The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary 9780822375418

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The Repeating Body

Sl avery ’s Visual

The Repeating Body

Resonance in the Contemporary

Kimberly Juanita Brown

Duke University Press Durham and London 2015

© 2015 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Brown, Kimberly Juanita, [date] The repeating body : slavery’s visual resonance in the contemporary / Kimberly Juanita Brown. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5909-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5929-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-7541-8 (e-book) 1. African American women. 2. African American women in literature. 3. African American women in art. 4. Human body. 5. Human body in literature. 6. Human figure in art.  7. Slavery. 8. Collective memory. I. Title. e185.86.b69745 2015 305.48′89607—dc23 2015008878 This publication was made possible [in part] by financial assistance from the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund, a program of the Reed Foundation. Cover art: When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla, María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Courtesy of the artist.

For my father and my sister

For the Pathbreakers: Nellie Y. M c Kay Barbara Christian Sherley Anne Williams Sylvia Ardyn Boone Toni Cade Bambara Audre Lorde Claudia Tate June Jordan

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction: Visualizing the Body of the Black Atlantic 1

1.

Black Rapture 18 Corporeal Afterimage and Transnational Desire



2.

Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 57



3.

The Boundaries of Excess 96



4.

The Return 138 Conjuring the Figure, Following the Form

Conclusion: Photographic Incantations of the Visual 177 Notes  195 Bibliography  229 Index  245

Acknowledgments

I came to this project from several different angles and avenues, different mediums, genres, and theoretical points of view. All have had their human guideposts and beacons. All have brought me to this place. The Repeating Body began in the African American Studies Department and the American Studies Program at Yale University. My dissertation committee had much to contend with as I moved closer and closer to the end of the project. Their grace and consistency made a difficult task that much easier. My dissertation chair, Robert Burns Stepto, is the epitome of exceptional humanity: a wonderful scholar, a probing and exacting adviser, an exuberant teacher, and a flawless writer. He gave me poetry at Yale, and I am not soon to forget what that means. The scope of this project is a testament to his interest, patience, and dedication. Laura Wexler’s insight and attention to detail allowed the project to reach its fullness. Matthew Frye Jacobson provided the steady pace and encouragement I needed and will always remember. I thank you all for your patience and hope this book is a small token of my appreciation. My time at Yale brought me many gifts, most in the form of friendship and collaboration. Brandi Hughes, Kaysha Corinealdi, Lyneise Williams, Nicole N. Ivy, Robin Bernstein, Qiana Robinson-­Whitted, Heather Andrea Williams, Sarah Haley, Courtney J. Martin, Tisha Hooks, Laura Grappo, Dara Orenstein, Megan Glick, Erin D. Chapman, Lara Langer Cohen, Shana L. Redmond, and G. Melíssa Garcia—I want to thank you for your individual and collective brilliance, the multiple times you have each saved me from myself, and the future we have before us. My conversations with Erin D. Chapman consist of both laughter and intense concern for the future of black feminism in the academy. I want to thank her

for an unrelenting code of honor, which I hope to one day emulate. Lara Langer Cohen has had my full and complete admiration since we shared a booth on a train from Durham, England, to London. I thank her for those important moments we contemplate our academic lives in an off-­ the-­beaten-­path café. I have G. Melíssa Garcia to thank for our continued (and continuing) conversations about our interlocking interests in gender studies and visual culture, and Kaysha Corinealdi for the import of thinking diasporically at all times. At Rice University I was given the opportunity to pursue research and writing at my own pace, supported by a humanities postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Rosemary Hennessy and Lora Wildenthal made my time there an intellectual joy. I will be eternally grateful for the time I spent there and the work it has produced. My sincere thanks to Helena Michie, Betty Joseph, José Aranda, and Kirsten Osther. I was especially lucky to be a part of a group of humanities postdoctoral fellows invested in the preservation of both research and sanity. Mary Helen Dupree, Voichita Nachescu, Gordon Hughes, and Jeanne Scheper were my entrée to both Houston and a writing group that rotated from café to café throughout the city and created a camaraderie I can only hope will find a way to continue. I have had the great fortune to be mentored by Carla Kaplan, who leads by exuberant example. Her dedication has enriched this project, and I am fortunate to have her encouragement and advice. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Nicole N. Aljoe share my concern for all things transatlantic, literary, and visual. I hope our conversations continue and become ever more expansive. Elizabeth Dillon introduced this project to Duke University Press, and for this she has my enduring thanks. I thank Marina Leslie for craft-­influenced kindness, laughter, and wit. I want to acknowledge the many people whose work, time, and mentoring have been instrumental to my scholarship and the way I am thinking about my work in its present manifestation. Ann duCille, Junia Ferreira Furtado, Thadious Davis, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Shawn Michelle Smith, Vera Wells, Wai Chee Dimock, Jennifer L. Morgan, Paul Gilroy, O. Hugo Benavides, Lloyd Pratt, and Christina Sharpe—thank you for the many gifts I have received from you. Lisa Cartwright has made mentoring a mission statement, full of genuine interest and enthusiasm. For Saidiya Hartman in particular, I want you to x Acknowledgments

know that I have taken your words and your deeds as a cartography of the life of the mind that I am still mapping out, slowly. My research has been supported by the Mellon-­Mays Foundation; the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University; the Woodrow Wilson Foundation; the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women at Brown University; the Ruth Landes Memorial Grant (the Reed Foundation); and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. I have appreciated the time, the resources, and the conversations afforded me by the generosity I found at each of these institutions. A portion of the first chapter of this book was published as an essay in the fall 2007 issue of wsq. I thank the Feminist Press for allowing me the opportunity to deepen my engagement with the essay in this book. Elizabeth Ault, Sara Leone, and Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press have my profound appreciation and thanks for a process that was efficient, smooth, and utterly civilized. I thank the readers at Duke (both known and unknown) for their interventions and thoughtful comments on the book. This is a stronger project because of your serious engagement with it. In Boston I was exceptionally fortunate to be a part of the New Eng­ land Black Studies Collective. I am humbled by the friendships that began there—with Aliyyah Abdur-­Rahman, Alisa Braithwaite, Monica White Ndounou, Sam Vasquez, Stéphanie Larrieux, and Sandy Alexandre (“dance, dance”)—and am blessed to continue to know you. Marcia Chatelain, Samantha A. Noel, and Shirley Carrie Hartman are the gifts that keep on giving, and I thank them for that. I have known Shirley Carrie since we were both undergraduates at Queens College, and our fifteen-­year-­old friendship is still blossoming. Caroline Light is a trooper, a guidepost, and a friend. This work is enriched by the members of The Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar, a group of scholars who have elegantly altered the trajectory of my thinking. For this I am forever in your debt. My graduate students teach me every day how to imagine my work through their engagement with it, and I remain impressed by the stunning intellectual projects they produce as they move through the program. In Providence (the city, that is) my good fortune has been good company. Tanya Sheehan and Daniel Harkett, Toby Sisson, Françoise Hamlin, Esther Jones, Patricia A. Lott, Karida Brown, Rebecca Louise Carter, Lara Acknowledgments xi

Stein Pardo, and Courtney J. Martin make an already creative and vibrant city so much more than that. May we continue to find pleasure and solace in this space of boundless energy. My success as a scholar is a testament to my family and their collective dedication to me. My father is the man I most admire, and in more ways than I can count he makes me proud to do this work. My sister Yolanda is my best friend and the mother of three of my favorite people in the world. Thank you for always reminding me that there is a larger purpose to this work. I have Vanessa M. Liles and Nadine Adjoa Smith to thank for my continued attempts at rooted activism, Trimiko Melancon for unreasonable laughter and bawdy behavior, and Sarah Haley (sahaley) for determined and consistent humanistic endeavors (to think of others more often than I think of myself ). I thank Adebola Asekun for decades-­long care and affection. And for patience. Finally, this book was written to music. From the first few scrambled thoughts on slips of paper to the crazed final moments of revision, we have formed a rhythmic synthesis—a melodious understanding carved out of easy isolation and submersion: the music, the book, and me. I want to thank the gifted artists who have made this journey image-­rich, provocative, and eclectic. My appreciation goes out to Roberta Flack, Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Marisa Monte, John Coltrane, Africando, the Roots, Amy Winehouse, Alice Smith, Anthony Hamilton (dap, Vanessa), Concha Buika, Maxwell, Janelle Monàe (turn thanks, Shana), Zap Mama, Rokia Traoré, Leela James, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Mos Def, Meshell Ndegeocello, Lila Downs and Susana Baca (gracias, Melissa), Phyllis Hyman, Marvin Gaye and Beres Hammond (always, daddy), Fela Kuti, Damien Rice, Lhasa de Sela (obrigada, Kaysha), Sade, and Cassandra Wilson. I absolutely could not have done it without you.

xii Acknowledgments

Introduction

Visualizing the Body of the Black Atlantic

What did they do to your memory That makes my quiet walk unknown to you. —Cristina Cabral

Audre Lorde’s poem “Afterimages” takes the murder of Emmett Till and its famous photographic representation as a key moment of black memory and makes the poem take the place of the photograph, creating a lasting image of history and engaging the power of the eye in the word, in the body. “However the image enters,” the poem begins, “its force remains within.”1 The speaker attempts to contain and release the tremendous burden of black subjectivity when that subjectivity is tethered to sight. To think of the afterimage in its plurality, in the collectivity of vision it renders, is to engender a discourse of the visual in the service of violated black bodies—both past and present. “My eyes are always hungry,” the speaker continues, “and remembering.”2 Memory here measures the distance of “the length of gash across the dead boy’s loins / his grieving mother’s lamentation / the severed lips, how many burns / his gouged out eyes.”3 The import of collective visibility cannot be separated from the gendered nature of the speaker’s witnessing. Her eye absorbs the imprint of the event, and it haunts her, filling her eyes with images both violent and lingering. Words drip from the poem, slowly paced but with precision, and imbued with the range of racial violations set against black people and over black flesh. Lorde’s racialized and gendered subjectivity enters the frame and invests the image with a totality of vision. In this

way she orients the eye of the viewer so that there is no way for the viewer to remain outside the framework of vision when that vision is gendered— no way not to see if that field of vision includes black women. Fred Moten hears in the visualization of the Till photograph an auditory impulse that propels the urgency of the image it hopes to frame. “The fear of another castration,” Moten writes, “is all bound up in this aversion of the eye.”4 In the “dissonant, polyphonic affectivity of the ghost,” he declares, “there is the trace of what remains to be discovered.”5 Lorde is invested in this trace as well. The afterimage as familiar distortion, as at once different and familiar—“dissonant” and “polyphonic”—is a space of imagery unfolding. The time-­elapsed significance of this unfolding is also a part of its force. Taking the shape of the image before it, only altered, the afterimage requires the work of the viewer in order to be decipherable. To be known. But “however the image enters” the black imaginary, “its force remains.”6 For Lorde it is a moving carousel of violated black flesh that the poet encounters when she walks “through a northern summer,” her eyes “averted / from each corner’s photographies.” Her particular “aversion” has a sound that matches Moten’s. And for her it is “louder than life” and circular, leading from “pictures of black broken flesh / used, crumpled, and discarded / lying amid the sidewalk refuse / like a raped woman’s face,” to the “flickering afterimages of a nightmare rain.”7 “I wade through summer ghosts,” she writes, “betrayed by vision / hers and my own.” This betrayal of vision is one of severe iteration, as “summer ghosts” populate the speaker’s ocular canvas, vying for her attention. Mamie Till, Emmett Till’s mother, is the other “her” who forces a photographic engagement with the murder of her only child, and in Lorde’s poem Mamie Till is also the “her” who “wrings her hands / beneath the weight of agonies remembered,” and her son’s famous photographic imprint lingers over and through Lorde’s articulation.8 In the doubling properties of her use of “refuse” (“lying amid the sidewalk refuse”), Lorde locates an urban iteration of a southern horror steeped in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”9 “The site of memory is also the sight of memory,” Katherine McKittrick contends, invoking the Toni Morrison essay that places blackness in the landscape of the racial formation of the United States.10 For McKittrick, then, “imagination requires a return to and engagement with painful 2 Introduction

places, worlds where black people were denied humanity, belonging, and formal citizenship.”11 To enter this engagement and its “painful places” requires an examination of transatlantic slavery and black women’s necessary positioning within it. It requires a totality of vision—the image and the afterimage—in order to grapple with all of the ways in which black women fail to be seen with any clarity or insight. What Mary Ann Doane refers to as the “persistence of vision,” the photographic afterimage, is embodied in the literature of the African diaspora with its insistence on visually rendering the potency and force of the transnational imaginary.12 This afterimage is also present within the visual culture of the black Atlantic and forms a layering of contingent imagery therein. It is the place where black women’s endurances have been used against them, and their bare survival is reconfigured as a strength that cannot be altered, damaged, or destroyed. The force of representation enters a collective consciousness and remains within—seen, though distorted—and therefore remaining unknown.13 Part of the purpose of this project is to follow the trace of slavery’s memory in black women’s literary and visual representations. I am specifically interested in the realm of the visual and the proliferation of imagery seeking to address the impossible duality between black women’s representations and slavery’s memory. I turn to John Edgar Wideman’s novel The Cattle Killing (1996) to consider the import of the afterimage in this work of fiction. Early on in the novel, the unnamed narrator speaks briefly with Rowe, a former slave physically and emotionally scarred by the oppressive system he endured, “his whole dark body a map of torture.”14 The narrator wonders how Rowe still manages to possess a smile that “positively glows” against the reality of his present existence.15 When Rowe is asked to share “the vision that beams” in his gaze of subtle satisfaction, the former slave happily agrees. “Sometime I looks at the sky and close my eyes and I see the whole world startin over again,” Rowe begins.16 In this space of internal visual creation, the ex-­slave observes “a black man and a black woman and a white man and a white woman laid side by side fresh out of the oven and theys the only people God done made. Black man he wake up first this time. Remember everything. Quick. Grab ax. Chop white man head.”17 Rowe continues his reimagining of the biblical story of creation by next figuring the black man and the white woman in a narrow lock where he sexuIntroduction 3

ally possesses her but ensures that she will bear no children—that, in the future, “ain’t gone be no more white peoples cept this one woman.”18 Rowe spends the majority of this monologue concerned with “ramming” and “fixing” the white woman and ends by turning to the narrator, saying, “And that, scuse me Reverend, what I see sometimes when you see me smiling up at Heaven, Amen.”19 In this unsettling and violent liberation narrative, the phrase “remember everything” is key. It is at once a rhetorical statement (“I remember everything”) and a command, delivered in the imperative (“remember everything!”). Embedded within an imagined momentary yielding, Rowe fantasizes about trading places with his white patriarchal counterpart and severing his competition in one fell swoop. Remember everything. Within the phrase, buried silently beneath the dichotomous repulsion/ desire left lingering and barren inside the body of the white woman, is the assumed acceptance and collusion of the black woman, who, we are to imagine, shares her memory with Rowe and understands his inclination toward violence. Is the former slave truly working within the process of memory? He moves seamlessly between an act of physical liberation to “chop white man head” and shifts immediately onto his next concern, the white woman, lying prostrate, eager to receive him. She is envisioned as a version of evil he must destroy by giving “a good ramming.” For a man musing over his ability to “remember everything,” the passage is conveniently forgetful of the black woman who is integral to the narrative but ignored within it. She is a visual necessity, but a logistical inconvenience. The black woman in this example is an afterimage of all she has witnessed and experienced—a ghost of representation. She is both “betrayed by vision,” in Lorde’s imagination, and “lying amid the sidewalk refuse,” awaiting her articulation. The passage situates her within Rowe’s narrative and tangential to her body: a visual vessel for Rowe’s imagination and an apt illustration of his need to return to the origin of man’s creation and begin again. If, as Doane asserts, the afterimage proves that “vision was subject to delay,” and that “the theory of the afterimage presupposes a temporal aberration, an incessant invasion of the present moment by the past,” what is to be made of the black Atlantic body forgotten?20 Doane’s useful articulation, “the idea that temporality invades vision,” is one that lends itself to the machinations of the afterimage of slavery, and the 4 Introduction

interactions that locate themselves between the hyperpresence of black women within the slave system and the particular experiences that continue to present them as “marked women,” to borrow from Hortense Spillers, that “render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh” and “whose disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color.”21 In order to “remember everything,” Rowe would have to acknowledge the black woman who emerged with him “fresh out of the oven” as an entity imbued with a history of infliction and capable of considering herself deserving of a recognized history—a “remember everything” of her very own. In this recognition, her story would be told from her specific vantage point; her concerns, her desires, and her observations would rise to the forefront. The negotiated trajectory of tortured flesh is explored most fully in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), which depicts three generations of women related through blood, slavery, and death. For Sethe, a woman with bodily scars ever present but not easily seen, her obsessive attempt to control memory frames her engagement with the world. Negotiating multiple traumatic violations against her body (physical, sexual, psychological, generational, scopic, maternal), she retreats into a world of word, sound, and image, vacillating between the material and the ethereal as her long-­dead daughter returns to her in the flesh. The generational lineage of black pain, literally “written on the back” of black female subjectivity, is a repetition of imagistic concern in the novel. In Sethe’s world, there is the scarred back that she cannot see and the killed daughter made flesh again (and this she can see). Slavery’s violent proximities, its aggressive intimacy is mapped out in Morrison’s novel with a particular attention to the world of the visual. This is an intimacy and proximity that provides breast milk to other people’s offspring, features a negotiation of sex within violence, and conflates and elongates temporality, and therefore pain.22 To remember everything in fragments and pieces. The marking of Sethe’s flesh happens against her will, and the physical scars, the keloids she possesses on her back, rise out of the physical and sexual violence she has sustained and thicken instead of disappearing. The residue of this slave experience is a part of Sethe’s “rememory,” a reframing of the particular and the general that she utilizes in order to hold firm to her subjectivity and to get other people to see it as she does. Introduction 5

Sethe’s witnessing is thus communal and interactive, and though her pain is her own, she articulates it outward as a less evolved part of her subconscious that she must nevertheless appease. Sethe attempts to curtail illegible torture at the point of the narrative visual. Beloved offers us a “rememory” for Rowe’s “remember everything” and, in doing so, a unique way of seeing the force that remains within. Sethe reorganizes temporal order as she remembers events and emphasizes the intimate contingencies others may miss when, for instance, they focus on one aspect of her physical presentation (the tree on her back) as opposed to others that are less visible (her stolen milk, her missing husband, her dead child). In Beloved there are unique and expected corporeal repetitions: two Denvers (Sethe’s daughter and Amy Denver, the white woman who helps Sethe give birth to her last child); three Beloveds (the baby, “crawling already,” the ghost in the home, and the woman who returns to 124 Bluestone Road to take the baby’s fleshed-­out and grown adult female form); and several Pauls (the brothers: Paul D, Paul A, Paul F). Bodies repeat in the narrative in an attempt to grasp the enormous weight of slavery on black Atlantic subjects. The repeated bodies, narratives, and names make clear that it takes many generations to grasp the horrendous event of slavery. And in order to “remember everything,” black women, alive, dead, and in-­between, linger and loiter, waiting to have their stories told. My interest in this project is to trace out these repetitions as they move across particular genres of representation and to think through these renderings that have so encapsulated the black imaginary within a narrow containment of black women’s visibility. In his introduction to The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Antonio Benítez-­Rojo graphically utilizes the symbolic power of imperial violation through the rhetoric of birth-­through-­conquest. “The Atlantic is the Atlantic,” he writes, “because it was the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched between continental clamps.” During this process of violation, Benítez-­Rojo asserts, “after the blood and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar.”23 Here gendered hyperpresence, indeed, the gendered hyperavailability of particular bodies, is treated to both a violent birth and a kind of postmortem examination, with all of the clinical investigation the event necessitates. In this space 6 Introduction

of birth without female subjectivity, the gendered body is one of total and complete physical (and violent) utility. To think of the “painfully delivered child” as having a birth mother would necessitate a consideration that was both observant and inclusive. “The integrity of the race is thus made interchangeable with the integrity of black masculinity,” Paul Gilroy writes, “which must be regenerated at all costs.”24 Again we see what it looks like when women are a visual and corporeal necessity but a logistical inconvenience. Like Rowe’s silent black woman, they are mostly objects of articulation for men to write through.25 While I share with Benítez-­Rojo an interest in what happens when the ruptures of empire and slavery form the threading material of culture and identity, my purpose here is to stay with the symbolic figure of this impact when she is no longer just symbol, but subject. Mine, then, is an emphasis that employs the photographic trace to retrieve women from the margins of slavery’s framing mechanisms.26 As James Elkins argues in The Object Stares Back, “We prefer to have bodies in front of us or in our hands, and if we cannot have them, we continue to see them, as afterimages or ghosts.”27 Therein lies the difficulty in attempting to wrest black women from the trace of the corporeal. Where could they go without bringing the past along with them? Where would we let them go without our perception of their bodies’ utility in an ocular world? Part of the work of this book is to make legible the multiple enactments of hypervisibility black women cannot escape, and to highlight artistic attempts at using opacity, framing, fragmentation, and repetitions of the visual to illustrate a desire for black subjectivity that includes black women within it. This project gathers at the intersection of literature and visual culture studies, building on the work of Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America, Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, and Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-­Slavery Subjects. Sharpe’s intervention in particular brings into focus many of the contemporary traces remaining after slavery’s demise that I also interrogate. Hartman and Gordon measure the meaning of embodiment: how, in the words of Hartman, its very “fungibility” is the key to envisioning black subjectivity through its requisite deployments and representational iconographies. The Repeating Body is a book informed by black feminist theory, visual Introduction 7

culture studies, literary criticism, and critical race theory. It is with this determinedly interdisciplinary lens that I endeavor to investigate the phenomenon of black women’s representational late contemporary restructuring. I am interested in Jennifer DeVere Brody’s attendant portrayals of grammatical structure and the traces of violence located in fictional narratives; Katherine McKittrick’s engagement with black women, bodies, and the geographic resonance of space; Jenny Sharpe’s diasporic interrogation of narratives of resistance; and Jennifer L. Morgan’s analysis of slavery’s reproductive and reproducing mechanisms. Within this well-­ established rubric of black feminism, I want to privilege the centrality of the visual as a prevailing feature of black Atlantic literature, using contemporary visual culture as another way to engage this discourse.28 When Sethe allows others to see the scars on her back, she conceals and reveals all at once. As she exposes her previous physical pain and makes herself vulnerable and open to reading, she also obscures a visual reading of her face. The corporeal refusal she enacts here engages in the vernacular discourse of black Atlantic metaphoric communicating (“I got a tree on my back . . . I’ve never seen it and never will”).29 It is a call-­and-­ response interaction that reads (or allows others to read) the body and its narrative.30 To refuse (by turning your back to someone) is to move outside the realm of racial and corporeal familiarity and “knowing.” It is to turn your back (refusing a full entrance into the frame) on those who would propose to know you, to put mystery in the place of that knowing. An emphasis of black feminist articulation gives us a totality of vision, attuned to the visual properties of slavery’s memory. The resonant echoes of slavery’s memory have a genealogy that is repetitive, and rituals and gestures that are cadent and fluid. They allow us to see how black women must occupy the center of the frame of a system that literally gave birth to modernity. “Slavery has ended,” Avery Gordon writes, “but something of it continues to live on in the social geography of where people reside . . . in the veins of the contradictory formation we call New World modernity.”31 This “contradictory formation” masks the import of the very centrality (of black women and their bodies) organizing transatlantic slavery and its resonant imprint. To give birth to modernity is no small order, particularly if that very act is considered a masculine feat, devoid of women. In one of Carrie Mae Weems’s more provocative examinations of creation, subjugation, and 8 Introduction

the continuing conundrum of dna, she engages in a genealogical trace that is historical, imagistic, and national. The fifth panel of the six-­panel series called The Jefferson Suite is the only one that includes a representation of both Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings as the foci of the frame (figure I.1). Jefferson’s quill pen draws the viewer’s eye to the center of the frame, as it appears that he creates Hemings out of the recesses of some previous declaration—over certain bodies, out of others. While both subjects have their backs to the viewer, Jefferson is visualized as someone who is free and open, intimated by the position of his arm and the quill, the apparatus of his legibility. Weems-­as-­Hemings represents self-­portraiture’s resurrecting possibilities within a black Atlantic self-­reflective imperative. She is a figure of both mystery and mastery. Arms crossed in front and with her head facing the direction of a window the viewer cannot see, the faint appearance of light the only indication of a reprieve from total enclosure, Weems offers the slight inference of a failure of communication between the two. Not just quill against gesture, Jefferson is illustrated as fully clothed while Hemings’s shoulders and arms are bare, an errant shoulder strap either absentmindedly or purposely drawn down, illustrating the framing mechanism’s perspective of choice. If, as Saidiya Hartman claims, “the discourse of seduction obfuscates the primacy and extremity of violence in master-­slave relations,” Weems-­as-­Hemings delineates this concept as a failure of the archive, or an available archive that others refused to see.32 The Jefferson Suite illustrates racial ambiguity, merging it to the slave system Thomas Jefferson symbolized through rhetorical inconsistency, lust, and lineage. Here, “suite” connotes an interior, private space where lovers come together (hotel suite), a connected set of musical notes or chords, or, as in its auditory configuration, a pleasing smell or taste (sweet). If we think of The Jefferson Suite and the bodies presented as “types” collected and cataloged like the human and animal possessions marked in Jefferson’s famous Farm Book, the suite becomes an ironic play on words, the sweetness dissipates. What remains, though, is the question of affect and effect, the sentimental attachments of the visual and the familial and their lingering imaginaries. Severing the viewer’s ocular comportment while making malleable the corporeal dimensions of slavery’s legacy, The Jefferson Suite contains the delineations of the evidentiary photograph, linking it to past presidents and plantations, science, possession, and lineage. Introduction 9

I.1. Re-­enactment of the Jefferson-­Hemings Affair, Carrie Mae Weems, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

That Hemings’s body is the text upon which democracy stands and modernity forms allows Weems the ability to perform a postemancipation declaration of slave visibility. With her back turned to the viewer, Jefferson’s articulation, and the mismanagement of history, Weems-­as-­ Hemings seeks to interrogate the place of the known historical narrative and its always-­embattled counterconstruction. Using Hemings and her famous master as symbolic precursors to photography’s duplicating prerogatives, Weems’s self-­portrait underscores the contemporary obsession with dna as biological proof along with its concomitant imagery, prephotographic temporally, but inferred with a force of visuality all its own. To envision, then, slave subjectivity within the structure of slave agency and limited mobility is to splice the narrative and reorganize it. For this, a negotiation of word and image brings the body into focus, brings history into the frame, and whether the work is literary or visual, the pattern of repetition remains the same. A repetition of corporeal refusal within the photographic frame sets the visual trajectory in opposite motion—controlled and taut, slowly releasing the narrative deployments of the visual and corporeal that are often neglected. Weems fashions an archive out of the visibility of her skin. She brings to the center of the frame a woman who would have been relegated to the footnote of history had it not been for the insistence of her archival embodiment. Her descendants ultimately provided the archive that now registers her legibility. Before that she was a ghost like the fictional Beloved—a haunting that marred the good name of the third president of the United States. In the sheer repetition of imagery associated with this one figure (from William Wells Brown to Natasha Trethewey, Carrie Mae Weems, and Robbie McCauley), there has been a refusal to forget, a refusal to bend to the will of nearly two hundred years of fierce rhetorical denial.33 Sethe describes events like this to her daughter Denver as “a thought picture” that both is and is not. Instead, it is more like a collective event, like “when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.”34 If we think of the afterimage as a violation of the gaze, the “force that remains within,” the repetition of this force creates a visual circle that can seem unyielding. The afterimage as temporal motif, then, is the organizing mechanism suturing black women to the cultural narratives that have been used to placate black Atlantic subjectivities in flux. Introduction 11

Symbolic of the corporeal register of subjectivities in flux, María Magdalena Campos-­Pons’s When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla (plate 1) envisions a diaspora that is bilingual, black, female, and the end product of the transatlantic slave trade. It is a representation of the riverain goddess Yemayá, the traveling deity of reproduction, resurrection, and reckoning. In the anonymity of the fragment there is also the imprint of a diasporic return. This return is a frontal assault of corporeality and visuality, engaging the viewer in a layered construction of all that the image cannot contain, and that which flows out from the body. Sea waves envelop a woman’s body, fragmenting her form. From the neckline through her waist she embodies the Atlantic Ocean, its organic properties, and the mechanized reproduction (via the bottles of milk draped around her neck) facilitated by and through slavery’s birth and rebirth. She occupies the bifocality of the black diaspora, the left and right hemispheric alignment that locates itself on black women’s bodies. In the self-­portrait other bodies enter the frame with Campos-­Pons. They slip in under the rubric of black Atlantic haunting. Since the image also invokes the Middle Passage deity Yemayá, there is an otherworldly element here that conflates the temporal demarcation of slavery’s transmission. In the circular logic surrounding slavery’s “eternal return,” oceans meet bodies in flux and alter the trajectory, the sway, and the movement of the transatlantic slave trade. I am interested in the rhythm and the extension of this movement, in the many disparate locations that allow it to glide through cartographies of violence that “though they were unspeakable . . . were not inexpressible.”35 In the multiple temporal possibilities engendered by the production of slavery in the New World, I focus on those that hover as they drift, a skulking metaphor for the past that is, according to Christina Sharpe, “not yet past.”36 In doing so, I offer not a definitive and linear trajectory of cultural production in the Americas but instead a gathering of archival intent, that which places all of the conflations and displacements of the visual at the center of contemporary engagements.37 I do this because studies of the black Atlantic and its subjectivities have always been studies of visual culture(s), whether or not they have been received as such.38

12 Introduction

What can encompass this haunted house of empires and nations, this transnational narrative of silence and strength hovering over representations of slavery in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil? Repetition. I have structured as a thematic production the repetitive qualities of the black Atlantic that hover somewhere between the past and the present.39 Each chapter of The Repeating Body is informed by an aspect of repetition that provides insight into the visual, material, and gendered iterations of slavery’s indelible memory.40 Whether it functions as afterimage, double exposure, hyperembodiment, or the ocular and auditory meditation of a diasporic riff, repetition brings the figuration of slavery into being with the force of modernity. This is a phenomenon of the contemporary and is particularly suited to explore and expand on slavery’s gendered modulations. For this reason I have incorporated multiple geographic locations, multiple genres of representation, and multiple repetitions of the ocular. I have also employed some textual repetitions and duplicating extensions so that it is possible in this text that a novel like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, with its uncanny mutating abilities, will occupy space in multiple chapters. In The Repeating Body, Morrison’s novel becomes the threading text, a novel that painfully lays bare the reiterative qualities of slavery’s burdens. The first chapter of the book positions repetition as afterimage—as the figurative register of what gets left over when the eye no longer has the image before it. I begin by considering articulations of slave women’s sexual agency, particularly when these women are the mothers of both slavery and freedom, giving birth to the children of slave masters. Specifically, I examine the place of whiteness moving through slave women’s bodies and the postmodern inversion of this phenomenon. In chapter 1, “Black Rapture: Corporeal Afterimage and Transnational Desire,” I use Mary Ann Doane’s theory of the photographic afterimage and Saidiya Hartman’s critical engagement with the performative space of the plantation as a way to situate slave women’s bodies as corporeal “sites of memory” wherein white men visit their patriarchal predecessors’ handiwork in the bodies of their own slaves and yearn to make a mark of their own. The afterimage is an ocular residue, a visual duplication as well as an alteration. One could call it a burning image that eventually fades. And Introduction 13

that image is based on another, the one before the after of the image. The myth of black women’s sexual supremacy furthers this cause, as it is precisely the marking of their flesh that serves as the racial coding to the planter class, while making the intense violence of the system difficult to discern. As visual phenomena, afterimages represent slavery’s profound ability to linger throughout the diaspora. They linger in the architectural structures built for the system to self-­proliferate: landscapes of myriad mechanical testaments to enslavement, the racial fetish of a bygone era, and family portraits illustrating the height and depth of property relations—inanimate and human—that perpetuate the visuality of hegemony. Visual imagery becomes particularly useful here, solidifying representation and directing the trajectory of the discourse. This chapter juxtaposes contemporary artistic representations of Sally Hemings, Margaret Garner, and Brazil’s Chica da Silva and concerns the visual positionality these women enter. The imagistic lens of slavery confronts the space whiteness occupies within repetitive sexualized violence. I examine narratives of nonbiological, familial connectivity crafted by artists who see little space between the violations of the past and their present diasporic bodies. Robbie McCauley’s play Sally’s Rape links the corporeal legacy of her great-­great-­grandmother Sally with that of herself as well as the “Sally” of Jefferson folklore. Faith Ringgold, in her thangka print Slave Rape Series, challenges the anonymity of sexually exploited slave women by marking the canvas with her own image as a pregnant slave woman fleeing a lascivious overseer. In the after of these images, there is the temporal instability that weaves the past onto the present, visually representing a conflation of imagery writ across time. In this book I attend to the contemporary negotiation of slavery that tethers itself to the world of the visual.41 It is within the realm of repetition, its looping and determined return, that black Atlantic subjectivities are able, in all of their profound and disparate invectives, to be seen. To be seen. Double vision and sight conspire here, in this space of insistent recognition, the ocular comportment of engagement. Rendered as simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, black women function within the register of externally imposed enclosures. What is it that brings the event of slavery out of the archive and into the plain sight of the late con14 Introduction

temporary? What tethers its import, its tendency to reverberate into the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries? In slavery’s heightened visible register, gender delineates the force and future repetition of the usable corpus, a double marking that has reverberations throughout and beyond the Americas. They tell us how to see the beneath and beyond of the system of slavery, the “visions and revisions” fueling poetry, fiction, and visual art practices. The afterimage here occupies the space of stubborn insistence and transcultural haunting, the pathos of diaspora. Chapter 2, “Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal,” presents repetition as the double exposure of the black diaspora, as the suture between production, reproduction, and counterproduction. The concept of double exposure (as I am articulating it here) structures violent and discordant interactions within the contemporary as continually fraught with the tonal frequencies of slavery’s remains. Repetition functions as and through this bifocality, a layering of contingent imagery embodying both sight and sound. In this chapter I argue that processes of black maternal longing limit the ability of black women to self-­possess; this is a disjuncture that artists highlight through fragmentation, sectioning off parts of black women’s bodies (and often their own) imagistically to mark the collective “parsing” out of black maternal capacities. This is always negotiated through a cultural reinforcement of surrogate mothering or, to use Patricia Hill Collins’s term, “othermothering.” Along with the collective request that black women participate in repetitions of maternal sacrifice, there are representations that challenge the siphoning of black women’s power through the maternal, literally marking the place of maternal dependence and visual impossibility. In the synesthetic quality of this productive deployment, visual and auditory impulses converge, performing through the matter and the mode of the black Atlantic. “The question of racial terror,” writes Paul Gilroy, “always remains in view when these modernisms are discussed because imaginative proximity to terror is their inaugural experience.”42 Within this “inaugural experience” are the pace and proximity of the black maternal, the mode and manner of its diasporic iteration. Bound to this iteration of the diaspora, repetition as reproduction offers us improvisation and agitation, movement within the visuality of maternal retrieval and within a constant state of loss. Utilizing a flood of imagery Introduction 15

associated with black women’s conflicted maternity, I emphasize the role of fragmentation in illuminating the ruptured nature of postslavery maternal processes. Chapter 3, “The Boundaries of Excess,” deploys the visual register of hyperembodiment and disembodiment in order to investigate the ever-­ expansive corporeal tether that binds black women to the framework of slavery’s making. Here I use visual shielding and the gender transference of slave women’s bodies as a way to read the corporeal trajectory of diasporic movement and loss as a narrative of excess. This chapter looks at artistic representations of physical prowess in American abolitionist Harriet Tubman and Brazilian slave deity Blessed Anastácia. I argue that certain historical figures of the black Atlantic are symbolic body armor and are portrayed as such; their representations are created to serve as virtual/visual protection to black masses. For Tubman, this is done through rhetoric and rifle, as literary and visual images reinforce a hypermasculine performance of collective protection. Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts imagines the male historical survivor of the throwing overboard from the slave ship Zong as a woman who climbs back onto the ship after being tossed off and subsequently plans an insurrection. Hyperembodiment and disembodiment extend the visuality of the boundary between utility and excessive use, delineating the marker of black women’s corporeal availability as continually shifting beyond and beneath the horizon of the grand spectacle that is slavery’s contemporary representation. The final chapter, “The Return: Conjuring the Figure, Following the Form,” concerns the materiality of the event of slavery that seeps through cultural productions of the black diaspora with force. In the tumultuous rendering of both subject and object, slavery creates/anticipates the Du Boisian structure of double-­consciousness that, had it a visual register, would always be photographic. The stereograph, a photographic image popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intimates this doubling with slant repetition. It is the mechanism that mimics both the eye and the ear, pairs of visual and auditory encompassing that function as a methodology for survival. This survival engenders a future fraught with slavery’s duplication: formerly enslaved people who are not yet free, and whose “freedom” bears the violence, marginality, and hypervisibility of slavery’s tether. To step out of the shadow of slavery in the contemporary means gazing back onto the haunting of its varied past. 16 Introduction

It is an event that is always invoking, always evoking. And like any other haunting, it has the desire to be seen. In this final chapter I prioritize the matter of diaspora, the dependent methodology of the black Atlantic that taps into the bare survival of others in order to highlight the liminal status of both the enslaved and the marginally free. This bare survival deepens the discourse of the ocular that slavery manipulated; it is a large part of the reason black women still exist under a rubric of repeated and excessive use. Here, I focus on iterations of ethereal haunting in literature, imbued with a hyperdependence on black women’s “resurrecting” qualities. Mystics, preachers, and god figures maintain the black diasporic space between the living and the dead and drift in out of the black Atlantic imaginary as purposeful martyrs negotiating their place within a structured narrative of what Avery Gordon calls “ghostly matters.” Standing between Western productions of stasis and movement, slavery ruptures a linear trajectory in favor of flux: the flux of subjectivity, of permeability, and the flux of protection and possession. Literal movement places the body in a position of external whim, coercion, force, and self-­theft. If, as many critical race and slavery studies scholars assert, black Atlantic subjectivities force an engagement with death that is repetitive and unrelenting, these engagements survive off of the riff and the motif of New World slavery.43 In the contemporary there can be no accounting for the total enclosure of slavery and its aftermath without being attuned to the aural and imagistic mandates that locate themselves at the site of the event. There can be no telling of this story without making black women central, no way to see the indexical force of the horrendous event of transnational slavery unless the way of seeing, the sight and the sound of it, is rearticulated and black women are at the center of the frame. Sethe’s created recollecting, her “rememory,” mirrors Rowe’s internal mandate (from The Cattle Killing) to “remember everything,” placing the event that is slavery and its afterlife at the center of a visual and corporeal retrieval. For this retrieval to reach its fullest invocation we must pay close attention to what black female artists are showing us, how, in the words of Anne Cheng, “we do not master by seeing; we are ourselves altered when we look.”44 I hope The Repeating Body works within the vein of the camera lucida, allowing multiple vantage points through which to layer slavery’s recurring and repeating visions. Introduction 17

1

Black Rapture Corporeal Afterimage and Transnational Desire

That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it as visible as our blood. —Gayl Jones

The residue of sexual exploitation on slave women’s bodies is the afterimage of the black diaspora, the puncture of the past materializing in the present. It is an insistently visual spectacle—racial coding wrapped in the chromosomal legacy of the black Atlantic, and it is no accident that the projections of slave memory manifest themselves onto black women’s resistant flesh. For this has been the history of corporeal imperialism in the Americas, and this is where I will begin.1 When blues singer Ursa Corregidora in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora (1975) looks at a photograph of herself and her husband, Mutt, she sees only the remains of her own corporeal past. Fixating on the image, Ursa fails to notice her husband standing next to her; instead, she locks onto her own reflection. “I realized for the first time I had what all those women had,” Ursa says. “I’d always thought I was different. Their daughter, but somehow different. Maybe less Corregidora. I don’t know. But when I saw that picture, I knew I had it.”2 The “it” Ursa refers to is the physical resemblance she shares with slave patriarch Corregidora, his infusion into her flesh. The Portuguese coffee plantation owner supplies Ursa with a last name and the remnants of an incestuous lineage she tries

desperately to sever. Two generations of women share Corregidora as a father; two share him as a lover. Although for Ursa he is neither lover nor father, his legacy and hers are inextricably intertwined. For Great Gram, Ursa’s maternal great-­grandmother, her grandmother, Gram, and her mother, Corregidora is not just a man or a destiny; he is an imprint, marking each successive generation with the determination of his dominion. “The womb was her mark,” Christina Sharpe writes about Ursa’s liminal position within this family of women haunted by the power of one man, “the signifier of the prescribed meaning of her life: to make generations to bear witness.”3 To think of progeny as that scar—as that which is left to bear witness—is to recognize the centrality of gender to the process of enslavement. Jones’s novel joins the slave histories of both Brazil and the United States (most specifically using Kentucky as the focal point of the novel), blurring the space between nations in the corporeal subjugation of enslaved subjects. Ursa’s body is her destiny and, as her name signifies, must both bear (Ursa) and correct (Corregidora) her invaded lineage.4 Her body carries within it the inference of past assaults, and she spends the duration of the novel battling her familial demons. Sharpe writes, “Jointly the memories made flesh and the photograph work to make a particular experience of slavery real,” and for Ursa, “real” is an unbearable imagistic reality.5 In Mary Ann Doane’s figuration of the photographic afterimage, the phenomenon “presupposes a temporal aberration, an incessant invasion of the present moment by the past,” and regulates the machinations of the eye. If we look at slave women’s bodies as extensions of this aberration, “the consequent superimposition of two images,” sexual violence has an explicitly visual resonance.6 The contemporary manifestation of this aberration haunts the black Atlantic subject, making a modern reinterpretation of the past not only necessary but also unavoidable. In this instance, violation becomes volition, and slave women emerge as the most powerful corporeal space on any plantation. This is, of course, a mechanism of cultural necessity and therefore subject to the whims of collective desire. Corregidora straddles the boundaries of slave sexuality and the violence that envelops the slave body with meaning. Jones’s rendering of the schizophrenic movements of fragmented and traumatized black female bodies necessitates a reversal of the gaze that the world Black Rapture 19

of slavery made: haunting, hybrid, and hopelessly melded to historical ­amnesia. This chapter delineates the contours of the slave woman’s body as a regenerative “site of memory” wherein the sexualized marking of her flesh carries with it a wealth of transcultural meaning. Like the fictional Ursa Corregidora, collective desire dictates the manner and mode of corporeal and cultural need. In particular, the representations of three historical slave figures (Sally Hemings, Margaret Garner, and Chica da Silva) trace out the repetitive borders of slavery’s descendants and lay them bare, allowing a reimagining and revisiting of slavery’s memory to be explored through the mediated meaning of their unfree flesh. Because each woman’s historiography is (intimately) tied to white patriarchal power, they each embody the corporeal afterimage of a symbolic past and a commonality with the Ursa Corregidoras of the historical world. What will occur here is an examination of the limitations of this visual currency and an exploration of the dangerous ground cultures tread upon using the bodies of others. Corregidora tells the story of Kentucky blues singer Ursa Corregidora, the last in a line of women related to the Portuguese planter, each unable to remove his memory from their embodied visage. The photograph is Ursa’s moment of altered embodiment—the place where she sees both master and slave within herself—and it unsettles and disorients her. The repetition of violence is filtered through her family via the request to “make generations,” and the novel opens with a dramatic act of violence that then provides Ursa with the corporeal refusal that she could not achieve psychologically. After she is pushed down a flight of steps by her husband, Mutt, Ursa (who was newly pregnant at the time) finds that she can no longer have children. “That scar that’s left to bear witness” in the novel is the repeated imploring from mother to daughter (to “make generations” as proof of past sexual exploitation), and this is quickly halted by Mutt’s action, leaving other possibilities in its place. There, within the space of these other possibilities, Ursa is allowed to delineate the measure and the tempo of her sexual existence as separate from her (no longer) reproductive capacities. This leads her back through her own visage to the sexual lives of her mother, her grandmother, her great-­grandmother, and herself. In Corregidora, Ursa’s ambiguous racial appearance dictates how she 20 Chapter One

is perceived by the men and women she encounters during her lifetime. Faced with the prospect of her past lineage forcing itself through her present visage, Ursa employs an altogether unremarkable strategy for dealing with inquiries from others: avoidance. The stream-­ of-­ consciousness structure of the novel allows the protagonist to drift back and forth through four corporeal histories, from her great-­grandmother’s to her own. Even Ursa’s interior conversations take on the question of her paternal ancestor. “Ursa, what makes your hair so long?” she remembers. “I got evil in me” is her response, “Corregidora’s evil.”7 When later Ursa remembers Mutt asking her “Was your mama mulatto?” Ursa’s response negates the context of his question. “I’m darker than her,” she says, and Mutt proceeds no further with his inquiries.8 Ursa’s insistence on her father’s mark on her complexion (for he is the only man who is able to break the lover/father cycle) is one of the ways she can separate herself from the three maternal influences—all of whom are connected to “Corregidora’s evil” in one way or another.9 And because the novel insists that “hate and desire” are “two humps on the same camel,” Ursa is the embodiment of all that slave hate and desire that cause men and women to fixate on her ambiguous flesh in the present.10 For black men in the novel in particular, their need to possess Ursa has as much to do with her sexuality onstage as it does with her body’s inference of white interference. Ursa recalls a time when she was walking along the street in Detroit as a teenager. She was approached by a man named Urban, who, while leaning on a car, “smiling, showing his gold tooth,” asks: “What are you?” to which Ursa replies, “I’m an American.” “I know you a [sic] American,” the man answers. “But what nationality. You Spanish?”11 The reference to Spain, the country bordering Portugal to the east, is meant to link Western European influence and conquest through the bodies of those marked by centuries of enslavement and subjugation. It is possible that Urban’s interest is to reclaim and subsequently darken (through offspring) what Europeans have indelibly lightened through centuries of exploitation. The body holds the same photographic capacity as the afterimage, to infuse itself with layers of meaning, duplicates of racialized marking— the present as well as the past. This “incessant invasion” solidifies the imagery of the dispossessed, as those lacking power are marked upon with such meaning at the same time that their marked bodies are mediated in Black Rapture 21

reverse.12 The infamous one-­drop rule and its facilitation and longevity in the United States ignore the more insidious and plentiful drops of nearly complete “white blood” (known as those other ninety-­nine drops) and its consequent barrage of white power.13 For Walter Johnson, the souvenir-­ esque quality of slave women’s bodies was precisely what interested potential owners. At the slave auctions, Johnson writes, “many slaveholders were buying for themselves a fantasy of provision that would amplify itself over time.” That was not all, for these men were also looking to “be present in the bodies” of their slaves for generations.14 In the white masculine quest to imprint, there is that same desire to be present that contributes to the shape and shade of nations, subjects, citizens, and families.

Margaret Garner’s Genealogical Rift and Toni Morrison’s Beloved In the oft-­told story of Toni Morrison’s discovery of the Margaret Garner case, the foundation for her Pulitzer Prize–­winning novel Beloved (1987), there is the sliver of the archive leaving indelible footprints across time.15 But more than the impetus for the novel, Garner’s story illustrates the “too much” that Morrison attempts to explore in much of her work. Because of the heightened visibility of the famous case that also existed in the dense shadows of American miscegenation (slaves carved out of slaves), I would like to read the historical archive into Morrison’s novel so that we may explore Beloved’s purposeful exploration of the violence that attends slavery’s remains. In the repetitive afterimage of corporeal imperialism that accompanies known slave mothers and unknown white fathers, we first have Margaret Garner (marked everywhere in the historical archive as “mulatto”), then at least two of her four children.16 These indiscriminate markings that fail to clarify originary patrilineage are also central to the “too much” that Garner experienced but about which she was forced to stay silent, at least in the public record.17 The ubiquitous nature of these absented patrilineal details keeps the haunted quality of slavery’s force as something that happens organically, and without the benefit of will, “the monstrous intimacies” Christina Sharpe contends “are the original trauma and the subsequent repetitions.”18 This “original trauma” reflects both the repetition of absence (invisible patriarchy) and the hypervisible mechanization (biracial and multiracial offspring) that sprinkle each plantation with loaded m ­ eaning. 22 Chapter One

By the time Margaret Garner enters the lexicon of the historical rec­ ord, she is the young mother (twenty-­three years old) of four children, three of whom were suspected to have been fathered by her owner, Archibald Gaines.19 Before Archibald there was his brother John Gaines, possible father of Margaret (thus making Archibald Gaines her paternal uncle). And yet, none of this figures cleanly into the archive, which is overwhelmed with the sensationalism of the 1856 trial. Margaret Garner and her husband escaped from Gaines’s Kentucky plantation with four children late in January 1856, crossing the Ohio River (which was frozen) and entering Ohio, a free state. They were quickly caught and taken into custody, but not before Garner managed to kill one of her four young children, a daughter who was three years old. The sensational court case that followed had all the elements of national shame: a young mother so unwilling to be enslaved that she instead attempted to kill her children and herself. Because she succeeded in killing one of her children, the legal questions concerning maternity, property, sentience, and personhood all coalesced around the Garner case. Garner was married, but it is evident that some of her children do not belong to her husband, Robert. The subtext of the Garners’ decision to run away has the “too much” of the slave system in the United States at its center. With the unveiling of the details of Margaret Garner’s life, the excesses of slavery’s hypocrisies rise to the forefront. Encased within the relative sexual safety of having been allowed to choose her husband, Halle, and of having him father all four of her children, Morrison creates for Sethe a specter of sexual exploitation that is both ubiquitous and invisible. Beginning with Sethe’s unnamed mother, Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-­in-­law, and Ella, neighbor and friend, this encasement eventually fractures itself around the two white boys (“with mossy teeth”) who hold Sethe down and suck the milk from her lactating breasts, a merging of the sexual and the maternal that Sethe plays out in a maddening loop of rhetorical repetition (“and they took my milk”).20 Like Margaret Garner, each woman in the novel has an unspeakable story to relate about white male access to black bodies, and Morrison marks this as a particularly resonant aspect of American slavery that extends beyond just women (as Paul D’s memories prove) but is reproduced (through offspring) via women’s bodies. As Antonio Benitez-­Rojo laments these discordant violations (“stretched vaginas,” etc.), Morrison Black Rapture 23

allows us to linger here before, during, and after these violations take place. If Margaret Garner, “mulatto,” had little bearing on an examination of her circumstance, then her dead daughter, described as “nearly white,” might intimate an important part of the equation that Garner, as a slave woman, was unable to testify about during her trial. In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia Williams famously tries to envision the world of her great-­great-­grandmother, purchased at age eleven by the man who will impregnate her almost immediately. “Since then I have tried to piece together what it must have been to be like my great-­great-­grandmother,” she writes.21 “She was purchased, according to matrilineal recounting, by a man who was extremely temperamental and quite wealthy. I try to imagine what it would have been like to have a discontented white man buy me, after a fight with his mother about prolonged bachelorhood. I wonder what it would have been like to have a thirty-­five-­year-­old man own the secrets of my puberty, which he bought to prove himself sexually as well as to increase his livestock of slaves.”22 This is the imagistic trace of slavery’s delineation, the imprint of both master and slave, and the willful blindness that attends a guilty nation-­ state, built on the bodies of the very slaves it tries desperately not to see. Beloved disallows this blindness by sprinkling the text with disparate narratives of problematic sexualization: from Ella’s yearlong captivity in which she was passed between a father and son (“You couldn’t think up,” Ella says, “what them two done to me”), to Baby Suggs’s hopeful trading of sexual favors for the possession of her children.23 Even as Sethe receives sparse information about her mother from a friend who traveled with her from across the sea, she finds that her mother survived multiple acts of sexual abuse that shaped her inclinations toward motherhood. The Margaret Garner court case, fixed as it was on the death of Garner’s young daughter, nevertheless presented the American public with a visual conundrum: a slave woman (property, not person under the law) accused of killing her child (property destroying property). In the coded (but horrifically specific) language of the auction block, white men delineated the force of their will, the remnants of resistance to that will, and the aftereffects of their immense and repeating dominion.24 Central to this force is that selfsame proximity and familiarity that breeds insidiously, moving up and through blacks and whites with dizzying speed and a seeming lack of accountability. Sharpe writes: “Slavery provides both a 24 Chapter One

1.1. Margaret Garner, Thomas Satterwhite Noble, 1867.

time and space (real and fantastic) where to commit incest or amalgamation is to break the same law.”25 Margaret Garner suffered beneath both the “legible trace” that Doane articulates and the “deferred effect” of that trace that welds her memory to the footnote of history and attempts to hold it there, visibly.26 Along with the sensationalism associated with the case and the sexual connotations of that sensationalism, there was the corresponding visual imagery, of which Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Margaret Garner (1867) is the most famous (figure 1.1). Noble’s painting features the slave mother in an agitated state immediately after the attempted murder of all her children (the painting features a young male child as deceased instead of a female child). In the painting Garner is discovered by the white men who represent civilized order to racial chaos and monstrosity, and the gruesomeness of the image is, according to Leslie Furth, a measure of Noble’s racial guilt and his inability to fully humanize his black subjects in the painting. “Garner’s frenzied demeanor,” Furth contends, “does little to dispel the viewer’s response of horror. . . . In fact, Garner’s image falls within the lexicon of contemporary representations that crudely Black Rapture 25

lampooned and grotesquely exaggerated the black body and physiognomy in minstrel shows and in popular illustration.”27 Morrison explores the capacities of the grotesque by structuring her novel around Sethe’s act that is also an indictment of slavery, racial hegemony, and the limits of refusal. When Stamp Paid, with all of the unwanted responsibility of a traumatized witness, shows his new friend Paul D the newspaper clipping that details the infamous court case in which Sethe is tried for killing her baby daughter, Paul D has an abrupt and insistent refusal. “He simply looked at the face, shaking his head no,” Morrison writes. “No. At the mouth, you see. And no at whatever it was those black scratches said, and no to whatever it was Stamp Paid wanted him to know.”28 The refusal of recognition is both imagistic and auditory—he listens to the story of the court case and refuses it. He sees Sethe in the newspaper drawing and refuses the image. Refuses her face at the mouth, because he did not hear the story from her first. The repeated refrain in the passage is “That ain’t her mouth.”29 Noble enacts a refusal within his own painting, seemingly unwilling to paint the scene as the scene presented itself. Instead, there is a dark and monstrous mother, with her equally dark, dead, and injured children (mostly boys). There is an absence of the visual possibility of previous sexual violence or exploitation, just the subtext of a slave woman with apparently inherent violent intent. “Noble did not—perhaps could not— create an image of Garner in 1867 within the sentimentalized rhetoric of motherhood,” Furth contends.30 Instead, he presents the viewer with a vengeful scene of horror, initiated and extended by the supremely powerful figure of black womanhood. Absent, then, is the all-­important figure of whiteness, maleness, and sexual exploitation. What is left, awkwardly, violently, is the afterimage of these interactions, and the only evidence (as the epigraph to this chapter intimates) that anything at all has taken place.

Corporeal Inversion The afterimage promises a visual impingement, the layer of the master upon the slave, its inference of violation and repetition. Gifted with the ability to carve slaves out of slaves, this imagistic negotiation “pivots on a 26 Chapter One

temporal lag, a superimposition of images, an inextricability of past and present.”31 There is in this superimposition a particularly cruel visuriency: to peel back layers of blackness by force and watch the magic of intermixture make permanent (and fluid) the measure of white male dominance. So fully could white patriarchal power be enforced that visual whiteness could be achieved (but not necessarily freedom) in three very short generations of inculcation.32 This is the not-­often-­told story of those masters and slaves, and, in the contemporary record, of Sally Hemings. For poet Lucille Clifton, the now-­famous history of American slave Sally Hemings contributes to the desire to situate her body at a sexual crossroads between power and possibility. In Clifton’s poem “monticello,” the speaker begins with a “history” that places the slave mother as the human landscape of Thomas Jefferson’s ultimate possession. “Sally Hemmings,” [sic] the history begins, “slave at monticello, bore several children with bright red hair.”33 In the casualness of the poem’s historical background, Clifton does a great deal of cultural work. She sets the poem on the grounds of Jefferson’s beloved plantation, Monticello, essentially bastardizing the property and marking it as part and parcel of a larger process of lawful but egregious corporeal use. The branding Hemings sustains is the legacy of both slave and master, the imagistic viscidity necessary for the subtleties of slave life to be reproduced decade after decade through slave progeny. And Jefferson is not anomalous in his sexual compulsions; he is ordinary. The surprise is not that the former president fathered multiple children with his slave. The surprise would be if he did not. Sally Hemings is the afterimage of the white father before her, and the white grandfather before him. Jefferson is just last in a line of chromosomal imprints linking slaves and masters.34 Clifton’s “monticello,” a single-­stanza piece consisting of four lines of verse, places the former president in contradiction with himself as the icon of tormented slave ownership: God declares no independence. here come the sons from this black sally branded with jefferson hair35 Clifton hints at the power dimensions of Jefferson as a God figure who was not benevolent enough to “declare independence” for his slave. InBlack Rapture 27

stead, he declared his own independence onto her body, his will into her flesh, and “branded” her with his biological legacy. The poem notes the irony of Jefferson’s family history, since no sons—no “heirs” born to Jefferson and his wife Martha—survived into adulthood. The president’s only “sons” were through Hemings: the “black Sally” of folklore and defamation; the “dusky Sally” of slave era fantasy and fault; “Sally the seductress,” the imagined sexual aggressor by whom Thomas Jefferson found himself enslaved.36 Hemings provides a compelling point of representational binary pairings. She is imagined as both slave and free, subjugated and powerful, child and woman, black and white, hypervisible and invisible.37 The visualization of Hemings’s near-­white, sexually prolific body reverses the power structure of Thomas Jefferson’s slave plantation, inverting the dimensions of their relationship. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “The discourse of seduction obfuscates the primacy and extremity of violence in master-­slave relations and in the construction of the slave as both property and person . . . as the enslaved is legally unable to give consent or offer resistance, she is presumed to be always willing.”38 As this chapter will explore, corporeal conflations often solidify the slave woman as a remnant, an afterimage, of white patriarchal dominion.39 The transnational slave romance necessitates the illusion of black women’s sexual supremacy, their mastery of carnal pleasure to project desires actualized onto the victims of those actions. The static cohesion of symbol and rhetoric formulates a revolving circle of negation, which rarely receives interrogation. This is the contradictory point at which we find ourselves face-­to-­face with the slave woman’s particular conundrum and her relationship to corporeal memory, to historical endeavor.

The Figurative Auction Block: Sally Hemings and Contemporary Memory Sally Hemings’s final resting place, according to a recent news report, “is likely under a new Hampton Inn and its parking lot” in Charlottesville, Virginia, four miles from Monticello.40 The sudden and furious interest in her physical whereabouts has all the markings of the former hypervisible/invisible treatment Hemings encountered. We know her only through rumor, deduction, and the cataloging of Jefferson’s notes. In the 28 Chapter One

present moment, nearly two hundred years after her death, she is a veritable industry of memory.41 In Virginia, a proposal is under way to name a street “in her honor,” a Kentucky racehorse owner is suing to keep his thoroughbred’s name—Sally Hemings.42 And a 1970 radical newsletter emerging from the University of Virginia, in an ironic play on the use of voice, was named “The Sally Hemings.”43 In her present incarnation, Sally Hemings is not simply the property of Thomas Jefferson but symbolizes the nation’s incestuous enslaved/free intermingling, as well as our continued fascination with political figures. Jefferson’s wife, Martha, and Hemings were half sisters. Their father, John Wayles, purchased an African woman from Captain Hemings, by whom the woman soon had a daughter, Elizabeth Hemings.44 Elizabeth Hemings gave birth to six children by John Wayles, completing the popular cycle of plantation owners taking women born on the plantation as later mistresses. Sally Hemings was their youngest child, born a few months after Wayles’s death.45 Whether sexual exploitation took the form of consent, coercion, rape, or “seduction,” New World slavery afforded slave owners like Wayles and Jefferson unparalleled access to black women’s bodies. The resultant power dynamic was not accidental; instead, plantation owners utilized all tools at their disposal to ensure their continuing dominion over all things chattel and worth possessing. These slaveholders, according to Walter Johnson, “sought victims, not companions. In their most private moments, these men existed only in the slaves whose bodies provided the register for their secret desires and their evident power.”46 To sustain this power and absolve it of guilt, the slaveocracy established a set rhetoric, which delineated the purpose and position of slave women’s unfree bodies. Johnson continues: “Behind the shroud of patriarchal prerogative, some slaveholders hid fantasies of domination that could be seen only by their slaves. . . . By hiding their private desires from everyone but their slaves, they recapitulated the ultimate logic of the slave market: their phantasms of independent agency were built out of practical dependence upon people bought in the market—their selves were built out of their slaves.”47 Purchased in the slave market by a total stranger or, as in the case of Sally Hemings, inherited as the known product of previous sexual indiscretions, a slave woman, as bell hooks reminds us, “could not look to any group of men, white or black, to protect her against sexual exBlack Rapture 29

ploitation.”48 “Half-­white children in southern households,” according to Deborah Gray White, “told a story of a white man’s infidelity, a slave woman’s helplessness . . . and a white woman’s inability to defy the social and legal constraints that kept her bound to her husband regardless of his transgressions.”49 And so it was this rarely acknowledged series of repetitive relationships, played out on the bodies of black women, which, if unearthed and deconstructed, would be the backstory to the construction of a new nation.50 The slave women who, according to Hortense Spillers, are imbued with so much “mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean,” are embodied in the memory of Sally Hemings.51 Barbara Chase-­Riboud’s wildly popular novel Sally Hemings (1979) attempted to reintroduce the former folkloric figure to a wider, more willing audience. Of the several book jackets that provide a visual representation of Hemings, the one for Chase-­Riboud’s novel stands out (figure 1.2). A close-­up shot of a woman’s neck and bosom is focused on an open locket that sits between the woman’s breasts and is opened to a photograph of a young Thomas Jefferson. The image is both in and outside of time, flirting with the repetitive nature of black woman’s imagery. The locket functions as a miniature oval daguerreotype, a priceless keepsake from a loved one, but it precedes the era of daguerreotypes by fifty years. The colorful image, understood as a painting, is closely cropped and cut like a photograph. Straddling three imagistic portrayals, artistic painting, documentary photograph, and erotica, the cover art also eliminates Hemings’s gaze by cutting her figure off at the neck, leaving the viewer with only her breasts, her supposed desire, and her lover to contemplate. The visual decapitation alters Hemings’s slave/seducer singularity and offers her figure an anonymity that renders the reality of a slave woman’s sexual unprotection a more frightening duality. As the visual imitation of a romance novel cover, the image makes small (literally minuscule) Jefferson’s participation in the scandal for which he has been associated publicly since 1802. The locket represents an intense love on Hemings’s part, while the cleavage is a window into the slave woman’s sexual capabilities and appetite. The neckline, taut and inviting, makes visual an eagerness already assumed in the historical memory. Hemings is presented in a pale yellow dress, with a small matching flower attached at the center of the bodice, the image high30 Chapter One

1.2. Book cover for Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-­Riboud. © 1979 Barbara Chase-­Riboud. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

lights Hemings’s represented sexual prowess, and is larger than the borders of the novel it accompanies. It is an illusory power play of tremendous proportion.

Jefferson and Hemings in Paris In 1995 Merchant-­Ivory Productions released the film Jefferson in Paris, to generally mediocre reviews. The movie attempted to filmically address the Jefferson-­Hemings connection, and many of the overtly negative reviews responded to the subject matter with distrust (one critic referred to the portrayal of the relationship as “politically correct but historically absurd”).52 The graphics used to advertise the film in France and Black Rapture 31

the United States were similarly designed and gestured toward a particular understanding of the Jefferson-­Hemings “affair,” which apparently began when the former president was the American minister to France in the late eighteenth century. By the time Hemings returned from Paris to Monticello in 1789, she was reportedly pregnant with her first child.53 One of the images used to promote the film features the interior of a large domicile rendered through an ornate decorative door. The door, which is opened about a quarter of the way, shows Nick Nolte as Thomas Jefferson and Greta Scacchi as Maria Cosway, locked in an embrace, wrapped in each other’s arms while Cosway gently strokes the left side of Jefferson’s face. They are close enough to kiss in the shot, but this is at once unnecessary and strategic within the image. For on the other side of the immense door stands Sally Hemings, played by Thandie Newton. She exists in the darkened recesses of the corner of the frame, out of the light and beyond the field of vision of Jefferson and Cosway. Her expression is a mixture of anxiety, fear, and anticipation. The shadow cast behind her forms a darkened outline that contrasts with the light that emanates from the couple behind the door. Hemings’s eyes glance toward the left side of the frame, where it seems she has a vested interest in disrupting the relationship on the other side of the door. The image makes clear the acceptable/unacceptable, exterior/interior, white/black, and love/lust binaries at play. Because Jefferson and Cosway are so intimately and lovingly connected to each other, whatever Hemings may think, desire, or believe becomes immaterial. She wants what she cannot ever have; her “desire” cannot be fulfilled. In this image there is only the hint of impropriety on Jefferson’s part. Hemings is rendered visually as the agent of her own lustful intentions—intentions of which Jefferson may not be fully aware. These intentions are cornered and closeted; only brought forth by the Hemings’s efforts and visually resisted by the insular and private tender relationship between Jefferson and Cosway. Critic Michael Moore notes that in the realm of visual arts, doors, which he refers to as “both barriers and means of admittance,” encompass a multiplicity of meaning ranging from danger to the sexual symbolic. According to Moore, a door’s “ambivalence is further enhanced by the fact that, while a closed door provides defense, its very existence implies a potential for danger when open.”54 The door in the film graphic 32 Chapter One

1.3. American poster for Jefferson in Paris, 1995.

for Jefferson in Paris directs the location for danger and the necessity for defense onto the shoulders of Hemings’s character. She is the agent of temptation, the visual (and dangerous) blockage to true love. This is also the case with the American graphic for the same film, which depicts the same three characters in the interior of the Jefferson home (figure 1.3). Although Hemings is now featured in the center of the image, she is placed farther back, as part of the background to the movie’s true love story. In the forefront, Jefferson and Cosway display the same affection articulated by the previous image. Visually parted seemingly only to allow the appearance of an infatuated Hemings, Jefferson and Cosway once again gaze deeply into each other’s eyes. Cosway strokes the side of Jefferson’s face in a gesture of familiarity and tenderBlack Rapture 33

ness. As for Hemings, her eyes once again gaze over to her only concern, Thomas Jefferson. She glances at Jefferson achingly, her line of vision following out from the shadows of darkness to her left and into the light of his face on her right.55 In both images, although Cosway is the married woman to Jefferson’s widowhood, it is only Hemings who is seen as sexualized, the flickering passion of her solitary desire burning like the candle that sits directly behind her. Visibly straddling the worlds of black and white, her body carries the resonance of white paternity, and therefore sexual interference. In the French and American graphics, only Cosway’s profile is shown. Her long, curly hair obscures a full viewing of her neck as she is portrayed as the epitome of a lady: dignified and refined. Hemings, on the other hand, in the French image faces the viewer, her plunging neckline accentuating her rising cleavage and accentuating the visual access the viewer (and Jefferson) has to her body. The image distributed in the United States shows Hemings in a deep green dress, signifying her lust-­filled envy of Jefferson’s true love, Maria Cosway. Though Hemings is presented in a side view, her cleavage figuratively splits the image in half and renders a powerful block to the proposed transnational romance. Cyrus Cassells’s poem “Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson” (1983) takes the Sally Hemings sexual power play to new heights. The poem appeared in the literary journal Callaloo along with a dedication that reads “for Barbara Chase-­Riboud and for my family, reputed to be the direct descendants of Hemings and Jefferson.”56 Placing his lineage squarely between the famous slave woman and her more famous owner, Cassells’s poem anticipates the outward victimization of Hemings with its first line, “Je m’appele Sally,” an introduction that first situates Hemings in the realm of the named, the counted, the recorded, then places her memory within a Europeanized learned category of French lessons, eager student to Jefferson’s requested tutelage. “Now, years later,” she tells us, “I repeat the French, / As if to yield / All that I am, / And open the locket to find, / Cached in the tiny, gold-­lined womb, / A lock of your red hair: / It happens, your face / Looms again in my lifetime.” As narrator and agent, Sally Hemings, silenced by history, endeavors to speak for herself, to claim that which is close to her heart and her consciousness, and she is given a voice to do just that: 34 Chapter One

If I could go to the doorway, And stand, waiting for you As you take the hall, your leonine figure Assembling in the longest mirror As in my eyes. But you are dead, Thomas Jefferson, And I can only sit, Motionless, my heart pounding At your phantom, For today I learned The census-­taker made me white To absolve you of the crime Of having loved a slavewoman. So I burned our correspondence —The diaries and billet-­doux an ash Clinging to my skirts, A smoke in my hair. Each word A swatch of myself, a forbidden history: The Hotel de Langeac, the Palace of Marly, The Capital, Monticello— Now I am robbed of everything, Even of my color.57 Cassells creates an image of Hemings etched in the elegant, love-­struck, duty-­filled existence that has become historical memory. At once lingering on the memory of Jefferson as lover, Hemings, “made white” by the census taker, enacts her agency on the page by burning the love letters passed between the two over the years. Where there is a crime committed by Jefferson, Hemings as speaker releases him from fault, and it becomes the census taker’s desire “To absolve you of the crime / Of having loved a slavewoman” by marking the older Hemings as white instead of black, which is seen as the true crime. The poem, a long narrative constructed of 119 lines broken into five stanzas, travels from Hemings’s spoken present back through her infamous past. But it is the second stanza that makes the goal of the poem expressive and explicit: I was fifteen when you took me, Your daughter’s nursemaid; Black Rapture 35

You brushed my cheek With your red-­plumed chest, Whispering Martha, Martha —Piercing me with the name Of your dead wife, my white half-­sister Whom I resembled. I was so frightened by you then, So overawed and unbelieving Of your love. I would stand before my mirror, Cupping my breasts In my two hands, amazed: no fledgling But a woman— Je t’aime, Sally, Je t’aime, I heard you say, And in Paris I mislaid My slavery So home to Monticello, I met My mother’s loving, though accusatory face, And knew I should have chosen freedom.58 Crafted to be a sympathetic portrayal of the complex “relationship” Jefferson and Hemings shared, the poem addresses some of the more troubling aspects of the power dynamic between the two historical figures. “I was fifteen when you took me,” Sally confesses. Using “took” to connote a momentary lack of volition and signaling age and level of maturity, the stanza reiterates the facts of the oral and historical record and then quickly moves on to the more intimate interiors of a problematic coupling.59 “The compelling, even hypnotic fascination inspired by slave spectacles,” Joseph Roach writes in Cities of the Dead, “resides, I believe, in their violent, triangular conjunction of money, property, and flesh.”60 This trinity of money, property, and flesh has to negotiate sex with violence and subjection with volition. Cassells’s poem, dedicated to Chase-­Riboud and referencing her novel, stresses some of the more romantic aspects of the fictional work. Chase-­ Riboud, eager to author a historical novel bearing such a provocative subject, began working on the book that would bring her additional fame, this 36 Chapter One

time as a writer of fiction. The novel, dedicated “to the enigma of the historical Sally Hemings,” begins with the same census taker immortalized in Cassells’s work. Nathan Langdon, the eager patriot who rewrote the documentation concerning Hemings and her grown sons, is drawn in by Hemings’s beauty and allure and repeatedly returns to her cabin to spend time with her. Setting off a flood of memories, Langdon’s visits are welcome until he reveals his “decision” to whiten up Hemings and her sons by marking their race as white in the census record. Hemings responds by burning all correspondence between Jefferson and herself, the only written proof of their relationship. Her memories, though, do not burn.61 When Hemings recalls her journey to Paris as the servant of Jefferson’s daughter, she remembers it as a happy time. Jefferson, whom she most often refers to as “master,” quickly “sought his slave’s company more and more” and “indulged her as a child rather than a servant.” 62 Reaching back into the memory of their first sexual encounter, Hemings admits, “Perhaps I had always known he would claim me. Had not the same happened to my mother and sister?”63 Speaking in the first person, Hemings initially treats her impending sexual relationship with Jefferson as “a thing that happens.” She is the slave body happened upon, a destiny she can do nothing about, only wait. “I could hasten or delay that moment,” she tells us, “but I felt powerless to prevent it.”64 Hemings’s adolescent lust for her master takes over her body as she waits for Jefferson to approach her or give her some sort of signal that he desires her in the same way. “I dared not leave the house lest he send for me. At night I fell asleep sitting upright on the side of my bed.”65 The evening before Jefferson is scheduled to go to Amsterdam for six weeks, he sends for Hemings but fails to tell her what he wants. She falls asleep in his bedroom, awaking to his “immense shadow” materializing in front of her. I had no idea how long he had been standing there. Now that he had come, I felt no fear, only an overwhelming tenderness. His presence for me was command enough; I took control of him. I bent forward and pressed a kiss on the trembling hands that encompassed mine, and the contact of my lips with his flesh was so violent that I lost all memory of what came afterward. I felt around me an exploding flower, not just of passion, but of long deprivation, a hunger for things forbidden, for darkness and unreason, the passion of rage against the death Black Rapture 37

of the other I so resembled. For in this moment I became one with her, and it was not my name that sprang from him, but that of my half sister.66 The initial sexual encounter between master and slave is initiated, naturally, by the slave—reiterating the oft-­told story of slave lust, impossible to contain or resist. Jefferson is the one who trembles, is ambivalent and awestruck, and Hemings is the “exploding flower” of “passion,” the one who has experienced “long deprivation” and seeks “things forbidden.” In this moment of carnal magnetism, Sally Hemings becomes the “master of her own subjection,” willing agent to a relationship she herself pursues.67 As a man mesmerized and hypnotized, Jefferson falls into her, using her body as an opportunity to revisit his dead wife’s flesh. The narration portrays Jefferson as a weakened, torn, and unsure middle-­aged American minister distantly recognizable as the architect of Monticello, the founder of the University of Virginia, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the future president of the United States. His ability to see Hemings as a child whom he “indulged” one moment, and as his sexual superior (nine months younger than his own daughter) the next solidifies her sexual maturity. Hemings renders her enslavement in perpetual terms: “Nothing would ever free me of him.” 68 She owns up to her servitude to Jefferson, body and womb, allowing him the luxury of powerlessness. The conflation of child and woman imagined by Chase-­Riboud adds to the incestuous element that was plantation slave life. Father, lover, master, owner—the roles are not so easily classified and demarcated, and they fail to disappear cleanly into contemporary memory.69 Hemings has an immense responsibility in the text, written to navigate the borders of a “love story” that would be as scandalous today as it was in the early nineteenth century. Historians and image producers alike have needed the narrative safety of a Hemings-­initiated sexual liaison, even as it rings with the familiar desire of a guilt-­inflicted national narrative. It might be useful here to return to the second stanza of “Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson” and read it through the clouded lenses of historical memory. In twenty-­one lines of verse, Hemings as narrator moves through no fewer than nine temporary and permanent identities. Beginning as an impressionable child, then a “taken” victim, an enslaved subject, and a sexual replacement for a dead wife, she, the qua38 Chapter One

droon sister of Martha Jefferson, is corporeal proof of previous sexual abuse, but also the image of emergent sexual desire and power. She is, as she professes, “a woman,” a worldly woman of French tutelage, hearing “Je t’aime” spoken to her, a profession of love in the language of love, and she also believes she is this—loved. By the end of the stanza, reality returns to Hemings’s consciousness, and she realizes that her fate is one that she chose for herself, the “my slavery” she refers to; as she realizes this, the fantasy fades, settling on the “loving, though accusatory face” of her unfree mother, Elizabeth Hemings, and ending on the one thing denied her even upon Jefferson’s death—freedom.70 The poem consistently paints Hemings, slave woman and survivor, as the emotional superior of the two, an unfree confidante who could harbor Jefferson’s secret desires within her body and ease his psyche of its own culpability. “I looked into your eyes” she says, “two sapphires / set in a human face / and met a suffering so vast, what else / But to take your hand”: And whisper, yes . . . My love and master, I need to believe I would choose this way again, Though as property I had no choice ’Cept to give myself But I, Mademoiselle Sally, Gave you my heart, And returned to slavery. Nothing could free me from you.71 Cassells’s poem attempts the difficult task of humanizing both Hemings and Jefferson. As readers of the poem, we are implicated in Hemings’s dilemma, though she absolves even us of our historical complicity. “I need to believe,” she tells us, “I would choose this way again.” In this sense, she reprises her role as sacrificial center to an ever-­e volving psychosexual historical narrative.72 It is not only she who needs to believe. To invoke Hortense Spillers, Sally Hemings’s country needs her, and if she did not exist, she would have to be invented. Such is the fate of this slave woman in relation to cultural memory. She existed, and we invented her anyway. A portion of Cassells’s poem articulates the multivalent corporeal tendencies in terms of slave women and their possible desires. Against the Black Rapture 39

backdrop of Hemings’s primary dilemma, there is the founding of a new nation: The battlecries, Your glittering words of revolution Have been recorded. But in a secret wing of Monticello, Against your will, I marked The dreams and follies of our seven children, The shocked faces of our foreign guests. But O what I could not capture Was your silence As all the country crowned me Black Lillith, Sooty Chatelaine.73 In these lines Cassells contains Hemings’s “love” for Jefferson within the arena of a lifetime of physical desire and maternal production. Yet this portion of the poem also releases Jefferson from his paternal responsibility, instead listing Hemings as a woman full of maternity but devoid of paternity, situating her within the realm of the slave-­maternal (a known mother and an unknown or unacknowledged father) that structured the system of slavery in the United States and beyond. “Against your will,” she says, “I marked / The dreams and follies of our seven children” (emphasis mine). Her attempt to make legible the existence of herself and the children she produced with Jefferson disrupts its own insistence. Absence here relinquishes memory and provides the reader with a relationship that spanned Hemings’s adolescent and adult life, but prosaically failed to reproduce itself in the historical record, thereby making it an anomaly situated within the slave woman’s body. As Spillers asserts, “This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside.”74 This inside/outsidedness facilitates Hemings’s immersion into cultural lore, with body and without child, without a past of white paternity, which, while rhetorically necessary, is historically dangerous.75 Robbie McCauley’s Obie Award–­winning play Sally’s Rape uses the discourse of the “unspeakable” to perform into being an alternate reading of master/slave sexual relations. Merging the biographical history of her great-­great-­grandmother Sally, as well as the story of Jefferson’s slave, 40 Chapter One

McCauley, according to James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, “uses Sally . . . as the generic name for all women without social, economic, political or physical power who are therefore available to be raped.”76 Ann Nymann sees McCauley’s performance piece as an experimental mode that “demonstrates a black female subject bearing witness to the confluent demons of racism and sexism,” particularly as they relate to the slave experience. There is no romance here, no discourse of seduction and submission that could make the American family romance of slavery less violent, traumatic, and devastating. Instead, the performance seeks to juxtapose like imagery and disrupt it, creating what Nymann calls a “survival act,” one in which the subject performs her way out of victimization through repetition.77 As Jeanne, McCauley’s partner in the performance, tells the audience, there is trouble in this, for “Black women get bitter. / Scared somebody gonna look at them and run and search for the wind, look at them and go to the bottom of pain and sadness, looking for breezes.” Because the legacy of rape is inscribed on black women’s bodies, and these same bodies are not allowed to give voice to this history, McCauley articulates their stories for them, performs survival for those who could not, and extends the legacy out of its origin and into a created future where it can work toward meaning. She asks her audience, “Do you think Thomas / took his Sally to European tea rooms? / and what did she wear?” (emphasis mine). The structure of the play, experimental and only partially scripted, casts the audience as the third performer in the piece as it is the audience interaction that provides the variable and often dictates the flow of the play. At a critical point in the performance, McCauley climbs onto an auction block and displays her nude body. She then faces the audience: (to audience) I wanted to do this—stand naked in public on the auction block. I thought somehow it could help free us from this. (refers to her naked body) Any old socialist knows one can’t be free till all are free.78 McCauley uses the performance space to reclaim and revisit, baring her body and forcing the audience to participate in the healing processes of theatrical truth. She uses disjuncture, rupture, and an emphasis on collectivity to summon both her familial and her racial collective experience. For McCauley, Sally Hemings is her grandmother Sally, and in the display of her nude body on the theatrical auction block, she is Sally as well. She Black Rapture 41

carries in her dna the presence of the past. She carries the legacy of both master and slave, reclaiming, in the words of Nymann, “agency to the black female subject position.”79 In McCauley’s piece, the American slave romance—so necessary for national amnesia—is auctioned off like the former enslaved women it represents. Denying the audience the “linearity of history,” McCauley channels an American slave past and “acts as their storyteller, embodying their experiences of rape and racial oppression as her own.”80 Audiences, forced to participate in and negotiate the sale of McCauley’s present body from the embattled past of its own lineage, are involved on a very intimate level in the making and remaking of corporeal recovery. This is a transnational desire that moves beyond the borders of the United States and encompasses every aspect of black Atlantic slavery, even in its afterlife. There is but scant evidence of white men’s sexual violations against the women and girls they owned—little written, more located in the oral history of slavery’s descendants, and more still marked in the dna of both whites and blacks throughout the Americas. Infused into the flesh as it is, the visual nature of this marking is a peculiarly absent aspect of discourse. For slaveholders, and other white men in positions of power, their whiteness proved visible in the first instance it was reproduced in their slave offspring. Beneath this visual relationship was the inference of what Phillip D. Morgan refers to as a “forced embrace.”81 Slave owners refused to outwardly acknowledge this aspect of their power, and yet this was the place where their dominion was ubiquitous, because it was ineffable. As Nell Irvin Painter describes it, “Scholars and lay people have avoided, sometimes positively resisted, the whole calculation of slavery’s psychological costs.”82 Part of those psychological costs lay in the sexual legacy passed down from slave to slave owner, purchaser to property, father to child. Because all of this takes place through the bodies of black women, this is a phenomenon having a deliberate global contemporary resonance.

Chica da Silva and the Seductions of Historical Re-­Creation According to Júnia Furtado, Francisca “Chica” da Silva,83 “born between 1731 and 1735 was the child of Maria de Costa, a black slave, and Antônio Caetano de Sá, a white man.”84 Much like her U.S. counterpart 42 Chapter One

Sally Hemings, Silva was born into a legacy of paternal whiteness situating her biraciality as a marker of previous sexual exploitation, while her mother’s blackness signified her availability for present and future use.85 Because Silva appears to have attained a measure of power through her sexual relationship with her owner, the underside of the dynamic of slave negotiations and desires cannot be fleshed out completely. Silva was the slave, mistress, freewoman, and later common-­law wife of João Fernandes de Oliveira, a diamond contractor from Portugal. Over the span of fifteen years with Oliveira, Silva gave birth to thirteen children, spending almost her entire adult life pregnant, disallowing the fantastical folklore of her wanton sexual performances (all of which occur devoid of the visual of a single offspring). Historical memory concerning Silva is fickle, culturally self-­conscious, and inventive, crediting the former slave woman with possessing otherworldly mystical powers of seduction.86 In this narrative, João Fernandes is the one without the power to control his body and becomes a slave in his own home as Silva is remembered as a woman who cast her sexual spell on everyone she encountered. Of the historical subject of her biographical study, Furtado wonders: “Witch, seducer, heroine, queen or slave: after all, who was Chica da Silva[?] After almost three centuries, the lack of historical research on her life contributes to the questions remaining about her.”87 Even though Furtado’s study is the first to concern this central figure of Brazilian historiography, Silva has remained a vital part of the national narrative of resistance, power, and multiracial reproduction. In his study The Masters and the Slaves (1946), Gilberto Freyre outlines the structure of the social world into which Silva was born. Racial hegemony and sexual exploitation as a birthright, Freyre would argue, contribute happily to the colorful blending of the Brazilian familial landscape. And the sexualized black woman, from antiquity to the present, has been the foremost contributing factor to the racial mixture that is apparent contemporarily. Freyre illustrates the sexual excess of the slave woman through an anecdote concerning the marital norms of a white Brazilian man in power. “It was necessary for this youth,” he tells us, “in order to excite his white bride, to take with him to the bedroom the sweaty nightgown, imbued with the budum, or odor, of the Negro slave girl with whom he had been having an affair.”88 In Freyre’s estimation, it Black Rapture 43

is this connectivity to base sexual desire that explains the particularity of sexual mores Brazil has to offer. Speaking in the collective voice, Freyre begins his chapter “The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian” with an affectionate dedication. He situates “the mulatto girl . . . who initiated us into physical love and, to the creaking of a canvas cot, gave us our first complete sensation of being a man” as the epitome of sexual experience, to which all white men are grateful.89 The concept of sexual initiation and innocence exuded through the pale body of the white Brazilian (male) and made sensual by the baser primitive “gifts” of the “Negro slave girl” has a direct connection to this specific Brazilian narrative of wild and wanton sexuality. Between a “slave girl” and her mulatto child there stands an invisible white presence, underarticulated but fully understood as an essential part of the miscegenation equation. The conglomeration of what Saidiya Hartman calls “socially tolerable and necessary violence,” which “sets the stage for the indiscriminate use of the body for pleasure, profit and punishment,” is located outside the slave woman’s acknowledged experience.90 Through the interiors of an unacknowledged experience, though, we can carefully pull together the beaded strings of a circular narrative history, one in which slave women’s bodies are sexually engendered to give the illusion of volition, a needful thing to an oppressive slaveocracy. In addition to sexual access, there is the promise of its other benefit— offspring, the kind that signifies another kind of physical growth and meaning. According to Walter Johnson, male bodies purchased during slavery were objectified for present and future use; women had the additional marker of eternal replenishing through their bodies to contend with. Their use was seen as never-­ending—everlasting. And the sexual access of plantation slave systems allowed for the proliferation of racially mixed progeny that “existed in a state of public erasure.”91 For Chica da Silva, born into this lineage of known mothers and known and unknown fathers in Minas Gerais, nearly two hundred years of imperialist possession of Brazil had already taken place, and by the late sixteenth century, the Portuguese had control. According to Robin Blackburn, “brazil wood, from which red dye could be extracted, gave the colony its name and remained the principal product for nearly half a century.”92 By the early eighteenth century, the “precious metals” the Portuguese were in search of were discovered: gold in cities like Ouro 44 Chapter One

Preto and diamonds in Tejuco (present-­day Diamantina in the state of Minas Gerais). Along with the extensive mining for diamonds in Tejuco, there came the inevitable structure of Portuguese hierarchy and the officials sent to oversee the operations (and collect taxes). João Fernandes de Oliveira was one such official. Like the former slave woman the mythology represents, Carlos Diegues’s film Xica da Silva (1976) satirically portrays the inner workings of slavery, sexuality, and desire in the context of eighteenth-­century Brazil (figure 1.4). The film, which plays with the limits of representation and reclamation, was tremendously successful in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. It later spawned a popular telenovela (soap opera).93 Xica exemplifies the difficult endeavor of untethering black women from the framework of the corporeal. The film mirrors the negotiated space of the empire with the varied bodies it necessitates in order to render itself visible. As Jennifer L. Morgan writes in Laboring Women, “Europe had a long tradition of identifying Others through the monstrous physiognomy or sexual behavior of women.” (Morgan, 16). Extending this “long tradition” to the colonial project, Western practices of the ocular merged gender, sex, sexuality, and geography in order to produce the visual cartography of black women’s eternal availability. Contemporary cultural productions often place the performative possibilities located in visual spectacles at the center of engagements with public and private space. In this way they acknowledge what is most troublesome about these representations even as the prerogatives of repetition also allow for the possibility of more fluid movements. Xica wrestles with the negotiation of sexuality within slavery’s violent framework, and ultimately decides upon the rendering of this singular protagonist who is apparently free of slavery’s corporeal entanglements. The construction of the mythology of sexual supremacy is a vestige of the past revisited on the present and repeated, as if there had been no negotiation, no recognition of the ways exploitation functions. One of the many ways this exploitation survives in the cultural imaginary is through the artistic emphasis on the uncontrolled/contained sexual power of enslaved female bodies. Xica opens in the lush and virginal fields of Minas Gerais, outside Villa Rica, where the magistrate from Portugal is on his way to the city’s center to take over control of the diamond mines. In these initial few shots of Black Rapture 45

1.4. Poster for Xica da Silva, 1976.

the film, we find out many things about Oliveira (played by Walmor Chagas) just by looking at him. He is wealthy, garbed in the fabric of a man of leisure and luxury. He is clearly a man of status; his economic power precedes him. Yet he is also a man of the people, for he stops along the way to Tejuco to partake in a colonial musical retreat, playing the flute with such skill that it immediately impresses the transient musicians he meets on the way. Intrigued and eager to take on the task he has been assigned, Oliveira says he believes his destiny is located in the Tejuco city limits. Because the very next shot is our introductory image of Xica’s (Zezé Motta’s) bent, squatting body, viewed from behind, it is clear in the narrative that his destiny is tied to her sexuality. 46 Chapter One

According to Laura Mulvey, who argues that cinema is uniquely qualified to precipitate the repetition of visual subjugation and objectification, “The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further.” Allowing “the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object,” film is a layered enabler, streamlining the distance between symbol and representation. “The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world.”95 The visual presence of a black woman’s body contained in a system of slavery has a similar effect. She is the unfree body made free through a process of visual recognition and interdependence upon historical memory, reinvention, and fiction.96 When we are first allowed to gaze at and linger on Xica’s body (as unfree), she is shown from behind, kneeling on the ground outside of the home she takes care of, shucking corn as chickens scurry about nearby. José (played by Stepan Nercessian), the young son of Xica’s owner, the sergeant of Tejuco, emerges from the second level of the house and walks along the railing, belting out the slave woman’s name repeatedly in song, chest full, and half strutting along the pathway. José’s playful gestures are a measure of his entitlement to her body. Xica slowly stands, her back facing the viewer, and places her hands on her hips, turning swiftly to face her taunting master as she refuses him verbally. José begins his approach down the stairs, juxtaposing his higher status and desire, while at the same time delineating the depths of his lust and the way in which he is willing to physically “lower himself ” to be with the slave woman. José races toward Xica, kneeling down and grabbing her from behind. He quickly and playfully rips the top of her loosely fitting blouse to expose her bare breasts. Xica struggles against him at first, quickly covering her breasts, her face a mixture of fear and anger. A smile slowly rises on her face, and she joyfully darts off into the cellar, shrieking as she goes. José follows her, gleeful, about to receive his body’s delights. After a few moments in the dark cellar of the domicile, the young man locates the playful slave. Viewers are privy only to the auditory exchange between Xica and José, and it is in this space where Xica’s particular sexual talents are introduced to moviegoers as José is overcome by the sheer force of her Black Rapture 47

sexual strength. This strength is never visually rendered but is intended to be fully understood as Xica’s special and unique talent. At the same moment José’s father, the sergeant/governor (Rodolfo Arena), is entertaining the newly arrived intendant, Theodoro (Altair Lima), and his wife, Dona Hortensia (Elke Maravilha). While the three of them prepare for João Fernandes’s anticipated arrival, the governor calls for his house slave, and the site of her enslavement is visually contrasted by the intendant Theodoro and his wife, both of whom are dressed in the excesses of imperial power. Dona Hortensia is garbed lavishly in a red dress and is sampling from a platter of raspberries, signifying the bounty of Tejuco as well as her association with sexuality and desire. Although she does not eat an apple, she is visually guilty of sexual curiosity. Dona Hortensia, white and entitled, is portrayed in a way that contradicts her prestige and position within Tejuco. Xica is the slave, but it is Dona Hortensia who attempts to enact her base desires throughout the film. Like Xica, she is viewed as enamored by power—men in power—but unlike Xica, she is bound by the sexual mores of her race and class. She is enslaved by the social discourse of her “feminine position,” the Cult of True Womanhood that Xica can never aspire to. According to Júnia Ferreira Furtado, in Brazil, “A slave concubine was generally granted manumission upon her master’s death, though usually only after buying her liberty at a price stipulated in the will of the deceased or after providing a certain number of extra years of service to his heirs.”97 Manumission was a very difficult undertaking in and of itself; as Furtado notes, “Although women were the majority of freed slaves, many ended up living on the margins of society as prostitutes, tabuleiro women, or vendeiras.”98 “Slavery,” writes Joseph Roach, “including the genteel servitude of the fancy girl, is social death.”99 This narrow progression in status is of particular importance for former slave women, whose race and gender have framed them outside the register of true womanhood. Xica has no such feminine position, although it is her race, gender, and slave status that situate her body as both with and without power. The slave woman emerges in the scene, followed quickly by José, and as Xica and José stand in the doorway, Theodoro’s attention is instantly drawn toward Xica. The intendant is sexually attracted to Xica (or to her position as a slave with no right to refuse him) and fixes his eyes in her direction. We do not know whether Xica returns the gaze, and the movie makes it 48 Chapter One

clear that her desire is not as dominant as Theodoro’s in the scene. At the same moment that Theodoro is pleasuring his internal fantasies with visions of Xica’s body, his wife makes her way over to José. Xica enters the room more fully, existing outside of the frame that now consists of José, Theodoro, and Dona Hortensia. The two men fix their eyes on Xica, who stands just outside the frame. Dona Hortensia, meanwhile, focuses her attentions on an actively disinterested José. Dona Hortensia is seen as sexually intrigued and stifled at the same time, one hand placed masturbatorally over her vaginal area while she eats raspberries with her right hand. She is clearly aching for sexual attention but is disregarded by both white men in favor of Xica. Theodoro addresses his curiosity—sexual and patriarchal—to José. “Since when is she your father’s slave?” he asks the governor’s son. “I don’t know,” José responds. “Ever since she was a child, I guess.”100 Having situated her as a domestic and domesticated enslaved woman, one who would certainly know the ways of the slave body unprotected, José and Theodoro look over at Xica once again, envisioning their needs played out on her body as Dona Hortensia looks on, unpleased but also unsurprised. His wife’s displeasure aside, the intendant strolls over to Xica and makes a counterclockwise half circle around her. He eyes his prey, smiling satisfactorily. “A good piece, this Xica, isn’t she?” Duplicating the exchange on the auction block, the discussion between the two men has all of the potent import of Xica’s waning agency without going so far as to have the viewer render her without power. Itching to wield his power and importance around Tejuco and possibly humiliate the wife who is unable to do the same, Theodoro calls Xica over to him, as José posits, “You like her, don’t you?” This obvious reference to the intendant’s lustful desire and the intended location of this lust unsettles him. White male access to slave women is a thing whispered and negotiated, a thing mentioned in polite company only by those of the inner circle. Nonetheless, Theodoro checks Xica’s teeth, shoulders, and arms and finally grabs and squeezes her breasts, declaring, “Not much meat, but she’s good . . . for certain things.”101 In another repetition of the auction block, the intendant surveys his future prey for her physical stamina and her body’s future resources. Dona Hortensia, visually absent during this scene, shifts out of the frame as the shot shifts back and forth from Theodoro and Xica to José. Even in her imagistic absence, she functions as a haunting, drifting in Black Rapture 49

and out of the frame’s point of view to remind the viewers of the contained (and yet vibrantly exploding) sexuality of white women. It is Xica’s dark complexion, contrasted with the dainty whiteness of Dona Hortensia, that works to visually compel and intrigue the viewer. Dona Hortensia is not only pale in complexion but also blonde—lighter than everyone she encounters—while Xica is seen as sturdy, black, and solid, perfect for penetration and exploitation. And yet this penetration works filmically from Xica outward, as it is Xica who possesses the symbolic phallus, and the men she conquers are unable to measure up. The film spans Oliveira’s time in Brazil to the point of his forced return to Portugal, but it omits the more than dozen Silva/Oliveira offspring who would have visually altered Xica’s movements and renderings for the viewer.102 It is possible that Diegues felt that the sight of multiple quadroon children would be a visual disruption and an unnecessary element for the progression of the narrative. It is also possible, I would argue, that this compelling omission imagistically engenders an impregnable version of Silva where every sexual act, every physical gesture, slides off her body like liquid and disappears into cultural folklore. This is what she shares with Sally Hemings—participation in a phallic fantasy with visual reward and no repercussions. Much like the poem by Cassells, one can imagine that Silva, as well, would choose just as forcefully as she seems to in the film, allowing the viewer’s gaze to enter and engender—empowered by the narrative. As crowds gather outside the governor’s home to meet the diamond contractor and his entourage as they make their way through the city, Xica looks out of the window at João Fernandes, and she likes what she sees. “I would like to meet him,” she says to no one in particular, though José is present in the room. José joins her at the window and utters in disgust, “See how people love those who exploit them?”103 He speaks of the citizens of Tejuco, seemingly rapt under the spell of the contractor, but he could just as easily be speaking of Xica. His statements carry multiple possibilities: Xica can be (and has been) exploited, and she could also exploit those who use her, just as the people of Tejuco could be exploited by Oliveira as easily as they could (collectively) use Xica’s body to exploit the contractor (see figure 1.5). Diegues’s film allows the spectator to slowly realize Xica’s sexual powers one unsuspecting man at a time. She is the only one in the film 50 Chapter One

1.5. Film still from Xica da Silva, 1976.

who seems to have total control of both her sexuality and the sexual pleasures of the multiple men she comes into contact with. When the film opens, the viewer is invited to see Xica and José as playful lovers, monogamous and troubled by their problematic coupling. After a few shots, the viewer’s comfort in this fantasy is disrupted by the screams of the governor, and later the advances of Theodoro. It is only Xica, then—slave to both the governor and his son—who is seen as the victor of this historical fable. The following day, as the governor and the intendant meet with the new contractor and go over the details of Villa Rica’s diamond-­mining capacities, they are interrupted by an agitated Xica, who storms past the guards and other white members of the village to take her place in the center of João Fernandes’s office and headquarters. Xica alters whatever compromise she and the governor came up with the night before in this moment. He clearly has no idea what she is going to do. “Lord and Master,” she says, addressing the man who owns her, “excuse my bursting in like this.” Xica then turns to the contractor and curtsies slightly, turning her attention back to the startled and befuddled governor. “But I had to come immediately to tell you something.” Xica continues: “I hope I am not intruding. But your son José runs after me day and night. . . . Just beBlack Rapture 51

cause I lay down with him and did what you love so . . . now he says he can’t live without my favors anymore. . . . he sounds like my lord and master when he . . . when he says that life is worthless without those things only Xica knows how to do.”104 Everyone in the room is enveloped in Xica’s fantastic story of fear and abuse, told comically, of course. When it is clear that Xica has João Fernandes’s attention, she turns to face him, no longer concerned about telling her tale directly to the governor. She places her hands on her hips and smiles. She slowly walks toward her next intended victim and weaves a story of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the governor’s son, José, abuse so awful, she has to bare her naked flesh to expose it. “Day before yesterday over here,” she says, ripping off the side of her blouse and exposing her right breast. “Another day here,” she claims, as she rips the left side of her blouse, exposing her left breast. “He beats me, he kicks me. My whole body burns, my lord.”105 This is the moment of spectacular exposure (narrative, corporeal), and as she does throughout the film, Xica gets the biggest part of the spectacle for herself. Using sexual impropriety against a Catholic white male patriarchal order, Xica marks this order as proper and improper, organic and oddly incestuous. With the contractor’s eyes fixed on her, Xica strips and articulates the violence being done to her enslaved body and pleads with her owner (though her eyes and body face only the contractor) to be released from the exquisite pain of her present arrangement. With her last declaration of violent “burning,” Xica drops the final piece of the fabric covering her, presenting her nude body to the contractor and Theodoro, as well as the colonial citizens who are present in the room. For a few seconds no one moves in the frame, and the camera pans out in a 360-­degree circle to her triumphant and sly smiling face as her mouth moves ever so slightly into her infamous grin. The held shot of Xica’s body, like the one that visually introduces her in the film, locks on her backside and buttocks—­ overemphasizing her sexuality and savagery. Cabeça, the slave, is in the left corner of this shot, looking on at Xica, astonished and slightly ashamed. The camera continues to pan the horrified faces of the Portuguese contingent of Tejuco, settling on Dona Hortensia’s pale, shocked, and disturbed yet entranced face.106 The song “Xica da Silva” begins playing as the crowd in the room remains fixed on Xica’s nude body.

52 Chapter One

Dona Hortensia screams, and the spell of frozen silence is finally broken. Everyone begins to react, as Dona Hortensia nearly faints and must be hurried out of the room. Theodoro calls for the guards to enter, and Cabeça and José’s father push everyone outside the contractor’s office and close the door. Out in the hallway, Xica’s performance has set off something sexual and inexpressible in Dona Hortensia. She writhes in a sort of orgasmic exhaustion and requires water with sugar, then swiftly shifts to thoughts of violence, demanding that Xica be punished for her actions. The shot quickly shifts to Theodoro inside João Fernandes’s office as he demands exactly the same, a visual conjoining of sexuality and violence. The contrast and juxtaposition of the white, Portuguese representatives of sexual repression—the same repression that threatens to explode at any moment—is effectively portrayed in this scene. “200 strokes with the whip, at least 200,” the intendant tells Oliveira. “I myself insist to be the first to . . . whip her.”107 Theodoro’s basest desires, to violently strike Xica and treat her body in the same manner slavery’s enforcement allows, rise in this scene as he becomes agitated with the drive to inflict pain. João Fernandes is intrigued but calm. “I could use this slave of yours,” he tells the governor, and his meaning is not lost on either the sergeant or the intendant. “Name your price.” The governor resists, saying that he would rather not sell Xica and offers the contractor “an excellent negress who’s for sale.” The two men understand each other and the coded language of slave ownership. The governor is claiming possession of Xica’s body. It is his to “use,” and he does not care to share or lose this privilege. The sergeant major tells Joao that this “excellent negress” is “exactly what your Excellency must have,” reinforcing the unstated sexual access a slave woman affords him. It is a promise, that the “excellent negress” will be as agreeable and sexually aggressive as Xica has been thus far. The next scene featuring Xica and João Fernandes is an exterior shot of Oliveira’s bedroom. Only the sounds of Xica and the contractor can be heard in the night air. “What’s this Xica?” “Just a little something I can do.” “No, Xica, not that.” “What about it?”108 Black Rapture 53

The camera slowly zooms toward the lone light on in the house—and it is in the bedroom. “No, Xica,” Oliveira pleads, a request he makes over and over while Xica disregards him. The screen fades to black as the contractor’s screams reach their highest pitch, then trail off in exhaustion. It is Xica’s ability to subdue any man she chooses that makes her the desired slave mistress for seemingly all the men in Tejuco. The film begins and ends with Xica’s bodily screams of burning and desire, set against the relative ineffectiveness of white masculinity, patriarchy, and power. It becomes impossible for the viewer to attribute a victim status to Xica, and this inability is the way in which the film functions as the one-­sided memory of a forgetful past. Brazil’s legacy of slavery is replete with the sexual silences of a nation’s historical construction. Carl Degler notes that in the state of Minas Gerais, where Diamantina is located, “the lack of women was felt so keenly that the government in 1732 prohibited white women from leaving Brazil for Portugal.”109 Willing to force white women to remain in Brazil whether they wanted to or not, while simultaneously exploiting the physical and sexual labors of black women slaves, Portuguese authority figures, slave masters, and arbitrary white men found ways to force themselves, again, literally and figuratively on the bodies of black women (and white women) and make a world out of their own desires. Later, artistic endeavors found a way to inextricably link black women’s sexual prowess to the failed resistance white men attempted and connect the divide between exploitation and volition.

Resisting the Image: Contemporary Visual Artists and the Memory of Slavery Bound, threaded, and pieced together like the embattled history it represents, artist Faith Ringgold’s Slave Rape Series of thangka prints also makes deliberate and visible the divide between exploitation and volition. In the series, unclothed slave women bearing axes are shown in a green field, sometimes running, sometimes standing still. The expressions on their faces are deceptively humorous, with their mouths agape in shock and eyes bulging in surprise. The Slave Rape Series attempts to ease and unsettle, soothe and sicken, illustrating the schizophrenic relationship to history that slave women’s bodies occupy. Ringgold’s series, subversive 54 Chapter One

and ironic, turns the tables on the regularly told story concerning slave women’s vulnerable bodies and the system that denied the very exploitation they experienced (plates 2 and 3). In plate 2, two slave women flail clumsily as they chase after the white overseer/master/slave catcher figure who has control over their laboring, sexual, and reproductive capacities. Characterized by a fragmentation of the body, the white male tormentor is faceless and nameless, as are his victims, and he scurries to escape their wrath for once, run off by the weapons the women wield. Their safety, though, is fleeting, since the piece speaks to the perpetual accessibility and lack of bodily protection common among black women during slavery. In order to highlight both the static nature of black women’s unprotection and its historical origin in the New World, Ringgold layered the Asian-­inspired thangka print with embroidered fabric, giving it the appearance of a historical sealant, diagonally crossed and pointing down toward and away from the center of the image. An acrylic painting set to the fabric exterior/border for which Ringgold would become famous, The Slave Rape Series attempts to be in dialogue with the hypersilence surrounding black women’s bodies and sexual histories. Plate 3, Fight to Save Your Life, features the artist/survivor as the lone figure of this experience, and its survival holds in her hand the tool of freedom from the onslaught of violence, her weapon against assault. Though visibly pregnant, the residual effects of her physical status clearly articulated, she stands partially victorious, slightly more relaxed and without the bodily movement associated with an attempted escape. By positioning the image as a self-­portrait, Ringgold makes circular the “temporal lag” between slavery and postmodernity. Lisa Farrington notes that the figure’s “solitary stance,” one hand gently holding her abdomen, allows the figure “to become more than merely an objectified nude, or a hapless victim.”110 It also allows a space for a visual legacy of slave testimony to signal regeneration to future generations of slave women’s progeny with the promise held within her body. The framing of fabric and image around a like image of the author implicates while it liberates and complicates a story of captivity and survival.

Black Rapture 55

The Corporeal Space The rupturing of linearity with regard to slave women’s bodies and the contemporary insistence on reinterpreting the historical offenses against the flesh all signal a circular recognition of the wounds the body may carry. Registering these wounds for the collective as a way to move through the corporeal site of memory might be the only way to, in the words of Lucille Clifton, “sail from this to that.”111 The legacies of sexual supremacy and memory, historical amnesia and erasure, cultural avoidance and hyperpresence, have all contributed to Afro-­diasporic women’s contested relationship to a visuality of representation. Slavery’s sexual legacy, the myth of sexual supremacy and availability, is inscribed on black women’s present bodies and reads like a familiar text long in existence. Slave women’s bodies illustrate the contemporary denial that nations are so adamantly in need of protecting and the conversation, long overdue, we do not want to have with ourselves. For contemporary artists this conversation must make visual the extent of corporeal vulnerability and illustrate the unprotected stance of black women’s transnational bodies in a postmodern paradigm.

56 Chapter One

2

Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal

What was the thing, I wonder, the one and final thing she had not been able to endure or repeat? —Toni Morrison, Jazz

The Slave Body Maternal Milk. The protagonist in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved has it stolen from her in an exchange that layers violence with maternity. It is her breast milk that is stolen, the sustenance for her toddler (“crawling already”) as well as the baby for whom she is days away from giving birth. And so the milk in its externalized form has a double duty—it is to feed and nurture the older sibling and, imminently, the younger. This process is interrupted by the nephews of the master of Sweet Home, the plantation from where Sethe later flees. “I had milk,” Sethe tells Paul D moments after they are reunited. “I was pregnant with Denver but I had milk for my baby girl. I hadn’t stopped nursing her when I sent her on ahead with Howard and Buglar.”1 Paul D understands Sethe’s heightened sense of anxiety in the past and in the present retelling of the event. “Men don’t know much,” he tells her, “but they do know a suckling can’t be away from its mother for long.”2 This untethering of mother and child is structured as a frantic quest; a mother’s need to get to her child quickly and with her milk intact. Sethe continues:

All I knew was I had to get my milk to my baby girl. Nobody was going to nurse her like me. Nobody was going to get it to her fast enough, or take it away when she had enough and didn’t know it. Nobody knew that she couldn’t pass her air if you held her up on your shoulder, only if she was lying on my knees. Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me. I told that to the women in the wagon. Told them to put sugar water in cloth to suck from so when I got there in a few days she wouldn’t have forgotten me. The milk would be there and I would be there with it.3 The milk, though, is taken before any reconciliation of mother and child can occur. Sethe’s violations are legion here. They merge the disparate fragments that make up her life until that point at Sweet Home. Her attributes parsed out and demarcated (human, animal) by Schoolteacher and his wretched accounting book, his nephews (“sons or nephews,” Sethe is not sure) are being instructed in the art of plantation compartmentalizing; they study under Schoolteacher’s lesson plan and over Sethe’s body, all and everything falling within the purview of their privilege and their possessions.4 Sethe draws many lines in the novel, multiple points of no return. Milk is one of the more visceral and immediate, but Sethe also intends that her children never exist within the pages of Schoolteacher’s notebook, that they are never divided in that way.5 (“No, no,” Sethe overhears Schoolteacher telling his nephew pupils. “That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right.”)6 In the binary logic of Schoolteacher’s book is the double conundrum of slavery’s subjection. “Contrary to pronouncements that sentiment would abate brutality,” writes Saidiya Hartman, “feelings intensified the violence of law and posed dire consequences for the calculation of black humanity, for the dual existence of the slave as object of property and person required that the feelings endowed to the enslaved be greatly circumscribed.”7 Thinking through this binary logic as a double exposure of slave availability and exploitation (property, person, slave, woman), we can see the totality of Sethe’s layered maternal concerns. Cognizant of the relationship between violence, sexuality, and maternity within the institution of slavery, contemporary writers and artists use the sight of the fragmented slave woman’s body to underscore 58 Chapter Two

the vulnerabilities faced with little reprieve. The fragment, as a point of detachment and disintegration, highlights those particularities familiar to the black Atlantic subject, whose scattered corporeality knows little physical or emotional sanctuary.8 This chapter engages the parsing out of collective will through the double exposure of slave motherhood (both person and property) and the concomitant discourse of the separate portions of maternal disintegration located therein. Maternal vulnerabilities orchestrate the manner in which sexual subjugation extends through black women’s bodies, creating an inextricable link between typologies of sexual violence and external force: disparate parts constructed out of a fragmented corporeality, the backbone of transatlantic slavery layered with bifocal enforcement. Fragments, parts, and divisions dominate Morrison’s novel, relegating slave motherhood to the most unmerciful state of being—the edge of the edge of human existence. Sethe’s memories of her mother are a series of partial or pseudo interactions; the sight of somebody’s back as she moves toward the fields, and somebody else’s breast milk providing nourishment. When the newly arrived Beloved asks Sethe if her “woman” ever did her hair for her, Sethe is initially confused. “My woman? You mean my mother? If she did I don’t remember.”9 What she does remember manufactures itself in the cadence of absence and loss: I didn’t see her but a few times out in the fields and once when she was working indigo. By the time I woke up in the morning, she was in line. If the moon was bright they worked by its light. Sunday she slept like a stick. She must of nursed me two or three weeks—that’s the way the others did. Then she went back in rice and I sucked from another woman whose job it was. So to answer you, no. I reckon not. She never fixed my hair or nothing. She didn’t even sleep in the same cabin most nights I remember. Too far from the line-­up, I guess.10 The balancing act of removal and possession that elongates both the violence and the reach of slavery’s imprint cements itself in motherhood, where the sum of all parts ironically mimics the whole. This is the place where slave milk feeds white offspring, solidifying both distance and loss, intimacy and violence. Beloved highlights every aspect of this cycle— from the violence of proximity to the intensity of affection. For child-­ Sethe, of all of the slave women at the place she was before Sweet Home, Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 59

“Nan was the one she knew best, who was around all day, who nursed babies, cooked, had one good arm, and half of another.”11 The “one good arm, and half of another” illustrates the not-­wholeness that ferments the system of slavery and renders its profundity in a multitude of bits and pieces. Fragmentations frame the meaning of black motherhood within and beyond slavery (somebody’s back, and somebody else’s milk). Linda Nochlin sees the fragment as a mainstay of Western art in the nineteenth century, asking, “What of that sense of social, psychological, even metaphysical fragmentation that so seems to mark modern experience—a loss of wholeness, a shattering of connection, a destruction or disintegration of permanent value . . . identified with modernity itself ?”12 And what of the particular subjectivity (in this case black female enslavement) that embodies every mediated and unmediated space of corporeal rupture? In the previous chapter I argued that the power dynamic in existence during slavery highlighted the sexual vulnerabilities slave women’s bodies exemplified and opened up a venue for double violation, literal and figurative. Out of this violation we now encounter the other phase of this corporeal spectrum: black motherhood within and beyond slavery. Hortense Spillers asserts that in the context of slavery and maternity “the captive female body locates precisely a moment of converging political and social vectors that mark the flesh as a prime commodity of exchange.”13 The contemporary black Atlantic attempt to reclaim the “flesh” through the same maternal body already burdened with slavery’s legacy is the metaphoric slice, the cut that hopes to merge intention with desire. It is this desire that will anchor the focus of this chapter.14 The impetus in Beloved is so strong to reclaim flesh that multiple characters in the novel fall under this elusive spell. Most vibrantly represented through the ghost-­made-­flesh, Beloved, the entire narrative reinforces the visuality of retrieval in the aftermath of the event of slavery. If we read each character in the novel as a fragment of the visual, just one part of the whole that is the experience of the enslaved at the tail end of slavery’s progress, the ghost-­made-­flesh that is Beloved draws out those fragments (tenderly, violently) and pulls them together magnetically so that a quest for wholeness can finally begin. “Beloved’s appearance,” according to Avery Gordon, “the breathing presence of this beautiful ghost whose sparse talk is like a series of picture books, bears out this theory of memory as haunting.”15 “Beloved,” Sethe states in the affirmative in 60 Chapter Two

her isolated monologue near the end of the novel, “she my daughter. She mine. See.” She continues: Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else—and the one time I did it was took from me—they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby. Nan had to nurse whitebabies and me too because Ma’am was in the rice. The little whitebabies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left. I’ll tell Beloved about that; she’ll understand. She my daughter. The one I managed to have milk for and to get it to her even after they stole it; after they handled me like I was the cow . . .16 Possession here is parsed out through the imagery of lost milk—milk intended for the daughter that she later kills. Her guilt takes the form of that reconciliation: “Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children” (my emphasis). Of the myriad compartments that make up the slave maternal, Sethe fixates on what was lost from her past (her mother’s inability to be present in her life and to nurture her with her own milk) and her present (the containing register of her own way of nurturing her young). “One other thing that becomes clear,” Fred Moten writes, “is that black mirror stages and/or primal scenes operate on different registers, at the level of what might be called an extended infantilism despite the fact that there are no children here.”17 Marking motherhood as the “what was left” when whites took what they felt belonged to them (the literal manifestation of “no children here”), Sethe’s illustrated hypermothering after Beloved returns is understandable. Seeking to take all of the disparate parts of slavery and motherhood and finally make them whole, Sethe sutures the living and the dead through sheer force of will. In the double entendre that is double exposure and the haunted reserves of the corporeal that dominate slavery’s remains, the slave maternal holds sway. It is at once the central feature of citizenship (the ability to make more citizens) and the central feature of slavery, the antithesis of citizenship (the ability to carve slaves out of slaves). When Baby Suggs wonders about her moved and missing children, she understands the futility in it. “Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with her own—fingers she never saw become the male Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 61

or female hands a mother would recognize anywhere.”18 Detached from this recognition and with only Sethe as a surrogate daughter, Baby Suggs attempts to impart some maternal influence—that is, before the twenty-­ ninth day, when Schoolteacher and his nephews track her daughter-­in-­ law down, planning to take them all back to Kentucky enslaved. In the melee that unfolds there, in the blood-­soaked shed where the killing takes place, Sethe does not heed Baby Suggs’s request that she “clean up” before breastfeeding Denver. “So Denver took her mother’s milk right along with the blood of her sister,” merging violence with slave maternity, blood with the sustaining force of mother’s milk.19 Milk unsettles the force of maternal connection by its mere dispersal, which has the capacity to move in many different directions (to a woman’s own children, or a myriad of others). It covers the discourse of slavery and motherhood with an unmistakable viscidity and uncovers the Western preoccupation with other peoples’ breasts.20 In Beloved it takes the form of theft. To think of milk as yet another resource pilfered using women’s bodies against them (as long as there is someone feeding, the lactating body will continue to produce milk), Beloved bastardizes and corrupts the concept of mother’s milk, making the imbibing of it the violent extraction of fluid against will. Sethe experiences motherhood in pieces, from her own unnamed mother to Baby Suggs and Nan, and on to her own children whom she is only allowed to love and protect from the margins. In Wayward Reproductions, Alys Weinbaum considers the confluence of race and nation in the structure of law and citizenship where “theories of nationalism . . . are characterized by two conceptual blind spots: the relationship of race to nation and that of racial nationalism to sexism.”21 In order to probe the interstices of racism, nationalism, and sexism, the intersection of labor, law, slavery, and pseudocitizenship, Beloved offers the reader characters who have to live their whole lives in the in-­between spaces of slavery’s purgatory, where humanity is parsed and citizenship remains elusive, even after slavery ends. For Baby Suggs, “what she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.”22 These pieces and pawns are not easily regathered, even when the game is over. Baby Suggs attempts to find her disparate and dispersed children when she is free, but to no avail. “After two years of messages 62 Chapter Two

written by the preacher’s hand, two years of washing, sewing, canning, cobbling, gardening, and sitting in churches, all she found out was that the Whitlow place was gone and that you couldn’t write to ‘a man named Dunn’ if all you knew was that he went West.”23 Baby Suggs, filled with the memories of the multiple removals of her progeny, instead focuses on her preaching and the coming of her grandchildren through her one “somebody” son, Halle, and his wife, Sethe, newly pregnant.24 Using milk as the representative manifestation of fluid against will, Morrison emphasizes this important bodily production within the context of force or violation (“and they took my milk”), as well as power (“nobody had my milk but me”). When Amy Denver, the white woman who helps Sethe give birth to her last child, invokes the possibility of procreation for herself, she uses maternal lactation as a right of refusal. “I been bleeding for four years but I ain’t having nobody’s baby. Won’t catch me sweating milk” Amy declares to Sethe, because she is on her way to Boston in search of velvet.25 Milk, in Amy’s estimation, is a slowing-­ down elixir, one that makes movement less possible. Though she is poor, Amy Denver’s whiteness allows her a wider space in which to move (not completely fluid, but not completely fixed, either). While Sethe fears not being able to reach her daughter with the milk her body has produced for her (fluid within will), she is also cognizant of what she has lost with the theft of her milk: that it is body-­creating and body-­replenishing, that it needs very little external coercion to come into being, and these are the elements of negotiation that Morrison privileges in her novel. Laura Wexler sees the interplay of race and class in the fluid exemptions shared by white men and many white women. She writes, “Spectatorial privilege—that is, permission to discriminate on the basis of visible signs—was established for white women in this country during slavery, in alliance with the white male gaze.”26 Within the horrendous proximity necessary to facilitate the nursemaid’s responsibilities, within the photographic register of absented black offspring, cultural productions engage slave motherhood for its highly visual oxymoronic balance of tragedy and force. In Morrison’s novel all the senses come to bear down on black women and the hypervisibility of the narrow nature of their choices. About the event of milk theft, Sethe tells Paul D, “Anybody could smell me long before he saw me. And when he saw me he’d see the drops of it on the front Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 63

of my dress. Nothing I could do about that.”27 Making masculine (and adult) the predatory act of stalking, sniffing, and stealing milk, Morrison adds this act of literal and symbolic violence to the long list of assaults against black women’s flesh. Later, accepting her dead daughter-­made-­ flesh is a choice, one that Sethe feels free, in the decades after she murders the unnamed child, to make so as to make amends. “If memory is materialized in Beloved’s reappearance,” writes Mae G. Henderson, “it is materialized in Sethe’s (re)configuration.”28 This doubling creation, flesh and word, siphoned through Sethe’s insistent return of the fragment to the whole, is her desperate attempt to mutilate the destructive system that took everything away from her. Beloved structures memory as a living quilt of creation, stitched and restitched from the cloth of individual and collective trauma. “Of that place where she was born,” Sethe recalls, “she remembered only song and dance. Not even her own mother, who was pointed out to her . . . pointed out as the one among many backs turned away from her, stooping in a watery field.”29 Sethe has a similar visual memory of her two oldest children, Howard and Buglar, who run away together after their mother tries to kill them. Not immediately, but run away they do. “Now all I see is their backs,” she declares, “walking down the railroad tracks. Away from me. Always away from me.”30 Beloved’s return, her fractured and fragmented narration, her still and stilted corporeality is the in-­between that Sethe can use to fuel her desire to re-­create (pulling the back that is turned away from her closer still). Everything about the dead daughter-­made-­ whole again brings that particular back (of her own mother and her own children) out of the anonymity of the unknown.

The Fragment as Body: Gayl Jones’s Song for Anninho Extending and further violating the imagery of stolen milk, the protagonist in Gayl Jones’s narrative poem Song for Anninho spends the duration of the text searching for her lover, Anninho, and tending to the literal fragment that is her body. Butchered and reassembled minus her two breasts, Almeyda is a walking breakage, a visual remnant of her corporeal and reproductive violations. Anninho’s discovery will bring her back not just to herself, she believes, but to a place of wholeness—one she

64 Chapter Two

does not believe she can reach without him. Her guide on this journey, Zibatra, a spirit healer who “can hear beyond ears,” has found the badly damaged Almeyda unconscious by the river, a casualty of war.31 Along with Anninho, Almeyda is a resident of Brazil’s Palmares, the largest of the country’s seventeenth-­century quilombos, or slave enclaves. After Palmares is attacked and the residents scatter or are killed or reenslaved, Almeyda’s breasts are sliced off by one of the Portuguese soldiers. This butchering extends the land-­and-­body castration carried out by the Portuguese in the name of empire, and the residents of Palmares are the only thing standing between the empire and total land domination. Almeyda’s physical state of fragmented womanhood is exacerbated by her mutilated memories; the poem is her attempt to complete the circle of her life in Palmares, with its promise of freedom and growth. When she awakens from her deep slumber, Almeyda tries to move back through her memories, but she does not get far. “Portuguese soldiers,” she tells Zibatra: Caught us at the river. My memory does not go beyond that. Did you not see Anninho when you found me?” “No. Only the globes of your breasts floating in the river. I wrapped them decently and hid them. The mud on the riverbank had stopped the bleeding. I put you in a blanket and brought you here.32 Almeyda’s injuries become an allegory of her humanity as a former slave, as a woman, Anninho’s possession, and, most immediately for her, a maternal entity—sliced and left to put herself back together without her breasts. Because there is no ghost-­made-­flesh in the poem, it is Almeyda (and Anninho) who functions as this symbolic figure—the subject of her own ruptured narrative drawing others into her impossible story. For Zibatra, a woman who knows “the places where the visible and the invisible meet,” the damaged woman has more immediate concerns. “You’ll gather together again,” she tells her visitor, “a New Palmares . . . / but you’ll have

Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 65

to do the/climbing yourself. I can’t take you there.” This rebirth of the old homestead, the “New Palmares,” is a production Zibatra wants no part of in a literal sense, since it would affect her ability to make use of her powers. “I was there when names were given and taken away,” Zibatra tells Almeyda, signifying her presence during both birth and death rites as well as her temporal movement. She is a nurturer and an adviser, but she understands Almeyda’s quest as a solitary one. And she allows her injured charge to use her abilities to move through time, reaching back to make sense of the memory of Anninho in order to make her body whole again. Sliding in and out of her own memories, Almeyda speaks to Anninho in reproductive terms: I wanted my womb to grow deep for you, Anninho, even in a time like this one, in spite of the time, I wanted my womb to grow deeper than the earth. I wanted my womb to grow deeper than the earth. But my womb was angry. Maybe time made my womb. Maybe the times. I opened my legs and you touched me, not saying anything. I felt the heaviness of bread soaked in water.33 Volition here functions as a process of becoming that involves regeneration, something that cannot happen to her physical body. “The question of natality and of a catastrophic break that could not but be disruptive and augmentative” is, according to Fred Moten, a disarticulation of the other that bifurcates identity.34 If Almeyda is representative of Palmares, its future tied to her body like a symbolic representative force, then only she can rebuild, working from the inside out. As her body slowly heals and she is forced to repeatedly acknowledge the violence inflicted on her, and its reproductive dissonance, Almeyda moves through time and beyond her body to the place where she can share with Anninho the impossibilities of half-­motherhood, the kind she would experience in Palmares. This is symbolized by the many repetitive conversations the ailing/ healing Almeyda has with Anninho, whom she sees intermittently as her body recovers. 66 Chapter Two

You are the man that came between The wind and me, Anninho. I had nothing to fear. Where are my breasts? Where is my necklace of shells and seeds? That soldier, Anninho, He tore my necklace of shells and seeds Away and then tore my breasts away. I am confused about that time, And now I seek you again, And you are somewhere seeking me.35 The losses are multiple and great for Almeyda, for she returns to similar questions concerning her severed breasts and her missing necklace of seeds and shells (“Where are my breasts, Anninho? What will become of us? He tore my necklace of seeds.” [my italics]). The seeds are pomegranate and are visually reminiscent of a breast when they are ripe and of an ovary when they are open, merging materiality with corporeality. The trumpet shell resembles the Ghanaian (and Jamaican Maroon) war horn—the abeng. Almeyda’s missing necklace, combining these two items, shows her inability to reconcile motherhood with a lifetime under siege. That the decision to abandon motherhood seems to have been made for her (she associates her removed breasts as a sign that she will never have children), Almeyda fixates on a woman she heard about, a woman under siege who forged a different path for herself: a woman who mutilated herself, so she wouldn’t have to have any man at all. She had done it, because she didn’t want any man at all, not the black ones or the white ones. There was something she did to herself so that No man would go near her.36 The “mutilated woman,” in Almeyda’s estimation, may have gone too far. “Because,” as Almeyda tells it, “she had done it without remorse / and carelessly. Because she had done that thing / so that she could cause no beginnings, / so that she could be the source of no beginnings.”37 “Beginnings” being represented as new life, this woman’s self-­inflicted woundFragmented Figurations of the Maternal 67

ing is seen as self-­destroying devoid of agency. It is only later in the narrative, when she is considering her own plight, that Almeyda affords the mutilated woman an opportunity to participate in the emotional connection that she shares with Anninho, though it can produce no offspring— no generational legacies. “She has done that horror to herself,” she tells Anninho. “The horror so that no man would take her, before / she knew there was a future. / So stand close to her if you wish. / Kiss her. The long kiss that heals, / or that persuades healing.”38 The often-­discussed divide between a life of slavery that reproduces itself (slaves carved out of slaves) and one that refuses (“so that she could cause no beginnings”) is negotiated through two mutilated (and compartmentalized) bodies in the poem—Almeyda’s breasts and the mutilated woman’s vagina (we are to assume). In the double exposure of land and body that Almeyda represents, so much is located here that enters the realm of the cyclical—from the hemispheric shapes of her breasts to her circular movements through Palmares as she searches for her lover. Corporeal transfer happens when Almeyda seems to join her violently fragmented flesh with that of a resistant woman self-­fragmented from below. In her offering of the mutilated woman to Anninho for “healing,” Almeyda is actually moving disparate parts together in the puzzle that is her memory. What is known and unknown of her history, of her body, and of Palmares becomes linked with the mystery of Anninho’s displacement and, most likely, his demise. Because there is no sanctuary in the chosen place of refuge, there can be no future there, no beginnings to cause. Almeyda’s body signifies this most fully, since hers is a body literally in pieces; her breasts have been hidden in the place where she must make her healing manifest itself. And being refused a self-­possessive self-­mutilation, she clings in memory to the woman she knew who makes that violent decision for herself. Haunting Song for Anninho is the fear of sexual violence that leads to an untenable maternity, a theme that Jones explores more fully in Corregidora. In the poem, however, multiple references are made to the lack of black possession that places the idea of tenderness at too far a distance. This tenderness comes across as a furious protectiveness in Beloved, at once extremely violent and horrifyingly endearing, a clashing of the “too thick” love Paul D accuses Sethe of possessing.39 Of Anninho, Almeyda is concerned that if she does not find him, he will continue turning into 68 Chapter Two

“rock,” becoming a stonier, less malleable version of himself. “I want him to grow into me now, / if he must grow into anything in this world. / I want us to be one whole flesh and spirit.”40 “One whole flesh” would manifest itself as their symbolic progeny, entities that would “grow into” Almeyda, being made from the promise of both of their lives. This quest shapes the purpose of the poem as well as its protagonist, and because Anninho cannot be the one to save her from past or further torment, Almeyda must make the space in her memory to save herself and rebuild the pieces she has been left with. As Trudier Harris argues, Almeyda’s “love for Anninho, and the love and health of her people which is symbolized by her cut-­off breasts, provided the dramatic development for the possibility of reunion with Anninho as well as the healing/re-­birth of the African settlement of Palmares.”41 The locus of this healing is Almeyda’s body—wounded, divided, and longing to move from fragment to whole.

Sea Shapes of Trauma and Tranquility: María Magdalena Campos-­Pons’s When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla Milk. The Afro-­Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-­Pons has it dripping out of her in the image When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla (1996), also mentioned in the introduction. Making literal the maternal implications of the Middle Passage journey on her black diasporic body, Campos-­Pons’s photographic self-­portrait captures maternal ambiguity and translates its symbolic power through the lens of loss (see plate 1). In the fragment of the figuration the sea overwhelms the framework of the corporeal, situating the body as a vessel holding a vessel representing the sea as vessel. As a force of movement and dispossession, as a source of regeneration and reclamation, the sea marks itself against all bodies, all forms of motion. The standing figure, a re-­creation of the Yoruba orisha Yemayá, is shown cradling a carved wooden boat like an infant in her two hands. Around her neck hang two bottles, half filled with milk and held together by a rubber cord. The breasts of the bottles are covering her own nipples and replacing her corporeal source of lactation with its constructed counterpart. Both bottle nipples release droplets of milk into the infant/boat below them and replenish the source of migration and forced removal embodied by the figure in blue. In Pedagogies of Crossing, M. Jacqui Alexander explores the totality of borders—social and cultural, corpoFragmented Figurations of the Maternal 69

real, material, and ethereal—that mark the transatlantic with such violated meaning. “Not only humans made the Crossing,” she writes, “grief traveled as well.”42 With its telling title and multiple layers of the in-­ between that the figure represents, Campos-­Pons makes visual the trajectory that Antonio Benítez-­Rojo explores in The Repeating Island, except that this “painfully delivered child of the Caribbean” meditates on the before, during, and after of that birth.43 While When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla centralizes the nurturing efficacy of Yemayá as a traveling deity of the transatlantic slave trade, the image also conjures up the notion of a constantly migrating maternity, always filled with loss and longing, and ever producing milk. As an Afro-­Cuban artist interested in the legacy of slavery and removal in the Spanish-­speaking Caribbean, Campos-­Pons embodies the fragment and relocates the imagery of the maternal to the center of the black woman’s experience. Both the boat and the figure are vessels in the black imaginary, instruments of movement and meaning contingent upon memory to signify something of their own. “Being everywhere was the only way,” Alexander attests, “to evade capture and to ensure the permanence of change—one of the Truths of the Ocean.”44 Seas, sights, sounds, and horrors repeat on the ocean and on the sea. Bodies repeat. People survive. The fragment in this instance serves as an organizational guidepost, delineating the marker of maternal angst and impossibility. The cut, or slice, through the narrative is in the interest of expressing that which the narrowness of liminal slave existence offers, forging what Hortense Spillers calls an existence “literally suspended in the ‘oceanic’” and therefore moving across the Atlantic, “but they were also nowhere at all.”45 In the rich texture of the sea-­blue background, the faceless figure is able to blend effortlessly with her surroundings and incorporate them into a stance of liquid maternity associated with the Santeria deity Yemayá. The waves on her body invite a sort of sway within the frame and emphasize the movement the body is dependent upon. With this particular movement the evoking presence of the maternal is reinforced, and the possibility of the figure’s own rereading of her embattled position lingers. It is this lingering that will ultimately provide the disruption necessary for a woven narrative to become meaningful for both the collective “black family” and the individual women who bear the brunt of 70 Chapter Two

the needs of this collective, in the revolving transnational imaginary. The female figure in the image holds the wooden boat as her own creation, her progeny, releasing the markings of creation from her body and outward in an attempt to reclaim them at a later and more fortified historical moment. In the realm of the visual the matter of the body centralizes the gendered concerns regulating slavery and society, bringing corporeality (fragmented, parsed) into view. For both Campos-­Pons’s image and Lorna Simpson’s photograph Self-­ Possession, to be examined later in this chapter, the question of corporeal access is as central as the figure in the frame. In the same manner that women’s bodies are always rendered as the available template through which to generate nations, they are assumed to be always willing to play the part. When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla complicates the notion of volition and intent by splicing the sentiment into two distinct (and abstract) locales. This is the enormity of the reach of empire and enslavement, and the multiple subjectivities caught in its undertow. The word “milk” has countless possibilities, rhetorical and visual. It combines the verb that signals extraction (to milk) as well as exploitation (milking) with the recognizable white liquid used to provide nutrients to newly born offspring (mother’s milk). It connotes thickness or coating (milk-­white atmosphere) with the haunting anxiety of theft (“took my milk”). Campos-­Pons invokes all the qualities of this reproductive property, using both her lactating body and the mechanized reproduction of her artistic form to highlight the self-­replicating and self-­fragmenting possibilities located in the diasporic body. Her rendering of the layered inculcations of this one fluid encompasses the interior and exterior demarcations that slavery has made visual.

Parsing the Black Body In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the “Free Womb” law of 1871 conceptualized just how problematic the legal negotiation of the slave mother was for slave owners and state officials, insisting on compartmentalizing the female body. According to Martha Abreu, the hotly contested debate about the impending bill ensuring the freedom of a slave woman’s offspring was closely connected to white men’s rights as multidimensional oppressors. The law “jeopardized an even more effective means of control over slaves Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 71

. . . the control over their families and future children, who, once the law was ratified, would be born free (ingênuos) forever after.”46 The decision to “free the womb” instead of the slave was a negotiation that hinted toward the deep space between the slave body and the state’s inability to successfully address the necessary parsing out of freedom through that body. The interconnectedness of sexual exploitation and economic gain, coupled with the surge of power engendered by the wholesale ownership of another, was too enticing for slave masters to relinquish. As Jennifer L. Morgan argues, “The relationship between production and reproduction was fraught with violence and the threat of familial disruption” for slave mothers, maintaining, “Colonial slave codes were universally concerned with regulating the movements of the enslaved.”47 These “movements,” corporeally rendered, would mean the relationship between sexual exploitation and reproduction could splinter, altering a slave woman’s context within the system. Alongside the fear of a “free black womb” there were concerns about how the womb would materialize and affect the nation’s future. The intertwining of sexual access and labor, of production and reproduction, lingered in the transnational imaginary long after slavery’s demise. The racial and gendered construction of the mythology of black women’s maternal capacities is a vestige of the past revisited on the present and repeated, surviving efforts to dismantle it. Historically, black women’s reproductive bodies have held the utmost importance for the slave industry, and this has always functioned through the window of the partition. According to historian Barbara Bush, colonial planters in the English-­speaking Caribbean portrayed slave women’s amenorrhea as the work of elderly root women utilizing “abortifacient techniques” and aiding slave women in their quest to deny plantation owners further profits.48 Walter Johnson contends that in the United States, while the reproductive capabilities of slave women were of particular importance to potential owners, “the reduction of femininity into reproduction was ultimately embodied in the figure of the enslaved nurse and midwife—the woman who cared for and often suckled not just her mistress’s offspring but those of other slave women who had to return to the fields shortly after giving birth.”49 The repetition of these reproductive fissures is the splinter of the diasporic subject, whose natality is always in flux, and within whom mother loss is profound. Saidiya Hartman writes in Lose Your Mother, “Slavery made your mother into a myth, 72 Chapter Two

banished your father’s name, and exiled your siblings to the far corners of the earth.”50 The system also created another mother in the space of that myth: one who carried the burden of mythmaking to the outer edges of the global imaginary. The ultimate vision of the slave nursemaid and disarticulated motherhood is encapsulated in the figure of the mammy. As a symbolic image of service and surrogate mothering, the mammy embodies a host of fragmented contradictions. In her image there is assumed motherhood but no trace of sexuality; her white “children” never quite belong to her— they are extensions of her occupational position within the plantation household, and her biological children exist on the peripheral edges of maternal visibility (somebody’s back, somebody else’s breast milk). From daguerreotypes of slave nursemaids to exaggerated visual images of Rubenesque black mammies, it is the presence of absence that allows the enslaved nursemaid the ability to reproduce such an embattled persona. In Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America, Marcus Wood threads through the not-­so-­identical comparisons between the two countries. “Brazilian slavery,” he writes in the introduction to Black Milk, “had been fixated with the figure of the legendary Mãe Preta for centuries.”51 The cultural possession of the nursemaid’s body and reproductive capacities is inextricable from the guilt/blame paradigm slave nations have been unable to address nationally.52 When her reproductive needs are not being usurped for the collective needs of others, to whom does her body belong? This is the question contemporary artists like Betye Saar are asking in their reinvisioning of marginalized black motherhood. Served with irony and subtlety to an unsuspecting viewer, Saar’s mixed-­ media assemblage Lullaby is a framed “family” portrait set within the exterior frame of a wooden serving tray. The portrait situated in the middle of the tray completes a narrative only half told in slave era daguerreotypes and photographs. In Lullaby, a black mammy is surrounded by her young white charges as she looks somberly into the camera lens. Lines from the lullaby “All the Pretty Horses” (folklorically attributed to slave mothers) are written above the photograph, slowly encroaching on the domestic space invented by plantation rhetoric. The bottom left-­hand corner of the photograph contains a miniature image of a black child, appearing under the frame of the photo and representing previously invisible offspring to Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 73

its metaphoric biological mother. Above the child’s head there is another verse, one lamenting a child’s sorrow and mother loss. The dolls held by two of the three children further layer the slave woman in the image, quietly overtaken by whiteness. And yet her presence reinforces a spectacular regeneration for the white family she is absorbed by and from which she is racially distinguished. As an image of material consumption, a photograph of a nameless nursemaid with a white child sends multiple messages to multiple audiences. “Iconographically,” Laura Wexler argues, “this image also relates to a long symbolic tradition in Western art of portraying the Madonna and Child,” yet she also contends that for the black mother in the image, “working for someone else’s transcendence, she is not allowed to signify her own.”53 With motherhood existing somewhere between the obscurity of her white charges and the corner of the frame where the image of her own child takes up the smallest amount of space, Saar’s rendition of slave motherhood illuminates the silenced agony of slave mothers. According to Mara L. Dukats, because “the slave mother both is and is not a mother, this oppressive situation both opens up a space for self-­affirmation and reveals that this space is inaccessible to her.”54 Focusing instead on the weighty subjection slave mothers endured, Saar presents Lullaby as a difficult sight to swallow. What was a source of comfort, convenience, and racial possession and hegemony is now a contemporary reminder of the cruelties inflicted on slave women’s bodies and histories. The serving tray in Lullaby is vertical, not horizontal, pushing the viewer to alter ways of seeing that may be more familiar and desirable. The soothing lines of verse at the top of the work are contrasted with the loneliness and distance of the excluded child’s verse on the bottom, and even the small white dolls held by two of the three children surrounding the nursemaid are a source of familial and racial rejection. The “invisibility” of the nursemaid’s own offspring is as essential to this discourse as the lactating body of the black nurse. The result is a negation of the slave woman’s accessibility to her progeny, the “what was left” that Sethe refuses for her own children in Beloved. In the black diasporic creation of the othermother, or surrogate entity in black literature and visual culture, there is an attempt at the nursemaid reconfigured, the space in which historical absence becomes hyperpresent, and a maternal figure is often sacrificed (in the realm of service) for the collective com74 Chapter Two

fort of the group, only this time the group is black and not white. Within this re-­creation, necessary and unyielding in its black world interests, black women’s bodies are thrust into service once again—cutting off portions of the self to sit in service of the collective. Othermothers reemphasize Afro-­diasporic maternal processes through physical hyperpresence, reinforcing a matrilineal connection that does not always exist biologically, reinforcing a relationship routinely denied historically. Betye Saar’s mixed-­media assemblage Imitation of Life builds on the contested image of black motherhood and division (plate 4). Forming the interior of a keepsake box and surrounded by slave auction notices, a mammy figure stands atop a slice of watermelon and a half set of white teeth. Around her waist is a large clock, which signifies the longevity of her representation, as well as its possibility in the contemporary future. Placing the figure on top of the teeth serves as a gesture of consumption that regurgitates outward. Her left hand holds a spoon, and her right hand holds a grenade. The image on the left interior of the box is that of a black mother sitting with a black child in her lap. This image is faded and grainy, but the mother’s poverty is as clear as her facial expression is obscured. With the watermelon, the teeth, the clock, and the grenade, the material layering works to further contain the space. Even with the faded subterfuge of the black mother and child, the racial double duty of the mammy and her service to both the white collective and the black is Saar’s commentary on the legacy of slavery. The relative permanence of the mother and child image contrasts with that of the mammy set vertically inside the box and stacked on top of those items that have contributed to her stereotypical staying power. When the box is closed, the mammy figure is face-­to-­face with her other self—the mother who cares for her own child and has the visual reminder of her maternal duties to reflect upon. Both figures, eye level as their representations are, have the ability to achieve this kind of ocular transcendence. As an open keepsake box, the assemblage refuses to be hidden away and fills the viewer with both the problems and the possibilities of the contested image. In her study of the historical significance of black women’s representations in the United States K. Sue Jewell argues, “Although female slaves performed a multiplicity of duties on the plantation, from working in the fields as laborers, to assuming the primary Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 75

duties for the slave owner’s household, it is this last function that became the foundation for imagery that symbolizes African American womanhood.”55 It is this image that black artists are attempting to subvert by placing the black mother squarely in the service of black children, whether biological or surrogate. Saar’s Imitation of Life is at once an imitation of slave motherhood and also its realistic black base. In this space of obfuscated blackness, there is no true place for a black female self to actualize, within or outside the realm of motherhood. If Beloved is not the ghost-­made-­flesh but instead exists in the novel to facilitate Sethe’s surrogated othermothering, she also draws out a hypervisuality of embodied human need. To take back the violence of her “thick love” act, the killing in the shed, Sethe pushes herself deeper into the margins of an already marginalized existence. There is no longer any stolen milk to retrieve and offer her visitor, but she has other offerings. “I’m here,” Sethe says. “I lasted. And my girl come home. Now I can look at things again because she’s here to see them too. After the shed I stopped.”56 The ability to “look at things” when for years she simply did not consumes the former slave, and it could be argued that having seen too much, she acquiesces to more. This willingness can only further divide an already divided maternal orientation, and Sethe nearly crumbles under the demand.57

Breakages Fractured black motherhood is a battle the protagonist in Maryse Conde’s novel I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem fights from the moment she is born. Her existence, marked horrifically on her mother by the rape she endures on a slave ship, then defines the fractured relationship Tituba shares with her birth mother, Abena. In fact, the novel’s opening lines display the impending internal torture of Abena, the woman who gave birth to but could neither raise nor nurture her daughter and who exists between the two possibilities. Tituba subsequently defines herself as a child of misfortune, “born from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt.”58 M. Jacqui Alexander writes: “Of what significance, then, is the body in the making of experience if it cannot merely be summoned instrumentally to serve or explain the axes of violence that stem from the crises of capitalism’s various plantations . . . ?”59 Situated at a physical 76 Chapter Two

and psychological crossroads, Abena is child, rape victim, and mother, and Tituba is at once a reminder of that heinous act and a part of Abena’s life history and legacy. Because the narrative places Abena’s story simultaneously within that of Tituba’s, mother and child coexist through Tituba’s retelling of their narratives, and their interrelated histories merge in such a way that the distance between mother and daughter is obscured. It is difficult to tell which one of them is more bereft. Speaking to a maternal past imbued with unspeakable pain, Tituba attempts to articulate her own pain: When did I discover that my mother did not love me? Perhaps when I was five or six years old. . . . I never stopped reminding my mother of the white sailor who had raped her on the deck of Christ the King, while surrounded by a circle of obscene voyeurs. I constantly reminded her of the pain and humiliation. So whenever I used to cuddle up to her, as children are wont to do, she would inevitably push me away. Whenever I would throw my arms around her neck, she would quickly duck her head.60 Tituba’s desire for maternal comfort and solace is at first filled by her surrogate father, Yao, to whom her mother is “given” when it is discovered that she is pregnant. Filled as he is with sympathy for Abena’s pain, and love for a child that is not his own, Yao’s selflessness gives Tituba comfort when her mother cannot. Because Abena is virtually a child herself, she eventually turns to her mate, Yao, for parental nurturing and guidance. “In actual fact,” Tituba attests, “Yao had two children, my mother and me. For my mother, he was much more than a lover: he was a father, a savior and a refuge.”61 This comfort does not last long, since Abena’s vacillation between mother and child is a luxury that her owner, Darnell Davis, disrupts when he makes lascivious advances toward her in the field one day. As Jennifer L. Morgan asserts, “African women’s Africanness became contingent on the linkages between sexuality and savagery that fitted them for both productive and reproductive labor.”62 When Darnell sees a healing and physically healthy Abena walking with her daughter, he connects her to both “sexuality and savagery” and commands her to come closer to him. The memory and present reality of her slave body’s unprotection produce a swift reaction in Abena. Tituba tells us, “My mother stepped back so sharply that the basket on her head holding a Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 77

cutlass and a calabash of water fell to the ground. The calabash broke into three pieces, spilling its contents over the grass. The cutlass stuck upright in the ground, icy and murderous, while the basket started to roll down the path as if it were fleeing the drama that was about to unfold.”63 The calabash of water containing the “three pieces,” or three members of her family, is now split and broken, its destruction crashing down on Abena’s psyche as her forced maternal water breaks once again with the phallic threat of Darnell’s imminent violation. And just like the fleeing basket, which represents Abena’s physical and psychological well-­being, the phallic cutlass, “icy and murderous,” is anonymous white maleness— entitled and cruelly abusive. Abena’s sexuality is tied to white men’s external desire for production and reproduction. She has little recourse, and in her powerlessness, she reacts in defense of her own body. Fearing a second rape, Abena reacts by grabbing the “icy and murderous” cutlass and slashing Davis in the arm. She does not kill him, but her actions seal her fate. She is hung by the gallows.64 “All the slaves had been summoned to her execution,” young Tituba recalls. “Taking refuge in one of the women’s skirts, I felt something harden inside me like lava; a feeling that was never to leave me, a mixture of terror and mourning.” 65 This mixture of “terror and mourning” dictates the remaining trajectory of the young orphan as she spends the novel in a constant state of movement, uncertainty, and confinement. Like Sethe, she has the memory of her mother’s absence (though they are in close proximity to each other) and then the violence of her loss. She also has within the text the rhetorical repetition of the source of that loss: “They hanged my mother.”66 For Tituba, the tiny witness to Abena’s hanging and a seven-­year-­old outcast, it is the kindness of another that saves her. Taken in by Mama Yaya, an elderly root woman who herself is an outcast, Tituba again receives her nurturing from a surrogate. As an othermother, Mama Yaya embodies a space of limited transcendence, able to sacrifice and serve while her own biological role as a mother has been removed through an attempted slave insurrection where both of her sons were killed. “An old woman took me in,” Tituba states. “She had cultivated to a fine art the ability to communicate with the invisible.”67 As a maternal vessel through which Tituba communes with the deceased Abena and Yao, Mama Yaya does for Abena what Abena could not do on her own. She allows her the space where mother and daughter can coexist without worldly barriers of 78 Chapter Two

slavery and possession. And so Mama Yaya is not only surrogate mother to Tituba but also a surrogate mother to Abena from beyond. It is suggested that Mama Yaya’s previous position as mother comes at a cost to her nonbiological subjects. She is positioned in the novel as an alternate revolutionary, one who fosters rebellion in others but limits her rebellion to the spiritual strength and healing she can provide. Those she enables then become the focus of her existence. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is the story of the famous footnote in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Conde fictionalizes the account in order to privilege the narrative of the first person to confess to witchcraft during the trials, a slave woman named Tituba. A novel in the realm of the speculative, I, Tituba merges the intangible with the tangible, a negotiation of temporality and flesh that puts generational considerations constantly in flux. “The dead do not like to be forgotten,” M. Jacqui Alexander writes, “especially those whose lives had come to a violent end” and for whom the concept of rupture was a perpetual condition of marginal humanity.68 Tituba’s perpetual aching for comfort and her unresolved familial pain are the cause of her constant ambiguity concerning motherhood. She is always cognizant of its limitations and fragmentations within the institution of slavery. Her eventual marriage to the slave John Indian provides her with a connection she feels she cannot live without. It takes her away from Barbados, and the spirits of Abena, Yao, and Mama Yaya, into seventeenth-­century Massachusetts, where she will be misunderstood, feared, and finally tried as a witch.69 And so although Tituba is portrayed as a sexual being filled with very real, albeit problematic wants and desires, her sexuality is relegated to spaces of confinement and limited movement, spaces that highlight the difficulty of articulating the black female body in all its intricacies and dimensions. Her relationship with John Indian also transforms her existence from one of freedom to one of enslavement and precipitates her forfeiture of impending physical motherhood through abortion. “There is no happiness in motherhood for a slave,” she says. “It is little more than the expulsion of an innocent baby, who will have no chance to change its fate, into a world of slavery and abjection.”70 Tituba continues: “Throughout my childhood I had seen slaves kill their babies by sticking a long thorn into the still viscous-­like egg of their heads, by cutting the umbilical cord with a poison blade, or else by abandoning them at night in a place frequented Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 79

by angry spirits. Throughout my childhood I had heard slaves exchange formulas for potions, baths, and injections that sterilize the womb forever and turn it into a tomb lined with a scarlet shroud.”71 In contemporary representations of slave motherhood (literary and visual), the agonizing duality of embodied dispersals (forced or voluntary) resides in two contrasting spaces: the lament and the rhetorical imperative. Most agonizingly articulated in the title of Saidiya Hartman’s book Lose Your Mother, this duality exists in that liminal space (to lose your mother) and that heartbreaking imperative (lose your mother!). “Emotional attachments exposed one to further abuse,” Jennifer L. Morgan writes in Laboring Women. “Enslaved women viscerally experienced their embodied contradiction.”72 In Beloved, Baby Suggs has a series of potent laments concerning her missing and (presumed) dead children. “God take what He would,” Morrison writes. “And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing.”73 By agreeing to live with John Indian and traveling with him to his mistress’s property, Tituba is also agreeing to move from one state of marginalized existence (living on the outskirts of Darnell Davis’s plantation after her mother is killed and Mama Yaya takes her in) to another marginalized existence (servant to John Indian’s owner, Susanna Endicott). Endicott sells John Indian to Samuel Parris, a minister on his way to Boston to start a new life. Tituba’s relationship with her lover creates a separate “embodied contradiction” in that she is subsumed beneath John Indian’s enslavement—she is free to leave and return to her patch of abandoned land—and, in a twist on the maternal mandates of the slave system, her position follows that of his, though they are not yet married. Tituba and John Indian spend a year in Boston as Parris, who is as cruel as any slave-­owning patriarch is wont to be, attempts to build a congregation of his own. Tituba manages to find solace in the relationship she has with his wife, Elizabeth, and their daughter, Betsey. Along with her husband (Parris marries Tituba and John Indian on the way to Boston), Tituba tries to adapt to the detachment from her birth home of Barbados, her status as a slave woman, the chilly weather, and the extreme religious conditions in New England. After witnessing the hanging of an elderly woman accused of witchcraft, Tituba has a visceral reaction to the scene. “It was as if I had been sentenced to relive my mother’s execution,” Tituba says. “No, it wasn’t an old woman hanging there. It was 80 Chapter Two

Abena in the flower of her youth and at the height of her beauty . . . and I was six years old again.”74 Cognizant of the powerful imagery embedded in the label “witch,” Tituba moves through the remainder of the narrative searching for a replacement relationship that would rival the one she had with her mother, Yao, and Mama Yaya. This she finds not in her lifetime but in the afterlife. Tituba ends her quest of familial longing where it began, back on the island of her birth and the place she calls home. By the end of the novel, Tituba has earned the right to reproduce her own life lessons through another. It is not the second unborn child in her womb, since before she gives birth, she is hung like Abena, and her perpetual pregnant body signifies how close she was to biological motherhood. Her surrogate child is a little girl she chooses and watches from the afterlife: “I tell her the secrets I’m allowed to share, the hidden power of herbs and the language of animals. I teach her to look for the invisible shapes in the world, the crisscross of communications and the signs and the symbols. Once her mother and father are asleep, she joins me in the night that I have taught her to love. A child I didn’t give birth to but whom I chose! What motherhood could be nobler!”75 Struggling to negotiate the place of motherhood in her life, Tituba finally decides that she will be satisfied to become a mother figure to someone in need of her guidance and nurturing. Maternal restrictions, both externally and internally placed, force Tituba into a world of doubt, confusion, and mistrust. The cycle of continual denied maternity and othermothering blend in the narrative to illuminate the complex negotiations of Mama Yaya, Abena, and Tituba. For Tituba, matrilineal power exists outside of the realm of the natural world, and it is there that she finds her only solace in black motherhood. Conde situates black motherhood as slightly beyond the reach of the women who embody it—­ problematic, unrelenting, and often impossible to contain.

Suturing With her novel Corregidora, Gayl Jones emphasizes the reproduction of pain in the aftermath of slavery. For Ursa Corregidora, the novel’s protagonist, the women in her lineage and the incestuous sexual trauma they suffer under their father as slaves are revisited upon Ursa through the Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 81

oral history her great-­grandmother tells her. Great Gram insists, “The important thing is making generations. They can burn the papers but they can’t burn conscious, Ursa. And that what makes the evidence. And that’s what makes the verdict.”76 And so the best Ursa can hope for is the making of generations, this being the only way to pass on the history of familial trauma. The verdict presented by Great Gram is in the living replicas of the master Corregidora’s guilt, the girl-­children he raped and then rented out as prostitutes, keeping the profits for himself. He fathered two generations of Corregidora women but engendered three generations of abuse, making traumatized sisters out of mothers and daughters. Ursa’s grandmother relays a memory unto Ursa: He was big. He looked like one a them coal Creek Indians but if you said he looked like an Indian he’d get mad and beat you. Yeah, I remember the day he took me out of the field. They had coffee there. Some places they had cane and then others cotton and tobacco like up here. . . . He would take me hisself first and said he was breaking me in. Then he started bringing other men and they would give me money and I had to give it over to him.77 Ursa is the only Corregidora woman who did not have the elder Corregidora as her father. This fact does not save Ursa from a legacy of emotional and sexual injury. In fact, it is an early action by her husband, Mutt, that deepens the psychological wounds Ursa can never escape, and at the same time alters the course of her life in a way she never imagined. At the start of the novel, Ursa is pushed down a flight of steps by Mutt outside the blues club where she performs. She subsequently suffers a miscarriage and has a hysterectomy, barring her from ever fulfilling her duty as a Corregidora. She cannot “make generations” and therefore exists in the space between repetition and release. In the context of slavery and black subjectivity, according to Saidiya Hartman, gender “must be understood as indissociable from violence.”78 Corregidora presents a world of gender and violence that loops around a refrain of sutured loss. Each character stitches her fractured subjectivity to the fragmented subjectivities around her, and every wound promises to replicate itself like plantation offspring, only this time at a cost. As a blues novel emphasizing the power and the pain of black heterosexual relationships, the inescapability of history, the power of the parts of a whole, Corregidora succeeds in its attempt to startle its audience into 82 Chapter Two

comprehension. Jones’s strength in the text is the manner in which she negotiates the velocity of experience, one line of dialogue at a time. For Ursa Corregidora, the infusion of history and memory is emblazoned on her body like the babies she will never have. Her past haunts her in the same way it haunts her immediate ancestors, and for a while in the novel it seems to consume her, stunting her emotional, familial, and psychological growth. “Consequences. It seems as if you’re not singing the past, you’re humming it. Consequences of what? Shit, we’re all consequences of something. Stained with another’s past as well as our own. Their past in my blood. I’m a blood. Are you mine, Ursa or theirs? What he would ask. What would I ask now?”79 In this instance of self-­e valuation, Ursa is thinking about the change in her voice due to the “consequence” of Mutt’s violent action. In the production of a deeper, grittier singing voice and the absence of the possibility of biological offspring, Ursa lays out a generational division that has the potential for redress-­through-­performance. Her many moments of self-­reflection and evaluation bring her family’s past to the forefront and her physical position as a Corregidora to bear on her place in her immediate community. Her entire existence is a series of causal effects, a call-­ and-­response blues motif, which, while able to elicit her creative energy, serves also as the locus of her lineage and her pain. Ursa’s emptied womb is the promise for her future, the literal reconfiguration of her value separate from her mother, grandmother, and great-­grandmother. Her physical inability to give birth signals a cathartic expulsion of trauma through the outlet of the blues. “Let no one pollute my music,” Ursa says. “I will dig out their temples. I will pluck out their eyes.”80 Willing to fight for her music with tenacity, her music becomes the only offspring she can accept and nurture in her life. The blues, as a product of Ursa’s creation, is the artistic outlet by which she expresses the pain in her life, and her personal history has the ability to give her back to herself. When singing onstage, Ursa transforms her music into her own body of rebirth, having the same spiritual effect on her psyche as the trauma she knows all too well. “What bothers you?” “It bothers me because I can’t make generations.” “What bothers you?” Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 83

“It bothers me because I can’t.” “What bothers you, Ursa?” “It bothers me because I can’t fuck.” “What bothers you, Ursa?” “It bothers me because I can’t feel anything.”81 “Repetition enables the recognition of the self and points to that which can never be fully recollected,” Saidiya Hartman writes.82 What Ursa “feels” about her family’s past she transfers into song using the repetition of a blues motif. Her lyrics reflect both the inherent suffering that exemplifies blues music and also Ursa’s own suffering, unyielding and possessive. “They squeezed Corregidora into me,” Ursa laments, “and I sung back in return.”83 For Ursa, the Corregidora legacy is a violent rapist attacking her in the present, leaving only music as an outlet of transference. According to Jacqueline de Weever, “Ursa’s success is due, in part, to her hysterectomy, which prevents her from carrying out the mandate of the other women, but her success is also due to her determination to be an artist, a fully developed blues singer.”84 The greater triumph, then, for Ursa Corregidora comes through her musical gift, and “the claustrophobic relationship with the three older women yields a new song, which Ursa will now nurture and shape.”85 Though the lineage is now broken and the Corregidora line ends with Ursa, this break is negotiated musically through Ursa as the familial lullaby that she nurtures on her own. In the case of Corregidora, repetition is the elongation of a blues motif, the call-­and-­response of collective agency, while Ursa herself resists the double exposure of her incestuous lineage through song. Bound to this iteration of the diaspora, repetition as reproduction offers us improvisation as agitation, as resistance, and witnessing within the visuality of fungibility and loss. In the realm of the photographic, double exposures (purposeful or accidental) impose two images (or exposures) onto one negative. Ursa’s proximity to the forced layering that her last name intimates presents a difficult corporeal negotiation. Her response is an utterance that is sung, the only reproduction Ursa can possess with the force of her autonomy and will. The journey to nurture and shape eventually leads Ursa back to Bracktown, the Corregidora women’s home, to recover lost aspects of her history from her mother. “I couldn’t be satisfied until I had seen Mama, 84 Chapter Two

talked to her, until I had discovered her private memory,” Ursa says. This includes an emotional journey into the Corregidora legacy of genealogical rifts and all that those rifts have cost. Ursa asks her mother about the man who got her pregnant, Ursa’s father, Martin. He is the first man to break the cycle of lover/father. He is also the man Ursa’s mother could have loved if she had allowed herself to feel. But since Corregidora “made them make love to anyone, so they wouldn’t love anyone,” Ursa’s mother does not have a chance to be happy with Martin.86 The couple’s history together begins with promise and ends with devastation. “He was a good-­lookin man,” she begins. “Tall and straight as a arrow. Black man. You know, kind of satin-­black. Smooth satin-­black.”87 Ursa’s mother remembers the tenderness with which Martin first approached her, speaking softly to her, calling her “woman” even though she “didn’t feel like a woman,” and riding the bus to accompany her home even though it was in the opposite direction of his own home.88 Ursa’s mother, while smitten by Martin’s advances, has a duty to fulfill for the Corregidora line. She uses Martin because she desires the mother he can make of her and yet is too afraid of her predestined inability to love to allow herself the possibility of more. Ursa’s mother allows Martin to approach her, but just when he speaks to her directly, she leaves. “I could feel his eyes following me,” she tells Ursa. “I couldn’t help feeling like I was saved from something, like Jesus had saved me from something . . . but still it was like something got into me.”89 The spirit possession Ursa’s mother imagines has the Corregidora legacy written all over it. She says: My body or something knew what it wanted even if I didn’t want no man. Cause I knew I wasn’t lookin for none. But it was like it knew it wanted you, and knew it would have you, and knew you’d be a girl. . . . Just knew what it wanted, and I kept going back there. I told Mama and Grandmama that I had to work, you know, and I go there and eat my supper, and then I come home and eat supper again. My stomach got all stretched out too. I almost felt like I was getting a baby then.90 Ursa’s mother “just knew” physically, definitively, what her body was asking her to do. She followed her body, her womb, and immediately became pregnant from “just that one time” with Martin. “In keeping with the inversive bent of their narrative,” Madhu Dubey writes, “the Corregidora women counter the perversion of motherhood during slavery with a Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 85

thoroughgoing naturalization of reproduction.” This naturalization, according to Dubey disallows a process of self-­sustaining sexuality in anyone other than Ursa. “The desire to procreate is so deeply instilled in Ursa’s mother that she perceives it as a natural desire rooted in her body.”91 Ursa’s mother turns away from Martin after she is impregnated, and even though they are married and he lives with the Corregidora women for two years, the husband and wife rarely have sex.92 Fraught with the tangible and intangible effects of her burgeoning sexuality, Ursa’s mother instead decides to forgo sexual desire in favor of familial imperatives. Because her mother is incapable of it, and suffers from the loneliness of this knowledge, Ursa makes a final attempt at the end of the novel to allow her husband, Mutt, back into her body and her life. Twenty-­ two years after he violently gives her body back to her, they are reunited. Ursa’s blues, rough and edgy now from the experiences she sings, are her attempt at re-­creation. They are the way she “makes herself,” and how she structures her family’s legacy of emotional fragmenting in a manner that she can nurture and own.

Reproductive Resistance and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother As the title suggests, the main character in Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother both embodies her deceased mother and survives her, an exterior ownership of maternal fragmentation. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the novel’s first-­person narrator, is as close to her mother as she is to herself. She is the duplication of the life her mother never got to live, and it is her own life that she concerns herself with in the narrative as a natural extension of life culled from death. Xuela mothers and nurtures only herself, since the other being that would have done so for her (so she assumes) no longer exists. Creating a community of self, Xuela attempts an unorthodox existence, moving her outside the register of external empires (British and French), nationalist imperatives, and masculine demands. The Autobiography of My Mother is the story of this second Xuela, named after the first. In the matter of empires and self-­making, the protagonist first refuses her mother tongue (French), then her surrogate mother (her father’s new wife); finally, in a pattern of self-­defense that borders on the 86 Chapter Two

vigorously defiant, Xuela refuses to procreate, meeting each opportunity to bear a child with the same resistance with which she meets any challenge to her autonomy and her agency. The novel spans the duration of her life (seventy years) and facilitates her corporeal register as an allegory of the colonial condition under the thumbprint of an enslaved past that is constantly born anew. This rebirth and Xuela’s resistance to it place women (in this case West Indian women) at the center of a constant conversation over slavery’s afterlife in the Caribbean. Xuela is the embodiment of all who have gone before her and failed. She represents the small island of Dominica and the inhabitants there who swelter under the hybrid creation of subjectivity in the shadow of an enslaved past Xuela cannot escape. Xuela cannot identify with her surroundings because she has no ancestry, no root homeland with which to negotiate her place. As the protagonist admits in the first sentence, “My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind.”93 In this way, both her biological mother and her symbolic one (Africa) are equally unfulfilling as life-­giving and nurturing sources. This “bleak” wind she imagines within her biological family includes a father who wraps her up as a baby along with his dirty laundry and brings both bundles to a washerwoman in the village. “It is possible that he emphasized the difference between the two bundles,” Xuela supposes, but then again, she is never quite sure.94 Paternally challenged and disaffected, Xuela’s father abandons her as an infant. Seven years after she is unceremoniously donated to a neighborhood laundry lady, she is brought to the home of her father and his new wife. The wife, a woman with “a face of evil,” quickly makes it clear that Xuela is not welcome. “She did not like me. She did not love me. I could see it in her face.”95 No surrogate mother, but rather a stranger—a void—greets her in her father’s home. But the knowledge of her predicament does not seem to startle or concern Xuela. “My spirit rose to meet the challenge. No love: I could live in a place like this. I knew this atmosphere all too well.”96 In the space of this lack of love, this place where she can live, is the promise of self-­ creation, the lament and the imperative—to lose your mother—that creates a hybrid identity. Emotionally invested in her own neglected upbringing, Xuela cherFragmented Figurations of the Maternal 87

ishes the nuances of competition she can elicit from her stepmother just by being. “In her was a despair rooted in a desire long thwarted,” Xuela says of the woman to whom her father is married. “She had not been able to bear my father a child,” and it is this inability that frames the woman’s relationship with Xuela the child.97 It is this relationship in part that helps to convince Xuela that she has no desire for the kind of heterosexual partnership that leaves women emotionally barren. She will never be the vessel for some other person’s mediated desire. Xuela’s entire experience has an origin, and it is not the contradictory nature of the postcolonial condition, nor the meaning of motherhood, although these are important themes for the novel as well. Xuela is the personification of a colonized nation: a subject searching for knowledge of self, through symbolic connections and fracturing. Obsessed with the very idea of her mother and with little or no tangible information besides her own physical features, Xuela creates a mother where none exists and a history outside of the one never taught her. I only came to know this in the middle of my life, just at the time when I was no longer young and realized I had less of some of the things I used to have in abundance and more of some of the things I scarcely had at all. And this realization of loss and gain made me look backward and forward; at my beginning was this woman whose face I had never seen, but at my end was nothing, no one between me and the black room of the world.98 The death of her mother and her lonely childhood existence seem to create in Xuela a hardened shell of subjectivity that produces an emphasis on self-­creation. As a child, she does not speak for years; when she does speak, she does so in English, “not French patois or English patois, but plain English . . . a language I had never heard anyone speak.”99 For Xuela, to first speak the language of “a people I would never like or love” makes sense because everything in her life is to her “a source of pain” and a way to force self-­creation.100 By the time Xuela becomes sexually active, sexually exploited by the man for whom she works and encouraged by her employer’s wife, she is fifteen years old.101 “He was not a man of love,” she says of the elder Monsieur LaBatte. “I did not need him to be. When he was through with me and I with him, he lay on top of me, breathing indifferently; his mind 88 Chapter Two

on other things.”102 Soon she is pregnant by him, but appears unafraid. Spending the day with his wife, she collects money from Monsieur LaBatte’s room and walks to the home of a woman known for her ability to end pregnancies. Xuela describes the process of expulsion as one that pushes her body to the limits of tolerance. “She gave me a cupful of a thick black syrup to drink and then led me to a small hole in a dirt floor to lie down,” Kincaid writes. “The pain was like nothing I had ever imagined before, it was as if it defined pain itself; all other pain was only a reference to it, an imitation of it, an aspiration to it. I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before.”103 Dark, damp, and reminiscent of the womb, the “small hole in a dirt floor” is the space where Xuela reinvents herself through the first of many bodily rejections of childbearing. She rises after the ordeal is over and is renewed and convinced of her own completeness. Xuela marvels at her newfound discovery: the unborn child she has rid from her body is as tangible to her as her own life. Because her mother before her died giving birth, Xuela seems to aim to retrieve her life through this act of maternal refusal. Her ability to control this aspect of her life and reject the barren existence she perceives motherhood to be is the result of the unpleasant life she imagines for Caribbean women through the stories of her people. “I would bear children,” she says of the biological conundrum that is diasporic black womanhood, “but I would never be a mother to them.”104 Xuela creates her future out of the shards of a West Indian existence traumatized by colonization and perpetual defeat. And she will do so through the body she claims for herself. If Xuela destroys her unborn children “with the carelessness of a god,” if she would “cover their bodies with diseases” and “embellish skins with thinly crusted sores,” she would also envelop her restricted womanhood with its source of frustrated prowess.105 In Xuela’s opinion, it is women who possess the power of creation and women who remain defeated by a legacy of slavery that dismantled the mobility of their choices. Historian Barbara Bush agrees that although slave women managed, like women in Africa, to take “herbal concoctions to make themselves sterile because they did not want to bring into the world children condemned to a life of slavery,” she also notes that West Indian slavery was so brutal and physically totalizing that many women suffered from a lack of menstruation and never gave birth.106 Jennifer Morgan writes, “At the very least, the exFragmented Figurations of the Maternal 89

treme contrast in fertility rates among enslaved women in the Caribbean and those in the American South suggests that the question of fertility control must be taken seriously.”107 As a commentary on the aftereffects of the dispersals so common within the slave system, the novel positions self-­retrieval as the mode of operation that is self-­generating and self-­ sustaining. Xuela is mothered and comforted by the invented memory of her maternal connection. This invention has little to do with the bits and pieces of information she receives concerning her deceased mother, and more to do with what Xuela can create in her own mind. For the young motherless adolescent, Xuela the mother and Xuela the daughter are connected in more ways than biology alone. When she dreams of her mother, it is her sleeping body forcing her to imagine a woman she resembles, but will never know: “She came down the ladder again and again, over and over; just her heels and the hem of her white dress visible; down, down, over and over. I watched her all night in my dream. I did not see her face. I did not see her face. I was not disappointed. I would have loved to see her face, but I didn’t long for it anymore.”108 Xuela’s most significant invention concerns the manner in which she deregulates the access to her body in terms of sexual stimulation. Instead, her body performs the function of comfort in the absence of her mother. Early on Xuela confesses that she “loved the smell of my unwashed mouth, the smell that came from between my legs, the smell in the pit of my arm, the smell of my unwashed feet.”109 Later she transfers this love of bodily functions into an exhortation of self-­gratification. She allows Monsieur LaBatte to watch her gently fondle herself “in a small shaded area behind the house,” unashamed and unembarrassed. “I removed my fingers from between my legs and brought them up to my face,” Xuela says. “I wanted to smell myself.” As her employer gazes mesmerized by this sexualized and brazen activity, Xuela contemplates the usefulness of his body only as it pertains to herself. “The body of a man is not what makes him desirable; it is what his body might make you feel when it touches you that is the thrill.”110 Digging into her own flesh as the source of all things, this is the way Xuela attempts to subvert the hegemonic system she sees in Dominica. Of her employer’s wife, Xuela is certain: Madame’s body has weakened “with the strength of the weapon he carried between his legs”111 90 Chapter Two

In Xuela she sees “her youth, the person she used to be,” a person with power enough to bring forth a baby for this man, her husband, because for Madame LaBatte, “her womb was like a sieve; it would not contain a child, it would not contain anything now.”112 Instead, Madame LaBatte reaches out to Xuela; for a long while Xuela does not know why, but she is interested in the unmentioned proposition. “She wanted something from me, I could tell that,” the protagonist claims. “I longed for the moment to come . . . that I would know just what she wanted.”113 Madame LaBatte pays special attention to the adolescent worker, hand sewing clothing to accentuate her form, giving her fine dresses that she herself can no longer wear, and instructing her in the way to make Monsieur LaBatte the perfect cup of coffee. All this is to prepare the youthful womb Madame LaBatte would like to borrow. None of the attention she bestows upon Xuela is intended for Xuela alone. She appears the same way Hortense Spillers sees Harriet Jacobs’s jealous mistress, “not to have wanted her body at all, but to desire to enter someone else’s.”114 In her position of pseudopower, Madame LaBatte desires the entire bodily existence Xuela possesses. She wants her womb back, and she wants to retrieve it through the protagonist. Choosing to see the desire for a biological surrogate mother for her empty womb in Madame LaBatte’s careful coaxing, gentle baths, and evenings spent with Monsieur LaBatte, Xuela first rids herself of the unwanted pregnancy and then flees the town of Roseau, leaving the memory of the awkward childless couple behind her. As a child, Xuela’s need to invent her mother’s life and legacy corresponds with the manner in which she invents herself much later. For the young woman of sensual desires, the possessor of mild mystic powers and emotional callousness, her self-­inventions are a way for her to maintain control in an environment where it seems impossible to do so. Traveling from one town to the next, while still a young woman, Xuela finds that she becomes less and less attached to the only familial lineage she has known thus far. The Richardsons—father, stepmother, half sister, and half brother—have an unusual and almost pathetic unity that Xuela does not want or need. When family tragedy brings Xuela once again back into the familial fold, it is only temporary, and not without its irony. Xuela’s half brother, Alfred, is dying (named after his father, he succumbs to illness, leaving the senior Alfred with the wholeness of his name). The younger Alfred’s health and happiness were valued uncondiFragmented Figurations of the Maternal 91

tionally within the Richardson home. As he passes slowly from life, Xuela reexamines her place of chosen isolation. “I could not see anything of myself in this house,” Xuela confesses, articulating one of the problems she grapples with throughout the text.115 Xuela’s half brother dies, “his body covered with small sores,” and is buried quietly in the town of Roseau. “In death he became my brother,” Xuela states. “When he was alive, I did not know him at all.”116 It may be this newfound attachment to family that causes Xuela to later help her sister Elizabeth to rid herself of an unwanted pregnancy the same way that Xuela herself was assisted previously. It was not hard to do; I had remembered everything from my own experience. She did not want anything surrounding these events to be advertised, so I hid her in my small room behind the kitchen where I had resumed living. . . . I made her strong potions of teas. When the child inside her still refused to come out, I put my hand into her womb and forcibly removed it. She bled for days. Her body shrank and crumpled up with pain. She did not die. I had become such an expert at being the ruler of my own life in this one limited regard that I could extend such power to any other woman who asked me for it.117 Xuela takes mild pleasure in her abilities to give life and take life away. Although Elizabeth is ungrateful, Xuela is secure in the thought that she gave her sister more than an abortion; Xuela had allowed her to witness the force of her own destiny, the very same destiny Xuela had secured over her own life. It is something that, due to Elizabeth’s birthright, her doomed life circumstances, is only a distant possibility, and yet it is a possibility all the same. Elizabeth, so enchanted with the idea of what her father’s wealth and position might afford her, becomes stunted by the limitations of her sex in a patriarchal society. Xuela continues an existence of sensual bodily pleasure when she engages in a clandestine relationship with Roland, another man who is already spoken for. What Xuela wants from the relationship is not what Roland wants. Hers is a desire for constant physical gratification and a wholeness of visceral engagement, while it seems that Roland wants only to possess. He is handsome and charismatic, a man very much used to women admirers. But Xuela only admires his body against hers, and the

92 Chapter Two

joy she can receive from his touch. Her body, as she has come to appreciate it, exists only for her own wonder. She will not be a part of the glory, nor the terror and lack of control, she envisions in motherhood. She will belong only to herself. As for Roland, “He could feel the times that I was fertile, and yet each month blood flowed away from me, and each month I expressed confidence at its imminent arrival and departure, and always I was overjoyed at the accuracy of my prediction. When I saw him like that, on his face a look that was a mixture—confusion, dumbfoundedness, defeat—I felt much sorrow for him, for his life was reduced to a list of names that were not countries, and to the number of times he brought the monthly flow of blood to a halt.”118 Xuela defines herself by a system of strategic nonmothering that she believes will spare her the formidable existence of the “mother” or, as in the case of Roland’s wife, a “woman who found herself unable to keep her life’s booty in its protective sack.”119 Using the language of reproduction in the face of Xuela’s avoidance, Kincaid refashions Xuela’s resistance into a double-­edged sword. Certainly, the protagonist has taken her life back from the colonial and patriarchal masters who desire nothing more than total ownership. Yet her life is one of alienation and excommunication. She dwells on the margins of Dominica literally as well as figuratively, a partial entity of self-­creation. By the end of The Autobiography of My Mother, Xuela Claudette Richardson has survived her entire immediate family. All are dead: her stepmother, father, halfbrother, and halfsister have passed on while Xuela endures the life made without her permission in a land of “vanquished” people and lost history. It is in her decisive actions concerning her imagined offspring that Xuela finds her sense of purpose. But at the end of her living existence, she finds time for a moment of regret, lamenting, albeit momentarily, her lost maternal opportunities. Xuela sees her body as “fruit dying on a vine” and wonders about the months in which her body would “swell up,” apparently “longing to conceive” and, as Xuela states, “mourning my heart’s and mind’s decision never to bring forth a child.”120 But this she only does for a moment, only as long as it takes her to form the words on the page. Attending to the doubling frequencies of slavery’s afterlife, reproduction (of people and products) orients the discourse of the diaspora in

Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 93

ways that are both particular and general. Within the sliver of space between production and reproduction we can see black women like Xuela negotiating various states and subjectivities in flux.

Embodying the Fragment Seemingly visualizing Xuela’s autonomous declaration of self-­creation, Lorna Simpson’s photograph Self-­Possession (1992) marks the corpus of black female subjectivity as a nameless, faceless register of containment (plate 5). With an image that effectively amalgamates the individual with the collective, Simpson elongates a visual process both necessitating and amplifying the fragment. The title of this photograph, which appeared in Callaloo in 1996, combined with the text from the image (“is 9/10ths of the law”), illustrates the goal of the piece—to center on the ways in which black female bodies are framed around the discourse of possession. This extended corporeal ownership is all the more contested within the rubric of black womanhood, which is often (if it is allowed to exist at all) relegated to fixed notions of the maternal. A large color Polaroid engraved in Plexiglas, Self-­Possession draws the viewer’s eye to the lower center of the frame where Simpson’s anonymous female subject stands, visualized from the neck to the upper thigh, with her red-­gloved hands placed strategically across her waist. The woman’s hands frame her uterus and are positioned as guardians of a sort, claiming the very possession of the self that others have claimed of her body. The crimson background, shaded to match the gloves, which extend nearly to the end of the forearms, fill the frame with all the symbolic imagery associated with the color; the violence and the legacy, the sexuality and corporeal connectivity. Though the figure faces the camera, her neckline is taut, and the borders of the frame seem to give her very little room within which to move. The image seems to ask the viewer: Can self-­ possession be achieved within the containment of race and gender? Of the four images Simpson submitted to Callaloo for inclusion in a special issue on emerging writers, Self-­Possession is the first, locating Simpson’s interests as both concrete and abstract, allowing a kind of collective conversation to occur. What are the possibilities for self-­possession in the context of black maternal investment? Writers and artists of the diaspora create a kind of corporeal reconstruction of the black womb, one 94 Chapter Two

that includes an examination of the very structures that limit the possibilities for the actualization of the self, since the self is rarely allowed to exist for black women, outside of an ever-­needy collective. This is especially true of the maternal slave body. Visual artists, as well, interrogate this paradox of myth and motherhood, situating their bodies at the crossroads between self-­possession and collective intention—a longing for the visuality of wholeness. Artistic representations of mothers, othermothers, and nonmothers are attempting to reveal the impossible dualities created by transatlantic processes of rupture, loss, and generational violence. Writers and artists of the African diaspora utilize the theme of restricted, disrupted, violated, or denied maternity to highlight the many ways motherhood is a problematic aspect of black diasporic relations. The hypervisible/invisible image of slave mother delineates the proportion of understanding and desire held within the embattled term “black mother.” If the desire is resisted through the formulations of black female subjectivity, often a collective will is imposed that detracts from the very attempts at self-­ actualization. With all of its constrictions and dilemmas, black motherhood will continue to be the battle of choice for present and future cultural productions. The doubling enforcement of slavery and maternity was a process and production violently engaged with the layering of imprints. Black maternal production within the framework of slavery’s memory adheres to structures of fragmentation, parsing, and the layering of contingent forces of race, gender, and nation. Heavily dependent upon a patriarchal order that is rendered in disorder, and an afterlife of slavery that is filtered through offspring, these images paint a portrait of slave motherhood that presents the event that is slavery as an unrelenting reproductive continuum of bodies in pieces and in flux.

Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 95

3

The Boundaries of Excess

folk live in ma bones breathe ma breath we night like skin I bear de weight ma back bent ta light —Quraysh Ali Lansana, “Burdens”

Broken black women cover the literature of the African diaspora like skin over flesh. They beg to be seen. Sometimes tightly connected and integral to a narrative, sometimes hanging loosely off the textual bone, they are beaten, bruised, scabbed over, burnt, and scarred; they enable myth and imagery, and are fueled by historical erasure. In Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred (1979), the protagonist, Dana, travels back in time from the twentieth century to the nineteenth century and from a life of freedom in California to one of enslavement in Maryland. The journeys are not of her own making, as Dana is pulled into the nineteenth century by Rufus Weylin, the white youth who will eventually become her ancestor. Dana’s body, instantly transformed by Weylin’s needs, can only be returned to its present if she fears that her life is in imminent danger. On what turns out to be her final trip home from the past, Dana comes through without her left forearm, which is torn off and left behind in the wall that serves as her passageway between the two worlds. This violent amputation constructs a circle around the narrative, as the novel both opens and ends with Dana Franklin’s physical limblessness.

“An accident,” Dana tells the police about her missing left limb, “my fault.”1 Her self-­confessed complicity intimates that the arm is her penance for an understandable cultural sin. For feeding one ancestor to another and forcing her generational flesh into being, she must pay with a highly conspicuous part of her present body.2 Survival is the goal, and yet for Butler, it is the visible consequence of this experience that Dana must eventually “survive.” The phantom limb in Kindred is slavery—­ throbbing, pounding, and sending sharp jolts of pain through the body, forcing a recognition of the flesh that used to be. Like Giorgio Agamben’s Holocaust Muselmann, the walking dead of slavery’s past become processed through repetitive acts of bearing witness against an unbearable corporeal utterance.3 This phantom limb exemplifies the boundaries of excess, the borders of the corporeal. Thus, the black female body is central to the discourse on physical pain. Although Elaine Scarry’s study, The Body in Pain references novels for which “more often, though still with great rarity, the subject may enter briefly into a small corner of a literary text,” Scarry finds them to be unsuccessful attempts at articulating bodily pain.4 Using fictional texts as diverse as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Miguel Angel Asturias’s Strong Wind, and Homer’s The Iliad, Scarry, for reasons not made entirely clear in her narrative, consults almost none of the fictional works of the black diaspora.5 Scarry’s is a curious oversight, especially when read in the context of black literature. While I agree that the level of trauma experienced by Middle Passage descendants in the New World is often inexpressible linguistically, Scarry contends that “the rarity with which physical pain is represented in literature” is a glaring commentary on artistic silences on the subject.6 Black writers have not been silent on the subject of physical pain. “If pain has been largely unspoken and unrecognized,” Saidiya Hartman explains, “it is due to the sheer denial of black sentience rather than the inexpressibility of pain.”7 Black Atlantic pain, especially when articulated through a woman’s body, fails to carry the same currency when fictionalized as other bodies suffering under corporeal possession and subjection. The role of the fragmented bodily text is therefore essential to an understanding of physical context, negotiation, and textual manipulation. Hartman continues:

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The black is both insensate and content, indifferent to pain and induced to work by threats of corporal punishment. These contradictions are partly explained by the ambiguous and precarious status of the black in the “great chain of being”—in short, by the pathologizing of the black body—this abhorrence then serves to justify acts of violence that exceed normative standards of the humanely tolerable, though within the limits of the socially tolerable as concerned the black slave. In this regard, pain is essential to the making of productive slave laborers. The sheer enormity of this pain overwhelms or exceeds the limited forms of redress available to the enslaved. The “ambiguous and precarious status” Hartman mentions is especially problematic when viewed through the lens of gender. Vessel, shield, weapon, or collective repository of cultural suffering—representations of black women leave the civil rights era symbolically clinging to their corporeal lives. Buttressed by the Moynihan Report (1965) and its timely coalescence of reinforced mythologies, representations of black women, according to Roderick A. Ferguson, “agreed with Moynihan’s thesis about the emasculating effects of black women and the need for black men to resume their role as patriarchs.”8 This need will frame the invisible parameters of slavery’s afterlife in the late 1960s through 1980s in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, and it will inform the icons and identities that are layered with the burden of the responsibility thrust upon them—a coalition of both the willing and the unwilling. Kindred tells the story of African American writer Dana, her husband, Kevin (who is white), and the members of the Weylin plantation she routinely visits whenever Rufus Weylin is in peril. Alice Greenwood, initially free and living with her mother near the Weylin grounds, is later enslaved as punishment for attempting to escape with her husband, Isaac (who is enslaved). Alice and Dana look remarkably alike, as Alice and Rufus will eventually have a daughter (Hagar) who will be Dana’s direct matrilineal ancestor. Dana figures out fairly early in the narrative, on her second trip back in time, that Rufus and Alice are related to her. Each time she is called to Rufus, she is visiting Maryland in the early nineteenth century, and her body is rendered completely vulnerable. This corporeal vulnerability follows her back to the twentieth century, creating the temporal conflation necessary to explore the totality of slavery’s imprint. 98 Chapter Three

After her second trip into the past, Dana is beaten and almost raped by a patroller in the woods outside Alice’s childhood home. When she returns to 1976, the immediacy of the violence she endures in the past renders her physically and psychologically traumatized. “Pain dragged me back to consciousness,” she states. “At first, it was all I was aware of; every part of my body hurt.”9 Reappearing like a ghost from a dead place, Dana’s husband is the first face she sees, but she does not recognize him. Instead, she flails about in anticipation of another fight for her body, “kicking him, clawing the hands that reached out for me, trying to bite, lungeing up toward his eyes.”10 Gone for hours on this second journey to the past, only two minutes have elapsed in the contemporary moment. The collapsing of time—present to past—guarantees Dana will live forever after in the immediacy of American slavery, that it will be as close to her as that part of her body she no longer possesses. For W. J. T. Mitchell, “to lack memory is to be a slave of time, confined to space; to have memory is to use space as an instrument in the control of time and language.”11 Dana’s use of language, the repeated utterance of the words “accident” and “fault,” conflate the psychic distance between her worldly flesh and the chromosomal embodiments of her historical past. In this way, Dana functions as the literary alpha and omega—the beginning of Alice and Rufus’s destiny and, through her intervention, the end. Snatched back through time by patriarchal whiteness—Rufus’s bodily needs—Dana must repeatedly bend to the will of his temporal navigations. In order to reorient time and return herself to the present permanently, she has to take the position of entitlement and privilege and slaughter the patriarch before her. Dana is the catalyst to her ancestor Alice’s suicide (since Dana’s freedom and ability to move through time is a vision Alice cannot bear) and the literal end (through murder) of Rufus’s life.12 His fatal act of incestuous recognition—Alice through Dana’s body— is as far as Dana is willing to allow her flesh to journey. “You were one woman,” Rufus says to Dana. “You and her. One woman. Two halves of a whole.”13 Joining a temporal and corporeal conflation, Rufus endeavors to trade one body for a lost other. And yet, as Rufus advances on her sexually after Alice kills herself, Dana imagines “how easy it would be for me to continue to be still and forgive him even this. So easy in spite of all my talk. But it would be so hard to raise the knife, drive it into the flesh I The Boundaries of Excess 99

had saved so many times. So hard to kill.”14 Moments later she achieves what previously seemed impossible for her. Her postmurderous repeated utterances of “accident” and “fault” form a linguistic circle of ambivalent corporeal purpose—the biological imperative of survival combined with the physical costs of that survival. Dana acknowledges her use of Alice’s body as a shield against her own oblivion, and her striking resemblance to Alice serves as both Dana’s haunting and her drive toward self-­ protection. In a Lacanian/Freudian gesture of recognition, Dana looks at Alice and sees both herself and enough of the other that she can use to further her own existence.15 She must pay for this knowledge, this transgressive corporeal intimacy.16 In a 1991 interview Octavia Butler was asked the question that she would find herself answering repeatedly whenever she spoke about her novel Kindred: Why Dana’s arm? “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back,” Butler answered. “I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.”17 Dana’s physical fragmentation is more than most readers can bear, as it disrupts the psychic fantasy of the unbreakable black female body. A missing arm cannot be easily ignored, especially when Dana tells how she lost it: Something harder and stronger than Rufus’s hand clamped down on my arm, squeezing it, stiffening it, pressing into it—painlessly, at first—melting into it, meshing with it as though somehow my arm were being absorbed into something. Something cold and nonliving. Something . . . paint, plaster, wood—a wall. The wall of my living room. I was back at home—in my own house, in my own time. But I was still caught somehow, joined to the wall as though my arm were growing out of it—or growing into it. From the elbow to the ends of the fingers, my left arm had become a part of the wall. I looked at the spot where flesh joined with plaster, stared at it uncomprehending. It was the exact spot Rufus’s fingers had grasped. I pulled my arm toward me, pulled hard. And suddenly, there was an avalanche of pain, red, impossible agony! And I screamed and screamed.18 Her left arm caught between the present and the past, Dana cannot free herself from her own history and connection to slavery. Her slave body 100 Chapter Three

ties her to the horrifying reality of the life most slave women were forced to endure. As Kindred insists, endurance is dangerous. While Dana is on the Weylin plantation, her body refigures the metaphoric landscape of her ancestral Maryland home; she follows the trajectory of Rufus’s bodily trauma. Yanked back and forth from the present to an enslaved past each time Rufus’s body is threatened, Dana is unprotected throughout the narrative so that she is preoccupied with ensuring her existence in the future. If Rufus does not live, she cannot be born. In the context of her journeys back and forth, she experiences the life of a slave woman—with its rendering of trauma that unfolds continually on her worldly flesh. Kindred is exceptional in that the reader is constantly aware of Dana’s impending physical not wholeness. Her amputation does not come abruptly at the end of the narrative but instead haunts the text, threading together the repetition of pain that has become Dana Franklin’s present life. The novel places the visual of bodily pain slave women endured at the center of the narrative and explores the trajectories of damaged black bodies. We are left with the legacy of Dana’s body, as witness and informant, enslaved and free, marked and re-­created. We are forced to look— an activity that then makes us complicit, our gestures laced with participation. Turning away becomes less of an option, and it is precisely this uncomfortable gaze we must contend with. The fragmented nature of black Atlantic maternity, as it was highlighted in the previous chapter, marks the physical space of black womanhood as one wounded by slavery and augmented through its ruptured recovery. Instead of a communal reconciliation of the flesh (as is intended in Beloved, for instance), we find that black women’s literal and symbolic bodies complicate the arc of slave survival so fully that an obliteration of the corpus makes less of an immediate visual impact.19 In Monstrous Intimacies, Christine Sharpe attends to the “post-­slavery subject positioned within everyday intimate brutalities who is said to have survived or to be surviving the past of slavery that is not yet past” and endeavoring to make legible just how difficult that might be.20 This is a feat of survival that takes place on and through a usable corpus—a breakable, vulnerable, pregnable corpus—proximate and familial, available and replenishable.21 Memory, here, is the haunting Mitchell imagines making one a “slave of time.” But what if cultural productions could attempt to reframe memory—reorder and refashion it to suit collective needs? The Boundaries of Excess 101

This chapter explores a post–­civil rights era proliferation of bulletproof, armed, and armored black female bodies, constructed as the answer to an ever-­present racial conundrum: How does one survive slavery’s flesh-­and-­blood defeating processes? The answer: use black women’s bodies as the shield against which all atrocities can be siphoned, all exploitations contained. Black female bodies are often rendered as invisible armor, the “sturdy black bridges” that have the ability to emerge from the horrors of slavery physiologically intact. This intactedness facilitates the politics of guilt and shame so instrumental to diasporic capacities of processing trauma. As the structure of slavery and patriarchy placed black women’s bodies in a strategically unprotected positionality, the resurrection of representation in the 1960s through 1980s was particularly invested in narratives of prowess. “Such contradictions,” Robyn Wiegman writes, “haunt in various ways all black bodies in modernity, especially as subjectivity, humanity, and the privileges of patriarchal gender were repeatedly cast as unintelligible aspects of the slave’s being.”22 Historical figures and cultural icons loom large here, not only managing to keep all of their original metaphoric limbs but bequeathed an extra one of deadly intention: the rifle. Those figures not gifted with militaristic weaponry have the capacity for supreme success within the corpus itself. Bodies made of translucent and extravagant armor. History has held Aunt Jemima, Harriet Tubman, Nanny of the Maroons, and even Blessed Anastácia stagnant within the realm of rigid memory—disallowing the necessary evolution of imagery. In addition to these icons of historical and cultural creation, there are the fictionalized renderings of black women that attempt, as in Kindred, to place an emphasis on slavery’s gendered manifestations, its resounding aftereffects.

The Primacy of the Body in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–­winning novel Beloved tells the story of Sethe, a former slave so traumatized by her experiences within the system that when threatened with a return (due to the geographic extensions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850), she attempts to murder her children so they will not have to know the world that she does. She succeeds in killing only her third child, who returns to Sethe and her last daughter, Denver, as a ghost-­made-­flesh called Beloved. With no history to speak of (and no 102 Chapter Three

clear narrative of where she has been), Beloved is taken in first as a lovely stranger, a curiosity, and then as kin. This, of course, is where things get tricky for everyone at 124 Bluestone Road. Because she has no past that can be deciphered, Beloved (the lovely stranger) communicates through gestures, grunts, and the incoherence of a seemingly forming language. All body, partial memory, and one name, when she first arrives at Sethe’s home it is the violence of physical exhaustion that takes precedence over all other activities, a force that regulates her movements and her body. “Four days she slept,” Morrison writes, “waking and sitting up only for water.”23 Denver acts as her nurse, interpreter, and protector, providing a shadow upon which Beloved eventually stitches herself together, one retrieved or requested memory at a time. “Tell me,” the lovely stranger asks of Sethe soon after she arrives, “tell me your diamonds.”24 The story of Sethe’s wedding gift from Sweet Home is about a pair of crystal earrings presently “gone . . . long gone” by the time Beloved makes her way to Ohio.25 The stories Sethe weaves for Beloved, of her time at Sweet Home, her relationship with Halle, and the memory of her own mother (unnamed, branded, and hung by the gallows) allow a space of self-­retrieval for Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. It takes the presence of this ghost-­made-­flesh to facilitate the totality of familial and corporeal loss. In the fragmented section told from her point of view (the first of two such sections near the end of the novel), it is Beloved who sketches out her attempted self-­retrieval in the bits and pieces of her particular “rememory.” The narrative is thus jagged and violent, with broken spaces in between that simultaneously attempt to witness and record (“the man on my face is dead”) and to process the full import of slavery’s resonant trauma (“we are all trying to leave our bodies behind”).26 Beloved recalls and re-­creates in this liminal space of sight, smell, and horrifying sound. In this arena of mediated terror, sensory impulses meld, but there is no getting around the primacy of the body—nowhere to put it so that it might be safe, nowhere it can hide without its mechanized imprint. Vessel, tool, or canvas of modernity, she is both attempting to articulate the impossible task of “leaving the body behind” and stitching through disparate corporeal spaces the uneasy temporal destruction that attends slavery’s reckoning. “All of it is now,” she says, “it is always now.”27 If “it is always now,” then it has always been then, and the living and the dead, The Boundaries of Excess 103

the slave and the magistrate all occupy the same space in the corporeal contemporary.28 Beloved’s section vacillates between past, present, and future tense, and as for punctuation, beyond the first sentence there is none: in the beginning the women are away from the men and the men are away from the women storms rock us and mix the men into the women and the women into the men that is when I begin to be on the back of the man for a long time I see only his neck and his wide shoulders above me I am small I love him because he has a song when he turned around to die I see the teeth he sang through his singing was soft his singing is of the place where a woman takes flowers away from their leaves and puts them in a round basket before the clouds she is crouching near us but I do not see her until he locks his eyes and dies on my face we are that way there is no breath coming from his mouth and the place where breath should be is sweet-­smelling the others do not know he is dead I know his song is gone now I love his pretty little teeth instead.29 Jennifer DeVere Brody argues that in the realm of the performative, “punctuation choreographs and orchestrates thought.”30 Though punctuation is not employed upon the page, the fragmented section of Beloved invites the reader to fill in the very grammatical information denied. It is the puncture of the absented, the ellipsis engendered. “The ellipsis marks both presence and absence,” DeVere Brody states.31 “The ellipsis tarries with negative space and suggests the not (t)here. Ellipses (un)cover (un) familiar ghosts. These blank black bullets bore into our psyches asking us as we read them to project and imagine what might be . . . behind, beyond, and within them.”32 The ellipsis that is not there symbolically registers for the “60 million and more” Morrison presents to the reader at the onset of the novel.33 A forced pause: “the air is heavy I am not / dead I am not there is a house there is what she whispered to me I am where she told me I am not / dead.”34 Devoid of a visual component to accompany her disembodied voice, Beloved marks an engagement upon the page that takes the place of the body. Within the fragmented spaces/statements and the disjointed prose is the world of the visible and the invisible. Each repeated utterance of the

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declaration “I am not dead” is an interruption: first the refusal (“I am not”), then the manner of subjectivity in flux (“dead”). Significantly for our purposes here, more than any other punctuated demarcation this section of the novel can only truly be reconciled with the “absent presence” of the ellipsis—first because it is the only marker that would logically fit the space, and second because its own absence elongates the temporal demarcation of the pause (possibly adding a fourth dot to the three already present in the punctuation). “Like empty signifiers,” DeVere Brody writes, “they mark a desire whose meaning can never be fulfilled but must always be filled.”35 Morrison fills the empty spaces of the text with that desire, “to leave our bodies behind” while visually accounting for the totalizing subtraction of so many bodies within a system of racial domination. It is here that the puncture of the absented solidifies itself, and where the ellipsis is engendered. In the repetition of the rocking of the waves that the section intimates and the reordered syntax of the fragmented phrases and sentences, bodies fall out of the narrative. People are lost, to disease, malaise, mishandling, and the vagaries of precarious survival. If read as a reenactment of the Middle Passage, full of longing and loss, the profundity of that loss is corporeal. In the purgatory of the Passage, the in-­between of this perilous journey, Beloved remarks, “it is hard to make yourself die forever.”36 Volition exists within the absence of punctuation, for “those able to die are in a pile” but she is not—not “able to die” and “not/dead.”37 She is certain of her continued fragmenting, her coming repeatedly apart: “I am going to be in pieces,” she says, and only once.38 To “be in pieces” as the future tense of her present state, she is foreshadowing the disintegration of her fleshed-­out form at the precise moment that she is also searching for a way to hold herself together: “Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing.”39 Earlier in the same passage Beloved’s repeated phrase “I am not dead” is articulated without a break, as one uninterrupted declarative statement. At the very limits of the body’s ability to “leave itself behind” and also render itself “not dead,” the muted and the missing, the walking and the wounded divide the line between what is recoverable and recallable within the black imaginary. Beloved’s fleshed-­out existence in the

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novel underscores both the tremendous sense of loss represented and the multiple attempts by many in the novel to play out the break within this breakage.

Something about Flesh, Something about Word Beloved is concerned with the articulations of excess that slavery demands but refuses to acknowledge. These excesses, for the characters in the novel, are of the flesh-­parsing type, as disparate members of traumatized subjectivities reveal themselves in the novel to be negotiating inflictions of the mind and the body and the sliver of space between what Saidiya Hartman calls “the glimpse of freedom” and a near-­totalizing containment of black bodies under the rubric of transatlantic slavery.40 In this space it is often difficult to mark the dividing line between the slave past and Beloved’s declaration that “it is always now.”41 Everything in the novel bends to a temporal order that is disordered and people rendering their humanity through the bodies marked for marginalized objectification. In the novel Baby Suggs is charged with using the word to bring people out of a state of pure flesh. As Sethe soothes herself with a memory of Baby Suggs preaching in the Clearing, we see a stratified hierarchy of “we” and “them” that hinges on the excesses of violence driving the slave system and its concomitant racial demarcations. “Love your hands!” she tells her audience. “Love them.”42 Marking the space between an amorphous “they” and the body-­ destroying tendencies “they” possess, Baby Suggs desires a reclaiming of the flesh that whites (“they”) would rather “flay,” “use,” “tie,” “bind,” “chop off,” and “leave empty.”43 When she insists that her congregation find affection for their own mouths, she is imploring that they come to voice despite the fact that this seems a futile mission. “What you say out of it they will not heed,” she says. “What you scream from it they will not hear.”44 In this moment of rhetorical self-­possession, Baby Suggs uses the inhumanity of slavery to ritualize the survival of these (mostly) former slaves. The Clearing represents an attempted ordering of the promiscuity of disorder rigidly fixing itself to the lives of the formerly enslaved. And all of it is now . . . : “Here,” Baby Suggs begins, “in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love 106 Chapter Three

it hard.”45 Presenting black subjectivity as “loved” flesh endeavoring to make itself visible, Baby Suggs’s repeated implorings reverse those Beloved negotiates collectively alone (“we are all trying to leave our bodies behind”). Indeed, Suggs’s persistent imperatives are about foregrounding the primacy of the body within the space of an externally produced market system of forced labor. In the Clearing they are all trying, it would seem, to get their bodies back. “So love your neck,” she tells them, “put a hand on it . . . grace it, stroke it and hold it up.”46 To make the body central to healing and critical to the way the victims of slavery articulate that victimization is to place the corporeal at the very border of what it means to be human and enslaved, with all of the illogical irony involved in the process. The space between a literal break in the corporeal (Dana’s severed arm, Suggs’s hip) and a temporal one (“it is always now”) is equally dependent upon the body to play its violated part. In a visceral symphony of the grotesque that is all dissonance, all sound, Baby Suggs tries to reorganize the tempo: “Saying no more, she stood up then and danced,” Morrison writes.47 In what Fred Moten has described as “a spatio-­temporal constitution,” Sethe stands in the Clearing reliving a memory of flesh that is reclaimed through the dead mother of a missing husband, while bringing her two daughters (one alive for certain, one lacking all certainty) to this space of temporal and corporeal conflation.48 Created, sustained, and facilitated by a circle of women related by blood and trauma, the hidden and circular nature of the Clearing mimics the cyclical nature of voluntary and forced memory. Like Sethe, Baby Suggs has slavery inscribed into her flesh, and like Sethe, her memories are interfering with her waking life, forming a circle of pain (or “sorrow” and “misery” in Morrison’s parlance) that never ends for her. “Everything depends on knowing how much,” Suggs states. “Good is knowing when to stop.”49 Because her later phrase of excess haunts the narrative (“There is no bad luck in the world but white people. . . . They don’t know when to stop”), the statement pulls the narrative forward through the hideous decades of Reconstruction and into the twentieth century, where it would appear that knowing when to stop with black bodies is an experiment that is still failing.50

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Mapping the Corporeal Terrain of Aunt Jemima For representations of the pancake imagery icon Aunt Jemima, excess layers the discursive contours of her imagined flesh—repeatedly. As one of the most enduring figures from the dominant narrative of North American slavery, the mammy and her consumerist counterpart Aunt Jemima symbolized servitude and obedience and was the epitome of the happy slave. The layers—her layers—are essential to the cultural impetus: the conflation of asexuality and maternity, imbued with an intense physicality. Corporeally, as recent scholarship has pointed out, it was important that the persona embodied by Aunt Jemima had all the attributes of asexuality that the slaveocracy might necessitate.51 This included most often an imagistic portrayal of obesity, confounded by dark, invulnerable skin tones. The corpulence of Aunt Jemima worked toward eroding the historical body of unprotection by making reference to her physical overpresence, while her skin color signaled the absence of sexual exploitation. And as the antithesis of the plantation mistress, this woman was not fragile; she could not break, and her body size, fictional or not, envisioned power and force to a willing audience.52 It is through the method of black Atlantic protectionism—the “slave mother” as cultural shield against which almost any trauma can be mediated—that we must explore mammy’s longevity. In Clinging to Mammy, Micki McElya states that during the nineteenth century, “discussions of lynching were explicitly joined in the black press to recognition of widespread sexual assault against African American women historically and contemporaneously,” yet this acknowledgment is almost always filtered through mammy’s body (“lynching her sons, raping her daughters”)—the reverse subjectivity spoken of abstractly, distanced, and viewed only in relation to her familial attachments.53 As black nationalist ideologies were taking form in the United States and elsewhere in the diaspora, they altered the roles historically charged images and symbols were allowed to perform.54 Artists from the African diaspora used the contested image of Aunt Jemima and demanded of it something more. The creation of the mammy/Aunt Jemima as a tool aiding in the justification of lynched black male bodies went undiscussed. Artists quickly invented a sort of Aunt Jemima revolutionary—one with an allegiance to black power rhetoric and a militaristic impulse visually 108 Chapter Three

communicated through the barrel of her weapon of choice—a machine gun. Ideologies of power, attributed to black women unilaterally, continued to dominate the structure of visibility negotiated during this time. Mammy was subsumed by the figure of Aunt Jemima: layered, literally hyperfleshed through a corporeal filling out of her immense responsibilities to black masses in multiple narratives of excess.55 The rhetoric surrounding lynching allowed the black male body to signify the very victimization black women were excluded from, and black men became the victims black women were never allowed to be.56 As Hazel Carby notes, as powerful as lynching imagery was, as much as it is indelibly imprinted on the memory of American culture, there is no image of black women and racial violence that holds the same power, the same inference of corporeal disruption, the same reading of racialized and sexual trauma. There is no visual remnant of this experience, no way for it to be imagined visually.57 Art historian Michael D. Harris is interested in the varied longevity of Aunt Jemima’s visual image, from its origins as “white male minstrel tranvestism in the guise of mammy,” to the post–­Black Arts Movement representative protector-­in-­arms.58 While I agree with Harris’s reading of Joe Overstreet’s acrylic media work The New Jemima (1964) as a “political and symbolic” narrative “predicting or prescribing action rather than recalling experience,” there is possibly another way to look at this imagery (plate 7).59 Overstreet’s pursuit of rupture with respect to Aunt Jemima is played out in New Jemima in a massive way. The work, on fabric over plywood, stands at 1023/8″ × 61″ × 17″ and is created in the image of a box of Aunt Jemima pancake mix. Even Aunt Jemima’s face is replicated for visual recognition. She grips a machine gun in her hands, pointing it in the direction of the plate of pancakes in front of her and shooting white blasts of fire as she smiles deceptively at the viewer. As Harris sees it, Jemima’s smile “insinuates the danger she represents to the status quo since she has removed her ‘happy darkie’ mask.”60 And behind that mask there is her weapon—her body, devoid of the traces of physical abuse or sexual exploitation, with the machine gun reinscribing her power.61 In Kindred, Dana observes a slave named Sarah, a cook on the Weylin plantation. “She was the kind of woman who might have been called “mammy” in some other household,” Dana says. “She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixThe Boundaries of Excess 109

ties.”62 Attending to the symbol within the iconic imagery, Dana still sees “the house-­nigger, the handkerchief head, the female Uncle Tom—the frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose,” even as that image does not encompass a full view of the woman before her.63 Overstreet’s The New Jemima reinforces the veracity of this mythical icon even in its name. As a revision of the older model of Aunt Jemima, The New Jemima insists that things will be different in the future, but for whom? And who will pay the cost of this reinvention? The machine gun as symbolic death to oppressive forces, as the tool of destruction, ironically extends this particular imagery and aids in its ability to re-­create itself continually. In the framework of The New Jemima, violence is ushered outward, toward a definition of Aunt Jemima more readily acceptable to a transnational demographic. Even without a weapon to serve the purpose of visualizing power, Jeff Donaldson’s painting Aunt Jemima and the Pillsbury Doughboy positions Aunt Jemima’s body, absent of weaponry in the midst of street conflict with a uniformed police officer. Although the “doughboy” is armed and poised to strike, Aunt Jemima is no victim in this image. According to Lisa Farrington, “Donaldson redefines Aunt Jemima as a superwoman—­someone who is quite capable of protecting herself against police brutality by direct, one-­on-­one confrontation with her uniformed attacker.”64 Though it is possible to read in Aunt Jemima’s stance (arms up, palms facing the officer as if in surrender) the violence of this confrontation, her vulnerability within the space of resistance, many critics see the rendering of superhuman power coming into contact with state power. Because the desire has been consistently articulated that black women’s bodies be sacrificed in the service of black world consciousness, the residual imagery corresponds to this request. The victim of physical torture and abuse disappears, and “in her place stands an angry and violent fighting machine ready to do battle with guns or fists, posing malevolent danger to man and child.”65 The memory of mammy, projected onto Aunt Jemima—troublesome, varied, and prone to the needs of the black diaspora—continues to obscure the realities of the black women she unfortunately represents.66 Robert Hayden’s pseudohistorical subject in his poem “Aunt Jemima

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of the Ocean Waves” refers to herself as others have called her: the “Sepia High Stepper,” a term that frames her body within the technology of photographic production (sepia print: gold toning) and corporeal performance (high stepper: defining her body in terms of her gait or rhythmic movement).67 This framing is extended through the poem as the speaker/ poet Hayden observes: “She laughs, but I do not, knowing what / her laughter shields. And mocks.”68 What he also knows is what her laughter creates—the auditory structure of displaced visual subjectivity, and the enclosures of a lifetime of exposed flesh. As the woman smokes a cigarette next to the narrator, “not saying any more,” he imagines: Scream of children in the surf, adagios of sun and flashing foam, the sexual glitter, oppressive fun . . . . An antique etching comes to mind: “The Sable Venus” naked on a baroque Cellini shell—voluptuous imago floating in the wake of slave-­ships on fantastic seas69 For Hayden and the poetic figure of Jemima, there is no way to separate the historical trajectory of her corporeal forced endurance from slavery and slaughter, visuality and envisioning. There is no way to frame a poem ostensibly about a man who happens upon an older black woman, now part of a carnival show exhibiting her body to a willing audience so that they may enjoy the fantasy of her “fixed identity.” There is no true space for her subjectivity. She has images, but no portraits that portray the self she wants to offer to the world. The desire to contain what makes she and he “confederates” does not allow either one to be free within that confederacy. Hers is a body negotiating the contours of the frame that has been her tether to a life not of her own making. The speaker ends where he began, not quite sure of what this experience signifies, and having no true knowledge of the mysterious figure he has just met. He is overwhelmingly aware of the doubling of two slightly distorted truths—­ walking stereographs offering no interiority to those photographically represented. Hayden’s “Aunt Jemima” reminds the reader of the fragmented black iconographic figure, real and created—from the sexualThe Boundaries of Excess 111

ized figure of Josephine Baker to mammy, and marks the divide as one intensely invested in the negotiation of familial and sexual legacies.70 Betye Saar’s mixed-­media assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972; plate 8) is another such representation, mired in the inconsistencies of the familial, the national, and the generational. In this work, Aunt Jemima’s mammy likeness is fitted with a rifle and a gaze of retribution and defiance. She refuses the mammy of the white supremacist past and is the agent of her own reinvention. She does not feel pain; she inflicts it. And in her empowered self-­representation, she is without the residual effects of oppression. Cushioned as she is by the Aunt Jemima pancake mix wallpaper in the background and the image of the plantation mammy holding the white charge to her front, the “liberation” in Aunt Jemima’s title is questionable. But the viewer may still be able to imagine that Aunt Jemima, boxed in and layered by gradations of her stereotypical image, has willed herself to “liberation” through violence. The weapons are oddly placed for battle, though. The small pistol protrudes from her side just below her breast, and the rifle leans conspicuously against her large frame, unacknowledged by her. A black power fist rises up and is layered over her skirt, exposing the invisible barrier between her asexuality and her stereotypical necessity to plantation rhetoric. But it is not her fist that rises up out of the ground. She is as she has always been constructed: a tool to serve collective needs. Removed from the servile experience of her enslaved past, this eternal symbol can now work for her intended employers—the black family. Her body fluctuates through a series of impossible collective desires. As the rifle leans against her frame, it is the fist that does violence to her body and her memory. Obliteration and regeneration are what the image seems to offer, but like Hayden’s protagonist, the image does not fit the frame, and the framing distorts the image. If, as the title announces, Aunt Jemima is now “liberated,” the trauma of slavery’s past has somehow also been liberated. Survival success as Aunt Jemima reflects it is considered contagious, and one black woman of spectacular endurance represents a multitude of others. The scars inflicted by the institution disappear into the barrel of mammy’s rifle, fading from sight. This is not so much “liberation” as it is subterfuge. And since “Aunt Jemima” is still mammy, we, as her viewers, are indicted in

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her incomplete resurrection. The speaker in Hayden’s poem reminds her of a former flame, “Dead before his time, / Killed in the war / to save the world for another war.”71 She, too, is dead before her time, buried beneath the cultural constructions that facilitate a national narrative of guilt and shame. The metaphoric “layering” of imagery surrounding Aunt Jemima is more troubling when we think about her as a constructed image—a figure created to erase hundreds of years of sexual and physical exploitation, a secret promise to the slaveocracy. Once a weapon is thrust upon her, the viewer witnesses the construction becoming real—real enough to resist silent service to whites. Reclaimed by African Americans and ready for battle, her fabricated existence is no longer in question. She exists, just not any longer for the pleasure of whites. The danger is in the reinforcement of the very same rendering writers and artists attempted to refute in the past. Rifles and representation have long been in dialogue, especially when the rifle is placed in the hands of an otherwise vulnerable body, one potentially exposed to the horrific aspects of transatlantic slavery. When a weapon appears, poised to inflict harm, there are layers of failed protection (physical, sexual) working to weigh down the image, exposing the multilayered dimensions of an unresolved history. As the hypersexualized black male body shifted meaning over time, so did his female counterpart. The creation of the Aunt Jemima/mammy had the ability to obscure the visibility of numerous slave era violations. Artist Faith Ringgold, for instance, refused to portray Aunt Jemima “as a gun-­toting revolutionary,” since she saw it simply as the opposite extreme of an already embattled image.72 As we will see, the rifle as “omnipotent” protection is not a visual strategy lost on post–­civil rights era artists, linked as it is to transatlantic processes of slave memory.73 When speaking about the testimonies of the Holocaust, W. J. T. Mitchell argues that the “refusal to ‘go back’ in memory” is tantamount to the “refusal to revive a visual memory, to remember an experience in a form that brings it too close, too near to a re-­experience of the unspeakable.”74 Unspeakable mammy imagery from slavery functions on a similar terrain, representing collective pain through marked bodies while obscuring the violent connectedness to other bodies. The refusal to delve is

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an insistent one. Coalescent and anxiously defined, it is redacted visually while it hopes for an absence of utterance. It is here that Aunt Jemima shares a collective “refusal to go back” with the historical icon Harriet Tubman. They are both mediated through the ever-­present needs of black Atlantic subjects, appearing and fading at will—shielded and armed protectors bound to cultural demands.

Rifles and Representation: Harriet Tubman’s Bound Memory In 2000, artist Mike Alewitz became embroiled in a bitter conflict with the city of Baltimore. A mural he had proposed featuring the image of Harriet Tubman was in danger of being vetoed before it was even created. According to the Washington Times, the Associated Black Charities of Baltimore, which initially asked for the mural to be painted on a wall outside its building recoiled after hearing the artist’s plan for the dedication. The scene, entitled Harriet Tubman’s Dreams, featured the former slave parting a massive sea and leading her people to freedom. In one hand she carried a lantern, and in the other, a rifle. The group argued that Tubman’s rifle-­ toting likeness, in a city besieged by three hundred murders per year, was irresponsible and dangerous. But Alewitz would not be moved. “I will not disarm Harriet Tubman,” he said. And for that the ABCB vowed to find a more suitable place for his memorial. Besides, the group insisted, she never carried a rifle; she carried a pistol.75 At the center of artistic memorials that honor Tubman, there is inevitably that rifle. And although it is clear that it is a tool Tubman never utilized while transporting slaves to the North, it is a part of the cultural consciousness, as necessary to her image as she is to American history. The insistence upon weaponry, with its underlying reliance on the viewer’s participatory slave memory, further encapsulates this image and expedites its permanence. Multiple visual references to battle connoted by the mere imagistic rendering of a rifle in the hands of an ordinarily unprotected body provide invisible layers, which deepen both desire and historical denial. Functioning on what critic Shirley Carrie calls “retrogressive memorialization,” the weapon provides the necessary armor for corporeal transference and creates a historical past more easily absorbed by the contemporary counter narrative.76

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Representations of black women utilize images of physical resilience for any number of reasons. When it comes to propelling images of brute physical strength to a mass audience, the message can most easily be conveyed by utilizing the corporeal mythology of the black female slave. As Michele Wallace explains: “She was believed to be not only emotionally callous but physically invulnerable—stronger than white women and the physical equal of any man of her race. She was stronger than white women in order to justify her performing a kind of labor most white women were now presumed to be incapable of. She had to be considered at least the physical equal of the black man so that he would not feel justified in attempting to protect her.”77 According to Jacqueline Jones, on southern plantations “slaveholders had little use for sentimental platitudes about the delicacy of the female constitution when it came to grading their ‘hands’ according to physical strength and endurance.”78 Therefore, “together with their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, black women spent up to fourteen hours a day toiling out of doors often under the blazing sun.”79 After that, black women, Jones argues, were relegated to domestic duties within the home that their husbands were not willing to perform. The general upkeep of the domicile, the care of the children, the cooking, and the washing of linen were often considered particularly feminine duties. Black women were caught during slavery between the rhetoric of two worlds at odds. The dominant narrative of slavery insisted that fieldwork was unproblematic for black women due to their “natural” abilities for physical work. The counternarrative supposed that if black women were indeed laced with physical power, it was due to their particular status as the products of slave labor. Harriet Tubman becomes an unfortunate symbol of black female hyperability. Hers is a body of malleable history, projected through the guilt-­laced collective memory of the United States, a stand-­in for the intense militarization of black nationalist imperatives.80 According to Milton C. Sernett, after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, and “in the wake of this rending of the American social fabric, calls went out to reexamine America’s past with new honesty.”81 As such, “writers and publishers scrambled to find African American historical figures more in keeping with the mood of the post-­civil-­rights

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era than earlier icons such as George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington.”82 It is here where the tidal wave of memory concerning Tubman solidifies and hardens, resisting alternative readings.

Purgatories What does it cost to escape the binary limitations of the physical narrative of slavery? Quraysh Ali Lansana proposes that for Harriet Tubman and the people she led, it is a life of limbo and unsettlement, a life of exhaustion and perpetual unrest. His book of poetry They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems is a work that envisions Tubman’s multifaceted life story and her many dimensions of character. The opening piece, “Purgatory,” sets the tone for the book and introduces the reader to the struggles faced by slaves in their search for freedom. The poem consists of eight couplets and follows Tubman on a journey through the treacherous backwoods of the South. The lack of punctuation structures the overall flow of the poem and contributes to the sense of urgency dominating the work. A quote attributed to Tubman serves as an epigraph, linking the title to the horror that slavery was. That sentence, “I think slavery is the next thing to hell,” situates Tubman at the center of resistance efforts.83 The poem itself is another form of resistance as it rejects the desire to make the slave route seem less burdensome than it was for those who sought the possibility of escape. It illustrates how a chance at freedom is often enough to keep a person moving, against the most difficult odds. The poem brings the reader into the ultimately unknowable ordeal that was the slave escape: on this path of becoming shrouded by hoot owl white snake and nosy deer callous feel muster creek rock between toes that know blisters cuts fourteen and three babies people blue black night brown limbs aching

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amidst rusty leaves moses hushes them up the mountain half her body lost in river the other in stars her hands a basket her face grit a young man guiding wife and child through purple water looks over his shoulder at the broken ones in back ghosts rattling their bones84 The physical toll on the human body, emphasized by the “callous feet,” “blisters cuts,” and “brown limbs aching,” merges with the arduous surroundings and attempts to encompass the totality of the collective journey. Tubman is referred to only as the biblical Moses in the work and is split by the structure of the poem into two pieces, with “half her body” lingering over the fifth couplet, while the rest of her comes together through a meeting of heaven and earth woman. The final image in “Purgatory” is unsettling as well, for the man who looks behind at the sight of the others is just like them—half slave and half free, damaged and being chased by death. To that end, “Purgatory” maintains the balance between the “hell” of slavery itself and the “purgatory” of freedom’s attempts. The poem endeavors to connect Tubman’s worldly flesh to the horrors she endured for the sake of others. Up until very recently, what we knew about Harriet Tubman and physical pain is how remarkably she was able to overcome it. The mythology surrounding the abolitionist leader and her multiple bouts with both capture and the traumatic aspects of American slavery attests to the theory that the woman was unbreakable. As her popularity rose quickly across the country and internationally, the Tubman mystique grew to superhuman proportions.85 Her early life was relatively unremarkable until one event both changed and marked it. In numerous accounts, including ones by Sarah Bradford, Earl Conrad, and Benjamin Quarles, a benevolent Tubman sprints to the aid of a slave attempting to escape and is struck in the head by a two-­pound weight. Knocked unconscious, she suffers a fractured skull and battles bouts of “sleeping sickness” for the rest of her life. In her own words Tubman relayed what should have been

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little surprise for anyone who possesses a cursory knowledge of the patterns of cranial injury: she remembered almost nothing of the incident and may very well have been just an innocent bystander when the iron weight was flung.86 Whether Tubman was instrumental or incidental in the attempted slave escape, the injury caused a severe debilitation for the teenager, as it was not known if she would live or die, and her owners feared that she might be monetarily worthless.87 A fragile or bedridden Harriet Tubman is an artistic subject that does not interest most visual producers.88 In order to articulate the grandeur of her exploits, her figure is expanded and extended, her fingers and arms elongated and often muscular(ized), her height exaggerated, and her weapon magnified. More and more, Tubman has become a figure of rendered image and less the product of a documented past. But poised and staged photographs featuring Tubman standing still or sitting with a serious but calm expression on her face betray the black diasporic attempt at historical re-­creation. Visual images featuring Tubman situate her freed black female body as symbolic and collective armor. Poets from Robert Hayden to Lucille Clifton mention with reverence the “pistol” she carried as silent persuasion.89 Yet for visual artists like Alewitz, the pistol is transformed into a cumbersome rifle, noticeable in its inadequacy for travel but necessary, it is assumed, to make the larger point emphasizing the power of the woman. Paul Collins also manipulates this fearsome persona in his portrait Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad. In his image, the viewer is situated as a participant in one of Tubman’s miraculous escapes. Collins’s rendition features the leader crouching by a riverbed and extending her left hand back to protect her human cargo, consisting of three men, a woman, and a baby. In her right hand she carries her trademark rifle, which blends with the angle of the tree branches behind it, becoming a “natural” extension of her body. Tubman’s image, a side-­angle view in which she is face-­to-­face with an imposing threat the viewer is unable to see, forces one to focus on what possibly exists outside the image, as well as on Tubman’s ability to overcome that danger. The viewer is able, in a split second, to navigate the trajectory of Tubman’s super-­womanness and envision multiple scenarios wherein Tubman places her body in the path of destruction and emerges triumphant. The rifle’s position points the way. Michele Wallace finds Tubman’s image to be detrimental to all black women. She 118 Chapter Three

3.1. Photograph of Harriet Tubman in Auburn, NY with family and neighbors, William Cheney, 1887–88.

claims that although Tubman has become the representative strong black woman, “for every single slave woman like Harriet Tubman there were twenty who died in childbirth, went mad or became old by the time they were thirty.”90 Initially, Harriet Tubman’s life narrative and significance were seen through the lens of middle-­class white abolitionists of the nineteenth century who were interested in telling her story. Sarah Bradford’s biography of the former slave, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (1886), upheld most of the conventions of the dominant narrative of slavery.91 Tubman is portrayed as a God-­fearing and physically overpowering woman who is given to singular acts of bravery and performances of deep, affecting spirituals. Bradford paints Tubman as “an unmitigated African” who was so physically strong that “powerful men often stood astonished to see this woman perform feats of strength from which they shrunk incapable.”92 Part of the visual register of Tubman as a figure of deserved admiration is her perceived physical strength. Another part concerns the “unmitigated” nature of her Africanness (read: devoid of white paternity). Contemporary cultural representations of Tubman depend upon her historical image in order to mold a particular remembrance out of the shards of slavery’s past. The Boundaries of Excess 119

Even though they conflated the rifle’s presence in the Civil War with Tubman’s journeys to the North via the Underground Railroad, artists have created a reality out of an image, and we are now unable to envision Harriet Tubman without her armor, her imagined barrier against white wrath. Aiming the rifle outward, toward an invisible white oppressive force, is the most popular choice when visual artists engage the memory of Tubman.93 For them, it is this weapon that draws upon the mythology of her exploits; it is the desired resolution to slavery’s corporeal conundrum. Though we have multiple photographs of Harriet Tubman in the historical archive, there is no photograph of Tubman that rivals the visual imagery created to produce an arc of power within and beyond the woman who embodied slavery’s fiercest resistance in the United States. Standing alone or grouped alongside the formerly enslaved, Tubman’s representations often duplicate the trajectory of movement that framed the abolitionist’s exterior life.

Elizabeth Catlett’s Tubman As one of the foremost artists of her time, Elizabeth Catlett was concerned with representations of famous black American women since the middle of the twentieth century. Her series The Negro Woman (1947–48) examines the accomplishments of well-­known African American women, as well as ordinary women who have been instrumental in ensuring the progress of the nation. Along with Sojourner Truth and Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Tubman features prominently in Catlett’s substantial visual imagination. Catlett’s linocut In Harriet Tubman I Helped Hundreds to Freedom (1946) casts Tubman in the familiar role of liberator. She stands with her back toward the viewer and her right hand outstretched and pointing north to freedom. Tubman appears to tower over the escaped slaves she is guiding to the Promised Land. Appearing nearly twice the size of the men and women in her care, Tubman envelops the image, conjuring thoughts of a benevolent Goliath, easily able to conquer but choosing instead to use her body as a mechanism of emancipation, the antithesis of oppression. Tubman’s command of the image is reinforced by her engagement with the audience. While her back is facing the viewer, Tubman herself is glancing back expressionless. The various male and female slaves she leads face 120 Chapter Three

away from the viewer for the most part, bowed heads leaning in the direction toward which Tubman gestures. The two males who are returning the viewer’s gaze are positioned so far back that their facial expressions are obscured by the dark etchings behind them. Tubman’s gender is signified by the ankle-­length dress that drapes across her body, the canvas bag around her waist, and the headscarf wrapped around her head. Her body is another story. Long, lanky, and muscular, Tubman’s physique commands attention and at the same time disallows outward feminization. Of the three famous women featured in the series, Tubman is the only figure of physicality, the lone figure of movement. Wheatley is portrayed at her writing table, three shackled women in the background, and Truth is at a pulpit, presumably reciting a section of the Bible for her audience. Tubman is in the process of moving, as are the scores of enslaved souls she hopes to emancipate. The figures seem to glide through the racial barriers of bondage, leaning forward in a visible effort to transcend their collective lot. According to Vincent Brown, for slaves on plantations in the Americas, “The most common experience was dislocation and movement. Enslaved men, women, and children moved from trader to trader, and from market to market.”94 Haunting the image is the corporeal and psychic tread that most slaves knew all too well—the “next thing to hell” that carries with it the kind of generational trauma that a figure as awe-­inspiring as Harriet Tubman has the ability to obscure. Catlett registers the totality of this cartography using Tubman as guidepost and guide. The image constructed around Tubman’s memory has been a formidable opponent, refusing to yield to most revisionist attempts to deconstruct it. Jean Humez’s biography Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories delves into the Tubman folklore so instrumental to her lasting legacy. According to Humez, Tubman was a “private woman whose life has virtually disappeared behind the heroic public icon.”95 Catlett portrayed Tubman twice more in the next twenty years. For her second image, Harriet Tubman, Melanie Ann Hertzog writes, “her aim was to produce a specific likeness, immediately recognizable to her African American audience in the United States.”96 Catlett’s work is a linocut reversal, with Tubman again pointing toward freedom. Making obvious reference to Tubman as conductor of the Underground Railroad, the piece shows the leader with a rifle grasped in her The Boundaries of Excess 121

3.2. Harriet, Elizabeth Catlett, 1975. Ralph E. Shikes Fund, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Art © Catlett Mora Family Trust/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by scala/Art Resource, NY.

right hand, the barrel leaning diagonally toward her. Her entire outfit, from headscarf to the satchel around her body, is a replica of the previous nineteenth-­century image. With the weapon at her disposal and her implied self-­determination, the Tubman figure is once again an instrument of awe. Standing tall on a hill, expressionless and stolid, Tubman directs and waits while her cargo makes their safe passage through the perils of slavery. For Harriet (1975) Catlett’s final installation in the Tubman trilogy, the gritty, shadowlike figure from 1946 reappears, only this time she is a fiercer, darker, more forceful and resolute leader (figure 3.2). She is 122 Chapter Three

missing her satchel but has, like her previous counterpart from 1953–54, gained a visible weapon, which points outward. In addition, this Tubman has lost her footwear and leads scores of men, women, and children barefoot to freedom. The dark lines and sharp angles create in the piece a sense of hurried danger—a space in which the unknown hovers over Tubman’s passengers but seems not to affect the leader herself. Catlett has described the three versions of Tubman as “sorrowful,” “stoic,” and “determined.”97 In historical transference there is also re-­creation. And in these re-­creations Tubman is bigger, stronger, and faster. She is the protector of her people, the human shield against which they find sanctuary and deliverance. Harriet Tubman has come to embody the impermanence of slave trauma, the constancy of transcendence, and the representational turning of the body inside out. Her worldly flesh takes on otherworldly capacities and subsumes the woman behind the myth like the rifle we imagine protected her body but was never actually there. Driven and determined and consumed by a singular mission, Tubman’s future representations will attempt to enlarge the visual potency of her weaponry and play down the perpetual ailments of her flesh. To give the people what they want and need, we have to make that journey through Harriet Tubman’s body.

Catching Bullets: The Internal Weaponry of Nanny of the Maroons Harriet Tubman’s and Aunt Jemima’s representational asexuality allows for a discourse around slave women’s sexual vulnerabilities to be discussed with the tentative qualities of projected shame. According to Hazel Carby, in the relative silence of generational miscegenation during slavery, “delicacy, shame, blushing, and being disconcerted were not the conventions governing patriarchal behavior.”98 Instead, “The image of the strong, nonsubmissive black female head of a household . . . became a figure of oppressive proportions with unnatural attributes of masculine power.”99 For the Jamaican historical figure of Nanny of the Maroons, it is precisely her hypersexualized yet impenetrable body that centers her “masculine power” as aimed and dutiful—directed toward slave subjectivity. As the leader of the Windward Maroons, Nanny appears in the historical record as a named member of a treaty between the maroons and the British.100 According to Jenny Sharpe, “Nanny belonged to a period The Boundaries of Excess 123

of Caribbean history that presented the possibility for a black woman to have greater authority than even male warriors and to assume a leadership role.”101 This possibility is rendered through figurations of excessive agency, sorcery, and a body that is literally bulletproof. Michelle Cliff engages a wealth of physical, religious, and sexual mythology concerning Nanny in her novel Abeng (1984), where the maroon leader appears as the spiritual origin of Caribbean resistance: a leader of rebel forces with exceptional battle skills, a woman of motion and change. To fight against British persecution, Cliff ’s version of Nanny gives all that she has carried with her from Africa to the maroons who fight with her: “She teaches her troops to be sure-­footed and to guard the points of access. They hunt with bow and arrow. Spears. Warclubs. They fill the muskets stolen from plantations with pebbles, buttons, coins. She teaches them to become bulletproof. To catch a bullet in their left hand and fire it back at their attackers. Only she can catch a bullet between her buttocks—that is a secret she keeps for herself.”102 Nanny’s powers emphasize her mystical corporeal invulnerability. Historical accounts of how the supernatural informs oral cultures illustrate the Afro-­diasporic reliance upon traditional African methods of spiritualism. The “bullet” Nanny catches between her buttocks illustrates both her sexual and her physical prowess. Cliff places her fictional Nanny at the crossroads between traditional masculinity and overt sexuality, imagining, as Sharpe suggests, “the black female body as a weapon capable of combating the violence of slavery.”103 Of course, this is not necessarily a combating of slavery but more akin to containment such as might lead to a fuller understanding of the corpus under trauma, if one were invested in a gaze of that depth. Flesh-­and-­blood survival during slavery may be defined as uniquely true and majestically false.104 Nanny’s doppelgänger as portrayed in the novel is Mma Alli, a slave on the Savage Plantation. A peculiar sight with “a right breast that had never grown,” Mma Alli’s body illustrates the residues of war without the necessity of a full investigation into the space her “wounded” body occupies.105 Mma Alli exists in the text for the men and women on the plantation who need her comfort, support, and instruction. According to Cliff: She said she was a one-­breasted warrior woman and represented a tradition which was older than the one which had enslaved them. She 124 Chapter Three

Plate 1. When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla, María Magdalena Campos-­Pons. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 2. Help Your Sister, The Slave Rape Series #15, Faith Ringgold © 1973. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 3. Fight to Save Your Life, The Slave Rape Series #3, Faith Ringgold © 1972. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 4. Imitation of Life, Betye Saar, 1975. Collection of halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New York, NY.

Plate 5. Self-­Possession, Lorna Simpson, 1992. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 6. Corridor (phone), Lorna Simpson, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 7. The New Jemima, Joe Overstreet, 1964, 1970. Courtesy of the Menil Collection, Houston. Photograph by Paul Hester.

Plate 8. The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, Betye Saar, 1972. Collection of University of California, Berkeley Art Museum; purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (selected by The Committee for the Acquisition of Afro‐American Art). Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery llc, New York, NY. Photograph by Joshua Nefsky.

Plate 9. Yemaya of the Bay, Anisa Romero, 2002. Courtesy of the artist.

said she was one of the very few of her kind in the new world. Where in some places Mma Alli might have been shunned or cast out or made fun of, the slaves on the Savage Plantation respected her greatly. The women came to her with their troubles, and the men with their pain. She gave of her time and her secrets. She counseled how to escape— and when. She taught the children the old ways—the knowledge she brought from Africa—and told them never to forget them and to carry them on. She described the places they had all come from, where one-­ breasted women were bred to fight.106 This “one-­breasted” warrior woman wages battles on the plantation for the benefit of other slave bodies, not her own. She merely instructs the slaves she encounters on how to resist their collective lot and function, albeit rebelliously, within the system of slavery they must endure. Reading her body as a mutilation that allows for a rendering of her breastlessness as a strength and not illness or loss, Mma Alli translates the body (fragmented, castrated) as one of the ways women can utilize the corporeal as a weapon of will. As a warrior woman, her disfigured body does not reflect weakness or inability, and her healing capabilities as an obeah woman separate her from the rest of the slave population on the plantation. Although it is clear in the narrative that Mma Alli is a slave, she is not perceived as one of the enslaved members of the population. The Ghanaian war horn known as the abeng, associated in Jamaica with the Maroons (and one in particular, Nanny), holds a dominant position in the novel that bears its name.107 The one-­breasted warrior woman kept the abeng “oiled with coconut and suspended from a piece of sisal and a fishhook,” always close at hand in her cabin on the Savage Plantation.108 She is the literary interpretation of Nanny—at a moment’s notice prepared to do battle with the enemy in order to secure the freedom of her fellow enslaved people. Her resilience is imagined as body armor, and she is considered to be devoid of fear, full of sacrificial purpose. This sacrificial purpose is put to the test when Mma Alli’s pseudoapprentice Inez decides to leave the Savage Plantation and seek out land for herself and the fellow slaves who will be free the next day. Inez is the forced mistress of Justice Savage, and Mma Alli first helps the young woman by guiding “the mixed up baby she carried” out of her body, much in the same manner as Xuela in The Autobiography of My Mother.109 Inez The Boundaries of Excess 125

hopes to return the favor by securing farmland for her people to work, so that they may sustain themselves after slavery and make their own living. Justice Savage has other plans for the slaves, and in another instance of rage and entitlement, the judge decides that “these people were his property, and they were therefore his to burn.”110 A day before emancipation, the judge decides that he would rather set his slaves on fire than set them free. As Cliff writes, “Not all died that night; some escaped into the interior of the island and managed to find Inez. There she was waiting for them with land and tools. They told her that the fire began at the cabin of Mma Alli and that the old warrior woman—their strict teacher and true sister—had been trapped as the flames caught the thatch and the tightly woven palm collapsed inward.”111 Cliff ’s imagery provides an apt metaphor for the status of the black female body in representational renderings “trapped” in a “tightly woven” narrative that folds over on itself and regulates the relationship between myth and memory. And while this section of the novel is utilized as background information on the protagonist Claire Savage’s troubled lineage, the reader is left with a full sense of Claire’s pain and quickly forgets the place Mma Alli occupies in the narrative. As a character made in the image of Nanny, Mma Alli, even in death, serves the purpose of collective intention. Jenny Sharpe insists that “the story of Nanny is the story of contending forms of knowledge: written versus oral histories, colonial versus national cultures, institutional versus popular ways of knowing.”112 Among these complicated and multilayered images, the artistic renderings of Nanny have contributed to her present prominence. The poet Grace Nichols envisions Nanny as an “earth substance woman / of science / and black fire magic,” fully capable of inflicting pain on those who would seek to reenslave the escaped Maroons.113 The image of Nanny as a force to be reckoned with is extended as Nichols writes that Nanny is an awe-­ inspiring warrior. The source of Nanny’s power is spiritual. There are no guns for this “Ashanti Priestess.” There is no army. There is only the resplendent figure of Nanny, “Standing over the valleys / dressed in purple robes.” bracelets of the enemy’s teeth curled around your ankles in rings of ivory bone 126 Chapter Three

And your voice giving sound to the Abeng its death cry chilling the mountainside which you inhabit like a strong pursuing eagle114 This artistic elevation of the Maroon leader is liberating and redeeming and yet is also dangerous. From the depths of domination and oppression a figure is created, able to absorb trauma with grace, showing no evidence of ever knowing pain. The struggle between a legacy of slavery pregnant with the devastation it left behind, and the black-­world desire to transcend this system has placed added burdens on an already burdened bodily text.115 Collective desire occupies the space of slavery’s resonance in the contemporary act of remaking and mythmaking, ultimately “mouthing a new beginning song.”116 Lorna Goodison’s poem “Nanny” imagines the rebel leader as imbued with spectacular internal gifts enabling her to combat slavery, avoid capture, and ridicule history. Hers is a body of intricate mystical detail, created by the gods, summoned by the ancestors, and able to alter itself to the demands of war: “My breasts flattened / settled unmoving against my chest / my movements ran equal / to the rhythms of the forest.”117 The transformation that takes place solidifies Nanny’s clandestine powers, rendering her invulnerable and impenetrable. Goodison’s Nanny, ever moving, ever fighting, is imagined with her strength intact and her duty instilled in her from her days in Africa. “And when my training was over,” Nanny insists, “they circled my waist with pumpkin seeds and dried okra, a traveller’s jigida / and sold me to the traders / all my weapons within me.”118 These internal weapons of Nanny’s grant her the assurance necessary to thrive as a female leader in a male-­centered war. And yet the next line implies that she is but one member in a network of purpose-­ bound militaristic abolitionists. “I was sent, tell that to history.”119 For Goodison, Nanny exists more as an icon than a mythologized subject. Her poem insists upon historical redemption, placing the ex-­slave at the center of Jamaica’s legacy of slave resistance. The poem also imagines Nanny as a spiritual figure chosen by the ancestors in Africa to help the enslaved fight for their freedom. The Boundaries of Excess 127

In Honor Ford-­Smith’s poem “A Message from Ni,” an alternate vision of the leader emerges, one laced with fear, apprehension, and self-­doubt. While still envisioned as a leader of the Maroons, Nanny is alternately imagined as a woman plagued by the burden of her responsibilities. These burdens, physical and psychological, are recognizable to her. She sees them in the bodies she has been entrusted to protect. In the poem, Nanny tells of the multiple journeys she must travel alone, journeys that are Blinded by a future I could not vision, my old words meaningless, choked to silence in a forest of trees I had no names for, I fell and fell, was lost, bled, marooned in a landscape that grew stranger with each discovery I made.120 Ford-­Smith’s rendition of Nanny’s historical record is one of the rare instances in which Nanny is not portrayed as the all-­knowing vessel of resistance and retribution. She is a woman with faults, fears, and uncertainty. “My body shook in battle,” she claims, “and I vomited after seeing the dead.”121 The constant bodily motions of a woman on the move—a woman who fully recognizes her own mythology—are stressful to the military leader, since “that woman they describe” is a stranger to her. From the first-­person point of view of her historicized past, Nanny, or Ni, as she is also known, professes: Once for hours I climbed that cracked crumbling black rock, till hunched up and hungry I could stare down at the oceans of cane bound by the sunlit grid of straight roads and study the repetitious movements of slaves Tied as I am to that treadmill of change, I envied them obedience’s freedom I hungered for their assured meals their chance to confuse imitation with innovation, to trace all evil to one source outside themselves.122 Though mindful of her binding to “that treadmill of change” forcing her to keep moving forward through history, she is unable to pause and con128 Chapter Three

template her destiny. Ford-­Smith’s Nanny is a woman who slowly convinces herself that she is the icon “they write so much about” because she has to be, and because this is the place where she is all-­powerful. “That was all I had / to hold against surrender, to hold against the defeat that would make me visible in / their history and I wanted that, / I was that vain.”123 In the end, Ni confesses, “it was terror that drove me on / till it was all over and I heard / I was Ni eye of change / leadress pathfinder healer of the breach.”124 The revolutionary leader as a frightened, bitter, and tormented being, as a crumbling archetype emoting pain, is a figure of mediation between the binaries of victimization and gratuitous agency. Connecting the legend to Nanny’s more earthbound exploits, Ford-­Smith navigates the landscape of Jamaican historiography and memorialization, doing so to highlight the rarely examined interior life of this important Afro-­Caribbean leader.

Renee Cox’s River Queen Visual artist Renee Cox also does battle with various images from black women’s collective history throughout the diaspora using water and self. Born in Jamaica and raised in the United States, Cox illustrates the visuality of collective intention with her series Queen Nanny of the Maroons (figure 3.3). River Queen, a photograph overwhelming in size and dimension and connecting to a figurative Nanny who is between heaven and earth, land and water, shows a lone Cox, as Nanny, sitting stoically in the middle of a river, legs apart, arms resting on her thighs, her gaze half acknowledging the viewer and half refusing to engage the silent discussion concerning the historical Nanny. Cox embodies all that Nanny is believed to be without fitting neatly into any designation or box. Her home is in the dense forest of Jamaica, and yet she is homeless; she is queen of an alternative throne, yet her constituents are nowhere to be found. The Blue Mountains are behind her and illustrate the same landscape of freedom that Nanny helped to create during her reign. But this time Nanny is placed in front of the mountains, in front of history; nor is she obscured by the power of her own mythology. She does not stir, leap, reach, or lurch. She places herself at the crossroads between two distinct possibilities: supremacy and survival. She leaves it to the viewer to decide which is more dangerous, which more laced with embodied possibility. As a phoThe Boundaries of Excess 129

3.3. River Queen, Renee Cox, from Queen Nanny of the Maroons, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

tographer interested mostly in self-­portraits, Cox embodies this figure of history in order to situate herself in the space between individual and collective intent. Cox is acutely aware of the gender implications when attempting to represent a figure as iconic as Nanny. She is known for portraying history’s quiet inner spots, the places where race and gender are absented from the dominant discourse.125 River Queen does battle with Nanny’s image in the middle of the landscape she is famous for conquering. With no abeng, no rifle, no impending and immediate threat against the flesh, Nanny is allowed in the image to concern herself with her own contemplations and intentions. She is allowed a space rarely afforded historical black female bodies in artistic renderings. She is allowed to just be still—to just be.126 Perhaps as a testament to the rigors of Caribbean slavery, Nanny’s representations require that her body absorb the extremities of slave violence in a manner befitting her memory. Her corporeal sacrifice is full of imagery and internal weaponry—bulletproof and magnetized. She is spiritually and culturally extended—and her body is the site of unspeakable collective histories moving through time. As far as slave deities go, she fills this need in full. For Blessed Anastácia, Brazil’s slave deity, in opposition to Nanny’s configuration, is in a state of always dying—a purposeful, determined, and stoic death that she has no protection from, that she seeks no protection against.

Blessed Anastácia and the Body of Devoted Retrieval Blessed Anastácia’s construction in the popular imaginary of Brazil is all image and no weapon, all dedication and no speech: beloved in the acceptance of her duty to others and not self and, of course, nonexistent. Unlike Nanny of the Maroons or Harriet Tubman, and different from representations of Aunt Jemima, Blessed Anastácia exudes the vicissitudes of corporeal limitation, as her body illustrates the extremities of slave violence while proving that it is her pleasure and her duty to sacrifice her flesh for slavery’s collective descendants. Self-­ravishment is imagined here as a cultural imperative, and Anastácia as Brazil’s most dedicated practitioner. In Rio de Janeiro, the corporeal recovery of a slave deity with no present The Boundaries of Excess 131

and no past, with dark skin and light blue eyes, takes the ocular place of the representative mixtura fina—exquisite mixture of white and black Brazil. Blessed Anastácia does this from the point of least insistence: she is the visual reiteration of a woman who most likely never existed—a safe space for laying down the burdens of Brazil’s underclass. As a created cultural figure “given” a back history and a sense of divine purpose, Anastácia exudes some of the more contradictory aspects of Brazil’s relationship to race and gender and its long, long history of slavery. Blessed Anastácia is a phenomenon of recent making, although her oral history dates back to the nineteenth century. According to John Burdick, Anastácia’s emergence into Brazilian popular culture begins at a museum in Rio, where Jacques Arago, a French traveler, featured a sketch of a slave wearing a mouth and neck iron. From there, visitors to the museum declared the sketch to be that of folk goddess Anastácia, for whom no image previously existed. The marriage of image and text is complete, and a mythology emerges.127 Marcus Wood writes, “The torture print merely became the outward and visible sign of a living myth that had circulated on a mass scale, in indeterminate and indecipherable ways for an unknown length of time,” giving the people their very own martyr figure.128 Burdick asserts that Anastácia’s memory is mediated by the racial and religious demands of the Cariocas, who see in Anastácia the confluence of victimization and power. Blessed Anastácia’s body is one burdened with the resilient desire of slavery’s descendants. Her body is used to negotiate the space between a victimized slavery, enduring and brutal, and a sort of transcendent humanity, not bound by the limits of pained flesh (figure 3.4). Her image intimates a corporeal dedication beyond the boundaries of life and death, sex and sexuality. More important, Anastácia is marked with the eyes of the whiteness she may or may not possess—blue eyes absent from the original black-­ and-­white sketch by Arago and added in the recent reinvention of the folkloric tale. The importance of this particular shade of her iris is not lost on the Brazilian women interviewed by Burdick. And while some are convinced the blue eyes are a gift from Africa, many others link Anastácia’s white lineage through the eyes that are as blue as the waters surrounding Rio and are a stark contrast to Anastácia’s dark skin. However the eyes that serve her image became blue, they are not an unimportant, accidental, or ambivalent blue. Their color serves a purpose, even if that purpose 132 Chapter Three

3.4. Photograph of the Shrine to Blessed Anastácia in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Courtesy Stéphanie Larrieux.

is to make visual the remnants of white sexual power and to return a gaze that forces the viewer to acknowledge Anastácia’s place in a postslavery Brazil. Her image serves as an inflicted, conflicted afterimage. Blessed Anastácia’s body is imbued with sexual intention. As she is rendered/remembered as a force of corporeal resistance, her image serves as a testament to what awaits those women enslaved to lascivious masters: temporary earthly bound pain followed by a heavenly reward. That her body and, more specifically, her eyes reflect the afterimage of sexual impingement, they become the markers of visual volition, so much so that her body has to complete the task of sexual refusal that her eyes indicate as incomplete. James Elkins outlines the precarious nature of sight in relation to its concomitant inability to see. For Elkins, “a great deal of vision is unconscious,” therefore people, cultures, and nations all participate in random (and highly selective) acts of blindness.129 For Blessed Anastácia, this blindness manifests itself in the silence of the mouth iron coupled with those expressive blue eyes, her way of being received by the masses of The Boundaries of Excess 133

3.5. Sketch of a male slave by Jacques Arago, 1839–40.

devotees who necessitate her retrieval. The symbol of corporeal strength in the face of brutalizing subjugation, Anastácia embodies the collective request of the black Atlantic subject; her silent suffering is the way slave women can redeem their violations in the face of collective desire. Interestingly, Arago’s drawing is of a man and not a woman at all (figure 3.5).130 Burdick, more interested in the “attention to the female body as the site of physical affliction and suffering,” makes little mention of the gender transference at play.131 Burdick notes that “her body suffers violence, torture, rape, disease, dissolution, and death,” but he sees this as an important aspect of her memorial longevity.132 Catholic devotees in the country can utilize Brazil’s relationship to this specific figure of enslavement and physical abuse because hers is a body of sustained, continued, seemingly endless pain. Marcus Wood asserts that the image of Anastácia “and the suffering eyes which stare out from behind the metal mask simply affirm that the memory of slave torture is as much a part of black religious consciousness in Brazil as the torture of Christ.”133 134 Chapter Three

Anastácia’s body of perpetual pain, visualized and memorialized, recognizes how connected slavery and history are in the context of cultural ­reinvention.

“Identity Could Be a Tragedy” As if to respond to the limitation of corporeal demand and the tragedy of collective insistence, the artist María Magdalena Campos-­Pons uses the diasporic legacy of her body to articulate the costs of collective freedom (figure 3.6). Her photograph, the third panel of a double triptych from the series When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla, features the artist as the harbinger of all that black women’s bodies will be asked to negotiate in the future, silence and strength, creation and re-­creation. Because identity is a process that can fossilize and fix devoid of intent, Campos-­Pons seems to engage this solidification by speaking out—through the words on her chest—and pulls the viewer into this process fully. Layered over paint, the figure in the photograph faces the viewer, eyes closed, a single sentence scrawled on her chest: “Identity could be a tragedy.” This image plays with the central questions artists contended with in the late twentieth century. What is the cost of individual freedom in the shadow of the collective? How can we visualize the trauma of transatlantic slavery so as to ensure black women’s bodies a centrality of experience that does not always end in rupture, in loss? For her own interests, Campos-­Pons locates memory at the center of her work: “I think that memories first are the circuits of the past as they weave themselves on the present, so when talking about memory in my work, I want to locate it not in the past but in its transient quality, in its permeability. It is that solid line surrounding everything and everywhere. But also memory is selective; not all is recollected.”134 This selectivity of memory is illustrated in the second triptych, where each panel eventually lightens to near-­total white. The words eventually disappear as well, leaving the final figure with only a single word visible: “tragedy.” If identity is strength, then it is also tragic, depending heavily on the acquiescence of the flesh, the removal of subjectivity. As the figure fades to near invisibility through repetition, the “tragedy” is also layered. The flesh dissipates, leaving only the memory of the ordeal, the memory of this particular cultural identity. The Boundaries of Excess 135

3.6. When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla, María Magdalena Campos-­Pons, 1996. Courtesy of the artist.

In Quraysh Ali Lansana’s poem “Burdens,” the speaker’s voice is that of Harriet Tubman articulating the weighty responsibilities engendered by her identity as black liberator to the masses. If the escape route is a version of purgatory, then Lansana’s piece sees this difficult space as the price paid for just one of the many versions of freedom. The only problem with this version of freedom is one that often costs more than it should. In “Burdens,” a portion of which is quoted at the beginning of this chapter, a transitory Tubman reflects on both her future and her past when she laments, “folk live in ma bones / breathe ma breath / we night like skin.”135 The poem emphasizes both collective desire and its problematic corporeal incantations; “Burdens” achieves a sort of physical and emotional haunting, lingering on the memory of the famous woman like a cautionary tale. “I bear de weight / ma back bent ta light,” the speaker reflects.136 The conversion of bodily demands juxtaposed against earth’s natural elements layers the stanza inside a bitter dance of controlled space and repetitive physical request. “Draggin de moon / like a shackle,” Tubman artfully attempts to see her way back to herself. “I pray dis night / is silent as dawn’s feet.”137 In another instance where metaphor meets historical memory, fragmented bodies attempt a collective coming to voice where broken, battered, scarred, burnt, and bruised existences seek recognition.

The Boundaries of Excess 137

4

The Return Conjuring the Figure, Following the Form

Are all my bones mine? Whose could all my bones be? Could they have bought them from me at that distant public square of Goréee Island? Is all my skin mine at all Or have they rather returned to me The skin and bones of another woman Whose belly has been branded by another horizon, Another being, other creatures, another god? —Nancy Morejón, “Persona”

“A fully dressed woman walked out of the water,” returning from the dead.1 This return, precipitated by an emptied house and the presence of an unexpected guest, sutures the living to the nonliving in stereographic fashion in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, drawing out the stories attending the absented presence of slavery. “Sopping wet and breathing shallow,” the figure, who calls herself Beloved, is visualized as a series of body parts: “eyes,” “neck,” and “chin” with “new skin, lineless and smooth.”2 It is as if the world is starting over again with this body at the center: a fully formed Eve, sans Adam. Alone. Like the throbbing-­yet-­absent arm in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Beloved is a haunting made of flesh and a visual entity who cannot be ignored.

She seems to exist in multiple hemispheres and temporal positions: she is a fully grown woman, a small child, otherwordly, undead, and inexplicably connected to the living. “Acts sick,” a befuddled Paul D tells Sethe shortly after the stranger’s arrival at the house on 124 Bluestone Road. “Sounds sick, but she don’t look sick. Good skin, bright eyes and strong as a bull.”3 Though he cannot be certain, he knows something is off, and Morrison registers a female alignment (Sethe, Denver) with all of the possible unknowables that Paul D does not immediately consider. Ghost or demon in their midst, the women refuse what Robyn Wiegman has called “the logics of presence and visibility conditioning and contributing to the black woman’s historical expulsion.”4 If Beloved is a material manifestation of mystery for Paul D, she is absorbed (albeit problematically) into Sethe and Denver’s collective envisioning, even as that envisioning marginalizes Paul D (who is already pushed to the margins at 124 Bluestone Road). Beloved is imbued with powers of shape shifting and wish-­granting. She enters Sethe’s home as a body both familiar and unknown, a mystic with secrets of the universe to share, and, in a feat that is both corporeal and generational, Beloved assumes the position of progeny to both Sethe and Denver. The novel illustrates that most of what happens to Beloved herself is only marginally within her control. After she pulls out one of her wisdom teeth with her bare hand, for instance, “Beloved looked at the tooth and thought, This is it. Next would be her arm, her hand, a toe. Pieces of her would drop maybe one at a time, maybe all at once. Or on one of those mornings before Denver woke and after Sethe left she would fly apart. It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached to her hips when she is by herself. Among the things she could not remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces.”5 As the product of those slave intimacies that Christina Sharpe terms “monstrous,” Beloved imagines her body to be capable of literally falling apart, and herself as partially present, split and spliced by the system she can barely remember or articulate through language. Symbolic of both the “historic absence” Wiegman alludes to and the violence and proximity Sharpe negotiates, Beloved enters a field of vision marred by an inattention to detail. She has returned, but to whom and to what end?

The Return 139

Resurrections of the Atlantic There are many ways to return from the dead, particularly when the return is expected. The “conjured one” is called, brought forth from the beyond by a concerted effort grounded in ritual and often desperation. The willful return may or may not be desired. If the spirit is determined and purposeful, it can make manifest inclinations it possessed when its flesh was flesh. Possible, also, is the brink-­of-­death return wherein a person’s ghostly presence is precipitated by repeated near-­death experiences and pseudoresurrections. No less spectacular than a return to the living from the dead, these figures seem to have a knack for wrestling life to the ground and beating it to a pulp. There is a remnant of nineteenth-­ century spirit photography in the post–­civil rights articulation of the ghostly return. Hyperpresent, ethereal, and imbued with the powers of resurrection, representations of the return visualize corporeal transcendence as a uniquely black female experience, situating their bodies in two realms at once: the living and the life beyond. And much like the photographic “ghosting” dominating the post–­Civil War era in America, black Atlantic subjects in the twentieth century rely upon a liminal corporeality to process the memory of collective and excessive death. This final chapter invokes the improvisatory inclinations of the black diaspora that depend on blurring the line between life and excessive death. Manipulated through particular bodies (read: gendered), these improvisations push the limits of survival for the symbolic registers they employ, namely, black women who are envisioned as entities that are beyond death. In this stereographic deployment (two eyes and two ears), people see and do not see, hear and fail to register auditory dimensions. This chapter concerns the psychospiritual figure of ethereality in the diasporic imagination and the multiple attempts to render her image as an all-­powerful metahuman, beyond the scope of fallibility and easily accessible for cultural retrieval.6 A living ghost of slavery’s past, she is a figure of reinvention and return: preacher woman, mystic, rebel, and the “mad woman at the river’s edge,” the figure of the goddess is a shape-­shifter of massive mythical currency.7 Her manifestations are easily recognized and utilized for the physical and emotional comfort of her diasporic constituency. Like any well-­meaning sacrificial figure, the only body that remains 140 Chapter Four

unprotected in this scenario is that of the goddess herself—but because hers is a body in need of no protection, her representational powers are seen as infinite. We will explore fictional narratives that place black women’s bodies at the center of collective survival—perhaps imagining that like their spiritual counterparts they will emerge unscathed and ever duplicating, having the capacity to either resist death or return from it. Their very representations, though, challenge diasporic imperatives toward self-­sacrifice and complicate the notion of transcendence. What does it mean to be, as Erna Brodber puts it in “One Bubby Susan,” “a people’s God”? Is it the heavenly ascension laced with lifelong appreciation and honor? And when is the return too much for an entity to bear?8 The technology of spirit photography includes manipulating the movement of a body in order to affect the image of a departed one on film. At its core it is a process highly dependent on layering—one presence seamlessly building onto the memory of another and bridging the connection forged through a heightened sense of the spirit’s availability. The sacrifice of the departed figures is in the way they choose to be seen—as the evidentiary proof not only of their former status among the living but also as one tied irrevocably to loved ones still claiming a human existence. Post–­ civil rights imagistic ghosting forges the determinative effects of visual layering with a similar emphasis, highlighting slavery’s fissures and providing evidentiary and documentary proof of gendered transcendence. Louis Kaplan argues that spirit photography is invested in a psychic gesture toward paranoia, which corresponds rather seamlessly with “some of the duplicities that go unnoticed on account of photography’s privileged relationship to the referent.”9 These “duplicities,” while embedded in the documentary nature of photographic processes, are nonetheless similarly reliant upon the viewer’s projections. Far from keeping the effects of slavery’s violence upon the body at a distance, images that illustrate the return highlight death’s proximity, its unmistakable ­intimacy.

The Yemayá Within: The Conjured One of the Black Atlantic Iemanjá, the comeback kid of Afro-­Brazilian lore, is a spiritual figure of repetitive insistence, part of a circle of deities who can be conjured at will, based on a continuum of diasporic need. Emerging from the water, The Return 141

returning to the water, this particular god figure possesses replenishing capacities that hover between earthly and otherworldly embodiments. For it is the power to move and control movement, to return with determinative purpose, that allows the charge the opportunity to “listen to the lesson” the deities have to impart. These gods participate in what Karla F. C. Holloway has termed “recursive structures” that glance back toward a collectivity which is, for Holloway, “plurisignant” and “translucent.”10 The most significant of these orishas, Iemanjá, is the Afro-­Brazilian goddess of the sea and is often portrayed as a voluptuous mermaid figure (plate 9). In Anisa Romero’s Yemaya of the Bay, the figure of Yemaya is formed from the sea, and takes the translucent shape of her surroundings. Her body, artistically imagined as a writhing and swirling entity, is rendered as hyperfeminine, supernaturally powerful, and intensely maternal (as if to offset the fragmentation of black maternity within slavery). Iemanjá, or Yemanjá, as her name is alternately rendered, is the remanifestation of the Yoruba goddess Yemayá and is one of transatlantic slavery’s more popular traveling deities.11 She controls the elements of both river and ocean and exists between the earth world and the world of water.12 For Robert Farris Thompson, Iemanjá engenders both the life-­ giving and nurturing aspects of a deity and the capacity for anger and retaliation. “Vengeance, doom, and danger also lurk within the holy depths (ibu) of the rivers where the goddesses are believed to dwell,”13 Thompson asserts, making Iemanjá a multidimensional goddess, one capable of the many varied nuances of ethereal entities. According to Sheila S. Walker, as vessels of the Candomblé religious system, orishas contribute to the overall tranquility of the believer through an ethereal immediacy and “harmony between the human and spiritual realm,” creating in a figure like Iemanjá invaluable possibility, since “this harmony is symbolized and mediated by the orishas, the anthropomorphized forces of nature that are the spiritual beings of Candomblé and the intermediaries between the Creator and His human creations.”14 Iemanjá strikes the delicate balance between this world and the next, marking a hybrid territory for herself in the diasporic universe. According to Vincent Brown, “Having been witness to untold deaths and to corpses scattered everywhere—in raided villages, along roads and riverbanks, and in rotting heaps at coastal depots—Africans undoubtedly 142 Chapter Four

fixed upon the association between slavery and death.”15 She is the bridge between that “voyage through death” immortalized in Robert Hayden’s poem, “Middle Passage” “to life upon these shores.”16 For our purposes, Iemanjá also serves as the necessary repository for all earthly slave traumas, having the requisite lack of material existence that spares her flesh an attack of the lash, the repetition of sexual violence, the corporeal stress of running off into the mountains to join a maroon community, as well as the manifestation of problematic procreation. She therefore is the goddess-­protector of those unfortunate Middle Passage subjects whose proximity to the very consistency of death, according to Stephanie Smallwood, “became part of the nomenclature for it. Slave ships were called tumbeiros in the eighteenth-­century Angolan trade, for example, a term historians have translated as “floating tombs” or “undertakers.”17 Reminiscent of death’s intimacy, the sea as undertaker and corporeal uncertainty, María Magdalena Campos-­Pons’s installation The Seven Powers Come by the Sea (1992) strategically arranges seven orishas of Santeria using life-­sized panels carved in the image of a slave ship’s hold (figure 4.1). Simultaneously marking the corporeal event of both life and death, the carvings resemble coffins, or tumbeiros, and illustrate the many ways in which spirituality, trauma, migration, and dispossession “come by the sea” or are lost by the sea. Yemayá is here as one of the agents of resurrection. In the diasporic transference of the Middle Passage, she is a survivor, an enigmatic vessel unique in her powers of regeneration. What Okwui Enwezor calls Campos-­Pons’s “existential and historical suture,” stitching her lineage with other descendants of transatlantic slavery, The Seven Powers envisions as a journey guided by the orishas and traveled through death to life.18 Along with other riverain goddesses like Oxum and Oyá, Iemanjá is characterized in the diaspora as a protector figure ensuring the safe oceanic journey of her people to their black Atlantic dispersals. Iemanjá is considered a Middle Passage spirit figure, guiding transitory African captives to their New World destinations. As a figure of sexual excess, physicality, fecundity, and spirituality, Iemanjá embodies all of the repetitive qualities explored in this study. It is fitting, then, that The Repeating Body examines the phenomenon of the figurative goddess as its final chapter, for she weaves together all of the representational elements that The Return 143

4.1. The Seven Powers Come by the Sea, María Magdalena Campos-­Pons, 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

I have interrogated thus far. Iemanjá, like the women she represents, is a creation of the people. When anthropologist Ruth Landes traveled to Salvador da Bahia in the northeastern part of Brazil in the 1930s, she was in search of this creation. With her book The City of Women, Landes complicates the relationship between agency and cultural desire by focusing on the female practitioners of Brazilian Candomblé, the necessary but fragile terrain of a postslavery existence, and the particularities of siphoning power when one is both black and female. When Menininha, a Candomblé priestess, said to Landes, “I am the slave of my people, two hundred of them who depend upon me absolutely,” she was negotiating the parameters of her exalted position while being painfully cognizant of all that it would cost her.19 In her book, Landes considers Menininha’s statement and the “tremendous imponderables of life in Bahia”; she illustrates for the reader that in this context the intricate interplay of sexuality, possession, spirituality, freedom, and its concomitant restrictions bear down heavily on the priestesses of this hybrid religion.20 Alluding to the schizophrenic nature of the spiritual center from which strength is gathered by others, Audre Lorde’s poem “From the House of Yemanjá” battles the symbolic relationship the orisha has with Lorde’s familial history. “My mother had two faces and a frying pot / where she cooked up her daughters / into girls / before she fixed our dinner,” we are told.21 To be “cooked up” intimates burning, melding, and seasoning—a violent molding. Into the imagery of creation and doubling, the female speaker sees herself through the memory of her all-­powerful, life-­ affirming mother, her Yemanjá. This relationship, though, is problematic as the protagonist/artist sifts through the archive of her historical past and finds a ruptured connection, thick and heavy with expectation: my mother had two faces and a broken pot where she hid out a perfect daughter who was not me I am the sun and moon and forever hungry for her eyes. I bear two women upon my back one dark and rich and hidden The Return 145

in the ivory hungers of the other mother pale as a witch yet steady and familiar brings me bread and terror in my sleep her breasts are huge exciting anchors in the midnight storm.22 The two women the speaker “bears”—like a known burden, a longing— situate the cross-­racial anxieties engendered by the black Atlantic world. The speaker understands the recognition of her two selves, that the “two women” who constitute her spiritual and physical makeup are imperfect and demanding, enticing and engaging, black and white. There is no comfort embedded in the knowledge of this splicing. There is only more uncertainty, solitude, and eternal aching. The elements that provide stability and familial recognition have shifted out of focus for the speaker, and she pleads through her confusion, searching for herself through the barrage of images she has now become. “I am / the sun and moon and forever hungry / the sharpened edge / where day and night shall meet / and not be / one.”23 The promise of ethereal solidification, the Yemanjá-­ inspired encompassing sanctuary that presence in the deity’s “house” would seem to intimate is an illusion, and yet this illusion is worth the investment for the speaker. It reminds her of her own imaginary renderings, her symbolic frailty and maternal inaccessibility. Karla Holloway reminds us that the deity in literature “is a figure of both strength and tragedy—like the women whose lives echo hers.”24 In all of her variance and complexity, the goddess figure summons the easily identifiable aspects of cultural retrieval and releases them accordingly. Holloway continues, “Instead of looking to this goddess for indications about the commonalities of women whose lives she symbolically extends, the aesthetic interpretation of her image is achieved through her being in the culture, the myths, the religions and the art. Her literary being is neither decorative nor passive.”25 Accessing the West African origins of the goddess figure, Holloway resists easy compartmentalizing as either one aspect of the deity or another. The goddess, “neither decorative nor passive,” encompasses the totality of collective desire simply in her 146 Chapter Four

myriad existence. Full of fluidity and fecundity, dedication and sacrifice, power and purpose, the spirit of Iemanjá permeates black Atlantic literature as a regenerative source of strength and narrative extension. Grace Nichols’s poem in honor of the orisha is a praise piece holding the deity up as a supernatural force, bountiful and ever flowing. “It was here by the riverside,” the speaker begins, “I came upon Yemanji / mother of all beings sprawled / upon the rivershore, her long / breasts (insulted by her husband) / oozing milk that lapped and flowed.”26 Amid the chaotic scene of ritual worship, mild brutality, and violence, Nichols configures Yemanji as a flawed physical figure with long breasts and a prostrate form, unappreciated, used, exhausted, and unnoticed—though also powerful, otherworldly, intense, and aggressive. As the narrator’s field of vision shifts, so does her characterization of Yemanji’s power and performative functionality. All that the orisha has come to represent meets in the reiterative qualities of a she-­god, trailing down the narrative like a staircase with no landing. Yemanji Mother of seas Goddess of rivers I will pay homage to you You who bless your followers With an abundance of children You whose temple rests like a lotus In Ibandon, you whose waters flow down the River Ogun, past the cities of Abeokuta and Oyo Yemanji Mother of Shango Mother of the long breasts of milk and sorrow Sacred be your river stones27 The speaker’s “homage,” the lines of verse used to praise the goddess, can do only so much justice in the face of her tremendous responsibilities. Yemanji, as a force of nature and God, as the intermediary between life and death upon the seas, as an imaginative center of prowess, faces the The Return 147

double task of elevation and defeat. Just as she is “Mother of seas / Goddess of rivers,” so is she also “Mother of the long breasts / of milk and sorrow,” and it is in this capacity that the speaker most identifies with her. The mixture of fluid fecundity, dedicated service, and power lead the reader to a vision of the goddess as a tortured entity, fluctuating between power and performance and limited by the whims of the Atlantic. Stephanie Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery investigates the vicissitudes of life and death during the Middle Passage and its afterlife in America, arguing that “those who survived the slave ship were haunted by the rhythm of untimely fatality,” causing a forced linkage with the casualness of death—one Avery Gordon believes facilitates “the capacity not only to live with specters . . . but also to engage the ghost . . . as metaphor, as weapon.”28 To visualize the spirit, then, to conjure it, willfully or not, is to acknowledge that slavery is occupying memorial ocularity and returning consistently in order to make sense of trauma, place, and origin. Yemanjá provides this space for both Nichols and Lorde—her body is that place, her powers speak to slavery, origin, and survival. Through her black Atlantic subjectivity she has a vessel—a way to attempt the containment of slavery’s individual and collective horrors.

Willful Returns and John Edgar Wideman’s Cattle Killing John Edgar Wideman’s postmodern novel The Cattle Killing (1996) examines the trajectory of the willful ghost, the vessel of slavery and survival through the body of an African woman, repeatedly rendered and engaging corporeally with the sea, with slavery, and with an African origin. A fictional account of historical moments spanning from the eighteenth century through the present, The Cattle Killing journeys forward into a world of a past that cannot fully be absorbed. The spiritual possession employed by Wideman is one of subtle nuance, leading to the visual manifestation of a figure of diasporic excess. The novel begins with an intricate and fantastic epigraphic prophecy: Certain passionate African spirits—kin to the ogbanji who hide in a bewitched woman’s womb, dooming her infants one after the other to an early death unless the curse is lifted—are so strong and willful they refuse to die. They are not gods but achieve a kind of immortality 148 Chapter Four

through serial inhabitation of mortal bodies, passing from one to another, using them up, discarding them, finding a new host. Occasionally, as one of these powerful spirits roams the earth, bodiless, seeking a new home, an unlucky soul will encounter the spirit, fall in love with it, follow the spirit forever, finding it, losing it in the dance of the spirit’s trail through other people’s lives.29 Using the female body—more specifically an African female body—to denote an ethereal entity of spiritual upheaval and of death, of willful return, Wideman’s epigraph is a haunting. Just as the “unlucky soul” who follows the spirit forever knows not what he is doing, so are readers of the story also entranced and held captive. Having the power to “refuse to die,” echoing the mandate of the orisha, this is a figure of everlasting return—a being of life even after death. Enchanting and misleading, the “powerful spirit” is a dangerous guide, situating the “unlucky” between the world of the living and the world of haunted death. The spirit, feminized as a vessel of evil, the remnants of a “bewitched woman’s womb,” is imbued with the power to both destroy and create, even as she drifts through a catalog of corporeal lives. Avery Gordon renders representations such as Wideman’s as ever-­e volving diasporic dialogue: “But above and beyond the African inheritance, it is not so difficult to see that any people who are not graciously permitted to amend the past, or control the often barely visible structuring forces of everyday life, or who do not even secure the moderate gains from the routine amnesia, that state of temporary memory loss that feels permanent and that we all need in order to get through the days, is bound to develop a sophisticated consciousness of ghostly haunts and is bound to call for an ‘official inquiry’ into them.”30 Gordon’s reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the context of haunting fits Wideman’s preoccupation with slavery’s inheritance as legacy and as collective performance. The process of engaging this legacy, of attempting to “control the often barely visible structuring forces” it makes legible, often manifests itself through the visual apparatus of the psychospiritual resurrection: the repetition of a particular kind of resilient body, earthly or ethereal, and always gendered. The narration is a fragmented and nonlinear story the unnamed narrator is telling to a flesh-­and-­blood woman he loves, a slave named Kathryn who toils in the home of Dr. Benjamin Thrush (Dr. Benjamin The Return 149

Rush). Kathryn’s body is marked and measured through the sexual abuse she sustains at the hands of Dr. Thrush, as well as the torment of tending to his wife, the blind (and kindly) Mrs. Thrush. “He comes for me in the middle of the night, when she is sleeping,” Kathryn tells the narrator, “as if darkness could conceal anything from her.”31 The Cattle Killing plays with the construct of sight as a willful endeavor that conceals as much as it reveals. The story is the narrator’s way of sustaining Kathryn, who is dying of an inexplicable cause. It highlights both her powerlessness and his own. Though his goal is to bring Kathryn back to her body and keep her alive, he finds this task to be a race against time—time that he does not possess in that space of early American racialized violence and its visual remains. As the novel begins, we are introduced to the narrator, our literary guide through the fictional rendering. It is early morning in a field on the outskirts of late eighteenth-­century Philadelphia. Former slave, itinerant preacher, and diasporic link to an African origin, the narrator begins his day as the novel opens, awakening slightly more with each carefully crafted paragraph. “He waits,” we are told, “holding his breath while the house that is the world remembers its shape, erects itself again, all the stone and brick and wood piling up without a sound.”32 Each night of sleep is a psychic reorganization for him, a reconfiguration of place as fleeting as his night’s rest. On one of his journeys through the various towns and cities he traverses, our narrator encounters his “passionate African spirit” and begins his own personal recovery mission, through the body of this woman. Rising in the early morning mist of a repetitive life, “he thanks God for a new day, for the strength to rise, for breath in his body preserved through the night. He stretches his stiff limbs, shivers as he remembers how cold he had been during the night, how cold he will remain always, a chill deep within even if he were tied to a stake and burned as a witch.”33 The narrator’s travels have taken a physical and psychological toll on him as he makes his way through the various townships seeking to improve the lives of the people he meets through his teachings on the “Good Lord.”34 Consumed by his overwhelming desire to spread the Word and preach to all he comes into contact with, he has seen more than his share of the strange and unusual. The novel structure, what critic Sheri I. Hoem calls “hybrid textuality and historiographic metafiction,” 150 Chapter Four

blends narrative postmodern positions, gliding into second- and first-­ person narrative from the vantage point of the third person.35 The identity of the narrative position shifts like the unsettled temporal narrative moment—present is infused with the past, the past with the future. All narratives converge on the vision he sees before him in the distance. As he describes it: On one of those stifling August afternoons after the city had begun to invade the peaceful precincts of our neighborhood, as I trekked toward a remote valley where two farms nestled, their families unconverted to the truth of the inner light, I noticed a dark speck far ahead of me shimmering on the horizon. Perhaps a trick of the sun. Perhaps a person. Perhaps a mote of dust in my eye, or a drop of sweat glued to my lashes. A womanshape as I drew closer. Pedestal of flowing skirts. Slim-­backed and slim-­waisted, carriage erect as if she’s balancing a load atop the turban wrapped around her head. Beneath the pinch of waist, a refugee’s resigned gait, the numb plod over endless leagues that bring you no closer to a destination, leagues that are your destination, step after heavy step on a road going nowhere, sapping your strength, exhausting your will to go further.36 Poetic and engaging, the passage is the first of many moments where Wideman involves the novel in a give-­and-­take battle of feminized African stoicism.37 The “womanshape” slowly engendered by the narrator amid a “pedestal of flowing skirts” is a regal vision of force he is compelled to watch. When he journeys downward through the metaphor of her perpetually surviving body, he is able to read a historically rendered corporeal entity. And when this entity is in danger of losing her position on the narrative’s high ground, the story shifts into the second person, conveniently replacing the pronoun “she” with “you.” The shift marks a decisive disengagement with the “womanshape,” an inability to identify and relate to her as a fellow black, as a human being wrapped in pain and malaise even as he registers physical exhaustion and trauma on her body. As Saidiya Hartman suggests, “the difficulty and slipperiness of empathy” lies in its capacity to lend to appropriation. She writes, “In making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration,” and the actual pained body is balancing an existence of invisible/hypervisible repetition.38 The Return 151

In this case the narration makes the other’s suffering belong to the reader. The “step after heavy step on a road going nowhere, sapping your strength, exhausting your will to go further” (my emphasis), is a postmodern communal activity, shared by the readership of the novel, exorcised from the experiential realities of the woman the narrator sees standing before him. Her power source, from which she gathers her tremendous surges of energy, is a gift from Africa. “I know she is an African woman,” the narrator says. “Her walk leaves no doubt. A supple flow that exhaustion cannot extinguish. Even if she falls, she’ll fall gracefully.”39 In an instant of prowess-­conjuring, the narrator returns to a romanticized notion of African femininity and deified power dependent on the African body of spiritual protection, a body that could be read as both bulletproof and dainty. “Falling gracefully” requires little or no assistance, as the person who falls will elegantly assemble herself, rise, and walk again. The Cattle Killing evokes this mythical deity of black feminine strength with the African ghostly figure that the narrator watches emerge from a distant road carrying a white child “African style” around her waist. The woman, “bony arms, lean-­muscled, the image of wiry strength,” carries the child toward the lake as the narrator tracks her every movement. “Slowly she undresses,” Wideman writes. “Stares into the water after her whole body’s naked as her head. Has she forgotten he’s behind her. Does she care. Why should she. Why does her nakedness, her sex, matter any more or less than the child’s.”40 These self-­referential questions (devoid of the expected punctuation) do not linger in the consciousness of the narrator for long, particularly since the African woman continues her silent activities, aware of the preacher’s presence but seemingly unaffected by it. The narrator watches as the woman walks with the child into the water before sinking deeper and deeper until she and the baby she is holding disappear completely. Is she the American reincarnation of the goddess Yemayá? Is she returning to the depth of the water whence she came? The startled narrator watches her in silence as if he is witnessing a miracle. Multiple scenes of subjection unfold before this body, intimating the violence haunting and stalking this marked subjectivity. Slave or free, mother or mammy, spiritually possessed or corporeally dispossessed, the narrator sees what he wants to see: “She drops to one knee again. Gathers the child in her arms. Mutters indistinguishable sounds to it as

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she strides into the water. Slowly, deeper and deeper, stirring ripples behind and before her as one leg then the other pushes through the water. Water rises to her thighs, her waist, covers her breasts, the baby in her arms, water finally closing over the dark glisten of her skull.”41 The preacher wonders what has become of the woman and the child, as he is the only witness to their disappearance. He knows that they entered the lake but does not know what became of them after that. Wrestling with the question of what might have happened, he stops short of actively engaging meaningfully with the woman as she prepares the child for their disappearance into the lake, then follows through with her intention. The itinerant preacher is surprised at his own inability to act when he watches the actions unfold. “How long I spent gazing after her, silent, not believing I’d stood there and watched her sink, watched the water close over her head, the circles one within the other expanding.”42 He does not immediately see the woman as dead. Because he “expected her to pop up from the water any moment,” he fails to accept her demise in the lake.43 Kathryn interrupts him for clarification: “She strolled into the middle of the lake—disappeared—and you watched.”44 The scene is an extended trope of black women’s subjected endurances during slavery—slowly disappearing into the abyss while somebody watches. The narrator’s denial is framed in the historical memory he willingly re-­creates when she appears before him, and what he imagines the psychospiritual impulse to encompass. “She returned,” he convinces himself when there is no evidence to support the claim. “I know she did.”45 He does not know this, but he convinces himself of it because he cannot accept the alternative, which is a reflection of his inability to protect, an inability to control the forces that lay before him. If the woman’s death is the end of her story, he creates another. And although he is certain that the child she carries with her into the water was already dead, he chooses to believe that the woman can transcend the yellow fever epidemic ravaging the white community of Philadelphia, as well as her full corporeal immersion into the lake. While his specific and localized belief in her indestructible body does not last long, it is later replaced with a theory of resurrection and African-­centered conflations of time, both of which allow him to fantasize away corporeal trauma for the “water woman” he watches.

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She pauses. Sways. Has weariness consumed the last of her strength. Will she collapse onto the parched grass bordering the hard-­packed earth of this track. No. She pushes on. Her shoulders echo the subtle swing of her hips, her body possessing itself again. I did not see her dance, and the market basket on her head was invisible, but these African parts of her were as real as the raw, naked feet protruding from her gown when finally, near the crest of a punishing grade, I overtook her. . . . When I saw where the woman had dropped, the vast black network of branches overhead, the apron of roots erupting through the soil, the feet, in truth, did not seem to belong to her. She seemed anciently planted in the earth. The bare feet a separate growth, fresh shoots from the giant tree, dark tentacles that had plunged underground until they cleared the woman’s gown. . . . Familiar as my own feet or hands, yet who could guess what fate intends for them. I could reach out and touch her, but I’d never know her touch. Never know how the ground feels to her heels and toes, how the world makes her feel.46 Memory and fantasy converge in this passage while the narrator reminisces about the dream his mind’s eye has conjured into being. He “did not see her dance,” and “the market basket on her head was invisible,” but it is with these sites of familiarity that he imbibes her memory with his own. He knows her—like he knows his own scent. This knowledge is only dangerous for the African woman, “anciently planted in the earth” as the separate parts of her body merge and become earthbound symbols of her physical and spiritual endurance, nature-­rich and tied to the narrator’s ideologies of transcendence. The young preacher assuages his guilt about what has become of the woman with the thought that her emergence into the water is not the end of her story, but “like a curtain between acts.”47 He is sure that he will see her again, and he patiently awaits his opportunity to step in, reclaim his previous inactivity, and save her life. When she does not reemerge from the lake, she once again places the protagonist in a bitter struggle against his own recollection of past events and retains some of the “power” he believes her to possess in totality. “I never feared she was dead,” he says. “Enchanted by a wizard’s spell, perhaps, but not dead.”48 The narrator succeeds in replacing the woman’s demise in the lake 154 Chapter Four

with a story of resurrection. Not only had she existed in human form previously, but he had known her in a former life—two years in the past. “Only after I’d lost her,” he explains, “did I realize I’d met her before.”49 Prior to their meeting by the lake, the narrator realizes in retrospect that this same woman had touched him previously. After the water woman disappears, he explains, “I began to recall more and more about her as I rehearsed the circumstances of our first meeting. No doubt about it. She had returned.”50 This partially created memory affirms his ability to reinvent all black women (even Kathryn, for whom he weaves this story) as malleable, regenerating, and stubbornly successful species of humanity. “Because she’d returned once, she could return again,” he estimates, “even from the waters where she’d carried her child.”51 In the narrator’s scarred memory, it is more than a year later and there is another African woman, as silent and purpose-­filled as the one he meets on that rural road, but this one has a more direct effect on him. She is his healer, and she heals with water. “She appears as soothing coolness. Water from somewhere someone carried to the clearing. A handkerchief soaked in cool water wipes my forehead . . . water cool and healing on my brow as my mother’s hand. A touch that familiar, that far away. Someone tending me, a fragrance, a blue rustling in the air. Sleeves the color of sky passing back and forth close to my face.”52 And although he does not register her face, does not know her from the “other folk huddling around,” the preacher is in desperate need of some familiar affection and attention, something akin to a mother’s dedication and sacrificial love, draped in the color of the blue sky.53 He creates it in the same way that the narrative is a creation of the preacher’s need, his guilt, his vulnerability, and his troubled memory. Yet when the original woman from the lake does not return as he imagined her, as he believed she would, he consults the people in Philadelphia who have created mythological explanations for her disappearance. There, stories are woven of a “brown husband and wife, their child inexplicably fair-­skinned, golden-­haired, a sign from birth of its unnatural fate.”54 These stories attempt to explain why an African woman would sacrifice her own life for a child for whom his or her whiteness does not appear to be compatible with the woman’s blackness. When these explanations are no longer suitable, he imagines that the woman has been

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reborn once again, just as mysterious, just as elusive as before, but this time, instead of failing to save her life again, she saves him in a moment of crisis. “The day she returned,” he tells us, “began with a warning.”55 The young would-­be preacher attends church services on an October Sunday and finds he is witnessing a vision that takes his breath away. In another of his many epileptic fits, he faints, mutters passages from the Bible, and sees double. Soon, an unfamiliar black woman approaches him, wipes his brow with a handkerchief of cool water, and drifts out of sight before he can see her face: “Was the young woman in the blue dress who’d bathed my brow one of us or one of the others. I knew everything and nothing about her. I was certain she was young, certain she was a woman. Certain of the color of her dress. Her scent. Though I’d not seen her face, I was positive she’d not worshiped with us previously.”56 Now as a savior figure on a more personal level, having been touched by the mysterious African woman from the lake and her “soothing coolness,” there is a new ownership of her image emerging for the preacher and his romanticizing of her memory. She is no longer the woman he neglected to save in the lake that day; instead, she is a spiritual healer able to produce a natural elixir for the preacher’s temporary wounds. The preacher/narrator in The Cattle Killing is prone to bouts of time-­ lapsed memory and visions he cannot explain. The “African” woman and all of her reappearances tie into his confusion and desperation about his place within his community and the larger community around him. There is an added cruelty involved when he is again and again unable to provide safety for the woman who attempts to do just that for others. But as it was for their initial meeting, the young man and the woman who would be his savior delve in and out of historical expectations, never fully investigating their respective roles or their sociohistorical relationship to each other. For the preacher, driven through the narrative by the questions he raises for himself concerning humanity, survival, and the persistence of the spirit, the reiterating woman is his own personal haunting. And although by the end of the text it is not clear if he is certain about anything but his place within the scheme of things, her image consumes his continuing construction of his identity, his memory. He is still not sure what to make of all he has seen, but he is sure that the mysterious woman is a key to his life’s purpose. When the preacher does not manifest the surge of strength and su156 Chapter Four

perior humanity that he receives from the mysterious African woman, he is placed in a position of weakness. He is what he wants to save; he is fragility itself, and his epileptic seizures are emblematic of a communal inability to render its own trauma. The African woman who glides in and out of his memory, in and out of his visual consciousness, eventually becomes the continued cause of his emotional discomfort. She reminds him of a long-­past promise he and his kind did not fulfill. She makes herself a vision in his immediate world so that he may remember his participation in her imagistic destruction and come to terms with it: In the clearing I witnessed two roads crossing. One for people like us, who worshiped at St. Matthew’s. The other a thoroughfare frequented by our ancestors, our generations yet to be born. One highway solid earth, the other air, the stuff of invisible ether where angels float. Perhaps seeing the spirit road and those who traverse it meant I was on my way to join them. The falling fit my middle passage. But she crossed over instead. Tended me. And perhaps because she tarried a moment to cool my feverish brow, perhaps she was left behind. If not left behind, suspended between her world and ours.57 The series of attributes he accords the mystery woman, her perceived success, connection to the Middle Passage, and worldly transcendence are a mixture of emotional need and historical shape-­shifting. The “spirit road” of this world and the next works within a negotiation of her corporeal ability to visually affect the narrator’s fragile sense of identity. Because she does not need him in the same way he needs her, because her time within the temporal space is transitory, this intranarrative is allowed not only to function through her representation in this space but to thrive there. She becomes for him the spirit figure materializing, as if from a photographic negative, as true as the image of his own visage, and as needful as she is transitory. Like a photograph, she must be developed. The African woman represents this regenerative force quelled by the narrator’s desire to believe in it. His narration compromised, the reader is still unable to release the thought from his or her mind. Was this woman able to achieve the impossible? Could she be the healer/spiritual mother figure of his past? If it was at all possible, how did she achieve all that he has attributed to her? Did she live to tell about it? Does the silent figure in the novel get to exert a use of voice, or are we to gamble on the usurped The Return 157

representation of the troubled narrator and trust him to do her memory justice? The answer lies in the historical event that frames the novel. The title The Cattle Killing comes from the mid-­nineteenth-­century South African Xhosa’s tragic killing of all of their cattle.58 The killings occurred when a teenage girl named Nongqawuse returned from the river predicting the future for the Xhosa. She said a spirit spoke to her, instructing her to tell her people to kill all of their cattle—hundreds of thousands—in order to purge the evil that the colonizing whites had recently brought.59 Wideman’s Cattle Killing revisits this very public catastrophe replete with all the tragedy expected of a racial, historical, and sociopolitical disaster. Nongqawuse emerges in the novel as a ghostly vision within a dream—a failed prophet and unreliable deity who lingers by the water and sneaks into the narrator’s psyche, a return of immediate necessity.60 When the narrator sleeps, she comes to him to tell her own story of mythical elevation, and the events that led to her spiritual downfall. She wants to speak for herself. She tells the sleeping narrator that her people lived close to the sea, “but we didn’t love the sea and neither did the sea love us.”61 For the sea “brought the whites,” and with them came the death, starvation, and sickness.62 As an allegory of history’s dangerous cyclical nature, The Cattle Killing interrogates the limits of collective interdependence through a child-­god figure full of human frailties. In the midst of this destruction of her homestead, while she is out bathing in a “pool at the edge of the land,” she is approached by the spirit of her father’s brothers, who demand that the Xhosa cleanse themselves of the whites who have infiltrated their territory and are attempting to destroy them.63 “The evil world is dying,” they tell Nongqawuse, “a new one on its way. The whites will be driven out. The ancestors will return and dwell again on this earth, bringing with them endless herds of cattle to fill our kraals.”64 Nongqawuse, limited by her youth and gender, is not believed to be the prophet she insists that she is. Even as her people languish in disbelief, they are dying. They want to believe their suffering will soon end, and so they heed her message via the ancestors and begin killing their cattle. This mass killing seals the fate of the Xhosa, forty thousand of whom perish from starvation and lung sickness. Nongqawuse is the one they blame. In Wideman’s rendition of the tragedy, she is given an opportunity to analyze the reason behind the occurrence from her position in the after158 Chapter Four

world. She believes she now knows why she led her people to their own demise: “We’d been deceived. It was not the shade of my father’s brother who spoke through me that day beside the pool. No. It was a spirit of despair grown strong inside our breasts, as the whites had grown strong in our land, during years of fighting and plague and hate. A spirit who whispered the lies of the invaders in our ears. Who tricked us into toiling for our foes. Taught us to kill our cattle, murder ourselves.”65 Nongqawuse’s failure as a “people’s god,” her false prophecies, far from exalting her as the peoples’ savior, reduce her to the status of a crazy woman and an attention seeker who is prone to spinning fanciful tales for her own personal amusement. Nongqawuse’s story crystallizes the circle of tragedy when the narrator wakes up to “the acrid odor of smoke, smoke’s burn in my eyes,” and finds that a fire has been set to kill his friends, an interracial couple living in the small town of Radnor.66 The narrator watches the fire from a measured distance in the grass, but even this feels like an illusion. He is “the ghost of me that died with them,” and it is Nongqawuse who enters his dream and who is once again to blame.67 She does not tell him about the impending fire or warn him that his friends will die. “Sleep my child, my pumpkin,” she says to him, “and I will come to you in another dream. This one is too old and sad.”68 The cycle of fear and death that consumed her people continues in a future Philadelphia, with a yellow fever epidemic, and without mercy. For the narrator, the god of mysterious ways, of prophecy and pain, of cleansing and redemption, and of cattle killing patiently awaits understanding. The mythic African woman is a staple representative of the black diaspora, hypervisible and self-­regenerating, a secret within a lie, signifying destruction.

Transcendental Slavery: Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts Middle Passage fictional narratives tend to be highly masculine journeys testing the limitations of a character’s physical resilience and spiritual resolve.69 Fred D’Aguiar’s novel, one in which the protagonist is female, still exists within a masculine framework and structures gestures, movements, and desires within an androcentric worldview. Of the historical event D’Aguiar fictionalizes he writes: “I read from The Longest Memory in Liverpool back in 1994 and came across the story then at the Liverpool The Return 159

Maritime Museum slave gallery. . . . I thought it likely that the person who climbed back on board was very healthy and for my purposes, female.”70 Sadly, the “person” who managed to climb back on the slave ship Zong has disappeared from historical memory. All that exists is a masculine pronoun and short description in Granville Sharpe’s account.71 Yet there are moments of specific gender transmutation and recognition in the novel, instances where the novel points toward both a male and a female encompassing.72 Mintah, the protagonist in Feeding the Ghosts, is both feminized and masculinized in the work as it benefits the narrative ideal and therefore exhibits a muted doubling within the text, surpassing the gendered expectations of a diasporic constituency and engendering a transitory collective allegiance. From the moment we are introduced to Mintah in the beginning moments of the novel, she is the hierarchical spiritual and physical center of the slave ship she survives, placing herself directly in harm’s way throughout the novel, establishing herself as a figure of sacrifice, her body and spirit imagined as fully able to transcend the horrors of the Middle Passage. If we think about Mintah as a figure beyond death, as the specter of slavery that she herself did not survive, the spectacular nature of her embodiment brings to mind the “sacred energies that accompanied the millions who had been captured and sold for more than four centuries,” encompassing the historical trajectory of the black Atlantic.73 Imagined as the conjured god figure of the Zong, sent there by higher powers for the benefit of the newly enslaved, Mintah is an overly capable protagonist—physically, psychologically, and spiritually.74 Created as a sort of flesh-­and-­blood sea goddess, Mintah does not register the same anxiety, fear, and apprehension that consume her fellow Africans on board the Zong. When we meet her in the text, she is the guilt-­infused roaring of a secret past, calling out the name of one of her captors and screaming herself into existence. And as she bellows out the first mate’s name (Kelsal) from the hold of the ship, she creates an incantation of sorts in his psyche, one he furiously attempts to sever. The slave wailings, those “howls, moans, cries, calls and implorings in indecipherable tongues,” we are told, “assailed Kelsal’s ears.”75 But it is the repetitive incantation of the first mate’s name (“Kelsal!”) that unsettles his sense of safety on the Zong. While at first Kelsal ignores the shouts, he finds that it is impossible to pretend that he is not hearing the elevated sound of his own name being 160 Chapter Four

screeched at him (and how does this slave woman know his name?). When he locates Mintah, the female slave whose eyes “glistened as if they retained the flame of his failed lamp,” this vision coincides with an erosion of his masculine identity.76 Kelsal quickly learns that Mintah acquired English at the same Danish missionary school where he once spent time recovering from an illness and that he is looking at his nursemaid, the woman who helped to save his life. When Mintah explains where she is from, the missionary Kelsal remembers all too well, and he “seemed to be in pain . . . the furrows between his eyebrows disappeared and his lips parted over his teeth.”77 Kelsal’s shame is twofold. First, he has been recognized by one of the enslaved members of the Zong, a process that reinforces Mintah’s humanity and erases some of his own. Second, Kelsal’s position as first mate is compromised when the crew overhears Mintah speaking English (“come here”), calling Kelsal’s name and forcing him to acknowledge her. When two sickly female slaves are unshackled to be brought out of the hold and probably never returned, “the women shouted [Mintah’s] name as if she could reverse their fate,” even though it is clear that Mintah is not that powerful.78 It is the captives’ perception of her power that is necessary to continue the belief in her leadership abilities. For her part, Mintah does everything in her power to live up to her newly created role. When she calls out, “Kelsal!,” we are told, “His name burst out of her eyes and ears and nose and mouth. Her pores sweated his name. He seeped out from under her fingernails, from the ends of her hair. She saw herself taking hold of his hands, and she shouted his name at those hands for the offence of beating, for the offence of holding a living body and slinging it over the side into the uncaring sea, and the flesh peeled from those offending hands and the little, offending bones of the fingers and wrists splintered, shattered, crumbled and blew away.”79 Mintah wills her force into existence in the hold of the slave ship, where she is most powerless. It is in her ability to concentrate communal suffering and trauma and harness them into a psychic overpowering of the first mate of the Zong that Mintah manages one of many acts of anticipated prowess. While Mintah represents Kelsal’s inability to effectively erase his past, she is also something of the future. Placing herself repeatedly in the path of danger, illustrating a martyrdom throughout the text, Mintah is read as hyperphysical and transcendent. Her metamorphosis from spirited The Return 161

African captive to New World savior begins after she receives that painful beating from Kelsal on the deck of the ship. As Mintah glares strangely toward the first mate, Kelsal wonders, “Did Mintah look changed? She was the woman he had beaten earlier. He had done that. And for good reason. His name was not to be used in this way by a slave. She had been warned, beaten, chained, gagged and here she was again, as impudent with his name as before. She was a fine specimen, would fetch a good price in Jamaica, but he couldn’t countenance her another moment on this ship.”80 Kelsal is overcome by rage and confusion and swiftly makes a decision that will (in his mind) benefit all involved. Mintah, the visual reminder of his vulnerability and incompetence, will be thrown overboard along with the other captives on the ship. The captain, who “nodded his assent and made a rapid reluctant stroke in his ledger,” agrees with this decision, which Kelsal makes alone.81 “She is not sick, he thought, though she is enough of a nuisance to cause trouble on this ship.”82 And so despite her efforts to remain aboard the Zong, “first the left leg then the right disappeared with the body over the side, then her left arm and her right, the hand still gripping a clump of Kelsal’s long auburn hair, and then Mintah was gone.”83 Her disappearance into the oceanic abyss is just the catalyst necessary to foment the rumblings of an insurrection. Immediately after Mintah is thrown overboard, “there were screams and shouts from the slaves. Many of the adults emptied their bowls on the deck or simply threw them at the crew. Cutlasses and clubs were used to cut and beat the men and women singled out as the main culprits.”84 As quickly and passionately as they react to Mintah’s dismissal, it is not the last time she inspires action on board the Zong. Mintah is jettisoned as a rebel; she reemerges on the ship as a god. Using every ounce of conjured power she has, Mintah manages to climb back on board the Zong using the ropes attached to the hull. “Wind burned her,” D’Aguiar writes. “The ship’s hull scraped her skin. ‘[L]et go, Mintah!’ she heard the voice above the wind and the rain and the sea, above all the flames, inside her body and out.”85 But Mintah has crystallized into another form of being. She imagines herself as an object of wood, and “the sea was to be her first independent project.”86 That project comes to fruition when she uses the wood of the ship to make her way back onto the Zong. Her reappearance takes on an alternate form 162 Chapter Four

of resurrection that reconfigures the future of the Zong’s voyage. As the Iemanjá of the Middle Passage, Mintah is responsible for ensuring the survival of her African shipmates. Keeping her elevated role in mind, Mintah achieves the impossible— she makes her way back on the ship with no one’s help. For this she is looked to over the males in the hold as a savior and liberator from a hell for which they had no name. Most important, she does not need the help of the males to persevere and be resilient. It is in her blood. It is her birthright, and she willfully accepts it. Although she knows that if she continues to cause a commotion on the ship she can and will be easily disposed of overboard again, Mintah continues to try to save her fellow Africans from being tossed into the Atlantic. As two members of the crew attempt to jettison a young boy, Mintah finds her way back on the deck of the ship verbally chastising Kelsal again, causing the men to drop the child without tossing him into the sea. They think they are seeing a ghost and are horrified by the sight. Mintah is a hypervisible entity in the text. She is a barren vessel infused with the task of creating of her own memory the repository of the 132 lives lost on the slave ship and tossed into the sea. The actions that took place on the Zong are known to us only through the legal records that followed the ship’s return and the subsequent lawsuit by the insurers, so in a way, Feeding the Ghosts is a literary memorial to the undocumented jettisoned, the invisible archive hovering over transatlantic modernity. Mintah is at first a good colonial subject; after that she is a nurturer and a healer. Next she is a captive, and finally by the end of the novel she is the resurrected physical embodiment of lost slave souls. She does not encompass just her own life and her own existence; she encompasses generations of lost slave souls, never spoken of and never remembered. This task is an awesome one of community, spiritual essence, and conflations of time. It is as if Mintah never existed in essence on that ship of the past, and she ceases to exist in the present. Her being aboard the Zong is almost a mirage—illusions of collective will summoned by those who believe and set her aside when it appears she is not needed any longer. In this manner Mintah functions like a martyr figure, available for momentary siphoning of power, never expected to exist outside of what the community necessitates. Mintah is the literary fusing of women like Harriet Tubman. She rises from the ashes of obscurity so that she may serve, proThe Return 163

tect, lead, and inspire. Her emergence into the text reeks of the desire of diasporic literature to transcend even a near-­totalizing experience such as slavery. As a symbol for the endurance of the enslaved body, Mintah also serves as the people’s God on that ship. Her survival of the sea and her return to the bottom of the hold elevate her to a spiritual and physical hierarchy that the other slaves cannot even fathom. When she reappears to the other slaves, she is honored with the dedication of a deity. Upon Mintah’s arrival below the deck of the ship, “there were shrieks and open mouths and sudden intakes of breath” from the male slaves who see her first.87 Soon after, it is a child who gets to witness Mintah’s resurrection on the ship, and it is this little boy who tells the other children how Mintah “scaled the hull” of the ship with “her bare hands and feet” riding on the back of a big fish after killing three others.88 “She would break the chains of the men between her teeth and they would all be free,” the boy believes, and soon the women believe as well.89 Stories about Mintah travel throughout the hold, and though the women are the last to hear them, they are seemingly most affected by the powers Mintah inspires: “To the women, talking among themselves, Mintah’s reappearance was nothing short of a miracle. The gods were present in her to watch over them. How else could a woman be thrown into the big sea and climb back on to a speeding ship? Hadn’t she assumed the invisibility of a god to remain on board all this time undetected? Which goddess was she?”90 There is a swift transformation in effect on the ship. Mintah goes from being considered a strange, English-­speaking troublemaker, to the savior of the ship. She has in a matter of hours achieved the superior ability necessary to slay sea beasts and men alike. “Lucky for them this god was on their side,” the women in the hold think aloud. “Not so lucky for the crew or those who had betrayed her.”91 The women begin to sing a song in honor of Mintah, “a god who walks among us as a woman.” And since they believe that she is alive and present on the ship “to save us from the sea,” it would seem that all the prayers of the Middle Passage have been answered. Mintah is that prayer. Mintah is that god.92 For Mintah to have survived the unwilling and unforgiving sea and dragged her beaten, hungry, and exhausted body back onto that ship, she would have to possess a superior human strength, an unyielding will, and the determination of gifted deity. She would have to be stronger than the 164 Chapter Four

strongest man thrown overboard, because she has to survive and prevail where he could not. She has to achieve the historically impossible—she has to have defied the very water that destroyed millions of others. She has to make the memory of the passage one of resilience and resistance, determination and persistence. It is not only the climb back onto the Zong that Mintah survives. She is resilient in numerous other ways also. As the only literate slave on the ship at a time when most of the crew on the Zong “could barely sign their names,” Mintah is able to assume a position of power and moral and emotional hierarchy among the whites on the ship.93 She uses this hierarchy to the crew’s disadvantage when she speaks in clear English and admits, “I am baptized like you,” knowing how much the statement would enrage the captain to whom she speaks.94 Mintah takes a number of chances on the ship, all for the betterment of her fellow slaves and never for herself. Working alongside the men she is able to free with some nails she has found, Mintah plans an insurrection on the ship. “The sea was no place for her people,” Mintah states, declaring, “Before another living soul could be thrown into it they would do something about it.”95 As the other captured Africans aboard the Zong await an unsure fate, they put all of their faith in the woman who defied death and create a praise song in her honor: We are on the sea Not in the sea Over the sea Not under the sea Apart from the sea Not a part of the sea Show us mercy Mintah’s mercy And show us land Mintah’s land96 Out of the bowels of suffering and unimaginable horror, former Africans become transitory subjects forced to create a new process of worship and ritual where the previous ones had been denied them. Mintah emerges The Return 165

from this transformation and finds herself the chosen one. She is worshiped over former deities, and the people she once lay next to in the hold now need her to save them from the evil that has swallowed them whole and refuses to let them go. When the attempt is made to take over the ship, “the four young men” picked to fight with the newly appointed savior of the people “bunched behind Mintah,” and it is Mintah who leads them into the war on the Zong.97 It is Mintah who shouts out commands and orders her regiment to cut down any sailor they come into contact with. Even when the insurrection fails and Mintah and the men are captured once again, she uses her self-­manufactured powers to subdue the captain of the ship, who “raised his arm to strike Mintah.” To this, Mintah “pushed her head towards him and glared. He froze with his arm upraised.”98 Though all her attempts at revolution fail, Mintah is the symbolic center from which all other acts of resistance aboard the Zong must be siphoned. As a vessel of the people she represents, Mintah is utilized within Feeding the Ghosts as both a haunting and a prophecy. She is a figure of the sea, a goddess and trauma-­stricken martyr. Obsessed with her inability to save more lives aboard the Zong, Mintah spends the remainder of her free days carving wooden replicas of the bodies lost aboard the slave ship. The novel ends on the island of Jamaica, where Mintah has made her home as a free woman. The year is 1833, fifty years after the Zong left the coast of Africa. Mintah remains as the only spiritual tie to a past she cannot accept, forfeiting the opportunity to have a life for herself because she believes too much in the sacrificial Mintah, the one who exists only for others and inspires transcendence even in the most restricted spaces.

Baby Suggs’s Retreat in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Unlike Mintah, deity resistance consumes Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison’s Beloved even as she quietly rallies to disappear inside it. For Suggs, the former slave entrusted with the care and safety of her grandchildren and daughter-­in-­law Sethe after the latter escapes from slavery, the overwhelming burden of “the Misery,” Sethe’s killing of her oldest daughter, is devastating. The former preacher woman descends into a deep depression, ending in her slow and methodical death eight years later. Morrison 166 Chapter Four

writes, “Her faith, her love, her imagination and her great big old heart began to collapse twenty-­eight days after her daughter in law arrived.”99 Reeling from a freedom from slavery purchased by Sethe’s husband, Halle, and the realization that her freedom was given to her “when it didn’t mean a thing,” Baby Suggs nevertheless provides the black people in her town with a spiritual center from which their collective trauma can be absorbed into a larger cycle of reconstruction.100 Suggs, “accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, . . . became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it.”101 As a preacher woman in the Clearing, Baby Suggs maintained herself as “the town’s spiritual healer and nurturer, needed because all of her people have been defiled physically and spiritually.”102 As for Suggs, the process of religious ascension mitigates her own defeated spirit and gives her something higher than herself to believe in. And then came “the Misery,” so named to hold a place in her consciousness for the moment everything shifted at 124 Bluestone Road and a haunting took hold of the family. Avery Gordon writes, “One major theme of the novel is this question: What is too much? . . . What is too much violence (infanticide) when you are already living with too much violence (slavery)?”103 After Sethe kills her baby daughter in an effort to free the child from an alternate misery, Baby Suggs immediately takes to her bed, weighed down by the enormity of her traumatized psyche and determined to find tranquility and safety where she can—in the safety of color. “Rather than talk about what we ‘know’ about slavery, then,” says W. J. T. Mitchell, “we must talk of what we are prevented from knowing, what we can never know, and how it is figured for us in the partial access we do have.”104 Baby Suggs’s refusal to participate in the religious renewal so integral to her community’s survival and success highlights the extent to which Baby Suggs has been damaged, ravaged by the system of chattel slavery she physically survived. The Fugitive Slave Act that allowed Schoolteacher to travel by horseback to Ohio and attempt to retrieve the slaves he felt he rightfully owned is the last straw for Suggs. She is not just tired, “the marrow of her bones has been worn out” and marrow takes an unusually long time to regenerate itself, time that Baby Suggs does not have.105 She takes to her bed, thinks only of harmless colors “that don’t hurt nobody” like “blue” and “yellow,” and dies there.106 We can think about Baby Suggs The Return 167

as the most forceful ghost in the house, since for eight years she pulls the totality of her trauma within her body and initiates a withdrawal that seems to be both protective and ejecting—a ghosting devoid of her actual death but functioning as if she had already been removed from the earth. Twenty-­eight days after her daughter-­in-­law arrives in Ohio, bringing her youngest grandchild in tow, Baby Suggs’s spiritual and physical worlds collide and she no longer has the faith in God necessary to continue her ministry in the Clearing. Even though it is possibly the first time in her long life that she considered her own desires over those of others, it is a difficult decision to make, and it fractures her emotional well-­being. Her inability to parcel out the word of the gospel for her congregation is a disappointment to most, and an all-­out sin to Stamp Paid, a ferryman who tries to force Baby Suggs back into the life she has since rejected. “‘Listen here, girl,’ he told her, ‘you can’t quit the Word. It’s given to you to speak. You can’t quit the Word. I don’t care what all happen to you. . . . You got to do it. . . . You got to. Can’t nobody Call like you. You have to be there.’”107 Like the rest of the community, he finds comfort in Baby Suggs’s preaching, and for a long time he does not want to give it up. While he contemplates “his refusal to see the effect of marrow weariness in a woman he believed was a mountain,” he discovers that although he is “too late” (she is long dead when he has this epiphany), he finally understands her exhaustion.108 And in his understanding, he forgives her. According to Avery Gordon, “Beloved also problematizes the retrieval of lost or missing subjects by transforming those who do not speak into what is unspeakable, so that in that marvelous power of negative dialects it can be conjured, imagined, worked out.”109 Stamp Paid conjures the memory of Baby Suggs’s fragility in order to reconcile the whole-­marrow of Suggs’s loss. Although Trudier Harris insists that when Baby Suggs refuses to preach in the Clearing, “by abdicating her creative role, Baby Suggs descends from the legendary status that has defined her to become just another victim of slavery,” it is possible to read in her refusal the full effects of slavery’s toll on her already aching body:110 After sixty years of losing children to the people who chewed up her life and spit it out like a fish bone; after five years of freedom given to 168 Chapter Four

her by her last child, who bought her future with his, exchanged it, so to speak, so she could have one whether he did or not—to lose him too; to acquire a daughter and grandchildren and see that daughter slay the children (or try to); to belong to a community of other free Negroes—to love and be loved by them, to counsel and be counseled, protect and be protected, feed and be fed—and then to have that community step back and hold itself at a distance—well, it could wear out even a Baby Suggs, holy.111 Showing that even preacher women, holy, cannot sustain themselves with bits and pieces of life, drops and small portions of what it takes to be whole—wholly determined to be about the business of self-­sacrifice, Baby Suggs steps off of the spiritual pedestal she has stood upon for years. And she cannot see the Word, or the need to call it any longer. Baby Suggs represents the confluence of psychological and spiritual strength, the kind that is often necessary for the community but detrimental to the self. Morrison shows the extent to which people make demands that are seamlessly integrated into the fabric of a culture. Stamp Paid realizes many years after Suggs is dead that she wrestled with too much and she wrestled alone. This is a revelation he comes to only after his own epiphany of pain. It occurs when he comes across a ribbon caught on the bottom of his boat. And “he tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet wooly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp.”112 It is at this moment where the full force of slavery’s trauma strikes him suddenly, makes him weary and allows him to empathize with Suggs’s choice to silently consider the beauty of harmless colors. “He hoped she stuck to blue,” Morrison writes of Stamp Paid’s reflections concerning Baby Suggs. “And never fixed on red.”113 In the stereograph of this interaction, then, there is the illusion of three-­dimensionality, an overlapping of one subject (or subjectivity) on top of another. Each eye sees something slightly different (as is the case between Stamp Paid and Baby Suggs), and this difference has the profound inculcation of the visual. Armed with his present ability to connect the elder Suggs with a systematic structure of psychic and spiritual destruction, Stamp Paid can move beyond his previous demands and to a place of understanding. This understanding is too late for Baby Suggs— she needed it when they were both “standing in Richmond Street, ankle The Return 169

deep in leaves,” and Baby Suggs was making verbal what should have been an obvious visual need to retreat.114 “What I have to do is get in my bed and lay down,” Suggs responds when Stamp Paid insists she return to the Clearing. “I want to fix on something harmless in this world.”115 Suggs’s desire to be left alone and to focus on her own interests, attempt to heal from the inside out, attests to the confluence of trauma that she found herself unable to process fully.

The Conjured Woman Rebels: Erna Brodber’s “One Bubby Susan” Caribbean literature boasts a history of art being connected to acts of structured rebellion. According to Selwyn Cudjoe, “In order to understand fully resistance as an aesthetic-­political element of Caribbean literature, it is necessary to draw on history.”116 Any discussion of the Caribbean must engage the tumultuous relationship the region has had with colonization, slavery, and revolt. Cudjoe considers literary resistance such a part of the Caribbean that there would arguably be no recognizable form of Caribbean literature without it. Jamaican writer Erna Brodber’s short story “One Bubby Susan,” which problematizes the rhetoric of strength and resilience as it exists in the diasporic community, is no exception. The story, told in Jamaican patois, features a speaker who has been given the task of telling the tale of the protagonist Susan, a Nanny-­ like resistant figure who “did like to fly through cave and talk to rat-­bat and climb tree and talk to bird.”117 In other words, Miss Susan is a mystic who refuses what she believes the future has in store for her. Helen Tiffin writes, “Brodber’s ‘One Bubby Susan’ takes anthropologist/historian Frank Cundall’s account of an Arawak rock carving and ‘fleshes out’ a counter-­interpretation.”118 The unnamed narrator exists within the text to “set the record straight” for the spirit of Miss Susan, who continues to “live” in a cave in the parish of St. Mary, Jamaica.119 The story focuses on Miss Susan’s rise to the spiritual leadership position she holds in the community of believers who seek out her advice, visit her in the cave, and refuse to allow her to live if that life is not on their terms. In this manner, Miss Susan represents both the ordinary, forgotten women of the diaspora and their spectacular womenfolk who glide seamlessly through a myriad of textual stereotypes and long-­held beliefs only

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beneficial to the continuation of the perception of superior existence these women are thought to embody. Susan’s problem is that she wants to be an individual—to be herself, the woman she was meant to be and not the historical self created by others long before she was born. She attempts to claim herself as an agent of her own future, “challenging,” in Valerie Orlando’s perception, “the prerogatives of male public space.”120 As the chosen narrator insists, “The picture on the money is real,” alluding to the imagined likeness of Nanny on Jamaica’s five-­hundred-­ dollar bill.121 In her literary replication, Susan attempts to humanize the memory of the obeah/spirit woman who possessed the answers to all of life’s questions. When Susan first takes to the cave to escape the monotony of marriage and the immensity of work it entails, she finds that she ascends to a spiritual height she never imagined. After a child sees her in a state of silent meditation, he starts to have nightmares and tells people that “him see a god”; the visitors begin to arrive at her cave, and soon there is a steady stream of people seeking her out.122 As a transformative space of solace and refuge, the cave is not an underground burial place but an emergent source of power for Susan. In her cave, she begins to parcel out advice and grant prayers to those who seek her insight. As a reluctant leader, Miss Susan finds it difficult to say no to those she has come to represent. The more they need her, the harder she works for them. “When the first man come up and put a problem,” the narrator explains, “Miss Sue find she just give him a answer straight out of her head and that she was right. She turn God now!”123 Soon, though, Susan is dissatisfied with this way of life, for it limits her much as she believes marriage would have. “The thing get so ridiculous with no little bit of space for herself that Sue start to consider that it was just as cheap she did married and put up with the bammy-­making and the bato.”124 The cave becomes a miniature prison Miss Susan cannot escape precisely because it is there that she chose to create her sanctuary. She no longer wants to help those who need her help in the absence of a consideration of her needs. Susan quickly ceases to be dedicated to the mission she never chose for herself in the first place.” “One thought lead to the other and the other to her usual rebellion and Miss Sue say to herself ‘Not a blast’ and decide that she not going to be no God with no privacy.

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She decide she gwine form dead and let them leave her. . . . She stand up straight now, press herself against the cave wall and hold her breath yoga style. And the people did believe that she was dead. And it vexed them.”125 The thought of Miss Susan retreating from her coerced position of spiritual leadership is unacceptable for the people of the island. In true rebellious fashion, they refuse to allow Miss Susan to leave them without a fight. They begin to throw stones at her as she sits in the cave. “At the very time when the tourist eating out them life and they have no help but from this God, the God decide to strike! Is stones now . . . is plain straightforward disappointment and vexation that make those stones come.”126 They throw enough stones to weaken and eventually kill Susan, and when her body falls into a sinkhole, they are so incensed that they throw stones at the granite carving they believe resembles her in the cave. They are so persistent and determined that, in anger, they knock off one of the breasts from the carving—which is how Susan got her nickname “One Bubby Susan.” As if her removal is not to be of her own volition, and her return is externally demanded, the space allotted to Susan is too small for existence. And even in death, there is demand. Brodber utilizes the legend of the Amazon warrior women of Dahomey, who were thought to fearlessly chop off their right breasts to make a place for their rifles. As Lucille Clifton asserts in her poem “female,” the “amazon in us” connotes a collective black-­world legacy of sliced breasts, exerted defiance, and resurrected prowess.127 And yet, Brodber’s story is a cautionary tale about the limits of not only history but also gratitude; the limits of not only selflessness but also self-­protection. There are but moments when it seems the people of the island are appreciative of all that Susan has given them, moments when they sacrifice animals and bring tributes to her in the cave. For the most part, though, they are selfish and refuse to see her as a human. The tragedy of Miss Susan’s story is that she clearly wanted to help her people. The cost was simply too high, and even though Miss Susan seems content to tell her story devoid of the bitterness she most certainly deserves, there is in her rendition of the tale a lingering disappointment in the processes of need and appreciation she undergoes in that cave. “No more peace any more,” the narrator says of Miss Susan’s dilemma. “Can’t even breathe.”128 The people will not let the God live, and in the end, they

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will not allow her to die. For the narrator to be able to tell Susan’s story centuries later connotes the lingering effect she has had on the island and its people—particularly the women who may fall into the metaphoric sinkhole of trying to do too much for others. Miss Susan’s narrator wonders why she has been given the duty of telling Susan’s story. She wonders what Miss Susan’s point might be, allowing her life story to be told after so much time has passed. “Perhaps she want to say you must be careful how you give or how you stop giving,” she says. “Perhaps she want to say to women ‘Make them call you angel but don’t make them make you into no heavenly being, for that is so-­so burden-­bearing and the day name day you say you tired, them get vex and lick you down and kill you.’”129 With caution and poise, “One Bubby Susan” tells of one woman’s reluctant leadership and the perils of creating god-­like figures out of flesh-­and-­blood human beings.

Visualizing the Spirit The idea of the conjure woman, the figure of spirituality and cultural necessity, is one Romare Bearden kept at the forefront of his artistic thought processes. Since 1964, according to Richard J. Powell, “Bearden created at least a dozen works on the subject of ” the figure.130 Culled as she was “from Bearden’s deep deep memory reservoir of the women he knew or had known and considered elemental, powerful and transforming in his life,” the conjured woman, in Bearden’s estimation, encompasses a multivalent identity.131 As the title of one of his first “conjur woman” portraits suggests, it is the “prevalence of ritual” that sustains a people beyond the trauma of enslavement and forced (or voluntary) migration. For Louis Kaplan, “The four images that constitute The Prevalence of Ritual . . . take on new dimensions. They are to be viewed as photomontages that interrupt myth and are engaged in the common exposure of singular beings (which takes place in the interruption of community as communion).”132 Peeling back the façade of the “singular being,” Bearden’s collages are layered with the ruptured history of postslavery black life. Acknowledging what is at once structurally significant with the cultural signifiers of laden dependence, Bearden’s “conjur woman,” like Charles Chesnutt’s conjure woman, is a figure interwoven between an

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African residue and its circum-­Atlantic resurrection. Composite hand or foot, fabric or photo, the “conjur woman” gazes back, constructed of disparate textual parts, an imaginative projection of black ethereal desire. Almost in opposition to the confines of collective ethereal desire, María Magdalena Campos-­Pons’s portrait The Calling (2003) features the artist as a lone black woman, robed in the garb of Santeria worship, encased in a solitary sojourn symbolized by the figure’s captured slow movement and the arched angle of her arm grasping a collection of flowers. The figure is a full-­circle and near-­complete spiritual entity. Her eyes closed, her skin peppered with white dabs of paint consistent with not only Santeria but also Haitian vodou and Brazilian Candomblé ceremonial performance, the woman is involved in a solitary spiritual moment, absenting the viewer of involvement, illustrating this as a private experience.133 The figure, seemingly unaware of the exterior world of black female subjectivity, stands as a woman invested and dedicated to her own spiritual pleasure and transcendence. There is nothing else to imbue and invest the image, and the only spirit imagining taking place in this photograph is one of the subject’s making. There is only a black space of insular ascension the woman either desires or has already achieved. The large-­format Polaroid portrait diptych, opened like two halves of a whole self, allows the viewer to enter the space created by and for the figure visualized, but it does not allow the disruption of the interior, private moment linked to the image itself. Any fragmentation of the representation is answered by Campos-­Pons’s resolute defiance of regulatory processes of black womanhood. A side-­angle view rendering the opposing gaze from the viewer as a secondary motion excluded from the interiority of the photograph, Campos-­Pons’s self-­portrait ties into historical and familial notions of spiritual centrality. She places herself at the crossroads between the known and unknown, the made world and that world which cannot be made again. Embodied within a side-­angle partial recognition, the subjectivity of the figure in the photograph is privileged over whatever manifestation of the gaze can be achieved by the viewer. As the subject’s eyes are closed and rapt in a gesture of nostalgic recognition and self-­affirmation, the viewer enters the space with the same careful and contemplative respect given a familiar place of worship. The temple, the body, its archive and transgressive possibilities all converge in this photograph, and the 174 Chapter Four

figure straddles both aspects of her created imagery—the rendered and the ­remembered.

Calling Black Atlantic subjectivities force an engagement with death that is repetitive and unrelenting, surviving off of the riff and the motif of New World slavery. At the “too much” point of no return in Morrison’s Beloved, a collective anger steeped in the melancholy of the bereft emerges. After constructing an edible celebration inclusive of neighbors barely out of the trauma of their previous enslavement, the “ninety people who ate so well, and laughed so much, it made them angry,” Baby Suggs is forced ever after to negotiate their wrath against her. “Why is she and hers always at the center of things,” they wonder. “How come she always knows exactly what to do and when? Giving advice; passing messages; healing the sick; hiding fugitives, loving, cooking, cooking, loving, preaching, singing, dancing and loving everybody like it was her job and hers alone.”134 In the repetition of “loving” produced three times in this short passage, there is the cadence of this representative lack. As Suggs provides for her community, they set themselves against her—for it is she “who had not even escaped slavery—had, in fact, been bought out of it by a doting son and driven to the Ohio River in a wagon—free papers folded between her breasts.”135 Left to her own oblivion in the wake of Schoolteacher’s encroachment on her property, Suggs is not warned of his arrival by the very people she had tended in the past. In the way that they turn from her, the way that they open the door and allow whiteness to enter, they refuse her previous offering for something more familiar: disregard (a figurative turning away). In so doing, Suggs is relegated to the space of invisibility, her previous sacrifices and suffering rendered irretrievable. Nancy Morejón’s poem “Persona,” featured at the beginning of this chapter, laments the space of invisibility that the speaker embodies. “Which of these women am I,” the poem begins, cataloging a series of impossible dualities wrapped in race, gender, and communal self-­offering. The final lines of the poem, “The wise night arranges its bones and mine / A bird from the sky has turned its light into our eyes,” offers the speaker a moment of bodily reprieve that can never last.136 If self-­sacrifice is the mandate, how are black women of the diaspora able to insert a measure The Return 175

of subjectivity into the arena of mythmaking? Whether due to devastation or blunt external force, or from an exploration of their own misery, each of the women in these fictional tales dies either remarkably violent or quiet and passive deaths, proving that even a goddess has flesh-­and-­ blood limitations. Yet, like a photographic negative in the hands of an expert, reproduction is not just a right, it is dominion. Bending to the will of cultural order, these representations are the paranormal activities of an anxious and aching constituency. These images lead us to wonder what the return is indicative of, and why so many cultures are invested in the same liminal existence for black women.

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Conclusion

Photographic Incantations of the Visual

The Body and the Ruin This body represents a conflation of temporality and space, the afterimage of slavery, and the elongation of the residue of empire. History is carved into the flesh of rock and concrete, forming a cast out of which the figure emerges repeatedly. Yet, as she duplicates a singular corporeal form, she becomes multiple subjectivities, and her body is the only tether to an aesthetic and political framework doubling as a racial disavowal and a racial reiteration. She provides for the viewer an archive of time that at once prefigures future slaughter and conquest, and survives it. In this way her engagement with the body is a structural mandate, what Eduardo Cadava calls “the dialectical transfer between the Then and the Now,” and the viewer receives the offering as a figurative temporal artifact, boldly straddling past and present, ethereal and material.1 Carrie Mae Weems’s series Roaming (2006) situates the photographer at the center of architectural structures that have drastically impacted the history of Western civilization. Her body, placed in the center of a series of buildings meant to connote the hyperpresence of constructed power, provides the linchpin that disturbs the existing narrative. In her haunting of the city of Rome and its outer areas, her complication of ritual and form into geometric patterns constructed out of concrete and stone, the artist reorganizes the visual imperative of race and body, preferring, it appears, a photographic cease-­fire. With Weems’s back turned away from the viewer as she faces disparate structures around the Italian capital, the

C.1. The Edge of Time—Ancient Rome, Carrie Mae Weems (Roaming series), 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

viewer must enter the frame through her, or at least with her permission (figure C.2). As this permission is granted, it becomes the task of the viewer to manage visual comportment, to complement the sovereignty of the eye with a concomitant negotiation, one that has at its center the machinations of sight (ocularity) and site (location). And so it is here that the artist interrogates the rigidity of the racialized body by continually repealing her corporeal frame in front of the viewer’s resistant indexical understanding. This is an understanding that takes race and conquest as two interlocking modes of understanding form and extending the discourse of the corporeal. But in this body there is a muted dichotomy of volition, and a softened conflict of race and place. The structural sites are one of several ways to understand hegemony, to see it overwhelm a body and envelop that body in its undertow. “Spatial strengths and the spatial imaginary in black narratives and theory,” according to Katherine McKittrick, “return the reader to important questions about the production of space.”2 In the production of space (or the artistic production over space) that Weems enacts, a different measure of mystery is invoked. And it is here, “in this place” (to quote Baby Suggs in the Clearing), that the flesh of the landscape can be seen to contain the divergent inheritances of the past. Ingrid Pollard, in her series Pastoral Interlude (1987–8), engages explicitly with the divergent inheritance of empire, race, and conquest. She does so by subjecting her body to the iterations of the “this has been” that Roland Barthes reminds us exists in each photographic display. The “this” Pollard highlights forces the eye to contend with the uncomfortable nature of the photographer’s self-­stance in the face of the British Empire. She does not enact a refusal as the mechanism of her engagement. She stands against a constructed stone wall alone on the edge of an English countryside. Her body becomes the boundary marker she reinforces in the photograph, upright, rigid, and awkwardly integrated. The place she cannot go is into the countryside. Her unbelonging is marked and mediated, measured and delineated. A legacy of slavery has brought her to this present space, so that her body can signal an internal conflict. And so, as another of these images illustrates, she seems to have abandoned her quest altogether. Her form measures starkly against the foliage of the underbrush beneath her feet, and her expression might be deConclusion 179

C.2. In De Sica’s Light, Carrie Mae Weems (Roaming series), 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

scribed as caught somewhere between introspective contemplation and a mournful fixation.3 The written narrative that accompanies both images is intended to further discomfort, to provide the lush landscape with violent intent.4 What Ulrich Baer regards, in the context of Holocaust memory, landscape, and photography, as the “uncoupling of seeing and knowing” gestures toward the “deep doubts about the possibility and limitations of mastering past events by integrating them into an account of an individual’s or a collective’s path toward their present position.” 5 Doubt renders Pollard’s scene a racial extension of the interplay between an invisible imperial power and its colonized afterimage. What is left of the foliaged fecundity, clusters of leaves and grass, trees and branches, is the body of the other—frozen and still.6 Even the remnants of a stone wall merge seamlessly with the plant life it borders, so much so that Pollard seems a conspicuous vertical line forming out of the wooden poles that frame her seated body. Head turned to her right and manually winding the film back into its canister with her back to a barbed-­wired blockage, Pollard exacts a handheld reversal of the scene she has just offered the viewer. And landscape as ruin is enacted through this postcolonial body. Within self-­portraiture photography, the task of convincing a collective constituency of the subject’s right to render the vicissitudes of her history a thing that is seen and therefore known falls to the image-­maker herself, and the body she carries with her through the world. While I do not want to read self-­portraiture photography as the ultimate solution to the problem of racial legibility and slavery’s lingering effects, I would argue nonetheless that the pattern of enforced recognition (both subject and object) allows for a greater measure of visual mobility. That photographic self-­portraits also offer an explicit engagement with the medium’s historically negotiated framing, documentary, and stereotyping capacities begs the question inferred by the famous Rita Dove poem about Billie Holiday. To turn her statement into that question, then, if you can’t be free, can you still be a mystery?7 Black female photographic practices in a postmodern paradigm attest to the poem’s conundrum in an inverted affirmative: Freedom is mystery. Mystery is freedom. Mystery is what curtails black Atlantic subjectivity as it wrestles with the enormous burden of slavery. When the figure later known as Beloved makes her way to 124 Bluestone Road in Morrison’s novel, she is a vision Conclusion 181

of mystery. “Nobody saw her emerge or came accidentally by,” we are told.8 And when she is finally discovered by the residents of 124 Bluestone, “the rays of the sun struck her full in the face, so that when Sethe, Denver and Paul D rounded the curve in the road all they saw was a black dress, two unlaced shoes below it,” and the dog “Here Boy nowhere in sight.”9 From where this lovely stranger has emerged and why, no one knows. Paul D is curious but cautious. “He was about to ask her who her people were but thought better of it. A young colored woman drifting was drifting from ruin,” and ruin is a state of being best traversed carefully.10 Claiming the expansiveness of the ruin as part and parcel of a mobile exterior life, Weems prefers the strictures of the built environment over landscape, and a bodily stance that arrives, enters, and highlights the constraints of race and gender over space. As Anne Cheng writes, “What it means to occupy space thus comes very close to what it means to be occupied. We are in fact confronting an implicit critique of modern architecture as monumentality and its implied project of self-­mastery.”11 Using a reversed temporal order, Weems utilizes premodern structures to mark her body in the space of an intimate, even if that intimacy is, as Christina Sharpe might argue, “monstrous.”12 To suture the empire to the visibility that attends its formation, the subject containing the viewer’s entrance into the framework of the corporeal produces the centralizing feature of this gesture photographically. And yet when Weems uses her body to enter the Jewish ghetto on the outskirts of the “eternal city,” she moves the viewer through the history of delineated force while restraining the double entendre of land and body she contains (figure C.3). The space is contending with itself, and she is engaging that battle. Her long black gown strongly resembles the liturgical cassock worn by Catholic priests.13 Along with the repetition of her body within the historical location, her dress gestures toward an engendered gender transference that marks her body as a text unread and unfixed. If masculinity is defined as movement, and whiteness is rendered as entitlement, the figure transmits both that aura and that cadence. She moves through these spaces—indeed, she roams—and her purposelessness as well as her certainty set her apart. Although the diminutive size of the figure within the space calls the structures around her into astounding question, she is a figuration of unknown origin, and therefore not marked racially by the boundaries of this particularized hegemonic 182 Conclusion

C.3. Jewish Ghetto, Carrie Mae Weems (Roaming series), 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

order.14 “The photograph” Amelia Jones writes, “is a death-­dealing apparatus in its capacity to fetishize and congeal time.”15 In her collapsing of temporal order, Weems appears as a death-­dealer, as well as the specter encroaching on history’s fissures and fixations. I do not mean here to argue that race can be postarticulated out of existence, that its ever-­present force can become a negation of social and political order, but I believe Weems presents us with an opportunity, one that envisions repetition as release. “Fine art photographers constructed ways to explore self-­ portraiture,” Deborah Willis contends, “and ideas of beauty both in front of and behind the camera.”16 Of nineteenth-­century white, middle-­class respectability, Shawn Michelle Smith writes, “Photographs and especially photographic portraits function as particularly problematic objects . . . collapsing the already tenuous oppositional distance between subject and object, identity and commodity, owner and owned.”17 Weems probes the deep layering of this negotiation by utilizing the self-­portrait that is also a self-­commodity, and an engagement that is also disengagement. The figure repeats this singular form in order to defamiliarize the racial dimension of imperialism from the body she uses to enact the space. This is a repetition that has served Weems well over the years as she has maneuvered between an overwhelming rigidity of black female representation and her artistic desire to be, particularly in her later works, both subject and object. Mining the deep field of counterinterpretation, her performance of both public and private spaces, of the interiority of a collective lived experience and its habitual iteration, secures for Weems the recognition of racial mimetic coding while parsing out its impossibility. “It’s been implied that I have no place in Europe,” Weems has said. “I find the idea that I’m ‘out of place’ shocking. There’s a dynamic relationship between these places: the power of the state, the emotional manipulation of citizens through architectural means, the trauma of the war, genocide, the erasure of Jews, the slave coast, and the slave cabins.”18 Layering impact after impact of movement, decimation, subjection, and migration out of a hegemonic reordering, Weems reinforces this reordering through corporeal repetition and structural recognition.

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Temporal Roaming Weems has consistently tussled with slavery’s corporeal embankment, its syncretized vision of the body’s commodification, its balance of duality and division. Initially beginning her photographic process as a documentarian, Weems soon finds that the “evidentiary” offers her no true evidence, and the viewer’s ability to fill the eye with culturally rehearsed semiotics of race and gender did nothing to release the body from the violence of the gaze. She then shifts her focus to narratives of visual performance, attempting, it appears, a structure of corporeal refusal that also reclaims the body by chaining it to the architectural space. She has done this before. The mysterious figure with her back against the viewer’s entrance into the frame is, according to the photographer, her muse. For the viewer she is an escort and a guide, a silent witness and a body, unfixed and figured in the center of the frame, lending to the ambiguity the photograph depends upon. Architectural structures figure prominently in Weems’s series The Louisiana Project (2003), commissioned by Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery to commemorate the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase. With this series, Weems uses the opportunity to haunt the present with the past and place her accidental and incidental body within the layered context of New Orleans slave history (figure C.4). Highlighting literal construction alongside corporeal destabilization, the cover image envisions slavery’s memory as a series of entrance points marked by known and unknowable possibilities. Though the ghostly/ guid­erly figure appears to pause before entering one such possibility, another lies beyond the door, a straight pathway to another spatial configuration. She enters alone, but her solitary stance at the center of the frame locks the viewer out of the experience, but within its witnessing. Amelia Jones writes, “Through the pose, then, and this is where the productive tension of self-­portrait photography resides, the embodied subject is exposed as being a mask or screen, a site of projection and identification.”19 These performances engage in repetitions that are architectural and atmospheric, corporeal, gendered, and tethered to the landscape. They allude to collective traumas that are generational, diasporic, temporal, and unyielding. I want to end The Repeating Body here, by examining the possibilities embedded in the sight of a black woman moving across Conclusion 185

C.4. Cover image, The Louisiana Project, Carrie Mae Weems, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

photographic time, through and beyond the demarcations of transatlantic slavery.

The Reversal of Space Weems sits in full view of the former Chalmette Plantation, where the Battle of New Orleans was fought and Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British solidified the Louisiana Purchase (figure C.5). Now known as the Malus-­Beauregard house, this structure was built in 1833 on the ruins of the former plantation. Weems situates her body in a state of quiet contemplation. The viewer is not meant to swiftly glide through the scene but to pause here and take in the enormity of all that passed before the landscape was reshaped. It is her body that privileges the past in a particular way, its impact on the spatial configuration she presents to the viewer. Removed from the contemporary scene, her body cannot haunt the space the way that her performative persona can. Subjecting the photograph to its divided lateral components, the image casts Weems as the shadow against which a national narrative is framed, the ghost in the machine of American memory, and the recalcitrant “body in the archive,” to use Allan Sekula’s terminology, that remains even after layers of reconfiguration flood the landscape. There is something of the spirit photography of the nineteenth century at play here, as well, the intersection of representation and creation fused into the compartments of collective pain. When Toni Morrison spoke of writing her novel Beloved as a monument to slavery—where anyone could go to contemplate its enormous national weight—she literally created a ghost in the figure of the character Beloved, a woman of immense mystery who stands in for all those lost and without names. As Weems duplicates her body against slavery’s most visible and enduring remains, the plantation loses something of its own mystery, tethered as it is to the perpetual unfreedom of others. The racial containment of plantation sites, with their eerie proximity to the specificity of corporeal trauma and racial debasement, gives Weems a visual working definition of the index in its most strident form. The body she presents to the viewer is there to both witness and instruct, leading the eye into the framework of history’s impact against specific people, and specific structures against individual histories. This explicit Conclusion 187

C.5. Malus-­Beauregard House, Carrie Mae Weems, The Louisiana Project, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

purposefulness enacts upon the space a near-­totalizing harbinger of later haunting, allowing the architecture of that containment to centralize the thematic evocation of the scene as the scene of a crime. If The Louisiana Project is meant to encapsulate the viewer through a series of reinforced passageways, tunnels through which race narrows the parameters of belonging, then the Roaming series is an overwrought treatise on power’s expansive hold. Using the body’s miniaturized form against massive structures connotes an understanding of domination that does not have to necessitate a racialized gaze. Standing at Western civilization’s precipice, the figure maps the Western imperatives of conquest and imperialism with one word: more. Weems’s video interview, aired on the pbs show Art 21 on October 7, 2009, situates the impetus of the photographer as global, mindful of the particularities of visual indentations, and attuned to the historical pertinence of the photographic eye. Featuring the established photographer’s newest imagistic endeavors, this interview was part of Art 21’s themed episode “Compassion,” in which Weems asserts, “I think that architecture . . . in its essence, much of the fabric of it, is very much about power. . . . You are always aware that you are a sort of, you know, minion in relationship to this . . . enormous edifice, the edifice of power.”20 The “edifice of power,” as the framing mechanism of Weems’s photographic intent, is a way both to highlight a built totality of constructed infringement and to negotiate its dominance. Every edifice is permeable, with a way in and a way out. And the figure in the center of the frame is performing her body’s release through the buildings that envelop her body, the texture of that enjambment (figure C.6). “What one is made to feel,” Weems asserts, “is the power of the state in relationship to the lower subject.” This “lower subject,” while likely racialized in very particular ways, nonetheless inherits this position from below, from the underbelly of subjectivity, and it is incumbent upon the subject to negotiate the sight (site) and the measure of its temporal order. Weems is most consistent when she invokes the subterfuge of mystery, when she enacts upon the viewer a puzzle that he or she must monitor and negotiate. “It is essential that I do this work,” she has stated, “and it is essential that I do this work with my body.”21 Using her body as a way to open up a dialogue on the architectural modality that the power of the state implies, she makes the connection between race and power part and Conclusion 189

C.6. Untitled, Carrie Mae Weems, The Louisiana Project, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

parcel of the unfortunate imperatives of the victors over the vanquished. “The visual culture surrounding the racialized female body,” writes Anne Cheng, “understood to be one of the most pernicious examples of masculinist colonial imagination, also tells alternate stories about the intersection of power, shame, and exhibition.”22 This “telling” is the place to “locate these alternate stories by attending to the utterances left on the surfaces of black bodies and white buildings.”23 The echoes of a racialized haunting permeate every stone and concrete structure in every major city in Europe and throughout the Americas. What happens when photography and literature probe these interstices and tether the corporeal to the demarcations of the ocular that others have neglected? And what happens when all of it is slavery’s afterlife? With Roaming, Carrie Mae Weems has positioned her body with an eye toward the bifocality of sight and site. We see the structures the figure presents to us. We see them through her and with her body’s permission. With the viewership tethered to the architectural space, we need her body to move us beyond the mandates of race and onto the expansive manipulations of structural power. This is the body offered and the gaze refused, facing a series of Italian structures in order to demarcate the elongation of empire over space, of bodies over time. She is the survival of conquest, prefiguring that survival. Repetitive, singular, and possessed of a purposeful saunter, it is the mystery of that sauntering that is meant to engage the eye and to extend the concept of temporality within and beyond death, ruin, haunting, slavery, gender, empire, and form.

Photographic Incantations of the Ocular “The postmodern body,” Linda Nochlin asserts, “is conceived of uniquely as the ‘body-­in-­pieces’: the very notion of a unified, unambiguously gendered subject is rendered suspect” by the artists attempting to bring postmodernity into focus.24 Black women enter the frame photographically—as a collective body always already in pieces; their inability to unify a collective discourse only lengthens the measure of their malleability. “The past cannot be recovered,” Saidiya Hartman writes, “yet the history of the captive emerges precisely at this site of loss and rupture.”25 Contained within the register of imagistic layering, the figure is allowed

Conclusion 191

to retain a measure of that loss and rupture while performing a kind of covert exposure. Photography affords a black female body a wealth of possibility mired in both the mystery and the subterfuge of slavery’s resonance in the contemporary. It is “the lie that tells the truth,” the secret of the frame, the marked terrain of the past, and the suspenseful dispensation of the future.26 Because the frame has the ability to “remember everything” and preserve nothing, it disallows the viewer’s inclination toward the “aversion of the eye,” as Fred Moten articulates it through the photograph of Emmett Till. Fixed or malleable, black women’s photographic bodies are the symbol within the referent, proof that what Susan Sontag calls “the arbitrariness of photographic evidence” extends beyond the mechanisms of the eye.27 That so many black Atlantic photographic processes of gender and race refuse full entrance into the frame, that they often deny the viewer the ocular possession they desire by inscribing the private space of a singular body with the public duplication of a layered contingency, is both curious and compelling. Maybe photography is an answer to a four-­ hundred-­year conundrum: Can one envision the totality of slavery’s traumatic legacy without leaving the collective body in pieces? How can one be seen without violence? Turn one’s back? Refuse and include? And what is a black woman’s back in the context of slavery’s resonance? In Lorna Simpson’s hands (plate 6), it reveals what the prostrated silence of Wideman’s black woman cannot. In Corridor (phone), by centralizing the figure of focus and intention, Simpson tautly contains the enormous weight of history against the flesh, forcing the viewer to take in information he or she might ordinarily self-­regulate, and making the subject the master of her own subjectivity. This works especially well for Simpson, whose photographs routinely take away the viewer’s expected enjoyment while leaving all pertinent information in place. The present and the past merge here, often with all of the varied nuances of time and delineation. “Unlike any other image,” John Berger writes, “a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.”28 What can we trace here that does not avail itself to previous genres of embodiment? What is particular about black women’s contemporary photographic insistences? What, for instance, is in the sway of the subject’s dress in Carrie Mae Weems’s image (figure C.7)? What is the fragment of the door in the 192 Conclusion

C.7. A Single Waltz in Time, Carrie Mae Weems, The Louisiana Project, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

frame that both faces the portrait in front of itself and also obscures it? Everything about the self-­portrait is an embodiment of corporeal conflation—the layering of intimate and contingent relationships. The subject’s body holds a secret, and yet in the spinning flow of the arms there is also a ballerina’s singular controlled release—subverting everything we think we see. Sharp architectural lines divide the space but are also marked by the circular intentions of the room. You are being brought from one side of history clear through to the other. And she is refusing the gaze as well, purely on her own terms, but also keeping the viewer at a distance that comforts the subject, privileges the interiority of the waltz, and swaddles the frame. Robyn Wiegman assures us that “while the visible must be understood as giving way to the authority of the invisible recesses of the body, to organs and functions, the full force of this production was nonetheless contingent on the status of an observer, whose relationship to the object under investigation was mediated and deepened by newly developed technologies for rendering the invisible visible.”29 The quest for a centrality of visibility, a centrality of subjectivity repetitively embedded, places the photograph in direct linkage with a literary impetus framed in highly visual and often largely photographic terms. Therein lies the difficulty in attempting to wrest black women from the trace of the corporeal. Where might they go without bringing the past along with them? Where might we let them go without our perception of their bodies’ utility in an ocular world? Much like the cadent repetition embedded in black Atlantic musical improvisation, cultural productions of the visual seek to reorient external expectations. Photography affords the body a wealth of possibility. With it memory—fragmented, fluid and malleable, rigid and still—­situates the black female body as one photograph in a continually duplicating frame constantly looking back on itself. And within that space is the possibility of freedom.

194 Conclusion

Notes

Introduction. Visualizing the Body of the Black Atlantic 1. Audre Lorde, “Afterimages,” in Collected Poems (New York: Norton, 2000), 339. 2. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339. 3. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339. 4. Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin,’” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 64. 5. Moten, “Black Mo’nin,’” 62–63. 6. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339. 7. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339–41. 8. Mamie Till-­Mobley (1921–2003), after the murder of her son, Emmett Till, insisted upon publishing postmortem photographs (most famously in Jet magazine) and having an open-­casket funeral for Till, stating, “I want the world to see what they did to my boy.” This insistence upon the indexical evidence of her son’s mutilated body contributed to the already-­present outrage concerning the gruesome, racially motivated murder. Till-­Mobley’s inability to receive justice in the space of the law is illustrated in the title of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “A Brownesville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.” 9. “I, too, am the afterlife of slavery,” Saidiya Hartman writes in Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6. This afterlife has a past and a past tense, a forward haunting and a resurrection. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339–41. 10. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 33; Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth, ed. William Zinsser (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 91. 11. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 33. 12. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 71.

13. In her poem “Memory and Resistance,” the Afro-­Uruguayan poet Cristina Cabral writes, “Sometimes legend reminds me / But never history.” Cristina Cabral, “Memory and Resistance,” in Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-­Hispanic Writers, ed. Miriam DeCosta-­Willis (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003), 396. 14. John Edgar Wideman, The Cattle Killing (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 63. 15. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66. 16. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66. 17. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66. 18. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66. 19. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66. 20. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 74, 76. 21. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (summer 1987): 65, 67. 22. “The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him,” Sigmund Freud writes in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” stating, “What he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.” In Morrison’s Beloved, the improvisational space of re-­created memories, or “rememory,” privileges a collective accounting and rearticulating rather than a clinical or individual remembering. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 602. 23. Antonio Benitez-­Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 5. 24. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-­Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 194. 25. These men writing through include Gabriel García Márquez, Nicholas Guillen, Fernando Ortiz, and Alejo Carpentier. 26. Mitochondrial dna is almost exclusively inherited through the maternal line in mammals. Though my study is not scientific, it is purposely invoking a genealogical trace (that I read photographically) in order to bring black women into the center of the framework of slavery’s memory. I am also interested here in what happens to the offspring of this “violation” when the offspring is also female. The Repeating Island follows the forceful reproduction of a Caribbean subjectivity, one that is curiously imagined as a female vessel producing male subjectivities in flux. 27. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Harcourt, 1996), 132. 28. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, “The deployment of visuality and visual technologies as a Western social technique for ordering was decisively shaped by the experience of plantation slavery in the Americas, forming the plantation complex of visuality.” Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 48. 29. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 15–16.

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30. “From our very first introduction to the scar on Sethe’s back,” Sandy Alexandre asserts, “we already begin to hear how conversations surrounding the scar suggest that it does not belong so much to Sethe alone as it does to everyone else who has better viewing access to it. Because the scar is on Sethe’s back, she never actually gets to see it herself; she alone experiences the pain associated with having acquired the scar, but after that ‘scene of subjection,’ she neither has the authority nor the ability to describe how that scar has exactly ensconced itself on her back.” Sandy Alexandre, The Properties of Violence: Claims to Ownership in Representations of Lynching (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 131. 31. “Such endings that are not over is what haunting is about,” she writes. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 139. 32. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 81. 33. These artistic repetitions take on multiple genres: a novel, a poem, a photograph, and a play, respectively. 34. Morrison, Beloved, 36. 35. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 73. 36. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-­Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 26. 37. My readings will investigate the absence of slavery as a traumatic event in the transnational imaginary. As it has developed in the United States and Europe since the 1980s, trauma theory (see: Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Marianne Hirsch) has had a necessary connection to the event of the Holocaust. This emphasis has moved the discourse of slavery even further out of the framework of possible trauma theory applications, and made it more difficult to imagine (despite all of the evidence provided by critical race theorists) slavery as a traumatic event. 38. I take as an example of this Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997). These “scenes” that she lays out in the text are multimodal and heavily performative. They locate an ocular investment at the critical crux between subjectivity and subjection. 39. Articulating a move that both imbibes Sigmund Freud’s “repetition compulsion” and creates a sonic space of black Atlantic performative splicing, James A. Snead argues that “repetition in black culture finds its most characteristic shape in performance: rhythm in music, dance, and language.” I would add visual culture to this demarcation as well, as artists (literary, visual) continue to riff on disparate moments and events from the black diaspora that they cannot or will not forget. James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1987), 68. 40. I register these “repetitions” as containing the trace of the photographic that allows for a multigenred articulation of slavery’s residual markings.

Notes to Introduction 197

41. The “world of the visual” as I delineate it for this project, is one that has sensorial properties that though they move beyond the realm of visuality (that which can be seen), still conform to an ocular comportment, placing race and gender (that which must be discerned) at the center. 42. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 73. 43. See Vincent Brown’s book The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Mary Francis Berry and John Blassingame’s Long Memory: The Black Experience in America; Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in Eng­ land and America 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000); David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Stephanie Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Hilary Beckles’s Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Barbara Bush’s Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Jacqueline Jones’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. 44. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21.

1. Black Rapture: Corporeal Afterimage and Transnational Desire 1. Zahid Chaudhary argues that “there is something deeply directive . . . about certain juxtapositions of images.” These “juxtapositions” formulate the suture between the empire and the bodies it hopes to conquer. Zahid Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-­Century India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 54. 2. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 60. 3. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-­Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 60. 4. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “Ursa” refers to the northern constellation of stars called the “Great Bear,” as well as “one whose sign or symbol is a bear.” Corrige is an Old English word for “correct” or “chastise.” 5. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 31.

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6. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 76. 7. Jones, Corregidora, 42. 8. Jones, Corregidora, 59. 9. Ursa’s father, Martin, is chosen by Ursa’s mother to help her achieve her goal of “making generations” so that the story of Corregidora’s cruelties can be passed through each generation. 10. Ursa is the only member of the Corregidora lineage who does not share the slave master as a lover and/or a father. As such, she is the one with the ability to break the cycle of trauma, which both stifles and drives the women in her family. Jones, Corregidora, 102. 11. Jones, Corregidora, 71. 12. The nineteenth-­century American obsession with delineating even “one drop” of black blood existing in otherwise white bodies was also illustrated along gender lines. The mark of miscegenation was represented as a phenomenon of women, thereby buttressing the idea that women begot only women in a multiracial lineage. The task of representing pure whiteness lay with those women who, for whatever reason, are considered suspect. For more on this phenomenon in literature and visual culture, see Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States; Carlyle Van Thompson, Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature and Culture: Expanding and Exploding the Boundaries; and James Hugo Johnston, Miscegenation in the Ante-­Bellum South. 13. In Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach writes, “The restored behavior of the marketplace created by its synergy a behavioral vortex in which human relationships could be drained of sympathetic imagination and shaped to the purposes of consumption and exchange. Under such conditions, the most intolerable of injustices may be made to seem natural and commonplace, and the most demented of spectacles normal.” Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 213. 14. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 93–94. 15. While working as an editor at Random House, Morrison reportedly came across a news article describing the Margaret Garner case and the sensational trial that followed after the Kentucky slave woman killed her young daughter. The Black Book, a compilation of images, advertisements, and newspaper clippings about the black experience in the United States, was published by Random House in 1974. 16. It is not known how many of Margaret Garner’s four children were fathered by a man other than her husband, but it is estimated that it could have been three of the four. 17. Lucy Stone (Blackwell), feminist and abolitionist, testified to the unspeak-

Notes to Chapter One 199

able nature of enslaved women during the Margaret Garner trial. Garner was not allowed to testify on her own behalf. 18. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 65. 19. For more on the Margaret Garner case and its connection to the novel, read Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Margaret Garner: A Cincinnati Story,” Massachusetts Review 32, no. 3 (1991): 417–40. 20. Sethe states: “I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-­reading teacher watching and writing it up.” Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 70. 21. Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 18. 22. “I see her shape and his hand in the vast networking of our society, and in the evils and oversights that plague our lives and laws,” Williams writes. “The control he had over her body. The force he was in her life, in the shape of my life today. The power he exercised in the choice to breed her or not. The choice to breed slaves in his image, to choose her mate and be that mate. In his attempt to own what no man can own, the habit of his power and the absence of her choice.” Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 19. 23. Morrison, Beloved, 119. 24. Here I am drawing on not only the last three decades of work within the realm of slavery studies but also the scholarship of Avery Gordon, who writes in her introduction that her text is an attempt “to get us to consider a different way of seeing” when we think about haunting and cultures negotiating power, gender, and violence. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 24. 25. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 28. 26. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 70. 27. Leslie Furth, “The Modern Medea and Race Matters: Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Margaret Garner,” American Art 12, no. 2 (1998): 42. 28. Morrison, Beloved, 155. 29. Morrison, Beloved, 154. 30. Furth, “Modern Medea and Race Matters,” 49. 31. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 77. 32. Between Hemings’s grandmother, mother, and Hemings herself, there were three white, free men: Captain Hemings, John Wayles, and Thomas Jefferson. 33. Lucille Clifton, “monticello,” in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980 (Rochester, NY: boa Editions, 1987), 126. 34. In Monstrous Intimacies, for instance, Christina Sharpe writes, “Postbellum the crimes and pleasures of slavery persist, are reenacted and recirculated in the national consciousness through the staging and interpretation of slavery and its

200 Notes to Chapter One

excesses, in everyday relations of terror, in literary texts, visual arts, museum exhibitions and memorials” (112). 35. Clifton, “monticello,” 126. 36. Historians are fond of noting that Jefferson, if at all guilty of the sin of illicit sex with Hemings, was most certainly pulled into the relationship by his “attractive mulatto slave,” and at least according to Joseph Ellis, “whatever his head told him about black inferiority, his heart emphatically denied.” This tender rendering of Jefferson’s at best severely problematic coupling is in line with major political and social historians who have difficulty seeing Jefferson in a less than ideal light. Joseph Ellis, “Jefferson: Post-­d na,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 57, no. 1 (2000): 125–38. 37. Because the dna evidence analyzed in 1998 has shifted the validity of the sexual relationship the third president of the United States had with his house slave, I will not concern myself with the maybes and could-­have-­beens that have stalled previous readings concerning this troubling and problematic union. My interest is in the metaphoric layers underneath: the earth and soil upon which the Sally Hemingses of the world were created, their memories maintained, and the physical and visual evidence of their sexual “consent” transformed into artistic purpose, poetic volition. 38. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 81. 39. What is a repetition that does not attend to gendered acquisitions of the corporeal order? As most feminists will attest, people are not repeated without womb and woman, and slavery necessitates the careful and chaotic demarcation of intent with imprint. 40. Dennis Cauchon, “Hunt for Hemings’ Grave Involves Jumble of Records,” USA Today, May 14, 1999, 23A. 41. Francis Clines, “Street-­Name Plan Sparks a Jeffersonian Debate,” New York Times, May 14, 2000, 16. 42. “Horse Owner Sues for Right to Name Filly after Jefferson Slave,” Associated Press, June 1, 2005. 43. “The Sally Hemings,” 1, no. 1, www.vcdh.virginia.edu/HIUS316/mbase/docs /sh1.html. 44. According to Annette Gordon-­Reed, “Even though he offered ‘an extraordinarily large price for her,’ Hemings’s owner, identified as ‘John Wales,’ refused to sell the child.” Annette Gordon-­Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (New York: N ­ orton, 2008), 49. 45. This was the only version of paternal indecency that most Jefferson historians were willing to accept (Wayles bad, Jefferson good) before the 1998 dna findings connected Jefferson to Hemings through her descendants. Lucia Stanton and

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Ann duCille write about the link between oral history and denial so pervasive in the historical record concerning Jefferson and Hemings. 46. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 15. 47. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 115. 48. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 36. 49. Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1999), 40. 50. As I will illustrate in the next chapter, the measure of a masculine response to imperialism and its attendant violations usually involves a decidedly fragmented corporeal subject rendered female. This “feminizing” of slavery’s violence puts black women’s representations in a very precarious position, as they are depended upon to subvert (with their bodies) the very system dismantling their possible retrievals. 51. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65. 52. John Simon, “Jefferson in Paris,” National Review, May 1, 1995. 53. There is much controversy about Hemings’s first child. Joseph Ellis writes: “The dna study produced a nonmatch with Thomas Woodson, the first of Sally’s surviving children. Either Madison Hemings was wrong about the origins of the relationship, or the nonmatch with Thomas Woodson is the result of a ‘false paternity,’ that is, a subsequent break in the genetic line that falsifies the results. The African-­American descendants in the Woodson line have been among the most outspoken claimants of a biological connection to Jefferson, and at their urging another dna study focusing on that lineage is currently being contemplated. Until the results of that study are known, an agnostic posture on the origins of the sexual liaison is probably wise. It does seem likely that Jefferson fathered most if not all of Hemings’ children and that the relationship was longstanding.” Joseph Ellis, “Jefferson: Post-­d na,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson /enigma/ellis.html. 54. Michael Moore, “On the Signification of Doors and Gates in the Visual Arts,” Leonardo 14, no. 3 (1981): 203. 55. Near the end of her book of poetry Thrall, four poems from the last page, in fact, Natasha Trethewey’s “Enlightenment” appears. Her take on Jefferson, his relationship with Hemings, and the centuries-­long refusal to see the man who so totalizes the self-­envisioning of the nation is at the center of the poem. Central, also, is Jefferson as often unenlightened, as a man stuck between the pursuit of liberty and the refusal of that same liberty for others. Trethewey writes: “In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs / at Monticello, he is rendered two-­toned: / his forehead white with illumination— / a lit bulb— / the rest of his face in shadow, / darkened as if the artist meant to contrast / his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.” Natasha Trethewey, “Enlightenment,” in Thrall (New York: Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 68.

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56. Cyrus Cassells, “Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson,” Callaloo, no. 18 (1983): 707–10. 57. Cassells, “Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson,” 707–8. 58. Cassells, “Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson,” 707–8. 59. Joseph Roach writes that in the case of representation and sculpture, “The signifier of innocence promised a body as yet untouched—acquiescent, passive, virginal, ownable—the body of a slave, the body of a child.” Roach, Cities of the Dead, 222. 60. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 215. 61. It is Jefferson who famously burned all the letters written to him by his wife, Martha. Annette Gordon-­Reed writes: “Only one letter from Martha Jefferson’s hand survives, along with a set of household accounts that she made as the young mistress of Monticello. We know her chiefly from Jefferson’s few references, some brief comments of people who met her as his wife, and the family stories told mainly by a great-­granddaughter born decades after she died.” Gordon-­Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello, 92. 62. Barbara Chase-­Riboud, Sally Hemings (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 92. 63. Chase-­Riboud, Sally Hemings, 99. 64. Chase-­Riboud, Sally Hemings, 99. 65. Chase-­Riboud, Sally Hemings, 101. 66. Chase-­Riboud, Sally Hemings, 102 (emphasis mine). 67. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 89. 68. Chase-­Riboud, Sally Hemings, 103. 69. Here it is useful to return to Sharpe’s articulation of the conglomeration of intimacy and violence that provided the slave system with such significance. “Contrary to the ideology of the plantation romance (that enslaved people were happy and remained with the master and mistress out of loyalty and devotion),” she writes, “the formerly enslaved faced a present in which most other possible lives for them were rigorously foreclosed at all levels of society, in which their freedom was only nominal. So, however traumatic staying might be, it is no small wonder that numbers of the formerly enslaved were unable to leave.” Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 37. 70. Upon his death, Jefferson freed five slaves in his will, all relatives of Hemings. Hemings herself remained enslaved after Jefferson’s death. 71. Cassells, “Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson,” 709–10. 72. It might be said that in this moment of recognition, Hemings sees Jefferson’s suffering as a vulnerability, and he saw his property—his dominion—as his strength. 73. Cassells, “Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson,” 708–9. 74. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” 75. The relative absence of offspring (visually, that is) also disrupts the narrative,

Notes to Chapter One 203

since readers do not have the uncomfortable burden of imagining Jefferson gazing upon his own progeny as they work the grounds at Monticello. 76. James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, eds., Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans, 1847 to Today (New York: Free Press, 1974), 776. 77. Ann Nymann, “Sally’s Rape: Robbie McCauley’s Survival Act,” African American Review 33, no. 4 (1999): 577–87. 78. Hatch and Shine, Black Theater USA, 782–85. 79. “Sally’s Rape,” 580. 80. “Sally’s Rape,” 582. 81. Morgan seeks to make egalitarian the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings by highlighting the numerical consistency of “consensual” sexual liaisons that took place in Virginia while Jefferson lived there. The phrasing “forced embrace” is strangely violent, and yet Morgan resists the possibility, more probable than “consent,” that violence and guilt could exist in the person of Thomas Jefferson as they did for scores of other slaveholders. Phillip D. Morgan, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World, c. 1700–1820,” in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 52–84. 82. Painter negotiates the rhetorical terrain of physical and psychological slavery on both slaves and the people who own them. Nell Irvin Painter, Soul Murder and Slavery, The Fifteenth Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures, 15 (Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund, Baylor University Press, 1995). 83. I use the official spelling of Silva’s name, “Chica,” when referring to the historical figure. I use the more colloquial spelling, “Xica,” when referring to Diegues’s film and the song bearing that spelling of her name. 84. “Nascida entre 1731 e 1735, era filha de Maria da Costa, escrava negra, e de Antônio Caeitano de Sá, homem branco” (translation mine). Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva e o Contratador dos Diamantes: O Outro Lado do Mito (São Paulo: Companhia Das Letras, 2003), 47. 85. Paula Giddings writes that in the case of the early American colonies, black women arrived on the slave ships already presupposed to have sexual powers. “Black women—described by English slave traders as ‘hot constitution’d ladies,’ possessed of a ‘lascivious temper,’ who had an inclination for White men,” would not get many opportunities to articulate desires that ran counter to collective white needs. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 35. 86. According to Júnia Furtado, the narrative surrounding Silva solidified itself after the Carlos Diegues film Xica was released in Brazil in 1975 (the international release came a year later). “Diegues’s film was the vehicle by which Chica da Silva definitely embodied the stereotype of licentiousness and sensuality always attributed to the black or mulatta female in the Brazilian popular imagination,” Furtado

204 Notes to Chapter One

writes in her introduction. Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 12. 87. The passage reads: “Bruxa, sedutora, heroinha ou escrava: afinal, quem era Chica da Silva? Apás quase tres séculos, a falta de uma pesquisa histórica sobre sua vida contribui para que a pergunta premanecesse sem reposta efetiva” (translation mine). Furtado, Chica da Silva e o Contratador dos Diamantes, 19. 88. Freyre uses the previous research of Donald Pierson to connote a scent particular to blacks. His footnote reads: “The body odor, the so-­called catinga, or budum, reputedly characteristic of the African.” Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, translated from the Portuguese by Samuel Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1946), 279. 89. Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 278. 90. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 85. 91. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 115. 92. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (New York: Verso, 1997), 163. 93. O. Hugo Benavides examines the phenomenon of the telenovela within the context of sexuality, history, and difference. In his probing examination of the vicissitudes of race and power through a theoretical reading of the telenovela, Benavides is interested in “the problematics of postcoloniality throughout Latin America.” O. Hugo Benavides, “Seeing Xica and the Melodramatic Unveiling of Colonial Desire,” Social Text 76, vol. 21, no. 3 (2003), 109–34. 94. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 16. 95. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (New York: Palgrave, 1989), 17. 96. In his 1980 review of the film, critic Randal Johnson claims that, for Xica, “in addition to being an object of the desire of the most powerful men in the village, she is also an acting subject in relationship to them. There are many indications that she, not her partners, controls and determines the sexual relationships she maintains. Diegues seems to be saying that even though she has no economic, military or political power, she exercises the power of Eros, erotic power. There is, however, something fundamentally sexist about this characterization . . . as a slave, she is not free to say no . . . she is used as a sexual object. Her unique sexual ability is her oppression.” Randal Johnson, “Xica Da Silva: Sex, Politics, and Culture,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 22 (May 1980): 18–20. 97. Furtado, Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 16. 98. These are the women who sell food and alcoholic drinks to people working in city centers. Furtado, Chica da Silva, 17. 99. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 218. 100. Xica da Silva, directed by Carlos Diegues, 1976.

Notes to Chapter One 205

101. Xica da Silva. 102. Silva, by the time she meets Oliveira, has already given birth to her first child by her previous owner, Manuel Pires Sardinha. 103. Xica da Silva. 104. Xica da Silva. 105. Xica da Silva. 106. It is worth noting that Dona Hortensia is dressed once again in a blood-­red dress as her body is situated in a lady-­in-­waiting pose inside the contractor’s office. During the street gathering announcing the arrival of João Fernandes a day earlier, Dona Hortensia bestows a bouquet of flowers on the contractor, which he accepts without giving her a second look. The blooming flower of her desire, taken and unused by Oliveira, causes all the more anxiety in Dona Hortensia as she sits idly by watching her sexual desires played out on Xica’s body. 107. Xica da Silva. 108. Xica da Silva. 109. Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 228. 110. Lisa Farrington, Faith Ringgold (San Francisco: Pomegranate Art Books, 2004), 55. 111. Clifton’s poem “blessing the boats” engages the healing power of water: “water waving forever / and may you in your innocence / sail through this to that.” Lucille Clifton, “blessing the boats,” in Quilting: Poems 1987–1990 (Rochester, NY: boa Editions, 1991), 83.

2. Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal 1. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 16. 2. Morrison, Beloved, 16. 3. Morrison, Beloved, 16. 4. Sethe mourns the making of the ink that engenders that compartmentalizing privilege. “I made the ink, Paul D,” Sethe says at the end of the novel after Paul D returns to her. “He couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t made the ink.” Morrison, Beloved, 271. 5. In the historical reporting about the Margaret Garner case, she is asked whether “madness” or hysteria had led her to try to kill her children. “I was as cool as I now am,” she replied, “and would much rather kill them at once, and thus end their sufferings, then have them taken back to slavery and be murdered piece-­ meal.” Samuel J. May, “Margaret Garner and Seven Others,” in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: A Casebook, ed. William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 32. Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook is the correct title.

206 Notes to Chapter Two

6. “No notebook for my babies,” Sethe declares, “and no measuring string either.” Morrison, Beloved, 193, 198. 7. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 93. 8. I want to draw a distinction between the contested site of postmodernism as a Marxist paradigm of cultural anxiety (read: white) and the more culturally productive lens through which to endeavor to understand and explore black subjectivity in the Americas. In “Postmodern Blackness,” bell hooks writes, “The failure to recognize a critical black presence in the culture and in most scholarship and writing on postmodernism compels a black reader, particularly a black female reader, to interrogate her interest in a subject where those who discuss and write about it seem not to know black women exist or to even consider the possibility that we might be somewhere writing or saying something that should be listened to, or producing art that should be seen, heard, approached with intellectual seriousness.” bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture 1, no. 1 (1990). 9. Morrison, Beloved, 60. 10. Morrison, Beloved, 60. 11. Morrison, Beloved, 62. 12. Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 23–24. 13. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81. 14. For Linda Nochlin, corporeal fragments in nineteenth-­century Western European art allow the viewer to glance back anxiously on an impossibly heroic past filled with conquest and purpose. Painters articulated the collective trepidation of a tormented impending modernity by visually severing limb from corpus—a detachment determined in its parsing insistence. Almost as if modernity carries with it a necessary compartmentalization, Nochlin cites the surrendering of the body as a mandate of this anxiety. Nochlin, The Body in Pieces, 15, 23. 15. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 167. 16. Morrison, Beloved, 200. 17. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 176. 18. Morrison, Beloved, 139. 19. Morrison, Beloved, 152. 20. In Nature’s Body, Londa Schiebinger writes, “Long before Linnaeus, the female breast had been a powerful icon within Western cultures, representing both the sublime and the bestial in human nature. . . . For Linnaeus to suggest, then, that humans shared with animals the capacity to suckle their young was nothing new.

Notes to Chapter Two 207

This uniquely female feature had long been considered less than human. But it had also been considered more than human.” She argues that with slave plantations in exterior colonies, the phenomenon of wet-­nursing took on not just a class-­based but also a racially confined nature. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 53, 59. 21. Alys Eve Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 25. 22. Morrison, Beloved, 23. 23. Morrison, Beloved, 147. 24. Halle is that “somebody” son, not just because he is the only child she got to have until adulthood, but because he is the one who bought her freedom. To facilitate her freedom, he borrows against his own time, doubling down on the length (with years of Sundays) of his own enslavement. In a reversal of maternal sacrifice, Halle tries to buy his mother a future with pieces of his own. 25. Morrison, Beloved, 83. 26. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 90. 27. Morrison, Beloved, 16. 28. Mae G. Henderson, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-­membering the Body as Historical Text,” in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: A Casebook, ed. William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 91. 29. Morrison, Beloved, 30. 30. Morrison, Beloved, 192. 31. Gayl Jones, Song for Anninho (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), 2. 32. Jones, Song for Anninho, 4. 33. Jones, Song for Anninho, 85. 34. Moten, In the Break, 176. 35. Jones, Song for Anninho, 76. 36. Jones, Song for Anninho, 54. 37. Jones, Song for Anninho, 68. 38. Jones, Song for Anninho, 112. 39. “Your love is too thick,” Paul D tells her while she is recalling the violent events that took place in the shed. “Love is or it aint” is Sethe’s reply. “Thin love ain’t love at all.” Morrison, Beloved, 164. 40. Jones, Song for Anninho, 48. 41. Trudier Harris, “A Spiritual Journey: Gayl Jones’s Song for Anninho,” Callaloo 5, no. 3 (1982): 106. 42. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 289. 43. Antonio Benítez-­Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 5.

208 Notes to Chapter Two

44. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 289. 45. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 72. 46. Martha Abreu, “Slave Mothers and Freed Children: Emancipation and Female Space in Debates on the ‘Free Womb’ Law, Rio de Janeiro, 1871,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 3 (1996): 571. 47. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women, Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 122, 167. 48. Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 120–39. 49. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 144. 50. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 103. 51. In a slippery refrain that often seems to fetishize the concept of slave women’s breast milk when that slave woman is Brazilian, Wood, even in the racialized compartment of the title of his book, fails to register the totality of abuses connected with the system as they relate to gender. He writes, for instance, “The slave as surrogate mother, or at least surrogate milk source, did not seem so problematic, and is present, centrally present, in the surviving photographic archive. The slave father is not so comfortable an entity, and his absence from this archive is one of the most significant silences in a world haunted, and in many ways defined by, articulate absences.” Marcus Wood, Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 195. This is how Wood has punctuated the sentence. 52. For instance, Thadious Davis relates the corporeal and maternal possession of his nursemaid Caroline Barr within the purview of William Faulkner’s anxious literary legacy. “Mammy and Caroline Barr and Mississippi are covalent, all codependent and intricately connected to Faulkner’s vision of slavery, maternity, and emotional space,” she writes, arguing that Faulkner’s “inconsolable grief and shame” after Caroline’s death open up a space of possibility in the renderings of black womanhood in his important text Go Down, Moses. Property, inheritance, possession, and collective intention move through Go Down, Moses in what Davis refers to as a narrative straddling the problematic ownership of lineage and history. As a focal point, Caroline is malleable and retrievable—symbolic of Faulkner’s failures as a writer, yet providing the author with a viable literary site for those failures to manifest themselves. Thadious Davis, Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s “Go Down, Moses” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 194, 5. 53. Wexler, Tender Violence, 61, 65. 54. Mara L. Dukats, “A Narrative of Violated Maternity: Moi, Tituba, Sorciere . . . Noire de Salem,” World Literature Today 67, no. 4 (1993): 3–5.

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55. K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of US Social Policy (New York: Routledge, 1993), 38. 56. Morrison, Beloved, 201. 57. In a rendering of what can happen when a look lasts too long, Morrison writes, “Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative—looked at too long—shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do.” Morrison, Beloved, 275. 58. Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 3. 59. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 297. 60. Conde, I, Tituba, 6–7. 61. Conde, I, Tituba, 6. 62. Morgan, Laboring Women, 36. 63. Conde, I, Tituba, 7. 64. Yao, who was suicidal at the onset of the novel, succeeds in his quest to die after Abena is killed. After being sold by Davis to another planter following Abena’s hanging, Yao swallows his tongue on the way to his new location, Conde, I, Tituba, 7. 65. Conde, I, Tituba, 8. 66. Conde, I, Tituba, 8. 67. Conde, I, Tituba, 9. 68. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 289. 69. After the trials Tituba is sold, and no record of her remains in the archive. 70. Conde, I, Tituba, 50. 71. Conde, I, Tituba, 50. 72. Morgan, Laboring Women, 115. 73. Morrison, Beloved, 23. 74. Conde, I, Tituba, 49. 75. Conde, I, Tituba, 177. 76. Jones, Corregidora, 22. 77. Jones, Corregidora, 11 (italics in original). 78. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 86. 79. Jones, Corregidora, 45. 80. Jones, Corregidora, 77. 81. Jones, Corregidora, 90. 82. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 76. 83. Jones, Corregidora, 103. 84. Jacqueline de Weever, Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 143. 85. de Weever, Mythmaking and Metaphor, 154. 86. Jones, Corregidora, 104.

210 Notes to Chapter Two

87. Jones, Corregidora, 112. 88. Jones, Corregidora, 114. 89. Jones, Corregidora, 114. 90. Jones, Corregidora, 114–15. 91. Madhu Dubey, “Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (1995): 260. 92. Corregidora flirts with the concept of a world of same-­sex relationships that fail to be acted upon because of the force of patriarchal order in each woman’s life. Ursa’s neighbor, Cat, is one such possibility, but she quickly abandons this in favor of a relationship with her boss, Tadpole. 93. Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Plume, 1997), 3. 94. Kincaid, Autobiography, 4. 95. Kincaid, Autobiography, 28–29. 96. Kincaid, Autobiography, 29. 97. Kincaid, Autobiography, 33. 98. Kincaid, Autobiography, 3. 99. Kincaid, Autobiography, 7. 100. Kincaid, Autobiography, 7. 101. Xuela is delivered by her father to Monsieur and Madame LaBatte as a house servant, linking her sexual destiny with the volition and purview of men. 102. Kincaid, Autobiography, 71. 103. Kincaid, Autobiography, 83. 104. Kincaid, Autobiography, 97. 105. Kincaid, Autobiography, 97. 106. According to Bush, “No British sugar colony showed an absolute increase in the slave population before 1832, and between 1807 and 1834 the total slave population declined from 775,000 to 665,000 at a time when adverse sex ratios of men to women were evening out and the population contained a greater number of creole slaves, supposedly more adapted to plantation life.” Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 136–38. 107. Morgan, Laboring Women, 114. 108. Kincaid, Autobiography, 31. 109. Kincaid, Autobiography, 32. 110. Kincaid, Autobiography, 70. 111. Kincaid, Autobiography, 65. 112. Kincaid, Autobiography, 76. 113. Kincaid, Autobiography, 68. 114. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 74. 115. Kincaid, Autobiography, 107. 116. Kincaid, Autobiography, 109–10. 117. Kincaid, Autobiography, 115.

Notes to Chapter Two 211

118. Kincaid, Autobiography, 175–76. 119. Kincaid, Autobiography, 174. 120. Kincaid, Autobiography, 225–26.

3. The Boundaries of Excess 1. Octavia Butler, Kindred (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 9. 2. In the novel Dana eventually realizes that in order to be born in the future, she must convince Alice, her black ancestor, to acquiesce to the sexual demands of Rufus, her white ancestor. 3. Dana repeats the word “accident” three times on the first page of the prologue. The trinity here signals her familial tree—Dana, Alice, and Rufus—while also marking the accidental occurrence of her three remaining limbs. She then repeats the words “accident” and “my fault” “over and over until the vague police shapes” disappear, her husband left in their place. Butler, Kindred, 10. 4. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 11. 5. Scarry finds that where written language is concerned, Judeo-­Christian texts, with their “insistent thrust toward material self-­expression,” make better use of language in the context of physical pain. Scarry, Body in Pain, 178. 6. Scarry, Body in Pain, 11. 7. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­ Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51. 8. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 123. 9. Butler, Kindred, 43. 10. Butler, Kindred, 43. 11. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 194. 12. Having been born free because her mother was, Alice is enslaved and purchased by Rufus after she attempts to escape with her husband, Isaac. That they share essentially the same visage comes at a much greater cost to Alice, who reads Dana’s mobility as a reminder of her former freedom. 13. Butler, Kindred, 257. 14. Butler, Kindred, 260. 15. Lacan’s “mirror stage” and Freud’s writing on the “uncanny” pose an emphasis on the visual recognition of the self. 16. Alice is the most verbally abusive member of the Weylin plantation. Her vitriol is reserved almost exclusively for Dana. “Doctor-­nigger. . . . Reading-­nigger. White-­nigger!” she hurls at Dana after she recovers from her substantial injuries

212 Notes to Chapter Three

and finds out she is newly enslaved to Rufus, whom she hates. “Why didn’t you know enough to let me die?” Butler, Kindred, 160. 17. Randall Kenan, An Interview with Octavia E. Butler, Callaloo 14, no. 2 (1991): 498. 18. Butler, Kindred, 260–61. 19. From Juba in Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder to Matty Lou in Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece Invisible Man, black literature is littered with wounded but necessary black women’s bodies—all serving a cause for the narrative. 20. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-­Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 26. 21. In her introduction to Scenes of Subjection, Hartman asks, “Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-­destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance?” Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 3. 22. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 67. 23. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 54. My info has Plume listed as the publisher. 24. Morrison, Beloved, 58. 25. Morrison, Beloved, 60. 26. Morrison, Beloved, 210. 27. Morrison, Beloved, 210. 28. Morrison, Beloved, 210. 29. Morrison, Beloved, 211–12. 30. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 13. 31. DeVere Brody, Punctuation, 76. 32. DeVere Brody, Punctuation, 77. 33. Beloved is dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” descendants of the Atlantic slave trade. 34. Morrison, Beloved, 213. 35. DeVere Brody, Punctuation, 77. 36. Morrison, Beloved, 210. 37. Morrison, Beloved, 211. 38. Morrison, Beloved, 212. 39. Morrison, Beloved, 211, 213. 40. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 120. 41. Morrison, Beloved, 210. 42. Morrison, Beloved, 88.

Notes to Chapter Three 213

43. Morrison, Beloved, 88. 44. Morrison, Beloved, 88. 45. Morrison, Beloved, 88. 46. Morrison, Beloved, 88. 47. Morrison, Beloved, 89. 48. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 49. 49. Morrison, Beloved, 87. 50. Morrison, Beloved, 87, 104. 51. Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-­American Women (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991), 101–5; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 71–74. 52. If the concept of corporeal power is registered through this particular corpus, all of the burdens (literal and metaphoric) of race, gender, and class exist here as well. In the cultural elasticity of this icon we have multiple deployments of national desire. 53. Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-­Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 162. 54. Patterns of violence illustrated in black literature are difficult to deny. Marking out the gender divide within these narratives is both taxing and necessary. When Frederick Douglass opens his slave narrative with the “terrible spectacle” of his Aunt Hester’s assault, Saidiya Hartman sees yet another instance of our participatory investments. We are not shocked by these displays, Hartman contends, since “too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity.” All too often, though, we ignore the intracultural display of corporeal transference. Douglass, it is possible, is also using Aunt Hester’s flesh, that which is proximate and familial, as a way to articulate his struggle under slavery. We put the pieces of his trauma together using his corporeal offering, slavery’s violence unfolding on a vulnerable body, struck silent yet yielding so much for the narrative. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 3. 55. Lucille Clifton’s poem “Aunt Jemima” swaddles the iconic figure in a barrage of possessive pronouns: “oh how I long for / my own syrup / rich as blood / my true nephews my nieces / my kitchen my family / my home.” Lucille Clifton, “Aunt Jemima,” in Voices (Rochester, NY: boa Editions, 2008), 12. 56. In Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel Carby draws on the work of Ida B. Wells concerning the sophisticated nuanced relationship between southern lynchings and black women’s sexual exploitations. Wells, according to Carby, “situated the murder of black men historically within the whole spectrum of black and white social, political, and economic relations. . . . Early in her work, Wells indicted the miscegenation laws which, in practice, meant that black women were the victims of rape by white men who had the power to terrorize black men under the pretense

214 Notes to Chapter Three

of the protection of white womanhood.” Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-­American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 111. 57. Carby writes: “Thus, the institutionalized rape of black women has never been as powerful a symbol of black oppression as the spectacle of lynching. Rape has always involved patriarchal notions of women being, at best, not entirely unwilling accomplices, if not outwardly inviting a sexual attack. The links between black women and illicit sexuality consolidated during the antebellum years had powerful ideological consequences for the next hundred and fifty years.” Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 39. 58. Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 102. 59. Harris, Colored Pictures, 109. 60. Harris, Colored Pictures, 111. 61. According to Margaret Miles, early Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary showed her suckling baby Jesus with one breast exposed at precisely the same historical moment that famine was taking place in Florence. “Thus,” Miles writes, “chronic malnutrition and anxiety over food supply constituted one of the most striking features of Florentine society at the time of the greatest popularity of paintings of the nursing Virgin.” Margaret Miles, “The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Nudity, Gender, and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 29. 62. Butler, Kindred, 145. 63. Butler, Kindred, 145. 64. Lisa Farrington, Art on Fire: The Politics of Race and Sex in the Paintings of Faith Ringgold (New York: Millennium Fine Arts, 1999), 143. 65. Farrington, Art on Fire, 146. 66. A perennial subject of interest for writers, historians, scholars of popular culture, and feminists, Aunt Jemima is the holy grail of American representation. For further reading, see M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (New York: Routledge, 1994); McElya, Clinging to Mammy; Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 67. Robert Hayden, “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves,” in Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liveright, 1997), 73. 68. Hayden, “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves,” 75. 69. Hayden, “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves,” 75. 70. Anne Cheng’s Second Skin moves through the multiple delineations—space, form, architecture, mobility—attending Josephine Baker’s relationship with mo­

Notes to Chapter Three 215

dernity, race, gender, and internationalism. Anne Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 71. Hayden, “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves,” 74. 72. Faith Ringgold, We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 251. 73. According to Alexander Rose, the move from widespread musket use to rifles in the middle to late eighteenth century took place seemingly overnight as “Congress—still a little unsure as to what a rifle was—voted on June 14 to augment the New England Militias” and introduce frontiersmen to a weapon promising both precision and power. It was also supposed to connote complete independence and self-­reliance. This self-­reliance and corporeal protection are precisely what artists looking back through history want to gift both mammy and Harriet Tubman— power, precision, independence, and self-­reliance. Alexander Rose, American Rifle: A Biography (New York: Delacorte Press, 2008), 41–42. 74. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 201. 75. Margie Hyslop, “Tubman’s Gun in Mural Stirs Baltimore Dispute,” Washington Times, June 11, 2000. 76. Shirley Carrie, “Of Mammies and Monuments: The Literature of Post-­ Reconstruction and the Rise of the New South.” Conference (presentation at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Violence and Belonging, October 16–19, 2003 Hartford, CT). 77. Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Verso, 1978), 106–7. 78. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 15. 79. Jones, Labor of Love, 15. 80. African diasporic literature is filled with female characters represented as towers of power. In one particularly disturbing section of Arna Bontemps’s novel Black Thunder, for example, Juba, the girlfriend of the fictionalized Gabriel Prosser, is beaten severely after she is suspected of being involved with the insurrection attempt. Highly sexualized and brutal, the scene nonetheless leaves the reader with the idea that for Juba, there is no such thing as physical or emotional pain. Bontemps writes: “She didn’t speak, didn’t even flinch. Presently her thighs were raw like cut beef and bloody. Once or twice she turned her head and threw a swift, hateful glance at the powerful man pouring the hot melted lead on her flesh, but she didn’t cry out or shrink away. The end of the lash became wet and began making words like sa-­lack, sa-­lack, sa-­lack as it twined around her thin hips. . . . She said nothing. She wouldn’t even let herself cry.” There is in Bontemps’s rewriting of the Prosser rebellion the creation of a strong black woman, subdued by her love for Gabriel but in all other aspects tougher than any man around. Because Bontemps’s

216 Notes to Chapter Three

image of Juba is inspired by history, the memorial request is that we see Juba as the epitome of nineteenth-­century black womanhood: silent and indestructible, a combination that has implications for future Afro-­diasporic literature. Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder (Boston: Beacon Press, 1936), 203. 81. Milton C. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 233. 82. Sernett, Harriet Tubman, 233. 83. “I think slavery is the next thing to hell” is a quote from Harriet Tubman that appears in Benjamin Drew’s book A North-­Side View of Slavery—The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada, Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856, 30. 84. Quraysh Ali Lansana, They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems (Chicago: Third World Press, 2004), 1. 85. With the emergence of Sarah Bradford’s biography in 1869, Kate Clifford Larson writes, Tubman’s “public image as a heroine and a ‘Black Joan of Arc’ was secured. . . . But from this point forward, Bradford’s narrative also defined Tubman’s public identity; the account ends with her Civil War activities, arresting Tubman’s life story almost fifty years before her death, immortalizing her forever as an Underground Railroad agent and Civil War spy. Clifford Larson claims that “with the publication of Scenes, Tubman emerged as more than a Moses; she was also a David figure, striking a fatal blow to an almighty goliath.” Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), 251. 86. According to Clifford Larson, “Taken together, the range of symptoms and behaviors that followed Tubman’s terrible head injury strongly point to the likelihood that she suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy (tle). Her seizures, or sleeping spells, and visions are typical of tle brought on by severe head injuries.” Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land, 43. 87. Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land, 42–43. 88. Jacob Lawrence is an exception. In his Harriet Tubman Series he features Tubman sprawled on the ground after she is struck by the iron weight, unable to move. 89. In his famous poem “Runagate, Runagate,” Robert Hayden writes of Tubman’s exploits guiding slaves to freedom. The speaker remarks, “and she’s turned upon us, / leveled pistol / glinting in the moonlight: / Dead folks can’t jaybird-­talk, she says, / you keep on going now or die, she says.” Hayden, “Runagate, Runagate,” in Collected Poems, 60. 90. Wallace describes the “intricate web of mythology which surrounds the black woman” as a representation of a “woman of inordinate strength, with an ability for tolerating an unusual amount of misery and heavy, distasteful work.” Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, 107.

Notes to Chapter Three 217

91. Bradford’s biography was first published as Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn, NY: W. J. Moses, 1869). 92. Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1886), 13–14. 93. Benjamin Quarles writes, “Her bravery was matched, moreover, by her coolness in a tight spot, her resourcefulness in a perilous situation. If the fugitives she led lacked her fearlessness, they were silenced by her blunt, no-­nonsense manner. The rifle she carried while on rescue trips was not only for protection against slave catchers but also to intimidate any fugitive who became faint of heart and wished to turn back.” Benjamin Quarles, “Harriet Tubman’s Unlikely Leadership,” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 45. 94. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 31. 95. Jean Humez, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 7. 96. Melanie Ann Hertzog, Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 103. 97. Hertzog, Elizabeth Catlett, 156. 98. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 30. 99. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 39. 100. The 1739 treaty granted five hundred acres of land to “Nanny and her people.” Jenny Sharpe painstakingly examines the archive and the symbolic register of the concept of Nanny, as one that “should seize the imagination of Jamaican women novelists, poets, and performers who take poetic license in their literary renditions of her life.” Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 28–29. 101. Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, 29. 102. Michelle Cliff, Abeng (New York: Plume, 1995), 19. 103. Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, 32. 104. Saidiya Hartman writes, “In the workings of memory, there is an endless reiteration and enactment of this condition of loss and displacement. The past is untranslatable in the current frame of meaning because of the radical disassociations of historical process and the discontinuity introduced into the being of the captive as he is castigated into the abstract category of property.” Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 74. 105. Cliff, Abeng, 35. 106. Cliff, Abeng, 34. 107. The abeng is a cow horn used by the Asantes to warn others of danger or to announce war. It is used in much the same way in Jamaica as it was in Ghana. The Maroons found the abeng to be an extremely useful tool when battling the British

218 Notes to Chapter Three

during the 1800s. Significantly, Nanny’s monument in Kingston’s Heroes Park is a metal structure composed of a series of abengs surrounding each other in a circle, perpetually announcing both war and resistance. 108. Cliff, Abeng, 36. 109. In yet another literary gesture of homosocial/erotic dependence and care, Mma Alli removes the only evidence of heterosexual interaction, illustrating the safety and tenderness that could exist when women tended other women, healed other women. Cliff writes, “When Inez came to Mma Alli to get rid of the mixed-­ up baby she carried, Mma Alli kept her in her cabin overnight. She brewed a tea of roots and leaves, said a Pawpaw chant over it, and when it was beginning to take effect and Inez was being rocked by the contractions of her womb, Mma Alli began to gently stroke her with fingers dipped in coconut oil and pull on her nipples with her mouth, and the thick liquid which had been the mixed-­up baby came forth easily and Inez felt little pain.” Cliff, Abeng, 35. 110. Cliff, Abeng, 40. 111. Cliff, Abeng, 40 (my emphasis). 112. Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, 2. 113. Grace Nichols, “Nanny,” in I Is a Long Memoried Woman, London: Karnak House, 1983, 72–73. 114. Nichols, “Nanny,” 72–73. 115. Audre Lorde’s poem “The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors” seeks to rectify the disremembered struggle inherent when one is marked upon the body: black, female, and damaged. Using the language of memory and violence, the title hints at the inability to retrieve what is lost when hands “mark the time” and seek to complicate the mythology of individual or collective power. The dance, a motion-­filled negotiation of self and community, is ironically performed with the use of a warrior’s weapon—the sword. Because the title also implies that the women are no longer warriors, that their cultural positions of power no longer exist, the weapons they previously carried now stand in the place of historical memory. The lines ask the reader to remember who the women of Dan are of the contemporary present. Whatever the “women of Dan” have become, they have done so together and traumatically—painfully, yet softly. To be a warrior, the poem suggests, is to sacrifice the body in battle and render the experience of the black diaspora through the lens of a static black body, a silent black body. Audre Lorde, “The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors,” in The Black Unicorn (New York: Norton, 1978), 14–15. 116. Lorna Goodison, “Nanny,” in Selected Poems (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 69. 117. Goodison, “Nanny,” 69. 118. Goodison, “Nanny,” 69.

Notes to Chapter Three 219

119. Goodison, “Nanny,” 69. 120. Honor Ford Smith, “A Message from Ni,” in My Mother’s Last Dance (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1997), 15. 121. Smith, “A Message from Ni,” 15. 122. Smith, “A Message from Ni,” 16. 123. Smith, “A Message from Ni,” 16. 124. Smith, “A Message from Ni,” 16. 125. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York criticized the Brooklyn Museum of Art for showing Cox’s five-­panel photograph depicting her own naked body as a Christ figure. Yo Mama’s Last Supper featured the nude Cox standing before eleven black males and one white male (Judas). BBC America, February 16, 2001. 126. In the attending images Nanny is seen wearing a British military coat and sitting among a group of children, representative of Nanny’s yoyo, or children. 127. John Burdick, Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil (New York: Routledge, 1998), 65–72. 128. Marcus Wood, Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 452. 129. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 13. 130. Arago states that the sketch is of a male slave he observed on a plantation while traveling in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: “See this man who passes by, with an iron collar . . . tightly squeezing his neck; this is a slave who tried to escape and who his master identifies as a runaway.” Translation by Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr., http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/slavery/details. Jacques Arago, Souvenirs d’un aveugle:Voyage autour du monde par M. J. Arago . . . (Paris, 1839–40), vol. 1, facing p. 119. 131. Burdick, Blessed Anastácia, 22. 132. Burdick, Blessed Anastácia, 22. 133. Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 227. 134. Okwui Enwezor, “The Diasporic Imagination: The Memory Works of Maria Magdalena Campos-­Pons,” in Everything Is Separated by Water. Lisa D. Freiman, ed. (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2007), 79. 135. Lansana, They Shall Run, 14. 136. Lansana, They Shall Run, 14. 137. Lansana, They Shall Run, 14.

4. The Return 1. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 50. 2. Morrison, Beloved, 50. 3. Morrison, Beloved, 55.

220 Notes to Chapter Four

4. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 77. 5. Morrison, Beloved, 133. 6. I am using the term “ethereal” to connote a sort of spiritual transcendence, one that often does, but need not, relate to a specific religiosity. 7. Lucille Clifton’s poem “Harriet” describes Harriet Tubman as the quintessential “mad woman at the river’s edge” harshly encouraging her human passengers to continue on their arduous journey. Lucille Clifton, “Harriet,” in The Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980 (Rochester, NY: boa Editions, 1987), 119. 8. Erna Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, ed. E. A. Markham (London: Penguin, 1996), 52–53. 9. Louis Kaplan, “Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography,” Art Journal 62, no. 3 (2003): 22. 10. Karla F. C. Holloway, Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 55. 11. I will be using the Brazilian Portuguese spelling, Iemanjá, as well as the alternate spellings (Yemanjá, Yemoja, Yemonja) and the Yoruba originary name, Yemayá, as the texts I am engaging with dictate. 12. According to Mary Ann Clark, “As the ocean, Yemayá represents that which nurtures physical, psychological and spiritual growth; she is the soothing and comforting sense of the transcendent many people find at the ocean.” Mary Ann Clark, “Asho Orisha (Clothing of the Orisha): Material Culture as Religious Expression in Santeria” (PhD diss., Rice University, 1999), 177. 13. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-­American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 73. 14. Sheila S. Walker, “Everyday and Esoteric Reality in the Afro-­Brazilian Candomblé,” History of Religions: An International Journal for Comparative Historical Studies 30, no. 2 (1990), 104. 15. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 38. 16. Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage,” in Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liveright, 1985), 54. 17. Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 137. 18. Okwui Enwezor, “The Diasporic Imagination: The Memory Works of Maria Magdalena Campos-­Pons,” in Maria Magdalena Campos-­Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water. Lisa D. Freiman, ed. (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2007), 85. Robert Hayden’s famous poem “Middle Passage,” for instance, ends with the lines “Voyage through death / to life upon these shores.” Hayden, “Middle Passage,” 54. 19. Ruth Landes, The City of Women (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 82. 20. “The Candomble is a great responsibility,” Meninha says. “Often I wonder

Notes to Chapter Four 221

where I can get the strength to go on with it.” Landes remarks with awe that the mobility and prestige existing within the African-­inflected spiritual system allow a measure of power for Afro-­Brazilian women who otherwise might have been completely consumed by the margins of their existence. Landes, City of Women, 82. 21. Audre Lorde, “From the House of Yemanjá,” in The Black Unicorn (New York: Norton, 1978), 6. 22. Lorde, “From the House of Yemanjá,” 6. 23. Lorde, “From the House of Yemanjá,” 7. 24. Holloway, Moorings and Metaphors, 155. 25. Holloway, Moorings and Metaphors, 155. 26. Grace Nichols, “Yemanji,” in I Is a Long Memoried Woman (London: Karnak House, 1978), 64. 27. Nichols, “Yemanji,” 64. 28. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 193; Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 151. 29. John Edgar Wideman, The Cattle Killing (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 15. 30. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 151. 31. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 201. 32. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 18. 33. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 21. 34. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 24. 35. Hoem discusses Wideman’s postmodern fictional texts that create “a lineage of ancestor figures in an effort to invigorate and recuperate characters in racial memory that have been excluded from mainstream literary/historical narratives.” Of these ancestor figures, women appear to be illustrative backdrops—figures to engender a sense of Africaneity. Sheri I. Hoem, “‘Shifting Spirits’: Ancestral Constructs in the Postmodern Writing of John Edgar Wideman,” African American Review 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 251. 36. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 36–37. 37. This shifts slightly as the narrator attempts to keep Kathryn, Dr. Thrush’s slave, alive through the traumatic sexual violence she endures at the doctor’s hands. The narrator’s stories are meant to sustain Kathryn, but it is her will to be taken away from her misery that no story can undo. Her body on its last earthly journey, Kathryn has no intention of remaining, though the narrator recognizes her as the returning spirit he is madly in love with, and he wants to save her life. 38. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19–20. 39. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 37. 40. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 46. 41. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 47. 42. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 46.

222 Notes to Chapter Four

43. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 48. 44. There are almost no question marks in the novel, no excessive demarcations of punctuation. There are a few commas and lots of periods, but little else. When Kathryn asks the question, unlike Sethe’s incredulity about Halle’s witnessing of Sethe’s milk theft (“He saw them boys do that to me and let them keep on breathing air? He saw? He saw? He saw?”), it is positioned like a foregone conclusion that is not so surprising. Morrison, Beloved, 69; Wideman, Cattle Killing, 47. 45. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 48. 46. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 37–38. 47. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 52. 48. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 39. 49. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 54. 50. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 55. 51. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 55. 52. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 75. 53. The colors most often associated with Iemanjá are blue and white, the same as are used in Christian renderings of the Virgin Mary. 54. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 53. 55. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 58. 56. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 76. 57. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 76. 58. For more on the Xhosa tragedy, see Jennifer Wenzel, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 59. J. B. Peires explores the full-­scale catastrophe that accompanied Nongqawuse’s prophecy. His study investigates the amalgamation of suffering, confusion, and spiritual ascension that contributed to the cattle killing and Nongqawuse’s involvement as the daughter of a respected spirit medium. J. B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-­Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 60. It is worth noting here that Wideman’s narrator foresees the Xhosa cattle killing more than fifty years before it historically takes place, making the true prophet the unnamed narrator and not Nongqawuse. The narrator knows that the cattle killing will fail. He knows what she does not, and he attempts to transfer this knowledge to the physically stricken people of Philadelphia, furiously reacting against the yellow fever epidemic that will ravage the city. 61. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 145. 62. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 145. 63. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 146. 64. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 146. 65. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 147. 66. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 148.

Notes to Chapter Four 223

67. Since the narrator awakens to the burning house of Liam and his wife, it seems that the prophecy Nongqawuse envisioned and her retelling of it save the narrator from a certain death in the home. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 148. 68. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 148. 69. Charles Johnson’s novel Middle Passage is one such narrative. The protagonist Rutherford Calhoun, a free black in New Orleans, escapes his debtors and his impending marriage by agreeing to work aboard a slave ship in 1830. He states, “What lay ahead in Africa, then later on the open, endless sea, was, as I shall tell you, far worse than the fortune I’d fled in New Orleans.” Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 1. 70. Fred D’Aguiar, interview, “Building Bridges to the Past,” Maria Frías. Callaloo 25, no. 2 (2002) 418–25. 71. Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains includes a quote by Granville Sharpe: “One man . . . escaped, it seems by laying hold of a rope which hung from the ship into the water, and thereby, without being perceived, regained the ship, secreted himself, and was saved.” Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, 80–82. 72. Hochschild, Bury the Chains. 73. “The pantheon of inheritance in what would come to be called the African diaspora collected itself on new soil through a combination of conditions: the terrain from which the trade drew its ambit; the specific and already transformed spiritual sensibility—the African provenance of belief structures and practices; the local pantheons that were encountered and transformed with successive waves of people; the degree of spatial autonomy that enslaved populations fought for and retained.” M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 291. 74. In September 1781, Captain Luke Collingwood directed sail of a slave ship from the coast of São Tomé to Jamaica. During the journey, Collingwood decided to toss 133 African captives off of the ship in order to ensure the maximum profit for the owners of the vessel and its cargo. Many of the slaves were sick, and some were dying, and Collingwood knew that the insurers would not pay if they died of natural causes. If they were killed in order to guarantee the safety of the ship, there would be compensation. 75. Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 19. 76. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 29. 77. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 48. 78. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 38. 79. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 38. 80. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 47. 81. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 48. 82. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 48.

224 Notes to Chapter Four

83. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 49. 84. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 48. 85. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 54. 86. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 52. 87. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 87. 88. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 92. 89. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 93. 90. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 93. 91. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 93. 92. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 93. 93. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 31. 94. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 32. 95. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 87. 96. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 94. 97. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 106. 98. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, 109. 99. Morrison, Beloved, 89. 100. Morrison, Beloved, 23. 101. Morrison, Beloved, 89. 102. Laurie Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 77. 103. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 141. 104. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 194. 105. Morrison, Beloved, 177. 106. Morison, Beloved, 179. 107. Morrison, Beloved, 177–78. 108. Morrison, Beloved, 180. 109. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 150. 110. Trudier Harris, “Beloved: Woman, Thy Name Is Demon,” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook, ed. William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 148. 111. Morrison, Beloved, 177. 112. Morrison, Beloved, 180. 113. Morrison, Beloved, 181. 114. Morrison, Beloved, 177. 115. Morrison, Beloved, 179. 116. Selwyn Cudjoe, Resistance and Caribbean Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), 57. 117. Erna Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, ed. E. A. Markham (London: Penguin, 1996), 49.

Notes to Chapter Four 225

118. Helen Tiffin, “Cold Hearts and (Foreign) Tongues: Recitation and the Reclamation of the Female Body in the Works of Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid,” Callaloo 16, no. 3 (1993): 910. 119. Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” 52. 120. Valerie Orlando discusses contemporary literary attempts to opt out of the self-­sacrificial mold that was so popular with past conceptions of womanhood. These “new processes for selfhood” include violence, madness, and even self-­ destruction and place women in the role of the agent instead of victim. Valerie Orlando, “Writing New H(er)stories for Francophone Women of Africa and the Caribbean,” World Literature Today, Vol. 75, No. 1 (winter 2001), 40–42. 121. Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” 49–50. 122. Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” 51. 123. Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” 51. 124. Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” 52. 125. Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” 52. 126. Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” 52. 127. In her poem “female,” Lucille Clifton remarks: “there is an amazon in us. / she is the secret we do not / have to learn. / the strength that opens us / beyond ourselves. / birth is our birthright. / we smile our mysterious smiles.” Lucille Clifton, “female,” in Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–2000 (Rochester, NY: boa Editions, 2000), 40. 128. Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” 52. 129. Brodber, “One Bubby Susan,” 52–53. 130. Richard J. Powell. “Changing, Conjuring Reality,” in Conjuring Bearden (Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, 2006), 19. 131. Powell, “Changing, Conjuring Reality,” 25. 132. Louis Kaplan, American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 118. 133. All three Yoruba/diaspora religious practices place women in unique positions as mediums and spiritual vessels. 134. Morrison, Beloved, 136, 137. 135. Morrison, Beloved, 136, 137. 136. Nancy Morejon, “Persona,” in Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-­Hispanic Writers, ed. Miriam DeCosta-­Willis (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003), 333–34.

Conclusion. Photographic Incantations of the Visual 1. Eduardo Cadava reinvigorates the discourse of Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre within the context of ruination and melancholia. Eduardo Cadava, “Lapsis-­ Imaginis: The Image in Ruins,” October 96 (2001): 38.

226 Notes to Conclusion

2. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 21. 3. Pastoral Interlude consists of five hand tinted silver prints. 4. The text on the photograph reads: “It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread . . . .” 5. Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2005), 88. 6. The body of the other is here displayed as distanced and displaced, isolated but strangely open to the uncomfortable invasion of the gaze. 7. Rita Dove’s book of poetry Grace Notes (1989) contains the poem “Canary,” which is dedicated to the poet Michael S. Harper. Farah Jasmine Griffin adapts this question as the title for her metabiography of Billie Holiday (If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday [New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 2003]). I think that for both Griffin and Dove, the cultural enigma that was Billie Holiday is body, soul, voice, volition, drive, guts, and foul-­mouthed determinism. In Dove’s and Griffin’s capable hands, she also was a woman who defied definition and was the epitome of mystery. 8. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1987), 50. 9. Morrison, Beloved, 51. 10. Morrison, Beloved, 52. 11. In Second Skin, Anne Cheng uses Josephine Baker as symbol, referent, and icon in order to present a discourse of public and private spheres, bodies, and racialized dimensions of cities in the modernist aesthetic. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57. 12. In Sharpe’s articulation, it is precisely the interplay of proximity and flesh that often attends the denial of racial violence, offering up “everyday brutalities . . . made visible or masked.” She aims, like Saidiya Hartman, to engage a discourse through visuality and therefore attendant to the temporal acceptance of our contemporary engagement with the past. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-­Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 72. 13. I want to thank Paige McGinley for pointing out the significance of Weems as a solitary figure against a Roman landscape so often populated with priests-­in-­ training traveling together. 14. For both Baudelaire and Benjamin, the flaneur participates in a subject position of experiential observation, able to embody a space by moving through it with little discernible purpose. I am purposely avoiding the term here, since I feel there is in the photographic endeavors of black women artists a visual conflation juxtaposed in order to reproduce power on a massive scale. For an extensive reading of

Notes to Conclusion 227

Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s considerations of the sauntering figure in verse and image, see Beryl Schlossman, “The Night of the Poet: Baudelaire, Benjamin, and the Woman in the Street,” Modern Language Notes 119, no. 5 (2004): 1013–32. 15. Jones’s landmark essay positions the structure of self-­portraiture as one imbued with inalienable powers. Amelia Jones, “The Eternal Return: Self-­Portraiture Photography as a Technology of Embodiment,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27, no. 4 (summer 2002): 949. 16. Deborah Willis, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (New York: Norton, 2009), xxiii. 17. Writing about the convergence of race, gender, and class in nineteenth-­ century literary and visual narratives, Smith notes “the relationship between photography and women, and between the camera and women, was sexualized in the earliest popular discourses of photography.” With Weems’s refusal to be read in a highly sexualized way, her engagement requests an alternative relationship with the viewer while also highlighting black women’s always already sexualized relationship to photographic practices. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 94–95. 18. Weems says in part, “I’m trying in my humble way to connect the dots, to confront history. Democracy and colonial expansion are rooted here. So I refuse the imposed limits. My girl, my muse, dares to show up as a guide, an engaged persona pointing toward the history of power. She’s the unintended consequence of the Western imagination.” Carrie Mae Weems interview with Dawoud Bey, Bomb Magazine 108, http://bombmagazine.org/article/3307/. 19. Jones, “Eternal Return,” 959. 20. Art 21, pbs, accessed July 4, 2010, http://video.pbs.org/video/1281748949/. 21. Carrie Mae Weems interview with Dawoud Bey. 22. Cheng, Second Skin, 166. 23. Cheng, Second Skin, 166. 24. Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 55. 25. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 74. 26. “Art is the lie that tells the truth” is a quote by Pablo Picasso. 27. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta, 1973), 80. 28. John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 50. 29. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 31.

228 Notes to Conclusion

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244 Bibliography

Index

abeng, 67, 125, 218n107 Abeng (Cliff ), 124–26 afterimage, 1–4, 7, 11, 13–15, 21, 26–28, 98, 133; of slavery, 177; corporeal, 18, 20 Amazon warrior women, 172 American slave romance, 41–42 Arago, Jacques, 132, 134–35, 220n130 Arawak, 170 archival: embodiment, 11; intent, 12 Atlantic Ocean, 12, 14; circum-­ Atlantic, 174; Atlantic, the, 6, 148, 163; transatlantic, 70, 95, 113 auditory impulse, 2, 15 Aunt Jemima, 102, 108, 112, 114–15, 123, 131; black power and, 108, 112; as constructed image, 113; New Jemima, The, 109; in poetry, 111; as superwoman, 110 Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid), 86–92, 125; nonmothering in, 93–94 Baker, Josephine, 112 Beloved (Morrison), 5, 13, 22, 57, 68, 74, 80, 138, 187, 199n15; Baby Suggs, 23–24, 62–3, 106–7, 166–70, 175; Beloved, 11, 60, 76, 103–4, 139, 181–82; ellipses in, 104–5; Fugitive Slave Act in, 102–3; hypermothering

in, 61; Sethe, 6, 8, 25, 58–59, 64, 76, 197n30 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio: 6–7, 23, 70, 196n26 black Atlantic, 3, 8, 13, 15–16, 42, 60, 141, 146, 160; dispersals, 143; forgotten bodies, 4; haunting, 12; historical figures, 16; legacy of, 18; literature, 8, 147; maternity, 101; musical improvisation, 194; pain, 97; photographic processes, 192; protectionism, 108; self-reflective imperative, 9; subjects, 6, 19, 59, 114, 131, 134, 140; subjectivities, 11, 14, 17, 148, 175, 181 black subjectivity, 1, 7, 82, 107, 207n8 Black Thunder (Bontemps): wounded black women in, 213n19, 216n80 black women: birthing modernity, 8; black maternal investment, 94; black womanhood, 26, 94, 174; bodies of, 12, 30, 41–42, 47, 59; bodies as archive of time, 177; corporeal transcendence and, 140; hyperembodiment and, 13; hypermasculine performance and, 16; hyperpresence of, 56; hypervisibility of, 7, 14, 63; as invisible armor, 102; as logistical inconvenience, 4; as martyr symbol,

black women (continued) 164; maternity/motherhood and, 15, 60, 72–73; as metahumans, 140; as mythic African women, 149–59, 161–62; myth of sexual supremacy and, 14, 28, 45, 56, 204n85; in New World, 54; as objects of articulation, 7; pain and, 5; photographic trace of, 7; rape of, 41, 215n57; representation of, 3; reproducing historical records, 40; resurrection qualities of, 17; self-possession and, 95; in service of black world consciousness, 110; sexual and reproductive labor of, 45; southern plantations and, 115; surrogate mothering or “othermothering” and, 74–75; transatlantic slavery and, 3; transnational bodies of, 56; unprotection of, 55, 108; as visual necessity, 4–6 Blessed Anastácia, 16, 102, 131–35 Brazil, 13, 19, 50, 98, 145; brazil wood, 44; Diamantina, 45, 54; figure of Mãe Preta in, 73; Free Womb Law, 71–72; legacy of slavery in, 54, 132; manumission in, 48; Minas Gerais, 44, 54; Ouro Preto, 44–45; Palmares in, 65, 68–69; quilombos in, 65; Rio de Janeiro and mixture fina, 131–32; slave concubines in, 48; tabuleiro women in, 48; Tejuco, 46–47, 50 camera lucida, 17 Campos-Pons, María Magdalena, 12, 69–71, 135–36, 143–44, 174 Candomblé, 142, 145, 174; as responsibility and power for Afro-Brazilian women, 221n20 Carver, George Washington, 116 Cattle Killing, The (Wideman), 3–4, 17, 148–59

246 Index

Clifton, Lucille, 27–28, 118, 172, 214n55 citizenship, 3, 61–62 conjure women, 170, 173–74 corporeal access, 71 corporeal conflations, 28, 99, 194 corporeal inversion, 26 corporeal ownership, 94 corporeal refusal, 8, 11, 20, 185 corporeal subjugation, 19 corporeal transfer(erence), 68, 114, 214n54 corporeal vulnerability, 56, 98 Corregidora (Jones), 18–20, 68, 81–86, 198n4, 199n9–10, 211n92 Cox, Renee, 129–31; Rudolph Giuliani’s criticism of, 220n125 da Silva, Francisca “Chica,” 14, 20, 42–44, 204n83–4, 205n87; Xica and depiction of, 45–54, 204n36, 205n96, 206n106 de Costa, Maria, 42 de Oliveira, João Fernandes, 43, 45 de Sá, Antônio Caetano, 42 diaspora, 84, 93–4, 129, 143, 170, 175; African, 3, 95–96, 108, 224n73; Afro-diasporic, 56, 75, 124; black, 15, 17–18, 97, 110, 140, 159; diasporic bodies, 14, 69; diasporic dialogue, 149; diasporic link, 150; diasporic literature, 164; diasporic loss, 16; diasporic return, 12; diasporic subject, 73; diasporic transference, 143 dna, 8, 11, 42, 196n26, 202n53 Dominica, 87, 90, 93 double exposure, 13, 15, 58–59, 61, 68, 84 Douglass, Frederick, 214n54 Dove, Rita, 181, 227n7

empire(s), 7, 13, 65, 71, 86, 177, 179, 182, 191; corporeal imperialism, 18, 22; imperial violation, 6 Feeding the Ghosts (D’Aguiar), 159–66 female subjectivity, 5, 7, 94–95, 174 fragmented corporeality, 59 fragmented womanhood, 65 Freyre, Gilberto, 43–44, 205n88 Fugitive Slave Act: See United States Gaines, Archibald, 23 Gaines, John, 23 Garner, Margaret, 14, 20, 22–24, 199n16–17, 206n5; Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s pictoral depiction of, 25–26 gender transference, 16, 134, 182 gender transmutation, 160 Hemings, Elizabeth, 29, 39 Hemings, Sally, 9–11, 14, 20, 27–28, 30–34, 43, 50, 203n70, 204n81; 1970 University of Virginia newsletter and, 29; Sally Hemings (ChaseRiboud), 30–31, 36–38; “Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson” (Cassel), 34–36, 39; Sally’s Rape (McCauley), 40–41 history: American history, 114; biographical history, 40; use of body as malleable history, 115; Caribbean history, 124; as circular narrative, 44, 158; collective history, 129; confronting of, 228n18; corporeal histories, 21; creating history, 88; embattled history, 54; familial history, 28, 145; historical amnesia, 20; historical erasure, 56; historical narratives of slavery, 11; historical recreation, 42; lack of history, 102;

life/personal history, 77, 83–84, 100, 181; limits of, 172; lost history, 93; oral history, 41–42, 82, 132, 201n45; photography and, 1; quite inner spots of, 131; recognized history, 5; ruptured history, 173, unknown history, 68; unresolved history, 113; weight of, 192 Holiday, Billie, 181, 227n7 Iemanjá, Yemanjá, Yemanji, 141, 143, 145–48, 163, 223n53 (See also ­Yemayá) imaginary(ies): black, 2, 6; black Atlantic, 17; lingering, 9; transnational, 3, 45, 71–72, 197n37 Invisible Man (Ellison): wounded black women in, 213n19 I Tituba (Conde), 76–77; surrogate mothering or othermothering in, 78–81 Jamaica, 67, 123, 125, 129, 224n74; 162, 166, 171; Jamaican patois, 170; legacy of slave resistance in, 127 Jefferson, Martha, 27, 29, 39, 203n61 Jefferson, Thomas, 10–11, 14, 30, 201n36–37, 201n45, 203n70, 204n81; as author of Declaration of Independence, 38; Farm Book, 9; Jefferson in Paris film, 31–34; Monticello and, 27–28, 35, 40 Kindred (Butler), 96–102, 138; female Uncle Tom in, 109–10 King Jr., Martin Luther King: assassination of, 115 lineage: dna and, 202n53; familial lineage, 91; history and, 209n52; incestuous lineage, 18, 84; invaded

Index 247

lineage (continued) lineage, 19; multiracial lineage, 199n12; patrilineage, 22; racial memory and, 222n35; slave system and, 9; stitching of, 143; troubled lineage, 126; white lineage, 132 Liverpool Maritime Museum, 159–60 Lorde, Audre, 1–2, 4, 145–46, 148, 219n115 mammy, 108, 152, 216n73; Aunt Jemima and image of, 109–10, 112– 14; as depicted in Imitation of Life (Saars), 75–76; as depicted in Lullaby (Saar), 74; as surrogate mothering, 73 maroon(s), 67, 124, 143; Windward Maroons, 123. See also Nanny of the Maroons masculinity: black masculinity, 7; ­imperialism and , 202n50; masculinist colonial imagination, 191; as movement, 182; traditional masculinity, 124; white masculinity, 54 maternal ambiguity, 69 memory, 1–2, 5, 135, 154, 156, 163, 165, 194; corporeal memory, 28; historical memory, 35, 38, 43, 47, 102, 143, 160; Holocaust memory, 181; legend and, 196n13; machine of American memory, 187; memorial ocularity, 148; re-memory, 6, 103, 196n22; rigid memory, 102; slavery and memory, 3–4, 8, 13, 18, 20, 54, 185, 196n26 Middle Passage, 12, 69, 97, 105, 143, 148, 157, 159–60, 163–64 modernity, 11, 103; as force, 13; fragmentations and, 60; New World modernity, 8; postmodernity, 55,

248 Index

191; rigid modernity, 102; transatlantic modernity, 164 Morejón, Nancy, 138, 175 Morrison, Toni: See Beloved Moynihan Report, 98 Nanny of the Maroons, 102, 123–29, 131, 218n100; image on Jamaican currency, 171; monument of, 219n107; Nanny-like, 170 Obeah, 124; obeah/spirit woman, 171 ocular residue, 13 “One Bubby Susan” (Brodber), 170–73 orishas, 69, 142–43, 145, 147, 149 ogbanji, 148 Oxum, 143 Oyá, 143 performance: collective performance, 149, corporeal performance, 111; “Mother of Seas” and, 148; repetition and, 197n39; spirituals and, 119; uses of performance space, 41; visual performance, 185 photography: black female body and, 191, 194; documentary photography, 185; evidentiary photograph, 9; photographic repetition, 11; photographic engagement, 2; photograph as history, 1; photographic afterimage, 3, 13, 19; photographic capacity, 21; photographic intent, 189; photographic negative, 176; photographic production, 111; Polaroid portrait, 174; photographic time, 187; self-portraiture, 179, 181, 184– 85, 194; spirit photography, 141–42 postemancipation, 11; marginal freedom and, 17; ex-slave or former slave and, 3–4; freed slaves and,

48; postslavery black life, 173; purchased freedom, 167–69 Portugal, 21, 43, 50, 54 racial ambiguity, 9, 20 repetition(s), 7, 11, 13–14, 41, 185, 197n39–40, 201n39; corporeal repetition, 6, 184; repeating visions of slavery, 17; as reproduction, 15, 84 restricted womanhood, 89 Salem Witch Trials, 79 Santería, 70, 143, 174 Simpson, Lorna, 71, 94, 192 slavery, 6, 14, 23, 47, 97; afterlife of, 87, 93, 95, 100, 102, 107, 116, 124, 191, 195n9; aftermath of, 17, 60, 80; aggressive intimacy and, 15; contemporary representation of, 16; counterconstruction of, 11; demise of, 7, 45, 72; escape from, 167; “eternal return” and, 12; failure of the archive and, 9; gendered modulations, of, 13; legacy of, 89, 149; master-slave relations and, 9, 40; in New World, 29, 143, 162, 175; patriarchy and, 22, 54, 102; plantations/ plantation slave life and, 38, 187, 196n28; planter class and, 14; representation iconographies of, 7; reproductive mechanisms and, 8; sexual legacy of, 42, 56; slave auctions, 22; slave population statistics and, 211n106; slavery’s purgatory, 62; slavery’s reckoning, 103; slave ships and, 148, 160–61, 163–64; slave testimony, 55; transatlantic slave trade/ slavery, 3, 59, 106, 113, 135, 142, 187; trauma of, 169, 197n37; violent proximities and, 5 slave women, 24, 28, 30, 54, 56, 58,

72, 134, 161; abortive methods by, 89–90; assumed sexual access of, 44; black Atlantic modernity and, 101; corporeal mythology of, 115; as corporeal sites of memory, 13, 20; as corporeal space, 19; as enslaved nursemaids and midwives, 73, 207n20, 209n51–52; motherhood and, 13–4, 40, 59–62, 63, 71, 74, 76, 79–80, 95, 108; sexual exploitation of, 18; slave lust and, 38; slave milk and, 59; visual shielding and, 16; white patriarchal power and, 20, 28 Song for Anninho (Jones), 64–69 spectacular exposure, 52 Till: Emmett, 1–2, 192; Mamie, 2, 195n8 transcultural haunting, 15 transcultural meaning, 20 transgressive corporal intimacy, 100 transnational, 13, 17–18, 28, 42 Truth, Sojourner, 120 Tubman, Harriet, 16–17, 102, 131, 137, 163, 216n73; archival photographs of, 120; Associated Black Charities of Baltimore (abcb) and, 114; as depicted in They Shall Run, 116–17; Elizabeth Catlett’s depictions of, 120–23; as mad woman, 221n7; militarized black nationalism and, 115; superwomanness and, 118; temporal lobe epilepsy and, 217n86; white abolitionists and, 119 tumbeiros, 143 United States, 3, 11, 13, 19, 32, 38, 40, 42; black nationalist ideologies in, 108–9; California, 96; Fugitive Slave Act in, 167; Kentucky, 19, 29, 62; Louisiana Purchase in, 185, 187;

Index 249

United States (continued) Maryland, 98, 101; Massachusetts, 79; Ohio, 23; one-drop rule in, 22, 199n12; post-Civil Rights in, 102, 113, 115, 140–44; racial formation of, 2; Reconstruction in, 107; representations of black women in, 75; rifle and militias in, 216n73; Virginia, 28–9 violence: cartographies of, 12; excess of, 106; freedom and, 16; gender and, 82; generational violence, 95; intimacy and, 59, 203n69; loss and, 78; master-slave relations and, 9; maternity and, 57–8, 60, 68; “necessary violence,” 44; pathology and, 98; racial violence, 109, 150; sexual violence, 5, 14, 19m 26, 36, 53, 59, 143; slavery’s violence, 22, 67, 131, 141, 167, 202n50, 214n54; slave

250 Index

women in, 72; violence of hypervisibility, 76; violent gaze, 185 vision: betrayal of, 2; visual duplication, 13; visual retrieval, 17; visual whiteness, 27 Vodou, 174 Washington, Booker T., 116 Wayles, John, 29 Weems, Carrie Mae, 177–80, 182–93, 228n17–18 Wells, Ida B., 214n56 Wheatley, Phillis, 120–21 Yemayá, 12–3, 69–70, 142–43, 152, 221n12 Yoruba, 69; women and Youba religious practices, 226n133 Zong, 16, 160–66, 224n74