiming textually illustrates Cliff’s efforts to claim Blackness and intentionally disrupt the assimilation into whiteness she has been trained to desire. Feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed theorizes white supremacy through the notion of “habits” and “habitual” practices. Ahmed writes, “White bodies are habitual insofar as they ‘trail behind’ actions: they do not get ‘stressed’ in their encounters with objects or others, as their whiteness ‘goes unnoticed.’”36 In white supremacist spaces, the bodies of white people are the physical referent of their normativity. Moving through space with a white body can thus allow that body to be taken for granted, rather than serve as a site of stress or friction in encounters with others. However, in Claiming Cliff narrates whiteness’ absence of friction and stress as a simultaneous absence of the frictions of intimacy.37 In a chapter titled “Passing” she writes: “I thought it was only the loss of the mother— but it was also the loss of others: who grew up to work for us and stood at the doorway while the tv played and stood at the doorway while we told ghost-stories and ironed the cloths for the tea-trays. but this division existed even then— Passing demands a desire to become invisible. A ghost-life. An ignorance of connections.”38

In this passage, the figure of the ghost makes visible the ways whiteness is at work within Cliff’s domestic space. As the ghost stories are told and traded among those who are accepted and recognized as members of the family, the non-familial others are relegated to the perimeter of the ghost story circle, present yet not included. Cliff’s reflection on passing does not focus solely on the spaces of the external world in which whiteness is dominant, but focuses here on how white supremacy demands a disruption of intimacy even in intimate home spaces. Thus, the “ghost-life” demanded of passing requires that one is not fully seen, lest the “fact” of one’s Blackness be visually confirmed. This passing also requires negating connections such that one can pass through space unencumbered by the possibility of rubbing up against another—whether a mother, a cousin, or a long-time family connection— whose more visible Blackness might make one’s own Blackness more visible through reflection and proximity. Both the title and the larger critical project of Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise function as a rejection of the common-sense logics of white supremacy which offer some the possibility of a ghost-life, neither fully seen nor able to be touched. Cliff’s narrative presents a situation in which claiming Blackness is the function of an intentional choice which seeks to

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honor one’s full heritage and culture. She writes, “The question of my identity is partly a question of color: of my right to name myself. That is what I have felt—all along.”39 Cliff’s color is undoubtedly a site of privilege in that she has the capacity to pass through some spaces with more ease than Black people with darker skin. Yet in bringing her race to the foreground, including her color and its privileges, she makes visible the moments in which she refuses to “sink” into the easy non-notice of whiteness that white privilege affords. The autobiographical content of Cliff’s narratives thus functions as “discourse that signifies beyond the materiality it represents” not simply through representing the materiality of Cliff’s lived experiences, but by also intentionally drawing a connection between Cliff’s experiences, the literary and cultural contexts they were shaped within, and a larger project of constructing anti-colonial discourse.40 Her invocation of Bertha Rochester as a literary example of someone whose Caribbean whiteness causes friction in the colonial center of England facilitates reading of how such frictions have been negotiated within Cliff’s family. The use of these lived and familial experiences is a form of sensual worldmaking, in the sense that sensuous and embodied experiences are central to the project of narrative knowledge production. Elsewhere within Claiming, Cliff also turns away from visibly autobiographical methods, opting instead to speculatively construct Black women’s embodied experiences as integral to the process of Black feminist historical knowledge production.

THE HISTORIANS: WRITING BLACK FEMINIST SPACE This chapter has argued that autobiographical narrative is used throughout Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise to critique colonial knowledge production and identity construction in the Caribbean. Significantly, the chapter “Against Granite” is the only section of the text that does not include a first-person narrative. The absence of first-person narrative in this section, particularly when contrasted with the first-person narration present in the other nine sections of the text, functions as an intentional distancing of the narrative from the appearance of an autobiographical or memorybased reflection. “Against Granite” is therefore the section of Claiming which registers most clearly as fictional. Despite the absence of first-person reflection, this section nonetheless develops a critical narrative emerging from embodied experience. “Against Granite’s” sensual worldmaking articulates the speaker’s Black feminist imagination through the narrative of an imagined physical and social space which materially centers Black women’s physical comfort and pleasure as well as their acts of collaborative knowledge production.

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“Against Granite” opens with an old Black woman, seated in the basement of a marble building, naming herself as a historian. Cliff describes the geographical space that comprises and surrounds the marble and granite building: “Here is where black women congregate—against granite. This is their headquarters; where they write history. Around tables they exchange facts— details of the unwritten past. Like the women who came before them—the women they are restoring to their work/space—the historians are skilled at unraveling lies; are adept at detecting the reality beneath the erasure. Out back is evidence of settlement: a tin roof crests a hill amid mountains— orange and tangerine trees form a natural border. A river where women bathe can be seen from the historians’ enclave. The land has been cultivated; the crops are ready for harvest. In the foreground a young black woman sits on grass which flourishes. Here women pick freely from the trees.”41

The images relayed here contest stereotypical notions of continental white European masculinity as the taken-for-granted representation of the discipline of History. In this way Cliff is in conversation with what Barbara Christian calls theorizing—processes of theoretical knowledge production, specific to people of color, women, and queer people, which are not bound to the aesthetic and structural parameters of what white academic authorities recognize as Theory. Christian writes, “our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.”42 Indeed, “Against Granite” theorizes the ways that Black Caribbean women “do” history in part by illustrating work that the historians do is not separated from the work that other Black women do—the historians “plant, weed, hoe, raise houses, sew, and wash— and continue their investigations.”43 Cliff therefore radically reimagines what the work of history entails by asserting an image of Black women engaged in the processes of creating and maintaining life as simultaneous producers of knowledge. Readers are informed that these Black women have congregated to write histories of incarceration and of “the unwritten past.”44 A history of incarceration will require accounting for histories of the transatlantic slave trade, in which these Black women historians are necessarily implicated. For Black women historians, the work of history reflects Black people’s violent enmeshment within colonial historical processes.45 Through describing the work the historians undertake as the processes of “exchang[ing] facts—details of the unwritten past,” Cliff alludes to Black women’s histories as both erased and unwritten, yet recoverable through the collaborative work of dialogue, oral

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history, and in conversation with the formal archives laid on the tables where they gather.46 This commentary functions as a critique of white supremacist and colonial forms of historical knowledge production which exclude Black people, women, and queer people as subjects of—let alone authors of—history. In this way, Cliff prefigures a tradition of scholars including, among others, Saidiya Hartman, M. NourbeSe Philip, Marisa Fuentes, and Jessica Marie Johnson, each of whom interrogate the limited capacity of archival practices and politics, and therefore the traditional discipline of History, to fully account for the lives of enslaved Black women across the Americas.47 While autobiographical reflection grounds the sensual worldmaking in Claiming’s other sections, “Against Granite” enacts sensual worldmaking through its positing of Black women’s imagined, yet embodied, experiences as central to reimagining the process of producing historical knowledge. Sensual worldmaking allows Cliff to challenge colonial geographies of domination, and in their place write Black feminist geographies in which spaces are arranged to meet Black women’s needs and desires. The world constructed in this chapter is defined by its support of Black women’s collective nourishment and intellectual engagement: the long passage quoted above illustrates the granite and marble building as a space dedicated to Black women’s gathering, while the land which surrounds the gathering place accommodates Black women’s physical sustenance, bathing, and relaxation. As the author, Cliff guides the reader through the visual field, (description of the topography, flora, and built landscape) and parallel sensory registers (the sounds of the women’s gathering, the description of the haptic textures of their physical interactions) which serve as this section’s setting. “Against Granite” therefore offers a rare perspective in that its reader’s experience of the space constructed within the narrative is mediated through the ways that Black women subjects experience this world. Around the perimeter of this nearly idyllic space for Black women are border guards who represent threats to Black women’s bodily well-being through forms of colonial and imperial institutions. The border guards are peripheral, “those who would enforce silence,” and the way that they are hailed in the text registers their violent and invasive relationships to Black women’s bodies: “slic​ers/s​uture​rs/in​vader​s/abu​sers/​steril​ izer​s/inf​i bula​tors/​castr​ators/​ divi​ ders/​enclo​sers . . . Upjohn, Nestle, Riker’s, Welfare, Rockland State, Jesus, the Law of the Land—and yes, and also—Gandhi and Kenyatta.”48 The Black feminist world centered in “Against Granite” critiques actual and symbolic purveyors of misogynist and patriarchal violence by reorienting them: placing them at the literal margins of the narrative space, and defining them through their violent relation to women rather than as the natural occupants of the center of the universe. This re-writing aligns with Katherine McKittrick’s definition of Black feminist geographies as “black women’s political, feminist,

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imaginary, and creative concerns that respatialize the geographic legacy of racism-sexism.”49 Despite the ominous presence of the border guards, the work of the historians continues unabated. Even in light of the possible harm they may face at the hands of these violent figures, the Black women persist in building and maintaining communal space. “Each evening at dusk, the women gather under the tin roof which shelters the meeting-house: the progress notes of the day’s work are read—they then cook dinner, talk, and sing: old songs whose noise carries a long distance.”50 “Against Granite’s” narrative prioritizes Black feminist community building with an emphasis on the ways that Black women take care of each other’s bodies. In this way, this section of Claiming reorganizes the forms of colonial, racist, and sexist power that have marked Caribbean sites. In their stead, Cliff creates narrative space for anticolonial realities that are Black, queer, and feminist. The strategy of voicing this critique not just through autobiographical reflection, but also through the speculative creation of the alternative world(s) one imagines, affirms, as other Black diasporic women have modeled, that imagination and autobiography can be purposefully and powerfully combined. “Against Granite” ultimately constructs a world oriented toward justice, care, protection, dignity, and creative agency for Black women.

CONCLUSION As an author, Michelle Cliff deployed a self-referential narrative method to put forward critical analyses of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. She manipulated genre and narrative forms in order to advance her texts as robust political critiques and was therefore highly critical of attempts to use elements of her narrative or authorial subjectivity to depoliticize her writing. By refusing to either fully embrace or reject the label of memoir for Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, Cliff prioritized the politicized dimensions of building narrative subjectivity in order to reshape the discourses of authorial and narrative authority. Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise is therefore part of a Black feminist tradition in which lived, personal experiences provide a foundation for political analysis as well as narrative production. First by positioning herself in relation to canonical colonial literature, and later through a fictionalized imagination of a Black feminist geography, Cliff uses Black women’s lived and embodied experiences to both critique racist and colonial hierarchies of identity and to reimagine writing history as a Black feminist process. Cliff uses narrative expressions of her lived experiences to affirm her heritage as a Black queer

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woman, light-skinned and class privileged, in contrast to white supremacy’s disruptions of intra-communal and intra-familial intimacies.

NOTES 1. Opal Palmer Adisa, “Journey into Speech—A Writer between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle Cliff,” African American Review 28, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 275, Black Women’s Culture Issue. 2. When theorizing transaesthetics in Black trans autobiographies L. H. Stallings writes, “scholarship on slave narratives, oral histories, the dozens, and biomythographies in black literary tradition reminds anyone that autobiography, authorial control, and tropes are often strategic manipulations to take into account differences of gender, class, nation, and sexuality between authors and their audiences. Sometimes an autobiography is as much fiction as fact, as much omission as revelation.” L. H. Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 216. 3. Michelle Cliff, Abeng (New York: Plume, 1984); and Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Vintage International, 1987). 4. For in-depth readings of No Telephone to Heaven see the following book chapters: 1) Heather Russell, “Race, Nation, and the Imagination: Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven” in Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2009), 81–107; 2) M. M. Adjarian, “White Skin, Black Masks: Michelle Cliff and the Allegory of a Dream Deferred” in Allegories of Desire: Body, Nation, and Empire in Modern Caribbean Literature by Women (Westport and London: Praeger Publishers, 2004), 15–49; and 3) Judith Raiskin, “‘With the Logic of a Creole’: Michelle Cliff” in Snow on the Cane Fields, Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 177–204. 5. Cliff, “Sites of Memory,” 57–58. 6. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 65–66. 7. Ibid. 8. Judith Raiskin, “‘With the Logic of a Creole’: Michelle Cliff,” 177–204; Angeletta Gourdine, “‘Write it in . . . Put the sex right up on in there!’: Walker, Cliff, and Aidoo Sexualize and (Re)map the Diaspora,” in The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002), 80–102; and Nada Elia, “‘A Man Who Wants to Be a Woman’: Queerness as/and Healing Practices in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven,” Callaloo 23, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 352–365. 9. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Transforming Sugar, Thiefing Revolution: Male Womanhood and Lesbian Eroticism in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven,” in Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

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10. Noraida Agosto, Michelle Cliff’s Novels: Piecing the Tapestry of Memory and History (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Abid Larbi Labidi, “Dismantling the Prison-House of Colonial History in a Selection of Michelle Cliff’s Texts.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies 7, no. 5 (October 2016): 64–69, Heather Russell, Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2009). 11. Sally O’Driscoll, “Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 28, no.1 (Spring 1995), 56–70. 12. M. M. Adjarian, Allegories of Desire: Body, Nation, and Empire in Modern Caribbean Literature (Westport and London: Praeger Publishers, 2004), 26. 13. Cliff, Abeng; Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven; Michelle Cliff, Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1993). 14. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 122–123. 15. Davies, Black Women, 122. 16. I develop the concept of sensual worldmaking at length in my dissertation Afrekete’s Room: Mapping the Shape of Space and Narrative in Black Queer Women’s Writing. 17. Cliff, Claiming, 15. Emphasis in original. 18. Renée Larrier, Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 6. 19. Ibid., 21. 20. Ibid., 6. 21. Ibid., 7. 22. Larrier distinguishes the I of Caribbean-authored text from the I of colonial or imperial outsiders, which means that the subject of this I of autofiction “benefits from insider knowledge, resists the dominating gaze, bears witness (témoignage), and transmits ancestral memory.” Ibid., 7. 23. Early African American feminists like Maria Miller Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell directly drew on their personal experiences in order to generate the narratives they produced to advocate for African American political recognition. Zora Neale Hurston is known for her pioneering of autoethnography, a different form of self-focused critical writing. 24. The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Words of Fire: an Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 233. 25. Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 234. 26. Ibid., 236. 27. Ibid. 28. To briefly and partially summarize other points in this tradition, Black feminist literary critics Carole Boyce Davies and Barbara Christian foregrounded the ways Black women authors theorized Black women’s subjectivity in their work, and both Davies and Christian utilized self-referential anecdotes in this analytical work. Audre Lorde defined the genre of her landmark text Zami: A New Spelling of My Name as biomythography, a genre combining autobiography, fiction, history,

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and mythography. Numerous contemporary Black women writers and scholars have made their lived experiences the direct subject of critical works about the Black diaspora. See Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity; Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York and London: Teachers College Press, 1997); Claudia Tate, Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1986), 115; and Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1982) Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return:Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007) Hazel Carby, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (London and New York: Verso Books, 2019); Brittney C. Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New York: Picador, 2018); and M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 29. For more on Black feminist geographies and positions of knowledge production. See Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 30. Cliff’s own relationship to her whiteness is impossible to sum up neatly, as this was a consideration throughout the whole body of her writing. Cliff’s racial ambiguity is often misread in the context of U.S. racial logics. It is beyond the scope of this essay to do a full treatment of the various racialized language and concepts used to describe Cliff, including her self-descriptions. For more on this subject see: Judith Raiskin, Snow on the Cane Fields. 31. Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, 44. 32. Russell, Legba’s Crossing, 62. 33. Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, 47. 34. Reflecting on the ways that U.S. popular culture stabilizes anti-Black racism through narratives of immigration Toni Morrison writes, “It doesn’t matter anymore what shade the newcomer’s skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open.” Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacks,” Time Magazine, Dec 2, 1993, https://col​lect​ivel​iberation​.org​/wp​-content​/ uploads​/2013​/01​/Morrison​-On​-the​-Backs​-of​-Blacks​.pdf. 35. Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, 12. 36. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 132. 37. Here I am thinking with Keguro Macharia’s formulation of frottage as a “relation of proximity” within the Black diaspora, which “gestures to the creative ways the sexual can be used to imagine and create worlds.” Keguro Macahria, Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 4. 38. Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, 5. 39. Ibid., 8. 40. Adjarian, Allegories of Desire, 8. 41. Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, 30.

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42. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique, 1, no. 6 (Spring 1987): 52, emphasis in original. 43. Ibid., 30–31. 44. Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, 29. 45. The Epilogue of Marisa Fuentes’s book Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive presents a particularly helpful discussion of some of the methods undertaken to narratively reconstruct enslaved Black women’s personhood in the face of colonial archives which staunchly refuse their visibility. Fuentes writes, “History is produced from what the archive offers. It is the historian’s job to substantiate all the pieces with more archival evidence, context, and historiography and put them together into a coherent narrative form. The challenge this book has confronted is to write a history about what an archive does not offer.” Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 146. 46. Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, 29. 47. For discussions of archival failures in the context of chattel slavery, see works such as: Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection:Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2020). and M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). 48. Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, 30. 49. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 53. 50. Cliff, Claiming An Identity They Taught Me to Despise, 31.

WORKS CITED Adisa, Opal Palmer. “Journey into Speech—A Writer between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle Cliff,” African American Review 28, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 273–281. Black Women’s Culture Issue. Adjarian, M. M. Allegories of Desire: Body, Nation, and Empire in Modern Caribbean Literature by Women. Westport and London: Praeger Publishers, 2004. Agosto, Noraida. Michelle Cliff’s Novels: Piecing the Tapestry of Memory and History. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005. Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Carby, Hazel. Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands. London and New York: Verso Books, 2019.

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Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York and London: Teachers College Press, 1997. ———. “The Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique, 1, no. 6 (Spring 1987): 51–63. Cliff, Michelle. Abeng. New York: Plume, 1984. ———. Claiming an Identity They Taught me to Despise. London: Persephone Books, 1980. ———. Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1993. ———. No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Vintage International, 1987. ———. “Sites of Memory,” in If I Could Write This in Fire, 49–64. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Words of Fire: an Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 232–240. New York: The New Press, 1995. Cooper, Brittney C. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. New York: Picador, 2018. Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Elia, Nada. “‘A Man Who Wants to Be a Woman’: Queerness as/and Healing Practices in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven.” Callaloo, 23, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 352–365. Fuentes, Marisa. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Gourdine, Angeletta KM. “‘Write it in... Put the sex right up on in there!’: Walker, Cliff, and Aidoo Sexualize and (Re)map the Diaspora.” In The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002. Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007. ———. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Johnson, Jessica Marie. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Labidi, Abid Larbi. “Dismantling the Prison-House of Colonial History in a Selection of Michelle Cliff’s Texts.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies 7, no. 5 (October 2016): 64–69. Larrier, Renée. Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean. Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1982. Macharia, Keguro. Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2019. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Morrison, Toni. “On the Backs of Blacks.” Time Magazine. Dec 2, 1993. https:// col​lect​ivel​iberation​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2013​/01​/Morrison​-On​-the​-Backs​-of​ -Blacks​.pdf

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O’Driscoll, Sally. “Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 28, no.1 (Spring, 1995): 56–70. Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 2008. Raiskin, Judith. “‘With the Logic of a Creole’: Michelle Cliff,” in Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity, 177–204. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Popular Library, 1966. Russell, Heather. Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2009. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Stallings, L.H. Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1986. Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.

Chapter 11

So Eager to Bloom Reframing Images of Adolescent Protagonists in Edwidge Danticat’s Behind the Mountains and Untwine Alison D. Ligon

Scholars of young adult and children’s literature have encouraged the cultivation of more expansive critical engagement. Currently, teaching academics welcome perspectives that challenge narrowly labeling audiences and limit exploration of literature that traverses genres’ borders. Such transformative discourse imagin new ways to consider previously understudied works of fiction written for younger audiences. Several young adult novels written by Edwidge Danticat may be aligned with this effort. As a novelist, essayist, and critic, Danticat is arguably one of the most impactful and prolific twenty-firstcentury writers. In particular, she has extended the boundaries of Caribbeanfocused literature through her novels, short stories, and essays that are often grounded in historical fiction. She has also broadened the dialogue on literature from the Caribbean by writing coming-of-age novels that appeal equally to mature and young adult (YA) audiences. Generally, YA fiction describes books written for audiences that range roughly from twelve to twenty years of age. By extension, children’s literature describes books written for audiences that are younger than twelve years of age. Despite these general distinctions, YA and children’s literature alike consider how characters seek to resolve challenges. This is so with two of Danticat’s young adult novels considered here, Behind the Mountains and Untwine. For this reason, one may consider how Danticat writes novels such as these for young people, and about young people, who are challenged by adult concerns such as familial turmoil and loss. Whereas many of Danticat’s books written for mature adults have been widely appreciated and seriously interrogated, there is scant analytical regard for her literature written for younger audiences. With her varying audiences 181

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in mind, Danticat writes to accurately depict lived and imagined moments of historical, political, and cultural expression. Her deft authorial gaze enables her to thoughtfully frame and explore internecine traumatic events. Danticat uses Behind the Mountains and Untwine to consider distressing themes while excavating realms of possibility from the vantage points of young protagonists whose lives are suspended in liminality, possibility, and stasis. Such a resonant perspective is focused on the experiences of young people—young girls and women, to be precise—and the spaces that they physically and mentally occupy during transitory moments of maturation and emerging self-awareness. Furthermore, these emotive spaces are used by Danticat to mirror the physically ephemeral states of development and loss found in the novels’ characters’ home communities located in Haiti and the United States. Danticat, with unflinching honesty and through recollections of stories that accurately depict lived and illusory moments of Haiti’s historic, diplomatic, and economic struggles, gives voice to the perspectives of mature and young adults about these matters. In examining Untwine, one will find that Danticat frequently evokes images found in her other novels and short stories—images of twins and adolescent girls. Her employment of these archetypal characters in Untwine prefigures her strategic evocation of young women and girls as the carriers of messages, holders of lessons from the past, and nurturers of possibilities. In this YA novel, Danticat employs memorialization, memory, and (re) memory as thematic conduits used to unite rich stories about burgeoning and mature characters’ experiences with trauma and healing. These strategies constitute the hallmark of Danticat’s oeuvre. She stands apart from other authors for her ability to modulate her expression and creatively probe literary themes and figures that are significant to audience members of varying ages. When considering the absence of critical discourse surrounding literature written for young people, in general, and from the Caribbean, in particular, Summer Edward, a Trinidadian-born children’s book editor, illustrator, and writer opines the lack of critical and theoretical engagement of Caribbean literature written for children. This appreciative gap, Edward observes, “speaks to a glaring and long-standing problem with the general attitude toward children’s literature in the Caribbean; children’s literature is somehow not up for serious discussion. In the Caribbean, children’s literature is treated as if it were a literature of no circumstance and no complications” (“Caribbean Literary Culture’s Gatekeeping” np). Edward’s assertion can be conceivably extended to include young adult fiction. This absence, though, is slowly being ameliorated through the recent expansion of critical discourse that takes into consideration re-envisioning children’s classics through the lenses of literary theory.

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To this end, Danticat’s young adult and children’s fiction provides readers and critics alike with opportunities to explore and theorize about fictional novels that speak to authentic lived experiences of people of African descent. Her YA novels invite frank conversations about the literature’s perceived worth. As well, Danticat’s books written for young people consider protagonists’ desires to experience physical, mental, and spiritual healing. Hence, traumatic realism, a term used by Dominic La Capra in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), may be used to theorize and explore fictional novels that Danticat has penned for YA audiences that feature characters healing from traumatic events. Cherie Meacham utilizes La Capra’s theory to conceptually shape and guide her essay, “Traumatic Realism in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat.” Whereas Meacham uses this theoretical lens to view selected works of Danticat’s fiction written for mature adults, Cindy Lou Daniels in “Literary Theory and Young Adult Literature: The Open Frontier in Critical Studies” critically observes: Unfortunately, many people working in literary theory and criticism areforegoing the opportunity to explore this [YA] phenomenon because they mistakenly believe that works labeled as YA should only be analyzed in terms of the connection—whether that be historical or psychological—to the supposed “intended” reader. They see the phrase YA, and they tend to dismiss the work as disconnected [from] the literary community (78).

Stated in another way, Daniels affirms the need for greater scholarly appreciation for YA literature’s contributory value and worth. In like manner, Lisa Ortiz advances a line of inquiry that seeks to insert Danticat’s YA fiction into the greater critical discourse alongside her works written for mature audiences. Whether Danticat is writing for either young or mature audiences, memory and (re)memory become channels for stories carried forth by burgeoning characters. Ortiz comments, “Danticat represents ‘memory’ of her cultural inheritance is the only multidimensional, multi-vocal way it can be restored.” She demonstrates that the “past has to be broken, deconstructed in order to be usable in the future” (“Remembering the Past” 67). For that reason, by giving this task of “breaking, deconstructing, and using” the past to create connections to the future, the young characters—Celiane, in Behind the Mountains, and Giselle and Isabelle in Untwine—are doing in effect the same “heavy lifting” that Danticat usually assigns to adult women characters in her novels. Through this spiritual “toting,” Celiane carries the spirit of her father with her before the weight of immigration causes his gentle personality to toughen. In the same sense, Giselle carries the memory of her deceased sister Isabelle into the future. When viewed in this way, such

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characters stand in the gap between life and either real or imagined death. Likewise, Silvia Martínez-Falquina probes the argument of loss in her study of Danticat’s adult novel, Claire of the Sea Light. She finds that the novel’s protagonist is its strategic representation of grief—which [Danticat] achieves through the short story cycle structure and overall in-betweenness and ambivalence in symbols and characterization—puts Haitians on the critical map of trauma, fighting invisibility and oblivion, but it simultaneously resists an appropriation of Haitian experience by rejecting any monolithic view on Haiti and refusing to fit into a predetermined template. (“Postcolonial Trauma Theory in the Contact Zone” 834)

Although such an inquiry is situated within the field of trauma studies, and thoughtfully interrogates questions of “real life” in Haiti versus fiction emerging oft times from global apathies, one may argue that such an inquiry into Claire of the Sea Light is comparable to an investigation of Untwine because both novels—although written for adult and adolescent audiences respectively—are rich in that they imagine the possibilities of the characters aside from strict dichotomies of life/death and existence/absence. By the same token, Martínez-Falquina’s argumentative framing—that does not take Danticat’s Untwine into consideration—effectively frames the dualities that the aforesaid novels’ protagonists symbolize. Physically speaking, the twins Giselle and Isabelle are incarnations of the dichotomies of life/death and existence/absence. They take up the mantle of many of the characters that Danticat assigns to this role as the bearer of legacies and histories, familial truths and fictions. The girls see themselves navigating the terrain of an uncertain family life: parents on the verge of separation, difficulties that the girls have individuating themselves and mediating their teenage-fueled issues that seemingly change by the moment. Nonetheless, Danticat does not mire readers in the girls’ growing pains and the family’s challenges. Instead, she uses such familiarity to create a common plane of human understanding. In a forthright manner, Danticat takes into consideration how young people wrestle with questions of life and death. In an interview titled “‘The Story Will Be There When You Need It’: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” Erik Gleiberman queries (when speaking to the novelist): I want young people to be represented in the conversation. I don’t want us to forget that you are an author of young people’s literature as well. In those works, you are also talking about the subject of death. Do you approach it differently, or how are your purposes different? (np)

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Danticat responds: I approach it the same way. You would speak slightly differently to an adult than you would speak to a very young child. And in the younger [audience-focused] book [Untwine], I’m writing from the point of view of a young person. I’m lucky that I have so many young people in my life to observe. I think everyone who’s written a children’s book will tell you the first rule is not to talk down to children. There’s no subject that’s off-limits, but it rings false if you talk down to children. (“‘The Story Will Be There’” np)

In the abovementioned interview, Danticat reveals that a book like Untwine is “like one that she wishes that she could have had to read when she was younger” (“‘The Story Will Be There’” np). Through such a revelation, readers not only find that Danticat is cognizant of how she seeks to authentically convey ideas to her readers, but also that she is reminiscent of how she sought to have been engaged through literature as a young reader. Again, her ability to modulate her authorial voice and reach others is yet why Danticat is a laudable author who successfully anticipates and meets the needs of her diverse audiences. For instance, whereas Untwine is written for a YA audience, and Claire of the Sea Light is written for a mature audience, both novels are foregrounded in appreciable historical and sociocultural references. In both books, Danticat uses the tools of interior monologue, stream of consciousness, and reverse chronology. These strategies distinguish the novels as “classic” Danticat for their aural richness and ability to engage readers. Claire of the Sea Light unfurls in reverse chronology that is used to weave together seamless vignettes recounting the life of Claire, a motherless child who is raised by her well-meaning but weary fisherman father. Although she adores him, poignantly, the girl carries the spirit of her mother who departed from life during her birth. (Claire is comparable to Giselle who carries the spirit of her departed twin sister, Isabelle. As stated earlier, a characteristic of Danticat’s writing is her frequent evocation of twin imagery in the storylines of her novels and short stories.) Moreover, Claire of the Sea Light orients the reader through the social entanglements of a seaside community that seeks to make sense of its somewhat staid insularity. These challenges beget opportunities for Danticat to cultivate a narrative that comments on individuals from different stations of life who find themselves equally complicit in other community members’ strifes and triumphs. The intimacy of the fishing village of Ville Rose enables the community members to develop an emotive embrace of Claire, the novel’s titular character. Many of her neighbors wish her well and seek to positively influence her upbringing.

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However, this community is no idyllic hamlet. Like many of the settings depicted in Danticat’s novels, it is a place that carries with it the heavy burden of past losses and a wistful, uncertain concern about the future: again another hallmark of many of Danticat’s novels written for both mature and young adult readers. Even so, Robyn Cope argues in “‘We Are Your Neighbors’: Edwidge Danticat’s New Narrative for Haiti”: that “her work’s ability to ‘bear witness’ for the voiceless as well as to its personalized, testimonial intimacy.’ . . .is the imperative to break the silence, [thereby,] allowing individual testimony to be entered into the record. However, all of this speaks to the hunger to tell the truth, not the ability to receive it” (101). Danticat, one may reason, gives young protagonists like Celiane, Giselle, and Isabelle the responsibility of existing within conceptual extremes. Celiane in Behind the Mountains represents those individuals who seek to turn inward, to separate and protect themselves from life’s harsh realities by looking for safe physical and emotive spaces to weather the storms. Thus, she, like Giselle in Untwine, reflects the need of an individual to separate, to furtively “steal away” from her life’s challenges. This is a space that readers are led to occupy alongside Danticat’s characters while also retracing the steps that have led to her characters’ often traumatic compositional changes. Of this distinction in familial composition in Untwine, Deborah Stevenson remarks: Split seconds change Giselle’s identity as well as her life when a van hits the family car, seriously injures Giselle and her parents, and kills Giselle’s identical twin, Isabelle. . . . The book effectively follows the deliberate and grief-burdened tempo of a narrator dealing with physical and familial loss simultaneously, punctuating the narrative with heartbreaking truths about Giselle’s experience (“I know exactly what I look like dead,” says Giselle at her sister’s funeral. “I look like Isabelle”). Cursed with little to distract her, Giselle understandably dives deep into memories of her sister as well as tortured explorations of what her life means without her twin and what the effect will be on her close-knit but sometimes mercurial . . . family. (“Review of Untwine,” 192)

It is significant to note that the thoughts of these characters bring into vivid relief the manner in which dashed hopes and dreams do not arrest their actions. Yet it is evident that Danticat effectively uses collective memory in Untwine to soften the realities of the death and loss of a young girl, Isabelle. Danticat is forthright about the subject of traumatic loss. In fact, one may find it to be especially revealing that fiction, rather than history, contextualizes Behind the Mountains—unlike the majority of her novels, short stories, and her memoir. Thus, the reconstituted “reality” offered by Danticat, is often a mediation of events in “real life” appropriated and embellished through

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a fictionalized cast of characters. Through this Danticat is able to teach her readers about the delicate nature of life and loss without soft-pedaling its ability to scar and unmoor an individual for the rest of their lives. What is more, Danticat employs the character Giselle to engage in volitional acts that enable the young girl to physically and emotionally “uncouple”—“untwine,” from her departed twin Isabelle’s physical form, but never her memory. By the same token, Leyla Savsar notes that memories enable the cultivation of resilience in characters whose personal recollections are often their sole source of strength. She observes: Behind the Mountains depicts the written word as the migrant’s tool for acquiring agency. The narrative portrays the struggles of a contemporary Haitian American family as they undergo double displacement, first from the village of Beau Jour to the city of Port au Prince, as implied in the protagonist Celiane’s later journey to Brooklyn. Set against the background of the Haitian elections, with bombs and economic pressures forcing Celiane and her family to flee the country, this novel . . . overtly presents the national history of the country as well as its presidential politics. Both are contained within thirteen-year-old Celiane’s diary, a format that weaves together fact and fiction. (“Mother Tells Me to Forget” 402–403)

The diary that Celiane is given by her teacher for her stellar academic accomplishments is the symbol of her growing need for privacy and independence as a young adult. Practically, the diary becomes a repository for her to record and process her thoughts about her life and her family as they are subjected to unsolicited changes in their family following periods of forced and elected migration. Even when Danticat deploys a youthful character as an informative narrator, she takes into consideration how young people wrestle with questions of life, death, and change. Yet, with a gentle authorial touch, Danticat does not offer burdensome questions delivered through heavy existentialist inquiries. Instead, she broaches these difficult conversations by placing her youthful characters in relatable postures. Such sensitivity reflects the remembrance of her experiences as a young adult reader. This revelatory gesture confirms that Danticat’s efforts as an author of adult and YA fiction are especially sensitive to the needs of her multiple audiences. She is able to pivot with precision to address the needs of diverse audiences with equal degrees of authorial awareness, attention, and honesty. Comparisons to Behind the Mountains and Untwine may be ostensibly drawn to Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey for each novel focuses on youthful protagonists in the midst of disorienting losses. Nevertheless, it has been previously established that Behind the Mountains and Untwine were specifically written for a YA audience, whereas Crick Crack, Monkey was not.

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Remarkably, Hodge, in the 1970s was ushering in a new authorial presence: that of the Caribbean female author utilizing the coming of age novel, and a female protagonist, as a means for commenting upon cultural and political realities. At that time, her efforts were groundbreaking. Hodge’s presence alone forever altered the space wherein commentary was levied through the novel about educational systems and social structures in the Caribbean. In the decades that followed, numerous female authors, like Danticat, writing in this manner, made their own lasting, transformative impressions on the genre. Whereas Hodge herself reveals that despite the questions of character presentation and narrative structure, there is no uncertainty about her intended audience. Most telling is her assertion in an interview with Kathleen Balutansky, during which Hodge confesses about Crick Crack, Monkey: The novel is aimed at the young people at school, at high-school students. [She observed in the late 1980s,] We don’t have enough for them to read at all in the Caribbean. Although we have Caribbean literature in the curriculum now, all the books that they read in school are adult books. Many of these books have child protagonists, yes, but these books weren’t for children at all. Crick Crack, Monkey certainly wasn’t written for children. . . . But I don’t think that any other books with child protagonists were meant for children, so I think that there’s a big gap there that needs to be filled. We have to start to write for young people. (“We Are Activists” 657)

This opportunity seems to be a clarion call issued by Hodge to writers like Danticat who write not only for adults but also for young people. Yet instead of writing novels exclusively for adults that critique social injustices and capture cultural chafings, Danticat, like Hodge, it may be said, also uses the novel, specifically the genre of YA fiction, as a transformative instrument. Behind the Mountains and Untwine are crafted so well that the characters’ “stories and their lives flow beautifully one into another, all rendered in the luminous prose for which Danticat is known” (Bush, “Review of Claire of the Sea Light” 30). Whereas Behind the Mountains provides a fair measure of instructive inspiration for the reader, it is also a study in individual and communal perseverance, honor, and respect. In fact, the novel’s title evokes the power of resiliency within Haiti’s daughters and sons. C. J. Morales comments that the title evokes “a Haitian proverb ‘Behind the mountains are more mountains,’ which means that once [one has] conquered one problem, another will be there waiting to be solved” (“Go Get a Book!” 16). Young Celiane braces challenges headfirst. Even so, she learns to broach doubts about herself and her family by posing uncomfortable questions to herself within the safe space of her diary. Her internal questions are articulated to readers through interior monologue and passages excerpted from her diary.

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Celiane like Giselle finds solace through writing. These character’s written self-expressions reflect young readers’ cogitations and ruminations about life’s challenges and possibilities. In addition, Marjorie Valbrun remarks that the impact of Danticat broadly writing for her diverse audiences engages readers of varying ages and cultural experiences because Danticat’s pain-filled novels of battle-scarred and emotionally wounded immigrants who come to America to build new lives and shed old identities only to find themselves inextricably tied to a homeland they both love and hate, also resonate with thousands of non-Haitian readers. Americans of various hues whose knowledge of Haiti was once limited to what they saw on the evening news, now consider her required reading. (“Haiti’s Eloquent Daughter” 42)

In like manner, Bonnie Thomas avers that Danticat in setting her works “[a]gainst the backdrop of exile, immigration, and the negotiations of identity, the place of papers, history, and the transmission of culture through storytelling becomes even more crucial” (“Edwidge Danticat: Connecting the Political and Personal” 113). Danticat equally entrusts her young and mature characters with the responsibility of storytelling. For example, Danticat presents Behind the Mountains and Untwine in ways that are thoughtful to members of multiple audiences, especially those comprised of young people. She must be commended for her strident effort to deepen and extend narratives about adolescence and girlhood—often in the midst of probing challenging subject matters such as familial discord and loss. By tapping into the interests of young people, and writing in an approachable manner, Danticat has demonstrated that a secondary effect could be achieved: motivating young readers to be personally reflective, accountable, engaged, and concerned about matters that impact members of their communities. This effort offers restorative commentary on the social systems and orders of the day. Through YA fiction, Danticat offers us opportunities to inhale the rich fragrance of verdant possibilities in bloom.

WORKS CITED Balutansky, Kathleen M. “We Are All Activists: An Interview With Merle Hodge.” Callaloo, no. 41 (1989), pp. 651–662. Bush, Vanessa. Rev. Claire of the Sea Light. Booklist, vol. 109, no. 19/20, June 2013, pp. 28–30. EBSCOhost​,sear​​ch​.eb​​scoho​​st​.co​​m​/log​​in​.as​​px​?di​​rect=​​true&​​db​=tf​​ h​&AN=​​88130​​53​6​&s​​ite​=e​​host-​​live.​ Cope, Robyn. “ ‘We Are Your Neighbors’: Edwidge Danticat’s New Narrative for Haiti.” Journal of Haitian Studies, 23, no. 1 (2017), pp. 98–118.

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Daniels, Cindy Lou. “Literary Theory and Young Adult Literature: The Open Frontier in Critical Studies.” ALAN Review, 33, no. 2 (2006), pp. 78–82. Danticat, Edwidge. “All Geography is within Me.” World Literature Today, 93, no. 1 (2019), pp. 58–65. Edward, Summer. “Caribbean Literary Culture’s Gatekeeping of Caribbean Children’s Literature.” http://www​.summeredward​.com​/2015​/05​/caribbean​-literary​-cultures​ -gatekeeping​_61​.html. Gleibermann, Erik. “The Story Will be there when You Need it.” World Literature Today, 93, no. 1 (2019), p. 68. La Capra, Dominic. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Martínez-Falquina, Silvia. “Postcolonial Trauma Theory in the Contact Zone: The Strategic Representation of Grief in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light.” Humanities, 4, no. 4 (2015), pp. 834–860. doi: 10.3390/h4040834. Meacham, Cherie. “Traumatic Realism in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Haitian Studies, 11, no. 1 (2005), pp. 122–139. Morales, C. J. “Go Get a Book in Your Hand! C.J.’s Pre-Teens: Behind the Mountains.” New York Amsterdam News, Jan., 2010, p. 16. Ortiz, Lisa M. “Re-Membering the Past: Weaving Tales of Loss and Cultural Inheritance in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! “ Journal of Haitian Studies, 7, no. 2 (2001), pp. 64–77. Savsar, Leyla. “  ‘Mother Tells Me to Forget’: Nostalgic Re-presentations, Re-membering, and Re-telling the Child Migrant’s Identity and Agency in Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 43, no. 4 (2018), pp. 395–411. doi: 10.1353/chq.2018.0046. Stevenson, Deborah. Review of Untwine, by Edwidge Danticat. Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, 69, no. 4 (2015), pp. 192–192. doi: 10.1353/bcc.2015.0951. Thomas, Bonnie. “Edwidge Danticat: Connecting the Political and Personal.” In Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past, edited by Bonnie Thomas. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 100–119. Valbrun, Marjorie. “Haiti’s Eloquent Daughter.” Black Issues Book Review, 6, no. 4 (Jul. 2004), pp. 42–43. The author would like to thank Dr. Melvin B. Rahming, Janice Ayer Jackson, and Dr. Cindy Lutenbacher for generously providing editorial assistance with this essay.

Conclusion Beginning at the Beginning: Teaching Morrison through Stewart and Hurston through Marson and Conde

Dear Reader, it is with reticence (I am not sure that is the right word) that I type this conclusion. Reticence? Perhaps hesitancy. Perhaps an overabundance of caution. I am not sure. However, here is something about my process that is indubitable: I have been thinking of this collection and delaying this concluding essay with a warning from Deborah McDowell in mind. In 1980, McDowell penned a fairly harsh criticism of the ideology surrounding Black women’s literature, “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism,” in response to Barbara Christian’s 1977 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” In response to Christian’s essay, warned that in our rush for some kind of working, political Black women’s literature criticism, practicing academics and writers should not use too few examples. McDowell’s response is sometimes seen as harsh. Delia Jarrett-MacAuley, when reviewing McDowell’s 1995 publication, “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory, states that McDowell’s earlier views had been updated, revised, and “tempered.”1 But, was there wisdom in McDowell’s warning? First, I am thinking of McDowell’s warning about using too few examples. Noticeably absent from this collection are the autobiographies of Jarena Lee and Sojourner Truth. Frances E. W. Harper was a pivotal poet and a serious analysis of her is also missing. We, the collection of scholars in this book, are writing during a time of pandemic, and many of the traditional archives were closed and unavailable to us. I am hoping to expand this collection, knowing that it is incomplete, in the future. Second, I keep returning to McDowell’s statement, Unfortunately, Black feminist scholarship has been decidedly more practical than theoretical, and the theories developed thus far have often lacked

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sophistication and have been marred by slogans, rhetoric, and idealism. The articles that attempt to apply these theoretical tenets often lack precision and details.2

As practicing academics, are we still attempting to hammer very round, three-dimensional, complex Black women’s literature into square, sometimes two-dimensional, totalizing theoretical paradigms? Are we, the teaching professors, failing to read Black women’s literature within its proper historical context, its sociological and economic implications, and its heavily layered instances of intertextuality? After all, Native Son and Invisible Man are not the only texts to signify. Have we been following the conversations that Black women writers have with one another closely? Have we missed the dialectical beauty and the richness, sometimes akin to the complexity of Black women’s kitchen conversations, that Black women’s texts create in the American, Caribbean, and African belletristic traditions? In order to further explain the questions that I ask (and not necessarily the answers that I seek), I was fortunate enough to begin at the beginning in one of my literature classes. I closely monitored what the students comprehended from several Black women writers’ pieces versus the historical metanarratives of African American history that most of them received from their primary educations and society at large. I chose several earlier texts, and paired them with contemporary ones, in order to teach the continuity and dynamic natures of African American history and artistic production in the United States. There is continued relevancy to Black women’s literature of the 1800s that continues into the contemporary era, and most of our students, who are now digital natives, are grossly unaware. Likewise, early Black women Caribbean writers deserve continued scholarly attention because there are several continuities between Black Caribbean writers and Black American writers (both men and women). It has been helpful, I feel, to teach Morrison through Wheatley and Maria W. Stewart and to pair Zora Neale Hurston with both Una Marson and Maryse Conde, Black women writers of the Caribbean. With McDowell’s warnings in mind, I present Morrison this way to the students, because Morrison is an exceptional writer (emphasis mine). Her presentation of Black individuals and people, in the oral tradition of the Black American folk that tells the story without an explanation to the white gazing audience, is akin to African writers such as Aidoo, Achebe, Ba, and Ousmane. Morrison is closely aligned in methodology to African writers than those Black American male predecessors of the Naturalism/Realism 1940s and 1950s. Her use of traditional African folk tales in African American fiction juxtaposes Morrison’s fiction with Caribbean authors who regularly employ the strange and wonderful feats of Brother Anansi and Ti-Jean and his brothers.3 Morrison, who became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize

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for Literature in 1993, is part of that tradition of Black women writer firsts in America. Wheatley became the first published Black writer in America and Maria W. Stewart became the first woman to leave behind a collection of political essays. Both Wheatley and Stewart lived and worked and wrote at a time when all women were considered intellectually incapable of producing written discourse (emphasis mine). Both Wheatley and Stewart produced literature that sparked controversy, because Africans were considered “scientifically” unfit for rational language comprehension and production. So, while Morrison is exceptional, she is not a single exceptional example of Black women writer firsts, and other Black women writers should be studied alongside Morrison, who was steeped in American history and as an editor, helped foster the careers of other Black writers such as Toni Cade Bambara (who is also missing in these collections). As teaching and writing academics, it is our responsibility to teach and continue to write about Morrison as both literary theorist and writer and to place her in the proper literary-historical context. Black women’s tradition of literary excellence neither begins nor ends with Morrison. The key word in the previous sentence was “tradition.” Unlike Morrison, who garners a lion’s share of literary theoretical probing throughout a stellar career, Zora Neale Hurston’s oeuvre was largely ignored until her reintroduction to audiences in the late 1970s by Alice Walker. Even still, some of Hurston’s works have been jettisoned in favor of others. Namely, her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road suffers critical neglect and her nonfiction contributions to science/speculative fiction barely receive mention at all.4 Yet, Hurston’s creative and nonfiction works are bridges: (1) With her positive view of voodoo as a viable and vibrant religion, Hurston links the American South to the Caribbean. In this way, it is helpful to link Hurston with the writer, Maryse Conde, who also used voodoo positively in her book, I Tituba Black Witch of Salem. (2) Hurston, who visited the Caribbean and grew up in Florida, is one of our earliest Black women ecocritical writers, linking her with Jamaica’s Una Marson. While Hurston certainly suffered the sexism and elitism of those active in the Harlem Renaissance, is it fair to continue to teach Hurston as a Harlem Renaissance artist, which restricts her to the continental United States for a narrow swatch of time?

TEACHING MORRISON’S BY BEGINNING AND THE BEGINNING I “discovered” Toni Morrison’s short story, “Recitatif,” while preparing for a class.5 The story features two very raced and classed women, Roberta and Twyla, who were placed in a homeless shelter in New York, at eight years old. The first-person narrator, Twyla, relates various incidents that occur in

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the Newbury, New York area as the two women meet over a twenty-year timespan. They reach adulthood, marry, raise families, and experience the racial strife and class clashes that spiraled Newburgh into decline. In typical Morrison fashion, she complicates the narrative by refusing to identify the races of the two women and by placing the turbulent economic and racial protests, so familiar to students of the Civil Rights Movement, in the United States North. Because students (and many published academics) are psychologically comfortable with the Southern metanarrative of the modern Civil Rights Movement beginning with a saintly seamstress and an evil bus driver, this story was and is almost impossible for even upper-level students to read and comprehend.6 In order to effectively teach this story in a manner that the students can fully comprehend its rich, historical allusions, it is necessary to begin at the beginning of the Black womanist writing tradition itself using the politicized poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the political essays of Maria W. Stewart. Upon viewing Wheatley as a political poet and reading Stewart alongside Morrison, students realize that Morrison, like many Black women writers, has given the world more than a masterful work of art. Morrison crafted a piece of valuable historical fiction that invites modern audiences to reinsert the Northern half of the United States into the Civil Rights Movement narrative and to rethink our entire corpus of knowledge surrounding racial and class attitudes in America. For those of us who have followed Morrison throughout our academic careers (yes, this is yet another Toni Morrison chapter or journal article. If readers do not complain about the voluminous work on Shakespeare and Faulkner, I do not expect a ton of complaints about this chapter), we know that she deploys every word as strategically as War Room attendees use intelligence details. Nothing is wasted. Not one character’s name, geographical description, metaphor, or even profane word is wasted. It is all done in a precise style where word and melody combine in a seemingly improvised, controlled, call-and-response performance that is ladened with African/ African American rural oral influence. For example, an opening statement of Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, “Quiet as it’s kept . . . (emphasis Morrison’s)”7 is an ironic term that begins a conspiracy of silence around an incestuous deed in the text. It could have easily been the opener for Black women’s kitchen or porch conversations. It is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying, “Everybody knows about it, but nobody speaks on it,” and so begins the conversation. Aside from the oral aspect of Morrison’s masterpieces, there is another purposeful/performative aspect to her creative language: to shake itself free of the restrictive chains of American-style racism. Writing in the essay, “Academic Whispers,” Morrison states, “I wanted to figure out how to manipulate, mutate, and control imagistic metaphoric language (and its syntax) in order to produce something that is free of the imaginative restraints

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that the racially inflected language at my disposal affords me.”8 For those of us who are practicing academics, we know that this is part of Morrison’s ultimate project. For students, however, this is an abstract concept. They do not yet understand how language is both circumscribed and circumscribing. It is best to demonstrate these concepts through teaching. Once students begin to read “Recitatif,” I ask them who they think is the white orphan and who is the Black orphan. Both of the little girls are fatherless and neither girl is from wealthy families. Though the story is told from a limited, first-person narrator’s point of view, Morrison never reveals which girl is white and which is Black. The narrator’s name is Twyla and her friend’s name is Roberta. In the twenty-first-century classroom, I ask the students who they think is the Black girl. They assume that the narrator is Black because her name is “Twyla.” I ask them to please only give details from the story in order to support their conclusion, and they come armed. In fact, they use the first line from the story, “My mother danced all night and Roberta was sick.”9 Other points they bring to the discussion are the following: Twyla does not know African American rock star guitarist, Jimi Hendrix while Roberta does; and when they become adults, Twyla remains poor while Roberta goes on to marry a wealthy man with servants in an upscale neighborhood. The students equate rock music with whiteness and poverty with Blackness. With this “evidence,” the students all but prove Morrison’s points about the imprisoning nature of the English language. Students of the twenty-first century, particularly those who may have been inculcated with the politics of respectability, simply do not understand how their answers reflect stereotypical thinking. First, many of them admit that they choose Twyla as Black simply because she has a “Black-sounding” or “ghetto” name. Some of them are familiar with the many articles that African Americans with “ethnic” sounding names have their resumes rejected immediately by white employees and they even laugh at the name, “Twyla.”10 I remind them that this story has a time span of about twenty years, from the 1950s until the late 1970s or early 1980s, and that most people marching with Dr. King were named “Henry,” “Mary,” or “John,” but still were unable to obtain jobs to the color of their skin and not names on resumes. Moreover, there just might be a white person out there who likes to dance and there are Black women named Roberta. In order to “prove” that point to my students, I show the students a picture of the world-famous white dancer, Twyla Tharp, and Black American soul singer, Roberta Flack. Unfortunately, many of today’s students have heard of neither (unless they are dance or music majors, specifically). Could it possibly be, I challenge students, that the narrator is based on Twyla Tharp (in a way) and the friend is based on Roberta Flack (in a way)? Students are heavily invested in this narrative of the “ghetto name,” and Blackness as poverty, continue to commit presentist biases and miss a vital

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clue on the very first page of the story. Twyla says, “and one of the things [my mother] said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny. Roberta sure did. Smell funny.”11 The differences between Black and white women’s hair are often overlooked. In their second meeting, Twyla mentioned that Roberta’s “own hair was so big and wild. I could hardly see her face.”12 Twyla could have easily been referencing an Afro, which was popular by the time of their adulthood. Roberta is on her way to see Jimi Hendrix, an artist like Roberta Flack and Twyla Tharp, who seemed to transcend and defy labels. Though a Rock-and-Roll legend, Hendrix was Black and began his career by playing for soul legends such as James Brown and Ike Turner. Contemporary Black students who do not regularly consume Rock or know Black musical history believe Twyla is Black, because she does not know Hendrix, either. I remind them that in the story’s time, most Americans would have been familiar with Hendrix’s performance at Woodstock and its political significance. And how did “poor” become synonymous with Black? Why do students assume that poverty equals Black and brown people? I ask students if they realize that in America, there are poor white people? In the story, Twyla could be a poor white person who does not own a television set. In order to answer my own questions, which are not rhetorical, I would like to launch into a full history of minstrelsy in America, but there is a finite amount of class time, and the semester has to end at some point. In order to answer these questions, students are introduced to Morrison as a literary theorist with a consummate eye for the ways that American history has shaped/continues to shape American language and thought. Morrison’s essay, “A Race in Mind: The Press in Deed” answers most of the questions that I pose to the students in class.13 In this essay, Morrison analyzes how “Black” became synonymous with “poor.” The tool was minstrelsy, according to Morrison. Since many of today’s students, regardless of color, have not actually seen a minstrel show or even an example of one, I find one for them on Youtube and show it through the overhead. I remind students, The point to remember is that minstrelsy had virtually nothing to do with the way black people really were; it was purely white construction. Black performers who wanted to work in minstrelsy were run off the stage or forced to blacken their black faces.14

The students collectively witness whites making a mockery of Black speech, Black physical features, Black thought, Black jobs, and Black humanity. As Morrison observes, “The spectacle of a black and signifying difference, taught to an illiterate white public (via minstrelsy) became entrenched in a literate public via the press.” And this form of entertainment did more

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than just spread negative stereotypes of African Americans at a time when extra-legal killings were rampant, it did something for white Americans as well. Minstrelsy was used to effectively “to disappear the white poor and unify all classes and regions, erasing the real lines of conflict (emphasis Morrison’s).”15 Indeed, most students reject my theory that Twyla could be white strictly because she is poor. The Hendrix reference is secondary. Their reluctance to equate poverty with whiteness stands witness to Morrison’s theory. Once students see for the first time how the very language that we speak has been racialized (and classed) and how it shapes and perpetuates our thoughts, we move on to another of Morrison’s major artistic aims: to redeploy language in a liberating way. She writes in “Academic Whispers,” I mean first to recognize thee linguistic strategies, then either to employ or deploy them to achieve a counter effect; to deactivate their lazy, unearned power, to summon other oppositional powers, and liberate what I am able to invent, record, describe, and transcribe from the straitjacket a racialized society can and does buckle us into.16

Professors and practicing academics are not immune to being straitjacketed. For far too many of us, the Civil Rights Movement began with Rosa Parks being ejected from a bus after refusing to give her seat to a white patron. For far too many of us, all slavery, racism, and prejudice are relegated to below the Mason-Dixon line where the signs of segregation make it easier to point out who are the victims of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal oppression and who are its perpetrators. The North, with its bureaucratic vagaries and seemingly liberal educational tradition, has been dropped from mainstream syllabi and conversation. Seemingly, we have but forgotten that the secondlargest slave port in America was New York, we do not acknowledge the Silent Parade of 1917 that took place in New York and began the African American tradition of organized, dignified protest in America, we do not discuss the racial problems of Boston that were prevalent in Black women’s writings as early as the late 1700s and early 1800s, and we keep quiet as kept about the corporate, legally sanctioned nature of the Ku Klux Klan in working-class Midwestern states like Ohio and Michigan. MORRISON AND THE FORGOTTEN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT OF AMERICA’S INDUSTRIAL NORTH This lack of scholarly attention to the Civil Rights Movement of the United States’ industrial North hinders students’ comprehension of Morrison’s

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“Recitatif.” There is particular confusion around what Twyla calls “strife.” Since students have limited background knowledge of both the scope and methodologies of the Civil Rights Movement (and it seems that many legislators want to keep it that way) I certainly do not expect many of them to possess fore-knowledge of the Boston busing crisis or any of the early very active Black women writers/journalists/activists of Massachusetts who frequented the Boston area. While many students are familiar with the Southern Civil Rights Movement, I use these moments in class to further provide context for Black women writers and the community they formed. Second, it is an opportunity to expand students’ views of African Americans’ struggle for socioeconomic equality in the United States. If we take a long view of the Civil Rights Movement, it began in Massachusetts when Wheatley first published her poems and Stewart began to address the politics of her day in a public arena in the presence of a mix-gender audience. And if the Harlem Renaissance represented an artistic flowering/maturation of African American artistic output, Massachusetts, particularly Boston, represented the beginning of Black political thought and activism decades before the Harlem Renaissance. Phyllis Wheatley, Maria W. Stewart, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Angelina Weld Grimke, Florida Ruffin Ridley, Pauline Hopkins (originally from Cambridge, but edited Colored American Magazine from a Boston office before it moved to New York) and Maria Louise Baldwin all hail from Massachusetts. The first meeting of the First National Conference of Colored Women was held in Boston in 1895. Most of these women (I am aware that Black men such as William Monroe Trotter and W. E. B. Du Bois are from Massachusetts) left behind extensive journalistic and political writings. For many students, the colonial history of America seems straightforward. It begins with the Mayflower and culminates with the Revolutionary War. “Recitatif” complicates that picture, because the conflict of the story between Twyla and Roberta reaches back toward colonial class, gender, race, and religious fractures that have been left out of the Civil Rights/African American history metanarrative. Contemporary students inhabit a world of posts: post-feminism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-American democratism (the Civil Rights Movement), and some would argue post-hardcopy information delivery. The #MeToo digital native is, fortunately, aware of the hardships and barriers that women faced two generations ago, because that struggle is still prevalent in the digital space. However, students may be unaware of the wall of patriarchy that most learned, white women faced a century ago. When teaching Black women writers, it is important (at least in my class), to remind students that early British American society patterned itself culturally from British mores and customs. One example is America’s Cult of True Womanhood (discussed in an earlier chapter), which was an

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off-shoot of British conduct literature for women. At a time when aristocratic women of England learned to write, they were ridiculed and labeled with the derogatory name, “blue stockings.” For Black women to enter the public sphere, which was considered masculine and speak in front of “promiscuous” audiences (a room with a mixed-gendered crowd) with what they believed was nothing less than God-given authority on politically-inflammatory topics were daily acts of untold bravery that the Western world had never seen. Because Black women were thrust into the public, masculine labor market without the benefit of “True Womanhood,” they could speak for themselves and all other human beings in their position without fearing anything like gentlemanly retaliation from white men or women. Here, I pose a question to students as they try to figure out the tension in “Recitatif”: Is Phyllis Wheatley considered political? Though most students were exposed to Wheatley in their high school English classes, they were not given the proper sociopolitical context for Wheatley’s gender and were not introduced to the “objective” scientific racism that Wheatley and others faced daily. Moreover, students’ reading and interpretation of Wheatley are influenced by critical and pedagogical practices that label her “apolotical” at best and complicit with oppressive Christian doctrine at worst. For instance, in the “Introduction” to Confirmation, Amiri Baraka refers to early African American poetry as, “the Phyllis Wheatley-Jupiter Hammon slavemastersanctioned house-negro writing.”17 Like most students, they do not expect to encounter a “political” poet, because they have been influenced by traditional readings of Wheatley. For Wheatley, the “politics” of her poetry were in the act of writing itself. In writing the poems, Wheatley began the African American writing tradition in America and began a Black woman activist/writerly tradition of transgressing gender boundaries that forbade women from speaking in a masculine space about manly subjects such as politics. Even during the uber-conservative, socially proscriptive Victorian-era America, Black women writers continued to follow this example. Though her poems seem to sanction slavery, the writing of them are the ultimate rebellion against the institution. Students find in Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” and are in a sense repulsed by the scientific racism implied by the use of Wheatley’s “pagan land,” in the first line. Yet, Wheatley wrote against the notions that African people and women simply did not possess the intellectual capacity to learn, read, and produce literature. I ask students to please be mindful that Wheatley was writing during a time when it was unlawful to detain Christians for lifelong slavery in the United States, regardless of skin color. Wheatley is writing herself into freedom by manifesting intellectual acumen and professing her Christian faith simultaneously. The students move on to “To the University of Cambridge in New England” and are befuddled

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at her imitation of Alexander Pope, the British poet who was castigated during the Restoration era for his Catholic faith. I remind the students here, that while the philosophical and scientific opinion of the day may have stated and defined the inhumanity of Africans due to the lack of a written language, it was not illegal to educate Africans in the privacy of one’s own home. The Wheatleys, as owners of the young Phillis, were within the boundaries of British law to provide their slaves with an education that included the classics, including Pope. It was only racism and sexism that kept Wheatley out of a publishing contract in America while women in Britain were begrudgingly receiving attention as novelists. Most students do not know that Wheatley did not publish in America, but in Britain. It is when students read “To His Excellency General Washington” that they understand the bold nature of Wheatley’s temperament, her knowledge of Revolutionary politics, and the depth of her engagement with Greco-Roman classics (many of them complain about the number of footnotes they must read in order to comprehend the poem). Wheatley, a Black woman slave, nonetheless, addresses a future president. Unfortunately, the criticism of Wheatley as nonconfrontational or apolitical or even master-sanctioned is the same criticism that dogged Zora Neale Hurston’s career and followed Toni Morrison into the contemporary era. Doubly unfortunate is the fact that much of this type of criticism is leveraged at Black women writers by Black male writers, historically. While “On Being Brought from Africa to America” is highlighted as an example of Wheatley’s master-sanctioned poetic style, her poem to General Washington, “Liberty and Peace, A Poem,” and her letter to Samson Occom are conspicuously absent in these conversations. This is irresponsible academic practice, especially since some of this criticism is eerily similar to Thomas Jefferson’s dismissal of Wheatley in Notes on the State of Virginia. It is irresponsible in light of the fact that modern students, even when they are confident in their knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement, do not know about the movement in America’s industrial North. To be sure, students double-check the setting of “Recitatif.” The narrator says, “They have lived in Newburgh all of their lives and talk about it the way people do who have always known a home.”18 Students must research the history of Newburgh, of course. They find that Newburgh, New York has been the site of intense racial violence, gentrification, and general urban decay. Ironically, one of the most-cited stories is one from the New York Times dated November 8, 1974. A curfew was imposed, because students rioted after a Black rock band won the talent test at the local high school.19 Even earlier, the mayor of Newburgh, Joseph McDowell Mitchell, as a city manager, became “famous overnight,” for his racially discriminatory policies. He insisted that the city’s mostly Black welfare recipients come to the police departments to pick up their checks.20 Again,

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this sparked racial protests. Students learn further that Newburgh, New York was the site of racially motivated labor protests and violence in 1899. With this context, students can comprehend the lines, “Strife came to us that fall. At least that’s what the paper called it.”21 Like Boston, Massachusetts, Newburgh entered a busing crisis. Morrison demonstrates how these historical/racial events affect the two individuals. Twyla sees Roberta protesting and they have a tense moment of exchange in which the national story begins to change their personal narratives. Roberta says, Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you’re the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot.22

These two girls were orphans together. Regardless of their race, they were each in dire poverty with single mothers who needed help. One mother was physically sick and another’s was mentally ill. They share of memory of victimizing a disabled worker at the orphanage, Maggie. As gentrification demarcates class lines between the IBM executives and the working class of Newburgh, and as racial protests irrupt over the desegregation orders, the story that Roberta tells both of them concerning Maggie changes. At the beginning of the story, when both girls were “dumped” (as the narrator calls it) by their mothers in the orphanage, Twyla relates the story this way: Maggie fell down there once. The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses. And the big girls laughed at her. We should have helped her up, I know, but we were scared of those girls with lipstick and eyebrow pencil. Maggie couldn’t talk. . . . I think she was born that way: mute.23

When the two meet years later, this time when they are married and one has moved into a house with servants, the story changes. Roberta tells Twyla that she misremembers the whole ordeal. Instead, the story becomes, “They knocked her down. Those girls pushed her down and tore her clothes in the orchard.”24 Twyla does not remember it that way, but Robert assures her that it did so happen that way. She says to Twyla, “Of course I’m sure. You’ve blocked it, Twyla. It happened. Those girls had behavior problems, you know.”25 By the time the women are embroiled in the busing crises, Roberta accuses Twyla of victimizing a disabled Black woman. The story ends with both women wondering “what the hell happened to Maggie?” Neither of them knew the story. At one point, Twyla does not know if Maggie is even Black. She referred to her at the beginning of the story as “sandy-colored.” This orchard and Maggie’s fall have haunted Twyla throughout the turbulent

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1960s, the equally awful 1970s, and into the late 1970s or early1980s when the story ends. Penultimately, Roberta has a confession: And you were right. We didn’t kick [Maggie]. It was the gar girls. Only them. But, well, I wanted to. I really wanted them to hurt her. . . . And I don’t want you to carry that around. It was just that I wanted to do it so bad that day—wanting to is doing it.26

Each of these girls, regardless of race, were eight years old when they were left at the orphanage. They were poor, lonely, scared, and American. What is it about American ideology that encourages a perpetual chain-line of victimizations/Othering?27 They were on the lowest rung of the pecking order in that school but found someone who they considered still lower than themselves and desired to abuse her. As the students discover, the need for Americans to Other is as “normal” or American as say, busing orders in a Northern, industrial city and the racially inspired creation of the Black Belt ghetto in those same, deteriorating industrial areas. At this point in the semester, since the students have learned about the Northern arm of the Civil Rights Movement, journalists and activists in the Boston area, geographical changes in the American city-scape due to white supremacy, and the imprisoning nature of American English, I give them a mental reprieve of sorts. Rather than read another story, we look to the political essays of Maria W. Stewart, the first Black woman to leave behind a body of written political thought. Students learn, first through Morrison and secondly through Stewart: The label of de facto segregation is so historically loaded—so wrapped up in artificial binaries between South and North, between white culpability and white innocence—that historians should discard it as an analytical and descriptive category and evaluate it instead as a cultural and political construct.28

Students read Stewart’s most famous speech, “Why Sit Ye Here and Die,” delivered at Franklin Hall in Boston in 1832. While the full text is available in the text edited by Marilyn Richardson, Maria W. Stewart America’s First Black Woman Political Writer (1987), I direct students to the excerpt on Blackpast​.or​g, which is available free of cost. Students, even in the twenty-first century, are shocked at Stewart’s direct attack on the racism in Boston. Stewart, a free-born woman, stood in front of a mixed-gendered audience by the authority of God, as she claimed. Students understand that for a woman, any woman, to enter politics at this time, was heavily frowned upon by their respective colonial societies. Women who worked for the cause of abolition disregarded those attitudes and spoke for themselves

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and their fellow kinsmen in bondage. E. Frances White highlights in her text, The Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (2001), that Black women were never offered the respect and protection of the Cult of True Womanhood. Early Black women writers, journalists, and political activism represented an aberration, and white women feminists would learn how to stir the social order for the national good by working with those early, Black women writers of the abolitionist movement. Even in the twenty-first century, students are often shocked at Stewart, who was never a slave, and her use of Old Testament, prophetic wording and the bold authority with which she condemned (not taught) her listening audience for their racial attitudes. Stewart proclaims in the first lines of her speech: I have heard much respecting the horrors of slavery; but may Heaven forbid that the generality of my color throughout these United States should experience any more of its horrors than to be a servant of servants, or hewers of wood and drawers of water! Tell us no more of southern slavery; for with few exceptions, although I may be very erroneous in my opinion, yet I consider our condition but little better than that.29

In Stewart’s time, Black people were limited to one side of town, blocked from meaningful employment, and their children were not allowed to attend the city’s segregated school system. Students recall that Stewart’s claims of Northern racism are confirmed by both Frederick Douglass in his 1845 narrative, and Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). With additional historical knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement and additional readings, students begin to formulate their own questions about the nature of Black women’s writings: Could Toni Morrison’s fiction be seen as pedagogical and politically-fiery without sacrificing her art? Could Black male critics have overlooked what a writer like Morrison stated in her fiction? Afterall, Hurston wrote that her most humiliating Jim Crow experience occurred in New York and not New Orleans. What do teaching academics like myself miss when we continue to teach Black women’s literature as an apolitical auxiliary to Black men’s literature? With one short story, Toni Morrison addressed racialized language, class fissures in American society, popular significations of race and racism, gender, incomplete historiography, poverty, disability, Othering, and gentrification. Having analyzed all of this in one story, is it fair for practicing academics and critics to relegate Black women’s literature to the anti-racism side-line because they refuse to incorporate a Hegelian-style confrontation between a Black man and a white one?

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HURSTON’S LITERATURE AS BRIDGE Having written at length about Morrison’s only short story, Dear Reader, I promise that this section on Hurston will not wax as long. However, I do intend to demonstrate that Hurston’s contributions link the past to the Afrofuture and the Caribbean with the United States. I know that Hurston’s literature predates Morrison’s technically, but Hurston’s work with zombies links her with contemporary speculative/Afrofuture (though most American or popular culture consumers do not know this), and her work in the Caribbean links her geographically with past and contemporary Black Caribbean writers. Here in America, we do not realize that the concept of a zombie, the walking dead, is a voodoo construction emanating from Black populations in the Caribbean. Allow me to quote Amy Wilentz’s definition at length here: He is a New World phenomenon that arose from the mixture of old African religious beliefs and the pain of slavery, especially the notoriously merciless and coldblooded slavery of French-run, pre-independence Haiti. In Africa, a dying person’s soul might be stolen and stopped up in a ritual bottle for later use. But the full-blown zombie was a very logical offspring of New World slavery.30

While there is a gluttonous amount of Hollywood-imagined humanoid, walking dead on the large and small screen, it was Zora Neale Hurston, in her anthropological work in the Caribbean, who took the first photograph of a real zombie and presented it in Tell My Horse (1938). Hurston was given permission to take a picture of the verifiable zombie, Felicia Felix-Mentor, by Dr. Rulx Leon, Director-General of the Service d’Hygiene. In addition to taking the picture, Hurston investigated this woman’s case. Reporting in Tell My Horse: Here name is Felicia Felix-Mentor. She was a native of Ennery and she and her husband kept a little grocery. She had one child, a boy. In 1907 she took suddenly ill and died and was buried. There were the records to show. . . . Then one day in October 1936 someone saw a naked woman on the road and reported it to the Garde d’Haiti. Then this same woman turned up on a farm and said, “This is the farm of my father. I used to live here.”31

Hurston not only details this case but lists the reasons why people would want to create a Zombie. First of all, Zombies are mindless, tireless fieldhands. Second, they make for good thieves. Hurston, in the next chapter, interviewed a doctor with a plausible theory for Zombies in Haiti:

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It was his belief that many scientific truths were hidden in some of these primitive practices that have been brought from Africa. But the knowledge of the plants and formulae are secret. They are usually kept in certain families, and nothing will induce the guardians of these ancient mysteries to divulge them.32

Not only does Hurston discuss Haitian voodoo in Tell My Horse, the Jamaican portion of the book discusses death ceremonies with particular attention to “duppies” (ghosts). Hurston participates in a ceremonial wake and funeral, and a watch for the “duppy.” In addition, Hurston was one of the first scholars to collect information about voodoo as a viable religion. John Lowe’s assertion in Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature (2016) is that Southern and Caribbean literatures are linked. Hurston uses the biblical character of Moses, recasting him as a voodoo figure, in order to link Southern African Americans with Blacks in the Caribbean and African people. She asserts that all over the United States, the British West Indies and Haiti there are reverent tales of Moses and his magic. It is hardly possible that all of them sprang up spontaneously in these widely separated areas on the blacks coming in contact with Christianity after coming to the Americas. It is more probable that there is a tradition of Moses as the great father of magic scattered over Africa and Asia.33

Hurston wrote an extensive article for the Journal of American Folklore in 1931, Hoodoo in America, which featured the practice of “hoodoo,” or voodoo in the Southern portion of the United States. While collecting for what would become Of Mules and Men, Hurston also underwent the ceremony to become a full voodoo priest in Louisiana. When most white/European folklorists and collectors treated voodoo with either a cartoonish or vengeful aspect, Hurston approached voodoo with a liberatory or respectful attitude. She defines it as “Voodoo is a religion of creation and life. It is the worship of the sun, the water an other natural forces, but the symbolism is no better understood than that of other religions and consequently is taken too literally.”34 In the chapter, “Sect Rouge,” she contrasts Voodoo with a secret society of cannibals: “It is outside of and has nothing to do with Voodoo worship. They are banded together to eat human flesh.”35 The book’s eponymous chapter, “Tell My Horse,” contrasts Catholic worship to a voodoo festival of the yams. The voodoo festival is portrayed as something beautiful and liberatory while the Catholic worship is punishment. She writes: I fail to see where it would have been more uplifting for them to have been inside a church listening to a man urging them to “contemplate the sufferings

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of our Lord,” which is just another way of punishing one’s self for nothing. It is much better for them to climb the rocks in their bare clean feet and meet Him face to face in their search for the eternal in beauty.

Hurston’s respect for voodoo as a religion and a liberatory/redemptive agent in the lives of Black people, prevalent in her anthropological work, appeared in her creative work as well. Her short story, “Spunk” (1925) and play Spunk (1935) feature voodoo as a redemptive agent with one character using it to seek revenge on another in the after-life. “Uncle Monday,” which first appeared in 1934, features a powerful Voodoo priest and reads like a Pataki.36 Hurston links Voodoo with Judeo-Christianity through the symbol of Moses in the short story, “The Fire and the Cloud,” (1934), and with the novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Moses, Man of the Mountain, recasts the African American liberatory tale with the use of Black vernacular English through the voodoo figure of Moses as collected through her anthropological work. She states in the “Introduction,” “Wherever the children of African have been scattered by slavery, there is the acceptance of Moses as the fountain of mystic powers.”37 By choosing to present voodoo as a liberatory agent rather than a sideshow or subversive demonic movement, Hurston anticipates Black Caribbean writer Maryse Conde, who reinserts the voice of the “witch” thought responsible for the hysteria of the Salem witches, the Caribbean woman, Tituba. In I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986), voodoo serves protective and liberatory functions and is in stark contrast to the oppressive, sexist Puritanical religion of the colonists. When Tituba is returned to her Caribbean island, voodoo is the religion of her ancestors and gives her courage to face her execution and fight on as a spirit against slavery. Hurston’s Moses and Conde’s Tituba show why voodoo was maligned by white slave masters: it offered some empowerment for the oppressed. Furthermore, many whites believed in the power of witchcraft as holdovers from European countries and exposure to Black folk beliefs and practices as children, regardless of their religious professions (emphasis mine). Chireau points out that “in many cases, children of both races were inculcated with images from a rich folklore tradition that served the twin objectives of admonition and instruction. Conjuring tales no doubt made a great impact on impressionable children.”38 Attempts to downplay or even eradicate the impact of voodoo on white imaginations were attempts to reassert some kind of religious control or dominance over enslaved Black populations. Both Hurston and Conde restore the voices of voodoo adherents in the Caribbean and the United States in their texts. Both Hurston and Conde anticipate contemporary playwright Katori Hall, who incorporates voodoo or hoodoo, in the Broadway play, Hoodoo Love.

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Still, one other continuity of Hurston’s Southern literature and Caribbean literature is the inclusion of the environment. First of all, the hurricane scene is well-known in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston experienced a hurricane in the Caribbean so terrifying that she thought she would die. This has been documented by both of her biographers, Robert Hemenway and Valerie Boyd. I am not going to review it here. Instead, this segment focuses on one of Hurston’s least-discussed novels and her last one, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). It is essentially a love song to the natural beauty of Florida and a dirge for the loss of the natural beauty due to land development that would eventually threaten the Everglades wildlife. This dual nature—praise song and dirge—aligns Hurston with her Jamaican counterpart, poet and playwright, Una Marson, who often sang praises and dirges for the natural beauty of Jamaica. Una Marson was also the first playwright to incorporate elements of voodoo drumming onstage with her third play, Pocomania (1938). In the essay, “Zora Neale Hurston: Environmentalist in Southern Literature,” Scott Hicks39 claims that critics are hesitant to consider Hurston an environmentalist in the same way that white male writers such as Thoreau are given that distinction. Yet, her descriptions of flora and fauna begin in childhood and can be as detailed as descriptions that Thoreau includes in Walden. Allow me to quote one from Seraph at length here: On either side yellow and blue flowers were ornamenting the spring. They passed groves of live oak, scrub oak, scattering pines and over towards the river bay and magnolia in exotic white bloom. Deep curtains of gray moss hung from the trees and waved ever so slightly in the breeze. Budding wild grape vines and briars tangled up trees and peeped out from upper branches. Possum persimmons spread their limbs among the rest.40

Hurston’s love affair and her adept description of nature do not begin nor end with her creative writing. Zora attests that they begin in childhood when she played in the woods and spoke to the pine trees. She had no innate fear of rattlesnakes, and at least one of her short stories, “Sweat,” features a Florida bull rattler. The bull rattler reappears in Seraph. While Jim Meserve belittles his wife, Arvay’s mental faculties, Arvay instinctively knows that there is something wrong with the way Jim exploits nature for material gain. Jamaican poet Una Marson strategically used the environment to comment on colonial exploitation in much the same way. Una Marson, the woman who birthed The Caribbean Artist Movement with her British Broadcasting Corporation Radio show, Caribbean Voices, published several volumes of poetry. Like many Jamaicans, she emigrated to London during World War II era in search of work but always maintained that English culture was not supreme to that of her island home. She uses a

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tree symbolically in the poem, “Home Thoughts” to demonstrate this, writing in the third stanza: June comes again and Poinciana trees/Now blossom in my sunkissed isle/And I am here in London, and the flowers/Of dainty shades and delicate perfumes stir my heart and wake my love,/But it is to the flaming glory/Of Poiciana trees in fair Jamaica.41

For her time, Marson’s stance is remarkably anticolonial and ecocritical, though, as with Hurston’s case, critics are hesitant to discuss or analyze Marson’s poetic stance as such. Both Hurston and Marson anticipate Alice Walker’s poetry, which focuses on mothering as a source of democracy. CONCLUDING THE BEGINNING? It is important, as responsible academics and writers, that we begin to teach the beginning of African American women’s literature for several reasons. First, McDowell, though seemingly harsh, is right in her assessment. We should not struggle to theorize Black women’s literature due to too few examples. If I am disappointed in this collection at all, it is because it had to end at some point, we are writing in times of COVID-19, and quite a few Black women authors are missing. Where is Toni Cade Bambara in the first text? Where is Frances E. W. Harper in this one? Second, African American theory has been masculinized with women’s text being hammered into male-centered holes. For example, Ann Petry’s The Street is often taught as Richard Wright’s feminist, Naturalist counterpart. The Street is its own text, its highly-layered and can stand on its own merit. It is not an auxiliary to the male-dominated literary ministry here. Furthermore, the very long conclusion that I have just attached to this collection shows that Black women are in conversation with one another transnationally. Black male writers are not the only ones who signify. Last, anthologized thinking is dangerous. Can we continue to teach Wheatley’s poetry as “apolitical” or even harmful in the face of the Cult of True Womanhood? Can students even hope to understand the power of Morrison’s only short story if they have never been introduced to Stewart’s radical Black woman political thought? Can we ever fully comprehend the art of the Harlem Renaissance if we are introduced to the flowering of political activity in Boston just a generation prior? Furthermore, if we jettison Jim Meserve in Seraph, how can we truly comprehend the eco-terror of Valerian in Morrison’s Tar Baby? Last, why are Black women writers dismissed as progenitors of African American Studies? For decades, academics and scholars have celebrated

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Locke and Du Bois while dismissing the great peril that Hurston faced in order to collect primary material in the American South and the Caribbean. For decades, Una Marson was dismissed as the founder of the Caribbean Artist Movement with her broadcast, Caribbean Voices, introducing Black Caribbean writers to the world. What conversations do Black women writers of the United States and the Caribbean have with Black women writers of Africa? These are the questions that continue in studies of Black women writers. These are the questions that merit further study.

NOTES 1. Delia Jarrett-MacAuley, “Review: ‘The Changing Same’: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory,” Feminist Review, 54 (1996): 127. 2. Deborah McDowell. “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism,” in The Prentice Hall of African American Women’s Literature, ed. Valerie Lee, p. 414. 3. In Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the folktale of “The Flying Africans” is reimagined. Brother Anansi and Ti-Jean and his brothers are folktales of the Caribbean with African roots. 4. I discuss Dust Tracks at length in Chapter Six of this book. 5. Subsequently, I tracked down the anthology of Black women writers, Confirmation, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka, that contained the story. For class, I used The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, v.2, ed. Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008, pp. 1364–1380. Currently, “Recitatif” is available as a stand-alone hardback with a new introduction by writer, Zadie Smith. 6. I am not casting aspersion on Rosa Parks. I wrote it that way to demonstrate the simplicity with which the modern Civil Rights Movement is taught and how little students know. 7. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, p. 6. 8. Toni Morrison, “Academic Whispers,” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, 2019, p. 199. 9. Toni Morrison, “Recitatif,” in Confirmation, ed. Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka, 1983, p. 243. 10. For an example of one such article, which are not as prevalent today, please see the story “Job Applicants with ‘Black Names’ Still Less Likely to Get Interviews” published in Bloomberg News. The link is archived here: https://www​.bloomberg​ .com​/news​/articles​/2021​-07​-29​/job​-applicants​-with​-black​-names​-still​-less​-likely​-to​ -get​-the​-interview 11. Morrison, “Recitatif,” p. 243. 12. Morrison, “Recitatif,” p. 249. 13. Currently, students in Composition II are discussing America and class. This same essay proves instrumental in helping the students to understand the essay,

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“White Trash Primer” by Lacy M. Johnson and the materials they read on Bacon’s Rebellion. 14. Morrison, “Race in Mind,” p. 37. 15. Morrison, “Race in Mind,” p. 38. 16. Morrison, “Academic Whispers,” p. 199. 17. Amiri Baraka, “Introduction,” in Confirmation, p. 23. 18. Morrison, “Recitatif,” in Belaso and Johnson, p. 1372. 19. Richard Severo, “Newburgh Sets Up Curfew as Disturbance Persists.” See the link, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/1974​/11​/08​/archives​/newburgh​-sets​-up​-curfew​-as​ -disturbance​-persists​.html 20. See, “Famous Overnight Joseph McDowell Mitchell” in The New York Times archived articles at: https://www​.nytimes​.com​/1961​/06​/24​/archives​/famous​-overnight​-joseph​-mcdowell​-mitchell​.html 21. Morrison, “Recitatif,” in Belasco and Johnson, p. 1376. 22. Ibid., p. 1377. 23. Ibid., p. 1368. 24. Ibid., p. 1374. 25. Morrison, “Recitatif,” p. 1375. 26. Ibid., p. 1379. 27. I use the notion of Othering as defined by Said in Orientalism. 28. Matthew D. Lassiter, “De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth.” In The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010, p. 27. 29. Maria W. Stewart, “Why Sit Ye Here and Die?” https://www​.blackpast​.org​/ african​-american​-history​/1832​-maria​-w​-stewart​-why​-sit​-ye​-here​-and​-die/ 30. Wilentz, Amy. “A Zombie Is a Slave Forever,” The New York Times. October 30, 2012. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2012​/10​/31​/opinion​/a​-zombie​-is​-a​-slave​-forever​.html 31. Hurston, Zora. “Tell My Horse,” in Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoir, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl Wall, pp. 269–556, 470. 32. Ibid. 33. Hurston, Tell My Horse, p. 378. 34. Ibid., p. 376. 35. Ibid., p. 483. 36. A Pataki is a Voodoo parable. For a modern-day example of one, please see, Nisi Shawl’s “Pataki” in the collection, Something More and More. 37. Hurston, “Introduction,” in Moses, Man of the Mountain, p. 337. 38. Yvonne P. Chireau. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. Berkley, UC Press, p. 18. 39. Scott Hicks, “Zora Neale Hurston: Environmentalist in Southern Literature,” in ‘The Inside Light’: New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Deborah G. Plant. Santa Barbara: Praeger, pp. 113–127. 40. Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee, p. 614. 41. Una Marson, “Home Thoughts,” in Una Marson: Selected Poems, ed. Alison Donnell. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2011.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Baraka, Amiri. “Introduction.” In Confirmation, edited by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Amina Baraka, 15–26. New York: Quill, 1983. Chireau, Yvonne P. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Conde, Maryse. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Ballatine Books, 1992. Hicks, Scott. “Zora Neale Hurston: Environmentalist in Southern Literature.” In ‘“The Inside Light:” New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, edited by Deborah G. Plant, 113–127. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Moses, Man of the Mountain.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories, edited by Cheryl A. Wall, 337–595. New York: Library of America, 1995. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Seraph on the Suwanee.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories, edited by Cheryl A. Wall, 599–920. New York: Library of America, 1995. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Tell My Horse.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, edited by Cheryl A. Wall, 273–555. New York: Library of America, 1995. Jarrett-MacAuley, Delia. “Review: The Changing Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory.” Feminist Review 54 (1996): 127–129. Lassiter, Matthew. “De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth.” In The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. edited by Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Lowe, John Wharton. Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Marson, Una. Una Marson: Selected Poems. Edited by Alison Donnell. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2011. McDowell, Debora. “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism.” In The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Women’s Literature, edited by Valerie Lee, 414–420. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2006. Mitchell, Joseph McDowell. “Famous Overnight.” The New York Times (New York), June 24, 1961. Morrison, Toni. “A Race in Mind: The Press in Deed.” In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, edited by Toni Morrison, 33–40. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Morrison, Toni. “Academic Whispers.” In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, edited by Toni Morrison, 198–204. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Morrison, Toni. “Recitatif.” In Confirmation, edited by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Amina Baraka, 243–261. New York: Quill, 1983. Morrison, Toni. “Recitatif.” In The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, V.2, 1865 to the Present, edited by Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson, 1366–1380. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage, 1970.

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Severo, Richard. “Newburgh Sets Up Curfew as Disturbance Persists.” The New York Times (New York), November 8, 1974. White, E. Frances. Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2001.

Index

2012, 128 African American Studies, 113, 114 African American vernacular, 81; Southern African American Vernacular, 41 African Diaspora, 132, 150, 152 African orisas, 147, 153 AfroFuturism, 133 Alexander, Margaret Walker, 3, 102 Antigua, 151, 156 Asimov, Isaac: The Gods Themselves, 125 Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale, 129 Baksh-Soodeen, Rawwida, 119 Balutansky, Kathleen, 188 Barbados, 156 Barnard College, 113 Berlin, Ira, 65 Bethune Cookman College, 114 Blue stockings, 199 Boas, Franz, 113 Boston busing crisis, 198 Boyd, Valerie: Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, 103 Braxton, Joanne, 21, 23 Bronte, Charlotte: Jane, Eyre, 167

Brown, Lois, 34 Bruce, Philip A., 15–16 Bruner, Charlotte, 139 Burrill, Mary, 70; Aftermath, 72–73, 79 Burroughs, Edgar Rice: A Princess of Mars, 129 Butler, Octavia: Kindred, 132; Lilith’s Brood, 122 Captain Marvel, 129 Caribbean Association for Feminist Research & Action, 119 Caribbean Examinations Council, 140 Caribbean literature, 165 Caribbean Voices, x, 7, 207, 209 Caribbean Women’s Movement, 119 Carib people, 134 Catholicism, 106 Celtic revival, 107 Chesnutt, Charles, 5; “Wife of His Youth”, 58 Children’s literature (definition), 181 Christian, Barbara: “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”, 191 Civil Rights Movement, 194, 197, 202, 203 Clarke, Arthur C., 127 Cliff, Michelle, 161–80; Abeng, 162; Claiming an Identity They Taught 213

214

Index

Me to Despise, 161; Free Enterprise, 164; If I Could Write This in Fire, 162; Jamaica, 162; No Telephone to Heaven, 162 Colonialism, 156 Colonial literature, 167 Colored American Magazine, 6, 7, 36, 198 Combahee River Collective, 166 Compromise of 1877, 42 Conde, Maryse, 193, 206; I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, 193, 206 Contemporary classroom, 50, 57 Cooper, Anna Julia: A Voice from the South, 110 Cope, Robyn, 186 Creolization (definition), 133 Cult of True Womanhood, 12, 14–16, 20–22, 198, 203, 208 Daniels, Cindy Lou: “Literacy Theory and Young Adult Literature: The Open Frontier in Critical Studies”, 183 Danticat, Edwidge, 181–89; Behind the Mountains, 181; Claire of the Sea Light, 184, 185; Untwine, 181 Davies, Carol Boyce: Black Women, Writing, and Identity, 164 DeCosta-Willis, Miriam, 17 Delmar, Rosalind, 118, 119 De Stael, Madame Germaine, x Disaster fiction, 130 Douglass, Frederick, 100, 101 Du Bois, W. E. B., 6, 71, 83, 84 Duster, Michelle, 12 Eatonville, Florida, 108 Edgell, Zee, 139, 141 Edward, Summer, 182 Eliot, T.S., viii Ellman, Mary, 126 Feminism, 117–18 Feminist critique, 164

Fisk University, 17 Fugitive Slave Law, 37 Gannet, Deborah, 23 Giddings, Paula, 11, 13; When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, 13 Gikandi, Simon, 140, 142 Gilbert, Mercedes, 70; Environment, 77–79 Gleiberman, Erik, 18 Graham, Shirley, 81–96; Aftermath, 85; It’s Mornin’, 84, 88–89; Little Black Sambo, 88; A Sunday Morning in the South, 85; Tom-Tom, 84, 88 Great Chain of Being, 2 Great Migration, 70–80, 84 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 73; “Who Set You Flowin’?” The African American Migration Narrative, 70 Grimke, Angelina, 70, 83; Rachel, 74–76, 79 Hall, Katori: Hoodoo Love, 206 Harlem Renaissance, 113 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins: Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Iola Leroy), 49–51, 55, 58–61 Harris, Adam: The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal and How to Set Them Right, 110 Harris, Trudier, 85–86 Hartman, Saidiya, 91 Hayes, Rutherford B., 42 Hemenway, Robert: Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, 102 Hodge, Merle, 139–44; Crick Crack Monkey, 187–88 hooks, bell: Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, 119 Hopkins, Pauline, 6, 33–44; Aristocracy–A Musical Drama in Three Acts, 39; “Bro Abrm Jimson’s Wedding: A Christmas Story”, 43;

Index

Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life in the North and South, 29, 33; Slaves’ Escape: or The Underground Railroad, a Musical Drama in Four Acts, 39; Winona, 39 Hopkins Coloured Troubadours, 41 Horne, Gerald, 81 Howard University, 83 Hughes, Langston: The Big Sea, 109 Human trafficking, 28 Hurst, Fannie, 113 Hurston, Zora Neale, x, 6–8, 24, 27, 36, 38, 41, 84, 99–110, 192, 204–8; “Spunk”, 205; “The Fire and the Cloud”, 205; “Uncle Monday”, 205; Dust Tracks on a Road, 99, 101; Hurston and Journal of American Folklore, 205; Hurston and voodoo, 205; Moses, Man of the Mountain, 101, 205; Of Mules and Men, 205; Seraph on the Sewanee, 101, 207; Tell My Horse, 204; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 102, 108 Hypersexualization, 58 Ida B. Wells Woman’s Club, 42 Individualism, 106 Irish Nationalism, 106 Jackson State University, 102 Jacobs, Harriet, 203; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 55, 203 Johnson, James Weldon, 24; Book of American Negro Poetry, 24 Johnson, Samuel, 3 Jones, Gayle: Corregidora, 52 Jones, Gwenyth, 128 Joyce, James: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, 100; Ulysses, 99 Kincaid, Jamaica, 139, 141; Annie John, 145–56 Kolawole, Mary, 146, 150 Ku Klux Klan, 4, 42, 69, 74, 197

215

LaCapra, Dominic: Writing History, Writing Trauma, 183 Larrier, Renee, 165 The Last Jedi, 129 Larsen, Nella, 49 Legba, 154 LeGuin, Ursula: The Dispossessed, 126; Left Hand of Darkness, 126 Lerner, Gerda, 13 Lewis, Vashti, 58 Literacy narrative, 109 Little NegroTheatre Movement, 83 Lord, Karen, 117–37 Lowe, John, 205; Calypso Magnolia: The CrossCurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature, 205 Lowry, Lois; The Giver, 129 Lucas, George: Star Wars, 120, 121 Lucas, Sam, 40 Mami Wata, 156 Marshall, Paule: Browngirl, Brownstones, 140 Marson, Una, x, 6, 7, 8, 207, 209; Pocomania, 207 Mason, Charlotte Osgood, 102, 114 Matthews, Victoria Earle, 24–29; “The Awakening of the Afro American Woman”, 25; Aunt Lindy, 24 McDowell, Deborah: “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism”, 191; The Changing Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory, 191 McKittrick, Katherine, 174 Meachum, Cherie: “Traumatic Realism in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat”, 183 Merrick, Helen, 116 Meyer, Annie Nathan, 102, 113 Minstrel show, 19, 196 Morales, C. J., 188 Morrill Act, 110 Morrison, Toni, x, 194, 200, 203; “Academic Whispers”, 194; Beloved, 25; The Bluest Eye, 194; “Home”,

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Index

148, 153; “A Race in Mind: The Press in Deed”, 196; “Recitatif”, 193–203 Mossell, Gertrude (N.F.), 2, 12, 16, 21–24; The Work of the Afro-African Woman, 16 National Association of Colored Women, 42 The New Negro, 84 New Negro: New Negro (Definition), 84; New Negro vs. Old Negro, 70, 71, 79 Nobler womanhood, 5, 16, 18–21 Obeah, 150, 156 Pargas, Damian Alan: Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South, 69 Passing: Definition, 49; Narratives, 50, 58, 168–69 Pauline Hopkins Family, 34–35 Perkins, Kathy, 83 Phillips, Ulrich, 26; American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labors Determined by the Plantation Regime, 26–27; Life and Labor of the Old South, 27 Phyllis Wheatley Festival, 3 Pickens, Theri, 81, 92 Plant, Deborah: Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston, 101 Playing crazy, 81, 85–88, 92–93 Raymond, Eric, 120 Reconstruction, 2, 42, 69, 74 Rediker, Marcus: The Slave Ship, 66 Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea, 167 Richardson, Marilyn: Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, 202

Roddenbury, Gene: Star Trek, 120 Rose, Mark, 134 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Confessions, 101, 103 Ruffin, Josephine, 37, 42 Rummel, Kathryn, 55 Rust College, 5, 16, 17 Said, Edward, 163 Science Fiction Encyclopedia, 131 Seed, David, 122 Sensual worldmaking, 169; Definition, 164 Sharecropping, 27, 69 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, 118 Showalter, Elaine: A Literature of Their Own, 118 Silent Parade of 1917, 197 Slavery: African kidnappers, 66–67; Displacement, 132; Middle Passage, 67–68, 131; New World, 106; Passing, 60; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 130–34, 161 Smith, E. E. “Doc”: The Skylark from Space, 128 Space opera (example), 135 Spaceship: Spaceship (definition), 126– 27; Spaceship vs. mindship, 127 Stevenson, Deborah, 186 Stewart, Maria W., x, 1, 4, 14, 15, 193, 194, 202, 206; “Why Sit Ye Here and Die” 202 Strong Black Woman (myth), 52, 54, 60 Thompson, Maurice, 28; “Voodoo Prophecy”, 24, 28 Time Travel, 131-32; Definition, 134 Tragic mulatta (trope), 49 Tucker, Wilson: The Year of the Quiet Sun, 120 Valbrun, Marjorie, 189

Index

Verne, Jules: From Earth to the Moon, 127; Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 127 Walker, Alice, 102 Washington, Booker T., 71, 100, 110, 111, 114 Washington, Mary Helen, 61 Weems, Clenora Hudson: Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves, 149 Wells, Orson: Ender’s Game, 124, 127; The Galaxy Game, 124; The War of the Worlds, 123 Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell: Antilynching crusade, 23, 26, 42; “The Brilliant Iola,” 5, 18; Chicago Conservator, 42; Club movement, 42; “Iola, Princess of the Press,” 5, 18; Journalism, xi, 12, 16, 22; Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, 5, 42; Museum, 5; A Red Record, 11

217

Welter, Barbara, 12-13; “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-60,” 12 Westfahl, Gregory, 120 Westover, Tara, 109; Educated, 7, 100 Westward migration, 69 Wheatley, Phillis (Phyllis), 1–2, 4, 10, 192–94, 199–200, 208 White, E. Frances: The Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability, 203 White Rose Industrial Mission, 27 White supremacy, 165, 168–69 Wilentz, Amy, 204 Womanism, 119 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 23, 126 World War I, 84 Wright, Richard, 41, 70, 109, 208; Black Boy, 109 Yellow fever, 5, 16 Young adult literature (definition), 181

About the Contributors

LaToya Jefferson-James is assistant professor of Composition and World Literature at Mississippi Valley State University. She is also the author of Masculinity Under Construction: Literary Re-presentations of Black Masculinity in the African Diaspora. Her research interests include anticolonial/postcolonial representations of African people across the globe, masculinity as a gender, and Black feminist thought. Verner Mitchell is Professor of English at the University of Memphis, edited This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. He continues to publish on writers of the Harlem Renaissance, most recently a biography of the poet Waring Cuney (Texas Tech University Press). Tajanae Barnes is two-time alumna of North Carolina A&T State University who obtained her BA and MA in English and English/African American Literature, respectively. She recently obtained her PhD in English in spring 2021 from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where her area of study was Black women, trauma theory, and the development of effective healing spaces. Dr. Barnes works to highlight Black women writers who are rarely studied and invoke conversations surrounding topics that are often ignored in academic and general conversations. Shubhanku Kochar is currently working as an assistant professor at the University School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi. He has been teaching since 2012. His areas of interest include African and African Diasporic Literature along with Ecological literary criticism. He is also a member of MELOW the society for Multi Ethnic Literatures of the World and IACLALS known as the 219

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About the Contributors

Indian Association of Commonwealth Literatures and Language studies. He has written a novel titled Everything Will Be Alright, and his other publications include Treatment of Violence: A Reading of Toni Morrison’s Selected Fiction and An Eco-critical Reading of Alice Walker’s Selected Works, both published by Lambert Academic Publishers of Germany. He has also published nineteen research papers in national and international journals. He has also presented various research papers at national and international conferences. He has contributed book chapters for publishers like Lexington Press, an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield, Vernon Press, Maria Grzegorzewska University Press, Routledge, and Cambridge Scholars Publishing. He has published his latest book Environmental PostColonialism: A Literary Response 2021 with Lexington Press, an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield. Regis Fox is associate professor of English at Florida Atlantic University and earned a PhD in English from the University of California, Riverside. Her primary research interests include Nineteenth-Century American Literatures, Feminist Theory, and African American Literary and Cultural Studies. She has published in such journals as Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and the Journal of American Studies, and in edited collections, including A Determined Life: The Elizabeth Keckley Reader. A McKnight Junior Faculty Fellow for the 2015-16 academic year, she released a book, Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival (University Press of Florida) in December 2017. Jacinth Howard is originally from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. She currently teaches at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. She holds a BA in Literatures in English with Education and a PhD in the same field. Her critical work focuses on speculative fiction and has been featured in the Journal of West Indian Literature. Her creative work has been featured in regionally acclaimed publications such as BIM magazine and she won the second prize at the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment in 2020. She currently lives in Barbados with her husband, their son, and their baby daughter. Alison D. Ligon is associate professor of English at Morehouse College. She primarily teaches Honors and non-Honors Composition, World Literature, Advanced Composition, and Selected Caribbean Poetry. Some of her most recent publications and research activities focus on sociopolitical subtext in works of historical fiction from the African Diaspora, primarily, the Anglophone Caribbean. The scope of her research interests includes the Caribbean and Latin American fiction, contemporary African American

About the Contributors

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literature and culture, HBCU-focused Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) theories and praxis, and oral histories and narratives associated with The Great Migration and its counter-movement. In addition to her essays that appear in several edited book collections, her articles are published in journals such as Caribbean Vistas: Critiques of Caribbean Arts and Cultures, the Journal of Africana Composition and Rhetoric, the Journal of South Texas English Studies, Zoe International Journal of Social Transformation, and the Midwest Quarterly. Joyce White is assistant professor of English in Gullah Geechee Literature and Cultures at Georgia Southern University. She received her PhD in Humanities with a primary focus in African American Studies from Clark Atlanta University and earned a BA and MA in English, with a focus in Creative Writing and literature, from Florida State University. Her research interests include nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century African American and diasporic literature, as well as African cosmological and spiritual continuities in diasporic literature. Alexandria Smith studies queer narratives of embodiment and intimacy in Black creative writing. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. Alexandria is committed to interdisciplinarity, reading as a source of pleasure, and building vibrant intellectual communities.