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TRICKSTER-TROPING ON BLACK CULTURE: REVISED READINGS OF
GENDER AND SEXUALITY

By

LaMonda Horton-Stallings

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English

2002

ABSTRACT

TRICKSTER-TROPING ON BLACK CULTURE: REVISED READINGS OF
GENDER AND SEXUALITY

By

LaMonda Horton-Stallings

Traditionally, studies on black culture have employed the study of folk figures
such as the trickster and their aesthetic cultural productions as a major strategy to define
what is distinctive about black culture. However, most of these studies were focused on
race and nation. In addition to race, this dissertation seeks to expand conventional
readings of oral traditions and folklore in black culture for alternative readings of gender
and sexuality in African American texts. This dissertation explores the hermeneutics of
hip-hop, black literature, and folk and oral stories to complicate the canons of gender,
sexuality, and class. If we critically explore Afiican and African-American models such
as goddesses, trickster figures, and African American matrilineal folk figures from myths
and oral traditions of the Black Diaspora, critics and readers can begin to explore
sexuality and gender ideologies beyond those conceived through Eurocentric western
canons of sexuality and gender. These endeavors of trickster-troping help formulate

revised readings of complex texts in black culture.

 

© 2002 LAMONDA HORTON-STALLINGS

 

For
VanessaMattieRaMondalatashaJasmineEthelFlorencePauletteMaryVictoriaPatriciaJudy

iv

 

ACKNOWLEDGEIVIENT S

I acknowledge the ancestors of the past, the ghosts of the present, and the person
who I will one day be for allowing me to complete the second phase of my life, and the
first step in my career. I thank myself.

I also want to acknowledge my family for all of their pedagogical philosophies on
folk and oral traditions, especially for conveying to me that tricksterisms would allow me
to live my life. This project is possible because my mother and grandmother, Vanessa
and Mattie, indoctrinated me with a love of music, gossip, and back-talk. My sisters,
RaMonda and Latasha, allowed me to develop my skills as a true sister-expert of the
dozens and signifying. My accomplishments are a reflection of the love and support that
you gave me when we had little else. Thanks for the rhythm and rhyme.

I thank my partner, William C. Stallings III, for staying with me throughout all of
my years of “higher education.” Thanks for putting up with my shit, staying when I said
leave, and leaving when I needed to get my work done. I am especially grateful for your
laughter and your understanding of and appreciation for all of me. Thanks for taking the
ride with me.

I wish to acknowledge my committee members for all of their advice and kind
words throughout this project. I am especially grateful to Dr. Harrow and Dr. Thomas for
reading early drafts of the project. I thank Dr. Smitherman for allowing me to pursue
independent studies that shaped this project. I thank Dr. Melendez and Dr. Michaelsen
for encouraging me to “write it.” I also wish to thank Dr. Keith Byerman at Indiana
State University for his suggestions on my work.

Thanks Phyllis, Tammy, Dolores, and David for always having my back!

PREFACE
The parenthetical sign in the title of my dissertation—written by herself—refers
to a genre of Black literature, the slave narrative, in which the meaning of the slave’s
words are always impacted, distorted, and hidden by authenticating documents and ill-
advised use of dominant discourses of the time. It is as much an indicator of the
theoretical concept of the work as it is a personal declaration and validation of the

dialogics I have decided to align myself with in the struggle. The struggle continues.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1

A Call for a Post-nationalist Reading of Folklore and the

Vernacular ...................... i ............................................................ 17
CHAPTER 2

The Mawu-Paradi gm: Tricking the Trickster-trope/ Revising

Gender ....................................................................................... 46
CHAPTER 3
The Black Woman and the Trickster Politics of Unnaming .......................... 87
CHAPTER 4
Zora Neale Hurston: A Transition From (Un) Naming to Unnaming ............. 132
CHAPTER 5
From Mules To Turtle Women: Evolution of Black Female Unnaming .......... 150
CHAPTER 6
Racialized Sexuality and Imagined Paradise(s) ...................................... 182
CHAPTER 7

Already Queer?: Tricking the Tropes of the Bad Nigger and Queen Bee... .....218

WORKS CITED .......................................................................... 292

vii

INTRODUCTION

Whatever is black about Black American literature is to be found
in this identifiable black Signifyin(g) difference.
Henry L. Gates—The Signifying Monkeyl

However attractive and culturally affirming, the valorization of
the vernacular has yielded what I would argue is an
inherently exclusionary literary practice that filters a wide range of
complex and contradictory impulses and energies into a single
modality consisting of the blues and the folk.

Ann Ducille—Tlte Coupling Convention2

The form of folk expression is gendered by exclusion, meaning
that when we speak of folk culture, we generally speak of male
folk culture.

Martin Favor—Authentic Blackness3

now how you just gon' be playa hatin' on me.

cos i got mad bitches just wantin‘ me.

And i got mad niggaz just checkin' for me see.

I got more stock than you ever see, i be.

The one that your main squeeze been diggin.

Pull you out your closet, sex on weekends.

It's my business of what i do, him or her, he or she, inside you.
Queen Pen—“Girlfriend”4

It does not take a Henry L. Gates to understand that the oral, folk, and vernacular
are the basis for a great deal of theory concerning African American culture. Critics of
black oral traditions, W.E.B. Dubois, Melville Herskovits, Zora N. Hurston, Langston

Hughes, Ruth Finnegan, Roger Abrahams, and many others have assured the place of

 

I The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford
UP, 1988). -

2 Ann Ducille. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction.
(New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) 69.

3 Martin J. Favor’s Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham: Duke
UP, 1999) 18.

‘ Queen Pen’s “Girlfriend.” My Melody. Interscope Records, 1997.

black oral traditions outside of anthropology and into a greater realm of black culture.
Nevertheless, as Gates understands it, these traditions help to decipher what makes Black
literature distinct from Western texts. Yet, as both Ducille and Favor’s criticism of
African American literary thought indicate, there exist specific problems of folk and
vernacular research partaking in moments of essentialism and exclusion that writers such
as Hurston, Toomer, Ellison, and others may have never intended. An examination of the
goals of African American culture and Black Studies formation, and the development of
African American literature and theory, reveals that traditional use of the vernacular and
oral has created dilemmas in representing the fragmentation and multiplicity of subject
positions defined as black in readings of cultural productions. These dilemmas have been
the basis of the small but vocal anti-vemacular criticism in African American critical and
cultural theory.5 Instead of dismissing the work of such notable critics, I wish to draw on
the conclusions they have made: African American culture and literature evolved from
oral traditions, but to date, none of the major proponents of black literary criticism have
broached the issues of sexuality and class as they appear in the vernacular. Further, the
use of the vernacular as it concerns gender appears to be limited. Years after we have
accepted the vernacular as the black difference, we should now move onto discussing the
differences in that difference (blackness). Clearly, there are contradictions in the anti-
vemacular theories of Favor and Ducille when we examine the product of vernacular

artforms through the lyrics of the black female hip-hop artist Queen Pen. If the

 

5 In addition to Ducille, there have been a number of critics who have addressed the negative and
essentialist use of vernacular criticism. See Hazel Carby‘s “Ideologies of the Black Folk: The Historical
Novel of Slavery" in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold
Ramperstead. (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins UP, 1989), Diana Fuss‘s Essentially Speaking:
Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), and Robin D.G. Kelley‘s “Notes on
Deconstructing the Folk,” American Historical Review 97, no.5 (December 1992): 1402.

vernacular is limited to the genres of blues and folklore or exclusionary to most of the
black female population, how is this particular female artist able to rap so succinctly and
unabashedly about her fluid or muteable sexual desires in a way that showcases the folk
and vemacular’s customary values of flexibility and transgressing false social borders as
they relate to gender and sexuality?

This dissertation argues that black folk, vernacular, and specific figures of the
tradition do not limit discussion of difference in black culture and society. It addresses
three major concerns that I deem important to the future of African-American literary and
cultural theory: We must make available readings of black texts that take into account
the experience of fluid subject position. We should acknowledge that African American
cultural theory has not fully explored the implications of its oral and folk tradition by
which it purportedly has been influenced. Finally, the most vital argument presented in
this study is that black texts aesthetically shaped by black oral and folk traditions reflect
discursive and subversive readings of gender and sexuality constructs that traditionally
rely on a foundational system of hierarchically opposed binary elements. By using the
non-westem models of Black Diasporic trickster figures and trickster aesthetics, critics
and readers can begin to explore alternative ideologies about gender and sexuality, as
opposed to those Western conceived notions of gender and sexuality. Black oral
mechanisms work to undermine the very formations of man/woman and
heterosexual/homosexual. With the trickster figure, we can recover these readings to
demonstrate the distinctions of difference in the construct of blackness and black cultural

texts that have vernacular, folk, and oral traditions within their narrative frame. Only

then can wevbegin fully comprehending and understanding how to see the differences
within blackness.

Theoretically, if we are to read differences, then it seems logical to adhere to
deconstructive strategies that complete the two-fold project of deconstruction. As
Jacques Derrida indicates in Positions (1981), the primary goal of a deconstruction
strategy should note that: “in a traditional philosophical opposition we have not a
peaceful coexistence of facing terms but a violent hierarchy. One of the terms dominates
the other (axiologically, logically, etc), occupies the commanding position. To
deconstruct the opposition is above all, at a particular moment, to reverse the hierarchy”
(56-57). Derrida’s notion of deconstruction hinges on a critique of the Western
metaphysical categorization process that manifests itself in the dispersal of widely
accepted oppositions such as presence/absence, good/evil, truth/error, man/woman,
positive/negative, identity/ difference, and so on. Derrida and the field of
deconstruction demonstrate that binary oppositions are a pair of contrasted terms, each of
which depends on the other for its meaning. Binary oppositions classify and organize the
objects, events, and relations of the world. Yet, the most important revelation of
Derrida’s critique of binary oppositions is that if we accept any binary logic, then that
acceptance establishes conceptual order.6 The conceptual order based on binary
oppositions impacts everything from race and gender to sexuality and language.
Subsequently, one must not only reverse the hierarchy but also avoid making the reversal
an established order. The later goal of deconstruction indicates one way as to how the

use of folk and vernacular becomes segregated and limited.

 

6 Positions, 39-40.

Ironically, the restricted use of the black oral, folk, and vernacular occurs as
critics work to find ways to discuss how Black culture and literature differs from White
western literature and culture. Such criticism often focuses on language practices of each
community, but more specifically on the way those language practices can be seen in
written narratives. Rather than focusing on the oral’s own theoretical ideas, such
criticism has only theorized on the interaction between the oral and the written, rather
than the oral itself. The exclusionary literary practice that “filters a wide range of
complex and contradictory impulses” is not characteristic of the folk and vernacular. The
misuse of post-structuralist thought in black literary criticism has brought stagnation
instead of benefits to research of black oral traditions in black culture.

With a focus on Saussurean notions of signification and difference, Henry L.
Gates, Houston Baker, and others7 have established and revised theoretical beliefs that
the very thing that makes black literature different and “black” is its distinguishing
vernacular. They employ black vernacular culture to disrupt a foundational system of
binary oppositions that privileges whiteness and written texts. Rather than placing at the
center white and western aesthetic traditions, critics reverse the hierarchy and place at the
center the black community’s own aesthetic standards to criticize African American
culture. Like Derrida, two major figures—-Gates and Baker—are able to successfully
disrupt the logocentrism of writing and speech and reverse the hierarchy of white/black in

black texts.

 

7 See Hortense Spiller’s “Mama's Baby, Papa‘s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Mae G.
Henderson’s “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary
Tradition” in Changing Our Own Words. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall, Gate’s Figures in Black: Signs, and the
Racial Self. Ronald T. Judy’s Disforming the American Canon: African Arabic Slave Narratives and the
Vernacular, Carol A. Blackshire-Belay, ed. Language and Literature in the African American Imagination.

In Blues Ideology and Afro-American Literature—A Vernacular Theory (1987),
Houston A. Baker considers the blues as a text and turns it into a tropological
investigative model for African, -American literature. Baker theorizes that “Afro-
American culture is a complex, reflexive enterprise which finds its proper figuration in
blues conceived as a matrix. . .They are the multiplex, enabling script in which Afro-
American cultural discourse is inscribed” (3-4). He later envisions the “ blues as a code
radically conditioning Afro-Americas cultural signifying. ...any aspect of the blues stands
for something else in virtue of a systematic set of conventional procedures” and that
they,” therefore, comprise a mediational-site where familiar antinomies are resolved (or
dissolved) in the office of adequate cultural understanding” (6). In the end, Baker finds
that the vernacular of blacks is shaped by a blues ideology embedded in the culture, and
this in turn can be found in many literary texts in African American culture. Baker
successfully reverses the hierarchy, but he does so in a way that makes it difficult to
conceive of any other differences in black texts, such as gender and sexuality. It becomes
difficult to see differences in blackness because the only thing we have done is to reverse
the hierarchy.

In further analysis of deconstruction, Derrida suggests how Baker’s project of
reversing the hierarchies may be incomplete because it is only one step. He maintains
that deconstruction must also, “through a double gesture, a double science, a double
writing, put into practice a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement
of the system. It is on this means alone that deconstruction will provide the means of

intervening in the field of oppositions it criticizes.”8

 

8Jacques Derrida. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.
392.

 

The blues itself may not be a binary opposition, but it is positioned in the
opposition of black/white and oral/written in the way that Baker uses it: “The blues
matrix is a ‘cultural invention’: a ‘negative symbol’ that generates (or obliges one to
invent) its own referents”(9). Baker is able reverse the hierarchy of oppositions.
However, Baker posits that the blues matrix is the subordinated and negative term,
admitting that he is working within the frame of binary oppositions rather than displacing
it. Baker’s theory is essential to African American literature, not because it fully
displaces the conceptual order, but because the theory provides a solid example of how
such strategies can present new readings of African American culture, and it is for this
reason that his work can never be easily dismissed.

Gates’s project with deconstruction and post-structuralism prevails in many of his
works. In the introduction to Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984), he asserts:
In the case of the writer of African descent, his or her texts occupy two
spaces in at least two traditions: a European or American literary tradition,
and one of the several related but distinct black traditions. The “heritage”
of each black text written in a Western language is, then, a double
heritage, two-toned as it were. Its tones are white and black, and its aural
tones are standard and vernacular. (4)
Here, Gates admits that there are multiple binary traditions. The very language of
divisions he creates to explain black traditions establishes that the basis of his work will
be an overturning of binary oppositions, not a displacement of the logos. Hence, the text
will become a space for binary oppositions (standard/vemacular, aural/written, and black!

white). Gates later claims that “oral literature is of such import because in it is to be

located in what I have called the ‘signifyin(g)’ black difference, the very difference, in
Ngugi’s words, ...enables the black writer to transcend ‘fixed literary patterns’ and what
that implies—the preconceived rankings of art forms” (I I). Gates’s project claims to
place more emphasis on the vernacular of a text, than on written forms. Black oral
literary forms, in other words, can merge with received (European) literary forms to
create new (and distinctly black) genres of literature” (Gates and Ngugi l2).

Gates’s The Signifying Monkey (1988) completes his most notable deconstruction
project by creating from vernacular scholarship a theory of signifyin(g)—“a black trope
of trOpes, the figure of black rhetorical figures”(5 1). His theory articulates the notion that
“signification/signifyin(g): rhetorical figures/signifier, black act of redoublin g, to engage
in certain rhetorical games” (48). The importance of this theory is that rhetoric supplants
semantics (signifier/ signified), 9 and he uses the trickster figure to tie into his notion of
signifyin(g). The importance of tricksters to his theory of signifyin(g) is that they and
their myths function as focal points for black theories about formal language use, define
the role of the figurative, and qualify traditions of indeterminacy and interpretation in
African American texts (21-22). Gates disrupts the conceptual order or logocentrism of
speech and writing. Yet, his work also makes it difficult to see how the oral tradition can

address concerns of gender and sexuality in the production of black texts.

 

9 On p. 9, Gates’s theory of signifying relies a great deal on Derrida’s work in Positions. Derrida
n0tes, “We can extend to the system of the signs in general what Saussure says about language: The
linguistic system (langue) is necessary for speech events (parole) to be intelligible and produce their
effects, but the latter are necessary for the system to establish itself” (39-40). Likewise, Derrida shows that
signifiers do nor produce signified, they prodirce more signifiers. As a less-oral culture, writing becomes
privileged in the west. The conceptual order of written over orality is created primarily because of the
binary oppositions we have imposed on language, and rather than creating true meaning we create
signifiers that must rely on each other to even obtain meaning. Gates theory of signifyin( g) attempts to
reverse this order.

Gates and Baker employ a conservative and limited use of black oral and ,
vernacular traditions in their theoretical works. They complete the first step of
deconstruction by reversing the hierarchy, but the second part of the strategy seems to be
forgotten. Instead of displacing a logos founded on binary oppositions axiologically
opposed, mainly stemming from race (the facing terms of black and white), so far they
have merely reversed the classical oppositions. Why? Structuralist notions of binary
oppositions organize and frame the direction of their African American literary theory
relying on a black vernacular. We cannot disrupt the conceptual order of white/black,
Westem/non-westem, or oral/written, when the very theories used to do so are
themselves a privileging of the same oppositions we seek to reverse. This is why we
cannot articulate a theory of difference in the construct of black as it concerns black oral
and folk traditions. Like Derrida’s work to overturn binary metaphysics by calling into
question the relationship between speech and writing, Gates and Baker use the black
vernacular to explore the relationship between speech and writing. It becomes their

“différance” ‘0

in exploring differences in black and white culture. However, it is crucial
to note that neither of the aforementioned critics ever really completes the examination of

the differences (gender, sexuality, and class) in the signifying black difference. If we

want to solve the dilemma of recognizing difference in black vernacular, folk, and oral

 

loJohnathan Culler’s 0n Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism afier Structuralism ( Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1982) reveals the importance of différance: “The term différance, which Derrida introduces
alludes to this undecideable, non-synthetic alteration between the perspectives of structure and event. The
verb différance means to differ and to defer. Différance sounds the same as difference. but the ending ance,
which is used to produce verbal nouns, makes it a new form meaning “difference—differing-defering”.
Difference thus designates both a “passive” difference already in place as the condition of signification and
an act of differing which produces differences” (97). Derrida uses this particular word to halt and show the
rankings of speech and writing, but he is also able to create an undecideable, a tool to disrupt the entire
system of logocentrism founded on binary oppositions.

 

traditions, we must find another way to talk about all differences in which they are not
ranked.

Before post-Structuralist theories were adopted by the black literari, Ralph Ellison,
in his work Shadow and Act (1994), repeatedly spoke of black oral traditions and their
significance to written texts. Though Ellison preferred to be known as an American
writer, rather than a specifically African American writer, he often exemplified the
influence of black orality and folklore in his own literature. In a discussion of jazz, he
once affirmed the possibility of black oral traditions providing a space and theory for
various black subjectivities:

There is a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. . .Each

true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial

performance) springs from a contest in which each artist

challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation

represents...a definition of his identity: an individual, as

member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition.

Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation

upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even

as he finds it. (234)
Ellison’s assessment of jazz connects with any discussion of the folk and vernacular, as
jazz sprang forth from the foundations of the folk and oral in Black America. Ellison’s
focus on improvisation suggests a link to lirninality and black subjectivity. In the less
commercial or commodified performance of the oral, identity is not fixed. The art form

allows a continued revision of the self, without fully losing characteristics of the old-new

10

 

 

self. Yet, if the current anti-vernacular criticism is any indicator, it appears very obvious
that the uninspired “commercial performance” of post-Structuralist thought has lured
many critics away from the aesthetics and ideologies that might stem from implicitly
“cruel contradictions, improvisation, and defining identities” lost during the moment of
conception of the art form itself. Black oral, folk, and vernacular texts are quite capable
of representing polyvalent subjectivities and delivering polyphonic discourse for those
subjects. If we take the right approach in exploring black oral, folk, and vernacular
traditions, they can be very effective in documenting differences within blackness, or
serving the needs of black people, as identified by Ducille.

Though the folk and vernacular exist as products of black culture, they already
possess their own theoretical strategies on class, race, and gender. In “Novel and History,
Plot and Plantation,” critic Sylvia Wynters notes:

Around the growing of the yarn, of food for survival, they created on

the plot a folk culture—the basis of a social order—in three

hundred years. This culture recreated traditional values—use

values. This folk culture became a source of cultural guerilla

resistance to the plantation system.”
Throughout this work, Wynters’s claim that folk culture possesses its own social order
and use values will resurface repeatedly as an argument against exclusionary uses of folk
and vernacular in African America cultural and literary theory. Writers who establish the
vernacular as a mechanism in the “novel” or “literature” of black culture understand that
those oral mechanisms interrupt any values of class, morality, nationalism, sexuality, or

gender that produce the very genre of the novel. As Wynters corroborates, folk culture

 

“ Savacour 5 (June 1971) 99-100.

11

resists, and in its resistance attempts to destroy certain value systems. Folk’s destruction
of these values then does displace the general system, as opposed to merely reversing
hierarchies. Trickster figures occupy an important part of explaining how the task is
possible.

In Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms (1993),
William Hynes offers a brief assessment of manifest trickster traits that can be used as a
typology: (l) the fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous personality of the trickster,
(2) deceiver/trick-player, (3) shape-shifter, (4) situation-inverter, (5) messenger/imitator
of the gods, and (6) sacred/lewd bricoleur (34-36). These traits explicitly deny either/or
dichotomies. They are concepts with fluid and unfixed attributes. Tricksters are the very
embodiment of difference. To use the trickster as the greatest trope of difference is to
revisit and extend the work of critics such as Gerald Vizenor, Henry L. Gates, Harold
Scheub, Roger Abrahams, Robert Pelton, and others. As I attempt to revise and move
beyond the work of the trickster done by the aforementioned critics, I solidify the basis
for my method of tricking the trickster-trope. This dissertation explores how trickster’s
characteristics disrupt conceptual order by forbidding any notions of axiologically
opposed binary oppositions. All of the characteristics of the figure enrich cultural
readings with the possibility of deferring social meanings of gender and sexuality, but at
the same time taking note of the differences stemming from gender, sexuality, class, and
race.

In “Race, ” Writing, and Diflerence (1985), Gates asserts, “race is the greatest
trope of difference” (7). However, rather than race, symbolically, trickster is the greatest

trope of difference. Gates has already proven the importance of the trickster figures Eshu

12

Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey in locating an origin of difference for writing and
race, but the trickster is also an undecideable figure capable of interrupting the logic of
order that established the white male phallus as its primary signifier. In Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1999), Judith Butler argues that “the masculine
linguistic position undergoes individualization and heterosexualization required by the
founding prohibitions of the Symbolic law, the law of the father. . .both masculine and
feminine positions are thus instigated through prohibitive laws that produce culturally
intelligible genders, but only through a production of an unconscious sexuality that
reemerges in the domain of the imaginary” (37). Butler explores how privileging the
phallus shapes discussions of gender and sexuality by asserting that discourses of
normative behavior, socially and legally enforced, produce the coherence of man/woman
and heterosexual/homosexual. The symbolic law establishes regulatory practices of
gender formation, and anything that disrupts these practices are not intelligent or normal.
Nevertheless, as suggested by Wynters, if we explore black folklore’s trickster figure as
possessing alternate social orders, or as a symbolic “undecideable” to disrupt established
constructs of gender and sexuality, then a cultural guerilla resistance—the displacment of
the system—becomes possible and allows for polyvalent subjectivity and polyphonic
discourse in a way that is culturally specific and mindful of the experience and cultures of
black people.

In addition to Hynes and Gates, other critics have examined the figure for its
abilities to transgress boundaries. In Writing Trickster: Mythic Gambols in Ethnic
American Literature (1997), Jean R. Smith explores the importance of tricksters in her

assessment of ethnic American literature. Smith asserts, “perhaps trickster’s biggest

l3

contribution to the postmodern is the notion that identity can be multiplicitous and the
deconstruction of a falsely unitary language”(3). Trickster’s ability to evolve and move
beyond the confines of language stems from its foundation in many bodies (community)
versus one (the individual). In Narrative Chance: Post Modern Discourse on Native
American Indian Literatures (1989), Gerald Vizenor writes that “the trickster is a
communal sign of a comic narrative; the comic holotrope (the whole figuration) is a
consonance in tribal discourse. ..[whereas] the instrumental language of the social
sciences are tragic or hypotragic modes that withhold communal discourse” (9). As
demonstrated by Hynes’s list of manifest trickster traits, the trickster is the greatest trope
of difference within difference. Yet, Vizenor’s critique of the language of social sciences
adheres to earlier statements about the way post-Structuralist thought and logics of
binaries has limited the infinite possibilities of vernacular subjects and culture. Hence,
the study of black culture, where race has traditionally been presented as the centre, we
have to assert that the trickster acts as the greatest trope of difference in order to
un/recover the trickster traits that can help prefigure a new reading of the intersection of
race with sexuality, gender, and class. We must move the trickster figure and the folk
and vernacular culture it derives from away from the language of social sciences. By
doing so, we can now begin to incorporate with less difficulty, the production of
blackness with distinguishing difference based on gender, sexuality, or class.

The title of my dissertation, then, goes to the very core of disrupting the way
trickster has been employed for African American literature and culture. We must
perform acts of “trick-troping” on the literature and culture. My concept of “trick-

troping” reflects back to the words of Ellison and Wynters. It is a continuous process of

14

 

revision and improvisation of the narrative of the trickster that allows subjectivity to
remain fluid and free from definition, but very open to a goal of self-determination. Any
acts in which we revise traditional tropes of the trickster, then, might be called trick-
troping. In this case, trick-troping alters/tricks numerous conventional readings of the
trickster figure in African American culture to create new and evolving narratives. The
trope of the trickster has been read or employed in four very limited ways for black
culture and literary theory: as a cultural recovery tool for the black nation within
America; as a strictly masculine figure and representation in black vernacular, literary,
and cultural theory of African American writings and texts; as a primitive and mythic
vulgar taboo—having lost its initial characteristic of sacredness and divinity through the
assimilation of Africans in America; and as a trope for black super-heterosexuality.

This work addresses how to overturn and revise these four tropes of the trickster
figure at various stages. The previously mentioned manifest trickster traits provide
crucial insights to revealing how the trickster can provide the foundation for new models
of discourse on sexuality, gender, and class, especially as they pertain to people of color
if appropriately utilized. Criticism must alter the already available tropes of the trickster
in African American literature. We accomplish the feat by the following: returning to
trickster’s manifest traits to explore the figure as a critical symbol and declare it as the
beginning of a non- western critical discourse on identity, which this introduction has
briefly done; moving beyond the use of black oral culture for nationalistic agendas, which
chapter one will discuss; employing trickster as a gender referent—chapters two and
three work to complete this task; using trickster figures to question the validity of

vulgarity and taboos by re- combining or re-connecting the sacred and profane together to

15

 

interpret black cultural products, which this work will address in chapters four and five;
and exposing how these values displace the logic of Western canons of sexuality. If we
complete these four goals, asserting the trickster as the greatest trope of difference, then
perhaps we can begin moving beyond essentialist notions of blackness that make it

difficult to account for differences of gender, class, or sexuality.

l6

CHAPTER ONE

A Call for a Post-nationalist Reading of Folklore and the Vernacular

“Ole Sis Goose, I’se got yer now, you’se been er-sailin’ on der lake er
long time, en I’se got yer now. I’se gwine to break yer neck and pick yer bones.”

“Hole on der, Bret Fox, hold on, I’se got jes’ as much right to swim in der lake
as you has ter lie in der weeds. Hits des as much my lake as hit is yours, an we is gwine
to take dis matter to der cotehouse and see if you has any right to break my neck and pick
my bones."

And so dey went to cote, and when dey got dere, de sheriff, he wus er fox, en de
judge, he was er fox, and der toruneys, dey wus fox, en all de jurymen, dey was foxes,
too. En dey tried ole Sis Goose, en dey victed her and dey scuted beer, and dey picked
her bones. Now my chilluns, listen to me, when all de folks in de cotehouse is foxes, and

you is des’ er common goose. der ain’t gwine to much justice for you pore cullud folks.l2

Before I can utilize the trickster figure as referent for new readings of gender and
sexuality in black culture, it is necessary to briefly illustrate why revising tropes of the
figure seems so necessary. Oral art forms and figures have to be seen as a complex
combination of distinct speech, verbal art, beliefs, music, narrative, and humor influenced
by experiences of location, gender, class, and sexuality. Yet, traditional research on
Black Diaspora oral traditions and folklore has not reflected the previous statement. The
above tale is a lesser-known story in the tradition of animal tales from black folklore. It
provides an initial query into the discussion of gender and sexuality in the folk. The
major function of this tale is to teach a valuable lesson to Africans in the New World

about justice. As Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: African

 

'2 The Book of Negro Folklore. eds. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps (Dodd, Mead. Co:
New York, 1958) 13.

17

American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977) formulates, trickster tales told in
the institution of slavery function as tools to teach about black experience in the New
World, and “because of their overwhelmingly paradigmatic character. . .were, of all the
narratives of social protest or psychological release, among the easiest to relate both
within and especially outside the group” (102). It comes as no surprise, then, that the
trickster figure endures as a pedagogical apparatus for the black community after slavery,
as indicated by the above tale. In “Ole Sis Goose,” the woes of the African American
community and the United State legal system provide a folkloric rendering of how race
affects the outcome of justice. The superficial lesson to be learned is that justice refers to
just-us white citizens. Not every animal judging the case is Sis Goose’s kind. The foxes
clearly represent white people and their presence in US. courts, while Sis-Goose
represents the black race. More subversively, the tale exemplifies how folk tales counter
any dominant social ideals. As slaves, black are deemed property, and the language of
ownership that would enable Sis Goose (blacks) to swim in the lake remains unavailable
to her. As Sis Goose learns, only those making the laws can expect to reap the benefits of
the privilege they might afford individuals.

The proliferation of tales such as the above make obvious that these pedagogical
tales work to teach black people, in addition to how to successfully negotiate the
oppressive racial realities faced by blacks in the New World, how to negotiate the
oppressive/repressive status of gender and sexuality in the community and culture of
blacks in the new world. However, the latter function is dismissed for a focus on race.
As Levine demonstrates, critics encounter few problems demonstrating the tales’

connection to issues of race and statue. However, connecting the tales to other conflicts

18

 

in black life remains to be fully done. Yet, it is apparent that “Ole Sis Goose” offers a
serious critique of gender relations in the African American community.

In animal trickster tales, we have continuously avoided discussing the
presentation of gender relations in these tales. Yet, in the Sis-Goose tale, gender
emphasizes the overall theme of inequality. Race doesn’t become a primary factor of the
tale until the end. From the very beginning, Br’er Fox’s attempted trickery of Sis Goose
is positioned as a masculine/ feminine dynamic. If gender were of no account, the
qualifier of “sis”—dialect for sister—would be unnecessary. Br’er Fox stands as the
stronger and more cunning figure in comparison to the more docile and weak goose.

Fox possesses characteristics attributable to masculine qualities, while goose possesses
representative traits of femininity.

In another tale, “Brer Rabbit and Sis Cow,” the issues of gender relations in the
black community are more clear— cut. In this particular tale, the masculine Brer Rabbit
tricks the feminine Sis Cow for his own needs:

Brer Rabbit see Sis Cow an’ she have a bag plumb full of milk, an’ it’s a
Hot day an’ he ain’t had nothin’ to drink for a long time. He know ‘tain’t
no use askin’ her fur milk ’cause las’ year she done ’fused him onct. ...he
say: ‘Sis Cow would you do me the favor to hit this persimmon tree with
yore head an’ shake a few of dem persimmons. . .Sis Cow. . .hits the tree,
but no persimmons come down...So den Sis Cow git mad...an’ hit dat tree

so hard dat her horns go right into the wood so fur she can’t pull ‘em out.

13

 

‘3 Hughes and Bontemps, 4.

19

 

Once Sis Cow becomes stuck in the tree, Br’er Rabbit brings his family to the tree, and
they proceed to milk and feast on the milk of Sis Cow. Br’er Rabbit’s trickery triumphs
again. The lesson to be learned from this tale suggests that wits win out over brawn
every time. However, tales such as Sis Cow and Sis Goose demonstrate a pattern that
consistently places animal figures assigned a less powerful status into the gendered
position of the Western construction of woman, as well as being the tricked rather than
the trickster. Such tales make it difficult to believe these animal trickster tales retain any
of the original genderless qualities of the African trickster figures, or that they could
represent various positions in black subjectivity. However, more than the tales
themselves, past research has made it almost impossible to explore how the tales of Sis
Goose and Sis Cow represent an on—going discussion of gender dynamics in black
folklore.

The story of Sis Goose may be the most emblematic example of the function of
trickster tales in African American tradition, but it also reveals unacknowledged gender
conflict in African American folklore. The lesson about justice being extended to one’s
own kind proposes a valuable lesson for studies of trickster and gender. The projected
use and function of folklore is as influenced by gender, as justice is by race. The issue of
gender must be confronted before we can deal with issues of sexuality and the trickster.
In order to do so, we must ask where the issue of gender comes in or fails to come in on
the discussion of trickster figures in black oral traditions. Animal tales with the prefix
“sis” before its figurative model indicate how the construction of gender informs,
rewrites, or calls attention to the traditions. Why is the Sis Goose tale lesser known,

under-quoted, or under researched, what can the tale reveal about reading gender in black

20

communities, and what has impacted the readings of gender in black folk and oral:
culture?

Currently, if one attempted a reading of the trickster figure from traditional
research on trickster figures, the endeavor would be impeded by the predominant place
accorded bourgeois cultural nationalism in research devoted to oral and folk traditions
about tricksters. Critics of Black Diasporic oral traditions have consistently sought to
- explain the function of their forms as a function black cultural nationalism. We must re-
evaluate the nationalist agenda that the fields of sociology, history, and anthropology
establish in African American culture. Africanism(s) become the primary connection for
descendants in the Diaspora and provide the primary tools for constructing culture for the
New Negro and the black nation.

The initiative to find Africanisms in the oral culture of New World black people
flourished in the work of Lorenzo Dow Turner. In his work, West African Survivals in
the Vocabulary of the Gullah presented at an MLA meeting in December 1939, which
later came to be published as Africanism in the Gullah Dialect (1949), Turner conducted
extensive studies about Gullah people in South Carolina to ascertain the first of many
viable linguistic links between African and African American language use. Similarly,
African American female linguist, Beryl Bailey continued such focus by distinguishing
her work Jamaican Creole Syntax (1966) with a broader non-US. context. These works
focusing on Africanist linguistic and language presence were only the beginning. The
focus on Africanisms in New World culture became more important as comments on its
absence or erasure were tied to the great myth of the Negro for the building of a new

nation, the United States.

21

The work of anthropologists of the early-twentieth-century, and particurlaly
Melville J. Herskovits’s The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), bears on these issues.
Herkovits’s study disputes early American thought that black people in the US. had no
culture, an argument used to assert that US. citizens need not afford the primitives
(African Americans) the same political rights as their white counterparts. Herskovits’s
contribution lies in his ability to formulate an argument against the one misconception
that undermined studies of African Americans, the myth of no past. As Herskovits
concedes, his work is supported by research conducted by the previously mentioned
scholars and W.E.B. Dubois. Herskovits astutely recognizes the thesis in the model of
the US. as a developing nation. His works makes the implicit connection that the
“Negro” itself is a Western construct. According to Herskovits’s The Myth of the Negro
Past, the myth of the Negro past is based on five ideological foundations:

1. Negroes are naturally of a childlike character, and adjust easily to the
most unsatisfactorily social situations, which they accept readily and
even happily, in contrast to American Indians, who preferred
extinction to slavery;

2. Only the poorer stock of Africa was enslaved, the more intelligent
members of the African communities raided having been clever
enough to elude the slaver’s net;

3. Since the Negroes were brought from all parts of the African
continent, spoke diverse languages, represented greatly differing
bodies of custom, and as a matter of policy, were distributed in the

New World so as to lose tribal identity, no least common denominator

22

of understanding or behavior could have possibly been worked out by
them;

4. Even granting enough Negroes of a given tribe had the opportunity to
live together, and that they had the will and ability to continue their
customary modes of behavior, the cultures of Africa were so savage
and relatively so low in the scale of human civilization that the
apparent superiority of European customs as observed in the behavior
of their masters, would have caused and actually did cause them to
give up such aboriginal traditions as they may otherwise have desired
to preserve;

5. The Negro is a man without a past. (1-3)

With this list, Herskovits establishes that the major goal of his work and his
search will be to document residual or prevalent African culture in the culture of US.
blacks. He goes on to present research that contradicts each of the five criteria
concerning Black people in the New World. He discusses the importance of recovering
and recognizing Africanisms in the endeavor to preserve the connection between
Africans and African Americans so that they might appreciate their past and understand
themselves in the New World. However, he also warns that using research to find
Africanisms is only the beginning of work dedicated to eliminating these myths of an
absent past (33). By further discussing tribal origins, African cultural heritage,
enslavement and reaction to slave status, and the process of acculturation, Herskovits
makes sure that Western civilization will be held accountable for its initiatives to erase an

African past, but he also makes it impossible for his critics presently or in the future to

23

deny the survival of African culture in the cultural artifacts of its New World Blacks.
Herskovits does not let his study rest on a focus of traditionalisms, but in what was then
considered current, he explores the beginning of black culture’s modernity by examining
Africanisms in secular life, religious life, language, and the arts of blacks. As Albert J.
Raboteau’s “African American Religion in American” proclaimed of Herkovitz’s
validation of black culture, it “turned out to be a powerful heuristic for both scholars and
political activists. Some black nationalists defended racial separatism by appealing to
cultural differences based on the retention and/or recovery of African culture.”14 Critics
and scholars latched onto the defensive strategy of Herkovitz’s work to shape black
cultural studies, and as a result, critics became locked into fruitless notions of
essentialism and authentication of blackness that takes no account of difference.
Ironically, Herskovits’s work points out the existence of differences based on tribal
origins and eventual locations of slaves and their ancestors. Herkovits understood how
crucial the distinctions were to the art forms. Unfortunately, separatism of race was not
the only drawback of the heuristic influenced by nationalist ideologies. The recovery of
culture shapes itself to parallel the black man’s demand for full citizenship in his new
nation.

The major problem is that the use of nationalism, by any group of people, risks
being used as a tool of imperialism. As Cedric Robinson notes in his Black Marxism:
The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1998), nationalism “ a second ‘bourgeois’

accretion, subverted the socialist creation. . .a mix of racial sensibility and the economic

interests of the national bourgeoisies, was as powerful an ideological impulse as any

 

14 Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. ed. Joseph E. Harris. (Washington, DC: Howard
UP, 1993) 65-82.

24

spawned from these strata” (3). Robinson also makes an argument that demonstrates how
nationalism as perpetuated by the state is in the interest of western hegemony.” Just as
nationalism subverts socialism in Europe, cultural nationalism threatens to subvert the
cultural guerilla resistance of the folk. The importance of doing a post—nationalist reading
of research on black folklore and oral traditions comes in the knowledge that a lower
class form of culture has been assigned a function that adheres to middle class values,
values which inherently work to undermine, the folk group’s own theories of itself.
Robinson is not the only scholar to offer interrogations of nationalism helpful to
this reassessment of folk culture. In Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and
Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (1985), George L. Mosse focuses on the middle
class and their obsession with respectability to expose the flaws of nationalism. Mosse
found that “the middle class can only be partially defined by their economic
activity. . .For side by side with their economic activity it was above all the ideal of
respectability which came to characterize their style of life” (4). The middle class
characterized as frugal, devoted, dutiful, and morally restrained would come to see itself
as better than the lazy lower class and the extravagant and amoral aristocracy. In
accordance with Robinson, Mosse argues, “but their methods had to be informed by an
ideal. . .to support normality and contain sexual passions. . .nationalism came to the
rescue. It absorbed and sanctioned middle-class manners and morals and played a crucial
part in spreading respectability to all classes of the population” (9). Hence, nationalism,
as carried out by the bourgeoisie, not only subverts socialism or other economic

movements, it also seeks to preserve Western canons of gender and sexuality ordered by

 

'5 In an especially damning critique of Marxism and national liberation movements, Robinson
demonstrates how nationalism becomes conflated with racialism. His argument reveals that periods of
nationalism in EurOpe are really imperialism. (44-68)

25

axiologically opposed and ranked binaries. To assume black folk and oral traditions as
foundational for black cultural nationalism, then, is to also risk the co-opting of those
forms by middle class values of the state, rather than the folk’s values. Unfortunately, we
have rarely avoided the pitfalls of Western nationalism in past research on oral traditions
and figures. If researchers claim Black Diaporic folk and oral traditions as functions of
cultural nationalism, then the issues of gender and sexuality surely must be addressed in
order to maintain the original values of “the people,” but it is only recently that critics
have attempted to do so.

In Race Men (1998), Hazel Carby provides a statement that suggests why African
American oral and folk tradition, as it concerns gender, sets up a Sis Goose dynamic that
eliminates the possibility of exploring differences based on sexuality and gender in these
traditions:

While contemporary black male intellectuals claim to challenge the
hegemony of racialized social formation, most fail to challenge the
hegemony of their own assumptions about black masculinity and accept
the consensus of a dominant society that conceives African American
society in terms of a perennial “crisis” of black masculinity whose
imagined solution is a prOper affirmation of black male authority. (6)
Carby’s critique of African American criticism manages to overcome the traditional
black patriarchal and ethnocentric agenda that seeks to limit past, present, and future
diverse constructions of black cultural production. From its very inception, African
American cultural and critical production about the trickster figure and its value as a

hermeneutical tool have been influenced by foundational ideologies that perceive black

26

society as experiencing a perennial crisis of black masculinity. The perceived crisis
stems from ideas of normative social ordering and behavior that ranks gender, privileging
“masculinity and masculine culture” over “feminine culture.” In research and studies of
black oral and folk traditions, the crisis of black masculinity occurs through an agenda of
black nationalism and a discourse concerned with nation-building. Historically, a
dialogue on black nationalism depends upon a unified front for similar goals and ideals of
empowerment.

In The House That Race Built (1998), Wahneema Lubiano points out that “black
nationalism is plural, flexible, and contested: that its most hegemonic appearances and
manifestations have been masculinist and homophobic” (232). Although Lubiano points
out the flexibility of black nationalism, she also recognizes the most pervasive effects of
presenting a monolithic voice for empowerment. Conflicts of gender, sexuality, or class
remain in jeopardy of being dismissed or subordinated by activists for the greater good of

16 These same

the black nation, understood to be the developing black bourgeoisie.
nationalist hegemonic appearances and manifestations of masculinity and homophobia
find themselves embedded in the research and discourse of black folklore and oral

traditions to create a limited nationalist reading of folklore culture for Africa America.

As the title of this chapter indicates, what follows in my analysis of folk culture

should not be taken as an attack on black nationalist thought that has helped sustain the

 

‘6 Although, I am focused on the more pervasive masculine and homophobic presentations of
black nationalism, Lubiano’s assessment can also be corroborated by Huey P. Newton‘s “The Women’s
Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements” in Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical
Reader (New York: New York UP, 1999). While Newton asserts a stance to unite black power movements
with women and gay liberation movements, he also acknowledges that “there has been some uncertainty
about how to relate to these movements. . ..sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the
mouth, and want a woman to be quiet” (387). Clearly, the founder of black power recognizes how
homophobia and sexism has manifested itself in black nationalism, and this recognition further
substantiates my claims.

27

culture and social values of African America. However, considering the importance of
folk, vernacular, and oral traditions in African-American literary theory and criticism, we
should be articulating a post-nationalist re-reading of the folk that demonstrates how it
figures into black subject positions. As Kobena Mercer points out:
Whilst both nee-nationalism and post-nationalism could be said to
recognize the ending of black nationalist’s narrative of cultural unity—
“one aim, one people, one destiny”—the former seeks a nostalgic and
conservative way of shoring up a monolithic conception of group identity.
Whereas the later offers the alternative of confronting the experience of
loss and uncertainty in order to examine what political potential resides in
what was repressed in earlier historical narrative of national identity. 17
A post-national reading of major black folklore research and studies demonstrates what
was repressed in earlier evaluations of folklore and oral traditions. Black nationalism in
folklore is not the problem; rather black nationalism’s narrative of cultural unity makes it
hard to comprehend the complications of gender and sexuality in vernacular culture.
Nationalist readings of black folk and oral traditions use vernacular culture in specific
ways: “a narrative of political history—a way to narrate a past in relation to that past’s
present and the present’s politics, as an articulation of what is good and beautiful, as
style, as a utopian narrative—a rallying cry, an expression of desire, and as a critical
analysis—an on-going , ever-renewed critique of black existence against white racial

”18

domination as well as an evaluation of black existence within the group. Mercer’s

 

'7 Kobena Mercer, “Decolonisation and Disappointment: Reading Fanon’s Sexual Politics.” The
Fact of Blackness. Ed. Alan Read. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996).

'8 In “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense” from The House That Race Built, Lubiano
giVes five specific traits of the way black nationalism functions and what it is. I use three of those

28

articulation of post-nationalism provides significant insight as to why critics such—as
Ducille wish to be able to discuss varied subject positions in blackness end up negatively
reviewing folk, vernacular, and oral traditions. A post—nationalist reading of black folk
and oral traditions would argue that these cultures perform the above functions with
noticeable differences: it functions as critical analysis of black existence against white
domination, but admits the concept of a utopian narrative (fundamentally based on a
unitary notion of community) with an evaluation of black existence within the group.
Such a reading would also give language to, and join together things that have no
necessary link in a way that makes the connection seem inevitable.19 A post-nationalist
reading should be anti-nationalist or intemationalist to go against the imperialist nature of
state nationalism. These functions would then make it easier to interject discussion about
gender and sexuality into studies of black folklore and oral traditions, specifically the
trickster figure. As Lubiano and Mercer acknowledge, nationalism can very much be
plural and flexible, and its influence on vernacular culture can benefit from that. This
becomes particularly important in any assessment of trickster figures in Black Diaspora
cultures.

Many critics concerned with issues of Black folklore life, and specifically the
trickster figure, have relied on the work of a number of African scholars and their
assessment of African oral traditions as the base for their own research. It is for these

reasons that this investigation includes issues of power and oralin in African research, as

 

functions in demonstrating how the functions and specifics of black folk and oral culture have been
conceived through nationalist thought.

‘9 Lubiano's definition makes no distinction between nationalism, neo-nationalism, or post
nationalism, but some of the functions are clearly constructed based on the evolving trends and phases of
nationalism. Yet, the last function of critical analysis has definite implications for post-nationalist thought
that Mercer articulates. I break up these five functions in my assessment of how nationalist and post
nationalist readings of the folk differ to reflect those differences in readings of nationalism.

29

 

well as African American research. This analysis does not mean to conflate African and
African American traditions, merely to show a trend that occurs reflexively in both.

In recent years, critics admit that there may be a negative influence of patriarchy
affecting the research and scope of the oral tradition. One of the most recent texts, Power,
Marginality, andAfrican Oral Literature (1995) by Graham Fumiss and Liz Gunner,
covers the dynamics of power as it concerns nationalism and the power of state. The text
examines how power relations are represented in oral forms, the role and power of words
in oral societies, the types of prestigious and power positions in oral societies, and finally
the question of whether the patriarchal paradigms should be endorsed or subverted in the
oral tradition.

Fumiss and Gunner’s text demonstrates that the issues of power in oral tradition
production and analysis need to be reconsidered for the sake of all Black Diasporic
studies. Fumiss and Gunner acknowledge that there are four factors in exploring the
power issues of oral literature: (I) the appropriation of expressive forms by the state,
corporate organisations, social groups of using oral forms for particular purposes, (2) the
ways in which oral forms articulate and represent to the performer and audience
particular visions of existing society, (3) the authority of oral performance in affecting
existing power relations, (4) and the relation of gender and genre. The fourth factor
uncovers the fact that women redefine the terms by which they are signified in broader
social discourses (19). The anthology provides several examples to support their
analysis. However, this study is more interested in how to use these four factors as the
guiding force to explore how deeply the narrative of unity in nationalism impacts the

study of the trickster for African American culture. Perhaps researchers take it for

30

granted that patriarchy affects all oral traditions in a similar manner and it need not be
stated, but if such were the case recent studies on power and marginality would not be
burgeoning. While Fumiss and Gunner are primarily concerned with how African nations
appropriate oral traditions to exercise power over people, their summary admits that
issues of power are at stake in the research of oral and folk traditions. Past research on
trickster traditions in Africa and the United States has failed to take into consideration the
issues of power, as they intersect and relate to nation and gender, when studying oral
literature and performance. Researchers must move beyond established boundaries to
fully understand how race and gender function in theories about oral literature.

Critics of black diaspora oral and folk culture assert the functions of the forms and
ties to agendas of black ethos in various ways, but they do so in a way that limits the
functions and uses of folk and oral traditions. For example, the gendering of the trickster
figure as male in academic research happens as a direct result of the aims of cultural
nationalism in both African and African American communities. In Robert W. Pelton’s
The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight (1980), the
author records and archives the tales and antics of trickster figures from various West
African nations: Anansi, Legba, Esu, and Ogo-Yurugu. Using the research of Melville
Herkovits, Marcel Griaule, William Bascom, and RS. Rattray, he reinterprets the myths,
but he also analyzes the theories of the tricksters—the Jungian method, Claude Levi-
Strauss’s work, the neo-Durkheim approach, and Markarius’s thoughts on a theory of the
trickster—to come up with his own conclusions of the trickster. Pelton concludes, as
those before him did in a similar way, that “Legba, Esu, and Ogo-Yurugu similarly open

up the pattern of trickster-transformer-culture-hero...this circularity of the trickster pattern

31

points to its own deepest meaning: the unveiling of the imaginative process that is able to
marry disorder and transformation and social order, foolishness and wisdom, history and
timelessness” (227). Such theories have proven useful, and I am in complete agreement
with Pelton’s theory of the trickster as it relates to social transformation; however,
research reveals that masculine attributes and constructs are thrust into studies positing
trickster in the pattern of trickster-transformer—culture-hero. Hero is the most problematic
ideological construct offered in studies of the trickster.
Similarly, Harold Scheub’s A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature

(1984) acts as a brilliant study and validation of African oral traditions and its evolving
connection to the discussion of oral and written dynamics in culture, but it too becomes
embroiled in arguments of cultural validation:

To attempt a literary theory without examining the roots of literature in the

oral tradition is to begin in the middle. . ..to exclude the oral tradition from

any influence on literature except for “residual oralism” ignores the

rich interplay (of the written and oral) and the fact that the novel form, for

example is prefigured in the oral epic. (23)
Before Scheub can begin to analyze and review the African traditions he has studied, he
must first assert his reason for doing so. The study of orality is as important as the study
of literary endeavors. While examining the relation between oral and written texts, he
has to elevate or make equal the status of oral literature. If he fails to do so, oral
literature and the cultural creations of African nations might continue to be deemed
primitive and underdeveloped. The presence of ethnocentrism in his field forces him to

tie his study to a more acceptable artifact of culture, literature—the heroic epic. While

32

 

Scheub is successful in highlighting the importance of orality in literature, his defensive
strategy leads him to play into the drama of cultural nationalism, or in the case of Africa,
cultural continentalism.

Scheub later suggests that “the oral tale is not the ‘childhood of fiction,’ but the
early literary traditions were beneficiaries of oral genres, and there is no doubt that the
epic and its hero are the predecessors of the African novel and its central characters” (16).
In Scheub’s text, the epic, the hero, myth, and other oral genres and characters are taken
apart and examined individually and contextually with each other to show how, despite
ethnocentric criticism that depicts African nations as culturally void, the African
continent possesses many cultural objects. African nations have oral epics like that of
Greek nations; we need only understand the culture to see how. A major part of Scheub’s
review dissects the heroic epic: “The heroic epic is the means of revealing the great
shifts of a cultural level necessary to the securing of that passage of a whole people. . .a
hero who is composite of all elements of nature and society; these flow through him, he
comes to represent them in their interdependence. . (3). However, the key issue of this
assessment comes when Scheub connects the African trickster figure and tales to that of
the heroic tradition of Western written literature as a way of grounding his defense of
African culture. Like other critics, Scheub models African oral epics after heroic models
taken from other cultures, choosing to do an assessment based on comparative
foundations, rather than relying strictly on the African oral traditions themselves.

Scheub begins briefly gendering the trickster tales and figures by relating to them
as oral and heroic epics. Throughout, he employs the excessive use of masculine

pronouns. Most of the trickster figures in the oral epics that Scheub investigates are

33

either animals or divine beings: “Rhinoceros of the Teketoa of Leribe/Down-homed cow
confronts Agitatorj. . .The fierce-starer chopped them into grouszBuffalo of the
Mphaphathi family”; and later in a Yoruba poem, “It is Wenis who eats men and lives on
gods, Lord of porter, who dispatches messages. It is Grasper—of Horns who is in
Kehanu.” 20 Unlike the Sis Cow and Sis Goose tales in US. black folklore, these poems
contain no reference to gender, and we should not automatically assign gender constructs
to them. There are plenty of figures in African oral traditions and tales that are not
gendered masculine as they transform society and culture.

A brief description of the well-known Yoruba trickster Esu from Adoye
Ogundipe’s Esu Elegbara the Yoruba God of Chance and Uncertainty (1978) makes
clear that, as a trickster figure, Esu “certainly is not restricted to human distinctions of
gender or sex” (119). In Esu Bara Laroye (1971), critics IE. and D.M. dos Santos
qualify Ogundipe’s statement: “he inherits the nature of all ancestors. . .male ancestors,
the Egun Irunmale, as well as those of the female, the Iyam-mi Aje” (91). The
contradictions about gender in research on trickster figure become evident in juxtaposing
the work of researchers. In stanzas of the epic poems presented by Scheub, we come to
understand the animal figures as tricksters. However, there exists no clear gender
construct in the tales. It is only through Scheub’s analysis that we come to know
rhinoceros, buffalo, or wenis as a “he” trickster figure. The pronoun usage is only a
small indicator of how trickster becomes associated with masculinity. The genderless
trickster figure also becomes masculinized in the construction of a cultural continent

agenda.

 

2° Scheub discusses the epics of the Sunjata, Mwindo, Ibonia, Liongo, and Yoruba. While some of
these tales are clearly gender specific, there are many that are not gender specific at all, but that are
gendered through Scheub’s use of “he” and “him”.

34

The research of Scheub makes it difficult to continue to see the trickster as

genderless:
The epic carries with it images and experiences of the past, what the
society has traditionally stood for in the new world. The hero is a part of
both realms, he would not be able to take his people with him if he were
not identifiably a part of the cultural past. But he has a vision of the new
world. . .To make the change (from past to present and future), the hero
moves to the boundaries of his community, necessarily so; and as he
escorts his society into the new world. . .becomes the original insider. (18)
Two important factors can be taken from Scheub’s and other critics’ work on the hero
and the trickster. Again, the most obvious is the use of masculine pronouns. Heroic
traditions establish that the world belongs to and can only be saved by the male in
society. Heroics and heroism are solid staples of masculinity, but tricksterism is not.
The reason trickster can transform culture stems from the figure’s resistance to society’s
constructs, and this would include any formations of gender and sexuality. By placing
trickster in the model of epic, the role of cultural-transformer, is changed to a gendered
role of nation that includes rhetoric of nationalism.

Scheub is not the only researcher who misinforrns on the place of gender as it
concerns African oral traditions and trickster figures. R.S. Rattray’s The Ashanti (1927)
completes an analysis of the Ashanti people’s oral traditions. Rattray reveals the Ashanti
elders’ response to Rattray’s surprising discovery of the importance of women in the
culture, state, and family of Ashanti affairs: “I have asked the old men and women why I

did not know all this....The answer is always the same: ‘The white man never asked us

35

this. . .we supposed the European considered women of no account, we know that you do
not recognize them as we have.’ ”21 Rattray’s admission points out how the privileging
of patriarchy in studies of the African oral tradition pervades the literature, and research
on the trickster figure is used in these agendas of power and knowledge. 22
In The Order of Things (1970), Michel Foucault expounds on how the tools of
knowledge and power are able to accomplish such a feat:
For man, then, origin is by no means the beginning—a sort of dawn of
history from which his ulterior acquisitions would have accumulated.
Origin, for man, is much more the way in which man in general, any man
articulates himself upon the already-begun labor, life, and language; it
must be sought for in that fold where man in all simplicity applies his
labor to a world that has been worked for thousands of years. ...and
composes into sentences which have never been spoken. ...words that are
older than memory. (330)
Foucault’s assessment reveals why the historical Western motivation to join knowledge
and power might influence the culture and study of African nations in the works of
scholars like Scheub and Rattray. The discourse of history (precise data and knowledge)
and anthropology (an understanding of an “oral civilization” based on observation) will
become a way to dominate and conquer through three models that impose themselves as
essential paradigms: function and norm, conflict and rule, and signification and system.
They constitute and concurrently cover the field and all that can be known about humans.

They strictly define what knowledge can offer about human beings (335). These

 

2‘ Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) 84.

22 See R.S. Rattray’s Akan-Ashanti Folktales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930)

36

paradigms, however, work off a system of hierarchy that privileges the philosophies and
ideologies of those constructing the discourse of history: generally male and patriarchal,
racially dominant, and heterosexual beings. Foucault documents that the discourse of
history and anthropology finds its place in the aim of nation building. Traditionally,
nation-building becomes the work of those gendered as male. It is an agenda steeped in
bourgeois concerns of respectability. These are the primary reasons that issues of gender
and sexuality become subordinated in the works of Scheub and Rattray. Heroics and
heroes seeking to build nations can only validate ideologies of culture and nation.
Genderless figures do not build nations, but heroes, gendered as males, do. Scheub and
Rattray struggle to assert the validity of oral culture in various African nations, but to do
so they mistakenly foster a defensive strategy in African criticism that disallows multiple
and varied perspectives in the use of oral and folk traditions. As indicated earlier,
nationalist thought implies the connection of black oral traditions to the articulation of
origin, experiences, and existence of black culture where other discourse have failed.

If the study of the African trickster figure has been made masculine in research on
African oral traditions, it has also been made masculine in the same way for black culture
in the US. since a great deal of research on black oral traditions and the trickster figure
relies on research about African oral traditions. Despite ethnocentric biases, it was very
evident that African nations possessed culture since the beginning of time. However, in
the early history of blacks (men) in the New World, their existence as a people without a
true nation calls into question the existence of their culture and ontology. The African in
the new world is perceived to have no sense of identity, and in the end, (he) becomes a

problem.

37

In W.E.B. Dubois and American Political Thought (1997), Adolph Reed provides
several implicit comments on how consensualism and the cold war in the 19505 and
19603 uses the “Negro Problem” framework to engage the U.S.’s national character and
ideology:

This meant, among other devices, construing “American” to mean white...
Of course, the normative consensus merely reasserted the long-standing
exclusion of blacks from the main narrative of American history, but it
also formalized the intellectual and institutional barriers separating the two
areas of inquiry and restricted Afro-Americans to the study and strategies
for (what had been called in the early twentieth century) “race
adjustment.” (6)
Reed later goes on to say that the p0pular phrase “ ‘America has a ‘Negro Problem’ not
only reproduces itself in the national experience; it also implies that the black experience
exists only in so far as it intersects with white American concerns or responds to white
initiatives” (7). Clearly, what Reed is criticizing so harshly is how ethnocentrism has
shaped the political thought of blacks. Research in sociology and anthrOpology increases
the rhetoric. Even as Reed ties his criticism to the emerging black studies in America
during the 19508, the “Negro Problem” had been ever-present before that time,
Specifically with Reconstruction in the US. Early black cultural studies, sadly as Reed
indicates, forms itself in defense against ethnocentrism, and this defensive racial strategy
rears its head from the very beginning of black studies to contemporary debates about
identity politics. The scientific discourse of history, as the black male in the US knows

it, has not taken account of him. He must find another viable discourse, and he does so

38

through the oral and folk traditions, working to eliminate any minor conflicts (gender and
sexuality) that might fetter his endeavors. For this reason, a reactionary defensive
strategy has contributed to the use of nationalist ideologies in creating an origin and
ontology of culture for African Americans by means of the oral, and that action has
proven to be dangerously regressive for continued study of oral, folk, and vernacular
traditions.

Recent study of African American oral traditions has remained stagnantly the
same. In the earliest folklore research, one finds a consuming concern with masculinity.
From early folklore studies to recent trickster theories, the dynamics of power and gender
in Black American oral tradition have been rarely discussed in oral and literary theory. In
a comment that acts as a follow-up to my analysis of Scheub’s focus on the heroic epic,
Nathan Huggins makes a provocative claim about the hero in African American folklore:
“Prirnitivism is especially a fantasy. It is easier to imagine men as roustabouts,
vagabonds, burns, and heroes, harder to draw sympathetic females whose existence is
their bodies and instincts” (7). Huggins, obviously not a folklore specialist as indicated
by his use of “primitivism,” explicitly expresses the problem of the hero and gender.
Though we should not agree that bodies and instincts represent the traits of figures in
folklore, regardless of gender, Huggin’s comment actualizes how embedded stereotypes
of gender have hindered the actual possibilities of folk figures. Despite the work of
Pelton, Scheub, Levine, and others, trickster should not be seen as similar to heroes
because to do so accepts a value system not originally intended for the figure. The
primary importance of trickster is that its genderless being becomes a strategy to alter

conception of what is primitive, civilized, masculine, or feminine. Figures such as the

39

trickster represent fluid conceptions of subjectivity, and if research of folkloric figures
can be conceived to incorporate this flexibility, then perhaps we would be able to solve
the dilemmas of the folk and gender. Huggins’s ignorance may be dismissed due to his
lack of knowledge in folklore studies; other critics cannot be dismissed as easily.

The most recent research on folklore and oral traditions in Black America still
attempts to present oral forms as masculine-centered. John W. Roberts’s From Trickster
to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (1989) shows a Scheub-like
influence. From the very beginning of the text, Roberts fixates his study on the hero:

We often use the term “hero” as if it denoted a universally recognized
character type, and the concept of “heroism” as if it referred to a generally
accepted behavioral category. In reality, figures (both real and mythic)
and actions dubbed heroic in one context by one group or people may be
viewed as ordinary or even criminal in another Context by another group. (I)
Roberts actually questions the definitions of hero and heroic. He admits that these terms
are subjectively based on specific cultural contexts and social beliefs. Yet, rather than
entirely dismissing the notion of hero, Roberts then demonstrates a hybrid Scheub-
Herskovits approach to his study:
A hero is the product of a creative process and exists as a symbol of our
differential identity. . ..In this regard, heroic creation is very much like
culture-building—the means by which a group creates and maintains an
image of itself ....In many ways, this approach to folk heroic literature
reveals the intimate relationship that folklorists envision between folklore

creation and culture-buildin g and reflects the assumption, implicit in

40

folkloristics, that folklore should support culture-building. (4)

Here again lies the problem of nationhood, gender, and race. Roberts plants the western
model of hero right in the middle of black culture. He rightly asks that we consider the
individual community’s goals and agenda. For Africans in America, culture-building
cannot be separated from issues of nation and race. Roberts admits the implicit
connection. Roberts, like Scheub and Pelton before him, considers his claims in
comparison with western notions of the hero. The first passage indicates that different
racialized or non-westem communities may find heroes in different places, but he limits
his point to the social blocks of national boundaries and race. Further, considering
Huggins’s comment in relation to the second passage, we realize that his assessment
appears vindicated by gendered notions stemming from research on the folk and oral.
Therefore, if heroic-creation is very much like culture building, it has to be male culture,
called Negro or Black culture, but one that is always gendered masculine, or
hypermasculine. The works of Roger Abrahams, Harold Courlander, and, Joel Chandler,
and other male scholars of black folklore support the remainder of Roberts’s text.23

Roberts specifically maintains his connection to masculinity by exploring
masculine equated functions and aesthetics in animal tales such as Br’ er Rabbit, African
oral tales, and the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass (19). In the realm of spirituality
and religion, he genders black folk and its figures as masculine through an examination
of the conjurer (66). Next, Roberts argues “Negro” spirituals are a strictly masculine and

heroic form by suggesting its relationship to Christian soldiers and war (111). The final

 

23 See Roger Abrahams’s Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore in the Streets of
Philadelphia (Chicago: Aldine, 1970); Harold Courlander’s Negro Folk Song U.S.A. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1963); and Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (New York:
Penguin, 1982).

41

and most potent display of masculinity occurs as Roberts explores how the (originally)
genderless trickster becomes the Badman-as-outlaw-hero (174). The quandary with
Roberts’s text, as well as those previously mentioned, is that they fail to mention whether
their research is specifically concerned with black male culture. For every figure that
Roberts expresses as male-gendered, there are counter-examples of tales and figures
depicted as genderless. Roberts focuses mainly on the male trickster Br’er Rabbit in his
study of trickster figures from slave culture.24 Though this figure fits more readily into
Roberts’s theory of folk culture as a key tool in the male work of nation-building, other
animal tales do not fit so easily.
A juxtaposition of the two tales that opened this chapter, ‘Ole Sis Goose” and “Sis

Cow,” with that of another tale reveals that something much more interesting occurs in
the dynamics of black folklore that we can only address through an evaluation of the
construct of gender in these tales. In “The Fox and the Goose,” the original
configuration of trickster as genderless is restored through a retelling of how fox tries to
trick goose into being his/her next meal:

Fox said, “You ain’t afraid of me, is you? Haven’t you heard of the

meeting up at the hall the other night?. . . .Why, they passed a law that no

animal must hirt any other animal. Come down and 1e me tell you about

it. The hawk musn’t catch the chicken, and the dog musn’t chase the

rabbit, and the lion musn’t hurt the lamb.” 25

 

2‘ Roberts connects the animal tales of Br’er Rabbit to the tales of John and Old Master, John ( a
slave driver), human possessing all the traits of Br-er Rabbit, but his trickery is more sophisticated and
complex. Br’er Rabbit leads to the establishment of a heroic tradition in America.

25 Hughes and Bontemps, 12.

42

As Fox works to coax and convince Goose to come out of the tree, a dog barks and
causes fox to assume a hiding position. As the dog’s bark comes closer, fox sneaks off
instigates Goose to ask, “Fox, you ain’t scared of the Dog, is you? Didn’t all the animals
pass a law at the meeting not to bother each other” (12). The goose wisely picks up on
fox’s trickery and the game of wits ends in a stalemate. Goose does not get eaten and fox
escapes the dog. No clear victorious/heroic figure exists. Though fox seems very clever
in its imagined suggestion of the passing of a new law, goose’s keen intelligence to assess
fox’s action at the barking of the dog indicates the figure’s own wiliness. As with the
African oral epics, the lack of gendering of animals in this particular tale suggests the
original ambiguity of tricksterism. The status of gender seems unnecessary because the
tale is not presenting a tale of hierarchies, as was offered in earlier tales of Sis Goose and
Sis Cow. Consequently, gender status seems to be employed in some animal tales as a
way to parallel the superior levels of creativity, ingenuity, and cleverness with those of a
given society’s measurements of superiority—in the case of the US, the ranking of male
over female. Depending upon the tradition, the being perceived as the most cunning
becomes recognized through a culture’s dynamics of hierarchies. Since, Africa America
culture lacks the spiritual world of its African mother, where hierarchies are conveyed via
deities/gods, divinities, and humans, the most effective way to represent those
dichotomies in African American culture may be via gender constructs of the empire
during slavery. The use of gender in African American folktales, then, does not
necessarily buy into or accept the notions of gender, or the agendas that come with those
constructs. Unlike, the rabbit and fox of previous tales who clearly enjoy a higher status

in the tales, the fox and goose of this particular tale can be viewed as equals.

43

ination of the tale begins our exploration to validate the need for explicating how
ch into gender and sexuality in this area can prove vitally important.

Previous studies have failed to remember the unfixed gender of trickster, but this
will not. In addition to reinvesting into a concept of a genderless trickster, one can
hat for every figure gendered male, there is a counter figure in black female oral
rles, or genderless figures in African American culture. In the following chapters,
5 such as Mawu-Lisa, Annie Christmas, healing turtle women, and Queen Bees will
as comparative figures for Esu, Legba, the signifying monkey, John Henry, and the
ligger. This is not to suggest that critics such as Roberts have converted a tradition

female into one that is masculine, but to insist that work be done to expose the
rility that not all of the folk tradition’s ties to the trickster are necessarily masculine,
'e masculine schemas. Critics have done more than ignore female figures in order
1 with male figures: they have created an alternate universe in which black oral
ons that have been attributed to both sexes, such as the conjurer, trickster, and
rals, become the product of a strictly masculine tradition. In the past, scholars
indicate that their studies are solely concerned with black male culture because to
black male culture should and does represent black culture.

Sadly, if one buys into the masculine constructed theories of the oral, these
11 assumptions can diminish the work of critics who study oral traditions in African
ican women’s culture. In a response to Kimberly Benston’s appraisal of the oral in
mning Blackness,” Cheryl A. Wall falls victim to these ideologies: “Women were,
rrse, historically denied participation in many of these traditions; for instance,

iifying, whether in the pulpit or on the block, has mainly been a male prerogative”

(188). Wall is right to be concerned, but the pulpit and the block are not the only forms
of oral performance, and women did and do engage in oral forms that may take place in
the kitchen, beauty salon, or elsewhere other than the block. Further, Wall’s comments
highlight the importance of finding figures to engage criticism of vernacular, oral, and
folk traditions.

In returning to questions posed earlier in this chapter, we can now move from the
post-nationalist reading folklore criticism to explore another reason as to why gender
should serve as a major consideration in present and future study of the trickster. While
we can attribute the lack of discussion of gender to critics, we cannot easily explain away
hierarchical gender dynamics in the tales so easily. Do these tales do more than teach us
to be aware of gender relations in the new world? Each tradition of folklore, oral
traditions, and tricksterism needs to be evaluated on a case-by—case basis. We can never
know the significance of gender in any of these traditions if we ignore or assume, as past
researchers have done, the possibility that gender is not relevant. The real work begins in

the following chapters.

45

CHAPTER TWO

The Mawu-Paradi gm: Tricking the Trickster-trope/ Revising Gender

Dat’s you, Alphabet, don’t you know yo’ ownself?”
Dey all uster call me Alphabet ‘cause so many people had done
named me different names.

Zora Neale Hurston26

Recreating in words the women who helped give me sustenance ....Mawu-Lisa,
thunder, sky, sun, the great mother of us all, and Afrekete, her youngest
daughter, the mischievous linguist, trickster, best beloved. who we all must
become.

Audre Lorde27

In addition to making ourselves aware of masculine agendas of nation building in
folk and oral traditions, critics of trickster and vernacular culture must find a model that
will provide a blueprint of how to begin fully re-evaluating and assessing folktales, oral
traditions, and tricksterisms in terms of gender. Audre Lorde’s use of Mawu-Lisa and
Afrekete is significant in that it comes five years before the most significant studies of the
trickster and its relation to African American texts, Roberts’s From Trickster to Badman
and Gates’s The Signifiing Monkey. Roberts’s study of the trickster is tied to specifically
masculine culture and the task of culture-building. Gates employs the trickster as a way
to define the canonical black discourse of signifyin(g). He sees the trickster figures
Esu/Legba as divine linguists, and uses the figures to establish the signifying monkey and
the vernacular tradition of signifying as having a close relation to the West African
trickster figure’s role of indeterrninancy and writing. By making the signifying monkey a
linguistic referent for African American literature, Gates skips the implications of the

trickster figure as a sexual and gender referent for African American literature and

 

26 Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; New York: Harper & Row, 1990) 9.

2’ Zami: A New Spelling ofMy Name (1982; Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1997) 255.

46

culture. However, he does conclude that such an Option is possible in the discourse used
to define tricksters: “Metaphysically and herrneneutically, at least, Fon and Yoruba
discourse is truly genderless, offering feminist literary critics a unique opportunity to
examine a field of texts, a discursive universe, that escaped the trap of sexism inherent in
Western discourse” (30). Initially, F011 and Yoruba discourse directs Audre Lorde’s
conceptualization of Afrekete in her life and work. Though Gates’s and Lorde’s projects
are completely different, she seeks the flexibility of the discourse as it pertains to gender
so that she can discuss the possibility of third designation. This chapter continues the
working strategies of Lorde, takes up work to develop the feminist critique of such
trickster traditions, and argues that the goddess/trickster figure Mawu-Lisa acts as a
complex figurative model for critiquing gender and sexual relations in the black
community, which could quite readily be used alongside the Signifying Monkey and acts
of signifyin(g).

In the above quotations, Hurston and Lorde demonstrate an understanding of
black female subjectivity as characterized by undefineable and boundless subject
position. Although this dissertation does not perform a detailed analysis of their work
specifically, it is influenced by their legacy of moving beyond synthetic norms to discuss
black females and males in their work. In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1935),
Hurston chooses to show this indefiniteness by the name Alphabet, to indicate multiple
and numerous names for one being. The name Alphabet becomes the signifier of black
females’ unfixed identity and experience of being shaped and named by others than

themselves. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), Lorde provides significant

47

insight into the functions of gender and trickster figures as they relate to the construction
of voice and identity by questioning the representation of woman:
My mother was a very powerful woman. This was so in a time
' when that word-combination of woman and powerful was almost
unexpressable in the white American common tongue, except or
unless it was accompanied by some aberrant explaining adjective
like blind, or hunchback, or crazy, or Black. . .Therefore when I
was growing up, powerful women equaled something else quite
different from ordinary women, from simply
“woman.” It certainly did not, on the other hand equal “man.”
What then? What was the third designation? (15 italics mine)
By theorizing about a third designation for gender and later tying that designation to the
trickster figure, Lorde theoretically attempts to find a space and discourse for black
females’ muteable subjectivity. Lorde’s novel connects the subjectivity of trickster
figures to alternate considerations of gender and sexuality in African American culture
and cultural theory. In doing so, she indicates that the most beneficial discourse for black
female subjectivity and revised ideas of Western constructs of gender might be found in
philosophies embedded in Black Diasporic oral traditions.

As hinted at by both Hurston and Lorde, to be effective, the model selected must
be able to provide a sufficient archetype for the complex subjectivity of black women. It
should extend the traditional boundaries of trickster studies and consistently disrupt the
traditional construct of gender for black females. Lorde’s audacious initial use of the

Dahomean figure, Mawu-Lisa, exemplifies the needed prototype. Mawu-Lisa is goddess

48

and mother to her son, servant, and divine linguists Legba and Afrekete, whom critics
have tied to the African American figure, the Signifying Monkey.28

When we disrupt the traditional models of trickster, while at the same time
adhering to its ability to change social orders, we can re—implant back into the figure its
original characteristics of being polygendered and divine. While Fon and Yoruba
discourse may be genderless, trickster figures often physically display biological
evidence of gendering (penis or breasts). In the figure’s original cultural context this
ideological division might not pose a problem. However, in a cultural context that orders
itself around opposing binaries, the actual figure and the discourse used to discuss the
figure create a dilemma that restricts trickster’s figuration. It seems difficult to fully
overturn the foundational ranked binary opposrtions of gender located in trickster studies
as they exist in the African American community without utilizing another figure to
overturn and revise the study of tricksters. For example, if researchers of black folk
traditions were to address issues of gender and sexuality by simply relying on existing
research for figures such as Esu or Legba, their studies would be forever haunted by the
overwhelming attention critics pay to Esu’s penis. In trickster studies, it becomes
apparent that critics fetishize the penis: “His masculinity is depicted as visually and
graphically overwhelming, his expressive femininity renders his enormous sexuality
ambiguous, contrary, and genderless”(italics mine).29 Esu’s erect phallus serves as a

symbol of the figure’s characteristic trait of hypersexuality, but critics have made it a

 

‘8 Though Gates’s work is the text that connects Legba/Esu to the Signifying Monkey, Lorde’s use
of Legba’s mother and sister also attempts to refer African American trickster tradition back to African
origins of subjectivity.

29 Robert Thompson’s Black Gods and Kings (B loomington: Indiana UP, 1976) make noted
references to Esu’s enormous penis. See also Ayodele Ogundipe’s Esu Elegbara Vol. 1 p.163 and pp172-
173.

49

 

symbol specifically for hyperrnasculinity. Even as critics give lip service to Esu/Legba
being both male and female, it appears very difficult for any of us to not notice the
elephant in the room, or for this matter the big phallus, in order to begin talking about
deconstructing notions of gender. The fetishization of the penis has as much to do with
masculinity, as it does with heterosexuality. The physicality of the penis acts as a strap
on for the straight mind of Western discourse, which is unable to resist imposing its value
of the penis onto the multi-gendered trickster.

As demonstrated in the first chapter, there is a privileging of the masculine in
studies of this West African trickster figure that scholars use to connect to cultural figures
in the Black Diaspora. By employing Mawu-Lisa as another trope of the trickster
narrative, we designate Mawu—Lisa as unacknowledged trickster figure. Mawu-Lisa and
her/his tentative status as a trickster is important because it opens up underdeveloped
discussions of gender and sexuality in tricksterism. In Tricksters Make This World
(1998), Lewis Hyde argues, “all the standard tricksters are male” (335). My first
question, then, is to ask whose standards guide the research and focus. Hyde further
extends his argument by suggesting three reasons for this: “first, tricksters belong to
patriarchal mythologies, one in which the prime actors, are male. Second, there may be a
problem with the standard itself; there may be female tricksters who simply have been
ignored. Finally, it may be that the trickster stories articulate some distinction between
men and women, so that even in a matriarchal setting this figure would be male” (335).
My analysis of Mawu-Lisa will reveal that the figure rebukes the idea of tricksters
belonging to a patriarchal mythology, or that even in a matriarchal setting the trickster

will be male. Finally, the existence of Mawu-Lisa does indicate a notable problem with

50

the standard itself. After determining Mawu-Lisa’s status as a trickster figure, we can
then begin seeing how she provides the initial figurative model for disrupting discourses
on gender in the African American cultural texts.

Before Lorde’s evoked the figure of Mawu, Herskovits describes Mawu-Lisa in
Dahomean Narrative: A Cross Cultural Narrative (1998). Mawu-Lisa, as Herskovits
notes, “is the creator...one person but has two faces. The first is that of a woman...The
other side is that of a man. . .Since Mawu is both man and woman, she became pregnant”
(125). Understanding this general description of Mawu—Lisa, it seems pertinent to
discuss Mawu-Lisa as a figurative model for constructing revised readings of gender and
sexuality. Herskovits describes Mawu-Lisa as bi—gendered, rather than genderless. Even
as language attempts to confine the transgressing of social boundaries represented by the
divinity, the myth of the figure resists. The compelling revelation that within one being
two unranked binary oppositions exists provides a welcome distinction from the either/or
binary provided by Western metaphysics. We know the binaries are unranked from the
detail that Mawu becomes pregnant. The figure exists both as the man who impregnates
and the woman who is impregnated, and this is possible because neither face dominates.
In the Dahomean creation myth lie vital strategic devices for self-creation and autonomy
in subjectivity pertinent to black cultural products and society. Herskovits detail of
Mawu impregnating herself should remind readers of Lorde’s third designation. As the
myth of Mawu-Lisa is fully analyzed, one can develop the underlying philosophies of the
myth to counter traditional discourse about the trickster, gender and sexuality.

What this work has been discussing is an interruption of the traditional narrative

of the trickster as a trOpe, and this does not happen without an interruption in the

51

discourse on the logic of language. Dahomean Narrative exposes how Dahomean
conceptions of language are not always mono-simplistic and universal.
When Mawu said this to the children, she gave the Sagbata twins the
language which was to be used on earth, and took away their memory of
language of the sky. She gave to Hevioso the language he would speak,
and took from him the memory of the parent language. The same was
done for Agbe and Maete, for Age and for Gu, but to Djo was given the
language of men....Now she said to Legba, “You are my youngest child
...your work shall be to visit all the kingdoms ruled over by your brothers,
and to give to me an account of what happens.” (126)
Mawu-Lisa is mentioned time and again, but the figure is never analyzed in the way that
Esu of Ifa or Legba of the Fon is analyzed. In this account, Mawu is creator of
polyphonic discourses for her children that are different from her own. She grants
knowledge of all of these languages, including her own, to Legba. Mawu’s actions give
different meaning to “mother tongue.” With the existence of seven languages, seven
mother tongues, it becomes impossible to remain static or defined by one limited tongue.
No longer trapped into the logic and values of one tongue, the speakers and writers,
Mawu and Legba, become able to conceive and think outside the borders of one
language. Consequently, providing a separate language to each child, destroys the idea of
mother tongue as universal and objective. As Mawu’s actions dictate, language remains
specific and particular to each individual, and the logic comes from those individuals,
rather than some perceived universal and false construction of logic violently or

ideologically enforced.

52

As suggested by Gates, Herskovits, and Pelton, the above example may reveal

Legba as a divine linguist, but it also reveals Mawu as a writer and author of man’s
destiny, according to the Fon people:

We bokono take three things for our Mawu. We take Mawu, or Fa, as the

author of man and destiny. We take Legba as the son, brother, and power

of Mawu and as Mawu herself ....Fa is the writing of Mawu, which was

turned over to Legba to make man. Therefore, we say Fa is Mawu and

Mawu is Fa. (Herskovits 203)
The text may be Fa, and Legba may be the translator and interpreter of that text, able to
impose his own meaning and govern the indeterminacy onto such text, but Mawu is still
the author. In addition to Mawu-Lisa’ s trickery, we need also take into consideration the
figure as the author of Fa. Once criticism explicitly defines the trickster figure as creator,
as well as transformer of existing elements, we can move beyond seeing the figure and its
forms of indeterminacy as mimetic or revisionist actions only. In doing so, we can then
recognize that a philosophy or logic of subjectivity exists before Western dynamics of
subjectivity. For the purpose of his post-Structuralist approach to vernacular culture,
Gates clearly assigns the writing of Fon, the Fa, a literal interpretation even as it calls for
something more.30 As noted earlier, the Fon take three things as their Mawu, and Pa is
one if them. According to Herkovits, Fa is destiny and a system of divination. It is the
alphabet of Mawu taught to mankind (172). However, closer analysis of Fa reveals that it
might also be considered a discourse on identity and subjectivity: "They said it was

necessary that every man have his Fa. The people asked, ‘What is this thing you call

 

3° See p.6—7 of The Signifying Monkey. Gates discusses the role of Legba as divine linguist. In an
all out attempt to make Legba and Esu rhetorical tropes. he often overlooks the assignment of individuality
from Mawu’s divination.

53

 

Fa?’ The prophets said that Fa is the writing with which Mawu creates each person. . .it is
necessary that a man should know the writing which Mawu has used to create him, so
that knowing his Fa, he knows what he may eat and may not eat, what he may do and
what he may not so” (173). Fa is very specialized and particular to each individual. No
one person will ever have the same Fa. If the Fon are to discuss their destiny, what I am
reading as their identity, then they must do so by comprehending the writing of Mawu. It
should also be noted that Fa is personified as Gbadu, a figure with sixteen eyes and both
male and female like Mawu. Creation of identity, then, acts as a major characteristic of
this trickster, and the creation of identity takes shape from the alphabet and language of
Mawu-Lisa that reflects these same doubleness and mutability as its creator, Mawu-Lisa.
Though Legba may be the divine linguist who determines a system of writing, Mawu-
Lisa’s role focuses on assigning subjectivity. Utilizing Mawu as a proto-type reveals
both the possibility of liminal subjectivity, and a discourse in which to talk about such a
subjectivity

As for Legba’s trickery, we may note that when Esu/Legaba changes or makes
some part of a text indeterminate, it is in effect a result of his tumultuous relationship
with the author of that text. Thus, the text cannot be fully understood without an
examination of the relationship between Legba and Mawu. Mawu serves as a referent for
subjectivity and a discourse for that subjectivity, and Legba serves as a referential means
of inscription and translation of that discourse into a larger text. Human life and
destiny—one’s subject position—will be influenced by this relationship of Mawu and
Legba:

Legba did good deeds towards everybody, and he was always with Mawu.

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When he did a good deed, people always thanked Mawu. . .Now, itis said
that in those days Legba did nothing without instructions from Mawu. But
when there was evil, and the people cried out and went directly to Mawu,
Mawu said to them, “It was Legba who did that.” All the people begin to
hate Legba. (Herskovits 149)
Again, the tale of the Dahomean gods reveals Mawu’s actions of trickery and deception.
Before Legba can be acknowledged as a trickster, Mawu teaches him the benefits and art
of tricking. Legba becomes trickster primarily to get back at Mawu for her trickery that
makes him appear evil in the eyes of Fon people. If Mawu had not lied and tricked the
people into believing her lies/truth, Legba would never have had reason to begin his life
of trickery. Just as the creator god provided him with the seven languages of the other
children, she also gives him her own language, and that language encompasses
indeterminacy and deception. When one focuses on Legba and language, the significance
of Mawu-Lisa’s actions is somewhat displaced. In any scrutiny of Legba, the endeavors
of translation take precedent. Mawu-Lisa’s role and all the possible disruptive strategies
of gender constructs are replaced by hypo-tragic modes previously mentioned by Gerald
Vizenor as the antithesis of trickster discourse. As Vizenor points out, trickster is a
comic holotrOpe. The importance of this displacing is that we lose what originally could
have been a way to disrupt and overturn metaphysical constructs of gender. In order to
use of the comic holotrope, we must remember the way Mawu—Lisa tricks Legba, and
rather than connecting trickster to a mono-heroic tradition that fosters removing the
genderless nature/dual nature of the trickster, we can consistently accept both the

treachery and divinity of the figure. The comic trope of trickster allows the original

55

 

 

flexibility of subject position, while the tragic model of hero in an epic tradition fixes the
figure in a context alien to the community’s cultural text of comic sign.

Analyzing both the trickery and divine elements become crucial in revising the
tr0pe of the trickster. If we go back to those manifest trickster traits introduced by Doty
and Hynes (ambiguous and anamolous personality, deceiver/trick-player, shape—shifter,
situation-invertor, messenger/imitator of the gods, and sacred lewd bricoleur), then we
must admit from the examination of Mawu-Lisa, that quite possibly s/he possesses all of
these traits. The ability to shape shift and invert situations is a given fact of the being’s
construction as ultimate creator. As a figure that embodies two supreme beings in one
existence, Mawu-Lisa continuously imitates other gods, Lisa and Mawu, since no one can
say where one ends and the other begins. Mawu-Lisa reveals all of the elements of
deceiver/trick player in that she creates a complex systems of language amongst her
seven children, while none but Legba may remember her language. She also tricks
mankind by asserting that Legba is the cause of all their mishaps and evil. As a
sacred/lewd bricoleur, there is no separation of good and evil in the higher power because
Mawu-Lisa contains both, just as Legba does. Mawu-Lisa’s embodiment of the majority
of trickster characteristics occurs every time she makes man believe that Legba has been
the cause of their misfortunes. Further, Erik Davis’s “Tricksters at the Crossroads: West
Africa’s God of Messages, Sex and Deceit” suggests that the fifth element of messenger
imitator is problematic when he states, “When we think of tricksters, we generally
imagine folk characters and culture heroes, not gods. Tricksters either tend to be
associated with animal spirits (such as Coyote), or are Promethean figures, archetypal

‘humans’ who interact with and upset the world of Gods” (1). Davis’s statement appears

56

valid in revealing the limited vision of trickster configurations in African American
culture and literature. I would go even further to say that when we think of tricksters we
rarely think of them as gods, or goddesses. Traditionally, notable minor Gods, such as
Esu and Legba, are deemed trickster figures and male with ambiguous or feminine
characteristics. By proposing Mawu-Lisa as god/trickster we can now demonstrate how
his/her deployment as a figurative model might disrupt the discourses on gender and
gender relations in the African American community.

A Figurative Model: Why Mawu for African American Culture?

As this critique of gender locates a mechanism that undermines the problems of
Western gender constructs, then it “ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist
signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to totalizing gestures of
feminism” (Butler 18). In order to do so, we must move outside of Western ideologies of
gender and ground our analysis in a symbolic connection to an order of thought which
undermines the social rankings of gender. Those symbolic connections can be found in
West African cosmology and its discussion of gender. The way to disrupt traditional
discourses of gender in black communities and culture is to find figures in black culture
that parallel the subjectivity of Mawu-Lisa, the symbolic dynamics of Mawu-Lisa’s
relationship with Legba, and Mawu-Lisa’s actions as creator of new individual and
muteable subjectivities. In doing so, we continue to acknowledge the belief that the
interior relations of the trickster tales are as important as the tales. Anne McClintock’s
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (1995) explores
resistance narrative ambiguity in black women’s writing. In constructing her argument,

McClintock states that “narrative differences are eloquent not of anatomical destiny and

57

 

design but the daily difficulties women experience in negotiating their lives around the
magisterial forms of male selfhood” (314). In order to create a reading paradigm for
African American folkloric culture concerned with gender, we need to take into account
the way gender impacts African American culture. We need an example that will
simultaneously acknowledge the African American community as a possibility for an
indeterminate humanity, but that will also acknowledge that African American culture
creates a silence about that unmoored humanity.

Karla F.C. Holloway’s Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender
in Black Women’s Literature (1992) makes similar attempts to symbolically incorporate
the importance of goddesses in her literary theory concerning a comparative analysis of
African American and West African women writers. Holloway believes: “the recovered
metaphor that articulates the relationship between soul and gender is the metaphor of the
goddess/ancestor. I focus on this subjective metaphor to illustrate the importance of
cultural, spiritual, and metaphysical places in both African and African American
women’s writings” (2). Holloway acknowledges, in choosing the metaphor of the
spiritual and the goddess/ancestor analogy, black women writers are trying to recover
something that they have lost. She perceptively continues, “I believe that far from being
a coincidental selection of metaphor, the ancestral presence in contemporary African
American women’s writing reconstructs an imaginative, cultural (re)memberance of a
dimension of West African spirituality, and that the spiritual subjective figuration is fixed
into the structures of the text’s language” (2). Moorings and Metaphors validates on
more than one occasion this work’s thesis concerning the use of Mawu-Lisa as a

figurative model to disrupt discourses of gender. However, while Holloway is

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concerned with using her metaphor to do a comparative analysis of West African and
African American women writers, to show the distinction between black male and female
writers, and to indicate how “there is a textual place where language and voice are
reconstructed by black women writers as categories of cultural and gendered essence”
(11), I am concerned about the implications of using and constructing a reading in this
way because it risks accepting Western categories of gender. We need to assess the loss
of other discourses on gender and the need to recover that loss, and how it impacts not
only African American women’s cultural production, but African American culture as a
whole. Such an endeavor does not preclude taking into account the historical experiences
of black females, but it also does not rely on artificial notions of a gendered essence.

This text does not seek to historically tie Mawu-Lisa into any African American
vernacular, folk, and oral traditions, but to use the figure as a subjective metaphor for a
double reading of gender in African American texts.

In addition to goddesses/tricksters like Mawu-Lisa, Esu, and Legba, there are a
number of West African communities that have a system of thought where unranked
binaries disrupt Western discourses of gender. Marcel Griaule’s Conversations with
Ogotemmeli (1970) reveals that although binary oppositions exist in Dogon communities,
ideally, none of the elements of the binary is subordinated. Ogotemelli states, “Thus it
came to be that each human being was endowed with two souls of different sex, or rather
with two different principles corresponding to two distinct persons. In the man the
female soul was located in the prepuce; in the woman the male soul was in the clitoris”
(22). Later, Ogoteomelli reiterates:

In the obscure beginnings of the evolution of the world, man had no

59

knowledge of death, and the eight ancestors. . .lived on indefinitely. They
had eight separate line of descendants, each of them being self-
propagating since each was both male and female. . .The four males and
the four females were couples in consequence of their lower, i.e. of their
sexual parts. The four males were man and woman, and the four females
were woman and man. (25)
Later, in discussing the creation of the second word and weaving, Ogotomelli relates that
the second word (the language of man) comes about because of a seventh ancestor,
conceivably a trickster who “is thus the completion of the perfect series, symbol of the
total union of male and female, that is to say of unity” (26). Clearly, we are presented
with the binaries of male/female, but they are not socially constructed or ranked. The
distinctions acknowledge biological differences such as the penis and clitoris and the
need for reproduction, but penis is not privileged over the clitoris or vice versa. In this
presentation of gender in identity formation, we cannot begin to determine where male
begins and female ends, and vice versa; and so we are left with the notion that difference
exists, but not with any clear identity of where. Even when Ogotemelli discusses the role
of initiation and circumcision to provide determinant sexuality, he does not imply that
these acts are to make one sex more important or privileged than another sex: “Man’s
life was not capable of supporting both beings: each person would have to merge himself
in the sex for which he appeared best. The Nommo accordingly circumcised” (22).
Ogotemelli later explains the belief of dual-souls and reveals the reasoning behind the
controversial circumcisions: “In so far as the child retains the prepuce or the clitoris—

characteristics of the sex Opposite to its own apparent sex—its masculinity and femininity

60

are equally potent...If this uncertainty were to continue, ...[s/he] would never have any
inclination to procreate (158). The Dogon consistently place values in unranked binaries,
but practically they are also concerned with longevity of their people and customs.
Reproduction becomes the way to ensure prolonged existence, but it does not displace the
original importance of Nommo philosophies.31

This order of reason also exists in Ashanti communities of West Africa. As R.S.
Rattray notes in his Ashanti, the Ashanti people also have concepts of duality and
doubleness that remains unranked: “It is the ntoro of the man mingling with the mogya of
the woman that, Ashanti believes, forms the child, and just as the woman transmits her
mogya or blood, so the man transmits his ntoro; the former inherited from the mother and
transmitted by her alone, and the latter received from the father and transmitted by him to
his offspring” (37). Both elements are necessary for the child’s identity formation, and
resist hierarchical status. This duality also manifests itself in creation stories of the
Ashanti: “Very long ago one man and woman came down from the sky and one man and
woman came up from the earth” (48). In neither cultural belief is there a privileging of
male over female. The world and people come into existence through an equilateral
beginning. Woman does not come from man, or vice versa. Creation relies on an equal
contribution from the binaries. As Pelton notes of Rattray’s analysis of the Ashanti:
“One can say briefly that Ashanti society is rooted in an awareness of doubleness of life
disclosed by maleness and femaleness, not as biological principles, but as ontological

poles between which the world comes to be” (65). The ontological poles of these West

 

3' In a discussion of male circumcision, we learn that after circumcision (the Dogon’s physical
removal of femininity) the prepuce changes to the nay. Nay means “ ‘four’, the female number and ‘Sun,’
which is a female being”(22). Despite the initiation rites, the Dogon remain dedicated to being numerous
things at once.

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African communities are rooted in a sense of variability, rather than fixed and
hierarchical oppositions. As with the trickster, the very idea that Mawu-Lisa, as male and
female, can become pregnant (self-impregnated), overturns a system based on ranking
binary oppositions so that we cannot positively define Mawu-Lisa as anything but what it
is. In the case of Mawu Lisa, it seems impossible to legitimately know what is or what is
not female/male. What we have here is an older construction of gender dynamics similar
to difie’rance, and this order of reasoning impacts the constructions of gender in West
African communities, as shown in language, culture, and social formations.

In The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourse (1997), Oyeronké Oyéwumr’ presents compelling arguments to reveal how the
oral, folk, and vernacular can reveal different discourses on gender. Specifically,
Oyéwr‘rmr’ works to establish how “Yoruba language and oral traditions represent major
sources of information in constituting world sense, mapping historical changes, and
interpreting social structures” (31). She also argues that gender is not the an organizing
principle of every society, as it is for Western society, and that woman as a social
category, as understood in Western terms, in Yoruba society did not exist prior to
colonization by the West'(31-32). The most compelling evidence that Oyéwirmr’ offers
stems from her analysis of three words that demonstrate non-hierarchical ranking of
gender:

The usual gloss of Yoruba categories obinrin and okunrin as
“female/woman” and “male/man,” respectively, is a mistranslation (of
Western influenced thought). . ..these categories are neither binarily

opposed nor hierarchical. The word obinrin does not derive

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etymologically from okunrin, as “wo-man” does from “man”. Rin the
common suffix. . .suggests a common humanity; the prefixes obi and okun
specify which variety of anatomy. There is not conception here of an
original human type against which the other had to be measured. Eniyan
is the non-gender-specific word for humans. In contrast, “man,” the word
labeling humans in general in English that supposedly encompasses both
males and females actually privileges males. (33)

In her important investigation of three simple words, Oyéwirmr’ illustrates that in Yoruba

societies physical bodies are not necessarily social bodies. Her terms of “body-

”32

reasoning” and “bio-logic compellingly stress that issues of power and social
structures are not necessarily dictated by gender, but other factors such as age and
descent. In order to enforce her points about biological determinism, Oyéwumr’ counters
the Western social-defined bodies of sex—gender—by creating terms such as
‘anafemale’ and ‘anamale’ as a way to discuss Yoruba society before colonialism and
emphasize the non-gendered attitude toward the socialization and ranking of human
bodies (xii). Oyéwirmr’ provides evidence of her point by noting that in Dahomean
societies the invention of men and kings happens as a result of mistranslation of altia‘fin
(Yoruba word for rulers). Because western thought perceives that rulers would be
associated as King or Queen, King becoming the positive term and Queen the

subordinated, when in actuality the two were equal under the term ala’c‘zfin (84). The

cultural mistranslations are simply the beginning of ranked binary oppositions in Oyo-

 

3‘ According to Oyéwirmi, bio logic is defined as an “ideology of biological determinism: the
conception that biology provides the rationale for the organization of the social world” (ix). and body-
reasoning is “the assumption that biology determines social position. Because ‘woman’ is a body-based
category, it tends to be privileged over ‘traders’, which is non-body-based. . .Body reasoning is a cultural
approach” (17).

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Yort‘rban societies. According to Oyéwumr’, these mistranslations occur due to western
metaphysics that afford more significance to the visual over the aural. She asserts that
western social hierarchies such as gender and race are a function of the privileging of the
visual over other senses in Western culture, and that the Yoruba frame of reference
appears based more on “a combination of senses anchored by the auditory”(30).
Oyéwr‘rmi’s theory appears consistent with the privileging of tonal articulation in
speaking and hearing for obtaining the meaning of a word in Yoruba language. As
Oyéwr‘rmr’ notes in her analysis of the misrecognitions and mistranslations of Yoruba
words, the language of the people serves as a considerable disruptor of axiological
binaries in Western discourse.

Similarly, Ifi Amadiume in her text African Matriarchal Societies: The Case of
Igbo Societies (1987), addresses similar concerns for Nigerian societies. Amadiume
relies on language to express her theories about the existence of matrifocal societies in
West Africa. She concedes that while there is a biological gender distinction of male and
female, there is not a ranking of them in the language: “oke means male, and nyi means
female. The terms for man and woman are nwoke and nwanyi. . .But in the subject
pronoun, no distinction is made between male and female. The third person singular, 0,
stands for both male and female, unlike the English gender construction... ‘he’ and ‘she’ ”
(28). These consistent elements of unranked binaries in the language are significant for
any study attempting to disrupt the established discourses of gender, and Amadiume
explores one of the results of the Igbo’s social order. Her insights about the logic of

gender in Igbo discourse for Nigerian societies allows her to complete a much needed

examination of the Nnobi society’s obvious separation of biological sex from gender

constructs: “Two examples of situations in which women played roles ideally or -
normally occupied by men, that is, what I have called male roles in indigenous Nnobi
society, for example were ‘male-daughters’ who have been accorded the status of sons to
enable them to continue their father’s line of descent, and ‘female husbands’ women who
married other women (29). The terms suggest that lineage matters more so than bio-
logics of the West. Oyéwumr’ also notes the existence of similar social orderings in Oyo-
Dahomey culture as well (112). The existence of “male daughters” and “female
husbands” serve as reminders that sex does not necessarily mean gender. 33 Such
terminology also complicates discussions of sexuality. Throughout each text, both
Oyéwumr’ and Amadiume stress the inadequacy of western bio-logic and order of gender
applied to African metaphysics, which can lead critics to misread the society being
studied. For these reasons, Black Diasporic culture can benefit from locating the
foundation of its resistance by adopting a figurative model, Mawu-Lisa—trickster-god,
inside these traditions.

Just as concepts of unranked binaries impact the language use of Nigerian culture
and language, so too can using Mawu as a figurative model to reveal a philosophy of
non-hierarchy of gender affect the reading of African American texts. Mawu-Lisa
emblematically signifies the concept of gender undecideability or gender disruption. In
Margins of PhiIOSOphy, Derrida explains how by stating that “there is no essence of
différance; it is that which could only never be apprOpriated in the as such of its name or

its appearing, but also that which threatens the authority of the as such in general, of the

 

33 Amadiume points out that “There is a series of contradiction here, for on the one hand, there is a
suggestion of gender asymmetry and not a sexual one. There were for example, women in master or
husband roles and men in wifely or domestic role. . .the master or husband role did not necessitate a male
classification” (30).

65

presence of the thing itself in its essence. That there is not a pr0per essence of différance
at this point, implies that there is neither a Being nor truth of the play of writing such as it
engages difference. . .There is no name for it—a proposition to be read in this platitude.
This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for
example” (27). Mawu—Lisa, as a goddess/trickster figure, represents the gender
equivalent of différance—a goddess, but most importantly, a subject being both male and
female that exists as a play of gender to engage the distinctions without ranking them.
According to this paradigm, the figure resists definition and naming that might fix its
subjectivity to continue its mutability.

More applicable to the discussion of gender in African Diaspora communities
than Derrida’s theory of différance, is a strategy derived from a specific (pre)post-
structuralist theoretical logic of gender in black communities. Toni Cade Bambara’s “On
the Issues of Roles” assesses the dismissal of gender as a revolutionary tactic that must be
completed for true black liberation:

In the last few years I have frequently been asked to speak on the topic of
the Black woman’s role in the Revolution. ...I’m not altogether sure we
agree on the term “revolution” or] wouldn’t be having so much difficulty
with the phrase “woman’s role.” I have always, I think, opposed the
stereotypic definitions of “masculine” and “feminine,” not only because I
thought it was a lot of merchandising non-sense, but rather because I
always found the either/or implicit in those definitions antithetical

to. ...what revolution of self is all about—the whole person.“

 

3‘ Toni Cade. “On the Issue of Roles” The Black Woman: An Anthology. Ed. Toni Cade Bambara
(New York, NY: Signet Press, 1970) 101.

66

Establishing a praxis for her theory, Bambara contextualizes the importance of
destroying gender assumption in black communities. She later states, “Perhaps we need
to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Blackhood”(103).
Bambara’s word echoes the sentiments of Oyéwr‘rmr’ and Amadiume. She remains aware
of the genetic differences between male and female, but wishes to assassinate the social
dictatorship enforcing ideologies of gender. The most beneficial way of adhering to
Bambara’s logic for true revolution means finding a way to re-write subjectivity.

As black is already othered to the signifier white, and woman is othered to man,
woman = white positions black female subjectivity as othered three times. Hence, a
reading strategy constructed from the Mawu paradigm would reveal a simultaneous
presentation of male/female distinctions without privileging one over the other; it would
facilitate the creation of a discourse on subjectivity that mirrors the seven particular
languages of Mawu, and use that polyphonic discourse—the mother tongue—to create a
process of unnaming to continuously disrupt the authority of gender and sexual
designations in African American texts. Using Mawu—Lisa as a figurative model is
especially useful when we consider that the power to unname one’s self is a repetitive
trope in African American culture. In discussing his theory on the topos of (un)naming
as it concerns Invisible Man, Kimberly Benston avers that “The ambiguities he (the
invisible man) learns to confront in ‘being’ at once a subjective absence and total self-
presence (invisible/man) arise from the comedy of his vain desire to achieve an
empowering name” (159). However, the process of unnaming based on the figurative
model of Mawu-Lisa does not function to achieve an empowering name in traditional

gender constructs. Rather its purpose is to evade intelligible gender discourse in African

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American cultural texts by remaining unnamed and in a liminal state. In the critical
theory, narrative, and fiction of the African American woman writer, there is no comedic
vain desire to find an empowering name, simply an ambivalent tragic recognition of the
failure by dominant discourse to translate her subjectivity. The existence of male-
daughters and female husbands in Nigerian language and social practice is possible
because of the fluid distinctions of gender that exist in philosophical and cultural beliefs
of the people. As we have now found an alternate paradigm or way to discuss gender
through the Mawu-paridi gm, we must now use the example of Mawu-Lisa to explore
whether any such possibilities exist for African American culture, but before doing so,
we must acknowledge one other facet of the Mawu-paradi gm.

West African’s cosmological construction of difference is not enough to establish
Mawu-Lisa as the paradigm for a reading of gender in African American culture; it is the
tensions in Mawu’s relationship with Legba that configure an appropriate model. The
story of Legba and Mawu critically highlights the very reason that Legba becomes the
trickster figure. After Mawu has tricked the people into believing that Legba is
responsible for the evil that happens to them, Legba is born as trickster. He sets Mawu
up for a crime by stealing her sandals to leave evidence of her footprint in the crime
against the people. “Mawu was humiliated. She said to all the peOple, that it was her son
who played her this trick” (Herskovits 150). Consequently, because of Mawu’s actions,
Legba begins a career of trickery. He soon uses tricks to displace Mawu. Mawu, who
once lived on the earth, goes to live up in the sky because Legba continued playing tricks

on her.

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Pelton points out that Legba’s shaming of high gods is crucial to his place and

identity as an outsider, mediator and divine linguist:

The human world develops through tricks, not tragedy, and thus the myth

is not a veiled cosmic matricide, despite its oedipal overtones. Legba

succeeds by using the very wiliness Mawu has given him. True, to

become a mediator Legba must create a distance that only he can span

but in doing so he is carrying out Mawu’s original intent. (78)
As Pelton points out, the relationship of Mawu and Esu/Legba is not Oedipal. However,
Pelton’s claim that the myth is not veiled cosmic matricide is a weak attempt to keep the
phallus at the center. If the world comes into being simply because of Legba’s trickery,
then we must also acknowledge that the world comes into existence because of the
reasons for that trickery—Mawu. Legba would not have used tricks and been made
trickster and mediator if Mawu had not used him to trick the people. Much in the same
way that the internal conflicts between Mawu-Lisa and Legba bring into existence the
Fon and writing, so too must we understand how the internal conflicts of gender
constructs influence African American culture. As Legba tries to elude the
misrepresentation of himself as evil and bad, he displaces Mawu by sending the goddess
into the sky, much in the same way as Africans in the New World displace their own
distinct discourse on gender often found in their oral, folk, and vernacular traditions.

In the texts of Amadiume and Oyéwumr’, it seems that the language practices

analyzed, over concerns for gender, are products of societies whose metaphysical logic of
differences of gender are not violently or hierarchically Opposed. The conception of

male-daughters and female-husbands explains that the fluidity of gender is possible.

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These texts are enough to prove that Audre Lorde’s initial connection to the trickster
occurs as a result of a psychological toning of oral and folk traditions in African and
African American cultural traditions, and specifically that the oral, folk, and vernacular
tradition begins without the ranking and socialization of gender hierarchies. My claim
establishes that we recover the psychological toning of early traditions to understand and
further discussions of gender and sexuality in African American culture. Oyéwr‘rmr’ and
Amadiume’s texts consistently demonstrate that the task for Yoruba and Igbo females is
not to try to find an unsexed humanity (as it is for Western feminism to move from a
gender construct of woman to an unsexed humanity), but they must realize that the
unsexed: humanity exists, “albeit in a concatenation with the reality of separate and
hierarchical sexes imposed during colonial period” (Oyéwumr’ 156). African American
communities and specifically black females must undertake this same mission. However,
projects regarding black female literature and cultural have fallen short of doing so.

The main purpose of Barbara Christian’s The Black Woman Novelist (1985) is to
recover and re—read texts written by black female writers. She describes the origins and
traces the development of the novel. In the end, Christian’s work addresses how
stereotypes of black women affected writings by black women novelists. She discusses
images and representations such as the mammy, the mulatta, and the licentious black
woman. Christian explains that origins and develOpments of these stereotypes arise from
the historical legacy of slavery, despite glaring contradictions from ideas of womanhood:
“Beyond the question of its relationship to truth, the image itself contained
contradictions. A lady was expected to be a wife, a mother, and a manager; yet she was

expected to be delicate, ornamental, Virgina], and timid” (8). She later goes on to say that

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“the truly civilized lady did not work, for work, although necessary, is demeaning” (8).
Christian’s reading of gender does not overturn or dismantle the system of gender
hierarchies. It works within and adheres to those ideologies precisely because it suggests
that the work of early female writers was.a way to align the black female body with the
rhetoric of womanhood and ladies.

Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American
Woman Novelist (1987) also investigates the novel tradition of black female writers.
From the very beginning, Carby exposes the flaws of Christian’s work: “However, it is
necessary to confront Christian’s assertion that the prime motivation for nineteenth
century and early twentieth century black writers was to confront the negative images of
blacks held by whites” (14). According to Carby, Christian never really talks about white
womanhood and black womanhood. She never articulates that the two different subjects
involved grapple with one mode of discourse. Carby is right in assessing that Christian’s
work is concentrated on explicating stereotypes rather than “engaging theoretical and
historical questions raised by the tradition of black women writing” (14).

However, Carby’s own text presents many of the same predicaments. More than
once, Carby argues how the institution of slavery makes it difficult for black females to
be accepted into the cult of womanhood:

To qualify as a “true woman,” the possession of virtue was an
imperative....Overt sexuality, on the other hand, emerged in images of the
black woman, where ‘charm’ revealed its relation of the dark forces of evil
and magic. The effect of black female sexuality on the white male was

represented in an entirely different form from that of the figurative power

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of white female sexuality. (25-27)
Carby interprets the possession of virtue, as opposed to biological factors, as one of the
major elements in creating the representations of woman and womanhood.
Like Christian before her, Carby’s work becomes, first, an examination of stereotypes
about black women, and secondly, a monument dedicated to representing the utmost
moral character of black females. The black female slave cannot be accepted as a true
woman because she functions as a laborer, breeder and concubine: “slave woman, as
victim, became defined in terms of a physical exploitation resulting from the lack of
assets of white womanhood: no masculine protector or home and family, the locus of the
flowering of white womanhood” (35). She is right to identify the horrors of female
bondage because the abuse of the black female body makes it impossible to figure black
female subjectivity into a discussion of womanhood, but it seems of equal importance to
note Carby’s lack of discussion on the concepts of virtue and gender. In spite of the
fallacies emerging from ideals about virtue, Carby studies the ramifications of stereotypes
and how they impact the emerging identities of post-slave women. Carby maintains a
commitment to examining how the novels of Frances Ellen Watkins and Paula Hopkins
adhere to Victorian morals. She outlined these morals as inaccessible to black women
during slavery, but she argues, with her analysis of black female novelists, that black
females could and did Obtain them during periods of Reconstruction in the US. (21- 30).
Each of Carby’s arguments work to fashion a moral culture of true black womanhood
because as she sees it: “ideology of true womanhood attempted to bring coherence and
order to the contradictory material circumstances of the lives of women” (24). Instead of

a model of black females seeking to define their own subjectivity, Carby positions black

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females as desperately pursuing the womanhood (white woman) that will bring order to
their lives as victims of physical and sexual abuse stemming from racial exploitation.

Even as Carby mentions the differing material conditions of black females versus
those of white females, she undermines her point by implying that there are two separate
ideologies of womanhood and motherhood:

The sexual ideology of the period thus confirmed the differing material
circumstances of these two groups of women and resolved the
contradiction between the two reproductive positions by balancing
opposing definitions of womanhood and motherhood, each dependent on
each other for its existence. (25)
The two groups of women, one black, and the other white, remained defined by the white
patriarchal system. “Womanhood” and “motherhood” depend on each other because they
are part of the same gendered lot. As long as we continue to accept these terms, we will
never be able to resolve the conflicts. Further, it will take a great deal more than a cult of
high moral womanhood to resolve the contradiction of black female slaves and notions of
woman.

Carby forgets that just as the phallus becomes the primary signifier of meaning in
discussions about what is male and female, so too womanhood has at its most basic
foundation whiteness or white female subjectivity. For this reason, to suggest that there
are two cults of womanhood, one for black females and one for white females is a
problematic argument. As much as the conceptualization of the cult of womanhood is a
problem for black female subjectivity, Carby’s conceptualization of the category of

“woman” as a “natural” social category, seems even more disturbing for any critic

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wishing to find a discourse for black female subjectivity. Initially, Christian and Carby’s
work are fine for an agenda of recovery and validation. However, they both fail to realize
their arguments hinder a true discussion about black female subjectivity. They should not
be working to “reconstruct womanhood” but to destroy the discourse of gender that
produces the notion of “woman.” The Mawu-paradi gm allows us to construct readings
that will fully disrupt the discourse of gender in African American community.

As in the cosmological ordering of certain West African societies, an unranked
sexed humanity exists in black communities outside of Africa. Although it cannot be
located as a moment of origin to be found in cosmological tales, for Africans in the US,
it appears to be an ever-evolving process to be realized. Because African Americans
utilize the language of their oppressors as it concerns gender and sexuality, it becomes
necessary to locate models outside of the U. S. The figurative model of Mawu allows a
fuller reading of gender in African American culture to be explored. Whereas a
traditional trickster reading might simply look only at the construction of male and
female in one being, we now can assess how the trickster’s tension in familial
relationships acts as another major element that can reveal moments of disruption or
displacement in the discourses on gender. Africa America displaces its philosophies of
unranked gender in cultural texts. In the tensions of gender and sexuality in African
American texts, we find the Mawu-paradi gm, an initial unsexed figure of doubleness
displaced by western metaphysics of logocentrism.

Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class (1981) documents the experience of
non-hierarchical values of biological sex in African American communities historically

formed during the institution of slavery. She completes a reexamination of the history of

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black women in slavery and explores the multi-dimensional role of black women within
the family and slave community as a whole. Her analysis argues against the works of
Daniel Moynihan, E. Franklin Frazier, Herbert Gutman, and Eugene Genovese in order to
move beyond much of the negative rhetoric about the black family as a destructive
matrilocal biological structure.35 Davis notes, “The economic arrangements of slavery
contradicted the hierarchical sexual roles incorporated in the new ideology. Male female
relations within the slave community could not, therefore, conform to the dominant
ideological pattern” (12). Whereas the work of the other controversial critics suggests the
structure destroys the black family and contributes to the social and economic problems
of the black community to this matriarchal family structure, Davis sees the resulting
community as being empowered:
The salient theme emerging from domestic life in the slave quarters is one
of sexual equality. The labor that the slaves performed for their sake and
not for the aggrandizement of their masters was carried out on terms of
equality. Within the terms of their family and community life, therefore,
black people managed to accomplish a magnificent feat. They
transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal
oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive equality: the

egalitarianism characterizing their social relations. (18)

 

35 Ideas about the matrilocal structure of the black family can be found in texts concerned with the
predicament of black women in slavery. See Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter: The Impact of
Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam, 1985); Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll,
Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); John Blassingame’s The
Slave Community: Plantation life in the Antebellum South (London and New York: Oxford UP, 1972);
Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), The
Moynihan Report in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancy’s The Moynihan Report and the Politics of
Controversey (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 1967) ;and Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts
(New York: International Publishers, 1970)

75

Davis shows that the black family structure potentially possesses the qualities Of gender
fluidity and equality found in West African societies, although as she shows it is not the
result of a spiritual cosmology but enslavement. Likewise, in Black Feminist Thought
(1990), Patricia Hill Collins notes that “black women’s centrality in Black family
networks should not be confused with matriarchal or female dominated female

units. . .Rather, African Americans’ relationship to the slave political economy made it
unlikely that either patriarchal or matriarchal domination could take root”(52).
Consequently, the egalitarian mode did not cease to exist once slaves were freed. African
American women continued to work in agriculture to help support their families. As the
narrative of Sara Brooks recalls, “we never was lazy cause we used to really work. We
used to work like mens. Oh, fight sometime, but worked on.”36 In addition to agriculture
work, Collins found that black women also found themselves moving into domestic
work, especially during periods of urbanization. This change begins a profound impact
on the previous social ordering of black communities: “While racial segregation
delimited African American space from white physical space, gender relations
...delimited female from male space. Male space included the streets, barbershOps, and
pool halls: female arenas consisted of households and churches.” 37 Likewise,
Higginbotham admits that the move to urbanization and domestic work begins to alter the
state of black families by moving black females to the margins in terms of social status

and “Women, who blurred the physical boundaries of gender, did so at the jeopardy of

 

3‘5 Thordis Simonsen. ed., You may Plow Here: The Narrative ofSara Brooks. (New York:
Touchstone, 1986. 39).

37 Collins, 5455.

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respectability in their communities.”38 Even with black families attempting to move
outside the influences of ranking gender, economically and emotionally, it remained
difficult to do so. Black females who had to work did so, but that work most often
referred them to domestic work as maids and mammies. Again, black female subjectivity
gamers numerous contradictions to ideals of womanhood. Economically, they are part of
the labor force just like men, but their race, work and biological sex subordinates their
status.

These historical experiences verify, as Oyéwr‘rmr’ documents in West African
societies, black communities who exist as populations socially ordered by values of
unranked sexes, albeit in a reality of separate and hierarchical sexes—grounded in the
white supremacy society in the US. As Carby articulated in the first chapter, black
culture in the New World has been touted as an experience about the perennial crisis of
black masculinity, and black cultural criticism proves the instability of black female
subjectivity as the source of one of the greatest internal conflicts of black existence in the
U.S.3’9 In Black Skins, White Masks (1967), Frantz Fanon wrote, “as long as the black
man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to

experience his being through Others” (109). Though Fanon’s major argument was to

suggest that in a colonized society theories about ontology fail to fully grasp the historical

33 Higginbotham, Evelyn B. “Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women in History.”
Gender and History I (1989): 59

39 “The Crisis of African American Gender Relations” Transitions, Volume, Issue 66 (Durham:
Duke UP,1965. 91—175) All the Women Are White, All the Black Are Men, but Some of us Are Brave, eds.,
Gloria T. Hull. Patricia Bell Scott. and Barbara Srrrith (New York: Feminist Press, 1982); Calvin Hemton’s
Sex and Racism in America (New York: Grove, 1965); Michelle Wallace Black Macho and the Myth of the
Superwoman (New York:Warner, 197 8); Robert Staples, “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to
Angry Black Feminists, “ The Black Scholar 10, no. 6-7 (1979): 27; Carol Stacks “Sex Roles and Survival
Strategies in the Urban Black Community” in The Black Woman Cross-Culturally. ed. Filomina Chioma
Steady. (Rochester, Vt.: Schenkman Books, 1985).

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experience of the colonized, the “minor” internal conflicts, gender and sexuality, that
Fanon makes mention of are not minor at all. Years later, Hortense Spillers commented
on the importance of gender in African American culture: “It’s clear to me that we’ve
not done enough work on the internal or interior relations and so it occurred to me that
there were reasons why we were avoiding the interior. One of them has to do with
gender” (“Black Cultural Studies Interview” 2).
Instead of simply explicitly avoiding the interior as Fanon does, or implicitly
avoiding it in the way that Carby does, we should question the very composition:
Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully
what it is at any given juncture in time . An open coalition, then, will
affirm identities that are alternately instituted and relinquished according
to the purposes at hand; it will be an open assemblage that permits of
multiple convergences and divergences without obedienceto a normative
telos of definitional closure. (Butler 23)
What black cultural criticism has failed to articulate is the deferment of gender.
Traditionally, it has accepted the very category, but by incorporating the figurative model
of Mawu-Lisa into our readings of African American texts, we form an open coalition to
Open discussion where there was once silence. We no longer are able to overlook the
minor internal conflicts of the African American community once we utilize the alternate
dichotomy of gender that the figurative model offers.
Just as specific African metaphysics organize and influence the language,
community, and culture of previously discussed African: societies, so too does the world

of Black Diaspora folk traditions. While African American culture does not share the

78

complex spiritual figures with those found in African communities, the Black Diasporic
folk figures as tricksters parallel those divine figures in the African spiritual world. The
oral traditions make it feasible to connect the symbolic with the real to show how
alternate philosophies about gender and sexuality occur in folk logic. Though the
egalitarian system of gender equality produced under enslavement, and thereafter,
fostered ideals of an unsexed community, African American communities faced
conflicting views about it.

In one under-read folktale, “Annie Christmas,” the flaws of intelligible gender are
revealed via the distinct discourse on gender present in black oral traditions in the New
World. Black Diaspora oral and folk traditions are filled with stories of god/ goddesses,
tricksters. In the midst of all those tales of Tar babies, Signifying Monkeys, Brer-
Rabbits, John Henry, and Stackolees we find a few tales on Annie Christmas, and the
implied complications of gender and sexuality she signifies for African American
vernacular culture. In the folk tale of Annie Christmas, we can see the beginning of a
process that Lorde wanted herself: “I have always wanted to be both man and
woman. . .to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered. . .to be hot and hard
and soft all at the same time” (Zami 7). Annie Christmas becomes the first Mawunian
figure for revising the trope of the trickster in black culture in the US:

Oldtimers say that the Negro longshoremen and all life on the riverfront
are not what they used to be. Its gone soft now, say they. In other days
men were really men, yet the toughest of them all was a woman. Her

name was Annie Christmas. She was six feet, eight inches tall and she

79

 

weighted more than two hundred and fifty pounds. She wore a neat
mustache and had a voice as loud and as deep as a foghom on the river.40
Annie Christmas has been described as the female version of John Henry. Yet, such a
reading of the story, like that of John Henry, would mean accepting the traditional
reading of gender and heroic figures. On the other hand, a Mawunian-reading uncovers
the real potential of the tale. The story of Annie Christmas reminds us that issues of
gender and sexuality are very much a part of black vernacular culture. Annie Christmas
highlights the trickster—like existence and disruption of gender constructs. The
description of Annie takes the contradictions of black female subjectivity to its greatest
heights by exaggerating the socially conceived physicalities, usually ascribed to either
men or women, embedded in one being. In addition to the tale itself serving as a signifier
of the importance of gender and sexuality in the folk, the recording of the tale explores
the influence of gender and sexuality in the research and study of folklore.

There are two very distinct versions of the Annie Christmas story. The first
version, as quoted above, is extracted from Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s
compilation, The Book of Negro Folklore. As we will see, the variations of the story are
attributable to the gender of those collecting or telling the stories. The version found in
the Hughes and Bontemps collection contains vivid descriptions of Annie Christmas as a
drinking woman: “Annie could outdrink any man in the south. She would put down a
barrel of beer and chase it with ten quarts Of whiskey, without stopping” (13). In this
version, the bio-logic of Annie’s gender runs contradictory to the bio-logic of woman.
That Annie’s strength and gendered fluidity is more male than female comes from the

realization that Annie chases beer with whisky, where typically it would be the reverse—

 

‘0 Hughes and Bontemp 13.

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with mortals using beer to chase the stronger and harder liquor of whiskey. Drinking
establishes Annie as a hard woman. The focus on drinking hard liquor typically is
assigned as a masculine pastime.
Nevertheless, when the story implies that Annie is more masculine than feminine,
the ideologies of gender constructs are once again interrupted: “Whenever she got ready
to have a baby, she drank a quart of whiskey and lay down somewhere. Annie had
twelve black sons, each seven feet tall, all born at the same time. She had plenty other
babies, too, but these were her favorites” (14). The tale reveals Annie as a biologically
fertile female. Yet, Annie’s ability to consume large quantities of alcohol and birth
twelve sons at the same time undermines Western bio-logic that positions females as
physically and emotionally weak.
In another version of “Annie Christmas,” recorded in Herstories (1995), a
collection of folktales compiled by Virginia Hamilton, a female storyteller delivers an
almost identical version of the story of Annie Christmas with noticeable changes:
Annie Christmas was coal black and tree tall. She stood seven feet
barefoot, and she weighed two-hundered and ninety-nine pounds. . .the
strongest (woman) that ever lived. . .She was a keelboat operator...She had
a mustache too. She could make fists hard, and she would fight boatmen
by the dozen and beat them down everytime. . .They say her baby boys
were born one right after the other for twelve days. (84)

In this version, Annie had boys right after the other, and there is no mention of her

drinking like a man. Could it be the variety in versions of the tale is attributable to the

ideologies of gender? In the Hughes/Bontemps collection, we have a version recorded by

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two men, and perhaps told by a man. In that version, the exaggerations of masculine
qualities seem to be re-emphasized. The Hamilton version, told by a woman and
collected by a woman, focuses less on the masculine attributes. Perhaps Hamilton’s
version, while still-according Annie great strength with which to beat down many men,
does not refer to Annie’s drinking habits because it buys into ideologies of drinking as a
masculine activity and that would be unladylike. Maybe, the Hughes/Bontemps version
includes it to continuously defeminize the character for believability of her status as
riverboat captain. The possibilities for the inclusion/exclusion of certain factors in this
particular context suggest how a tale with a limitless subject figure can be shaped by
gender ideologies. However, the tale and figure itself consistently refute these
ideologies.

In both versions, Annie possesses both masculine and feminine traits, and she has
the hypersexuality of trickster, as evidenced by her twelve children. Incidentally, the
description of Annie with facial hair disrupts the discreet order of gender. Facial hair has
been touted as a masculine trait, but women also experience facial hair growth. Annie’s
moustache, height, and weight subvert constructed ideas of gender and biological
feminine aesthetics. Conceivably, she is male and female. In addition, her very existence
works to change the community in which she lives. In one adventure, shape-shifting
abilities, a manifest trickster trait, prevail: “I’ll tell you about the time Annie decided to
dress up like a fine lady. She shaved that mustache real close so it wasn’t there. She
piled her raven hair up and stuck peacock feathers in it.”41 The shaving of Annie’s
mustache represents an acknowledgement of the discreet order of gender identities. The

relegation of gender understandings into familiar gendered categories is motivated by

 

4‘ Hamilton, 85.

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normative readings that are invested in dominant social gender constructs. Ironically, as
many of Annie’s girlfriends are prettying themselves for boatrides with a male suitor,
Annie sets to sail by herself in her keelboat. Annie Christmas’s story makes it hard to
believe that the trickster figure has contributed to a purely masculine line of folk
descendants. The figure consciously moves back and forth between Western constructs
of gender, but Annie never really adheres to the logic of such discourse. The endings of
the separate tales emphasize the possible disruptions.

The ending of “Annie Christmas” presents another primary inconsistency in the
two versions of the tale. Both tales end with Annie committing suicide because she fell
in love with a man who did not want her. However, the reactions and subsequent finality
to the gestures changes from tale to tale and depends on who is telling/retelling and
collecting the story. In the Hughes version, Annie commits suicide directly after the
rejection: “Finally Annie met a man who could lick her and then she fell in love for the
first time in her life. But the man didn’t want her, so Annie bedeckered herself in all her
finery and her famous necklace and committed suicide” (223). In this version, Annie
simply gives up and dies, while the captain seems to go on living. The presentation of
Annie Christmas tale, subsequently, makes the captain a victor or a more powerful agent
in the life of this black female. Where she was once the toughest of all (men), her
attempt to capture a man’s love weakens her. This version of the tale clearly indicates an
unhappy ending for black females who do not adhere to model ideologies of womanhood.
It seems to suggest that one may be different, but should be prepared to face the
consequences of that difference, the rejection of a man’s love. Further, it implies that

while Annie had her independence and freedom, she still could not be happy without a

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man. As someone who unashamedly possesses both “masculine” and “feminine”
qualities simultaneously, Annie exists liminally because she moves back and forth
between the social constructs of male and female. The only way out is to commit suicide.
However, in the Hamilton version, Annie does not simply accept society’s norms
and decides to kill herself right away. After the captain rejects Annie, we learn:
Well, that hurt Annie, to be put off like that. She was in love and then out
of love in about a minute flat. “I hope some big trouble gets you,” she told
the captain. “You’d better watch out this night. Your crew too. For all
that’s bad is right with you!” With that Annie Christmas got on her own
boat and tore out of there. (86)
Hamilton’s version positions Annie as the more active and powerful agent. After the
rejection by the captain, Annie is not silent: She speaks. Before she commits suicide,
Annie briefly places herself back into a position of power. Although she still commits
suicide, she does not seem to falter at the established norms. In fact, Annie rejects those
standards by altering the course of the captain’s life with her words/curse. Her actions
change the outcome of the story: the captain and his crew die, “but he haunts the big
devil river. You can hear him cursing the weather, the sky. . .”(86). In addition to the
captain’s death and his angry haunting of the rivers in New Orleans, Annie’s unhappy
predicament in death changes. Ironically, tellers of the story forewam: “Now you can
believe this last, or not. But this what the black folks say” (88). The need to address the
believability about the rest of Annie’s tale concretely conveys the importance of who is
telling the story, as well as who is listening. It also seeks to prepare the listener for a

more provocative ending: “Annie Christmas is still on the big river. . .sitting on her own

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wood grave, singing a river tune to the thundering sky” (88). The ending of Hamilton’s
version enunciates the differing perception of suicide in the two tales. The captain dies
and curses everything in his afterlife, while Annie, almost gloating, sings triumphantly on
the river. Unmistakably, this Annie is not the weakened, dejected, and dead female of the
Hughes/Bontemps version, but something much more. Characteristics and elements of
magical realism and hoodoo revamp Annie’s image. She lives as the strong,
indeterrninable self that she originally was. Her spirit state suggests the full reality of
what was at one time her flesh/body experience. She could only maintain this state in an
alternate world, and that is what black folklore suggests for black people and black
culture—to find other discourses that sustain liminal subjectivity rather than accept
falsely fixed options of subjectivity.

The complexity of “Annie Christmas” shows the complication of gender in the
African American community. The egalitarian dynamics of black females and males is
displaced by bio-logical explanations of men and women, perhaps as a way to construct
identity in the New World that is not different and can fit the established norms. I call
this dilemma the displacing of Mawu-Lisa and it signifies the embedded foundations of
an unsexed humanity in African American culture displaced by the logic of intelligible
genders: “ Intelligible genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain
relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire”
(Butler 23). The Mawu- Lisa paradigm symbolically stands for the undefineable
subjectivity of beings called Black/African American women, but it also indicates the
loss of an egalitarian presence in African American culture. Hence, the Mawu paradigm

is not simply a critical reading tool or lens for African American women’s literature and

85

culture, but African American culture as a whole. Again, this is not a historical claim. I
see Mawu-Lisa becoming the figure of undecideability for gender and sexuality in black
culture. As the sign, Mawu-Lisa makes it possible to defer and differentiate gender and
sexuality without the threat of privileging one element over another. In the end, a reading
strategy constructed from the Mawu paradigm would consist of a foundation of gender
distinctions without rank, a process of unnaming to continuously disrupt the authority of
definitions in African American texts, and an understanding of how to navigate the

tensions of these gender constructs.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Black Woman and the Trickster Politics of Unnaming

A culture, like an individual, is a more or less a consistent pattern
of thought and action. Within each culture there comes into being
characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of
society. ...Taken up by well-integrated culture, the most ill-
assorted acts become characteristic of its particular goals, often by
the most unlikely metamorphoses. The form that these acts take
we can understand only by understanding first the emotional and intellectual
mainsprings of that society.
Ruth Benedict"

True the black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the
children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job
market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him
accept. And she had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not
ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she
may have well invented herself.

Toni Morrison ‘3

Though oral and folk traditions readily offers an alternative philosophy on gender,
black female writers have struggled to discuss their subjectivity through the dominant
discourse of womanhood for years. Often times the people and characters in these
projects emphasize a necessity for Mawu’s process of unnaming by their failure to
successfully name themselves. In Talkin’ that Talk: Language, Culture, and Education
in African America (1999), Geneva Smitherman analyzes the opening quotation by Toni
Morrison by asking: “What is the nature and the linguistic character of this invented
persona? Must everything be cut whole from new cloth today, with no connecting
threads to the past” (266). Although Morrison uses the term “woman,” she and
Srrritherrnan understand that the “black woman” represents an invented character in the
narrative of black female subjectivity. Likewise, in a scathing critique of black cultural

criticism, “Transferences: Black Feminist Discourse: The: ‘Practice’ of ‘Theory,’ ”

 

‘2 Ruth Benedict. Patterns of Culture. Sentry Edition. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).

’3 Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” New York Times
Magazine 22, August. 63

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Deborah McDowell asks that, in addition to providing a history of the emergence of
black women’s literary studies, that “a counter history, a more urgent history, would
bring ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ into a productive tension that would force a re-evaluation on
each side.”44 In black critical traditions, the conflict of “practice” as opposed to “theory”
is a major dilemma, but it is not the only cause of the split. In a sense, this conflict of
practice as opposed to theory stems from the practice of self-creation, which in itself
exemplifies a theory of unnaming for black women.

In the narrative of black female subjectivity, the goal to name black females as
“black women” disturbs the self-invention of the subject, and results in a confining and
violent confrontation for the two separate subjects. The consistent cultural practice of
unnaming acts as a connecting thread to black females’ past. Conceptually, it seems
easier to discuss unnaming on a personal level as it concerns race. For example,
Malcolm or Amira’s decision to unname themselves by replacing their slave names,
Malcolm Little and Leroi Jones, with an X or an African name has always been deemed a
defiant act against racial oppression. On the other hand, what if Toni Cade Bambara,
Assata Shakur, or Ntozake Shanghe’s name changes were defiant acts against “gender”
oppression, in addition to racial oppression. Black females have been committed to the
process of unnaming themselves for years, and, as Benedict notes, this is a characteristic
purpose not necessarily shared by other societies or cultures. As cited in chapter two, the
topos of (un)narning seems to be a prevalent tool in African American culture. Yet
Benston’s theory of (un)naming, through its parenthetical coding, really implies

unnaming to rename. However, this work asserts that the process of unnamrning in black

 

4" Deborah McDowell's The Changing Same: Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995).

88

 

females lives is as much about gender as it is about race, and for that reason the black
female cultural experience of unnaming does not seek renaming, but instead a continuous
process of unnaming. Though the theoretical concept of (un)naming/unnaming does not
evolve until the later part of the twentieth century, the actions of selected historical
figures and their experiences reveal a dynamic process of eluding definitions and
boundaries for their subjectivity, specifically for African American females, that we can
now see as an initial precursor to unname themselves as slaves and as “black women.”
This chapter utilizes the Mawu paradigm to corroborate Morrison’s statement about black
women self-inventing themselves, answer Srnitherrnan’s question as to the nature and
linguistic character of the invented persona, and adhere to McDowell’s concept of a
counter history. In doing so, the Mawu paradigm highlights a consistent pattern of
thought and action focused on the desire and process of unnaming to disturb gender

. concepts in texts by African American females.

In the late 19705 and early 19805, female critics utilized ideologies of
matrilineage and matrifocality to discuss the significant agenda of African American
women writers. In “Black Matrilineage: The Case of Alice Walker and Zora Neale
Hurston,” Dianne F. Sadoff analyzes the concepts of the matrilineal on recovery work
and continued canon placement for African American women writers. Inevitably, her
critique concerns Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston:

Walker’s enthusiastic battle to restore both Hurston and her texts to the
African American literary canon, however, masks an underlying anxiety
about black women writer’s singularity in white America that emerges,

although disguised, in Walker’s fiction. ...Hurston becomes not only

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predecessor but originator; her work, archetypal. Walker’s essays on and
editorship of Hurston designate the Renaissance writer precursor and
obscure the Second Renaissance writer’s fear of her cultural marginality,
her own deep need for a foremother. (8)
Sadoff’s essay poignantly points out the distinction of early feminist criticism, the lost
literary matrilineage that must be recovered. Works such as Walker’s “In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South” and Mary Helen
Washington’s “I Sign My Mother’s Name: Alice Walker, Dorothy West, and Paule
Marshall” were all important in early recovery work of African American female writers
and establishing a black feminist criticism.45 However, Sadoff asserts that the black
woman writer covers “her ambivalence about matrilineage, her own misreading of
precursors, and her links to an oral as well written tradition” (5). She later states,
“Female precursors, fearful of overt originality, facilitate misreading by their daughters;
as precursor, the black woman writer, doubly culturally jeopardized by gender and race,
will necessarily represent herself even more ambiguously than do white women writers”
(18). The ambivalence and ambiguity that Sadoff speaks about stems from more than
simple fear or strategic masking of that fear, and to argue ambivalence, as Sadoff does, is
a misreading of the failure of language to convey a place for black women’s subjectivity.
Black women are not ambivalent about matrilineage, but they do find the discourse of
gender problematic. I bring up the case of matrilineage to suggest that while it may have
been important in recovering the work of black women writers and situating black

women writers in the canon, we have to move beyond it while still holding onto the

 

’5 See Walker’s In Search of Our Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose (San Diego, Calif: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1983) and Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies and Their Silent Partners. eds., Ruth
Perry and Martine Watson Brownley’s (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984) 142-150.

90

notions it embraces, meaning the historical identity of black women. The diverse -
approach of using Mawu finds its justification in the fact that I am not attempting to do
recovery work, or justify the place of African American women in the canon. The
symbolic referent Mawu-Lisa focuses less on incorporating a heritage slanted towards
traditional concepts of matrilineage and more on the metaphysical logic established by
the Mawu paradigm to blur the boundaries of gender constructs.

Where critics such as Carby, Ducille, and Wall see oral art forms as strictly
masculine, the work of critics such as Trudier Harris and Keith Byerman have shown
them to be quite fluid and adaptable, specifically in works of fiction by black female
writers. 46 Most notably, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s “Speaking in Tongues:
Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman’s Literary Tradition” presents one way of
exploring the discourse of African American women with her trope of glossolalia and
heteroglossia, speaking in tongues:

But there is a second connotation to the notion of speaking in tongues, one
that suggests not glossolalia, but heteroglossia, the ability to speak in
diverse known languages. While the glossolalia refers to the ability to
“utter the mysteries of the spirit,” heteroglossia describes the ability to
speak in the multiple languages of public discourse. If glossolalia
suggests private, nonmediated, nondifferentiated univocality, heteroglossia

connotes public, differentiated, social mediated, dialogic discourse. (22)

 

’6 Two works that offer great insights in to folklore are Trudier Harris’s Fiction and Folklore: The
Novels of Toni Morrison. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993) and Keith Byerman’s
Fingering the Jagged Grain: Folklore in Contemporary Black Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1987)

91

 

Henderson illustrates that black women must speak in a plurality of voices as well as a
multitude of discourses. Henderson’s theory of how black women speak to and link both
hegemonic and non hegemonic discourse utilizes oral traditions of the black sermon and
makes them specific to black women’s culture. She succinctly puts to rest any doubts that
the folk, oral, and vernacular cannot address the intersection of race and gender.
Henderson’s text explores how glossolalia (speaking in tongues) is an “ecstatic,
rapturous, inspired speech, based on a relation of intimacy and identification between the
individual and God” (23).

However, this chapter differs from Henderson’s work in that it uses the Mawu-
paradigm to explain that black females having a Mawu-like subjectivity—as disturbances
to the rhetoric and ideologies of gender—construct their discourses and identity from
their relationship to themselves (their own divine identity). Derrida acknowledges that
names cannot define or fix the being of God in language: this chapter submits that the
same is true of black females. However, we can only see this after we have connected
the example of Mawu to our readings of gender in African American culture. Reading
through the Mawu-paradigm, there are a number of ways in which we can see the
attempts to locate a mutable gendered subjectivity in African American texts. The first
occurs in a breakdown of intelligible genders brought about by subjectivity akin to that of
Mawu-Lisa, not specifically spiritual or divine, but a continuous and simultaneous
occupying of space considered male and female. The second occurs in the technique of
unnaming through folklore employed in African American women’s text. The attempt to
unname is a way to place the black female’s subjectivity outside Western discourses of

gender constructs, much like the writing and divination of Pa.

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African Americans and African American culture as a whole loses its own
empowering discourses on gender and sexuality in the New World. This loss becomes
most obvious in work of African American women because they are denied their own
subjectivity due to the gender hierarchies assumed under patriarchy and sustained
through the primary signifier for gender constructs—the biological and constructed
phallus. Black males and black male culture are privileged by the Western construct of
gender (man/woman). The greatest sustainer to this unequal relationship is the
construction and signifier of the “black woman.” Ironically, the subjectivity of the black
female serves as the most significant threat to male privilege and the construction of
“black woman.” The “black woman” is a myth in itself, but the black female occupies
space and subjectivity akin to Mawu, in addition to a tense relationship with language
and her community. If we remember the paradigm of Mawu-Lisa as a disruptor, then it is
easy tosee how the historical experience of the black female proves useful in a general
displacement of the phallus as signifier in African American culture. To demonstrate
how this is so, I begin with the slave narrative to examine how a Mawunian reading of
black female slave narratives reveals the need to disrupt the construct of gender for the
sake of African America culture as a whole.

Just as folklore becomes evidence in proving that blacks have a culture in which
they can stake their claim in nationalism, so too does the slave narrative. However, again
it is the male slave narrative that shapes the discussion of culture so that it parallels and
benefits the aims of nation-buildin g. Robert B. Stepto has suggested that the African
American literary tradition consisted of two pre-generic myths derived from its first

narrative form, the slave narrative. According to Stepto, freedom and literacy serve as

93

the pre-generic myth for African-American literature. In From Behind the Veil: A Study
of Afro-American Narrative (1979), Stepto reminds us that Afro-American culture, like
all cultures, has “canonical stories” or. . .“pregeneric myths, shared stories or myths that
not only exist prior to literary forms, but eventually shape the forms that comprise a given
culture’s literary canon” (ix). Subsequently, no one has questioned this universality of
pregeneric myths. Stepto’s designated pregeneric myths seem to deny the hierarchies
that existed in institutions of slavery (field slave/house slave, man/ woman, and
darkie/mulatto). He totalizes the slave experience, and if the slave experience were
universal then we would not have the development of the black female slave narrative.
What are pregeneric myths of the female slave narrative, and how do they shape the
tradition of African American women’s literature? These questions have not been fully
answered. Clearly, we have analyzed the importance of sex in contexts dealing with
history, themes, and the representation of the black woman, but there has not been a
moment of recognition of these pregeneric myths,-if they exist.

Stepto’s argument later influences the work of Henry L. Gates who bases his
theoretical The Signifying Monkey on Stepto’s Opinion. Later in Gate’s Loose Canons:
Notes on the Culture Wars (1993), he corroborates Stepto’s earlier opinions:

After Descartes, reason was privileged, or valorized, among other human
characteristics. Writing, especially after the printing press became so
widespread, was taken to be the visible sign of reason. Blacks were
“reasonable,” and hence “men,” if—and only if—they demonstrated
mastery of the “arts and sciences,” the eighteenth century’s formula for

writing. (54)

94

 

Gates then proposes that the slave writes himself into being through the narrative,-
indicating that the ontology of the enslaved African is replaced by the Negro represented
in the text—that before the moment of inscription there was no valid being. He uses the
work of a number of male slave narratives to confirm points about the trope of the talking
book. Frederick Douglass provides an excellent clue as to how pre-generic myths and
metaphors of authenticating black texts are not as efficient in discussing black women’s
cultural texts. The quest of freedom and literacy is a masculine concern. Douglass, an
advocate of women’s suffrage had a wife. It has been documented and noted that
Dougalss’s first wife, who helped him purchase his freedom, was illiterate and that
Douglass never taught her to read.47 The quest for freedom and literacy may have been
the pre-generic myths of the male-authored slave narrative, but what were they for his
wife?

Further, if we use a more recent text to examine slave narratives and their
importance to canon-building, Ronald T. Judy’s (Dis)forming the American Canon:
Af‘rican Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (1993), we may begin to move beyond the
established assumptions about the vernacular. Judy attempts to find a place for African-
Arabic slave narratives through a theory of indeterminacy. In so doing, Judy disrupts and
calls into question the literary tradition of the slave narrative, and states that a heritage
based on nationalistic aims exists. Judy makes solid claims that a black narrative

tradition exists before Africans in the New World construct it. In doing his study, Judy
takes on works that set the precedence for what will become the foundation for theory

Concerned with African American culture—a foundation based on an ontology of lack

x

1969) ‘7 See introduction to Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Dover,

95

(culture, history, identity) that can seemingly be addressed with the help of structuralist
theory.

Rather than relying on traditional slave narrative from the West written in
English, Judy refers to Ben Ali’s Diary as “an augmentation of Afro-American canon
formation” (22). Judy’s critique of the Ben Ali’s African-Arabic slave narrative
possessing a sense of indeterminacy could also reveals interesting insights about the issue
of gender in the African American literary tradition, but as indicated by Wahneema

Lubiano, Judy chooses not to focus on those insights:
Being is a set of terms—a male new set of terms; “making a man” is
“being” on male grounds, for neither Kant nor Douglass’s humanness
makes “female” humanness possible. And if Ben Ali’s manuscript’s
indeterminancy has feminist implications, then their articulation in Judy’s
work is sotto voce indeed. Judy not only doesn’t comment on the
masculinist language and imaginings of the texts or the discourse of
reason, he doesn’t make an argument for why gender does not have to be
addressed, and I mean gender not only in terms of what is left out—
because apparently it did not occur to Judy to take up gender as something

to consider even if only to dismiss its importance. . .48
Many critics of black literary thought assert in their works the definitive belief that the
slave narrative acts as the beginning of a Black literary tradition, and that the genre

becomes a way for slaves to construct their identities in the New World, but there has a

48 In the forward to (Dis)forming the American Canon, Wahneema Lubiano previews a specific
problem With Judy’s text as it concerns gender (xxii).

96

minor disagreements on the purpose of these narratives. 49 As we acknowledge those
critics who believe that the slave narrative erects itself as a way to complement its
primary objective of fulfilling a necessary identity, a desire to be Negro-—to write one’s
self into being,50 we should also then note this commonality to previous insights about
how black folk and oral traditions are said to perform similar tasks.

Critics consistently speculate that black narratives are tied to identity construction
of the New Negro, but what they fail to acknowledge in such theories is the way
nationalist agendas, be they American Enlightenment rhetoric or black power ideologies,
can negate and limit the identity process for New World blacks. In reference to both the

slave narrative and black folk and oral traditions, being becomes exactly what Judy
suggests: “the mute African body is overwritten by the Negro, and the Negro that
emerges in the ink flow. . .is that which has overwritten itself and so become the
representation of the very body it sits on” (89). Be it through the articulation of pre-
gcneric myths or metaphors of authentication, the narrative tradition of African
Arnericans and the desire to be a Negro is problematically assessed through an ontology
01" lack. The Negro lacks culture, lacks tradition, lacks history, and therefore lacks

idetltity. So focused on the idea of proving what the Negro lacks, we never ask what/who
\

49 pp. 33-37, 48-49. There are several works that demonstrate such as belief. I have already
acknoVvledged Stepto’s From Behind the Veil, Gates’s The Signifying Monkey and Baker’s Blues, Ideology
9nd Afro-American Literature (1984); other texts contain the same thematic focus: Gates’s critical
;‘deuczion to The Slave Narrative (1985) and Figures in Black (New York: Oxford UP, 1987, xxii);
18215110": Andrews '5 To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of African American Autobiography. 1760-
L‘ 5 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1986); Houston Baker‘s The Journey Back: Issues in Black
dfterature and Criticism. (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Valerie Smith’s Self-
];SS‘OVery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. (Cambridge. Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991).
id y argues that the theory of the slave narrative as a product committed to Enlightenment and Kantian

e33 0f being and humanism is debatable, and he presents Arna Bontemp’s foreward from The Slave
arraiive (xx) as a pro-Kant view of being and the slave narrative and offers as a counter-point to such
e01'itts Ralph Ellison’s belief that “too much has been made of the slave narrative’s influence on

cOntemporary writing” from “The Essential Ellison” interview, Yard Bird Magazine (1978): 155.

 

5° Judy, 106-110.

97

we mean when we say “Negro.” The representation masks the distinctions and
differences we currently find ourselves trying to account for in the identity of blacks.
Incidentally, as Lubiano alluded to earlier, the concept of the Negro is primarily
conceived as masculine? ' and as such, critics reach for the most widely perceived
masculine forms of the oral and vernacular to continue incorporating Africanism with
nationalist agendas. The Mawu paradigm allows critics to move beyond conceiving of
the narrative tradition and identity in an ontology of lack, but suggests that identity can

emerge through a simultaneous presentation of multiple and fluctuating processes that

don’t have to be fixed or limiting.

In the next few pages, we will see how both Sojourner Truth’s presence and
Harriet Jacobs’s narrative elucidate breaks in Stepto’s pre-generic myths, demonstrating
that the metaphor of authentication is especially challenging with regard to African
American women’s culture. Each work signals that the metaphors of authentication are
quests to fill a void and a need through writing. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth
Century of institutionalized enslavement, literacy is a masculine acquirement. Freedom
may be something that all slaves deemed a necessity, but for a female slave was literacy
really going to impact her upward mobility? Literacy may have been a significant factor
in Shaping the freedom of a male ex-slave, both practically and consciously, however
Othel‘ factors take precedent for the enslaved and newly freed black woman. It is for
these reasons that I employ the work of notable female writers in my reading of the slave

naJTative for the black female slaves. The African American women’s slave narrative,

\

 

5' See also Judy’s discussion of Kant: “Kant‘s problem is how to think about the Negro. not as a

phefiomenal appearance, or undetermined object of empirical intuition, but as an intellectual concept, a
derivative of the concept of “Man” (110-115). It is in this particular discussion that Lubiano feels Judy

COUld have also considered the critique of gender itself as it relates to race or the Negro.

98

and in the end, black women’s literary tradition does not construct itself to help advance
the ontological existence of Negro, nor are its pre-generic myths literacy and freedom.
According to the Mawu-paradi gm, the African American female tradition evolves
from a foundation of non-hierarchical roles of gender, an understanding of occupying
space that is deemed both masculine and feminine. In the tradition, a black female writer
does not attempt to write herself into being, because she already knows she exists; but she
works to make others understand the writing she has used to create herself so that she will
not be a mistranslation or misrepresentation. Deborah G. Plant explores how Jacqueline
de Weever’s work suggests “androgyny, as creator, healer, and medium of
transformation, figures significantly in Black women writer’s mythic narratives.”52
While de Weever and Plant may refer to the traditional model of mythic narratives, I
submit that even the slave narrative becomes a mythic narrative when we keep in mind
that always at the center of the black female’s narrative is a “myth,” that of the black
woman. The “black woman” acts like the grand narrative in Western thought.
Henceforth, the black female writing or producing a narrative (orally or visually)
Consi stently produces a counter-narrative to subordinate the mythic narrative of the
“black woman.” Essentially, Stepto’s concerns over pre-generic myths (freedom and
literacy) help to reveal the counter-narrative in black female slave narratives. As we will
see, freedom acts as a major factor in most slave narratives, but literacy fails to be a

$1gnificant factor not only because it was a male privilege and priority, but also because

literacy, in the sense that Stepto imagines it (writing), connects to Western discourses that

\

P . 52 See Plants‘s analysis of de Weever’s work in her text, Every Tub Must Sit On Its Own: The
123080th and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

99

mistranslate or misrepresent black female subjectivity. In order to represent herself, the
African female in the New World must strive for literacy from forms outside of written
narratives.

Reading female slave narratives through Mawu reveals the pre-generic myths of
black female tradition to be liberation from the bio-logic of gender, as well as freedom, as
seen in the African American slave narrative; and these myths are revised in literature by
African American women writers. When Lorde assesses the existence of a “third
designation,” and asserts that the trickster is the one whom we must all become, she quite
plainly seeks a discourse for her heritage and subjectivity, with tricksters and goddesses
providing the most adequate way of doing so. Further, what Plant and deWeever call
androgyny is not necessarily androgyny in the work of black women writers. It is, as it
was in West African spirituality and myth, an alternative discourse on gender. The
connection between the African goddess and the trickster figure for African American
Women lies in the exploration of an undefineable subjectivity and in having a discourse to
Speak of the subjectivity.

Sojourner Truth and the Historical Figuration of Mythology—“Black Woman”

Just as African American male writers and critics have written over the African
body and replaced it with Negro, African American female writers and critics have also
been guilty of performing a similar act. As Hortense Spillers notes, the black female
body fluctuates between false representations:

Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name.
“Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,”

“Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at

100

the Podium”: I describe a locus' of confound identities, a meeting ground
of investments. . .My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would
have to be invented. 53
Spillers addresses the ways in which language has failed to truly capture and demonstrate
an understanding of black female subjectivity. The idea of being needed or created to
serve a purpose and being marked but unnamed is the experience of black females.
However, more damaging than these false representations is the attempt to name
something that at one time had been unnameable:
motherhood as a female bloodrite is outraged, is denied, at the very same
time that it becomes the founding term of a human and social
enactment. ...only the female stands in the flesh, both mothers and mother
dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out
of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a
place for this different social subject.54
The historical experience of slavery obscures the conception of black female identity,
and hindered by language, her identity becomes stuck somewhere between African,
N egro, and Woman. Although both quotes from Spillers convey the need for a place for
this subject, we should note that in making a place we must avoid past mistakes of
attel'rlpting to name her. Naming black female subjectivity results in an acceptance of
Problematic historical figurations. Black female critics have overwritten the African

felTlale body and replaced it with the “black woman.” In the end, if we are going to make

\
53 “Mama’s Baby. Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Diatriacs. Summer 1987 (65).

 

5‘ Spillers, so.

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a place for black female subjectivity, we must understand why her subjectivity calls for a
process of unnaming, rather than naming.

We see the marker and the necessity for the process of unnaming in black feminist
thought in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850, 1998), as well as in subsequent
analysis of the narrative. Truth’s narrative, conveyed by two white women suffrage
activists, Olive Gilbert and Frances Grange, at times lacks the authority and strength of
voice that other narratives, such as Douglass’s may hold, but that doesn’t make the logic
of her most famous speech any less valid. Though narrated by Gilbert and Grange, the
logic and ideals clearly derive from the point of view of a female slave. From Grange’s
account, Truth’s famous speech at the 1851 Women Rights convention in Akron, Ohio
confronts social ideologies of womanhood and the bio-logic of gender:

“Dat man ober dar say women needs to be helped into carriages and lifted
into carriages, or ober mud puddles, or gives me any best place and raising
herself to her full height and her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder, she
asked, and ar’n’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!” And she
bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular
power. “I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man
could head me—and ar’n’t I a woman?” (133)
Biologically, Truth places herself in the arena of females, but socially she explodes the
ick=C>logies of “woman” with her position as slave labor. She possesses feminine
attributes of female reproduction, but she remains physically capable of manual labor.
ThOugh the logic of Truth’s speech attempts to disrupt the biological determinism that

Creates the hierarchical ranking of sexes, it is undermined by the intrusion of white

102

females and white womanhood emancipation. Besides Truth’s question of womanhood,
we see something else taking precedent in the narrative—Truth’s body. In the above
quotation, before Truth bares her unwomanly arms to reveal muscles usually accorded to
men, Gage focuses incessantly on Truth’s height. Apparently, as Truth performs she is in
some way slouching before raising herself to her full height. Gage previously discloses
that “the leaders of the movement trembled on seeing a tall, gaunt, black woman” (133),
and that “Old Sojourner, quiet and reticent as the ‘Libyan Statue’ sat. . .her chin resting
upon her broad, hard palm” (134). Gage’s narration reveals that Truth’s body obtains as
much attention as her words. If the point of Truth’s speech was truly to underscore her
subjectivity as woman and connection to sisterhood, then surely we can realize the irony
in her words “ain’t I a woman” in front of the apparently scared-ass-hell white “liberal”
masses. If white female leaders and social activists saw Truth as Gage does, then what
they see is an other. Gage’s attempt to destroy ideologies of womanhood by writing
Truth’s narrative appears admirable, but she does so at the cost of black female
SUbjectivity. Gage, while disclosing Truth’s life, also manages to construct early feminist
thought and build its very foundation through an othering of the black female body.
As the text progresses, Gage’s comments become even more problematically
centered around Truth’s physical presence being antithetical for “woman”: “there were
few Women in those days that dared to “speak in meetings” and “every eye was fixed on
this almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high”(emphasis mine, 135). After
Truth has made her speech, Gage recalls, “I have never in my life seen anything like the
"mgical influence that subdued the mobbish spirit” (emphasis mine, 136). Throughout

Gage’s narrative Truth becomes object and othered. Even after saying the powerful

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words that have made her a preeminent figure in history, Truth’s othered body is still an
issue with the white masses. At the request of a man, Truth had to bare her breasts to
prove that she was a female, which is not necessarily “woman,” as seen in the narrative of
Truth’s speech. From Gage’s own narrative, the white male was not the only one having
trouble grasping the figure of Sojourner Truth. Gage manages to connect Truth to every
negative image of blacks from magical/mystical Negro to all-body-no-intellect
stereotypes. Truth’s body elicits fear and trembling, and quite readily, Gage places Truth
outside the sphere of womanhood even as she speaks in support of women’s right.
Instead of describing Truth’s persuasion of the mob as the result of her great intellect,
Gage manages to reduce Truth’s rhetorical genius to magical influence. Gage’s narrative
of Truth’s life sets up a parameter for judging black female feminist thought that
continues in the work of current feminist criticism. This parameter asserts that feminist
criticism should use the black female as its intended goal and theory, but never
acknowledge it as the basis of its own white feminist hope. This suggests why black
females need to unname themselves in their own lives.

Erroneously, critics such as Denise Riley and Constance Penley see Truth’s
proclamation as a desire for the construction of womanhood to fit her, but they should
also be able to recognize that Truth’s words acknowledge woman as a frame that could
never be/replace her actual being.55 Riley’s work attempts to understand Truth’s

subjectivity by signifying on Truth’s famous statement, changing Ain’t I a Woman to
“Ain’t I a Fluctuating Identity” (1). Penley asserts that Truth’s statement acts as ‘two

ideas or strategies...important to feminism... ‘epistemological’ and ‘metaphysical’; the

 

55 See Denise Riley’s Am I That Name: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History.
(Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1988), pp.158—l60 and Constance Penley’s The Future of an Illusion: Film,
Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: U of Minn. Press, 1989) 179.

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other—represented by Truth—is ‘political’ ” (179). Deborah McDowell’s The Changing
Same provides prudent criticism of these two critiques of Truth’s importance:
Riley’s move to appropriate Sojourner Truth introduces a subtle racial
' marker that distinguishes between Truth’s original words and Riley’s
displacement. A familiar move in contemporary literary-critical
discussion, Riley’s “modernization” functions allegorically to make a
common, if subtle, insinuation about black feminist thinking in general: It
needs a new language. . . .That Truth’s declarative question. . ..might be
read as political and epistemological simultaneously seems not to have
occurred to Penley, partly because she manipulates both these
categories. . .to conform to an already polarized and preconceived
understanding. (159)
McDowell points out the flaws of both Riley and Penley’s critique in her argument of
“uncovering the truth: coloring feminist theory.” McDowell positions herself to explore
how “Truth and the knowledge of that name help to construct concerns about black
feminist thinking within the general parameters of feminist discourse,” but she also
argues that Truth “as a metonymn for ‘black woman’ is useful in this context both to a
singular idea of academic feminism in general, and in particular, to ongoing controversies
within that discourse over the often uneasy relations between theory and politics” (15 8).
Other black female critics support McDowell’s claim, and they prove that the “black
woman” also serves as a metaphor, myth, or historical figuration of myth for white

feminist thought.

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Holloway’s Moorings and Metaphors reveals vital information to expose how the
myth of the historical figuration known as the “black woman” might come to be because
of Truth’s statement. Holloway explains, “mythologies are not discrete units of structure
as much as they are features of a surviving sense of how language enables the survival
and transference of memory” (94). Truth’s statement survives centuries within the
machine discourse of feminist theory, and as a result, we are able to gather insights from
her memory of grappling with her subjectivity as a slave, a female, and an African in
America. However, as McDowell and Holloway point out, upon reading her words we
must always remember that it was the language of white female activists that enabled the
initial survival and transference of Truth’s memory. Holloway continues: “Because
memory is critical to mythologies, then the privilege that memory traditionally represents
over myth—that of representation (accuracy) over figuration (metaphor)—is dissolved
within the disappearance of the chasm between memory (history) and myth (figuration).
What remains are historical figurations of mythologies” (94). Truth’s all-powerful
statement serves as a(n) (accurate) representation of her flexible/indefineable subjectivity
that then becomes the (metaphor) figuration for an early white feminist movement.
Truth’s words do not create this figuration because she does not exercise authorial control
over the text. Truth, used to initiate a cataclysmic call for women’s vote that does not
apply to her, functions as a theory to dispute biological reasoning of why women
shouldn’t be allowed to vote (physically and emotionally weak and unable to bear
children and conduct politics). She becomes a mascot for a (white) women’s rights

movement, but she still fails to find a place/space for her subjectivity, for it does not exist

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in the term woman. We displace or dissolve the memory of Truth’s understanding of her
subjectivity in the chasm between memory (history) and myth (figuration).

As McDowell and Holloway explain it, Sojourner Truth becomes the theory in
feminist theory. Instead of using Sojourner Truth’s example to destroy that gendered
discourse, critics like Penley and Riley continue to attempt to place black female
subjectivity into bi-polar discourses of gender ideologies. What remains with us are
historical figurations of black females still trying to fit into the gendered discourse of
womanhood and historical figurations of mythologies—“Black Woman,” Hottentot
Venus, the mammy, the emasculating matriarch, the sexually licentious black woman, the
bitch, the diva, and the Strong Black Woman. Truth’s subjectivity becomes the goal of
white womanhood, which is to be biologically female and capable of doing masculine-
defined labor. However, this theory does little to advance black female subjectivity in
the New World, and consequently, it never moves black female subjectivity beyond
mimicking or desiring the false construction of white womanhood. When tied to feminist
thought, the discussion of the black female subjectivity fails to move into the realm of
creating distinct goals and discourses for black females, as characteristic of the trickster
Mawu-Lisa; it seeks only to fit and shape black female subjectivity into what was already
there. A Mawunian connection might have revealed a place for that subjectivity, where
black men or women would not have to feel ashamed, dysfunctional, or othered for
moving outside the boundaries of Western models of gender in the New World. It is
precisely because her subjectivity does not fit into a dominant discourse of gender that
critics must continuously work to place her outside of it so that she might avoid being

someone else’s theory.

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The complicated use of Sojourner Truth reminds critics that in order to fully
comprehend and describe black female subjectivity in any written narrative we must
begin with a Mawu reading of the narrative. According to that paradigm, we know that
Truth emerged from an institutionalized system of slavery in which egalitarian roles in
labor and family occurred on a daily basis. “Ain’t I a woman” was not an attempt to
become a part of womanhood; it was an attempt to destroy the very category of
womanhood. White women, unable to accomplish this feat through their own
representation, create a mistranslation—a myth. Unlike the ontology of Negro for the
African, Woman cannot sit on top of the female ex-slave. Woman can’t become the
representation for the African female in the New World. When Truth spoke those words,
she was seeking a language of liberation for her body and subjectivity. She never found
it. Truth’s well-known retort, “ain’t I a woman,” helps maintain the historical figuration
of mythology known as the black woman, and it is the Mawu process of unnaming that
delivers black females from this historical figuration of myth that Truth experiences.

It is from rebuking and displacing the historical figuration of “black woman” that
a true black female centered discussion—a discussion stylistically defined by
liminality—can evolve. It is for these reasons that we return to Derrida’s discussion of
unnaming and remember that an important element of the Mawu-Lisa figurative theory is
the power that comes from her being something that a name cannot approach:

This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects,
the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names,
the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, the

nominal effect difference is itself enmeshed, carried off,

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reinscribed, just as false entry or a false exit is still part of the

game, a function of the system. (Margins of Philosophy 27)
Black female writers employ a technique reminiscent of Mawu’s tricksterism, the process
of unnaming as a way to convey their Mawu-Lisa subjectivity, elude mistranslation, and
make others understand the narrative techniques and strategies that they use in self-
invention. While Truth may not have been able to demonstrate this concept by writing
her own narrative, another female slave attempts and fails to do so in her self-authored
narrative. Truth”s role in the historical figuration of the “black woman” indicates why
the process of unnaming is necessary for the formation of identity, but in order to see
how black women writers attempt to instigate the process of unnaming in their texts we
must turn to Harriet J acobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861, 1987).

Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl informs the reader that literacy and
freedom are not the pre-generic myths of the woman’s slave narrative. Like The History
of Mary Prince,56 Jacobs’s narrative makes known the horrors of the female slave
experience. However, Jacobs discusses in greater detail the oppressions visited upon the
female slave that make her goals very different from those of the male slave. She
presents her marriage, the idea of motherhood, and again the threat of sexual violence as
major driving forces in her life. These are the reasons that she needs to be free, and the
very notion of “woman” impedes her quest for true freedom in a number of ways.
Literacy is less of an issue in both narratives. Jacobs writes, “While I was with her (the

first mistress), she taught me to read and spell; and for this privilege. . .I bless her

 

’6 “The History of Mary Prince” in Classic Slave Narratives. ed., Henry L. Gates. (New York:
Penguin Press, 1989). Prince’s narrative was the first slave narrative written by a female. Prince, a slave
stolen from Bermuda, is credited for changing the genre of slave narratives to reflect the voice and
subjectivity of enslaved females.

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memory” (344). It was against the law for slaves to learn to read and write, but house
slaves, such as Jacobs, were often presented with the opportunity to learn, and the
hierarchies in the institution of slavery played an important and determining role. Jacobs
spent her early life as a house slave, which may have given her opportunities at literacy
that field slaves did not have. Phyllis Wheatley’s literary endeavors also give credence to
the idea that status and quite possibly gender determined the pre-generic quest for
literacy, rather than the desire to be Negro associated with the male slave narratives.

The major difference between Truth’s narrative and Jacobs’s narrative is the
importance of authorial control in both. William L. Andrews’s To Tell A Story: African
American Autobiography (1986) shows that “white America was willing to suspend
disbelief and assume the sincerity of an autobiographer it identified as a political peer and
a racial equal. However, the knowledge that they (the writers) could not predicate their
. lives on this racial credulity and trust forced black autobiographers to invent devices and
strategies that would endow their stories with the appearance of authenticity...the very
reception of the narrative as truth depended on the degree to which the artfulness could
hide his art” (224). Writers of these slave narratives/ autobiographies employed
rhetorical tools that would both authenticate the facts of their bondage and covertly
establish their self-hood and identity to an America that did not want to see them as
equals. However, this element is missing from Truth’s narrative. Because Gilbert and
Gage write, formulate, and control so much of Truth’s narrative, the issue of authorial
control is not as complex. Truth has very little authorial control of her slave narrative.

The lack of authorial control also corroborates the historical figuration of Truth as the

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“black woman” in feminist texts. In the end, authorial control exposes the controversy
surrounding the facts of slave narratives and beliefs of who wrote them. 57

Critics such as John Blassingame may have questioned the authenticity of
J acobs’s narrative, stating, “the work is not credible” because it is “too orderly.”
Blassingame finds particularly problematic the instances of “miscegenation and cruelty,
outraged virtue, unrequited love” that appear on every page, and refers to these issues in
the narrative as “too melodramatic.” Blassingame caps his critique of the credibility of
Incidents by proclaiming that the ending suggests “they all live happily ever after.” 5"
Blassingame’s critique, read without an understanding of the artifice of the narrative
writing, becomes plausible. Instead of feigning outrage at the possibility of these
elements being geared towards a fictitious narrative, we should instead be notably critical
of how use of such elements risks, as Truth’s narrative does, producing the historical
figuration of the “black woman.” Rather than seriously providing a discourse for black
female subjectivity, Jacobs’s text, with its narrative devices of Christianity and
womanhood, almost does what Gage did for Truth’s narrative, mistranslate the
subjectivity of the black female implying an inadequate discourse. As we will see, the
only thing that delivers J acobs’s narrative from the abyss of womanness, which leads to a
sphere of womanlessness, is her time in the garret. These elements, dismissed by
Blassingame, indicate the ways in which the female slave narrative of the African

American tradition established the need for a continuous process of unnaming in the

cultural producton of black females.

 

57 See introduction to Charles H. Davis and Henry L. Gates Jr., eds. The Slave ’s Narrative (New
York: Oxford UP, 1985).

58See John W. Blassingame‘s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Anti-bellum South
(New York: Oxford UP, 1972) 32- 36.

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Unlike Truth, Jacobs, while still adhering to the traditional authenticating
documents of slave narratives (letters from white editors or abolitionists attesting to
truthfulness of the narrative) constructs her narrative through the artifices described by
Andrews. It is the more complicated issue of narrative strategies and authorial control
that uncovers why the process of unnaming will become a factor in the narratives of
black females. Blassingame’s problems with Jacobs’s melodramatic references to virtue,
unrequited love, and Christian ethics succinctly reveals Jacobs’s ability and need to
disrupt the logic of intelligible gender, as well as dismantle the logic of institutionalized
slavery and racism. Writers from Equiano and Douglass to Williams Wells Brown and
Harriet Jacobs cleverly manipulated American ideals and morals in texts, and they used
documents such as the bible and the US. Declaration of Independence to denounce the
horror of slavery.59 In those machinations of authenticating, placating, persuading, and
converting, lay distinguishing narrative strategies of an African American literary
tradition. Critics should always take into consideration the artfulness of narration in
exploring how racial and sexual violence is depicted in slave narratives. In understanding
how contemporary novelists continued and changed the examination of racial and sexual
violence from their forefathers, we must first examine slave narratives with an
understanding of authenticating documents and artfulness in mind. While we may never
know for sure if an author’s descriptions of such things served as rhetorical strategies to
convince their white readers of their likeness to them, we can for certain point out that the
fact that they needed to be concerned about such things indicates a problem that does not

get solved by writing one’s self into being. The issue of authorial control divulges the

 

59 Andrews. 76.

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conflict as to how one writes him or herself into being in the dominant discourse while
still remaining true to that self.

For Jacobs, as a black female slave, the devices and strategies she used to reach
her readers were the bible and the false ideologies of womanhood. Jacobs’s narrative,
though concerned with the reception of narrative, makes considerable reference to the
bible and ideologies of womanhood, and in the process, manipulates these same artifacts
to expose flaws of dominant discourse concerning the subjectivity of black females. The
narrative also demonstrates that authorial control functions differently in female slave
narratives versus male slave narratives. These minor ploys indicate the need for black
female writers to unname their subjectivity because even as the narrative may claim to be
“written by herself,” it is not free from the influences of a discourse of white supremacy.

Christianity serves as one mode of discourse in which Jacobs attempts to critically
evaluate herself while oppressed by the institution of slavery. Jacobs’s early subjectivity
and spirituality is shaped by her mother’s belief in Christianity. Very early in the
narrative, we see Jacobs refer to the conflicts of Christianity and slavery without
explicitly passing judgment. When her first mistress dies, the conflicts of spirituality and
subjectivity become clear:

After a brief period of suspense, the will of my mistress was read, and we
learned that she had bequeathed me to her sister’s daughter, a child of five
years old. So vanished our hopes. My mistress had taught me the
precepts of God’s Word: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
“Whatsoever ye would that me should do unto you, do ye so unto them.”

But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as

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neighbor. (344)
As Andrews claimed, Jacobs manipulates the bible for her strategic purposes. She
manages to use the rhetoric of the bible to criticize whites that believe that they are
practitioners of Christian moral and ethics. Repeatedly, Jacobs describes herself as
waiting for her prayers to be answered, for promises to be upheld, and for the word of
owners to be made good. She portrays herself as a good and faithful servant who never
formally admonishes whites for the institution of slavery, for fear of alienating her
readers. Yet, she continues to prove that even in the face of death, the conflicts between
subjectivity and spirituality go unresolved and are ignored by those engaged in human
bondage. Witnessing the death of a baby during a young slave’s child birthing, Jacobs
hears an ugly exchange between slave and mistress:

In her agony she cried out, “O Lord, come and take me!” Her mistress

stood by, and mocked at her like an incarnate field. “You suffer, do

you?” she exclaimed. “I am glad of it. You deserve it all, and more too.”

The girl’s mother said, “The baby is dead, thank God; and I hope my poor

child will soon be in heaven, too.”

“Heaven!” retorted the mistress. There is no such place for the likes of her

and her bastard. . (349)
When Jacobs witnesses this exchange, she files it with all the other minor incidents. In
this particular incident, Jacobs combines manipulation of religion and womanhood. In
most religions, motherhood is a sacred duty, but in bondage, that sacredness disappears.
The mistress takes no pity on her slave having lost a child because her “morals” have

been corrupted by slavery. J acobs’s use of the reference explores the innocence of the

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child with the contempt of the mistress. Again, Jacobs appears not to pass judgment on
any of her “superiors.” I bring up these contradictions in Christianity because it acts as
the dominant discourse that helps to shape Jacobs’s subjectivity and subsequent lack of
language for that subjectivity.

Jacobs uses familial relationships to make judgments” of slave-owners that she will
not make directly. Through the presentation of her grandmother, she presents the reader
with a shared commonality—dignified moral and ethics. For example, Jacobs positions
her grandmother as the great maternal believer and teacher of Christian ethics for their
“family.” Through the grandmother, Jacobs learns the morals she must appear to agree
with to be a good person. After her father’s death Jacobs explains, “My heart rebelled
against God, who had taken from me mother, father, mistress, and friend. The good
grandmother tried to comfort me. ‘Who knows the Ways of God?’ said she, ‘perhaps they

’9’

had been kindly taken from the evil days to come (345). Jacobs does not explicitly
covey sentiments of opposition to slavery or Christianity, but she juxtaposes her
grandmother’s dogmatic devotion to Christianity with the more critical words of her
brother to reveal anti-slavery ideas.

As the most critical narrative ploy, the relationship between Jacobs and her uncle
and brother (William and Ben), acts as a way to reveal the hypocrisy and fatalism of
Christianity in slavery. Jacobs later uses the words of Christian wisdom provided by her
grandmother in talking to her brother William, but she finds that he is not as easily

persuaded by the “comforting” words of Christianity. Upon noticing her brother looking

deathly in his depression over their status of slaves, she offers, “Take courage, Willie;

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brighter days will come by and by” (346). The earlier rejection of God is now replaced
with a “new” understanding, but her brother reproves her words:
“You don’t know anything about it Linda,” he replied. “We shall have to
stay here all our days; we shall never be free.” I argued that we were
growing older and stronger, and that perhaps we might, before long, be
allowed our own time, and then we could earn the money to buy our
freedom. William declared this was much easier to say than to do,
moreover, he did not intend to buy his freedom. We held daily
controversies upon this subject. (346)
Defining their discussions as controversy, Jacobs strategically undervalues the
significance of her brother’s critique. “Controversy” implies that the subject of assuming
that a slave has a right to freedom is inherently wrong. Jacobs seems to always be aware
of what her white audience might be thinking concerning the notion that slaves would
think or perceive of themselves as worthy of freedom. As William notes in his dismissal
of his sister, his freedom is not something that should be bought. Though this idea might
make perfect sense to slaves perceiving themselves as humans, Jacobs can’t assumes that
her readers will feel the same. At the same time, her innocent acceptance of the morals
of Christianity works to covertly position J acobs’s voice in the narrative. By claiming
these beliefs as the words of her brother, she can distance herself from the unwanted
accuracy of this view. She can imply a verdict without explicitly passing judgment.
Reading beyond the masking, Jacobs positions her early subjectivity as young and
ignorant so that her words are the less-threatening words of a young girl uninformed by

the ways of the world. She can readily accept the advice of Grandmother because she has

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yet to encounter “true” cruelties. Jacobs and her family cannot continue to survive the
inconsistencies of Christianity.

In a later elaboration on her family’s status as slaves, Jacobs recalls her
grandmother’s way of understanding and resolving their positions as objects: “My
grandmother had, as much as possible, been a mother to her orphaned children. . .Most
earnestly did she strive to make us feel the will of God: that he had seen fit to place us
under such circumstances, and though it seemed hard, we ought to pray for contentment”
(351). J aCobs exhibits no desire for debating her grandmother’s position, but unlike the
previous references, Jacobs now reveals an accumulated wisdom about the circumstances
of a slave’s life that she had not possessed earlier: “It as a beautiful faith, coming from a
mother who could not call her children her own. But I, and Benjamin, her youngest boy,
condemned it” (351). Yet, when Jacobs says that she condemns it, it is not in the same
way as her brother. As a way to placate or lessen the sting of her comments about
condemning Grandmother’s faith, she says, “While I advised him to be good and
forgiving I was not unconscious of the beam in my own eye. It was the very knowledge
of my own short- comings that urged me to retain, if possible, some sparks of my
brother’s God-given nature. . .The war of my life had begun; and though one of God’s
most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered” (353). Not only does Jacobs
participate in self-criticism to undermine what some might perceive as her arrogance and
rebelliousness, she defines the rebelliousness of her brother as something given by God.
Manipulation of the doctrines of free-will in Christianity exposes that Benjamin’s will to

be free is a holy right denied by unholy men. Although Jacobs never rejects Christianity,

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she does begin to reject the oppressive way slaveholders use it; and in doing so, she
begins to critically probe its use in her life as a slave.

It is here again that Jacobs uses her uncle to counter the subservient attitude of her
Grandmother’s religious dogma. After being caught in an attempt to escape the bondages
of slavery in the North, Benjamin is returned to Dr. Flint. The quarrels between
Grandmother and Benjamin project Jacobs’s own conflict. Jacobs writes about her
grandmother’s reaction to his trying to escape: “She asked if he did not also think of
God. I fancied I saw his face growing fierce in the moonlight. He answered, “No I did
not think of him. When a man is hunted like a wild beast he forgets there is a God, a
heaven. He forgets everything in his struggle to get beyond the reach of the
bloodhounds” (356). Jacobs expresses how blacks who might wish to follow the creeds
of Christianity cannot do so as long as they are bonded and considered property.

Jacobs’s consistent use of Christianity as a narrative device she has to manipulate in order
to convince her reader of anti-slavery arguments, and her argument of herself as a human
being, is the first indicator as to why the process of unnaming is necessary for black
females. The second narrative device, treatment of the ideologies of womanhood,

plays a greater role in signifying why black female writers must seek, first and foremost
in their texts, an unnaming of the “black woman.”

Blassingame’s systematic revulsion on the issue of sentimental or romantic love
indicates this failure to recognize the significance of these issues as a narrative device
used by Jacobs to differentiate the female slave narrative from the male narrative. The
most proficient way of doing so is to explore the virtues of woman and how they apply to

black female slaves. Of course, J acobs’s early focus on Christianity in the narrative

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establishes a credible claim that Jacobs represents the essential characteristics for a
virtuous female. If slave women have virtue, then this means immoral men attack or rape
the women. This is not to suggest that Jacobs accepts the cult of womanhood. ' Because
she remains so aware of her audience, she recognizes how vital a strategy the cult and its
ideologies become in persuading readers. In a recounting of one specific experience,
Jacobs exposes the irony of claiming literacy as a goal and pregeneric myth of the slave
woman’s narrative. Notably, Jacobs does not have to resort to trickery to lean to read and
write, but she resorts to trickery to keep intact her “virtuous femininity.” She relies on
the belief in the illiteracy of slaves to thwart her master’s sexual exploitation. She
constantly faces the threat of rape by her white master, Dr. Flint:
One day he caught me teaching myself to write. He frowned, as if he was
not well pleased; but I suppose he came to the conclusion that such an
accomplishment might help to advance his favorite scheme. Before long,
notes were often slipped into my hand. . .I would return them saying, “I
can’t read them, sir”. . .“Can’t you?” he replied; then I must read them to
you.” (365)
At this point in the narrative, Jacobs has already established the threat of sexual rape from
her master. She makes it quite evident that, as a good Christian female, she not only has
to worry about the threat of rape, but she must also fear her mistress’s perception of these
sexual transgressions. Both the mistress and the master identify their female slave as
lacking morals and humanity. J acobs’s previous focus on Christianity in her life
establishes a record of morals that the readers can see. When Flint questions her ability to

read, the “quest” to read is denied and rejected so that she can ignore the sexual advances

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of her master. As presented earlier, Jacobs, a house slave, learns to read because of
lessons acquired from her first mistress, and this in turn means that she must use trickery
to hide this fact. Therefore, Jacobs’s quest concerns itself with sexuality and subjectivity,
rather than literacy. Trickery in reference to literacy in the male narrative, related to
Eshu’s trickery as divine translator/linguist, is denied in the female slave narrative.
Jacobs’s acts of trickery parallels Mawu’s god-acts of self-creation in order to accomplish
the human feat of self-determination.

We can best see how the issue of authorial control reveals the failure of dominant
discourse to grapple with the subjectivity of black females occurs in Jacobs’s
manipulative use of the characteristics that dictate womanhood. After conclusively
showing how Dr. Flint makes unwanted, sometimes violent, sexual advancement towards
her, Jacobs moves from discussing the rape of the female slave to positing that the slave
has a will to love. In a sentimental gesture, the kind that infuriates Blassingame, Jacobs
asks her reader, “Why does the slave ever love? Why allow the tendrils of the heart to
twine around objects which at any moment may be wrenched away by the hand of
violence” (369). Throughout the narrative, Jacobs moves from the virtues and elements
of womanhood to notions of sentimental and romantic love. Jacobs uses
sentimental/romantic love as a device to emphasize how slavery deprives her of the most
basic human freedom—the attempt to love and be loved by one of her own choosing.
Flint clearly denies her every right to any type of free will, be it love or physical freedom.

When Jacobs “falls in love” with a free man of color, both her mistress and master
object to the “courtship.” Their objection stems from the rules of property. An inanimate

object, property, can’t love. In their eyes, to grant Jacobs a marriage ceremony is akin to

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calling her human. Once Jacobs asks for permission to many, Dr. Flint explains, “Well,
I’ll soon convince you whether I am your master, or the nigger fellow you honor so
highly” (371). Dr. Flint’s statement indicates his view of marriage as another institution
established to preserve the status of white males. He assumes that the institution of
slavery takes precedence over the marriage institution for blacks. Jacobs herself
understands that slaves and free blacks attempting to practice or adhere to the sacraments
of marriage seems oxymoronic:
Again and again I revolved in my mind how all this would end. There was
no hope that the doctor would consent to sell me on any terms. . ..My lover
was an intelligent and religious man. Even if he could have obtained
permission to marry me while I was a slave, the marriage would give him
no power to protect me from my master. . .then, if we had children. I knew
they “must follow the condition of the mother.” (371)
In revealing the desire to love, Jacobs can create another bond with readers of the
narrative who believe in marriage as the ultimate fulfillment of “romantic love.” For
Jacobs to pursue a focus on sentimental love, versus the idea of marriage as an institution
for the exploitation of women, would specifically appeal to white women of the early
women’s movement who believed wholeheartedly in a redefinition of the concept of
marriage as a less financial and property based.
The earlier devices of romantic love serve only as precursors to the ideologies of
womanhood (white) that Jacobs exploits for her purposes in this narrative. Consequently,

in discussing her own subjectivity with respect to the ideal attainment of “woman,”

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J acobs’s narrative can’t help but document the inconsistency between the two and-the

failure of Western dominant discourses to translate her:
But, 0, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood,
who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes
are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too
severely. . .I wanted to keep myself pure; and under the most adverse
circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was
struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon of slavery. (384)

Jacobs caters to her readers by implicitly asking them not to judge her, and she
makes the reader aware that she has broken a cardinal moral rule—pre-marital sex.
Nonetheless, she explicitly explores how her legal status as property sets her on an
altogether different path of morality. As she formulates it, she isn’t evil personified, but
the institution of slavery is the monster responsible for whatever beast she becomes. By
constantly spotlighting her inclination for love, chastity, purity, innocence, and “self-
respect,” Jacob proves all the more the humanity of the slave “woman.” Yet, in the midst
of her catering to womanhood is to be located the struggle for black female subjectivity,
and the inconsistencies of Jacobs’s narrative are where we will find the author moving
beyond her white middle class readership to question her own subjectivity.

Again, it is unclear as to whether Jacobs actually buys into these ideologies of
white womanhood, virtues, and morals because frankly there are some contradictory
actions in the narrative. Can we really believe any of the narrator’s words when her
reasoning about virtue, marriage, and romantic love does not match her actions? While

Jacobs pursues marriage with a free black man, and verbally rejects and opposes her

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master’s desires, it all seems geared towards foreshadowing the sexual relationship a
fifteen-year old Jacobs will have with an older white male suitor. Whether Jacobs
actually believes in the cult of womanhood or romantic love is up for debate. Though she
proclaims to strive hard to maintain her virginity, it becomes very clear that she views her
sexuality as a way to exert independence during her time of bondage. In discussing her
relationship with the new lover, Jacobs speaks forcefully of free will and choice:
I knew the impassable gulf between us; but to be an object of interest to
a man who is not married, and who is not her master, is agreeable to the
pride and feelings of a slave, if her miserable situation has left her any
pride or sentiment. It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to
submit to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a
lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness
and attachment. A master may treat you as he pleases, and you dare not
speak... (385)
This statement is revolutionary not only for a black female slave, but for any female in
the nineteenth century where women (white) were still considered property. To what
school of womanhood does Jacobs belong, leading her to believe that such things are
rights? Though somewhat akin to the status of white women in marriage, Jacobs’s status
as a female slave has decidedly shaped her concept of the freedoms a female should
enjoy. The retelling of this particular situation in J acobs’s slave autobiography is
perplexing. One wonders how Jacobs, a black female slave, perceives that she has any

choice or control over any white men who might be interested in her. Does she, in fact,

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enjoy free will with this particular white male, or is this simply another narrative device
to persuade her readers about the rightness of her argument.

Authorial control becomes even more complicated when we return to her desire to
marry a free black man. Both marriage and slavery project themselves as institutions of
white patriarchal supremacy systems working to maintain the status of white males.
Jacobs’s affinity to participate in either institution seems suspiciously linked to her
strategy of appeasing her white female readers and white male abolitionists. As evident
from her attempt to marry and her “choice” to take a lover, she quite possibly did not see
marriage as anything more than two people of color sharing love and equal status as free
blacks, and her relationship as a mutual agreement to give in to attractions. It seems that
Jacobs has two ideals relating to her female status: the one she knows white America
believes in and the one she has conceived through her status a black slave in the New
World. Consequently, in referring to her earlier argument about choosing whom to love,
Jacobs understands the complexity of the argument she formulates, and so as not to
frighten her readers she explains, “There may be SOphistry in all this; but the condition of
the slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact renders the practice of them
impossible” (385). The radical way that Jacobs envisions man and woman stems from
her status as a slave in which, as Davis noted in an earlier discussion, males and females
shared the same status/position. Jacobs has insights about the status of women that
perhaps she should not have. She reduces her “extremist” view of male/female
relationships to confusion because she is well aware that her ideals conflict with Christian
moral and principles for women, but also because they conflict with societal discourses

on the treatment of women. Jacobs knows about the tenements for womanhood, but she

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certainly casts doubt as to whether she really believes in such ideas: “Still, in looking
back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel the slave woman ought not to be judged by
the same standard as others” (386). This particular statement reveals the subjectivity of
the black female, and it also implies that other discourses are needed to discuss the
subjectivity and status of the black female, enslaved or free.

Further, the one resonant voice for the moral codes for women remains J acobs’s
grandmother, rather than Jacobs herself. Upon learning that her granddaughter has been
fomicating, she exclaims, “ ‘0 Linda! Has it come to this. I had rather see you dead than
to see you as you are now. You are a disgrace to your dead mother.’ She tore away from
my fingers my mother’s wedding ring and her silver thimble. ‘Go away. . .and never come
to my house, again’ ” (387). Oddly, Jacobs grandmother seems to be ashamed of her
granddaughter, not because she had sexual relations with a white man, but because she
did not stick to the established criterion of woman. Though the grandmother shows
distinct disappointment in learning of Jacobs’s loss of virginity, the reference to the
wedding ring, reminds us of the symbolic importance of the ring, which, as Jacobs has
shown, does not apply to slaves. J acobs’s grandmother, who preaches the doctrines of
Christianity, hopes that one day her granddaughter will take part in the institution of
marriage, and she could only do that by saving herself for her husband. The wedding
ring that the grandmother removes from J acobs’s finger would never be able to protect
the young female slave from the sexual advances of her master. For Jacobs, the ring
serves as a symbolic connection to her dead mother, but for the grandmother the ring
holds a connection to the ideals and codes of womanhood that both she and her

granddaughter must work to attain.

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J acobs’s act of writing the narrative is indicative of trickster subjectivity in the
black female literary tradition. She is not writing the narrative to become “Negro,” but to
define her black femaleness. The failure of language to discuss J acobs’s subjectivity can
be seen through the reflective analysis of the authorial voice and control, and her
awareness of her audience. Jacobs’s masked resistance to the discourses of Christianity
and womanhood leads to her eventual loophole of retreat, the garret. Like her brother,
she must find a way to see herself, her humanity, and her spirit while being threatened
with rape and beatings. If Jacob does not wish to be a slave, then she must begin to
critically examine the discourse and institutions to which she adheres. Although she does
not consciously set out to do this, her actions indicate a need for the space to do so.

In the chapter entitled, “The Loophole of Retreat,” readers can experience
J acobs’s attempt to examine the restrictive spaces of her black female body during her
seven-year confinement to the garret, where she retreats to escape the continuous
advances of Dr. Flint and the other horrors of slavery. Jacobs calls the garret a loophole
of retreat because she briefly escapes the bondage of slavery, but her retreat also
represents a botched maneuvering to unname herself. Critics-Michelle Bumham and
Samira Kawash, have debated the significance of the garret to Jacobs’s subject status and
her narrative. Burnham sees the garret/loophole as “a site of resistance” and a
“simultaneous inscription and transgression of the law of slavery (such that) she is able to
reverse the master-slave power relation” (102). However,'in Dislocating the Color Line
(1997), Samira Kawash re-reads the chapter of Jacobs’s narrative, asserting that “the
garret is purchased at the price of loss of the authorized self ”(74). Kawash sees no act of

resistance in J acobs’s retreat. She asserts:

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The elsewhere of the 100phole is not an actual place where Jacobs might
safely live beyond the reach of slavery. It is at great physical and mental
cost that she remains in the garret. J acobs’s descriptions of her
experience are punctuated by the progressive atrophy and deterioration of
her body. The lack of air, the lack of space, and the ravages of the seasons
make her conscious of her body and its continued discomfort. (77)
J acobs’s retreat may not involve an act of resistance or empowerment, but Kawash’s
evaluation that Jacobs’s time in the garret creates the loss of authorized self is
contentious. Was it really possible for Jacobs to have an authorized self in the institution
of slavery? Jacobs’s retreat to the garret signifies the lack of a language for her
subjectivity. It is not until she is in the garret that she begins to openly formulate the
notion that she is neither slave nor woman. Even as the garret exists outside the realm of
the real world, it does become a safe space for Jacobs: “It seemed horrible to sit or lie in
a cramped position day after day, without one gleam of light. Yet, I would have chosen
this, rather than my lot as a slave” (438), and later when she discusses the garret she
acknowledges that “yet, there was no place that existed, that could have afforded me so
good a place of concealment” (440). Even before she is legally free, Jacobs understands
that escaping Dr. Flint will not necessarily lead her to freedom or an authorized self.
After a few months in the garret, Jacobs no longer sees it as a retreat but as a
prison. Nevertheless, as Jacobs reveals, the garret serves to make her aware of her
authorized self in a way she could not realize through the dominant language of
Christianity: “ I tried to be thankful for my little cell . . . Sometimes I thought God was a

compassionate Father, who would forgive my sins. . .At other times, it seemed to me that

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there was no mercy or justice to the divine government. . .These things took the shape of
mystery, which is to this day not so clear to my soul as I trust it will be hereafter” (445).
It is in the garret that Jacobs realizes the profound complication of her body and
subjectivity. In the garret, the body must reconfigure itself, bend, and manipulate its
construction to subject itself to the safe space, and Jacobs sees not only her body doing
this but her spirit (subjectivity) as well. Outside of the garret, she could continuously
follow Christian dogma like her grandmother, but within the garret she begins to
articulate what an authorized self might be like. She learns that if she were truly a subject
then she would not need to hide, bend, or reconfigure herself to fit in a space. She
understands, rather, that her aim would be to change the space around her. In an earlier
description of her choice to become the lover of a white man, Jacobs tries to changes the
space around her; but that endeavor appears flawed because a black female slave has little
freedom of choice when approached by any white man. In the end, the garret seems to
offer the best solution to finding a discourse for her trickster subjectivity—one that does
not fit into the social constructs of masculine/feminine and man/woman.

While Jacobs’s actions of avoidance, retreat, and hiding from Dr. Flint’s attacks
are very trickster-like, I choose instead to focus on her subjectivity in the garret. Her
actions of hiding are illusory, deceptive, and cunning, but her subjectivity is already that
of a trickster. Jacobs reveals that the longer she stays in the garret, the more cunning Dr.
Flint becomes and the more cunning she has to become to evade him:

Dr. Flint had not given me up. Every now and then he would say to my
grandmother that I would yet come back, and voluntarily surrender

myself, and that when I did I could be purchased by my relatives or

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anyone who wished to buy me. ...I resolved to match my cunning against

his cunning. In order to make him believe that I was in New York, I

resolved to write him a letter dated from that place. (448)
Jacobs’s narrative reveals that she is capable of trickery, but it also divulges that her
person outside the garret is not a person but property, and that inside the garret she is
something else. Although she may understand her subjectivity better than she did upon
entering the garret, we must acknowledge the justice of Kawash’s claim that “if the
loophole is an escape, it is not a triumph. Jacobs as a fugitive cannot be reduced to
property, but neither can she avail herself to the securities of person” (77). The conflicts
of Jacobs securing herself as a person is revealed as Jacobs discusses the laws and Dr.
Flint: “Yet the laws allowed him to be out in the free air, while I, guiltless of crimes, was
pent up here. . .”(443). Despite that Jacobs has been successful in hiding from Flint, he
remains victorious in affecting J acobs’s subjectivity.

Kawash’s argument that Jacobs undergoes a loss of authorized self rests on the
legal language of property rights, and she buys into ideologies that this language, which
does not apply to the female slave, is the only language that can lead Jacobs to freedom
and subjectivity. However, we should understand that the law and the language of
property rights are ideological state apparatuses. Arguably, as Jacobs constantly
mentions the merits of womanhood and Christian morals, it becomes clear that in these
discourses she does not have an authorized self outside the garret. Thus, Jacobs does not
lose her sanctioned self in the garret for the ISA of property rights never acknowledged
her at all. Kawash’s analysis may also be challenged since after Jacobs is free from

slavery, she is still the property of someone else through the institution of marriage.

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Furthermore, when we look beyond Jacobs’s enslavement, physical freedom of slavery
accords no rights or inclination towards a more authorized self. The intrusive presence of
Jacobs’s narrative strategies to guide her white readers through their turmoil of
consciousness as they read her narrative suggests all the more that an authorized black
female self is impossible in any of the dominant discourses of Western cultures. This is
why the concept of Jacobs writing herself into being is not applicable, because like Truth,
the narrative will always be aware of the white gaze. The self that is authorized is
authorized by the white gaze rather than her own.

In concluding her narrative, Jacobs learns that the concepts of woman and gender
impede her quests for freedom in a number of ways: “Reader, my story ends with
freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free. We are as
free from the power of the slave holders as are the white people of the north; and though
that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal” (513). There are many
implications in this brief passage. If the pre-generic myths and the quests of Jacobs’s
narrative were the same as Douglass’s, why would she end her narrative in such an
ambiguous and depressing tone? It seems particularly striking that her story ends with
freedom through marriage. By exclaiming her freedom is not obtained in the usual way
and tied to marriage, Jacobs implies that her gender, at this time, in no way allows her to
enjoy privileges that free black males might receive—she is a wife to serve them.
Further, she is not afforded the ideas of womanhood because of her race. Jacobs says as
much as she can about her liminal state of freedom. Like a trickster, hiding in the garret
permits Jacobs to place herself outside time and space. The garret teaches her that in

order to be fully empowered she must exist in liminal spaces, and liminality will

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eventually help her to recognize that true freedom is beyond dominant discourses of the
West. At the end of J acobs’s work, the authenticator of her narrative, Amy Post, divulges
that Jacobs expressed disgust at someone paying the monetary price for her freedom.
Jacobs claims that the purchase robs her of any victory. Her reaction fully expresses the
failure of language to fully comprehend her subjectivity beyond that of Negro woman.
The payment for her body enables society to define her subjectivity as a slave and “black
woman.”

Black female writers and critics are faced with the same dilemma when it comes
to theoretical discourse today. The key is to find a paradigm that will allow us to
construct discourse and subjectivity from an empowering state of liminality. Kawash’s
reading of the loophole uses legal language to read the loophole of retreat; my reading
moves beyond the legal rhetoric of the chapter to examine the spiritual rhetoric and
symbolic trickster actions of Jacobs in the loophole so as to qualify her subjectivity. As
documented by Truth and Jacobs, the experiences of black females slaves defied the
traditional logic of gender constructs. Jacobs’s time in the garret and her insistence that it
is. a retreat signifies the future of things to come for black women’s texts. The garret
symbolizes the need for space outside the subjectivity of the “black woman” myth. The
need for the space of the garret becomes a repetitive motif and a tropological revision in
black female literature. Ironically, it is not the action of retreat into the loophole that gets
revised, but the space of the garret and its influence on subjectivity. Although Jacobs’s
time in the garret may not be a retreat or an empowering loophole for freedom, it does act
as a safe place and provides a way for Jacobs to see that she must find a way to begin

unnaming herself.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Zora Neale Hurston: A Transition From (Un)Naming to Unnamin g

Jes’ ‘cause women folk ain’t got no big muscled arms and

fists lak jugs, folks claim they's weak vessels, but dass uh lie.
dat piece of red flannel she got hung between her joints is equal
tuh all de fists God ever made and man ever seen.

John Pearson—Mules and Menéo

While Jacobs and Truth illustrate how the evolution of black females hinges on
foundations of liminality, they could not reveal the most effective ways to maintain that
liminality. They could not unname themselves. That endeavor would go to the
descendants of Jacobs and Truth, Zora Neale Hurston and specific women of a black
female literary renaissance. Despite the publication of nineteenth-century novels, Medga
(1891) and Four Girls at Cottage City (1898) by Emma Dunham Kelley, and Frances
Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), the rhetoric of womanhood and the social construct of gender
remained undisturbed.“ During the early twentieth-century, novels such as Pauline
Hopkins Contending Forces (1900), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing
(1929), Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) and The Chinaberry Tree (1931) presented
female characters who attempted to (un)name themselves, that is unname to rename, by
attempting to fit into the models of womanhood prevalent during the time. It is only with

the works of Zora Neale Hurston, and those who follow her lead that we begin to notice

 

6° Hurston, 33

6’ These novels presented black female characters engaged in “civil” social-activism and
domesticated roles of dutiful wife and mother in prosperous post-slavery black communities. The
characters regarded the morals of Christianity as sacred and essential to their obedience to God, man, and
their community.

the fabricated block of gender being disassembled by a savvy use of Black Diasporc oral
traditions for the process of unnaming.62

This chapter proposes that certain black female writers eventually employ a
‘technique reminiscent of Mawu the trickster, the process of unnaming, as a way to
express their Mawu-Lisa subjectivity and make others understand the narrative
techniques and strategies that they use in self-invention. In chapter two, I claimed that
the tensions about gender in the African American community must be understood in
order to adequately evaluate gender, folklore, tricksters, and the vernacular. The need
for unnaming in African American texts is a simple way of addressing the issue of
subjectivity and gender in the African American community. However, the process of
unnaming happens in a number of ways in African American women’s texts, and this
process is carried out via oral, folk, and vernacular strategies shaped by the experiences
of black females based on the tensions of a lost egaltarian community. Once we
recognize the need for unnaming in black female texts, it becomes much easier to
corroborate Barbara Christian’s theory as to whether the African American female
community has distinct language practices because of their disconcerting subjectivity.

The work of sociolinguist, Marcyliena H. Morgan, becomes pivotal in re-
conceptualizing discussions of black female language. In her essay, “No Woman No
Cry: Claiming African American Women’s Place,” Morgan finds that “because language

is a social act, research on language constitutes social and cultural production that‘is

 

’52 All of these novels contemplated the existence of the black females after slavery. The novels
addressed issues such as black female representation and identity. Notably, a number of the characters in
these novels attempt to escape to a garret—like place in the form of racially passing as white females.

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influenced by issues of race, sexuality, class and power.”63 She later continues,
“Consequently, African American women’s issues are hyperrnarginalized and are
considered typical neither of all women’s issues (because the women who face them are
Black) nor of Black issues (because the blacks who face them are women). It is not
surprising, then, that all linguists—whether they include, marginalize, or fetishize Black
women—always at some level, take a position.”64 The lack of research on black female
cultural communities, especially the speech communities and language practices, has
hindered the readings of texts by black females.

However, the process of unnaming calls for specific language practices and uses
that reflect the subjectivity of black females. In “Indirectness and Interpretation in
African American Women’s Discourse,” Morgan contrasts the speech practices of white
women and black females as a way to explore the implications of indirectness and
interpretation following the affect on African American women’s language. Using
Morgan’s work, we can move further and discuss indirectness because of gender, as well
as race. More conceivable than Christian’s early claim, Morgan implies how we might
come to understand why there might be distinctions in African American women’s
language use:

I describe the life of a slave in the US. as one where all civil rights were
denied as well as the right to demonstrate any of the attributes of

responsible adults: grown men and women were treated as children. As

 

63 “No Woman No Cry: Claiming African American Women’s Place” in Re-inventing Identities:

The Gendered Self in Discourse. eds., Mary Bucholtz. A.C. Liang, Laurel Sutton. (New York: Oxford UP.
1999). 26-42. Also see Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis’s “Standing up and Speaking Out: African American’s
Women’s Narrative Legacy. Discourse and Society 2: 425-437, Michelle Foster’s “Are You With Me?:
Power and Solidarity in the Discourse of African American Women.” Gender Articulated: Language and
the Socially Constructed Self. eds., Kira Hall and Mary Bulchoz (New York: Routledge, 1995) 329-50.

64 Morgan, 28.

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part of the resistance to this “slave reality,” an alternate reality developed
amongst slaves which allowed them to express a positive self-view as men
and women capable of responsibility and control. This hidden, yet, self-
affirrning belief was a conscious attempt to provide alternatives that could
exist and thrive within the confines of social reality. (423)
Though Morgan does not specifically address her analysis to black female language but
to the whole of the African American community, the overall logic of her argument
carries over into research on black female language culture and practices. Morgan
discusses the idea that slaves in the US. created a counter-language to overcome the
hegemonic discourse of them as simpletons. This counter-language also explains the
importance of indirectness and signifying in the African American vernacular. Logically,
if an entire slave community could create a counter-language to battle a fictional ideology
of themselves, could not African American women do the same. This is the most
significant point of Morgan’s article. A counter-language for black females to battle the
fictional ideologies of themselves is exactly what Truth and Jacobs wanted and needed
but never found.

Black women’s language use and practices are influenced by their historical and
daily experiences. Folk and vernacular traditions become the ultimate mechanism of
unnaming the black woman and revealing these language practices. In the following
close readings, I argue that the distinctness of black female culture comes in the woman’s
decision to consistently use the oral, folk, and vernacular to construct her language
practices in a way that reflects, as was the case with Mawu-Lisa and Annie Christmas,

the tensions stemming from her disruptive subjectivity. Hence, uses of the folk, oral, and

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vernacular serve as strategic markers of rememberance of the fact that she is not “the
black woman” and a reinstitution of social and aesthetic implications of an unsexed
African American community—a liminality that disrupts the dominant norms of society.
Similar to Morgan’s account of a counter language, M.K. Halliday’s Language as Social
Semiotic: TheSocial Interaction of Language and Meaning (1978) describes an anti-
language occurring in institutions such as that of slavery, noting that anti-language is:
the means of realization of a subjective reality: not merely expressing it,
but actively creating and maintaining it. In this respect, it is just another
language. But then the reality is a counter-reality, and this has certain
special implications. It implies the foregrounding of the social structure
and social hierarchy. It implies a special occupation with the definition
and defense of identity through the ritual functioning of the social
hierarchy. It implies a special conception of information and knowledge.
(172)
In referring back to the Mawu-paradi gm, language and the trickery of Legba cannot
emerge without the tensions between Mawu and Legba. Likewise, African American
forms of signifying develop as a way to keep under wraps the true meaning of blacks’
speech and language, a characteristic of slaves and post-emancipated blacks. Morgan
notes that “it was necessary for ex-slaves to continue the expression of the dual reality,
long after the formal institution of slavery was dismantled” (423). The predicament of
African American women, then, is not just to be evasive with white people but to also use

language to evade the tensions of gender and male domination in the black community.

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The tensions about gender in the African American community are the reality, but these
tensions give rise to a counter-reality.

According to Halliday, counter-reality becomes a communication system
sustained by an agreed upon false reality projected by a dominant party over another
party.65 For example, if slaves were constructed as ignorant and primitive, then this
“reality” can support and justify the institution of slavery as a much-needed care-taking
of blacks in the New World. The false discourse acts as the counter-reality as opposed to
. the reality that blacks were not primitive or ignorant. Counter-reality, then, as it applies
to gender in the black community, finds its agreed upon false reality in gender constructs
that privilege males because they are biologically and socially superior to females. This
subjective reality also constructs language practices according to the counter reality. In
the black community, Euro-centric gender constructs are revealed to be a subjective
reality, hence a counter-reality for blacks in the new world. The special implications that
Halliday mentions, for gender, means that language practices would work to defend the
identity created by the counter-reality. For black males, that could mean accepting the
dominant discourses on gender, or ignoring conflicts resulting from them altogether.
However, the task becomes more complicated for the black female.

Reflective of Davis and Collins’s work based on the assumption that the social
structure and hierarchy that would be foregrounded is an egalitarian one, tensions emerge
for black female subjects engaged in cultural production because they must work from
the reality, rather than the counter-reality. Black females must create language practices
that subvert the general subjective model of gender. As the counter-reality runs opposite

to the reality that biologically, economically, and socially, the construction of gender in

 

65 Halliday, 171.

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black culture and society changes due to black female subjectivity, so too do language
communities reflect that redistribution. Black females construct their language and
discourses aware of the tensions-the counter-reality. This is why the process of
unnaming is important; it helps black females to avert the restraints of the counter-reality
and take on the tensions of created by it.

In The Assertive Woman in Zora Neale Hurston ’s Fiction, Folklore, and Drama,
Pearlie Mae Fisher Peters (1998) sets forth several questions about the way Hurston uses
folklore for her women characters: “Can she talk effectively or does she appear to be a
mealy-mouth rag doll? What are the detailed and intricate workings of her verbal portrait
in encounters with a man, a trusted confidant, or a fierce rival?” (7). In answering these
questions, we come to understand all the more that Hurston employs folklore and oral
traditions of Black Americans to begin reworking the historical figuration of mythology
left by the legacy of Truth, and she takes up the quest of finding a discourse for black
female subjectivity in her collectionof folklore Mules and Men (1935). Hurston, with
her understanding and appreciation of folklore, demonstrates the earliest efforts of how to
maintain an empowering liminal state, and continuously unname the “black woman” so
as to disturb the intelligible logic of gender. Hurston’s Mules and Men, originally
published in 1935, disappeared and was later reprinted in 1978. Its lengthy out-of—print
status serves as a testament to the undervalued work of a woman folklorist. Furthermore,
Roger Abrahams’s “Negotiating Respect: Patterns of Presentation among Black
. Women,” provides ample evidence of how gender has been misunderstood or dismissed.
Forty-years after the publication of Mules and Men, Abrahams claimed: “...how women

assert their image and values is seldom found in folklore literature. We know even less

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about the verbal traditions of black women in particular” (58). Perhaps this counter-

reality is why he, at one time, deemed black oral artforms such as the dozens and
signifying as a specifically male oral form.66
However, Mules and Men, a collection of folktales, hoodoo rituals and tales, and
conjure stories, presents the reader with more than enough knowledge about the verbal
traditions of black women. Hurston’s collection is important for two reasons: its
awareness of race and its inclusion of gender. Hurston expresses her understanding of
how race dynamics can hinder collection of black folklore:
Folk-lore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where
there are the least outside influences. . .And the Negro, in spite of his
open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive...
that is we let the probe enter, but it never gets out. (5)
Hurston takes into consideration race, and she uses her shared racial heritage to gain
access and full disclosure of black communal oral culture in a way that other white
folklorists could not have done before her. Ironically, Hurston does not explicitly
mention the way gender figures into the collection of folklore. Yet, Hurston’s collection
reveals that women who have the least outside influences, in this case male influences,
can provide a wealth of knowledge about black female verbal tradition. Mules and Men
expresses several ways of including and thinking about gender and folklore.
Hurston’s collection of folklore provides an ample amount of material focused
on women and the needs of women. Hurston explicitly records her collection process.
After listening to Charlie deliver a tale about “how the church came to be split up,”

Hurston’s text, attentive to detail, documents how black males and females in the early

 

‘6 Roger Abraham’s Deep Down in the Jungle (Chicago: Aldine Publishing. 1970)

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19005 enjoyed ritual storytelling together, rather than separated by gender as perceived
by Abrahams: “There was a storm of laughter following Charlie’s tale. ‘Zora, you come
talkin’ bout puttin’ de two churches together and not havin’ but one in dis town,’ Ametta
said chidingly. ‘You know better’n dat’ ” (31). Amette’s chiding of Hurston is not a
hesitant moment of uncertainty. It fully acknowledges a comfortable space for black
female subjects. She does not wait to be asked or given permission to speak by Charlie
or any other males. She willingly interjects her voice, and her knowledge of religious
culture and folk etiquette (“you know better’n dat”) into the communal conversation.

In a discussion directly following this particular exchange, the language practices
of black females become more complex. An argument occurs between a dark-skinned
black male, Gene, and a light-skinned black male, Gold: “Then Gold spoke up and said,
‘Now, lemme tell one. Ah know one about a man as black as Gene’ and Gene replies,
‘What you always crackin on me for?...Ah ain’t a bit blacker than you’ ”(31). The men
begin a serious engagement with the dozens reflecting the sensitive subject matter of
color consciousness in the black community. Gene insults Gold by arguing, “Well,
anyhow, Gold, youse blacker than me. If I was as fat as you Ah’d be a yaller man” (31).
Before allowing the dozens session to escalate into violence, Hurston notes: “Amette
soothed Gold’s feelings and stopped the war” (31). Amette has the ability to maintain
her voice in the ritual storytelling, but she is also capable of influencing the direction of
it.

Hurston’s omission of specifically revealing how Amette pacifies Gold’s feelings
seems strategic in terms of the presence of a counter-reality of gender in the African

American community. Hurston, and the women who provide oral tales for the

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collection, practice Morgan’s two major characteristics of black female language '
communities: “pointed indirectness—when a speaker says something to someone that is
either of no relevance to current or prior contexts, and/or not obvious from the
prepositional content and (ii) baited indirectness—when a speaker says something
general which is taken by the audience to be specific or addressed to someone because of

contextual evidence.”67

While indirectness of discourse has been a primary element of
the black art of signifying, the dozens, and sounding, Morgan’s most crucial point to this
study is that baited indirectness “focuses on the features and attributes of a referent and
implies that those features are also shared by the target who is among hearers and

overhearers. . .baiting is an act (sign) of intentionality.”68

As signifying may rely on
racially motivated understanding of the oral culture to obtain meaning, Morgan’s
definition of baited indirectness seems significant for an understanding of gendered
culture, in addition to race. If African American females use folk and vernacular as
strategies of baited indirectness and pointed indirectness, then only other African
American females would know it. Hurston indirectly mentions Amette’s pointed
indirectness.

If we recall Amette’s light reprimand of Hurston, there is a sense of a Specific
community informing the collections. Amette remains aware of the dilemmas of black
masculinity, and being aware, she can say something that will soften the verbal blows
between the two men. We should wonder, not only how she does it, but if the men, Gold

and Gene, are aware of how she kept a game of the dozens from turning into an all out

brawl.

 

67 “Indirectness and Interpretation.” 440.

63 Morgan. 430—431

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Hurston’s collection provides the remedy for creating a continuous process of
unnaming to resist the most dangerous historical figuration of mythology—that of the
black woman. Mules and Mens documents how black females can create verbal
traditions to parallel their liminal subjectivity akin to Mawu-Lisa. Hurston documents
how black female awareness of such tensions is to be found in Amette’s discursive
practices, as well as that of other women: “ ‘Oh, yes, womens is got sense too,’ Mathilda
Mosley jumped in. ‘But they got too much sense to go round braggin’ bout it like y’all
do. De lady folks always got de advantage of mens. ” (33). As indicated earlier, the
counter-reality of gender in the black community shapes and privileges the language
practices of black males. Mathilda’s assessment of this practice as bragging reveals the
power and privilege derived from the counter-reality. Mathilda’s statement suggests that
black females have reason to employ a counter-language in expressing themselves and
their culture that are specifically dictated by gendered positions.

Clearly, Mathilda indirectly baits her husband into a response. When B. Moseley
responds to his wife’s claim that women always have the advantage over men, he quickly
makes use of the intelligible logic of gender—the counter reality to thwart her
assessment: “Whut ole black advantage is y’all got. . .We got all de strength and all de
law and all de money and you can’t git a thing but what we jes take pity on you and give,
you” (33). Interestingly, B. Moseley accepts the Eurocentric construction of gender,
ignoring all the while, that as a black male, he does not have all the money or the law.
White supremacist structuring of society denies these items to him on a daily basis.
While B. Moseley accepts this reality, his wife accepts another. B. Mosley’s subjective

reality is not any more valid than his wife’s reality steeped in folk traditions. If black

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females refuse the subjective reality of themselves as subordinated to males, then they
can use the folk as a way to create subversive verbal traditions. Amette’s insistent voice
in the communal discourse shows that she does not accept the counter-reality. Mathilda’s
comment exposes how denying the reality and creating a verbal tradition to reflect the
rejection of the subjective model means, for black females, a bragging rejection of gender
ideologies. Folklore and oral traditions present an alternate and bold reality in which
black females can upset the status quo. B. Mosley’s question, “what advantage,” as a
response to his wife’s strategic baited indirectness then allows her to an opportunity to set
the record straight and tell the “real” story.

When Malthilda responds to B, Hurston manages to collect stories such as the old
folktale from the African American community, “Why Women Always Take Advantage
of Men.” The opening of the tale immediately informs us of the gender relations in the
black community:

You see in de very first days, God made a man and a woman and put ‘em
in a house to together to live. Way back in them days de woman was just
as strong as de man and both of ‘em did de same things. They user get to
fussin’ bout who gointer do this and that and sometime they’s fight, but
they was even balanced and neither one could whip de other on. (34).
Mathilda’s folktale is a ritualistic denial of gender hierarchies. It encourages us to
believe that males and females were at one time equal by intruding on the Western
narrative of bio-logic, asserting that in the area of strength men and women were once
equal. The tale is interesting in that it discloses how conscious the African American

community might have been about the similarities between black men and women, and

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this seems to coincide with the fact that social status of gender went unclassified during
field labor. Oddly, the tale documents strength as a consideration of gender differences
when by all accounts of historical experiences it was not, at first, a significant matter of
distinction for black men and women in the US. Further, Mathilda’s relaying of the tale
displays the characteristics of black female verbal tradition, a strategic use of the folk as
pointed and baited indirectness. Mathilda’s tale, through baited indirectness, rejects
dominant ideologies of gender and unnames the black female.

After recording the folktale from Mathilda, Hurston includes commentary from
Mathilda’s husband after she has finished telling the tale. B. Moseley responds to his
wife’s story: “You just like a hen in de barnyard. You cackle so much you give de
rooster de blues” (38). Instead of silencing his wife, B. Moseley attempts to take away
the appeal of the story to black female subjectivity. In comparing his wife’s tale to the
unimportant noise a hen makes, he implies that her tale is less valid than his earlier
construction of gender hierarchies. Hurston’s recording of the story and the male
response to it demonstrates how women’s stories and voices are dismissed or denigrated
as cackle and gossip. Mosley’s response to his wife is no different from those of male
folklorists who decide and define what is or is not folklore, always with certain
motivations in mind. While males may call it cackle or gossip, through a Mawu-lens,
Hurston’s recording of the tale suggests a greater importance. The fact that Mathilda tells
the story is a great indicator that she was practicing baited indirectness, as discussed by
Morgan. Again, the story reiterates that there was a time when men and women were
equal. This seems to be an implied reflection on the reality (unsexed humanity), rather

than the counter reality (a bio-logic constructed rhetoric privileging the male) of black

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females and males in the African American community. The more Mathilda conveys the
tale, the less potent B. Mosley’s statement becomes until we no longer have to innocently
accept the myth of intelligible gender but question it in the way Mathilda does. Morgan
notes that in her study black females and white females interpret indirectness and
intentionality differently.69 As indicated in Hurston’s recorded exchange between
Mathilda and B. Mosley, it also follows that indirectness might also be interpreted
differently by black males on issues as they relate, not to racial experience and culture,
but to gendered experience and culture. Mathilda conversates with Hurston using a
strategy, that as Mawu-like subjects, they both can understand.

Folkstories in Mules and Men, “Eulalia—How To Get A Man Ritual,” hoodoo
stories of Marie Leveau, and the conjure tales of Kitty Brown challenge the notion that
there is no oral tradition of black women or black female folk characters. Eulailia’s-how
to-get-a—man-ritual explicitly documents the rituals of indirectness and intentionality in
its presentation of the hoodoo doctor, Eulalia. Hurston writes, “So I went to study with
Eulalia, who specialized in Man-and-woman cases. Everyday somebody came to get
Eulalia to tie them up with some man or woman or to loose them from love” (italics mine
198). My use of italics recognizes how Hurston connects man-and-woman cases to
document that there seems to be little separation or ranking of the sexes in black folklore.
Eulalia does not perform her works for one specific sex. In one precise example of
hoodoo, a woman comes to Eulalia because she wants to be with a Jerry Moore, but some
other “ ’oman dat he got she got roots buried” (198).

Hurston’s recording of Eulalia’s experiences certifies a mechanism of pointed

indirectness directed at the intelligible discourse of gender in the black community. In

 

69 Morgan, 440.

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Eulalia’s response to the woman, we note the pre-conceived notions of Western
womanhood: “Course Ah’m a Christian woman and don’t believe in parting no husband
and wife” (198). However, the remainder of her response indicates intentionality—baited
indirectness: “But since she done worked roots on him to hold him, where he don’t want
to be, it tain’t no sin for me to loose him” (198). Eulalie, as a black female conjurer,
understands that her persona must be addressed in a way that connects her to the woman
coming to be healed. She relies on the mythical cult of Christian womanhood, but the
irony of the above statement is that quite possibly, as a conjurer, Eulalia is more than a
Christian woman, as her hoodoo practice insists. Yet, she understands the reality, or in
this case, the counter-reality that she exists. At first, as discussed by Halliday, she
constructs herself and her discourse to defend her identity and the definition of social
hierarchies. However, by switching to baited indirectness, she intentionally unnames the
identity she set forth in the beginning. Her claim to be a Christian woman is overturned
by her presence as someone who can remove roots from a person. “Hoodoo” becomes
the discourse for the female conjurer, as well as the folkloric practice of unnaming black
female subjectivity. The discourse occurs when the root working begins: “ ‘Git dat salt-

’99

bowl and a lemon, she said to me. . ‘Now write Jerry’s name and his wife’s nine times

,7,

on a piece of paper. (198). Hurston documents how cleverly folk, oral and
vernacular traditions can begin the process of unnaming black females to make way for
their subjectivity.

In the end, the title of Hurston’s work serves as a mechanisim of pointed

indirectness. If we examine Mules and Men as simply a collection focused on black

culture, with no concern of gender hierarchies, then it would appear that the title itself,

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Mules and Men, seems to have no context. Prepositional content is absent from the title,
and racial relevance seems non-existant. However, Mules and Men is pointedly indirect
about the gender rankings in the black community. Hurston’s collection constantly
determines that black women found a way of getting around the mistranslation of their
subjectivity by dominant discourse via pointed indirectness as a way to unname
themselves. In addition, Hurston also uses pointed indirectness in the title from her
collections, Mules and Men, and pointed indirectness can be seen in her use and symbolic
connection to the mule. In Their Eyes Are Watching God (1937), Nanny states: “De
nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see” (14). Mules and Men, written
years before Their Eyes, most certainly expresses that comment in its title before Hurston
gives the statement to Nanny. Hurston significantly claims the metaphor of the mule as
pointed indirectness, and this explains why Hurston does not explicitly mention gender
and race, for she shows that she is always aware of their presence. The very title of her
work, Mules and Men, suggests that Hurston wished her collection to serve as a basis for
the discussion of gender relations in the community and in the study of folklore. Her title
implies a gender concern, with mules serving as a metaphor for women (in this work and
her later works), while "men" appears more literal.

In addition to previous folktales documenting black females’ use of pointed
indirectness in their language practices, the text’s collection of stories themselves serves
as the continuation of pointed indirectness. In “Why the Sister in Black Works De
Hardest,” Hurston also explores the function and characteristics of a distinct tradition of
black women’s discourse. In this particular story that explains God’s delegation of labor,

one of Hurston’s male informants explains:

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Ole Missus said to Ole Massa: “Go pick up dat box, Ah want to see whuts
in it.” Ole Massa looks at de box and it look so heavy da he says to the de
nigger, “Go fetch me dat big ole box out dere in de road.” De nigger. . .tell
his wife: “’Oman, go git dat box.” So de nigger ‘oman she runned to git de
box. ...and opened it up and it was full of hard work. Dat’s the reason the
de sister in black works harder than anybody else in the world. De white
man tells de nigger to work and he takes and tells his wife. (81)
Black women in the collection of tales, and Hurston herself, continuously connect the
workload and use of the mule to the black female’s social station in early twentieth-
century U.S. regions of the South. In her depictions, no one sees these female beings as
women. Black women represent beasts of burdens for the newly forming United States
and its developing black nation. In choosing to use the mule and not make explicit the
issue of gender in her work, Hurston employs pointed indirectness and refers back to
Black Diasporic animal trickster tales to help her do so. Hurston replaces Sis-Goose and
Sis Cow with mules.

In Mules and Men, Mawu’s process of unnaming takes shape in the use of
folklore and the vernacular. While the male informer of this tale doesn’t practice baited
indirectness, Hurston’s inclusion of the tale, like that of Mathilda’s tale, dictates how the
theme from this tale connects to Hurston’s title and text exemplifying baited indirectness.
The story entails a distinct cultural function of educating black women about their status
in the New World It is in a sense, baited indirectness is a tale; one knows from the
historical experience of black women how much the tale mirrors her life. It is not a

complaint, but it is not an acceptance of the false status forced on the black female. The

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tale functions to make black females conscious of how the world works, and will expect
them to work. By orally telling the tale, black women teach other black women how to
discuss this divisive issue in the community. They can suggest to the black male
population that they are not happy with their status, while also keeping inline with
normative cultural norms of patriarchal hierarchy, privileging the males’ needs over their
own. Hurston’s collection of essays implicitly establishes an agenda to explore gender
and folk, and it thematically, structurally, and metaphorically institutes itself as a work
pointedly indirect about the complications of intelligible logic of gender in the black
community.

In contrast with John W. Roberts who excludes female traditions in his study of
folk traditions, Hurston does not exclude masculine folklore and oral traditions. She
chooses to juxtapose male-oriented folk with female oriented folk to explore the way
culture is being built in the communities of African Americans. Hurston’s inclusion of
comments made by each gender concerning the other gender’s story (e. g. Moseley’s
earlier response to his wife’s story) makes her work conceptually aware of the issues
about gender that she does not explicitly mention as shaping her collection. Hurston
remains one of the few earlier folklore scholars who seemed aware that race and gender
should be remembered in constructing theories about oral literature and performance.

When we examine the historical context of black women’s lives, the fixed notion
of gender in the oral can be problematic. As we move beyond the use of folklore as a
culture-building (read as male nation-building) function, into using folklore according to

the Mawu paradigm, gender ceases to be a fixed category in the texts of black females.

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CHAPTER FIVE

From Mules To Turtle Women: Evolution of the Black Female Unnarnin g

I was a turtle before I became a human being, said my
grandmother. She was taking a new order of beauty products out
of the boxes and restocking the shelves. . .Then I saw this
handsomest young man and took a liking to him, she said as
she put the superior beauty products on the shelves. Do you want
to know how far I followed him? She chuckled. I followed him
until I turned into a human being. Is that far enough for you?
Grandmother Eagleton—The Healing”

The black unicorn is restless
The black unicorn is unrelenting
The black unicorn is not free.
Audre Lorde—The Black Unicorn”

Just as Hurston conducted her own trickster strategies for the historical
experiences and subjectivity of black women through metaphors of animals, Gayl Jones’s
The Healing (1998) serves as the most recent textual embodiment to recall the
importance of animal trickster tales for creating a process of unnaming for black females.
In The Healing, readers are introduced to Harlan Eagleton, a black female jack-of-all-
trades, who becomes a faith healer. Yet from the very beginning of the novel’s
immediate meditation on a tin of “Spirit of Scandinavian Sardines, floating in mustard
sauce” (3), the reader comes to understand how Gayl Jones has taken your marna’s
healing protagonist (the conjurer woman and hoodoo priestess from Chestnutt and
Hurston) and made it into a character touched by her own voice and ideologies. The
novel manages to reject the historical figurations of the black woman in favor of a more
Mawu-archetype of black female subjectivity. Jones’s characterization of Harlan

Eagleton as a healer, essentially like the hoodoo doctor Eulalia in Hurston’s Mules and

 

7" Jones, 133.

71See title poem from Audre Lorde’s collection of poetry. Black Unicorn. (New York: Norton.
1978)

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Men, suggests beings who cannot be named or defined because of their subjectivity. The
Healing consistently recreates and revises gender ideologies about black women.

In the canon of African American women’s literature, The Healing is not the first
contemporary novel to make use of conjurers, healers, and magical realism. On the
contrary, Bambara’s Minnie Ransom and Velma in The Salt Eaters (1980), Marshall’s
Rosalie Parvay and Avery Johnson in Praisesong for the Widow (1983), and Naylor’s
Mattie Michaels and Sapphire in The Women of Brewster ’5 Place and Mama Day (1988)
are characters who have all been touched by or bestowed with healing gifts in various
ways. While Jones, like each of the aforementioned novelists, does explore healers and
healing in a similar and traditional way—to document and examine the psychological ills
of African American women—The Healing modemizes the concepts of healing in black
women’s fiction in several ways. As some critics have argued, there are some common
variables in the above traditional healing protagonists.72 Through her characterization of
Harlan, Jones revises and reconstructs the healer character type: where Minnie was an
outcast in Bambara’s The Salteaters, Harlan’s ordinariness and ability to shift her stations
in life and community are emphasized time and again; where Minnie and Sapphire may
have been asexual or non-sexual, Harlan comes to know her healing gift because of her

sexual transgressions; and where laying of the hands usually focuses on the healer laying

 

72 See Trudier Harris’s “From Exile to Asylum: Religion to Community in the Writings of
Contemporary Black Women,” in Black Women’s Writing in Exile. ed., Mary Lynn Broe and Angela
Ingram, 1989, pp. 151-169. Trudier Harris, “This Disease Called Strength: Some Observations of the
Compensating Construction of Black Female Characters” in Literature and Medicine 14:1 (Spring 1995):
109-126, Gay Wilentz’s Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-ease (New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 2000), and Valerie Lee’s Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers. (New York: Routledge,
1996). Each work documents. through historical analysis of critical analysis of the literary character of the
healer, society’s ideas about black women as healers, the known characteristics attributed to black women
healers who are either exiled or outcasts from their communities. asexual and non-threatening women, and
all explore the healer’s effect on those coming to be healed or being healed.

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hands on a body other than her own, Harlan’s first experience of laying of the hands puts
her in contact with her own body. These divergences from previous healing protagonists
exist in Jones’s text for a reason—to move the subjectivity of black females outside of
traditional discourses of gender.

For more than twenty-five years, Gayl Jones has explored the pain and
problematic subjectivity of black women in her writing. Scholarship and criticism have
heralded Jones as a creator of the blues-structured novel for her works concerned with
pain and oppression, Corregidora (1975) and Eva’s Man (1976). Yet, few critics have
assessed her aesthetic ingenuity in demonstrating how to heal that pain and oppression.
However, The Healing uses a divergent structure based on liminality and an oral narrative
structure and discourse defined by gender that differs from Jones’s blues aesthetic
narratology. Rather than use blues aesthetics, she demonstrates that new aesthetics must
be employed to discuss healing. As seen in Corregidora, Eva ’s Man, and Song for
Anninho (1981), Jones shows a specific interest in the use of folk aesthetics, language,
and black women’s subjectivity. The blues provides a way of dealing with pain, and
sadly celebrating its importance in our lives as a teaching and learning tool. In many
ways, blues aesthetics symbolize the struggle with and death of horrible experiences of
pain and oppression in historical and present life. Whether we are struggling with the
pain, or putting it to rest, the blues aesthetic finds at its center a preoccupation with death.
The birth of jazz from the blues signifies the need for black expression with life at its
musical center. Although J ones’s novel is not a jazz structured novel, her aesthetic

styling of the narrative, a stream-of-consciousness-novel and the focus on healing, is

152

about life. Healing symbolizes a gift from the divine, constant rebirth, with a return to
life rather than death.

In The Healing, aesthetics and metaphors in the text rely on a mythic
understanding of faith healing produced by oral traditions and grounded in what cannot
be named or defined—divinity. Jones creates a narratology based on divination—the
language/discourse of that which is unknown to discuss what is known as the “black
woman,” a misrepresentation and flawed symbol. The major indicators of the divination
narrative strategy are liminality, soulful raps or flowing usage of words, and indirection
through disjointed testimonies, interruption of a rap session, communality, and the
presence of omnipresent myth(s). As a rhetorical mode, it may in some way seem akin to
the black rhetorical mode of signifyin(g). However, one should note that the
characteristics and elements of signifying (indirection, cajoling, punning, playing on
words, introduction of the semantically logically unexpected) almost always operate from
a knowable referent.73 Since divination presents itself as the writing of the divine, its
referent is always unknown. Creating a narrative structure and discourse based on an
unknown referent leaves subjectivity in a liminal state, and allows characters to avoid
misrepresentation and static symbolism.

Negative images and representations about black women have long endured.
Positive images of black females and historical moments of survival and triumph over
adversity due to patriarchy and racism have been distorted or eclipsed. The problem of

finding a discourse for black women’s subjectivity has been revealed in the works of

 

73 See Claudia Mitchell Keman’s “Signifying as a Verbal Art” in Mother Wit from the Laughing
Barrell: Readings in the Interpretation of Folklore, ed., Alan Dundes. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1973), Roger Abrahams’s Talking Black. (Rawley, Mass: Newbury House, 1979), and Geneva
Smitherman’s Talkin’ and Testafyin The Language of Black America. (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1977).

153

several critics who approach the issues of healing and the psychological ills of black
women. In Trudier Harris’s “This Disease Called Strength: Some Observations on the
Compensating Construction of Black Female Characters,” Harris is concerned with the
prevalent type character of the Strong Black Woman (hereafter referred to as SBW) in
literary texts by black women. Harris’s text adamantly claims that the repetitive
manufacturing of the SBW exemplifies a psychological disease/illness, “a disease called
strength” (110). Harris asserts that strength is the disease of black female characters.
However, Jones’s text moves beyond the notion of strength as a disease. The novel
reveals that the ideology of the “strong black woman,” a myth, is simply another failed
attempt to create a discourse for black females.

Jones often mocks the ascribed elements of womanhood (femininity, weakness,
and physical beauty) through a concerned examination with the ideas of beauty for her
black female characters. The protagonist, Harlan Eagleton, is a former beautician, as was
her grandmother. The Healing cleverly takes on the dialogue of beauty and the bio-logic
of gender to explore existing hierarchies of gendered subjectivity for black women
through Turtle Woman tales and Unicorn Women stories. In the quotation that opens this
essay, Harlan’s grandmother implies that through the love of a man she follows from her
carnival existence, whom we later learn abandons her, she too can be a real human
woman. Harlan recalls her grandmother’s tale: “She say that he could see the genuine
woman behind that fake turtle shell” (135). When Harlan’s grandmother—a retailer of
beauty products—discusses with Harlan her status as a once-upon-a-time-turtle woman-
not yet human, we must metaphorically ascertain whether the discourse on gender is so

faulty that black females must struggle to see themselves as women as well as human

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beings! Coincidentally, Harlan’s grandmother sees herself as a woman primarily because
someone else sees her as such. This introduction to the Turtle Woman demonstrates that
womanhood, specifically notions of black womanhood, are illogically defined by persons
who are not black females. The grandmother’s story reveals that there is a secondary
reading of gender occurring in the text. In characterizing Harlan and her grandmother as
beauticians, Jones could simply address the internalization of racist values and an
inferiority complex over beauty in black women. However, there is a disruption of
gender in the text that stems from Grandmother Eagleton’s real subjectivity and her
counter-reality as a Turtle woman subject. In returning to the figurative metaphor of
trickster-goddess Mawu-Lisa, we must now explore how the internalization of the logic
of intelligible gender had, and still has, quite a bit to do with black women’s battle to see
themselves. The ability of dominant discourse and criticism to distort its subjects has
truly lent credence to Audre Lorde's suggestion that "the master’s tool will not dismantle
the master’s house.”74
While there are a number of ways that Jones could have taken up the question of
black female subjectivity, she chooses to refer to the Black Diaspora’s cultural
appreciation of healing because of the way it can also suggest the importance of language
in diagnosing and curing illness. In Planet Medicine (1980), Richard Grossinger offers a
connection between the practice of healing and language: “We assume we know disease
by the feel of internal organs of our body but that is not true. . .it must first be brought to

the surface, as concepts, as language as one’s self, and, finally, as language with the

society and its doctors” (16). In The Healing, Jones utilizes a complex structure of

 

7" Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press,
1984) 53-60.

155

orality and myth in ways that reflects Grossinger’s views, merging and intertwining the
health and well being of African American women with the use of language. She creates
a healing process for African American women that becomes more than a one time
medical practice; it becomes revolutionary for its ability to potentially impact the lives of
others long after the healer has passed on. Just as Mawu’s alphabets, through divination,
empower the Fon, so too does the arena of healing enable an empowering state of
unnaming that allows black females a liminal discourse for their muteable subjectivity.
As Carole Boyce Davies concedes in Black Women, Writing and Identity:
Migrations of the Subject (1994), “it is the convergence of multiple places and cultures
that renegotiates their identities. . .once Black women’s experience is accounted for,
assumptions about identity, community and theory have to be reconsidered” (3). Davies
understands the liminal subjectivity of black women and chooses to use the term and tool
of “migratory subject” primarily because her text is concerned with the impact of
nationalisms and nationalist borders in her deconstruction of black women and black
feminist thought. Yet, Davies’s term, migratory subjects, while consistently challenging
Western discourses of womanhood, still works within the confines of intelligible gender
ideologies and the traditional construction of woman. We must complete Davies’s
assigned tasks to reconsider the theory of gender. Furthermore, early discourse on black
females may not have been able to complete the feat of analyzing gender constructs. The
beginning of such a discussion is foiled when Sojourner Truth becomes a symbol and a
shadow for a movement that was not for her (the early [white] feminist movement).
Currently, we must move beyond superficial arguments of womanhood and accept that

any relevant attempts to construct black female subjectivities must first tackle the issue of

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gender; and one way to do so is to interrupt and dismantle the rhetoric of gender with the
subjectivity of black females, and then proceed to unname the “black woman.”

In The Healing, unnaming through divine acts such as healing become ways to
reject the construction of woman and traditional gender ideologies concerning black
women. Again, this unnaming through divination serves as a reflection of my figurative
model, Mawu-Lisa. Jones’s uses the phenomenon of faith healing to unname her black
female protagonist. She posits that we consider Harlan’s grandmother’s predicament:
how far will you go to become human and a woman? She then juxtaposes it with her
own question, How far will you go to become your self? Will you, black women,
unname yourself?

.Juxtaposing quotations from Grandmother Eagleton’s story with Audre Lorde’s
“Black Unicorn” provides another way to observe that Jones’s novel metaphorically
represents the manifestation of a revolution for black females to rebel against discourses
that have been used to shape or define them. Black females will not be free, until, as
Lorde has asserted through strategic hermeneutics in her works, they can find new
spellings of their name by which she meant new subjectivities for their historical subject
and experiences. Ana Louise Keating’s Women Reading, Women Writing: Self -
Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua, and Audre Lorde (1996) explores
Lorde’s “use of imagination, language, and mythic conversion principles to invent new
individual and collective gendered and ethnic identities” (146). As Keating points out, in
Lorde’s collection of poems like Black Unicorn (1978), the poet uses her work to
expressly take on what she had always acknowledged as the lack of language to convey

the experiences and subjectivity of black women. The title poem, “Black Unicorn,”

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makes significant comments on the subjectivity of black women: “The black unicorn is
greedy. lThe black unicorn is impatient. /T he black unicorn was mistaken/ for a
shadow/or symbol/and taken. . (3). In this poem, as. with the entire collection, Lorde is
concerned with black females being construed as signifiers without meaning, like
Sojourner Truth and Grandmother Eagleton. It is no longer the entire being itself that we
understand and know but the distinct characteristics divorced from the being itself, and
this is the sad historical experience that comes with accepting the term “black woman.”
The uniqueness of the black unicom’s presence becomes a shadow without light and a
symbol without a context, but it also possesses the ability to be a floating signifier if it is
not “other” in the text. The only way to keep this floating signifier from being othered is
to find a discourse in which to speak of the black unicom—the black female. The Mawu-
Lisa paradigm permits this because it already acknowledges that black female
subjectivity cannot be fixed.

Like Lorde’s collection of poetry, J ones’s text explores how misrepresentations
and distortions can sometimes become mythic influences in our lives; Jones also
completes a mythic conversion by exploring how opposing mythic influences exist in our
lives to aide us in the struggle to conquer and destroy the distortions. Jones replaces
mythic models such as the “black woman” or the SBW with her own Mawunian-models
of the Turtle Woman and the Unicorn Woman to create a discourse for Harlan T.
Eagleton. In order to recognize the models, we must first realize that an unnaming is
taking place.

On the surface, naming appears to play a minor role in the theme and goals of the

novel. For example, in discussing her long-lost grandfather, James B. Eagleton, Harlan

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reveals that the B. stands for Booker (T. Washington). Grandfather Eagleton’s middle
name goes to the political type of man that he may have been since we never really see
him, only hear of him through Grandmother Eagleton’s turtle woman story. James
Booker Eagleton, like his namesake, seems to understand the need for racial
empowerment in the way he vocally admires Grandmother Eagleton and raises her
esteem by saying he could see the real woman in her. However, much like Booker T.
Washington’s economic empowerment ideologies, his own methods of achieving black
female empowerment are flawed because they accept the classification of gender. The
Eagleton family follows a trend of bestowing upon themselves the names of influential
African Americans. Harlan’s own middle initial, T., stands for Truth, but Harlan’s
namesake acts as a major indicator of the struggle for black female subjectivity.
Upon further examination one realizes that Harlan’s full name symbolizes the
question of black female subjectivity and a language for that subjectivity:
So my name’s Harlan Eagleton. Harlan T. Eagleton, but I do not tell
anyone what the T. stands for, because I don’t think it’s a name that
anyone should be given. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s Harlan Truth Eagleton,
named for Sojourner Truth, not Truth itself. (252)
Harlan’s desire to softly reject her middle name is significant because embedded in that
desire lies the marker that highlights the necessity to unname the black woman. First,
Harlan’s rejection of her middle name implies that there is no such thing as an absolute
Truth (as posited in Enlightenment ideology and aesthetics) but a multiplicity of truths.
According to the Mawu-paradigm, Harlan’s rejection of her middle name entails an

acceptance of the divinity that she will become. Harlan knows the importance of

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multiplicity in discussing herself. She cannot allow herself to be defined or fixed as one
absolute. By rejecting the notion of an absolute Truth, Harlan makes it possible to
accept many truths about her own subjectivity as a black female, rather than a detrimental
monologic discourse of truth about woman.

The Mawu-model of reading reveals Jones’s demonstration of this belief through
her divination strategies in the work. Harlan’s name like that of the divine also hints at
an unknown being. She is not called God, but her very name itself creates a space of
unknowability and liminality for its being. Harlan could be perceived as; a male name;
Jane, a woman’s name; Truth, an ambiguous name (male or female); and Eagleton, her
family name. Hence, Harlan might very well be made to acknowledge, “I am that I am,”
that phrase we attribute to that which we cannot name. She does not fit an either/or
dichotomy but a liminal discursive space of multiplicity and polyphonic discourse.
Harlan’s seems apprehensive about the name because of its sacred place in time and
history, but she also intuitively appears to understand the logic and discursive baggage
that comes with that name. If there is no absolute truth, then Harlan, like the Sojourner
Truth after whom she was named, must ask herself that all important question: Is she a
woman? Harlan must decide whether to reject or embrace this question in the shaping of
her identity. Does she accept the discourse that comes with the question, or does she,
unlike her grandmother, go further past the one absolute truth? Harlan goes further
because she allows herself to be unnamed, and her first small step in doing so manifests
itself in her desire to reject her middle name.

Harlan’s rejection of her middle name is hardly enough to maintain the state of

liminality that will empower her to become the healer that she will become. Harlan needs

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to find other alternatives and tools in unnaming herself, and she finds them in the '
communal act of healing, primarily in witnessing and testimony. In this novel,
witnessing and testifying replace absolute truths, and they shape the narrative of the novel
to explore how the revolution can be achieved. Throughout the novel, Harlan’s narration
is disjointed, her thoughts never end, and thoughts and testimony by someone else
speaking about her gift for healing often interrupt the narrative. The acts of testimony,
narration, and oral myths refuse to be structured and bounded. There is no continuous or
specific connection from one person’s consciousness to another unless a character is
actually speaking. Understandably, the need to testify and witness cannot be done in a
linear structure; true testifying and true witnessing have to be the result of being moved
to speak. The novel’s narration is presented in different narrative voices. Yet, the
narrative continues, sporadically using quotations, as if the same person were always
speaking. Jones narrative technique acts as a testament to the need for multiple truths in
healing the discursive ills that can occur for liminal subjects or subjectivities without a
discourse. The deeply develOped recursive structure (repeated and circular rather than
linear) of the novel may initially make it difficult to recognize how Jones is taking up the
maladies of black women. However, when we recall the communality that can be
achieved from these oral acts, we understand that the author is focused on communal
rather than individual healing. Jones emphasized this belief in her previous novels but

makes notable changes to it in The Healing.75 Harlan often gives up narrative control to

 

75 In Corregidora, Ursa Corregidora is a blues singer who gives witness through her singing gift.
Her witnessing/blues singing acts as a communal way of healing African Americans. Her mythical legacy
is “the important thing is making generations. They can burn the papers but they can’t burn
consciousness”( 14). The repetitive and recursiveness of this phrase in the text makes the statement mythical
in the life of Ursa and in turn impacts how she will live her life. Although one must wonder, since three of
the major concerns of Corregidora are gender conflicts, sexual dysfunction and inability to love without

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those who witness for her because in ritual and spiritual spheres testimony acts as a
learning and teaching tool. Subsequently, because the telling of a story/witnessing is
never the same, rebirth and life are always possible through community exchanges of oral
traditions.
From the testimony of one witness, we learn that:
Doctors couldn’t do nothing or didn’t want to. I would go from doctor to
doctor and none of them could heal me, or didn’t want to. . .then she
looked a me and know my trouble. She said the trouble would end, and
touched me, and it did. That’s what I mean by she heal by
healing. . .Sometimes she speaks a word and it’s done. Other time she got
to lay on hands. She don’t prescribe none of them herbs and roots and
potions, though. She ain’t that sorta healing woman. (16)
This particular testimony emphasizes the tradition of laying on of the hands. In “A
Laying On of Hands: Black Women Writers Exploring the Roots of Their Folk and
Cultural Tradition,” Joanne V. Gabbin defines “laying on of hands”:
The term signifies the ancient practice of using hands in a symbolic act of

blessing, healing, and ordination. By its very act, it appears to bestow

 

hurting or allowing one’s self to be hurt, if Ursa’s return to Mutt is the beginning of her healing or a denial
of it. In Jones’s Eva ’5 Man, statements about the gypsy, great-grandmother Medina and the Queen Bee
become important factors in shaping how Eva Medina sees herself and guides her life actions. Eva’s
witnessing to the life and myth of the Queen Bee, and her actions of orally castrating Davis’s serve as
testimony for the traumatizing abuse black women can experience. In each novel, the endings are so
ambiguous as to leave uncertain whether either woman ever heals herself completely; this remains
unresolved in criticism of the text. However, unlike Ursa, Eva does not possess the tools to begin a healing
process to heal herself or others for she has lost her inability to connect through her community. At least
with Ursa, there is always the possibility that healing has or will happen. In both novels. readers only see
how witnessing and testifying has negatively impacted the protagonist’s lives. We rarely receive brief
glimmers of how the communality of oral traditions might positively effect the community and the
individual. However, in The Healing. Jones finally provides us with that crucial and vital component of
the oral, communality.

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some gift. . .Thus it is associated with the healing powers of Christ as he
lays hands on sufferers and they are cured. Others see the practice as
central to the concept that the African concept that the spirit and body are
one. Thus sensuality is essential to the process of healing and rebirth.
(247)
The witness’s testimony of Harlan’s healing affirms the importance of communal
healing: touch, sound, and physical exchanges are emphasized over herbs, roots and
potions. Jones suggests that healing is not a solitary process, but it is instead a communal
course of action that impacts those coming to be healed and the healer herself. In her
previous novels, witnessing and testifying may have been enough to alter the path to
healing. However, the inclusion of “laying on of hands” suggests that more needs to be
done. Gabbin’s analysis refers back to the concepts of unranked binary opposition in
African metaphysics. The spirit and body co-exist in one space, and they need not be
split, separate, or ranked as they are in Western Christian religious discourse. Gabbin’s
definition of healing through laying on of the hands, confirms that Jones Opts to implant
in her protagonist and story, an African concept of body and spirit, rather than the
Christian Christ-like elements of healing so as to move away from the healer as
otherworldly or unnatural. Jones’s concept of faith healings, as indicated earlier, differs
than those of other African American women writers in that Harlan is not the exiled
freak. Laying on of the hands allows the community to remain linked during what might
traditionally be conceived as supernatural acts. Therefore, the healer cannot be othered

and outcast, and the healed can physically embrace what they may not know or

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understand. Hence, the body and spirit can be one in the construction of Harlan T.
Eagleton.

Unnaming in African American females’ texts, as Jones demonstrates with The
Healing, must be about remaining unnamed, rather than finding a name; sustaining a state
of liminality. Harlan’s second phase of unnaming—the ability to maintain liminality and
unnameability is key to understanding the use of Turtle Woman and Unicorn Woman
stories. To comprehend the statement that addresses the all-important Turtle Woman
myth, “I was a turtle before I became a human being,” we must first grasp the meanings
of other myths in the novel. The Nicodemus legend has a minor but important place in
the plot and theme of the novel. This myth concerns Harlan’s sidekick, compadre, and
witness, Nicholas. Jones explores the correlation between Harlan’s sidekick’s name and
Nicodemus:

And N ’Orleans that ain’t my true name, that just his sometimes

name for me.

Then he whispers, He’s free.

Who’s free? Nicholas?

They freed Nicodemus.

Who’s Nicodemus? Nicodemus? Oh, yeah, yeah. Nicodemus.

That’s good. (35)
Again, there are moments when the reader may be unsure of who is actually speaking,
but in this brief passage Harlan's witness and former bodyguard becomes associated with
Nicodemus. The name suggests a number of possibilities for understanding the character

but most importantly for understanding myth and ideas of healing. Nicholas could

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represent Nicodemus—the righteous Monk of Mt. Athos; N icodemus—the Runaway
slave; Nicodemus—the Jewish King; John 3: 1 1’5 Nicodemus (What must I do to be
saved?), or the nineteenth-century Negro Exodusters from Kentucky who settled on land
in Kansas.76 All of the images share a common link to the notion of rebirth, new life,
separation from mainstream society; and they have a connection to healers and function
as witnesses or legacies to an important moment in a race/nation’s history.

In The Healing, Nicholas becomes all of these representations in some way. He
serves as the most significant witness to Harlan’s work. Harlan explains, “I thought
about hiring me another ‘witness’ but that would be duplicitous and Nicholas the true one
witnessed the first healing, and that ain’t the same as a hired witness” (10). Later Harlan
expands on the role of the witness: “All I know is Nicholas usedta tell the tale with more
fanfare, more flourish, more confabulatoriness. And when he tells about that healing; it
don’t sound like no confabulatory tale. Least the way he usedta tell the tale of that
healing. Now he tends to be kinda dry” (11). Nicholas serves as a witness to Harlan’s
work. As the first person to see Harlan go through her rites of passage into healing,
Nicholas lives up to the legend of the monk, runaway slave, Jew, and exoduster by giving
up his own life to witness for Harlan. His task is to help make evidence of healing for
those in pain.

Holloway’s Moorings and Metaphors provides evidence to suggest that Nicholas’s
repeated testimony and witnessing construct a myth:

Myth vitalizes language, giving it a presence outside of the interpretive

 

76 See “Nicodemus: Negro Haven on the Solomon” Kansas Historical Quarterly 34 (1968): 10-
31. and “Aquilla the Apostle and Nicodemus the Righteous of Mt. Athos,” Orthodox Calendar Company.

July 14.

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mode and forcing its significance to a level where the community’s shared
meanings are the basis of its understanding and interactions with both the
spiritual and physical worlds; it is both of them. In its ways of recursive
signification, it is the perfect vehicle for signification. (25)
Healing is a performative art that depends on more than the actual act itself. Healing
depends on the witnessing of the act. It can only work if the healer and those who are
coming to be healed believe in the existence of such a thing. What good is the gift if no
one is there to recognize the act, to call it, to name it, to give it a language for its very
existence? By constantly re-telling the first healing, the story becomes mythical.
Nicholas’s tale influences the doctrine of faith, and consequently, the lives of all that
come to be healed. Not only does Nicholas’s selfless act make it possible for those
coming to be healed to have faith in Harlan’s gift, but it also provides Harlan with the
faith that she needs to believe in herself and sustain her abilities. Harlan, temporarily,
becomes the healing woman. Each and every time Nicholas testifies he helps to sustain
the process of unnaming Harlan by helping to develop .a space that permits her to
temporarily misplace or replace the black woman with the healing woman, without her
having to choose one over the other.

In another pre-healing testimony, Nicholas revises his dry tone and narration as
he speaks of Harlan’s first healing, and in the process he creates a space for Harlan’s
Changing subjectivity:

I thought she were some witch at first, says Nicholas. Even she didn’t

know... Maybe that’s who she is. The healing woman healed herself

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first. . .Well I’m here to testify that she healed herself first. I’m here to
testify that she healed herself first. I’m here to testify that this healing
woman healed herself first. And now she trying to heal everybody that
want to be healed. (33)
Nicholas aka Nicodemus is witness to the construction of a space and language for black
women’s subjectivities. Again, Holloway reminds us that “myths are not discrete units
of structure as much as they are features of how a sense of language enables the survival
and transference of memory” (94). Nicholas’s repetitive testimony helps to create a
myth that reveals Harlan and the myths that she carries with her as the “perfect vehicle
for methodology” (Holloway 25). Nicholas’s testimony of the instability or elusive
definability of Harlan’s subject being provides a preliminary liminal state of being for
Harlan. The testimony of Nicholas and other witnesses removes Harlan from the static
subject position of black woman, and it places her into a liminal space where we can now
begin questioning the discourse of gender and Harlan’s subjectivity as a black woman. If
Harlan wishes to avoid the mistake of her grandmother of letting others name her, then
she should not accept or become the historical figurations of mythology created by her
witnesses. Testimony and witnessing initially launch a process of unnaming for Harlan
by providing myths to counter the historical figuration of mythology at the center of the
text—the black woman. However, as we saw with Sojourner Truth, such figurations can
be costly if we become defined as the figuration itself. Nicholas recognizes the
uncertainty of Harlan’s identity and subject position. He questions whether she is a witch
or something else. Even the subject being does not know, or she does not know how to

call her self. Harlan does not need to be unnamed as the black woman only to be named

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again as some “other.” She must not fall into the trap of accommodating traditional
discourse. Testimony and witnessing build myths, but it is the remaining historical
figurations that Harlan must learn to navigate to achieve an empowering subjectivity.
The historical figurations are no good to Harlan if they become a fixed identity. Only in
the liminal existence of these remaining historical figurations can Harlan begin the
important progression of unnaming through her own familial myths.

Jones uses the Turtle Woman story as the beginning of her critique of
womanhood. She constantly makes the reader aware of who defines womanhood and for
what reasons. In a discussion with her grandmother, Harlan learns how these discourses
work in the lives of African Americans:

...and that them other men just thought of her as freakish, as one of them
freakish women, whether or not they believed in the reality of that turtle’s
shell. She say that he (grandfather Eagleton) could see the genuine
woman behind that fake turtle shell. She say he say that she more a
genuine woman than any woman he know, a category he say ain’t just
limited to colored women, which some mens do. You know how some
mens do. They’ll compare you to other colored women, but not to
womanhood itself, and refers every other man’s woman to they own. (135)
The above passage focuses on freakish womanhood and camivalesque atmosphere, and
reminds us of how ideologies of the unnamed subject/black womanhood become freakish
in the dominant discourse. Harlan’s divulging of her grandmother’s tales about her
carnival experience as a Turtle Woman is essential to disrupting ideologies of

womanhood and gender.

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Turtles and terrapins have long been figures of tricksterism in African American
folklore and literature. Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness explains that
the turtle and terrapin occupy trickster spaces in African American folklore: “In the
popular tales featuring a race between a slow animal and a swifter opponent the former
triumphs not through persistence, as does his counterpart in Aseopian fable of the
Tortoise and the Hare, but by outwitting and capitalizing on his weakness and
shortsightedness. Terrapin defeats Deer by placing relatives along the route with
Terrapin himself stationed by the finish line” (115). Levine’s reading explores the
trickster as involved in strictly human deception. As I indicated before in the analysis of
Mawu-Lisa, the divine elements of the trickster figure are displaced. This traditional
reading of turtles/tortoises/terrapins would reveal little as to why Jones utilizes the Turtle
Woman figure in her myth of healing. However, the Mawu-reading reveals a surprising
parallel between Jones’s turtle woman and the turtle as trickster in African folktales.

When we return to Herskovits’s Dahomean Narrative, elements are revealed
about the tortoise in African oral stories that become essential in fully understanding the
importance of the Turtle Woman in The Healing and the connection to Mawu and
divination:

All the animals and birds go at sunrise to the fields to eat. Tortoise whose
skin is like stone, also goes out. There was a bird called Awele. When he
saw Tortoise, he called together all the birds. None of them had ever seen
an animal like than, and animal with skin like stone. Awele said to the
other birds, “. . .and today a stone comes to eat with us”. . .Since Tortoise

walks slowly, the birds flew down to see what was inside this thing Awele

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said was a stone. But they saw nothing for the Tortoise stopped still. (191)
The tale continues that all the animals were perplexed by the stone who came to eat with
them, and they took their concerns to Mawu, asking Why a stone ate with them.
Evetually, Mawu reveals turtle as an animal and tells the other animals, “Tortoise is the
diviner for birds and animals” (192). In another story, tortoise is told, “You will always
be a diviner because you have suffered much” (193). The connection between trickster
and the divine is embodied in the tortoise. In many of these tales, the tortoise is also a
genderless trickster who is diviner. The significance of subjectivity, identity, and
indefineability cannot be overlooked in these Dahomean tortoise tales. Tortoise is an
outcast amongst other animals and unlike anything they have ever known or seen.
Tortoise’s distinct subjectivity means that the figure will suffer much, but it will be
divine. The elements of trickery with divination in the turtle/tortoise are the basis for
Jones’s mechanism of unnaming the black woman.

Through the Turtle Woman myth, Jones makes a case that the representation of
the shell, the shell being a metaphor for the “black woman,” hides and distorts the actual
being that exists. Only through Mawu’s divine intervention—a disruption of the
discourse on intelligible gender, can we provide a discourse for black women’s
subjectivity. Harlan’s grandfather does not view her grandmother as freakish. The
grandfather sees Harlan’s grandmother as a woman, but because he defines womanhood
for her grandmother, the change is never really a true self-transforrnation. Throughout
the text, readers must recognize that Harlan’s grandmother, like Sojourner Truth, moves
between troubling constructs of womanhood, from turtle woman to human woman, and

she never really dismisses any of the false ideologies. Harlan’s name significantly draws

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us back to the subjectivity of black woman and how to translate it. In a scene. in which
Harlan has asked her mother if she ever believed in the grandmother’s turtle stories,
Harlan’s mother replies, “Yeah, I suppose I did. I suppose when I was a little girl I
did. ...I even imagined that I was a turtle woman transforming myself to free myself from
the tyranny of others” (277). Harlan’s mother may not have had the means to go back to
the process of unnaming that the turtle stories convey, but as a healer, Harlan has the
means to accomplishsuch a feat.
Harlan’s goal then is to believe the confabulatory tales of her grandmother and
see their usefulness in her'own life. » Understanding that ideologies of womanhood are
problematic for black women because of historical discourses of gender available to
them, Jones continues to create her own discourse of gender for black women through the
oral story of the Unicorn Woman:
A lot of people when they would see that sign advertising the Unicorn
woman, they’d think she was a white woman, you know, cause all the
unicorns in the storybooks is white, cause that’s supposed to be a sign of
purity, you know, and even the colored people that come to see the
Unicorn woman, theys’s as surprised as the white people that she ain’t a
white Unicorn woman, cause even colored people think that white’s a sign
of purity, and she is a genuine Unicorn woman, but a colored one. . .I
heard someone say that even if she’s a real Unicorn woman, she still a
fake one, just by virtue of being colored. (136)

Harlan’s grandmother repeatedly relays these tales to her as a child, and in their repetitive

and recursive orality they become myths for Harlan to process. The Unicorn woman is

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bound by the same ideologies of the Turtle woman. People assign hierarchies based on
racial and gender discourse that attempt to define individual subjectivity. Carnival goers
view the Unicorn Woman as an inferior and fake version of a unicorn simply by virtue of
her color.

If readers juxtapose the myth of the Turtle Woman with the Unicorn Woman, then
they can envision the choices of womanhood left to Harlan. These myths document how
each woman of color lacks a language for her subjectivity and is inclined to choose an
inappropriate language so that she might be useful in society, or a part of a community.
The idea that these women find themselves working in a carnivalesque-type environment
such as the circus, suggests they are seeking a place. In the case of Harlan’s
grandmother, someone else conceives that there is a failure of language to articulate her
subjectivity, and attempts to name her. Although Harlan’s grandmother asserts her
humanity and womanhood, it is a false one because the discourse does not apply to her.
Eventually, someone else renames the grandmother woman. Still failing to perceive the
course she must follow, Harlan’s grandmother ascertains that she might have remained a
Turtle Woman had it not been for her husband. She reaches womanhood because
someone else saw her as a woman. She never finds an empowering space for her
subjectivity. She follows a man, supposedly until she turns human, but as we learn
through Harlan, the man she followed deserts her never to return.

In asking the critical questions, Harlan draws from her grandmother a wealth of
wisdom that a young Harlan cannot yet begin to comprehend, and that the grandmother
has yet to admit in her own life. In expanding further on the Unicorn Woman,

Grandmother Harlan states:

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...but it takes a true mythical woman to be the ideal of true womanhood,
colored or ain’t. Why even the proprietor of the first carnival she was at
became obsessed with her, until he found him a woman that he thought the
more ideal of womanhood than herself. Then he sold the Unicorn woman
to another carnival, cause he didn’t want them two competing ideals of
womanhood. (138)
It might seem as if Jones is endorsing the use of mythical womanhood as a way of
empowerment for black women; however, the mention of competing ideals of
womanhood is important because it reveals, once again, that womanhood is not the
business of woman but of men. Men created the ideologies and buy and sell these
representations of women at will, but never for one moment can there be competing
ideals because that would cancel out profits from exploitation of the women. Jones does
not wish to replace mythical womanhood with another; she simply wishes to corrupt the
discourse of gender with myth. Symbolically, Lorde’s conception of the black unicorn as
a symbol and shadow mirrors the way in which Jones uses the black unicorn woman in
her novel. It is not that Jones draws from Lorde’s specific concept of the black unicorn
for her text, but Jones’s work in many ways demonstrates an appreciation and perhaps a
worthy response to The Black Unicorn. Like the black unicorn, Harlan must find a way
to avoid the false recognitions and mistranslations of her subjectivity.
Harlan recalls another moment when her grandmother ruminated over
womanhood by repeating a conversation with a man she’d met after transforming from a
Turtle Woman to a human woman. The man exclaims to her grandmother, “The man to

woman you. Who’d have the nerve to woman you. Who’d have the nerve to woman a

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woman like you?” (253). The implication is that women, especially women of color, can
become true women with the help of a strong and courageous man. As man remains the
primary signifier, woman can only receive meaning from man. The statement reveals
that, yes, men define womanhood, men impose womanhood onto women, and for women
of color the imposition often results in black females being unable to define themselves
by their own ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological visions.

Grandmother Eagleton’s misconceptions about her subjectivity do not have to be
passed onto future generations like Harlan due in large part to a discourse based on
tricksterism, liminality, and divination. Harlan acknowledges:

When I grew older, I didn’t believe the Turtle Woman stories, not the
magical ones. Not the tales of how when she was a turtle she‘d had to
play all kinds of tricks to keep from getting caught by humans. . .I believed
the one about the carnival, and even the tales of the confabulatory Unicorn
Woman, but not that one. Not the tale of metamorphosis, of how when
human beings chased her, like every turtle, she ran so slowly that in order
to avoid getting caught she had to transform. (164)
Harlan’s statement reveals that she once believed that such stories were real and
significant. Her goal, then, is find a way to believe in the magical turtle stories in order
to avoid the mistakes and misrecognition of her grandmother before her, and she soon
does. Initially, Harlan does not recognize the significance of these transformation tales as
somewhat representative of what she must achieve in order to heal herself and others, but

she will.

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Even before she acquires her healing gift, we can see that she is different because
she defies notions of womanhood with which the world provides her. As Harlan recounts
the details leading up to her divorce from her husband, Norvelle, she remembers how
uncomfortable she felt during a conversation with Norvelle’s sister:

I hope you’s a nice girl. I hope you’s a nicer girl than you looks like you

is.

It depends on what you mean by a nice girl, I said.

I hope you’s a nicer girl than you looks like you is what I mean. Cause

you don’t look like you’s a wifeable woman at all to me. (169)
Again, Jones forgoes the use of quotes to help continue the stream of conscious narrative.
These references to nice girls, wifeable women, and men that can woman a woman
irrefutably deny that standard conceptions of gender contain any empowering moments.
Throughout Harlan’s life, she constantly confronts the denial of herself in such
discourses, and this struggle leads her onto a path to finally accept the magical stories of
Unicorn Women and myths of turtles who transform to keep from being caught.

Harlan’s failed marriage to the medical anthropologist Norvelle brings her face to
face with the necessary non-western discourses of gender, healing, and change that
intertwine to influence her life as an African-American woman. Harlan asserts, “Even
when I went to Africa with Norvelle and heard African transformation tales which
sounded very much like that one (the turtle story), I still didn’t believe it or I thought it
was just folklore” (164). Here, we must go back to the turtle/tortoise connection to
Mawu and divinity. Harlan’s denial must be called into question because she implies that

she may not have believed them, but now she has reason to. After all, she does leave her

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husband in Africa because he chases after a medicine woman. Ironically, Norvelle’s

work on a Masai medicine woman enables Harlan to choose a myth that will allow and

shape her to developing her own subjectivity:
It was only that Masai medicine woman who disoriented me because he
wanted to stay with her, because he wanted to keep following her from
Korogwe to Morogoro. . .And I guess I envied her independent life,
traveling about, curing folks. I guess the only way she could express her
wanderlust even though the Masai are traditionally nomadic people was by
being a medicine woman. (228)

Harlan’s decision to leave Norvelle in Africa and pursue her own self concerns the
Masai medicine woman as much as it does the Unicorn Woman she’s heard so much
about as a child. Harlan’s grandmother states, “There’s plenty of mens crazy about her,
like I said, crazy in love or infatuation and even follow her from carnival to carnival, her
being a mythical-type ideal woman, but she ain’t follow none of them. . ..if it’s possible
for a woman to follow her ownself, it’s her. Free and independent” (139). Norvelle’s
academic pursuit and study of the Masai medicine woman sounds very much like those
men who came to see the Unicorn Woman. Harlan’s decision to leave Norvelle acts as a
critical experiment to see if she, like the Masai woman and the Unicon woman, can
follow herself.

In the process of following herself, Harlan becomes manager to a rock star, Joan
the Savage Bitch, and continues to be faced with the importance of her decision to leave
her husband to his own dreams and to follow her self. In discussing women with a

friend of Joan’s who claims not to be a “feminista,” Abio tells Harlan, “1 only think a

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woman should be true to who she believes herself to be. Or who she wants herself to be.
I don’t know what I mean, or whether I’m true myself, to any of that. I don’t think there
are many of us who are true to our possibilities (238). Throughout the text, such
statements work to address Harlan’s courage to accept her subjectivity as a black female,
and then as a healer. Harlan acquires the gift of healing, precisely because she began
healing herself a long time ago by trying to be true to her possibilities. She could not
have come to such a critical consciousness without the stories of turtle and unicorn
women that were a part of her childhood.

Ironically, Harlan heals herself after being stabbed by Joan Savage. Harlan is
sexually involved with Joan’s ex, and Joan, still in love with him, stabs Harlan when she
learns of their sexual relationship. Throughout the novel, Harlan’s commitment to being
“ a woman” or honoring the ideology of a woman is made an issue. She divorces her
husband because she does not wish to be the dutiful wife andfollow him across the
African continent. She engages in sex outside of wedlock with other men. Indeed, after
she has refused to be a traveler with her husband, she becomes a woman traveling the
United States alone to promote musicians. The fact that Harlan is stabbed because of her
sexual desires suggests that the way she wants to live her life as woman and the way the
world perceives that she should live it are at odds with each other. Joan, a white woman
(the model idea of womanhood), represents the reckoning of the world with Harlan’s
problematic subjectivity. After Joan stabs Harlan and Harlan heals herself, Harlan recalls
her client’s disbelief: “ ‘I thought you were a real person,’ she says. ‘But you’re not
even a human woman, you’re not even a real human woman,’ ” and Harlan says in

response, acknowledging, “This is the truth of it. The knife fell out. I put my hand to the

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wound and it healed” (280). 'After Harlan heals herself, she remains unaware and
unprepared for the act of healing in her life. It is only through the continued use of her
gift that she will come to know her true self and full possibilities.

Jones does not end Harlan’s life with tragedy, regret, or death; rather she resolves
to prolong her life with healing and hope. Her decision suggests that the gift of healing
Harlan acquires after the stabbing is to help her find a place for her subjectivity. In the
liminal performative space of healing, Harlan can generate a space in which she can
invent language for that which the world cannot deal with, her sexuality and
independence. In making Harlan a healer, Jones accepts a proclamation that Toni Cade
made in The Black Woman :

We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the
exploitive and dehumanizing system of racism from the manipulative
control of a corporation society; liberation from the constrictive norms of
“mainstream” culture, from the synthetic norms that encourage us to
. fashion ourselves rashly from without (reaction) rather than from within
(creation)... (7)
Jones creates a foundation for black women’s revolutionary subjectivity through Turtle
Women lessons and Black Unicorn woman philosophies. Jones equips Harlan for the
struggle for liberation, and in so doing she returns the healer to its New World setting, for
as Cedric Robinson has noted: “Obeah men and women were frequently the source of
ideology for the slave rebellion”(l36). Just as the obeah could instill fear in whites and

empowerment in blacks to rebel, Jones repositions this legacy to explore how the black

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female’s rebellion depends on the black female healer—Harlan’s courageousness to
unname herself through various acts of healing.

Jones also wishes to explore how Harlan’s sexuality contributes to her continued
process of unnaming. The presentation of Harlan as a sexual person moves beyond
traditional ideals of healers as asexual persons. Since her first healing act happens
because of her sexual relationships, we can be sure that Jones wishes to distinguish
Harlan from other literary healers. Further, it also reconnects to the Mawu paradigm of
being able to occupy many spaces at once--to be male and female, or sexual and spiritual
at the same time. Harlan is able to perform a laying of the hands on her own body to heal
herself because she accepted her flesh with her spirit long ago. She accepts her
subjectivity despite not having a discourse for it, and this acceptance is a revolutionary
act. Revolutionary acts lead to healing and liberation. When Harlan places her hands
over the stab wound, she prolongs her life through healing, but the act also enables her to
conceive of a space for her subjectivity where she can exist and have a language to define
herself. Harlan admits as much: “And when you discover that you can heal yourself, that
you can simply put your hand to a wound and it heals, you soon discover that you can
heal others. From a horsesuffering from a fractured phalange, and then a Turtle
Woman” (281). Furthermore, the gift of healing does not come from external forces but
from her own being. Harlan has carried her gift of healing with her the whole time; she
simply has not recognized it in herself. Her end goal is to continue healing herself as she
did that first time. In order to continue healing others, she must face her own fears,

despair, pain, and disbelief about herself. Years after she has healed herself, Harlan

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recognizes that the words of Joan Savage were incorrect, a failure of language to convey
what she is:

I didn’t even ask for the spirit gift, I begin softly. I weren’t even prepared
for the spirit gift. But it came, it came. . .A lot of y’all looking at me and
just seeing an ordinary woman, and asking y’allself how come a ordinary
woman like me to be given the gift of the spirit, how come a ordinary
woman like me to be given a spirit gift? But that the point of them spirit
gifts, the point of them spirit gifts, is that I am just a ordinary woman. I
am just a ordinary woman, that is the point of the healing. (34)

Harlan is not freakish, inhuman, or other-wordly. She is ordinary. She admits the
truth of it to herself and those coming to be healed. Healing is simply a space whereby
she can exist and know herself. In the end, Jones adeptly disrupts the construction of
gender in western discourse, specifically the construction of the “black woman” as the
primary cause of psychological illness in the lives of black women. Jones utilizes the
oral myths of the Turtle Woman and the Unicorn Woman to explore how black women
can heal themselves by locating their subjectivity through mythical discourse and
metaphors. As I pointed out earlier, testifying and witnessing are only the beginning of
the process of Harlan’s unnaming; her acceptance of the healing gift and her ordinary
existence defy the attempt to name or define her through traditional discourse. She will
not be like her grandmother and allow others (her witnesses) to define her. Harlan
decides to exist liminally between the historical figuration and her own self. She will not
let the myths define or restrict her. She will use them at her leisure to free herself from

the prevailing discussions of gender. This liminal state keeps Harlan from being static

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and choosing to embrace one subjectivity over another. She does not have to choose to
be society’s definition of woman and human or the myth’s definition; she can navigate
between the two worlds.

By making Harlan a healer and a black woman, Jones asks us to reconsider how
we conceive of gender for the black female, to use the subjectivity of those we name
black women as a way to conceptualize or re-conceptualize gender ideologies, and she
demonstrates that it can be accomplished without making the subject other-worldly,
mystical, or the other. Jones’s narrative structure and her knowledgeable use of mythic
structure skillfully navigates this terrain to find a way to discuss black women’s
subjectivity and empowerment in a way that is not deni grating, dominating, or
corrupting. The healer’s gift, specifically Harlan’s, comes from within the self. These
gifts derive from a consciousness of self that has been lost in the translation of language,
a subjectivity that exists beyond definition. As Audre Lorde once stated, the black
unicorn is not free but it can be. Gayl Jones has always understood the need for new
ways of knowing and that’s the point of them healing gifts, the extraordinary coming
from the ordinary that can find its own language. In assigning to Harlan a transforrnative
subjectivity, the novel provides a methodology that makes it possible for Harlan and
other black female subjects to move away from essentialist or totalizing telos that might
determine black female subjectivity. Finally, Harlan can be like the turtle she claimed
not to believe in. She can live up to her own possibilities, being whatever she wants, all
the while defying and eluding those who seek to catch and name her, a sentiment that

reclaims the way of the trickster and the construction of Mawu-Lisa.

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CHAPTER SIX

Racialized Sexuality and Imagined Paradise(s)

Homosexuality doesn’t represent an Afro-centric way of life.
Molefi Asante77

Racism doesn’t go better with a big dick, hot pussy, or a royal image.
Essex Hemphill78

As part of the hermeneutical usefulness of tricking the trickster-trope, I indicated
earlier that in order to allow for a continued revision of the trickster that can help create
new readings of gender and sexuality in black cultural texts, we must not allow the
paradigm to stay fixed or focused on one facet of the trickster. For these reasons, we can
move beyond the Mawu-paradigm to explore how the broad spectrum of trickster traits
and characteristics can help develop readings of sexuality in African American culture.
While we have recently accepted and began to theorize about the homosexuality of the
Mckays, Baldwins, and Lordes in the writing and activism of African American culture,
what critical and theoretical critiques can we offer for the Black bisexual, transsexual,
transvestite artist in the 21S" century? Revising the trope of the trickster to document or
articulate a discourse on sexuality may be one way. In addition, to be certain, discussion
of black sexuality must account for racialized sexuality in its articulation. In this and the
next chapter, I am specifically concerned with how African American writers utilize
trickster traits to create narrative texts to disrupt the logic of racialized sexuality. Most of
the texts selected for examination have been the subject of harsh criticism because of

their approaches to and presentation of struggling against preconceived representations of

 

77 Afrocentricity: A Theory ofSocial Change (Buffalo, N.Y.: Amulefi. 1980) 66.

73 From Shari Frilot’s Black Nation/Queer Nation. (New York:Third World Newsreel, 1995).

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black sexuality in their texts. Before turning to Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1999),- John
A. William’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967, 1994), and Arm Allen Shockley’s The
Black and White of It (1974) as fictional texts confronting sexuality for Africa America,
we need to understand the presence of racialized sexuality that may be encountered in
these texts.

It has never been easy to create a critical theory agenda on black sexuality. Asante
and Hemphill’s words go to the heart of the discussion of sexuality, critical theory, and
culture in the African American community. In this chapter’s epigraphs, Asante’s words
seem to suggest tensions of homophobia in Afro-centric thought, while Hemphill’s words
imply fallacies with Afro-centric thought as it concerns the representation of black
sexuality. In order to frame a concrete school of thought about black sexuality, any
theoretical critique of black sexuality must acknowledge the presence of racialized
sexuality, and then acknowledge the inclination towards the heterosexualization of desire
as a response to it. We can further develop the process of trick-troping to complete the
aforementioned task by using manifest trickster traits to examine how African American
writers suggest the benefits of capricious sexuality in African American community and
culture.

In an alternate reading of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, “Sexuality on/of the
Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, and the Articulation of ‘Racialized Sexuality,’ ” Abdul
R. JanMohamed asserts that racialized sexuality can be defined as “the point where the
deployment of sexuality intersects with the deployment of race” (94). Of racialized
sexuality, JanMohamed notes, “racialized sexuality, unlike its bourgeois counterpart,

links power and knowledge in a negative, inverse relation: the perpetuation of white

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patriarchy and the preservation of its self-image require that it deny a ‘scientific
discursive’ knowledge of its sexual violation of the racial border” (103). JanMohamed’s
discussion of racialized sexuality focuses on white patriarchy’s open secret of violating
the racial order that suggests slaves are inhuman. The slavemaster’s repressed
sexuality/sexual desire alters or undermines the race border, and the silencing of this
border-crossing inhibits the building of any type of analytic discursivity to discuss the
sexuality of the master or the slave who is sexually exploited.

J anMohamed continues his critique of racialized sexuality by suggesting that it
differs from white bourgeois sexuality in “its strategic rather than merely tactical,
deployment of a peculiar silence... a deployment of silence, wherein those who could
speak did not want to and those who did want to speak were prevented from doing so”
(105). Here, JanMohamrned addresses the issues of slavery and of Jim Crow laws, in
which whites who violated the racial border did not speak of transgressing the laws, and
blacks who suffered the trauma of violation could not legally give testimony to this
violation. As the author explains, “in this dynamic structure, where silence and
repression play a strategic role, rather than a tactical or local role, sexuality becomes an
even more dense transfer point of power” (105). This silence facilitates the creation of a
sexualized and hystericized black body, and it becomes the focal point of racialized
sexuality. In the end, racialized sexuality creates an environment in which black people’s
sexuality is thrown into the public domain.

While J anMohammed explains that the discourse of racialized sexuality most
often uses “the oversexualized body of the black male” as its major focus, another work,

Sander L. Gillman’s Diflerence and Pathology: Stereotypes of Race, Sexuality, and

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Madness (1985), also shows evidence that “the black, both male and female, becomes by
the eighteenth century an icon for deviant sexuality in gener ” (81). Her work, as well
as that of other critics,79 is supported through the analysis of published medical texts on
the physiognomy. In one example, Gilman analyzes J.J. Virey’s works on Saartjie
Baartman, otherwise known as the Hottentot Venus:
In this essay, Virey summarized his and many of his contemporaries’ view
on the sexual nature of black females in terms of accepted medical
discourse. Their “voluptuousness” is “developed to a degree of lascivity
unknown in our climate, for their sexual organs are much more developed
than those of whites.” V irey elsewhere cites the Hottentot woman as the
epitome of sexual lasciviousness. (85)
Gilman and JanMohammed make it quite clear that long before the Moynihan report
exploited the order of gender in the African American community, racialized sexuality
encouraged an intellectual environment that would enable such work to grow. Black men
then are assumed to be hypermasculine because their women are sexually licentious.
Subsequently, African America’s conservative/bourgeois defensive posturing
against the silence and repression at the core of racialized sexuality often works to
counter these elements by favoring a strict adherence to the heterosexaulization of desire.
Rather than destroying the Western constructs of sexuality that have consistently othered
black bodies to set off its “normative” sexual codes and behaviors and the
heterosexualization of desire, black critical discourse has often accepted and absorbed the

detrimental blanching discourse. The possibility of sexual fluidity that exists because of

 

79 Especially Felicity Nussbaum’s Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Eighteenth century
English Narratives. (Baltimore: Johns HOpkins University Press, 1995) and Barbara Omolade’s The
Rising Song of African American Women (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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the flexibility of gender in black communities continues to be displaced by an agenda to
present black pe0ple as “normal.”

For instance, when Asante claims that homosexuality does not represent Afro-
centric thought, the implicit irony of his words cannot be ignored. Asante’s quote was
not meant to disrupt the constructs of sexuality, but to suggest, as other black critics80
have done, that the desire of all men and women of African descent has always followed
the “appropriate” gender construction, and that same-sex desire for African-descended
men and women did not exist prior to white contact. The paradox in Asante’s words
derives from knowing that the term “homosexuality” is a modern western construct,
rather than any actual knowledge that same-sex desire did not exist in Africa.81 Though
Asante may have been correct in saying that the concept of homosexuality does not
represent an Afro-centric way of life, we must reconsider this comment in acknowledging
that some African Diasporic people’s philosophical values, which address issues of
gender as distinct from sex, alters any discussion of sexuality. In addition, Butler
reminds us that “when the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically
independent from sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the
consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male
one, and a feminine body as easily as a female one” (10). We can also note that before
Butler, Africanisms offer theoretical ways to dismiss the words of Asante and Cress.

As demonstrated in chapter two, there is evidence that Africanist thought

conceives of gender as radically independent from sex in its construction of male-

I

 

so See Frances Cress Welsing’s The Isis ( Yssis) Papers (Chicago: Third World Press, 1991).
Cress conceives of black bi-sexuality and homosexuality as a result of slavery, a practice of white men.

8’ For a discussion of the construct, see Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An
Introduction 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. (New York: Vintage Books. 1990)

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daughters, female husbands, and hommes-femmes. We have further seen that in New
World slave culture, gender becomes a free-floating signifier in early African American
communities. Desire, then, in certain black communities might have also been compelled
to be as free-floating as gender. Just as the trickster helps us to overturn the discourse of
intelligible gender by acknowledging itself as unnameable, so can it enlighten us on how
African American culture might construct the status of sexuality (desire) as autonomous
from sex, and that like gender it is also fluid.
Asante’s words seek to preserve “authentic blackness” by maintaining the
heterosexualization of desire:
The heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes the production of
discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between “feminine” and
“masculine,” where these are understood as expressive attributes of
“male” and “female.” The cultural matrix through which gender identity
has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of “identities” cannot
“exist”—that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and
those in which the practices of desire do not “follow” from either sex or
gender.82
This point demonstrates how gender influences discourse on sexuality. In order for the
logic of gender constructs to remain logical, sexual desire must follow the same pattern
of binary oppositions. If man is to be man, then he must be sexually attracted to his
opposite, woman. However, Butler’s position needs to be developed a bit more when we
take into consideration the experiences of African Americans. Whereas Butler observes

that fixed gender constructs and hierarchies have to be sustained through the

 

‘2 Butler, 23-24.

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heterosexualization of desire, I suggest something quite different for African American
culture. African American communities in the US. base their cultural foundations on the
early egalitarian order of gender that is not positioned axiologically because of
Africanisms and slavery. This system can consistently upset the logic of intelligible
gender through an unnaming of the black woman; but even so, African American writers
are left with the heterosexualization of desire. Why? In addition to the fluidity of
gender, racialized sexuality has created a separate logic of intelligible gender in African
American communities. While gender may be latently fluid, the construction of sexuality
in black culture struggles against such liminality. Butler’s ahistorical account of gender
fails to explain that the heterosexual matrix in black culture is the consequence of a
historical pattern. In African American culture, the heterosexualization of desire is not
simply a result of the cultural matrix of gender identity, but the result of a complex
cultural matrix of the open-secret of this othered sexuality.

In taking JanMohammed’s concept further, we should complicate the issue by
noting that his theory begins the exploratory work on racialized sexuality by positioning
it in a heterosexual matrix. Due in large part to his thoughtful analysis, we can now
begin moving beyond that of the heterosexual matrix to explore how his conception of
sexuality impacts other black communities, as well as the “heterosexual” African
American community. Racialized sexuality, as Kobena Mercer indicates, positions black
sexuality as not normal—as othered, or nonheteronorrnative83--thereby making it a

political space for black subjects: therefore, “assumptions about black sexuality lie at the

 

83 Roderick Antwan Ferguson’s manuscript Specters of the Sexual: Race, Sociology, and the
conflicts Over African American Culture (U of California: San Diego. 2000) provides new insights into the
sociological implications of the representation of black families non-heteronormative. as opposed to
conventional studies completed by the major critic in this area, Robert Staples.

188

heart of the ideological view that black households constitute deviant, disorganized and
even pathological familial forms that fail to socialize their members into societal norms”
(150-151). The societal norms that Mercer speaks about are heteronormative and
patriarchal behavior, and as illustrated in chapter two, the patriarchal organization of
black families does not serve as the major force of organization in early black populations
in the US. Hence, critics concerned with rescuing black sexuality from racialized,
othered, and non-heteronormative ideologies vehemently cling to the heterosexualization
of desire, fostering homophobia in the process. Yet, critical theory concerned with black
sexuality cannot discuss the intersection of race and sexuality without addressing sexual
orientation, if it truly wishes to move away from racialized ideologies. In this way, any
critical theory of black sexuality must first understand how race and sexuality intersect,
and force blackness to cross sexual boundaries beyond heterosexuality. Though Asante
may wish to preserve the authenticity or sacredness of black culture through the
heterosexualization of desire, he cannot do so because the discourse of race and sexuality
become one and the same discourse in African American communities and texts.

Asante and other Afro-centric critics rarely employ any type of queer theory to
assess their words as this work has done, but the use of such theory in articulations of
black sexuality can be beneficial and revealing. As Hemphill notes, when we encourage
black people, through black culture, to embrace images of big dicks and hot pussy with a
royal image—the oversexualized black body complemented by images of a connection to
a royal Egyptian heritage—we allow for the continued dismemberrnent of black bodies:
Such discourse never addresses how to understand the impact of racialized sexuality on

the African body. The discursive leap from kings and queens to enslaved pomotroped

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bodies fixes black subjectivity into an idealistic ancient past with no mention of body, or
to a traumatic more recent past where blacks were all body. There exists no space in
which blacks can be racially empowered and sexual. For example, when Molefi Asante
asserts that homosexuality does not represent a part of Afro-centric life and thought, he
practices the strategic silence and repression of racialized sexuality that others black
bodies, and refutes the sexual violation of the racial border. Such collusion‘ with the
schema of racialized sexuality makes it impossible for the broader black cultural
community to critically address desire and sexuality as it concerns people of the African
diaspora. Since he chooses to do so, he closes off any discussion in which we could
create critical Afro-centric theory that acknowledges the racialization of sexuality and
strategically counters it with a multitude of sexual identities.

In order to disturb Western constructs of sexuality in African American cultural
texts, we need to perform three specific tasks: to overturn racialized sexuality, uproot the
heterosexualization of desire, and explode the binary of hetero/homo in sexuality. Jan
Mohamed reminds us that “sexuality on the border was not a construct that could be
administered through analytic discourse” (104-105). His concept of racialized sexuality
and his analysis of Richard Wright’s Native Son demonstrate how racialized sexuality in
this sense finds its way into fiction rather than scientific discourse. Jan Mohamed’s
critique expounds on the belief that a less analytic discourse becomes necessary to
address the dilemma of racialized sexuality. Seen in the discussion of gender in previous
chapters, the connections to oral mechanisms through the trickster provide the most
efficient way to circumvent idealized black bodies. For the purposes of this study, the

spiritual aesthetics and discourse of the trickster replace the analytic discourse. To fully

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allow the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality to be exposed, we need to complete
the three assigned tasks. Again, the folk, oral, and vernacular provide the best ways of
doing so. However, carrying out these multiple duties requires a different type of
trickster hermeneutic than that previously used in the section on gender.

Barbara Omolade’s “Heart of Darkness” aptly explains the need for aesthetics that
can transgress boundaries and demonstrates its significance to critiques of black sexuality
in African American texts:

Sex between black women and black men, between black men and black
men, between black women and black women, is meshed within complex
cultural, political, and economic circumstances. All black sexuality is
underlined by a basic theme: where, when, and under what circumstances
could Iwould black men and women connect with each other intimately
and privately when all aspects of their lives were considered in the
dominion of the public, white master/lover’s power. (363)
The trickster figure is key to seeing how African American culture disrupts the public
discourse of racialized sexuality. African American culture utilizes the trickster
characteristics of sacred/lewd bricoleur, situation-inverter, and shape-shifter to disrupt the
public domain of racialized sexuality that maintains its foundation through silence and
repression. Traditionally, tropes of these trickster traits in African American fiction and
criticism focus on the idea of shape-shifting as it concerns race. For example, the shape-
shifting trope of trickster becomes apparent with issues of passing as white by black
characters in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man (1912) and

the previously cited texts, Quicksand, Passing, and Plum Bun. Shape-shifting has also

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included the transgressing of class and racial boundaries in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby
(1981). We have already briefly seen how Audre Lorde takes on the gender and sexual
implications of shape-shifting in her trickster novel, Zami. However, critics rarely apply
the tropes of sacred/lewd bricoleur and situation-inverter to explore the intersections of
race, gender, and sexuality in black texts. Ironically, if we trick the traditional way these
tropes have been employed, we can reveal that they are the most powerful disruptors of
racialized sexuality.

Other African American writers have utilized trickster strategies in attempting to
overturn the effects of racialized sexuality on the African American community. Toni
Morrison has examined the impact of racialized sexuality in many of her male characters:
Charlie Breedlove in The Bluest Eye (1970), Milkman in Song of Solomon (1977), Paul D
in Beloved (1987), and Joe in Jazz (1992). In her seventh novel, Paradise, Morrison
continues her examination of racialized sexuality by using the trickster aesthetic of
bricoleur to overcome the difficulties of racialized sexuality. Essentially a bricoleur is a
“tinker or fix it person, noted for his ingeneuity in transforming anything at hand in order
to form a creative solution.”84 What is most important about the trickster as sacred/lewd
bricoleur comes in the way s/he can find the lewd in the sacred and the sacred in the
lewd. Such a discrete transforrnative ability proves necessary in an African American
community attempting to move beyond the boundaries of racialized sexuality. In the
work of Toni Morrison, the presentation of themes on sexuality depends upon the
manifest trickster trait of sacred/lewd bricoleur.

To critique Morrison’s narrative and aesthetics as they concern sexuality is to run

the risk of being reprimanded by the author herself. Barbara Smith’s work was at the

 

3“ Hynes, 42.

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center of a major controversy when her analysis of Ne] and Sula’s relationship in Toni
Morrison’s Sula (1973) suggested a lesbian reading of Morrison’s novel. Smith recalls:
Some thought my discussion of a lesbian subtext was on the mark and
others, including Morrison, thought that I was seeing something that was
not there. My perspective about Sula was influenced by the bold new
ideas of 19708 lesbian feminism. Lesbian feminist activists and theorists
pointed out that the dominant heterosexist regime so often obscured actual
erotic connections between women that it was important to intuit the
possibility of lesbian existence in order to claim our history and our
lives.85
Although there may never be a consensus between lesbian criticism and the author’s own
comments, as Morrison herself has attested that Smith’s reading was off, we cannot
simply dismiss Smith’s reading. Although Smith used lesbian theory and criticism to
construct her reading, there might be other ways to conceive of the same reading. While
Morrison may not have been employing lesbian dynamics in her text, she has markedly
referred to her art in ways that are distinctly tied to trickster traditions.86 These

references to ancestors and trickster figures have also been supported by substantial

criticism of a great many of her works.87 Since Morrison does create from a veritable

 

85 Barbara Smith, The Truth that Never Hurts: Writings in Race, Gender, and Freedom (New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998) 3.

86 Morrison assesses her work in “Rootedness: The Ancestors as Foundation”. Mari Evan’s Black
Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. (Garden City. N .Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984. 499-
510). Morrison discusses issues of community and individuality, participation and reading at the same time,
and many of her conclusions are tied to a metaphysical presence that makes such a link possible, much like
that of trickster.

87 Two notable articles examine the various connection to West African in two different Morrison
novels. See Michele Pessoni’s “ ‘She was Laughing at their God’: Discovering the Goddess Within in

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cornucopia of trickster strategies, her work, even if not intended as such, comes to reveal
the distinct and dynamic fluidity of sexuality, especially in culture tied to a folkloric and
trickster tradition. The manifest trickster trait of sacred/lewd bricoleur provides the best
way of explaining that fluidity. Morrison’s writing may rely on heterosexual
assumptions, but her trickster strategies consistently work to overcome the construction
of racialized sexuality through whatever means necessary, be it hetero/bi/homo/ narrative
aesthetics and strategies.
In Paradise (1999), Toni Morrison’s seventh novel, the author presents readers
with a story that attempts to inform us of the legacies of racial and sexual violence in a
rural town in Oklahoma called Ruby. The destruction of binary thinking as a way to
overcome racialized sexuality is briefly hinted at in the novel’s epi graph.
For many are the pleasant forms that exist in/numerous sins,/ and
incontinences, /and disgraceful passions/ andfleeting pleasures, which
(men) embrace until they become /sober/ and go up to their resting place./
And they will find me there,/ and they will live,/ and they will not die
again.(l)
Morrison’s words are puzzling and hard to pin down until we have realized the full
implications of them. The first page of the novel determines a framework of sacred/lewd
bricolage. The most striking tricksterisms in the epigraph are the parenthetical emphasis
placed on “men” and the division of lines on the page. The way Morrison physically

structures the epigraph dodges fixed meanings. The parenthetical emphasis on men could

 

Sula”. African American Review, Vol. 29, No. 3. (Autumn, 1995) pp. 439-451 and Gay Wilentz’s
“Civilizations Underneath: African Heritage as Cultural Discourse in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon”.
African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, Women Writers Issue. (Spring, 1992). pp. 61-76.

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refer specifically to human species of “men.” Morrison may simply have done it as a
way to show that men embrace numerous sins and disgraceful passions, rather than that
those factors embrace each other (fleeting pleasures and numerous sins). Yet, she doesn’t
personify any of those elements. In addition, the parenthetical attention to men appears
to be an afterthought. While she physically separates sins from incontinences, or
disgraceful passions from fleeting pleasures, the afterthought of “men” suggests that all
those features will at some point embrace, hence, connect and overlap one another if we
are using a frame of opposing binaries. The ominous solitary configuration of “sober” on
the page refers to a logical and moral final awareness, although whose is not quite clear.
Further, resting place usually symbolizes death, but Morrison rejects the finality of
sobriety and juxtaposes it with an unnameable to be found, so that even in death, there is
life. Through the ambiguous structure and meaning of this short poem, Morrison
provides an example of what lies beneath readings based on binary dichotomies—
multiple and unfixed meaning that recycles itself. This is an important condition
necessary for overcoming racialized sexuality in the text. It relies not simply on the
trickster characteristic of sacred/lewd bricoleur, but situation inverter as well.

Like the epigraph, the rest of the novel interrupts binaries. Initially, Paradise
presents the reader with two separate places that signify paradise—the all black town of
Ruby and the Convent. Ruby is a place to which one goes to escape from racial violence.
The convent offers an escape from sexual violence for women. Though the two have co-
existed peacefully for some time, the impending influx of change brings these two
paradises to a violent confrontation—with the men of Ruby ultimately murdering the

women in the convent. This confrontation allows Morrison to comment about the fear

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and anger derived from racialized sexuality for both black men and women. Morrison’s
text confronts the intra-racial conflict that arises from the color-caste system in the black
community, and in doing so she changes the original axiologically opposed binaries of
white/black that privilege whiteness. The town of Ruby represents a paradise in which
blackness outranks whiteness, but Ruby’s conflicts reveal that the discourse of race
always has as its primary foundation a commitment to white male supremacy. Only the
trickster strategy of situation inversion allows an examination of this foundation and a
way to counter it with something less volatile.
When Ruby is founded in 1890, it is the direct result of the original eight families
being rebuffed by free black towns in the western frontier:
For ten generations they had believed the division they fought to close was
free against slave and rich against poor. Usually, but not always, white
against black. Now they saw a new separation: light skinned against
black. Oh they knew the difference in the minds of whites, but it had not
struck them before that it was of consequence, serious consequences, to
Negroes themselves. . . .The sign of racial purity they had taken for granted
had become a stain. (194)
Morrison reconfigures racial violence in this tale of a black community that uses its black
color caste system to reject the “blue-black people” of its own blood. The existence of
these lighter-skinned blacks serves as evidence that white patriarchy’s violation of the
sexual border—the master’s rape of the female slave—impacts African American
communities long after slavery. As Morrison articulates in her novel, the “open-secret”

of crossing racial boundaries fosters an environment in which racial purity of Africans in

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the US. becomes a negative factor in economic and social progress. Li ghter-skinned
blacks receive social and psychological benefits over darker-skinned individuals.88

Li ghter-complexioned blacks dismiss and shame the darker complexioned families so
that “their daughters would be shunned as brides; their sons chosen last. . .that colored
men would be embarrassed to be seen socially with their sisters” (194). The original 8-
Rock families are driven to locate a place for themselves in the New World (western
frontier) due in large part to the ideologies that occur because of racialized sexuality,
ideologies that privilege lighter-skinned blacks over whites. In turn, they create a town in
their own image, one philosophically conceived through Booker T. Washington’s notions
of black self-sufficiency as the basis for their social contract.

Current criticism on Paradise has been very adept in exploring this intra-racial
and class conflict of the 8-Rock family. Missy Dehn Kubitschek, for example, argues
that Paradise “investigates the divergence between the social realities of a separatist
establishment and an all-black Utopia” (180). However, for my purposes I am
concerned with other realities in the text, mainly the reconstructed notions of sexuality.
How does this establishment of an all black Utopia refer back to the detrimental
consequences of racialized sexuality? The answer can be seen in another significant
criticism of Paradise that explores the novel as a critique of black masculinity and
patriarchy. David Ikard’s “Killing the White Girl First: Understanding the Patriarchy in
Toni Morrison’s Paradise” highlights the significance of the novel’s opening sentence,
“they shoot the white girl first,” and recognizes its importance in the novel’s assessment
of gender, race, and violence. Ikard suggests that in founding and running the town, “the

Ruby men invert the ideology of white supremacy to underscore the superiority of black

 

8" See Kathy Sandlers’s film A Question of Color. (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1993).

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men. Thus, it is the Ruby men’s racial superiority complex—a complex inextricably and
ironically grounded in white supremacist notions of patriarchy—that is under scrutiny in
Paradise” (9). While Ikard’s text is concerned with the construction of black
masculinity and patriarchy, this reading of Paradise is more concerned with Morrison’s
presentation of sexuality in the African American community of Ruby. The patriarchal
rulers of Ruby must, at all cost, keep the “open-secret” of white male patriarchy if they
are to hold onto their established black separatist community.

Morrison explores the color caste oppression of black society, but in doing so, she
also demonstrates how racialized sexuality creates an situation in which blacks who were
othered by whites, now other their own bodies and sexuality by subtly changing the same
standards of normativity from which they originally fled. The sacred/lewd characteristic
of trickster enables us to understand how the 8-Rock men reverse the dynamics that result
in the viewing of African Americans as othered, primitive, and sensual beings, so that
everything that might be sensual, erotic, or sexual becomes associated with racial
impurity and whiteness. The mulatto has typically represented the sexual exotic in the
imagining of western Eurocentric sexuality, but Morrsion reveals how this predicament
operates in black communities. This is shown most aptly in Morrison’s depiction of
Patricia and her daughter Billie Delia. Patricia, in her dairy notes of the 8-Rock men,
acknowledges: “they don’t hate us because mama was your first customer. They hate us
because she looked like a cracker and was bound to have cracker-looking children like
me, and although I married Billy Cato, who was an 8-rock like you, like them, I passed
the skin to my daughter, as you and everybody knew I would” (196). Patricia records

the continued presence of the “Open-secret” in a black community without white people,

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the initial purveyors of the secret. She notes that no matter how much those in the
community work to achieve or maintain racial purity, it is threatened by the transgressing
of sexual borders. This is why Roger, Patricia’s father and an original member of the 8-
rock, is shunned and treated badly after marrying a black woman outside of the Ruby
community. As long as the men can maintain the “open-secret” from the practice of
slavery, they can hold onto Ruby and their status as the heads of that community.

The 8-Rock men’s conservative views on sexuality and gender as it relates to their
all black community are informed by the knowledge and fear that crossing the racial
border could very well lead them to be exiled and othered again. For if the rudiments of
racial and sexual oppression lead the town of Ruby to be born, then it also means that
anything or anyone who seeks to diminish those racial and sexual boundaries is a threat.
The existence of the convent as a haven is such a threat in Ruby’s continued existence as
a segregated black community dominated by black patriarchal rule. The convent deviates
from the men’s ideas of normative behavior and refuses to submit to their code of silence
and repression.

The hush and tyranny controlling black communities’ sexual identities make it
more than difficult to solve this problem of racialized sexuality, specifically in nationalist
agendas of the African American community. In Martin R. Delaney’s “A Black
Nationalist Manifesto,” Delaney claims, “No people are elevated above the condition of
their females. . .to know the condition of a people, it is only necessary to know the
condition of their females” (82). Delaney’s statement adheres to the logic of late

nineteenth century and early twentieth century programs for uplifting black communities.

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In a brief discussion of black social agendas and gender in Dubois’s Soul of Black Folk
(1903), Omolade provides an excellent analysis of the two-pronged dilemma:
The black man moved toward the black woman, clothing her raped and
abused black body with the mantle of respectable womanhood, giving
protection and claiming ownership of her. ...Protecting black womanhood
was the most significant measure of black manhood and the central aspect
of black male patriarchy. (359)
Omolade discusses how Dubois presents an imagined black community where the control
of female sexuality and sexual reproduction configures into the definition of manhood.89
The 8-Rock men epitomize this approach to the transgression of racial and sexual
boundaries. Their status and power rely upon sexuality being an open secret and its
construction as being fixed between notions of sacred and lewd behavior. If black
“womanhood” needs protection, this validates the ranked genderin g of the black male and
black “manhood” in Morrison’s novel. The 8-Rock men’s establishing of the town Ruby
offers the Opportunity to thwart the consequences of racialized sexuality for blue-black
manhood through the rhetoric of black empowerment and social uplift.

Morrison’s social setting and climate for Paradise is the beginning of the late
twentieth-century Black Power Movement. During this time period, the politicizing of
intimacy reached new heights for black communities. In “The Pill: Genocide of
Liberation,” Toni Cade Bambara presents the discursive practices formed as a result of
racialized sexuality: there is a “tall, lean dude” who suggests that “the sisters ...throw

away the pill and hop to the mattresses and breed revolutionaries and mess up the man’s

 

89 Carby's “The Souls of Black Men” in Race Men also discusses how black empowerment “to be
determined by the nature Of the struggle among men over the bodies of women” (9-10).

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genocidal program” (163). Bambara astutely criticizes the weakness of such ideology:
“I’ve been made aware of the national call to sisters. . .It is a noble thing, the rearing of
warriors for the revolution. . .I do, however find fault with the notion that dumping the pill
is the way to do it” (164). Bambara also reminds us that in each case the solution to
racialized sexuality is a heterosexualization of desire that comes at the expense of true
liberation for blacks, especially black females: “It is revolutionary, radical, and righteous
to want for your mate what you want for yourself. And we can’t be rhapsodizin g about
liberation, breeding warriors, and revolution unless we are willing to address ourselves to
the women’s liberation movement” (165). As Bambara notes, the national call for sisters
to avoid using birth control is deployed so as to deal with racial Oppression, but it
becomes a hysterical heterosexualization of desire, overtly embedded with sexism, that
ignores the way such ideology limits and fixes gender and sexuality in a community that
subsists because of its fluid and egalitarian social foundations.

The men of Ruby, then, conceive of their paradise in way that continues the
predicament of racialized sexuality and the defensive strategy of heterosexualizing desire.
The paradise created by the 8-Rock Men places Ruby’s social order in a black and white
binary, which means that the intersection of private and public domains and race and
sexuality must be held in place by force and silence. They cannot overcome the white
supremacist system they tried to escape because it serves as the primary force in the
organization of their paradise. Their problematic political endeavor to overturn the
distorted sexuality in black society that made them unacceptable can be observed in their

treatment of lighter-skinned blacks who represent the open-secret of racialized sexuality.

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Most of the men in Ruby share the belief that sexuality for anything other than
reproductive purposes, and outside of the sphere of male control, is lewd and to be
associated with whiteness. When Amette, Billie Delia’s best friend, becomes pregnant at
the age of fifteen, the 8-rock men call a meeting with the soon-to-be father, K.D., to
discuss what they (the men) should do about it. As they discuss the sexuality and body of
the darker-skinned more acceptable Amette, the subject on their minds quickly switches
to the lighter-skinned Billy Delia when K.D. attempts to explain his respect for Amette:

“I always respected her. From when she was that high. . .Ask anybody.
ask her girlfriend, Billie Delia. Bille Delia will tell you.”
The effect of the genius stroke was immediate. The Morgan uncles
held in their smiles, while the father and son bristled. Billie Delia was
the fastest girl in town and speeding up by the second. (59)
Male dominance over women’s sexuality in Ruby is evident throughout this passage.
Amette, the young girl who is impregnated by K.D., is not present at this meeting, nor is
her mother or any other woman. The men decide what will happen to the young woman
and her child. Further, the blue-black men have imposed their constructions of sexuality
on Billie Delia, the lighter-skinned daughter of Patricia, and her “cracker-looking”
mother. The character of Billie Delia allows Morrison to reveal the 8-Rock men’s
ideologies of sexuality. To the men of Ruby, sexuality seems to be a sacred thing when
associated with the darker-skinned Amette. Although Amette is unmarried and pregnant,
her darker-skinned self can produce another dark-skinned child for the town of Ruby.
Amette’s mistake is acceptable because she “breeds” with K.C., a darker-skinned male.

As Ruby’s major reason for forming is to mess up the white man’s program of black

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genocide, Amette is now a Ruby woman of great worth. She will give the town a'baby
for the revolution, or for the plan of Ruby’s social upliftment—avoiding genocide of their
own true-blue blackness. However, quite adeptly, just as Morrison reveals the

connection between pure African blood, sexuality, and sacredness, she also demonstrates
that the Ruby men especially perceive sexuality as lewd when associated with lighter-
skinned blacks such as Billie Delia. The lewdness of sexuality for these men is a direct
result of the open-secret of sexuality on the border—racialized sexuality.

The town of Ruby and specifically the men construct a representation of Billie
Delia’s sexuality long before she can ever have any control over it. As a child, Billie
Delia enjoyed riding a racehorse, bareback. Her delight in riding the horse amounts to
nothing more than mere childhood play. Yet, Billie Delia, and her mother Patricia for
that matter, find out quickly that as marked—light-skinned—women, they can never fully
love themselves when seen through the eyes of the townspeople in Ruby:

Billie Delia was three years old—too little still for everyday underwear,
and nobody noticed or cared how perfect her skin felt against the wide
expanse of rhythmically moving animal flesh. While she struggled to grip
Hard Goods with her ankles and endure the rub of his spine, the grown-
ups smiled, taking pleasure in her pleasure. (150)
Morrison creatively mixes the sacred innocence of childhood with what the Ruby
townspeople might see as the lewd longings of adult sexuality. At first, the citizens of
Ruby don’t perceive Billie Delia’s child-play as anything more than that, and Billie
Delia, a mere three years old, does not knows the boundaries of sexuality in general, let

alone in the town she grows up in. Billie Delia’s innocent act of autoeroticsim disrupts

the silence around sexuality in Ruby, and she soon learns how unforgiveable her actions
are:
Then one day. A Sunday. Hard Goods came loping down the street with
Mr. Nathan astride. Billie Delia, who hadn’t seen horse or rider for a long
time, ran toward them, begging for a lift. Mr. Nathan promised to stop by
after service. Still in her Sunday clothes when she saw him coming,
negotiating space among the after-church crowd. ...she pulled down her
Sunday panties before raising her arms to be lifted onto Hard Good’s
back. (151)
Billie Delia is not only whipped by her mother, but also teased for years to come by those
who witnessed her “offensive” behavior. The townspeople of Ruby brand Billie Delia as
a whore or loose female because of this childhood incident. In her role as sacred/lewd
bricoleur, Billie Delia forces the reader to be aware of the sexual boundaries established
by everyone in Ruby. Billie Delia’s acts are not only horrible because she was, as
perceived by adults and children alike, receiving sexual pleasure from riding Hard Goods,
but also because the three year old has not learned to distinguish between the binaries of
sacred and the lewd and the public and the private. Billie Delia’s act further moves into
the realm of moral lewdness because the incident happens on a Sunday. Morrison’s play
on the sacredness of Sunday supplanted for lewd sexual pleasure is exacerbated by Billie
Delia’s removal of her holy panties, which are designated so because they are only worn
on Sundays for church. This act in itself, perceived though binary divisions, suggests that

Billie Delia chooses the flesh over the spirit.

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Even though Billie Delia is a mere three years old when the incident occurs, the
town refuses to forgive her. Yet, as demonstrated by the town’s continued support of
Amette during her “secret” pregnancy, the scorn Billie Delia receives is due to her
youthful public display of her sexuality, as well as her skin color. She carries the burden
of being fast, loose, and sexual because she is not of pure blue-black skin descent. She is
tainted. The disdain Billie Delia and Patricia receive from the Ruby men derives from
the reverse discourse of racialized sexuality. Billie Delia does not understand the
importance of established boundaries between the sacred and lewd because her blood and
her skin express the notion that boundaries have been trespassed. Regardless of her
actions, she cannot adhere to the town’s sexual boundaries because her existence is a
representation of the fact that the borders between black/white have been crossed.

Billy Delia’s mother, Patricia, finally overcome with this orthodoxy, finds herself
doubting the sexual purity of her daughter. Unable to understand the complexity of her
daughter’s capacity to love two men, brothers Apollo and Brood Poole, Patricia is riddled
with paranoia, projecting the Ruby men’s representations of sexuality onto her daughter:
“I didn’t mean to hit her so hard. ..I just meant to stop her lying mouth telling me she
didn’t do anything. I saw them. All three of them back behind the Oven and she was in
the middle. Plus I am the one who washes the sheets around here” (202). Readers, then,
must determine what it is Patricia thinks she sees and why. Clearly, Patricia’s comments
imply that Billie Delia and the Poole boys were engaging in sexual activities together.
We can’t really ascertain whether Billie Delia’s childhood autoeroticism causes Patricia’s
paranoia, but what we do know is that the town of Ruby creates an environment where

women, especially 1i ght-skinned women, are seen as lascivious and unnatural because

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they are not racially pure. The very notion that her daughter is having sex with two men,
at the same time no less, enrages Patricia so that she hits Billie Delia and makes her flee
to the convent. Nevertheless, Pat’s assumptions are wrong, for Morrison reveals that
Billie Delia’s virginity remains intact precisely because she is unable to choose between
the two brothers she loves (152). In each case, Billie Delia is subjected to trauma
because of the way others have constructed her sexuality. Morrison posits that Billie
Delia can only find and accept herself, first in the convent, and then later, by removing
herself from the town of Ruby. Billie Delia ends up working and living in another town.
Interestingly, her refusal to choose one lover indicates that she will not make her life
about either/or binaries. She does not make a choice between the two brothers because
she understands better than anyone the problems that evolve from setting and fixing
standards. She, like the Others, comes to understand this after her brief stay in the
convent. Ultimately, as Kubitscheck concludes, “Paradise shows that opposed, mutually
exclusive categories can never be maintained because they deny social complexity”
(180). Though Kubitscheck’s comments appear directly related to the color caste
ideologies in the text, it is also very relevant to the fluidity of sexuality advanced in
Morrison’s work.

The second paradise constructed in the novel is at a convent that lies seventeen
miles outside of Ruby. In this second paradise, Morrison works to reverse the logic of
sexuality imposed on women in the town of Ruby. The convent offers the freedom to
have a black female/male subjectivity that does not collude with mantles of womanhood
and manhood, and this liberty threatens the rule of the 8-Rock. The convent serves as

safe space for Mavis, the first to come to the convent, who leaves a tyrannical husband

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and abandons two children; Senecca, a foster home refugee; Pallas, a sixteen-year old
runaway; and the women from the town of Ruby who come to the convent in times of
crisis in their lives. Each of these women experiences some form of physical and mental
abuse stemming from their sexuality and gender because of their positions as mothers,
wives, daughters, and black women. Abortion, rape, incest, wife battering, and teenage
pregnancy are all a part of the women’s lives. Though initially the convent seems to
provide a safe haven for women because it is an all female space, Morrison indicates that
the safety comes not from biological commonalities but from the convent’s space of
sacred/lewd liminality that connects racial freedom to sexual freedom so as to disturb
fixed gender/sexual constructions.

The emerging theme of connecting racial freedom to sexual freedom comes via
another woman who takes refuge in the convent. Gigi, a product of Alcom, Mississippi,
leaves her home because of the emotional toll civil rights activism levies on her. 90
Through her sexuality, Gigi seeks confirmation that her life as a black person will not
always be full of grief and racial injustices. Gigi aka Grace comes to town in search of
mythical objects that are tied to stories of sexual freedom. Her quest takes her in search
of a place she’s been told about, a rock formation outside Tuscon, Arizona that looks like
two people making love:

A man and woman fucking forever. When the light changes every four
hours they do something new. At the desert’s edge they fuck to the sky
tide of Arizona. Nothing can stop them. Nothing wants to. Moonlight

arches his back; sunlight warms her tongue. . .But they keep on doing it

 

9° Morrison ‘5 briefly glimpse into Gigi’s past implies that Gigi’s father was an activist involved in
the Civil Rights Movement who is now dead. See Gigi’s grandfathers’s comments, pp.65 and 265.

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in the rain—the black couple of Wish—Arizona. (63)
Gigi’s need to find this particular rock formation centers on her need to find a sexuality
untouched by trauma. The black couple of Wish, Arizona represents this utopia in a
number of ways. In that utopia, a black man and woman can come together to love each
other emotionally and physically despite whatever else is happening around them. Gigi
seeks an escape from the public domain of race to the private domain of sexuality, and
the tale imagines a place where such an "accomplishment is possible. Yet, Morrison has
already implied in Ruby’s deliberate practice of color casting, that racialized sexuality
makes such a feat almost impossible.

The imagined space Gigi longs to find is created via strategies of rendering the
“sacred” and the “lewd” parts of one entity. The consistent variability embodied in the
tale connects back to the idea that tricksterisms promote an agenda of not separating the
spirit from the flesh, or nature from man. Again, Morrison interweaves the sacred and
lewd by joining nature, spirituality, and divinity with images of sexuality, the flesh, and
eroticism—a trickster strategy. The strategy of sacred/lewd bricoleur permits us to view
the black couple as a metaphor for how we must approach the domain of sexuality in the
lives of black people. The couple is a rock formation that produces imagery altered by
the changing position of light, sunlight, and moonlight. That the couple can go on
forever with no person or thing stopping them is due in large part to the liminality offered
by the illumination. The rock formations, set and solid, are never fixed objects. In the
end, it seem significant that what Gigi sees as beautiful, others find to be “bold as
Gomarrah” and perverse (63). When Gigi finally arrives in Arizona, she is unable to

find the rock formation, but she journeys on and soon learns of another phenomenon

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produced by nature. On a train ride to nowhere, after asking a man if he’d ever heard of
the rock formation, the man laughs and tells her of a tree in the town of Ruby, Oklahoma:
...a lake in the middle of a wheat field. And that near this lake two trees
grew in each other’s arms. And if you squeezed in between them in just
the right way, well you would feel an ecstasy no human could invent or
duplicate. (66)
From that moment on, Gigi changes the course for Ruby. Ironically, Roger Best, father
of Patricia and grandfather of Billie Delia, brings Gigi to the convent. Because he knows
everyone born in Ruby, he immediately assigns her to the convent that takes in drifters.
Through the characterization of Gigi, Morrison is able to continue her efforts to blur the
lines between sacredness and lewdness. Though the utopia Gigi hopes to find does not
exist, she can more fully live her life if she learns from the non-hermenutical model of
the rock formation and the tree in Ruby, the joining of sacred and lewd, of nature and
man.

The convent holds the key to understanding how this trickster transforrnative
power uses the combination of the sacred/lewd to provide new life. Initially the convent
is the mansion of an embezzler: “He must have planned to have a lot of good-time
company in his fortress: eight bedrooms, two-giant baths. . .His efforts to entertain were
no more sophisticated than he was—mostly food, sex, and toys” (71). Morrison
emphasizes the excess of the embezzler’s mansion in her descriptions by calling it a
fortress. She constructs her tale of the embezzler’s mansion through sexual and phallic
imagery: “shaped like a live cartridge, it curved to a deadly point at the north end. . .the

southern end contained signs of his desire in two rooms. . . .a veranda curved from the

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north around the bullet’s tip” (71). Our first impression of the mansion’s architect is that
of a gun and violence, but we also quickly connect it to the phallic imagery of the
embezzler’s own sexual desire. The mansion, originally conceived as the symbol of
male status and sexual desire, is then transformed into a convent.

After the embezzler goes to prison, four sisters purchase the mansion at a low
price and turn it into a Catholic school for Native American girls and other women of
color. After thirty years, the school closes, but the convent continues to be run by Sister
Mary Magna who takes in an orphan, Consolata, who then runs the convent after Mary’s
death. Soon thereafter, the convent becomes a place for women to escape racial and
sexual violence in their lives. However, the four sisters have only superficially altered
the original construct of the convent. The signs of western and “masculine” conceptions
of sexuality and violence are still present in the midst of this womanist community.
While the four sisters were able to convert the living room into a chapel and the dining
room into a schoolroom, they were unable to remove all traces of the embezzler’s
designs. Gigi learns of the sisters’ failure to fully transform the convent into a singular
sacred place/space. In the convent, there still remained:

The female-torso candleholders in the candelabra hanging from the wall
ceiling. ...The nursing cherubim emerging from the layers of paint. The
nipple-topped doorknobs. Layabouts half-naked in old-timey clothes,
drinking and fondling each other. . .A Venus or two among several pieces
of nude statuary. . .She even found the brass male genitalia that had been
ripped from the sinks and tubs. . ..Gigi toyed with the fixtures, turning the

testicles designed to release water from the penis. (72)

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Though the convent is a haven for women, initially its very physical edifice still harbors
the production of masculine desires, and objectification of women and their sexuality.
Emotionally and spiritually, the convent is haunted by those same desires and
objectifications. When women in the novel seek refuge in the convent, they always bring
with them the false constructions of their sexuality and the violent fruits of masculine
desires. The nuns could not destroy all the masculine constructions of the mansion, and
the women who come to the convent cannot completely free themselves from masculine
desires and ideologies outside the convent.

The convent exists as a space in which the sacred/lewd dichotomy expresses a
philosophy never to separate the spirit and the flesh. Sexuality and spirituality are part
and parcel of the same trickster lot. For every sexual item owned by the embezzler, Gigi
also finds pieces belonging to the religious convent. She sees, at the same time, a plaque
engraved with “Saint Catherine Siena “ next to “brass dicks hidden in a box” and
“pudding tits exposed on a plate.” In a narrative designed to promote binary oppositions
and western metaphysical logics, the discovery of two artifacts representing ideologically
opposed ideas in one space might seem out of kilter. Yet, in true trickster fashion,
Morrison notes through Gigi’s perceptions, that “in fact it did not feel funny” (74). If we
are conditioned to see and think with the boundaries and restraints of binary oppositions
of good and evil, and black and white, it should feel funny or weird to see these things so
closely together. We should be uncomfortable with physical representations of the body
and sexuality (breasts and penis) in the same place where we see spiritual images (crosses
and saints). However, as the trickster trait of sacred/lewd bricoleur makes obvious, it

does not have to feel weird for us to join those two things. Trickster commends us to

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connect, rather than separate, the two and make them a part of us. Morrison knows the
only way to do that is to consistently blur the lines and explore, through the convent’s
example, the balance of sexuality and spirituality to help overcome racialized sexuality.
The embezzler’s mansion represents the excesses of pleasure, while the town of Ruby
represents the conservative or limitations of moderate views. The convent becomes the
symbolic manifestation of balancing the two for those women who seek refuge and who
can learn to see, as Consolata has done.
Morrison’s develOpment of Consolata reveals the fallibility of the all women
convent:
What she knew of them she had mostly forgotten, and it seemed less and
less important to remember any of it, because the timbre of each of their
voices told the same tale: disorder, deception and drift. . .. The three d’s
paved the road to perdition, and the greatest of these was drift. (221)
In referring to the women who came to the retreat and eventually live in the convent with
her, Connie judges that like the men Of Ruby, the convent women have also forgotten
important information in the struggle to overcome racialized sexuality, community and
culture. The women conceivably look to take the masculine space Of the embezzler’s
mansion and make it into a strictly feminine space. Yet, the four sisters who originally
brought the mansion and made it into a convent dismiss the idea of reverting back to
assumptions based on binary opposites when they keep many of the embezzler’s items
throughout the convent, rather than getting rid of them completely.
Paradise looks at how the convent women build their particular paradise around a

philosophy of womanism unfulfilled. To understand what that means, I turn to Alice

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Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Garden. Walker expatiates on how the political,
economic, and social restrictions of slavery and racism have historically stunted the
creative lives of black women. She also seeks to find a word that reflects black women’s
community. With both of these goals in mind, Walker constructs “womanismz” “a black
feminist or black feminist thought. From the black folk expression of mothers to female
children ‘You acting womanish’.. .Generally refers to outrageous, audacious, responsible,
courageous, or willful behavior” (23). Womanist thought combines black nationalist
ideology with feminist ideology but seeks to overcome the failures of racist and sexist
undertones of these movements. According to Walker, womanism seeks to build through
love of an all woman community, but not necessarily to the exclusion of the black (male)
community (24). The convent fails to be a full womanist community because it is not
allowed to be a part of the black town of Ruby, but also because it fears that community.
The goal of the women in Morrison’s text then must not mirror the 8-Rock’s
failed plan of mimetic revision of racial discourse. Rather than a reversal of Western
binaries, a simple remaking the masculine and lewd space into a feminine and sacred
space, the females must disrupt the rule of binary oppositions that stipulate that the two
forces must be axiologically opposed. Morrison allows the women a way to disrupt the
logic of binary Oppositions through the character Connie/Consolata Sosa. Consolata
possesses the gift of healing, and she is also the former lover of the married Deacon
Morgan. The significance of Consolata in this tale of sacred and sexual lies in the fact
that she has learned the trickster’s trait of the need to balance the two throughout one’s
life. During her affair with Deck, Consolata learns that “being love-struck after thirty

years took on an edible quality” (228). Eventually the illicit and adulterous nature of

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their lovemaking under a fig-tree every Friday afternoon begins to change Consolata’s
nature: “His wife might not know it, but Consolata remembered his face. Not when she
bit his lip, but when she bummed over the blood she licked from it” (239). Aware that
Deek has come to break off their affair, her love and desire for Deek changes from
emotional longing and desire to actually consuming what she most loved and enjoyed.
Later, in all of her shame, she prays and reveals the reason for her carnivorous reaction:
“Dear Lord, I didn’t want to eat him. I just wanted to go home” (240). We must refer
Consolata’s comment back to opening epigram of the novel: “and go up to their resting
place. . .”(1). Consolata, Gigi, and other women in the convent seek a home in which they
can find a way to connect their spirit and their flesh—a resting place.
Consolata has learned her lessons from the past and she decides to teach them to
the women who have come to the convent:
My child body, hurt and soil, leaps into the arms of a woman who teaches
me my body is nothing my spirit everything. I agreed her until I met
another. My flesh is so hungry for itself that it ate him. When he fell
away the woman rescue me from my body again. . ..So I wondering where
is the spirit lost in this. . .One sweet, one bitter. Where is it lost? Hear me,
listen. Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is
Mary’s mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve. (263)
Though the dogma is Christian, it becomes very clear that Connie cannot reach such an
understanding of herself without first realizing that the elements of her identity can co-
exist as a whole. Her gift of “seeing in” is the tool that allows her the wisdom to see

how.

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Before Consolata delivers her speech to the women in the convent, she qu'rte
purposely situates them in a circle: “In the beginning the most important thing was the
template. . .they ringed the place with candles” (italics mine, 263). All of the convent
women then lie in a circle together within that ringed circle of candles. The emphasis on
the circle clearly ties into the trickster’s trait of connecting the sacred and the lewd,
specifically when we recall the importance of the ring-shout in early southern black
culture of the US. In discussing the importance of spirituality to early slaves in the
United States, Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations
of Black America (1987) reveals how Africans were subtly and slowly converted from
their indigenous and native religions to Christianity. Yet, Stuckey argues that it was the
meaning and importance of the ring shout that allowed and sustained African spiritually
and culture for so long before slaves were successfully assimilated:

The majority of Africans brought to North America to be enslaved were
from the central and western areas of Africa—from Congo-Angola,
Nigeria, Dahomey, Togo, the Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone. In these
areas, an integral part of religion culture was movement in a ring during
ceremonies honoring the ancestors. . . .The use of the circle for religious
purposes in slavery was so consistent and profound that one could argue
that it was what gave form and meaning to black religion and art. (11)
Throughout this chapter entitled, “Slavery and the Circle of Culture, Stuckey does an
excellent job of proving that the ring shout contributes significantly to Africans’ culture
in the New World. Stuckey found that the ring-shout “being a principal means by which

physical and spiritual, emotional and rational, needs were fulfilled. This quality of

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African religion, its uniting of seeming opposites, was perhaps the principal reason it was
considered savage by whites” (24). As Consolata was able to resolve the uniting of
seeming opposites, she is able to teach the convent women, but never the men ‘of Ruby,
how to do the same.

While the men of the original 8-Rock can envision an empowering community of
blue-black people built on strong patriarchal ideas of prosperity, independence, and
freedom, they cannot see any type of empowerment developing from the community
women held up in the convent:

Bitches. More like Witches. ...Before those heifers came to town this was
a peaceable kingdom. The others before them had some religion. These
here sluts out there by themselves never step foot in a church. . .They don’t
need men and they don’t need God. . ..If they stayed to themselves, that’d
be something. But they don’t. (276)
Lone, another visitor to the convent, understands how the men of Ruby view the convent
women: “So, Lone thought, the fangs and the tail are somewhere else. Out yonder all
slithery in a house full of women. Not women locked safely away from men; but worse,
women who chose themselves for company, which is to say not a convent but a coven”
(276). The Ruby men have lost the ability to recall the benefits the circle. Clearly, these
women have been made to be “other.” They are supernatural witches who have the gift
of “stepping in” and “seeing in,” but these gifts are not what incite fear and anger into the
hearts of men; it is the women’s decision to choose each other’s company. The men of
Ruby, frustrated by the intolerable changes occurring in the town, choose to make the

women of the convent a scapegoat for their problems. Hence, the killing spree begins.

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After the Ruby men complete their reign of terror on the convent and supposedly
kill all of the women, Roger Best comes to pick up the bodies so that he can bury them.
Yet, when Roger arrives, there are no bodies. The town of Ruby is puzzled with the
exception of Billie Delia who, instead of asking where to and how the women
disappeared, focuses on when they will return (308). The ending of the novel leaves no
resolution for the convent women or the 8-Rock Men, and this, makes perfect sense when
we look back to the epigram’s allusion for “man” to live and not die again. Though
Consolata has finally been able to teach the convent women how to go home—back to
themselves, full and whole, rather than restrained and separated, they do not return to
Ruby. In addition, the epigram may lead us to think of one omnipresent being, God, but
we can see that the ending of the novel conceives of a liminality, like that of Mawu-Lisa,
for the convent women. Although Morrison does not explicitly endorse an agenda of
heterosexuality, neither does she reject a scheme of homosexuality. The town of Ruby
and the convent exist as homo-social spaces. The paradise sought by the men of Ruby
and the women of the convent remains elusive, but in remembering the sacred/lewd
bricoleur, the closest they may ever come to such utopias is in the destruction of binary
oppositions. Morrison’s use of the sacred/lewd trickster trait shows that the dilemma of
racialized sexuality can be solved when one accepts the trickster tradition of accepting
liminality and fluidity rather than choosing between one or the other. Monison enables a
space for sexuality that moves beyond Western constraints, a space in which multiple

numbers of options become possible at every sacred/lewd juncture.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Already Queer?: Tricking the Tropes of the Bad Nigger and Queen Bee

Broadly speaking, queer describes those gestures or analytical models
which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between
chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire. Resisting that model of
stability—which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more
properly its effect—queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender
and desire. Institutionally, queer has been associated most prominently
with lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic framework also includes
such topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity and
gender-corrective surgery. Whether as transvestite performance or
academic deconstruction, queer locates and exploits the incoherencies
in those three terms which stabilize heterosexuality. Demonstrating the
impossibility of any “natural” sexuality, it calls into question even such
apparently unproblematic terms as “man” and “woman”.

Annamarie Jagose9|

Though Queer studies has been evolving over the last few years to do exactly as
J agose notes, undermine Western canons of gender and sexuality, it has only recently
begun to conceptualize the way that class and race impact the issues of sex, gender, and
desire for peOple of color in Black Diasporic communities."2 Yet, the final analysis in
this work demonstrates that folk and vernacular traditions maintain theoretical
philosophies and discussions to exploit incoherencies of sexuality.

This chapter examines African American trickster figures, the Bad Nigger and

Queen Bee, so that through a continued evaluation of trickster traits we can comprehend

 

91 Annamarie Jagose. Queer Theory (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1996) 72-101.

92 In addition to the earlier efforts of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, writers and critics such as
Arm Allen Shockley, Red Jordan Arobateau, Essex Hemphill, James Earl Hardy, and E. Lynn Harris
interrogate notions of gender and sexual constructs for black peoples. See also a special edition of
Callaloo “Black Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Literature and Culture” Vol. 23, Number 1
(Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 2000); Charles I Nero's “Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying in
Contemporary Black Gay Literature,” African America Literary Theory: A Reader. ed., Winston Napier
(New York and London: NYU Press, 2000) 399-420 ; Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
&Transgender Anthology. eds. Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason. (New York : New York University
Press, 1996) 241-261; Oscar Montero, “Latino and National Identity,” Radical America. Vol. 24, no. 4
(April 1993): 16-17; and Merl Stor’s “The Sexual Reproduction of ‘Race’: Bisexuality, History and
Racialization” in The Bisexual Imaginary: Representation, Identity, and Desire. ed., Phoebe Davidson.
(London ; Washington: Cassell, 1997).

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variant sexualities in African American texts. The Bad Nigger and the Queen Bee
possess subjectivities parallel to that of Mawu-Lisa. In the end, I argue that John A.
Williams and Arm Allen Shockley utilize manifest trickster traits to revise ideologies of
black sexuality. The two writers’ use of folkloric tales and figures related to the Bad
Nigger and the Queen Bee in African American folklore exhibits sexual fluidity that can
disrupt the constructs of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Since these characters draw
their heroic appeal from breaking and crossing boundaries, it follows that the more
boundaries they cross, the badder (more heroic) they might be seen. These two figures,
the Bad Nigger and the Queen Bee, set up aesthetics in the texts of Williams and
Shockley that counter racialized sexuality and the heterosexualization of desire in Black
America.

In From Trickster to Badman, Roberts discusses how the badman or bad nigger
tradition in black folklore serves as the “transformation of the trickster tradition or the
trickster as proto-outlaw” (185). I do not intend to argue against that point or prove
further Robert’s conclusions that “trickster-like behavior became associated with black
badmen” who “could offer individuals adaptive behavioral advantages in retaliating for
their economic exploitation and persecution” (198). Roberts’s text acknowledges how
trickster-like activities deemed illegal create economic advantages that might not be

possible otherwise.93 This chapter agrees with his conclusion and moves on to discuss

 

93 For example, Roberts moves from discussing a slave’s theft from his master (199) and a
conjurer named Railroad Bill (200) to Stackolee and John Hardy (203-209). These figures serve as outlaw
heroes who employ their lack of citizenship in the US. to ignore the prescribed social morals of their time.
Though they often break white society’s laws, they enhance the quality of life for themselves or other
blacks through their trickster actions (214-215).

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how Roberts’s belief allows us to trick the traditional tr0pe of the badman/bad nigger as it
relates to sexuality.

Although trickster actions of the Bad Nigger enhance the material values for black
individuals through outlaw behavior, the figure also creates a socio-cultural environment
in which sexual activities and expression become less shaped by the society’s moral
standards and conceptions of sexuality. Some critics account for the trickster’s sexuality
in black folkloric figures by implying that the sexual bravado and hypersexuality of these
figures remain symbolic of the trickster’s original variant sexuality.94 One of Roberts’s
major point in the configuration of the bad-man as trickster demonstrates why the Bad
Nigger and Queen Bee, potential disruptors of sexual boundaries in black communities, is
understudied in black culture:

...in transforming their conception of the trickster to create a folk hero
whose actions unfolded primarily in the black community, African
Americans had to be concerned with the consequences of condoning
behaviors that potentially threatened both their communal values and the
well-being of its communities. (199)
Since the very notion of folk figures derives from the folk (lower-class), Roberts’s
statement acknowledges that the well-being of the community acts as a significant force
in the potential destruction of sexual borders. We must ask what African Americans and
who defines the communal values and well-beings? Clearly, the issue of class becomes a

marker of these values, and so, in a way that has not been previously included, we must

 

9" See Laura Makarius’s “The Myth of the Trickster: The Necessary Taboo Breaker” in Mythical
Trickster Figures for a discussion of the body and tricksterism (66-86) and Black Culture and Black
Consciousness (332-334). Levine briefly explores sexual stereotypes of black sexual superiority in black
comedy and laughter derived from slave culture (racialized sexuality).

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consider the black bourgeoisie and the black lower-classes. Tricksterisms only threaten
the well-being, i.e. the actual or potential material wealth and social status, of black
communities who embrace the values of the white supremacy system of imperialism and
capitalism. This possible threat to communal values explains why the existence of sexual
mutability in theories of such tricksters as Eshu and the signifying monkey remains
largely unaccounted for in studies of black culture. It is imperative to ascertain how
specific figures expose the flaws of these communal values in terms of the broader
African American community. One major benefit of re-reading the Bad Nigger and the
Queen Bee tropes in black culture texts may consist in locating a cultural mechanism that
moves black texts away from the desire to appear heteronormative to other communities.
As outsiders, the figures allow black communities to question concepts of sexuality in a
culturally specific manner

Daryl Dance Cumber’s collection, Shuckin’ and Jivin Folklore from
Contemporary Black Americans, (1987) contains numerous accounts of sexual fluidity in
black folklore, especially in the section entitled “Are You Ready for This? Miscellaneous
Tales.”95 Some of these tales are very ribald, making heterosexual assumptions, and
containing noticeable homophobic sentiments. A number of the tales present a wide
range of sexual behaviors and bodily functions. The specific title of the chapter in
Cumber’s collection warns the reader not to make any heterosexual or sexually moralistic
assumptions. In one tale, we find a satirical less-judgmental tone about sodomy in the
narrative. Three men are in court and a judge looks at one and says, “Well, what you
here for? ” One replies, “For eatin’ PEACHES!” The judge then asks the second man

what he’s in for, and the second man gives the same reply as the first. The judge then

 

95 Shuckin' and Jivin, ’ 274.

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asks the third man, “Well, who are you?,” and the third man, replies, “I’m Peaches”
(274). The tale plays on the knowledge that the reader will not make the necessary
assumptions about the three men presented at the beginning. Eating peaches could refer
to eating fruit; or if we are making heterosexual assumptions, it could very well refer to
the male’s performing oral sex on a female named Peaches. Yet, those assumptions are
destroyed by the third male who reveals that same-sex desire exists in the black
community. Though these men are clearly in court on sodomy charges, no qualms exist
about the presentation of three black men as partaking in homosexual activity. The tale
implies that the only crime comes with being caught. It is ribald tale of humor; the
punch-line and release of tension through laughter arise from the heterosexual norm that
is reinforced by the revelation that the three men do not meet the expectation of
heterosexual normativity

In another tale, the idea of sexual fluidity is further explored through the
evocation of homophobia in the black community. “I’ll Show You How Straight I Am”
parodies how far some black men will go to prove their heterosexuality. When two males
are drinking one night, and one man sexually touches the other on the buttocks, the
offended party argues, “I don’t go for that!” The other man then replies, “Look, I’m a
all-right guy cause, look, I’m married and got three kids. I’ll tell you what I’ll do.

Sunday you come by my house, and I’ll show you how straight I am.”96

This particular
tale also exposes the fatalistic flaws of heterosexual assumptions. When the offended
party goes to the man’s house, trickery abounds. Upon arriving at the house, the

offended man is left alone with the man’s wife who pretends to seduce him:

 

96 Shuckin’ and Jivin, ’ 275

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She say, “Come on.” She went into the bedroom. She took off all 'her
clothes. She say, “Look don’t worry about ‘im. Don’t worry bout im.
You come on. We kin get a quick one in before he ever get back.”97
At this point in the narrative, if the reader is making heterosexual assumptions, s/he is
not prepared for the ending of the tale, in which the man goes from proving how straight
he is to using his wife as part of a trickster strategy to allow him to have sex with the
male:
So he say, “okay, okay.” He took off his clothes and got in there [on t0p
of her]. She put her arms around him like that [very tight embrace around
his neck; legs around im like that [she locks her legs tightly around his
waist, holding him firmly in a position with his posterior up in the air], and
then she hollered, “Okay, George—I got im! Come on an get him!” (276)
As stated earlier, these tales may reveal the ever-present existence of homophobia
in the black community. Yet, a close reading of the tale also underlines several flaws
with the presentation of desire in the African American community. The man positioned
as the homosexual may be seen as the stereotypical homosexual who is always
attempting to trap the “normal” and “straight” man. However, the character should also
be seen as destroying the stereotype of the homosexual as highly effeminate and limp-
wristed, or to go further destroying the very canon of Wester homosexuality. This
particular man, who attempts to seduce another man, is married to a “nice, fine wife” and
has “nice kids. ...three 0’ them” (276). The story’s presentation of trickery for sexual
conquest destroys preconceived notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality. The

binaries are further disrupted by a wife who knows of her husband’s fluid sexuality and

 

97 Shuckin’ and Jivin,’ 276.

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helps him trick the man whom her husband desires. It seems important to note that these
tales are presented in folklore, rather than in the analytical works of the African
American community. The folk, oral, and vernacular provide a much needed and distinct
commentary on a representation of the community. However, many tales demonstrate
that poly-sexuality has long been a theme in African American folklore, especially
because of the way the discourse of sexuality and race need each other. Thus, black
folklore acknowledges the racialization of sexuality and sexualization of race in ways that
many Western texts cannot. As J anMohammed disclosed earlier, analytical texts,
especially as they concern African Americans, could never conceive of sexuality on the
border. Clearly, the vernacular offers revised readings of sexuality. As Cumber’s
chapter title suggests, we need only be ready for them.

In returning to the trickster figure’s form as male, female, and sexually
ambiguous, we must appreciate the central figures in African American folklore who still
possess those qualities of sexual fluidity. One of the most crucial ways to do so comes
in tricking the established heterosexual trope of the trickster in African American folk
narrative, the Bad Ni gger—Stackolee, Billy, or Benny. Daryl Dance Cumber notes:
”That the term Bad Nigger from its beginning had positive connotations to certain black
people and negative connotations to white people suggests its early meaning as a Black
man who fought against the system” (224). Cumber’s assessment points the racial
implications of the Bad Nigger. Our exploration of the sexual implications suggests that
the heterosexual trope of the Bad Nigger exists because critics tie it to a heroic tradition
of the black male defeating the white power structure. In addition to violent actions taken

by this character, his hyper-masculinity is consistently evident. The Bad Ni gger’s

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hypermasculinization deflects representations of the black male as emasculated and
feminized because of racial oppression:
Whereas prevailing definitions of black masculinity imply power, control
and authority, these attributes have been historically denied to black men
since slavery. The centrally dominant role of the white male slave master
in eighteenth and nineteenth century plantation societies barred black
males from patriarchal privileges ascribed to masculinity. ...Shaped by
history, black masculinity is a highly contradictory formation of identity,
as it is a subordinated identity.98
The super prowess of the black male in Bad Nigger tales consistently seeks to move
beyond the subordinated identity, which is still highly contradictory. As Cumber notes,
Bad Niggers “are sexual supermen, but their women are enemies to be conquered,
humiliated, and controlled rather than loved.”99 The hostility and sexual aggression
toward black women presented in these tales works to highlight the heteronormative
pattern of behavior of black males. We have already encountered this specific
heterosexual trope of Bad Niggers in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.

Morrison’s work provides a perfect representation of the ways in which Bad
Niggers deal with racial oppression. In Morrison’s text, we can see how the 8-Rock Men,
in their settlement and running of the town of Ruby, epitomize the most basic function of
Bad Ni ggers. The 8-Rock Men, in their gruesome killing of the convent women, confirm

both Cumber’s explanation of male/female relationships and Roberts’s theory about the

 

98 Kobena Mercer’s Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. (New York:
Routledge, 1994) 150-151.

99 Shuckin’ and Jivin,’ 225.

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function of the Badman/Bad Nigger: “trickster-like activities” and “the relative absence
of the ‘law’ in black neighborhoods allowed for the creation of a socio-cultural
environment” (198). The 8-Rock Men, as bad niggers, dictate the social values of the
Ruby community. Oddly enough, they use Victorian morality to counter racialized
sexuality and a color-caste system to establish social hierarchies. In Paradise, the 8-
Rock Men become tricksters/proto-outlaws based solely on their disruption of white
social and economic values that denigrate blackness. Though Morrison’s depiction of the
8-Rock Men adheres to traditional definitions of the Bad Nigger, that portrayal seems
devoid of the other basic characteristics of that figure, ambiguous and anomalous
sexuality. We must remember that the Bad Nigger exists as a trickster figure, and
seriously re-read him in terms of the crossing of racial and sexual boundaries by Bad
Nigger figures in black cultural texts.

Traditionally, critics assert that the system the bad nigger fights against is simply
a racist or white supremacist system of oppression. However, if we delve deeper into
these tales, we realize that the Bad Nigger cannot disrupt systems of white supremacy
without disrupting other ideologies within those systems. Consequently, the Bad Nigger,
without purposely being constructed to do so, disrupts the boundaries and borders of
sexuality in order to disturb the oppressive racist ideologies detrimental to his
community.

In “Stackolee” tales, homoerotic and homosexual behavior surface the “badder”
Stackolee tries to become. In one version of the tale, Benny Long confronts Stackolee:

“I’m that bad-ass-so-and-so they call Stackolee/ He said, ‘I heard of you, Stack from the

226

tales of old, But you know/You tore your ass when you fucked my hole.”100 Benny seeks
revenge on Stackolee for shooting his brother in the head, and though Stackolee’s
masculinity is asserted by his having sex with one of the women in the bar, the
homosexual symbolics within the above lines should not be ignored.

Even in death, the Bad Nigger’s badness ignores the established
borders/boundaries of sexuality. After being killed by Stackolee, Billy dies and goes to
hell. In hell, he has intercourse with the devil’s wife, daughter, and niece, and finally
when he comes back to the devil’s wife again, she proclaims, “Devil, get him
down....Get that motherfucker before he fucks us all.”101 In another version, Stackolee
pushes the boundaries of heterosexual assumptions even more, when confronted by Billy
Lyons. Billy exclaims, “You know, you bad motherfucker, I know your name is
Stackolee,” and Stackolee answers back, “And by the way, what’s your name, look so
fine?”102 Stacklolee’s comments about Billy’s physical appearance cannot be dismissed.
He makes such statements to provoke his competitor, but he also does it because he
knows the provocativeness and tabooness of such criticism. He uses these elements to
weaken, or disarm his adversary.

In other tales that blacks tell about anonymous Bad Ni ggers, it becomes very
obvious that the sexual prowess and superiority of the Bad Nigger reveals how racialized
sexuality produces the shift of blackness beyond boundaries of heterosexuality:

A white man promised his daughter when she turned sixteen he would

 

'00 Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle. 141.
‘0‘ Abrahams, 112.

‘02 Abrahams,]42.

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have her satisfied. After sending her several men who proved
unsatisfactory, he finally sent up a black man who stayed and stayed. At
midnight, while the father waited anxiously on the corner, his little son
came down and cried out, “daddy, daddy, you know that black man you
sent home, well he done satisfied sister, sister sue, mary lou, he done
packed me [had anal intercourse] and he waitin’ on you, so get yo’ ass
down there.103
Criticism of this tale has explicitly focused on the black male’s super sexuality, while
ignoring the homosexual implications.104 A reading of the traditional heterosexual
characteristic of the Bad Nigger and the way we read him in African American culture
acknowledges these implications precisely because they demonstrate the transgressing of
sexual boundaries and the complications created from the intersections of race and
sexuality. Black folk figures epitomize such knowledge. Yet, critical reflections of this
fact in African American texts have gone unnoticed until now. Though the folk tales and
figures stop short of offering serious critiques and criticism of the constructs of sexuality,
African American writers who draw from black folklore and oral traditions use their
skills to manipulate such figures and tales to disrupt racialized sexuality and the
heterosexualization of desire in their fictional texts. Manifest trickster traits allow them
to do so. As a mechanism of “cultural guerilla resistance,” these forms and their figures

were black people’s “queer” discourse before “queer” could even be defined by the

academic establishment.

 

'03 Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Consciousness, 333.

'04 Levine who records this tale from North Carolina does not make an attempt to explain or
explore the significance of homosexuality in this text.

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According to Hynes, the trickster’s trait of messenger and irrritator of the Gods
stems from its uncertain or impure birth between humans and gods or gods and Gods.
Subsequently, the trickster has “both divine and human traits...,can slip back and forth
across the border between the sacred and the profane. . .He may bring something across
the line from the gods to humans—be it a message, punishment, and essential cultural
power, or even life itself” (40). In John A. Williams’s novel, The Man Who Cried I Am,
the author utilizes the trickster trait of imitating godly acts of re-creation to rebirth the
black male. The novel’s plot takes into consideration black male sexuality and identity
during the Black Power movement of the 19605, a period of exaggerated black
masculinity in which the defining of voice and body for black males took shape. The
theme and plot are relayed through historical, surreal, and naturalistic forums.

The protagonist of the novel, Max Reddick, a successful black writer, travels to
Holland to bury a friend and make amends with his ex-wife. Aside from a reckoning
with the past, Max’s motivation for all that he does in the present is due in large part to
the fact that he is dying from cancer. Like any human being faced with the dilemma of
leaving this earth, Max seeks to make sense of his actions, his life, and his existence.
The novel utilizes flashbacks as devices permitting Williams to examine Max’s struggle
to consistently re-create black masculinity and himself as a black man. Eventually, Max
is provided with an unusual opportunity to really do something for his fellow brethren to
validate his existence. In Holland, Max discovers a government plan to eradicate the
existence of Blacks in the United States.

Although The Man Who Cried I Am has enjoyed tremendous critical acclaim,

most of it focused on the use of the “King Alfred” plot and the parallel connections

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between characters and real historical figures.105 In a 1971 interview conducted by John
O’Brien, William himself acknowledges, “I can’t say that it pleases me too much. ...The
acclaim has been political. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was both political and literary.
But the literary acclaim has been missing” (235). Undeniably critics do Williams, and
the novel, a great injustice when they ignore the literary skill and depth that pulsates
through the work. The very heart and mind of the novel are about the struggle for
identity through cultural liberation. For the purposes of this dissertation, we are
particularly concerned with how Williams explores the oral culture and folk tradition of
African Americans to disrupt racialized sexuality, and in particular with his revision of
the trope of the Bad Nigger.

In Williams’s novel, the presence and overturning of racialized sexuality happens
through the presentation of Max Reddick’s sexual identity, in the exploration of
interracial relations, and the character of Moses Boatwright. Max Reddick may not be a
slave, but as a descendent, he must find a way to own himself, to exist beyond false
representations. In order for Max to do so, Williams makes it pertinent that these
discoveries take place in a distinctively African-American tradition of empowerment with
the oral tradition. What eventually packs the punch, delivers the historical, surreal, and
naturalistic feel is the vehicle of sexuality in the novel’s oral structures.

As a descendant of an enslaved people, the protagonist Maxwell Reddick is
confronted with the racist mentality and distorted representations of black and white

people derived from slavery. The core of the text’s rhetoric about black male identity

 

'05 Critics have speculated that the characters who are writers represent the black male literati of
Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and even Williams himself. There has also been
speculation of the political figures and who they might represent historically. See Earl Cash’s John A.
Williams ’3: Evolution of a Black Writer (New York: Third Press, 1975).

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involves racialized sexuality in the construction of black masculinity through oral-and
folk means. One clear indicator of this rhetoric derives from William’s interruption of
the Bad Nigger type. Daryl Dance Cumber notes:

The term Bad Nigger from its beginning had positive connotations to

certain black people and negative connotations to white people... The

Bad Nigger is and always has been bad (that is villainous) to whites

because he violates their laws and he violates their moral codes. He is ba-

ad (that is heroic) to the Black people who relish his exploits for exactly
the same reasons.106
Max’s attempt to thwart the King-Alfred plot (eradication of black people in the US.)
positions him in the role of a Bad Motherfucker/Bad Nigger. As we will later see, his
relationships with black and white women will violate white moral codes. Although the
Bad Nigger type and mentality may be briefly empowering for the black male alone,
Williams suggest that it becomes less empowering for the African American community
as a whole. Further, it fails to serve as a tenable identity for black males precisely
because it allows identity to be formed from ideologies grounded in a racialized
sexuality.

Cumber continues her analysis of the Bad Nigger by explaining that the Bad

Nigger “asserts manhood through his physical destruction of men and through his sexual

victimization of women.”107 These perceptions of the Bad Nigger produce many

contradictions. On the one hand, the bourgeois perception, that is, the ideas that hold the

 

‘06 Shuckin ' and Jivin, ’ 224.

’07 Shuckin' and Jivin, ' 225.

figure as a threat to communal values and well-being, produces a notable collusion with
the discourse of racialized sexuality by accepting the black male as exaggerated and
hypersexual brute. However, read as an under-class satire on the issue of othering the
black body, the figure can subvert those stereotypes by calling attention to the

“performance” of the fi gure.108

The greatest feat of subversion of those stereotypes
consists of dodging the discussion of “manhood” and the fixed trope of heterosexuality.
Williams uses the folkloric beginnings of the Bad Nigger and tricks the established trope
of the figure.

The fusion of orality with issues of sexuality takes place in the text to make the
reading a physical, as well as intellectual, process. Max’s use of black slang to his white
ex-wife, Margarit, also reveals the underlying importance of vernacular culture to the
recreation of black males and sexuality, as we see in Max’s and Margarit’s exchanges:

“Roger? Roger is still Roger, what else?”

“Still macking in his own intellectual way?”

“Still what--?”

“Macking. Macking. Oh, Margarit, you know what macking is.”

“But no I don’t.” (18)
In one word, “macking,” Williams finds another way of making the reader aware of
Max’s body, the self-gaze, and the oral tradition. The fact that the slang term causes
miscommunication and that there is a relation of the word to the phonetic association of
Max’s name, is an example of the subtle way in which the incorporated sexuality works
in the oral tradition. It creates an awareness of physical and emotional differences. Max

9’ 6‘

could have easily used “playboy, womanizer,” or any other typical and standardized

 

103 See Mark Reid’s Re-defining Black F ilm.

232

word, but he chose macking. “Macking” or “mack” is not located in any SAE dictionary.
The very meaning and existence of the word “macking” depends upon the culture.109
Macks are found in some of the earliest blues and jazz works. Its origin is at once sexual,
oral, and mythical. In African America culture, macking is a masculine process of
finessing and finagling into a woman’s bed or coaxing financial support from women
through sexual charisma and good looks.110 Hence, the mack stands as the baddest Bad
Nigger. In the novel’s time period, macking symbolizes abundant black masculinity.
Williams could have used another word; but to do so would have changed the direction of
the conversation, and the image of the mack would not have been introduced and
revealed to the reader in order to be later dismissed. The ideology of the macker as the
low class pimp, rolling in a Cadillac, top down, with a gangster lean grooving is disrupted
when used in conjunction with “intellectual.” Only in African-American literature would
we find macking and intellectual in the same sentence: Sexualized black men are not
supposed to be simultaneously worldly and intelligent. However, as Max explains the
intellectual finesse of Roger in his mack- mode, the reader begins to see the developing
struggle of Max’s identity.

As Williams illustrates through a phonological pun on Max’s full name, Maxwell
Reddick, the mack is one image or gaze he must internally address. Williams re-
examines the idea of naming in the oral tradition by stressing not only the meaning, but
also the sound of that name to ascertain the specific meaning. The intonation of Max’s

name becomes an issue when pronounced by Max’s ex-wife, the foreign, un-American,

 

'09 In French, a “maquereau” is a pimp—and in slang a “”.mac
”° Geneva Smitherman’s Black Talk (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2000) 197. This text lists

several definitions for mack 1) a man who can sweet-talk women. 2) A man who has lots of women; a
PLAYA. 3) A man who manipulates women for money; a PIMP.

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white Margarit who says “Mox” instead of Max, or “Macks” as Max phonetically-
corrects her later in the text (279). The effect of sound, that Williams highlights so
insistently, makes the reader aware of the physical process of aural and oral
communication rather than one that is purely intellectual. For the phonological syntax,
the pronunciation of the name Macks Red-dick introduces the implied characteristics of
Max’s personality while simultaneously hinting at the importance of sexuality to the
novel and to the character. Max “macks well” with his heightened masculinity that is
represented via his excited “red-dick.”

Conventional readings of the text might simply see Williams’s text as propaganda
in favor of racialized sexuality, an excessive othered super sexuality of the black male.
For example, Chester Hedgepeth Jr.’s Theories of Social Action in Black Literature
(1986) attempts to prove that a Samson theory exists in The Man Who Cried I Am. In
pleading his case, Hedgepeth states, “The tragedy of Williams’s novel lies. . .in the hero’s
concept as a sexual athlete. . .Williams equates manhood with sexual prowess, a concept
which reinforces the mythic supersexuality and predominantly biological nature of
blacks” (31). Hedgepeth takes issue with an underlying myth at the center of Williams’s
text, that of the Bad Nigger. While Hedgepeth’s critique may be correct in designating
Williams’s presentation of Max’s sexuality as overt, we should question why this is
purported to be a problem. Hedgepeth clearly feels that the open presentation of Max’s
sexual escapades is tragic simply because any presentation of black male sexuality is
viewed as either submitting to or contradicting the Bad Nigger facade. In this way,
Hedgepeth’s criticism demonstrates the force of racialized sexuality and its

corresponding representation of black male sexuality.

234

However, Williams’s text suggests that a sexuality constructed in resistance to the
“other” can still be co-opted and impacted by the dominating Western canon of sexuality.
Instead of presenting a defensive alternative, Williams conveys the flexibility of
blackness and sexuality revealed through a non-traditional view of the Bad Nigger.
Max’s name becomes important to understanding how the disruption of racialized
sexuality must work in the novel with the Bad Nigger figure. Underscoring the
importance of sound as indicated by the play on Max’s name, Williams proposes that we
must first endure a verbalization of racialized sexuality as a way to reduce the power of
the open-secret. “Macks well” “Red-dick’s” performance as the Bad Ni gger—a
hypermasculine and overwhelming sexual being—allows Maxwell Reddick to negotiate
his individual identity while upsetting the white supremacist structure. Instead of silence
and repression, Williams chooses sound, candor, and satire. A literal vocal expression, as
presented in the pronunciation of Max’s name, subtly counters the strategic silence and
repression of the discourse of racialized sexuality.

Contraryto Hedgepeth’s argument, Williams’s writing works to topple these great
myths, not by denying or ignoring them but in allowing them to consume Max. William
utilizes bold representations of sexuality, rather than avoidance and shame in evoking
Max’s sexual prowess. Hedgepeth’s argument works on the assumption that sexual
prowess or aggressiveness in the black male is tragic and wrong simply because it fits a
stereotype. However, the overt presentation of sexuality offers a connection between the
trickster’s imitating God and the act of creation, and the Bad Nigger figure. Williams
employs the Bad Ni gger’s actions of transgressing racial, sexual, and gendered

boundaries as a manifest trickster trait, that of the messenger/imitator of God, to assert

235

that Max’s immersion into sexual liaisons is less about sexual prowess and more about
what he learns about himself, what he can change about society, and the new creations
that might evolve from his lessons.

As Bad Nigger, Max’s sexual relationships with women demonstrate the way in
which he reacts against or in collusion with the politics of a racialized sexuality in order
to create himself. When Max’s first love and fiancee, a black woman named Lillian,
becomes pregnant, we are introduced to the complications of othered sexuality as it
relates to black male-female relationships. The public domain of black sexuality is
made even clearer as Max and Lillian disagree about whether to have the child or to abort
it. Max wants to have the child and marry, but Lillian wants to have an abortion. Both
Max and Lillian are forced to consider more than their individual wants to focus on the
social impacts of their decision. Lillian thinks to herself of their argument: “What was
that he was saying, that Negro women had the proud tradition of keeping their children,
no matter what....What does this man understand?. . .Doesn’t he know that Mister Charlie
knew what he was doing when he took away everything except the ability to make love”
(112). Lillian’s comments politicize black intercourse and sexuality from a woman’s
point of view. Here again it seems important to remember that some black nationalists
used the rhetoric of genocide to politicize black women’s reproductivity. Here, rather
than politicizing sexual reproduction and sexuality to counter genocide, Lillian claims
that the sexuality of black communities becomes a tool of the white power structure to
undermine the economic and social progress of the black community. After Lillian dies
from complications of a botched abortion, Max asks in anger, “Baby didn’t you

understand? You overwhelmed with your blackness. . .Lillian see what the desire for old

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American security got you, baby” (117). Max accuses Lillian of being the only one
overwhelmed by her blackness, and his statement suggests that if they could have simply
been two people in love, rather than two black people trying to love, they might have had
a more successful relationship. However, as the text makes known, both Lillian and Max
are overwhelmed with their blackness—even, and especially, during their acts of
lovemaking:

And they knew each of them, the reality and the fantasy of what they

were doing and their movements were gentle, as if with great

sorrow. . ...After they held each other, and their orgasms were long and

sweet as if to signify that the narrow place between what was real and

what was not was the best place after all. (102)
The space between reality and false realities is a liminal orgasmic space for Max, where
he need not worry about the conflicts of his real self and society’s construct of the black
male. He consistently attempts to remake himself in his sexual relationships with women
primarily because he knows that if he can disrupt his othemess/racialized sexuality, then
he might be able to reinvent himself. The throes of orgasm briefly afford Max and
Lillian a narrow space where they don’t have to think about their act of lovemaking as
becoming politicized for both of them. During Max’s lovemaking with Lillian, in what
should be an experience of pleasure, jubilation, and passion, sorrow intrudes. This
sorrow arises from the way sexuality between black men and women has become a part
of the public domain. The reality and fantasy of sexuality between black men and
women makes it difficult for them to separate the politics and power of racialized

sexuality from their most intimate connections.

237

Another crucial disruptive moment caused by the trickster’s need to imitate god
through acts of creation occurs in Max’s relationship with the white woman, that is, his
ex-wife Margarit. The relationship of Margarit and Max in the text delicately disrupts
racialized sexuality, remaking the black male by forcing readers to examine the black
male/white woman taboo. Once slaves were free, the images and gazes blacks endured,
stemming from pre-slavery ideals (images of the black body as animalistic, evil,
abnormally sexually aggressive) remained with them. Such misrepresentations continued
and were reinforced during slavery because slaves were used as objects, breeders, and
chattels. Emancipation heightened the images; freedom enforced a new myth, that of
black men as rapists. Emancipation threatened to legally eliminate the racial border
established by Jim Crow Laws. The myth of the black man as rapist permitted white men
to promote a continual agenda of patriarchy in the name of protecting white womanhood,
thus playing on the fear that once free, black men would now sexually force themselves
on white women.1 H Deploying these representations and discourse, white males in
power promoted fear and violence through their campaigns for lynching. Just as Jim
Crow laws and the one-eighth blood rule created racialized sexuality of black women
during and after slavery, the black male/white woman taboo became part of the post-
emancipation discourse of racialized sexuality. As the case of Emrnit Till suggests, it was
a successfully enforced discourse.112 The mission then becomes one of getting over the
destruction, replacing the otherness, stopping the pomotroping, and assuming a subject

position in life and in literature.

 

1” One need only read Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman or view D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation
to understand the white representations of blackness being promoted in the US.

”2 See Stephen J. Whitefield’s A Death in the Delta: The Story ofEmmt't rm (New York: Free
Press, 1988).

238

Williams doesn’t simply create an opposite of the stereotype, he re-casts the
representation with the knowledge that the myth has been shaping the representation and
discourse of black masculinity and sexuality all along. The most obvious indicator of
this feat comes from Max’s marriage with Margarit, who becomes the wife that Lillian
could never be to Max. In a vivid description mirroring the earlier significance of Max
and Lillian having intercourse, Max sees his relationship with Margarit as another way to
rebuke racialized sexuality:

Now he would do it, he would become recreated as a Negro in the process.
The black anonymity would be gone. The old myths would be gone. The
old myths goaded by old hatreds would make him highly visible, more
dangerous. (339)
The old myths that Max refers to call attention to such folk idioms as “the only thing that
a black woman can do is lead me to a white woman.”1 ’3 Max engages himself with the
representations of othered black sexuality, but he does not consume them. Of course, we
might readily accept a Fanon-like reading of this moment for Max. In Black Skin/White
Masks, Fanon suggests that the relationship of the black man and white woman is about
the desire to be white: “by loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am
loved like a white man” (63). Subsequently, a more sexualized description ensues:
“When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and
dignity and make them mine” (63). According to Fanon, the black man reaches for the
white woman to validate his existence as a human being. While this might very well be a

valid reading for some inter-racial relationships, Fanon’s psychoanalytical discourse in

 

“3 Shuckin’ and Jivin, ’ 214

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Black Skin/White Masks articulates a sobbing school of black male victimhood that can
only be rescued via white women.

Yet, Williams shows that Max’s marrying Margarit does not provide him with the
fictional validation and stability that Fanon suggests occurs with the affliction of
internalized racism. As Max explains his decision, he knows “his possible vulnerability,
with Margarit at his side, would be publicized, his manhood put on the line as never
before, for now it would always be challenged. The boyhood that came with being Negro
was over” (339). Max’s claim undermines all traditional discourses of race and gender.
As he sees it, the very construction of black manhood does not hinge on taking the white
woman because, in Max’s case, manhood becomes equal to that of an authentic blackness
that embraces black over all that is white. This is why Williams makes the italic
distinction between manhood and boyhood. “Boyhood” very aptly connects to the white

”4 that helps to establish the racial

Kantian social construction of the black male as Negro
discourse about black males and white women, and Max knows it. He remarks of the
situation:
Somewhere it was all a lie, what the white man said black men should not
do, and what black men deep within their own hearts came to believe
themselves. It was a lie because no black man anywhere in the world
where newspapers, magazines, television and film existed could do
anything but move unconsciously throughout his life toward whitey

Aphrodite, the love and sex object, raping it when he could, loving it when

he was allowed to and marrying it when he dared to. (340)

 

”4 See previous discussion of overwriting the African body with that of the Negro in Chapter
Three.

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Representations of white females as the ultimate ideal or goal of beauty and validation
bombard all people of color on a daily basis. Max ponders whether there is a way to
separate the subliminal messages of white female superiority and internalized racism
from a black male’s choice to be involved with a woman of another race. The reader
must ascertain if Max is with Margarit because he has internalized the discourse of
racialized sexuality or because he has rejected it. For Max, manhood hinges on how
authentically black he can be. His marriage to a white woman places his blackness,
hence his version of maleness, in jeopardy. To accept a Fanonian reading is to accept
the rhetoric of black male victimization, of the Negro, instead of the African or the Black
who exists before white influence. Max is not like the those still engaged in Negro
boyhood:
Too many times,. . .he had been approached by black men, his sleeve
tugged and the question asked: ”That chick got a friend?” Or: “Max, now
you know I like ice cream too.” Or the crude passes were made, the ones
that revealed that many black men, whatever they said to the contrary,
had not yet jettisoned what the white man had said about them and the
white women. (340)
Max does not accept that his “black masculinity” be tied to bedding 3 white woman
because he knows that to do so conspires with the problematic excessive bodying of the
black male. The Negro accepts the rhetoric of white values, but the black (male or
female) rejects them. In Williams’s characterization of Max, the folk becomes a way to
move Max from racial victimhood to angry rejection. Max’s relationship with Margarit

serves as the ultimate Bad Nigger act, a rejection of white supremacist values of

241

blackness and womanhood. His act of marrying Margarit is less about internalized
racism and more about moving from Negro to black Bad Nigger. In doing so, he upsets
the logic of white supremacy and the established codes. As Max points out, the old
myths now situate him as dangerous. He will not fear but be feared because he has
stepped out of established boundaries by marrying Margarit.

Furthermore, Max’s relationship with Margarit does not follow the psychological
pattern that Fanon suggests for black men who have relationships with white women
because Max had already attempted to re-create himself through his relationship with his
first and black fiancée, Lillian. At one point Max asks, “If there had been no Lillian
would there be a Margarit?” (339). Clearly, if we went with a Fanonian reading of the
Max/Margarit relationship, the conquest of the white woman to validate existence would
not be subordinated to Max’s preoccupation with the black female, Lillian. Years after
Lillian’s death, Max, more involved in the King Alfred Plot and closer to death himself,
realizes the connection between the two most significant women in his life: “Margarit
looked so much like Lillian. True, a bleached Lillian. Strange after all these years. Have
I been looking for Lillian all this time?” (281). Lillian, before Margarit, teaches Max
everything he needed to know about the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
He simply did not realize it at the time. Before she aborts the baby and as she
contemplates marrying Max, Lillian rehashes the damaging results of racial discourse:

. .and she loved Max. But he was black. Of course he was black, but Negro men, they
had a way of starting out with a bang with the long, long dream, but ending with a
whisper, so beaten were they simply because they had dared to dream in the first place”

(103). Lillian’s repetitive focus on Max being black is very telling. Her words reveal

242

that despite the fact that they are both of the same race, their relationship of black female-
male relationships remains locked in a public domain, and that their relationship was just
as socially and politically torrid as his relationship with Margarit. If Max had been the
Bad Nigger that he had been with Margarit, both she and Max might have made it
through the complications of politicized black love. As the Bad Nigger, Max could have
ignored or exploded the boundaries established for them by a white supremacist system.
Margarit may serve as the vehicle for Max to assume the Bad Nigger persona, but Max’s
relationship with Lillian teaches him how.

In each relationship, Max attempts to move away from racialized sexuality to re-
create himself, rather than simply trying to become a white man as Fanon has posited.
These two women of different races serve as mechanisms for Max’s desire to create a
space in which he can move outside the previously designated space of an othered
sexuality. Williams is very aware of the implications of Max’s act for his attempt at self-
creation. Though initially Max may be able to confront himself and those old myths of
racialized sexuality in his relationship with Margarit, he cannot overturn the Western
canons of sexuality through his relationships with her or Lillian because each is
compromised by the white patriarchal legacy of heterosexual intercourse and desire.
Nevertheless, these relationships afford him the opportunity to navigate through racial
and gendered discourse to self-create his purpose and being. Further, William’s text
subversively offers ways for Max to overturn racialized sexuality by dismissing the
ideologies of heterosexual discourse.

The Man Who Cried I Am is not explicitly concerned with articulating an agenda

of homosocial relationships and homosexual desires, but through the characterization of

243

Ganor Byron115 and Max’s comments on love, the heterosexualization of desire is-
disrnissed in small ways throughout the text. Max’s initial comments on marriage
indicate a critique of the heterosexualization of desire and love: “Love. Marriage. A
thing for the poor (natives also) to keep them happy, while kings screwed themselves to
death or got screwed to death. . .But is the bible concerned with man-woman love? No”
(100). Further, Max questions the very idea of “man-woman love.” In a later discussion
race and love, the narrator explains, “most white people fell in love (?) and married
because of proximity to each other. Most black people fell in love (?) and married
because of proximity to each other” (340). The reality or existence of love, as the
narrator notes, is questionable in any context, but the depth of Max’s cynicism stems
from his understanding that romantic love cannot possibly exist in the revolution and
liberation of black people. Though he doesn’t explicitly state it, he does suggest that
some other love exists. In the case of Max, racialized sexuality makes the
heterosexualization of desire a political and public solution for black liberation and
empowerment, but it does not allow him something more individual and personal.
William’s most striking dismissal of the heterosexualization of desire and racialized
sexuality can be seen in a minor but notable character, Moses Boatwright.

Moses Boatwright presents readers with the vision of how a continuous tricking
of the Bad Nigger trope can disrupt traditional ideologies. In the forms of the grotesque
and the surreal, the reader learns the importance of finding a new space of sexuality when
Max meets the killer/prophet Moses Boatwright. Moses, an Ivy-league educated black

man, sits in prison for killing and eating an anonymous white male. Boatwright’s act

 

”5 In the novel, Byron, a gay male, tells Max the story of an alien race of men who needed women
only to procreate. See p. 189.

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significantly centers around the “orgasmic” joy he attains in relating to Max his
murderous experience and in conveying the taste of eating the white male, implicitly
finding specific pleasure in eating the penis. Boatwright becomes the quintessential bad
nigger breaking laws and taking care of the white man through physical violence. The
cause of Moses’s act seems to lie deep-seated in the myth of the supersexuality of the
black male, and of the black male as brute and rapist. In “Sex in Black and White,” an
excerpt from Williams’s Flashbacks: A Twenty Year Diary of Writing (1973), he reveals
historical facts to review the complications behind the taboo of interracial love and sex:
Note these reports, the first from the Washington Eagle for July 16, 1921
of a lynching in Moultrie, Georgia, and the second from the Baltimore
Afro-American from March 16, 1935, of a lynching in Florida: “They tore
the Negro’s clothing off before he was placed in a waiting automobile. . ..
The Negro was unsexed and made to eat a portion of his anatomy which
had been cut away. . .. In the case of Claude Neal, a mob. . .dismembered
his genitals and stuffed them into his mouth to compel him to eat his own
flesh.” (26)
Although the issue of lynching never directly enters into the text, it is there in the
underlying myths, in the forbidden tone of Max’s relationship with the white Margarit,
and especially in the interest Boatwright’s psychiatrist has as to why his victim was a
white male. Williams revises the grotesqueness of Africa America’s lynching past for a
reason. Through his act of murder, Boatwright reverses the past, shifting the white male
power position of lynch mob who lynches, mutilates, and dismembers to that of the

lynched and dismembered. Boatwright’s act symbolically recognizes the white male as

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the brute and rapist, and to that end exposes “the open-secret” of racialized. Through
Boatwright, Williams can also dislocate the myth of the black male’s hypersexuality and
his ill-defined psychosocial reasoning for desiring/raping the white female.
The racial and psychoanalytical implications of castration in Boatwright’s act are
in no way underplayed in the text:
Boatwright said. . .“The psychiatrist asked me if I liked to eat it.”
Max scribbled hastily. Boatwright was looking at him with a sly
expression. “Eat What?”
Boatwright shifted his cigarette into his other hand. His eyes lit up, then
clouded. “Cunnilingus, fellatio—” He smiled to the floor. . .. “And he
asked if I’d ever done those things and I gave him my answer. I knew
where he was going, to Freud, naturally, and he had been reading
psychiatric studies of Negro life, he told me. Why was it a white man, not
a black man I ate, don’t you see?” (57)
With the mention of Freud, the psychiatrist wished to place Boatwright’s act in the
narrative of the Oedipal complex that suggests in order for the black male (child) to
achieve his sexual or gendered subjectivity, he must displace the white male (father). In
adapting the Oedipal complex to African American criticism critics imply that the model
of the Oedipal complex articulates that the black male is the powerless son of the white
Oedipal father, the white woman is the mother and wife to the white Oedipal father.116 In

order to realize or be accorded power, the black male must not act on his incestuous

 

“6 In “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance.” Screen 29. 4 (Autumn
1988): 66-70 Manthia Diawara asserts that “the narrative of miscegenation...links isomorphically with the
Oedipal narrative of incestuous desire, an assault on the Symbolic Order of the father which merits the
most serious punishment.”

246

desires for the mother. He must always work to please his father by accepting the-legacy
of patriarchy. If he displeases the father in any way, he can be reprimanded through

castration, a loss of power.117

Whereas, we may have been inclined to see Max’s
relationship with Margarit taking on the tones of an Oedipal argument, Boatwright’s
reference to Freud and the black male places the reader directly into a conversation
concerned with rejecting Freud’s Oedipal complex as it concerns the black male, and
hence, a rejection of racialized sexuality.

In his representation of the intersection of race and subjectivity, Williams reveals
an ironic play on this racial Oedipal myth. He revises the claim that for the black male to
construct himself he must kill and replace the father so that he can be with the white
mother. Though Boatwright’s murder of the white male adheres to the suggestion that
the black male kills the white father to take his place, he does not do it simply to be with
the white mother. Williams revises this part of the myth as it relates to interracial
relationships simply because the Oedipal complex is compromised by racialized
sexuality. The Oedipal complex, as it relates to black male subjectivity, assumes that the
object of desire is always the white woman/mother. The emphasis placed on the relation
between Boatwright’s act of eating the penis and the act of fellatio undermines the
heterosexualization of desire derived from wanting the white mother. Boatwright does
not desire any woman, let alone a white woman. Disturbing the heterosexualization of

desire in this way allows Williams to conceive of blacks gendered male as separate from

the brute/rapist representation.

 

”7 In addition to Diawara, Arthur Flanigan Saint-Aubin’s “Testeria: The Dis-ease of Black Men

in White Supremacist, Patriarchal Culture." Callaloo 17.4 (1994) 1054-1073.

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Through the character of Moses Boatwright, Williams upsets the continuity of
these models by implying that Boatwright’s comments and actions are not about buying
into notions of white society, wanting acceptance by the white father and patriarchal
structure, or an incestuous desire for the white woman, but, it is instead a rejection of
those presumed ideals. In order to cut himself off from that space in which race is
sexualized and sexuality is racialized, he bites off the primary signifier of the discourse of
racialized sexuality, the white phallus. In a sense, he is able to subvert what would be the
symbolic order grounded in the father’s punishment for his incestuous desires—
castration. As Boatwright does not fear castration, he becomes a threat to the symbolic
order of the father and the heterosexualization of desire. Since Boatwright is now free
from the heterosexualization of desire and racialized sexuality, he can move beyond the
representation of black brute.

Williams uses Boatwright as an introduction to the myth of the black male as
brute. Aesthetically, he employs Boatwright as the messenger and irrritator of God.
Williams conceives of Boatwright’s act as creative and a form of text that Max should
read for his own subjectivity as a black man. Evident from his name, Moses Lincoln
Boatwright, he is the messenger and key to freedom from the white gaze and racialized
sexuality. Boatwright’s purpose seems to be to reflect back Max’s own confusion about
himself. Boatwright’s endeavor to become a philosopher echoes Harry’s statement about
being a black writer. He asks Max, “Ever heard of a Negro philosopher?” (56). It’s as if
the existence of the myths of the black man negates other possibilities of being. Like the
earlier juxtaposition that comes with Roger being an intellectual macker, we can

understand the complications that arise with Boatwright. Intellectual personas of black

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males are replaced and dislocated when the body, a fictionalized representation of the
black brute, dominates the male’s existence.

The fact that Moses Boatwright, a thinking man—the Negro philosopher—has an
orgasm each time he reveals his story, serves as evidence that his enjoyment comes not
simply from killing, but also from devouring (physically, orally) what consumed him
throughout his entire life — mythologizing it for Max. The reality of Boatwright killing
and eating a white man suggests that he wanted to devour the very thing that made him
ugly and abominable, white America’s propagation of degrading and destructive images
of the black man. Boatwright wanted to eat away at the myths and their creators just as
they’d done to black men for so long. He takes the heart and genitals because “isn’t that
what life is all about, clawing the heart and balls out of the other guy?” (65). Williams
fashions Boatwright as a metaphor for black male existence in white America. The
killing of white persons and Western tradition isn’t at hand, but the ingesting of white
gazes and Western cultural traditions, which work to negate and destroy black existence,
is an issue.

As a Harvard educated intellectual, Moses has a grotesque image of himself
before he commits murder because his existence as a Negro philosopher is not possible.
Moses sees himself as evil, not because he killed a man and ate him, but because he is:

...an abomination. Ugly, black, cutting back my thoughts so I
wouldn’t embarrass people, being superbly brilliant for the right
people. . . .But those acts (killing and cannibalism) had more in them,

This world is an illusion, Mr. Reddick, but it can be real. (58)

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Illusion is precisely what hinders Moses from being the person he knows himself to be.
As long as white supremacy maintains its power through delusionary ideologies (racial
discourse/racism) over the black masses, he will never be able to move outside those
apparitions. Moses’s statement about illusion and reality echoes the sentiments of the
love-making scene between Max and Lillian, but Moses’s act is more radical. It gives
him god-like power—the ability to take and give life. When Moses eats the heart and
genitalia of the white male, he is able to destroy the phallic impaired constructs of gender
and sexuality by destroying its primary signifier. In the process, he is able to create
himself. The act of killing and cannibalization turns on observation and creation so that
he can remake himself from what he sees. As a racialized black male, Moses recognizes
that his existence does not matter in the human structure and logic of the US. He opts
for another structure closer to his own subjectivity—that of trickster.

It is clear that Williams depends upon the Baad Nigger figure and its trickster
foundations of messenger and imitator of God for a wholistic identity for Max, one that
does not fragment identity based on gender, sexuality, and race. In place of the violent
acts of Morrison’s 8-Rock Men and Boatwright, Williams composes Max Reddick as a
trickster and god by making the character a professional writer. The brilliance of making
Max a professional writer lies in the fact that he can use his art to counter the continuous
fictions of black males as he attempts to become not simply a writer, but a black writer.
Max’s occupation as a writer will allow him to confront issues of race, sexuality, and
language in one fell swoop, simply because it involves both observation and creation.

Williams’s secondary character, Harry Ames—fiiend and writing mentor of

Max—suggests why it is so important to vocally challenge myths when he says:

250

In our society which is white—we are intruders they say—there has got

to be something inherently horrible about having the sickness and
weakness of society described by a person who is the victim of them; for if
he, the victim, is capable of describing what they have believed non-
existent, then they, the members of the majority, must choose between

living the truth. . .and the lie. (49)

As writers, Harry and Max possess the ability to change representations of black peoples,

specifically black males. Harry’s comments document the otherness associated with

black males. His words seem to echo Jan Mahommed’s thesis of the open-secret

discussed in the previous chapter. In this way, writing also positions Max and Harry as

Bad Ni ggers going against systems of white oppression. They ensure that they will

examine white society’s choice to live the truth or the lie.

Max challenges his otherness in writing. Honest and passionate writing allows

him to observe his place in the world and to create from that point. In the text, there are

certain eruptions of mumbo-jumbo, non-standard words used by Max and his friend

Harry Ames:

“Streevus mone on the reevus cone,” Max said enjoying the
poolhall, jitterbug, non-sensical word game, a game whose
meaning was conveyed not by the words, because they had no
meaning, but by the tone of the voice, the inflection. . . .Ames
closed his eyes and said “Weeby on the streeby and a dit-dit-datty-

dit.” (43)

251

The use of words and language are crucial elements to these two writers. Obviously, as
Max points out, it is a rhythm-based word game, but Harry understands Max and Max
understands Harry. There is no misunderstanding as there was with Margarit. However,
what happens when the world is full of Margarit-like rniscommunications and less Harry-
like understandings of language? What happens, as Max says, to “words and ways of
using them that no newspaper” can ever use? (47). What happens to the meanings
derived from tone and inflection of those words?

Like Roger, intellectual macker, the black male writer positioned very much as
Bad Nigger, overturns and reworks his culture to find the dislocated body and lost words
for his subjectivity through vernacular culture. Max’s anger and confusion cause him to
question himself as a writer: is he a freak? Harry makes the question rhetorical, another
sign of orality in the text, marked by its open-ended and ambiguous nature: “Harry
laughed. ‘Well, you’re colored and you wonder how come you’re a writer because there
is no tradition of colored writers. Are we related to some ancient Yoruba folklorist, to
Phyllis Wheatley?” (48). In this discussion of why they are writers, Max and Harry
speculate on the lack of tradition for colored writers, specifically novelists, but they come
to understand, with references to Yoruba peoples, folklore, and Wheatley, that oral forms
help provide them with a foundation. Much later in the novel, Max discovers a way, a
vehicle, and a body—bee-bop.”8 He finds himself “wanting to get away to write. . .to do
with the novel what Charlie Parker was doing to music, tearing it up and remaking it;

basing it on nasty, nasty blues” (209). The connection between writing, identity, and

 

“8 Jazz Bee-bop has proven to be a worthy strategic tool for exonerating jazz and blues from the
“Al Jolson-Pat Boone- tin-pan alley” cultural appropriation of jazz by the white mainstream, positioning
those creating and performing the art as Bad Niggers. Many of the male artists associated with jazz bee-
bop. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, epitomized most of the folk-heroic social and sexual character traits of
bad niggers. Also note Carby’s discussion of Miles Davis in Race Men (135-168).

252

existence is clear. Williams’s aesthetic in the novel then is birthing into existence the
black male with black art, and there is no better way to do so than to challenge the things
that those in power have always utilized to push black people into nonexistence—
language and sexuality. The character Maxwell Reddick becomes a trickster figure, a
god, who can create and recreate the world through words. The question that Williams
answers in his texts as to whether those same techniques can be used to recreate
ideologies about black males and their sexuality is a resounding yes. The foundations of
Max’s new identity as a black male will be delivered through a continuous interruption of
racialized sexuality in the book with a text of his own design or from his own culture—

vemacular and folk.

253

11

While Toni Morrison and John A. Williams were each concerned about male-
female relationships and racialized sexuality in their works, neither completely divorces
their tropes of Bad Ni ggers from heterosexual assumptions. In Paradise, the very
establishing of the town of Ruby hinges on the 8-Rock Men’s ability to “bad nigger” their
way into a town of their own by upsetting white supremacist beliefs and the violent
exploitation or suppression of the black female. In addition, though Boatwright’s
cannabalistic ingestion of the white penis mocks heterosexual assumptions, Max as a Bad
Nigger stays well within the heterosexual trope for the figure. In order to view an
absolute inversion of heterosexual tropes in folk figures and tricksterism, we must go to
Arm Allen Shockley’s The Black and White of It. The collection of short stories destroys
heterosexual assumptions in racial and sexual discourse in a variety of ways. Previous
discussion shows that, in addition to the detrimental effects on racial identity, the
sexualization of race impacts the formation of sexual identity. However,
JanMohammed’s theory about the deployment of race and sexuality very often appears to
make heterosexual assumptions. The considerations of how racialized sexuality focuses
on the crossing of racial boundaries by white men with black women does not take us far
enough into the concerns of sexual discourse. While authors of Black Literature have
been able to use trickster aesthetics in their writings to help overcome the fundamental
problems of a racialized sexuality, very few authors can overturn racialized sexuality
without submitting to the heterosexualization of desire. By revising the Queen B figure
and engaging trickster elements of shape-shifting and situation inversion to do so,

Shockley avoids the trap of the heterosexualization of desire.

While the Bad Nigger focuses specifically on the male in black culture, we can
also find several complements to this figure that essentially are derivative of one major
figure, the Queen B, for black females. As this chapter will fully discuss, there are three
intersecting tropes of the Queen B figure. The initialization of Queen B allows “B” to
serve as a representation of Queen Bee, Queen Bulldagger, or Queen Bitch, or all of these
at once. As with the black rhetorical tradition, the explicit meaning of Queen B can only
be obtained via the context in which the word is used, rather than the sound.
Understanding the mutability of the figure, rather than fixing it in a specific heterosexual
frame, allows us to understand how it complicates the issue of racialized sexuality. As
indicated in chapter five, “excluding the African American family from the heterosexual
nuclear family form identifies African American sexuality as the locus of anxieties about
the stability of a white heteronormative social order... African American culture has
always been deemed contrary to the norms of heterosexuality and patriarchy.”l ‘9 Any
use of the Queen B figure, as the Queen Bee, Queen Bulldagger, or Queen Bitch,
emphasizes and embraces the destruction of the white heteronormative social order, and
the dismissal of it for its binary canons of sexuality. The Queen Bee myth alludes to
“badness” (heroicness) for black females. The folk myth presents female heroism
through sexual desire, sexual freedom and independence, and violence

The first figuration of Queen B, the Queen Bee myth, draws from ideas on insect

120

mating behavior. However, like many of its animal trickster tales, African American

 

”9 Ferguson, 5.

120 As is the case in all colonies of social bees, only the sexually mature female honeybee is the
queen. When she flies away from the nest to mate. she gives off an odor (a pheromone) that the drones find
irresistible, and they follow her. The streamlined queen flies faster and higher than the majority of the
short, stocky drones. As she soars upward. many of them give up the pursuit. From the few drones that can

255

culture quite adeptly adopts the tale of the Queen Bee for its own rationalization of
racialized black female sexuality: “You know the Queen Bee kills the male after she
finishes with him. That’s right, use him and kill him. . .Yes, wharn, bam, thank you
sir.”m In this brief folktale, black women telling the tale switch the tradition of badness
from the male to the female. Queen Bee’s badness stems from the violation of moral and
legal laws. Whereas the Bad Nigger unleashes his reign of badness upon women and
white communities, the Queen Bee releases her reign of badness against men. In Gayl

J ones’s Eva ’s Man, the myth of the Queen Bee, plays an important role in the search for
identity of the main character, Eva Medina. Right before orally castrating her male lover
to become a Queen B herself, Eva tells him: “There was a woman. . .called the queen bee.
I don’t even know what her real name was, but she was a real good-looking woman, too.
People used to say she was marked, because she had three men, and each of them died,
you know. . .I guess she was sure too, because she met this man she was really in love
with and killed herself ” (73). One can’t help but notice the similarities between the
Queen Bee figure and Annie Christmas. The independence and assertiveness of the
figures and their acts of suicide as a solution for their indefineable subjectivity positions
them as one and the same. However, unlike Annie, Queen Bee’s persona hinges on her
ability to get men to make love to her, knowing they would die (53, 142). In any Queen

Bee myth, sexuality becomes a weapon to be wielded for protection.

 

follow her as she continues on a rising, whirling flight, she chooses one to couple with. After mere seconds
her mate falls dying to the ground. and she chooses another. Britannica Online, vers. 98.2, Apr. 1998,
Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Feb 2002 http://www.eb.com.

‘21 Daryl Dance Cumber. Honey Hush (New York: WW. Norton, 1987) 24-

256

Queen Bee tales present the continued image of the black female as hypersexual,
and in a manner akin to that of the Bad Nigger, we can see the remnants of racialized
sexuality in one such Queen Bee folk moment:

LeaElla and Deal were hanging out they daily wash one morning,

when Deal was moved to ask LeaElla, a personal question. “Ella,

I don’t mean to pry. But girl, I been wondering, why did you have

seven children by different mens and not marry a one 0’ them?”
LeaElla snorted, “A man won’t gonna make a fool of me twice.”122
Folklore entailing Queen Bee imagery reflects the concerns of the black female as a
matriarch who has no need for the black male. In its most denigrating critique and
evolution, the queen bee becomes the welfare mother who has children by different male
partners, although she never marries one. The above tale comically depicts another black
woman’s profound bewilderment over why another woman has allowed such a thing to
take place. The answer given, wrought with dry wit, compels readers to question the
morals of the woman. LeaElla’s response indicates the need to exercise freedom and to
establish the independence of her sexuality and body without worrying about the moral
implications. Her response also suggests that the institution of marriage allows men to
make fools of women. As we saw with Harriet Jacobs, Annie Christmas, and Harlan
Eagleton, black females’ suspicion of the social contract of marriage seems very valid.
LeaElla’s concerns are no different. Apparently, LeaElla was previously married, but as

she notes, maniage offers no security or convenience to her or her children. Though

LeaElla is the mother of seven children, her dismissal of the validation of marriage

 

122 Honey Hush, 349.

257

indicates the Queen Bee’s systematic rejection of heterosexual assumptions about
male/female relationships and morals.

In another tale, the trickery and sexual badness of the Queen Bee figure leads to
her downfall. In “That’s Why I Poisoned Ya , Honey,” a woman lies on her death bed
confessing her sins to her husband:

She say, “But sumpin’ else I want to tell you, honey. I haven’t been true

to you. I’ve had other men. Every time you’d go away in the morning,

another man would come in, and he’d spend the day with me. And just

‘bout time for you to come home, he’d just be leaving”. . . .And the

husband said, “Honey, huhn, huhn, I know that’s why I poisoned ya!””‘3
The Queen B representation in the folk seems as ambiguous as that of the Bad Nigger. A
positive view of Queen B figures can be ascertained by doing simple feminist readings of
these tales. In each tale, the figure works to be economically and sexually independent
and free. The act of violently killing the male functions as a defensive mechanism for
black females whose independence might be in jeopardy due to the ideologies of
patriarchy embraced by males. Like the Bad Nigger, the Queen B’s use of the male
becomes a way to retaliate for economic exploitation and persecution.

As with the Bad Nigger, the Queen B figure occupies several spaces of sexual
possibilities, but the tr0pe of heterosexuality in the figure needs to be tricked and revised
in order to use those other spaces to disrupt binaries in non-folk discourses of gender and
sexuality. The sexual liminality of the Queen B figure comes from more than the
presentation of exaggerated sexual prowess in the black female; it reverberates in the

agenda of the Queen B’s dismissal or rejection of a consistent male presence in her life.

 

123 Shuckin' and Jivin,’ 149.

258

 

In any configuration of the Queen B figure, male companionship does not take priority
for the woman. While portraying a superficial heterosexual agenda, Queen B implicitly
embraces a homosocial organization of community, and its subjectivity flirts with the
boundaries of heterosexual/homosexual subjectivities. Interestingly enough, perhaps the
aversion to monogamous male-female relationships leads critics to also suggest that the
construction of the black lesbian serves as another evolution of the Queen B. in black
fiction.

SDiane124 Bogus’s “Queen B in African American Literature” attempts to draw a
unique and constrained connection between “Queen B” and lesbianism. Bogus states,
“Queen B is a euphemism for Queen Bulldagger or Bulldyker. Judy Grahn traces the
linguistic and historical etymology of the word, to the cunning female warrior of AD. 61,
Boudica (pronounced boo-uh-dikey-ay), a leader/Queen of the Celtic” (275). This
particular Queen led an uprising against Roman imperialism. Bogus then goes onto tie
this etymology to the black community by suggesting that black cowboy Bill Picket
brings the word bulldogger, from his 1923 movie, The Bulldagger, into black culture.
She asserts, “in time, ‘bulldogger’ mutated into bulldagger” (275). Bogus’s assessment
of Queen B appears problematic in two ways: it lacks a strong foundational connection to
the community, and it fails to acknowledge other representations of the Queen B figure,
not specified as Bulldagger, in black folk culture. As we will see in a later assessment of
Shockley’s “Sapphic Sisters,” Bogus’s Queen B etymology is no more valid for black
lesbians than the representation of Sapphos is for black lesbians. Further, the Bill Picket

connection excludes knowledge that before 1923, there already existed in African

 

124 This is not an error. The author spells her name exactly as I have recorded it.

259

American folk culture notions of the Queen B that vacillate between heterosexual‘and
homosexual representation.

However, this is not to suggest that Bogus’s claim that the Queen B represents
lesbian sexuality in the African American community is totally incorrect. While Bogus’s
etymological frame appears weak, we can accept her representation that Queen B implies
bulldagger/lesbianism. It acts as an African American oral mechanism of initializing the
names or titles seen as too taboo to speak. Though Bogus’s spelling of Queen “B” differs
from the folktale spelling Queen “Bee,” it should be noted that in a culture based on
orality and aurality, there is no difference in the pronunciations of the two titles. Further,
I am suggesting that Queen B and Queen Bee simply operate as two sides of the same
coin. A trickster-trope reading of the Queen Bee and Queen B figures in black culture
finds that these figures do not represent a fixed sexual identity for African American
women, heterosexual or homosexual. According to the trickster aesthetics of shape-
shifting, the two figures essentially serve as branches of a Queen B figure that is meant to
represent multiple black female sexualities, rather than the fixed definitions of
heterosexuality or homosexuality assigned by Bogus and located in long-established
heterosexual readings of the figure. In recognition of this fact, further spelling of the
figure’s title will alternate between Queen Bee (heterosexual), Queen B(ulldagger), or
will be represented with Queen B to highlight the fluctuating position of the figure in
African American culture. Rather than being a promoter of the binaries, Queen B serves
as a designation that other possibilities outside the binary exist. This interpretation of
Queen B can be deemed valid once we remember that like the Bad Nigger, the Queen B’s

power and heroism stems from her rejection of heteronormative patterns of behavior for

260

“women.” Revoking the term lesbian, the black female with same sex-desires becomes
the ultimate evolution of the Queen B. Queen B, like Audre Lorde’s word Zami.125
replaces the term lesbian (white female same-sex desire) with a term that can unname and
resist fixed definitions for black female same-sex desires. Arm Allen Shockley reveals
the complexities of the figure and what it can offer to disturb the continuities of
established sexual boundaries. Through trickster machinations, Shockley revises the
historical heterosexual images of the Queen Bee and the racially tainted imagery of
Queen B(ulldagger) or lesbian through queer politics, and constructs the Queen B.
Through the practice of shape-shifting, trickster “can alter his shape or bodily
appearance in order to facilitate deception. Not even the boundaries of species or
sexuality are safe, for they can be readily dissolved by the trickster’s disguises and
transmorphisms.”126 Typically, we might assign shape-shifting to a temporal fluctuation
in the construction of gender and race, but Shockley assigns shape-shifting to disrupting
the construction of black heterosexuality. Shockley documents that when one is “gay”
and black, shape-shifting, aka passing, becomes a necessary art. She complicates the
issue by then incorporating the trickster element of situation-invertor—connecting the
taboo of interracial sexual relationships to her shape-shifting agenda. In this way,
Shockley is able to address racialized heterosexuality, homophobia of the black

community, and the less depicted racialization of homosexuality.

 

‘25 See Sagri Dhairyan’s “Racing the Lesbian, Dodging White Critics” in The Lesbian
Postmodern. Ed. Aura Dean (New York: Cu Press, 1994) for an insightful discussion of black female same
sex desire and the Western and Eurocentric Construction of lesbianism. Like Lorde, Dhairyan questions
the category of lesbian and suggests that re-naming it creates controversy among white gay and lesbian
critics.

‘26 Hynes, 36.

261

Reviews of Shockley’s texts explain why this particular trickster trope is
necessary. In Black World, Frank Lamont Phillips begins a critique of Shockley’s work
that opens the door for more negative, but less critical criticism. Phillips argues that
Shockley “should know better” than to write work of this nature. He goes on to assert,
“This bullshit should not be encouraged!” (xii). Phillips’s comments are not uncommon
for black men reviewing black women’s writing during the black women writers’ literary
renaissance of the late twentieth century. Shockley’s work has also received negative
criticism from lesbian critics such as Jewelle Gomez. In discussing several works by
Shockley, Gomez claimed that “Shockley’s writing, in addition to trivializing Black
Lesbians and their sexuality, paints a picture of an unremittingly irrelevant feminist
movement. ..The main flaw in Shockley’s work is not dissimilar from that of her white
counterparts: the inability to place a Black Lesbian in a believable cultural context in an
artful way.”127 Gomez, a premier activist for racial and sexual concerns, accuses
Shockley’s work of not being black enough. Gomez’s comments are problematic since
they come some three years after the publication of Shockley’s The Black and White of It.
This set of short stories presents counter evidence to Gomez’s claims by asking the reader
to question what constitutes a believable cultural context for black lesbians. Gomez’s
comments suggest that there exists only one specific context for black lesbians, or that

there is a simplistic model or authentic lesbian for black communities. Though others

 

:27 “A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women” HomeGirls: A Black
Feminist Anthology. Ed. Barbara Smith. (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983): 114.

262

 

had been quick to address Phillips and Gomez’s comments,128 Shockley herself, ‘
demonstrated that her writing lends itself to and can withstand criticism of this kind.
When asked who she writes for, Shockley responded,
I write for anybody who elects to read my work. I do this with the hope
that the message I am trying to impart, for there is always one, will come
through clearly, and cause readers to think more perceptively, try to
initiate changes, learn to accept different races, as well as individuals
within them.129
Shockley’s aesthetics of shape-shifting and inverting situations is one way in which the
author can help readers think more perceptively and initiate changes. The remainder of
this chapter proves that, in accordance with Lorde and Dhairyan, Shockley’s set of short
stories presents itself as not interested in the white social construct of black female same-
sex desire—the lesbian (white) darkened to “black lesbian.” Shockley’s work positions
itself in a Zamian model with its particular twists to the black female folk figure, Queen
B.
In reference to Shockley’s collection of short stories The Black and White of It,
Nellie McKay commented that the collection of short stories demonstrates Shockley’s
“expertise as a good crafts woman,” and that Shockley is an author “who really cares
about the conditions of women’s lives.”130 Though the entire collection of stories

attempts to meet head—on the issues of racism, lesbian politics and feminism, three short

 

’28 See Rita B Dandridge’s “Male Critics/Black Women’s Novels” CLA Journal 23 (Sept. 1979):
1-11 and Calvin Hemton’s Black Women Writers and the Sexual Mountain (New York: Doubleday, 1987).

‘29 “Who Do You Write For: A Collage,” Sinister Wisdom 13 (Spring 1980): 36.
'30 McKay’s “Ground Breaking for Black Lesbians: The Black and White of It,” Bread and Roses
2 (Autumn 1980): 43.

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stories, “Holly Craft Isn’t Gay,” “The Mistress and the Slave Girl,” and “A Meeting of
the Sapphic Daughters” work especially well together to create a continuous narrative
regarding the impact of racialized sexuality on black females with same-sex desires.
Both “Holly Craft Isn’t Gay” and “A Meeting of the Sapphic Daughters” provide early
insight into how to read the most controversial piece in the compilation, “The Mistress
and the Slave Girl.” Just as Williams manipulates the Bad Nigger trope to explore
hyperrnasculinty and the trope of heterosexual desire and discourse in regard to black
male sexuality, Shockley uses trickster devices to revise the white construct of lesbian to
make way for black female same sex-desire in a way that recognizes the politics and
interlocking of racial and sexual discourse. Initial negative reactions to Shockley’s
collection more than likely stem from the lack of queer theory during the first printings of
The Black and White of It. Shockley’s work adheres to a major mission of queer theory:
“Queemess should challenge and confuse our understanding and uses of sexual
categories.”131 Such endeavors in queer studies must also work to resolve the silence on
issues of class, race, and biology that occurred in early feminist, lesbian, and gay studies.
In “the Mistress and the Slave Gir ,” Shockley provides readers with a solid
exploration of why Queen B and her mutability prove to be so necessary in a re-
conceptualization of same sex desire for black female communities. Returning to
racialized sexualities’ ideological beginnings, slavery, Shockley announces just how
awkward the constructions of homosexuality and heterosexuality are for black peoples by

showing how “as its embodiments of whiteness attests, heteronormativity is not simply

 

13: Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993) xvii.

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articulated through inter— gender relations but also through the racialized body.”132

Through her depiction of slavery and lesbianism, Shockley shows why black females
with same-sex desires cannot rely on Western canons of sexuality, and that the Queen B
figure is the folk solution to creating a discourse for black female subjectivity that will
reject both the binary social constructs of gender and sexuality

“The Mistress and the Slave Girl,” set in pre-emancipation South, is a complex
short story that elicits initial reactions of surprise, anger, discomfort, confusion, and
curiosity. On the surface, the story is simply about a white female slave owner falling in
love with a female slave. As we have noted, the transgressing of racial borders promotes
ideologies of black women as Queen B figures. Determined by law, the African child’s
status as a free black or a slave depends upon the mother’s status. As Davis noted earlier,
such a law begins the detrimental myth of the black woman as the emasculating
matriarch/Queen Bee. Further, the institution of slavery, in order to benefit from the
myth in a commodified form, places the sexuality of black women at the border.
Shockley manages to reconfigure the ideologies leading to the configuration of Queen
Bee by interrupting the discourse of racialized sexuality with issues of lesbianism.

“The Mistress and the Slave Girl” is a fictional account of Heather, a white
woman who returns to the South to take over her father’s plantation, and in the process
falls in love with a black female slave, Delia. In order to pursue her “love” for Delia,
Heather purchases and “rescues” the slave from the horrors she might receive at hands of
male slave owners. Criticism of the short story has been controversial to say the least.
Critical response vacillates between taking Shockley to task for presenting an ill-

conceived love story that ignores the consequences and impact of slavery and race on the

 

’32 Ferguson, 5.

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“relationship,” to admiration for the writer for taking a chance on a risque subject.
Either way, the story has been grossly under~read because it is marked by critics’
inability to read the dilemma of intersecting race with issues of sexuality, gender, and
sexual culture. Perhaps this is why trickster-trOping becomes more than a passing fancy
with linguistics.

Though there are no obvious oral-aesthetics of black culture in this particular tale,
there is the presence of tricksterism. In constructing her story, Shockley inverts every
dynamic of slavery and black slave narratives that we have come to know. Ironically,
though one of the major characters is the black female slave Delia, we cannot recover
Delia’s story as a type of slave narrative. Shockley presents the story through a focus on
the white female slave owner, Heather:

After her father passed six months ago, she had come back to Virginia.
More liberal minded towards women and slaves than most of the
surrounding planters, he sent her to be educated in the north. Years of
being away had made her virtually a foreigner to this place where she was
born. . . .In a pleading letter, their family lawyer had beseeched her to
return, or the plantation would be put up for sale because of
mismanagement. (105)
Shockley revises the pattern of black writers who address the institution of slavery by
focusing on the slave as the major character by choosing to make her primary character,
the slave master, or mistress in this case. Using third-person narration, rather than the
traditional first-person account in slave narratives, Shockley presents Heather as the main

character and protagonist. Delia merely serves as a secondary character. Why does this

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black female “lesbian” writer choose to focus more on the white female character? By
making Heather, her thematic focal point, Shockley moves the open-secret (desires of
whites) further into the public domain. Because she does so, white practices of secretly
fulfilling desire through the racialized body is no longer the slave’s shame and abuse, and
Shockley’s strategy becomes a damning critique of, in addition to the institution of
slavery, the criterion of “normal” sexuality. Heather is presented as a liberal white
southern woman who believes in women’s rights and emancipation. However, as
Shockley reveals, there is a contradiction. Heather’s schooling is paid for by the labors
of the slave. Her privileges come via the slave economy. Heather’s return to manage or
stop the plantation from being sold is in clear conflict with her abolitionist philosophies.
Shockley’s tricksterism of situation-inverting enables her to reveal the destruction of self
and morals for the slave owner.

A second strategy in the short story involves the reversal of dominance and
exploitation. Readers are accustomed to thinking of men abusing women in the
institution of slavery. Shockley exposes how white women exploited and dominated
black women for their own ends. Traditionally, in tales about slavery and sexual
exploitation, writers present readers with white males exploiting black females. The
overturning of such models seeks to disrupt ideologies of racialized sexuality. Upon
returning home, the libertine and feminist Heather stops at a slave auction, where she
witnesses men bidding to purchase Delia. When the auctioneer wants to raise the bids, he
makes Delia the sexual specter: “ ‘Come now, surely she is worth two thousand!’ the
auctioneer challenged. Abruptly he bared a breast, exposing a perfectly molded mound

’9,

with a brown tip. . . ‘See. . .A fine specimen (106). The auctioneer’s actions remind us

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of another incident in which a black female’s breasts (Sojourner Truth) are bared to
signify her value as the physical and sexual specter of femaleness. However, this scene is
lacking the “feminist” background of the actual historical moment of Truth’s incident.
Herein lies the incongruity of the tricksterism Shockley practices: Delia is the object and
Heather the spectator. Shockley’s text acknowledges the position of power white women
maintained over black females.

When Heather witnesses the auctioneer’s tactics for selling Delia, the author
presents to the reader two separate accounts of her reactions, and in these reactions lies
the polyphonic discourse that represents the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality.
Here is the omniscient narrator’s account of Heather’s thoughts: “Something about the
girl fascinated Heather as she took in the pink silk dress hugging the curves of her
body. . .Heather swallowed hard as she experienced a familiar sharp sensation piercing
warmly through her” (106). After those thoughts, we receive the omniscient narrator’s
account of Heather’s actions: “Anger flared within her at the sight. Reaching over, she
shook her brother awake. ‘Ralph, come!’ she ordered, climbing hurriedly out of the

9”

carriage, ‘I’m going to buy that gir (106). Shockley’s doubled narrative represents a
true trait of the trickster discourse. In one paragraph, Shockley presents the reader with
two very distinct reactions. The first focuses on Heather’s thoughts, which by no means
allude to any type of social/political feminist empowerment or woman-to-woman
solidarity. The sharp sensation piercing and warm appears to be a strong pronouncement
of desire and Heather’s primary and true reaction to Delia. Shockley emphasizes

Heather’s desire over her rising anger. Heather’s thought, then, makes invalid the next

part of the narration aimed at showing the moral outrage of Heather. Shockley finds a

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subtle way of showing how the open-secret works in less heteronormative ways. This
doubled narration allows the reader to see that Heather’s motive for purchasing Delia
should be viewed as ambiguous. Heather does not buy Delia to rescue her from the
clutches of evil men, but for her own wants. Heather’s attentions show a transgressing of
the racial and gendered order. Even the title of the story comes to remind us of the need
to constantly dislocate racialized sexuality. “Mistress” replaces the dominant image of
Master. Shockley’s presentation reveals that the institution of slavery could further
corrupt even those white women who perceived themselves as liberal-minded. i
The issue of lesbianism in this slave setting is a pertinent one because it permits

Shockley to investigate perhaps one of the most complicated issues in lesbianism and

 

IVE/1‘3. -..

race, the relationship between scientific racism and the homosexual body. In Siobhan
Somerville's “Scientific Racism and the Homosexual Body,” the author discusses how
scientific racism is used to argue that homosexuality is deviant. Somerville demonstrates
that biological notions of sexuality and race shift from a focus on the body to
psychological theories of desire in the twentieth century: “One way in which they
overlapped and perhaps shaped one another was through models of interracial and
homosexual desire. Specifically, two tabooed sexualities—nuscegenation and
homosexuality—became linked in sexological and psychological discourse through the
model of ‘abnormal’ sexual object choice” (251). Somerville argues that physicians and
sexologists like Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter conceptualized the emerging
models of homosexuality on the black body presented in scientific racism.133 In order to
solidify her argument, Somerville includes Margaret Otis’s “A Perversion Not

Commonly Noted” written in 1913 to record the widespread love-making between the

 

’33 Somerville, 254.

269

white and black girls in all-girl institutions of reform and boarding schools: “One white
girl. . .admitted that the colored girl she loved seemed the man, and thought it was so in
the case of the others. . .The difference in color, in this case, takes the place of difference
in sex” (113). Somerville’s analysis of this article found that Otis reverts to “stereotypes
established by earlier anatomical models,” and that “she used a simple analogy between
race and gender in order to understand their desire: black was to white as masculine was
to female” (252). Somerville’s claim makes it difficult to believe that we can continue to
ignore issues of sexuality, specifically homosexuality, in discussing African Diasporic
culture.

Perhaps this is why “The Mistress and the Slave Girl” becomes such an important
story to re-read. Shockley’s portrayal of Heather and Delia does not serve as an exact
fictional account of lesbian relationships as expressed by Margaret’s Otis’s account of
interracial relationships in all-girl institutions. Shockley, unlike Otis, does not rely on
stereotypical anatomical models but real historical conditions. Heather and whiteness are
associated with whiteness’s dominant position and blackness’s subordinated and
“feminine” position. Heather is the “man” and Delia is the “woman.” The dynamics in
Shockley’s story more readily reflect the reality of racialized sexuality.

The reversal of racialized sexuality, moving it outside the domain of
heterosexuality, exposes how the racialized black body is used to construct a homosexual
identity, not necessarily for Delia the black woman, but for Heather, the white woman.

In the story, Heather becomes comfortable with being a lesbian through her ownership
rights to Delia’s black body. She uses Delia, her legal property, to assert her lesbianism

in a society that forbids her to do so in any other way. This is not to say that same-sex

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desire does not exist for black females, but that the social construct of lesbian, like that of
woman, is inadequate to framing such desires. As the narrator indicates, Heather is
familiar with black females. In noting the less subservient personality of Delia, Heather
is reminded of them: “The girl was definitely not servile in her speech or appearance.

An air of dignity emanated from her in the stately way she stood. Heather was reminded
of the Negroes with who she attended private school in Boston, daughters of free black
men, and the southern white slave owners whose consciousness pricked them to educate
their illegitimate daughters” (107). Heather notices the Sojourner Truth-like qualities of

black female subjectivity. Heather has attended all-girl schools with black women, but

 

IflV-‘LIl uanar— __ -

she still does not consider them as equals, as exhibited in her ownership of Delia.
Heather’s purchase of Delia allows readers to ascertain that Heather means to use Delia
for her own purposes—to assert herself as a lesbian through exploiting the black body.
Ordinarily, in white feminist thought, Heather might be championed as something

of a radical and exceptional woman. She proclaims herself to be anti-slavery, she owns
land and property, she acknowledges her same-sex desire, and according to the town’s
people she’s “got a mind like a man’s for business” (107). However, Shockley concerns
herself with a much more complex agenda, the penetration of white Eurocentric
discourses into the black female body. In one scene, Shockley convincingly presents
how the white woman uses the black body to construct her sexuality:

Turning to Delia, she questioned: “Have you ever cut hair before?” When

the girl answered in the negative, Heather handed her a pair of scissors.

“Let’s give it a try.”

As the cut tresses lay scattered on the floor by the chair, Heather

271

scrutinized the effect in the mirror. She resembled Ralph more than ever
now without his moustache and sideburns. . .“Don’t cut yours,” she said,
reaching up to finger Delia’s hair. (109)

The condition that slavery presents of dominance and submissiveness promptly
reveals the irony of interracial relationships and lesbian relationships, and the
presentation of both as “deviant” behavior. The institution of slavery fosters an
atmosphere in which the social constructs of female same-sex desire, the butch and the
femme, must rely on exploitation rather than a true liberatory expression of sexuality. As
Shockley shows, these ideologies of role-playing can then expose the collusion of
racialized sexuality and scientific racism in constructing ideologies of homosexuality.
Heather’s actions mirror the dehumanizing efforts of white, heterosexual men as slave
owners. The twist of female on female sexual exploitation reveals that heterosexuality is
not any less “deviant” than homosexuality. Going beyond ”this realization, we note all to
quickly that Western canons of sexuality present troubling definitions for sexuality.

Upon seeing Heather’s new hair style, her brother Ralph notes, “So you’ve cut
your hair. . .another link to wearing pants and buying a slave girl. . ..What role are you
trying to play, dear sister?” (109). Heather denies playing a role, but clearly she does:
She wears pants, she cuts her hair, she thinks like a man, and she desires like a man.
Ideally, we might assume that Heather interrupts the discourse on gender, but realistically
she enforces it. Heather’s insistence that Delia not cut her hair plays on the roles of butch
and femme in lesbian relationships, and it is further altered by the fact the Delia is a
slave, and really submissive to Heather. Shockley utilizes the institution of slavery to

show the literal representation of the problem with current canons of sexuality. In the

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Western canon of sexuality (homosexuality/heterosexuality), gender hierarchies are
reinforced all the more in the actualization of the lesbian (white female with same-sex
desires). Sexuality becomes fixed and limited as a result of whiteness needing to remain
in a dominant position of power.

Heather further asserts her lesbianism during sexual contact (rape) with Delia in
which she clearly takes on the dominant role as butch and mistress: “Slowly, Heather
began to remove Delia’s gown. ‘I want to see your beautiful body’. . .Lightly, Heather
caressed Delia’s breast and stomach” (112). Throughout the entire scene, readers barely
know what Delia is saying, drinking, or wanting. However, when Delia does speak it is
at the request of Heather, and a miscommunication ensues that divulges how critical
Shockley’s narrative is: “Delia, say my name,” Heather whispered, nibbling on her
earlobe. Delia, in turn, replies, “Mistress--” (112). Though Heather assures Delia that
she is not her mistress but her lover, the point is made. Delia, about whom we know
little, perceives their affiliation as what it is, a mistress exploiting a slave. The fact that
Delia does not call Heather by her name implies that the relationship is far from equal,
much less based on love. Only after being prompted for a response does Delia take up
the role that her mistress wishes her to play. While Heather may not want to be called
mistress because of its intended ties to the institution of slavery she supposedly despises,
she doesn’t mind using her position as a mistress to find a way to assert herself sexually
as a lesbian. Such a reading of the story is not to suggest that lesbianism is deviant. It
merely means to surmise that Shockley’s short-story is able to disrupt and question

discourses on sexuality, race, and their connectedness.

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.' ' fi-C '4’“. '—

 

(4.31-.

 

Ordinarily, the ending of the story might imply a romantic happy conclusion since
Heather sells the plantation and frees the slaves. Yet, there are some noticeable
manipulations of language and narrative strategy in that ending: “Months later, Heather
freed the slaves and sold the plantation. . .moved to Boston, taking Delia with her” (113).
The narrator notes that Heather frees the slaves, but Delia’s status seems unclear. Why
does the narrator choose to say that Heather “takes” Delia? “Take” still implies Delia is
the property of Heather. A true happy ending would have resolved this dilemma of
mistress and slave girl and noted instead that Delia chose to go with her, or provided
some other indication of Delia’s free will to go and love Heather. Yet, readers are
offered ambiguous narration, rather than details as to whether Heather freed Delia: “N 0
one knew they were lovers, only that the white and black women who lived together,
were terribly devoted to each other” (113). If Delia remains a slave, she has no choice
but to be devoted to her mistress. Therefore, we understand that, in every way possible,
Heather exacts full use from her purchase. She can fulfill her sexual desires and love
without the threat of being morally and legally reprimanded. No one will ever persecute
the rich white woman as a lesbian involved in a relationship with another woman. She
will be able to assert her lesbian identity through the body of that black woman she
claims to love. No one will ever question Delia’s presence in her life. Delia is her
property, and as such is not legally defined as a “woman.” Heather commits no crime of
sodomy. The open-secret of slave communities continues with a new twist. This ending
suggests that Heather still has not seen how she uses Delia’s black body to construct her
own sexual identity, and until she does so their relationship will not be valid and

legitimate, nor will Heather’s sexuality. Consequently, as the lesbian uses the black

274

 

 

 

female body to conceptualize her “homosexuality,” the black female must go in search of
another discourse for her same-sex desires.

In “A Meeting of the Sapphic Daughters,” Shockley reveals the dynamics of race
and sexuality for black lesbians attempting to form a lesbian—identified community. The
story exemplifies how same—sex desire exists for African American women, but the story
continues to acknowledge that Western constructs of sexuality very often deny how the
discourse of race has shaped such models. When the major characters, two black lesbians
Patrice and Lettie, attend a social meeting for lesbians in their community, they become
very aware of the politics of race and sexuality. They are the only faces of color in the
meeting. They spend the evening listening to Trollope Gaffney, a white woman in her
mid-forties speak about building a lesbian community: “We have to assert ourselves—
build. Identify ourselves to each other—this great army of lesbian women, because we
are all sisters-s-s. We are all one in the beauty of Sapphic love-e-e!” (65). As the meeting
progresses, Patrice and Lettie learn that the community Trollope was speaking of is an
all-white community. When Trollope asks the more vocal and radical Lettie what she
thought of the speech, she replies, “there doesn’t seem to be anything in any lesbian
literature on the lesbian movement addressing itself to helping the black lesbian to
become free from racism—especially inside the lesbian community” (67). Aside from
Trollope being flustered by Lettie’s comment, other white women around them become
uncomfortable, even trying to reposition themselves as allies though sexual relationships.
After Lettie’s proclamation on the status of black lesbians in lesbian communities,
Wendy, another white woman, blurts out, “I had a black lover once,” and Lettie replies,

“It’s easy to be liberal between the sheets” (67). Lettie’s comments are crucial to putting

275

n..- ._ .-_- _;'

 

IE

 

into perspective the ending of ”The Mistress and the Slave Girl” and the entire collection
of short stories. Through Lettie’s words, Shockley convinces readers that thematically
she is very concerned with disrupting discourses of feminism, lesbian politics, and race
relations. As Lettie makes clear, one can still be a racist and pursue sexual relations with
someone of another race. The dilemma of the black “lesbian” articulates the point that
sexual freedom without racial freedom offers no true liberty. The setting and the theme
in the “Mistress and the Slave Girl” also confirms this claim.

Returning to the disruption of racialized sexuality and the heterosexualization of
desire, we now know that Shockley inverts the dominant situation during the institution
of slavery. Had she not presented this tale of interracial relationships between mistress
and a slave, we would be unable to fully review the discourse of homosexual liberation
and sexuality as it concerns race and gender. Unable to do so through analytical
accounts, Shockley can consistently critique both the discourse of homosexuality,
feminist ideologies, and racialized sexuality through a revision of the Queen B figure and
the trickster trait of situation invertor. Only the trickster aesthetic allows such a
complicated narrative to form, and Shockley uses it well. Shockley’s trickster aesthetic
reveals that the binary of homosexuality and heterosexuality constructs itself on the
bodies of black women. Heterosexual white women’s sexuality has always asserted itself
through the imagined otherness of black females, but now we can also see that white
homosexual women do the same. Shockley’s tale does not deny the existence of same-
sex desires, but it does expose the flaws of discourse used to discuss those desires. This

is why the Queen B figure becomes an alternative to discussing black female same sex

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desire. Shockley continues to emphasize the necessity of the Queen B figure in another
short story in The Black and White of It.
“Holly Craft isn’t Gay” presents a brief view into the life of a fictional successful
R & B singer reordering her sexuality:
It was four am. and Holly had just sunk wearily into the custom-made
king sized waterbed when the phone mocked her. Upon hearing its sound,
she groaned. Her body was worn out from performing to a capacity crowd
at Town Hall. Immediately following, there had been a late champagne
supper distended with false gaiety to hide her fatigue, a brief appearance
on the Tomorrow Show, and finally, home to bed. (69)
From the very beginning of the story, Shockley establishes a way to examine the issues of
class, sexuality, and race. Holly lives in elaborate and expensive surrounding, she enjoys
a successful career as noted by her appearance on television shows and sold out crowds.
She possesses material wealth, but aside from the introduction of masked happiness to
hide her fatigue, Holly Craft seems hollow. Upon divulging the intrusion of the phone on
Holly’s rest period, we learn several things:
Victor was calling from Washington to find out about the show. New
husbands could be a bother sometime... “hello--” she said to an ominous
silence meeting her over the wire.
“Hi, babee-ee, it’s me.”
The too familiar husky female voice startled her into full wakefulness.
It couldn’t be!...There was only one person in her life who called her baby

in that slow, seductive way. “Adrienne!” (69)

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As we soon learn, Adrienne is Holly’s former lover. Holly’s iconic status as a singer,
her description of her “new” husband being a bother, and her reaction to her female ex-
lover gives meaning to the title, “Holly Craft Isn’t Gay.” Yet, because the title lacks
punctuation of an exclamation point or a question mark, we can never be sure if the main
character fully questions, asserts, or denies her same-sex desires, or if she simply denies,
accepts, or questions the white construction of lesbianism. The statement’s lack of
marked punctuation seems open—ended and necessarily ambiguous. Shockley’s title
manages to mark the narrative strategy of the story, and Holly vacillates between
accepting her same-sex desire and rejecting the construct of lesbian. Both the title and
the story thematically teeter on examining the politics of closeted homosexuality, but
they also seek to move away from fixed notions of homosexuality. This entails a candid
exploration of sexuality in the black community based on class and gender divisions.
Shockley depicts the main character, Holly Craft, as a pristine closeted “lesbian”
who possesses the potential to be the representation of the Queen B(ulldagger) figure, but
who accepts the heterosexual trope of Queen Bee. Bogus defines the Queen B(ulldagger)
as one who:
speaks of the generations who have nurtured her image. She is an
incarnation of folk history, a carrier of the nascent art of the Blues and a
product of black culture. ...She clearly knows the value of human freedom,
for her woman-loving choices compel her to confront life’s adversities.
(278)

As defined by Bogus and its use as a folk figure, the Queen B has definite class

implications. Its very construction is shaped by lower and underclass values. Holly, a

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“— 'zrr . ulna-.- an“?

 

 

product of a poor family, whose mother dies from “a heart attack in the white home
which she worked so hard to keep spotless,” rejects her Queen B potential at every turn in
maneuvering class issues (72). If we accept Bogus’s definition of the Queen B, Holly
Craft would be a revolutionary “lesbian” using her career as a singer to change the world.
She would be a woman comfortable with her “lesbian” sexuality and choice to love
women. However, Holly Craft is not that figure.

Shockley’s characterization of Holly Craft suggests a destructive fluctuation
between representations of Queen Bee and Queen B because she is a closet lesbian. In
her efforts to fulfill the heteronormative pattern of behavior, we learn that Holly’s
manager “promoted her with a vengeance, always parading her in the public’s eyes with
notoriously famous and arrogant black stud male escorts to help project her as a sex
symbol” (74). The more Holly attempts to escape her class background, the more
closeted she becomes. Holly’s image as a sex symbol andher financial success hinges on
his promoting her as a heterosexual Queen Bee figure enjoying and using men for her
own purposes. Ironically, her same-sex gender desire also positions her as Queen
B(ulldagger). Unfortunately, other than this and her career as R & B singer, Holly Craft
possesses none of the empowering attributes Bogus assigns to Queen B(ulldagger).

Holly is the Queen Bee who fears being the Queen B.

Holly buries lesbian inclinations for the sake of furthering her career until she is
reminded of those feelings when Adrienne, an ex-lover, attempts to reconnect by calling
her: “Holly, you haven’t forgotten. I’m glad for I would have been terribly
disappointed. . .You were marvelous and beautiful to watch. Your voice is getting better

and better all the time. I predicted that you’d be another Nancy Wilson someday” (70).

279

 

 

 

Clearly, this quote signals a black cultural context that Gomez claims does not exist in
Shockley’s work. The reference to a jazz singer is significant in exposing the shape-
shifting and situation inversion Shockley is capable of creating.

Perceptively, Shockley chooses to compare Holly Craft to a jazz singer, rather
than those women usually associated with lesbianism and sexuality, those wild women of
the Blues Era. Those black women took the stage, found the modes of a lost oral
language, and used it to help articulate their own sexuality. The blues women of the
Classic Blues Era definitely fit the profile of Queen B’s temporary illustration of female

sexual independence and empowerment. They represent the liminal embodiment of the

"WLMZOJ‘. .— ...-

Queen B. Hazel Carby explains that the “Classic Blues Era” confirmed that black

 

1' 8.9; A

women could have an emerging self-identified sexuality, as well as a voice in society:
What has been called the “Classic Blues,” the women’s blues of the
twenties and early thirties, is a discourse that articulates a cultural and
political struggle over sexual relations: a struggle that is directed against
the objectification of female sexuality within a patriarchal order but which
also tries to reclaim women’s bodies as the sexual and sensuous objects of
song.134

Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith in particular made their songs a part of a discourse of

societal struggles, as well as a discourse on sexual relations within the black community.

Women blues singers deviated from the traditional women roles (servants, wives,

mothers) and expressed their wisdom, sensuality, and sexuality to the public world. The

 

I34In “It J us Be’s Dat Wat Sometimes: the Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues”. Feminism: An
Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndhl. (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1991) 754-55. Carby discusses the politics of sexuality, themes of
sexual independence, and lesbianism in the songs of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.

280

 

triumph of the 19203 and early 19303 was short-lived. The late 19303 and 19403 -
introduced a “crossing over” of blues singers into white records and films. For legendary
singers like Ethel Waters and Hattie McDaniel, the empowering identity found as blues
singers was transformed into a set of subordinated, deformed roles presented in films as
comedic, but degrading, images portrayed to appeal to white crossover audiences. No
longer were they the strong, independent, sensual black women found on the stage in
many clubs, but comic minstrel characters.13S During the 19603 and 19703, black female
“soul” singers such as Aretha Franklin and Millie Jackson had again found a way to be

just as empowering as women of the Classic Blues Era, but the close of the seventies

 

'g'Ai— ' '

suggested something less empowering.

After Holly has talked with Adrienne about her singing career, she recalls a time
when she seemed closer to being that other Queen B: “A long time ago. Yes, when she
sang in small supper clubs and on the road with the Garland Trio. They traveled mostly a
tri-city circuit, sleeping in cheap motels, eating Kentucky fried chicken and Macdonald
hamburgers” (70). In addition to her same-sex desires, Holly’s early career mirrors that
of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and other blues singers who traveled to perform in less than
grandiose halls for “the people.” Holly’s early career is not marked by capacity crowd
sell-outs and television appearances; she is shaped by what she does and whom she loves.
She subscribes only to her thoughts and feelings, and she does not allow herself to be
constructed by anyone else:

Adrienne, eleven years older, had taken her under her wing. A nineteen-
year-old singer who didn’t even know how to wear her hair, but whose

voice has everybody a-mening on Sundays. . ..Emotional dependability

 

’35 “It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometimes," 757-758.

281

 

developed slowly, step by step, inch by inch into the physical. ..She
ignored the outside warnings about Adrienne from the older ones who
frequented the places where she sang. She’s a great gal, but, you know,
she ’5 funny. To her, Adrienne was simply unequivocally the center of her
young life. (72)
Just as mainstream success changes the empowering position of blues singers to comic
rninstrels, Holly Craft’s need to succeed usurps her authorized self for continued material
gains. She replaces the logic of her own desires with the logic of others. Holly Craft

becomes the post “soul” of the female R & B genre, and less radical. The way Shockley ’1

juxtaposes a young Holly, one who is similar to the blues women, with the older Holly of

 

cross-over success demonstrates the skill with which she can invert specific tropes and
highlight the manifest trickster traits in her texts. By revising the known trope of
audacious bisexual/lesbian blues singer in African American women’s culture to a timid
and closeted pop icon, Shockley simultaneously acknowledges racialized sexuality and
exposes her character’s closet homosexuality as the struggle for self-determination,
which is only obtainable as the Queen B figure.

In addition, the comparison of Holly to a jazz singer places her directly into the
discourses of patriarchy and heterosexuality that the Queen Bee and Queen B figures
violently struggle against. Throughout the twentieth century, cross-over success for
black women in the music industry has hinged on the impact and influence of racialized
sexuality. The success of female artists depended on how attractive, feminine, and
unthreatening white audiences found these performers. In other words, if they could

somehow manage to overcome the “otherness,” appear universally the same, and at the

282

 

same time remain the spectacled black body for a white audience, they could be
economically successful and socially acceptable.

With the story of Holly Craft, Shockley focuses on a period in time when black
women singers, again, lose the key to their salvation, the late 19703 and early 19803.
Critic Nelson George has called this particular period “Crossover-the Death of Rhythm
and Blues” because of its assirnilative agenda.136 In describing how Adrienne and
Holly’s affair ended, Shockley reveals how Holly Craft becomes the representation of the
new black female r& b singer, who, unlike Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, cannot present
or sing about her true sexuality:

Yes, that was what ended it. Bernie Goldman, forty years old...the Jewish
promoter was adept at making stars. . .he proceeded to deliberately
disintegrate their relationship. . .A gay, black female singer would never
make it. The public wanted their black women stars worshipped, loved
and fucked only by men. (73-74)
Shockley’s characterization of Holly Craft reveals how far the African American
community has come. Just as white appropriation of jazz changes the artform, so too
does the influence of bourgeois class values influence what is seen as acceptable in black

137

culture. The conversion of the blues singer trOpe, from its blues roots, to jazz, to pop,

reveals how concerns over racialized sexuality not only whitewash the aesthetics and art

 

‘36 Nelson George. The Death othythm and Blues (New York: Plume, 1988) 147.
’37 From W.C. Handy to Pat Boone, it is important to remember that jazz is not the only thing
changed by white appropriation of black music. Tin Pan Alley is a specific example of how early R & B is
changed by white appropriation. Further. during the 503 and 603, the reception of music produced by labels
such as Motown and Stax begins the separation between R&B and Soul music. The R & B of Motown was
a diluted p0p representation of black soul music. Despite the fact that some groups from the Stax label
were integrated, they remained truer to the African aesthetics of their northern counterpart, Motown.

283

 

 

of black music,138

they also disturb the construction of identity for a black woman, who,
had she had same-sex desires in an earlier time, could have quite possibly been successful
and out of the closet. Returning now to Adrienne’s description of Holly’s voice, we can
understand that Nancy Wilson, while representing jazz, represents a specific type of jazz.
Wilson, as one of the successful 19703 jazz female vocalists to cross-over,139 has a voice
and a style that is aesthetically polished for cross-over success. Her tracks are often laced
with restrained and ordered piano accompaniments, and even her voice reflects that same
restraint when compared to another jazz singer such as Nina Simone. It seems that
Shockley chooses Nancy Wilson over other figures for two reasons: to demonstrate the
impact of race politics on Holly Craft’s status as a singer and woman, and as a way to
explore the restraint and polish of her performance as a heterosexual. Holly Craft’s
positioning as a cross-over artist during this time reveals that her greatest performance
happens not on-stage, but in her own life.
After Holly talks with Adrienne on the phone, we learn that:

She was safely married to a man who was considered one of the most

promising young black leaders heading a civil rights organization. As a

husband, he fulfilled the model role of an attentive and loving spouse. . .In

line with this, she complimented his image, giving him ornamental

window dressing of herself, an attractive sultry black star-singer. And he

helped her by showing that she had married a man of her own color who

 

'38 In comparing the approaches of Stax and Motown, George’s work describes Motown Record’s
“finishing school” for its artists. The school taught artists how to make themselves saleable to a white
audience, but at the same time it worked to play down the distinct attributes of black culture: texture of
hair, rough and less polished aesthetic musical styles, soulful dancing etc. George, 86-88.

'39 George, 134 and 177. When CBS record company begins working to compete for and

appropriate the black music market, they begin creating strategies for black cross-over success. Wilson
represents one of the most successful cases in the genre of jazz.

284

was idolized by all. (71)
The bourgeois agenda of racial upliftment and “normal” representations of black
sexuality in the public domain seems to be underscored by the references to civil rights
and black male leadership. Consequently, the more economically or socially successful
Holly and Victor become, the more heteronorrnal they must appear to be for the white
masses, all the more since Holly is a black female who desires females. The presentation
of the heterosexualixation of desire by both Holly’s husband and Holly herself documents
the impact of racialized sexuality. It becomes clear that while Holly’s husband may not

be gay, that he too buys into the notion that he must put on a performance, and that black

 

people looking to raise their status in society must always strategically perform in public,
heteronormative behavioral patterns. Holly’s situation cleverly underscores the
complex dynamics for closeted black lesbians. In the folktale, the Queen Bee’s reaction
to the finality and fixedness of this discourse of heteronormativity becomes violence.
The same pattern continues in Shockley’s short story.

Like the Queen B figure, Holly’s occupation as a singer provides her with the
ability to deliver herself from an oppressive position to an empowering reign over almost
everyone without dismissing her desires. Holly’s voice could possibly articulate a
discourse against the objectification of women’s sexuality within a patriarchal order:
“But she sang to women and not to the gaping males. . .She wanted to touch them with her
music, words, make them aware of their woman-ness. Woman singing to women—soul
to soul”(74). Yet, these words are not reflected in any of Holly’s actions. She doesn’t
use her voice to move her sexuality outside the established order. After performing at a

concert, in which she made other women aware of their womaness, Holly continues to

285

 

 

refute her own desires by denying her sexuality. When one of the women she sings to
becomes bold enough to sexually pursue her backstage, Holly’s stage performance
becomes secondary to her sexual performance: “Then the woman moved across the room
to make a pass at her and she slapped her hard, hissing in rage: ‘I’m not like that!’ ”(75).
Though it is a woman whom Holly hits, her reaction mirrors the violence of the
“heterosexual” Queen Bee figure. Further, the narration reveals that Holly is like that:
“She had gone back to it, even before rebuking the woman. The urge to have a woman
almost stifled her after Adrienne. It was there and she could not throw off the need.
Going to bed with the male stud escort didn’t help either, only made the desire worse”
(75). The Queen Bee’s strategy of violence and using men in defense of herself
overwhelms Holly’s true self, the Queen B. Though she rejects one of her fans and
frequently mentions her husband to Adrienne when they finally meet, readers learn that:
Then one night the desire was so overwhelmingly strong in her...she got
drunk and went to a gay bar. . .When she scaled higher the ladder of
success and moved to New York permanently, she learned to harness the
urge by closing her mind to it and saturating herself in work. (75)
In true Queen Bee fashion, Holly’s use of the male escort service takes the Queen Bee’s
use of men to its logical ending. Holly is powerful and rich enough not to bother with
emotional ties. Her career affords her the opportunity to physically project the
heterosexualization of desire in her life, but it also allows her to emotionally bury same-
sex desires. Her restraint and adept skill at performing as the heterosexual woman

becomes a part of her identity. Whereas the blues women may have been using their

286

singing as a way to express every part of themselves, Holly inverts that strategy and uses
it to repress and deny. She stays deep in the closet.

When Adrienne confesses to Holly that she is “way out now. . .no longer all tight,
scared, and pent up inside,” Holly replies, “I’m not gay, Adrienne”(76). Even after
meeting with Adrienne and realizing that she desires her, Holly manages to return to her
performative identity. In the midst of their love-making, Shockley presents to us Holly’s
thoughts: “But no one was going to say that she was queer. She wasn’t gay. Then the
idea struck her. As soon as she got back, she would get pregnant. ...Queers can’t have
babies. A baby would complete the picture of a straight family circle” (77). Holly
Craft’s performance continues stating the title line “Holly Craft Isn’t Gay.” By the end of
the story, Shockley has marked the title of her work with an exclamation point. To be
certain, Shockley does not position Holly Craft as the liminal Queen B. Holly epitomizes
the violently destructive Queen Bee banning herself and others. The shape-shifting
performance of Holly goes hand in hand with her identity as a black female and a lesbian.
“Holly Craft Isn’t Gay” consistently seeks to alerts readers to the ways in which black
women, specifically black lesbians, have to present and revise their sexual identities due
to this racialized sexuality. Shockley’s tale while being pro-homosexual, anti-homophic,
and anti-closeted lesbian politics suggests that a revised reading of the Queen B, Queen B
as exemplified by someone like Bessie Smith, demonstrates how to disrupt traditional
ideologies of sexuality. She converys how much more powerful the liminal Queen B.
figure could be versus the Queen Bee. With this story, we are able to challenge not only
homosexual identities but heterosexual identities of blacks as well. Racialized sexuality,

in addition to fostering detrimental discourses on gender concerning the black female as

287

the emasculating matriarch, creates the excessive heterosexualizing of desire in black
communities. While “Holly Craft Isn’t Gay” establishes the benefits of the Queen B.
figure in the black community, “The Mistress and the Slave Girl” and “A Meeting of the
Sapphic Daughters” help to fully detail why Shockley positions the figure as so vital and
necessary to disrupting Western canons of sexuality and gender. The reason that Holly
never fully becomes the Queen Bulldagger stems from her inability to embrace another
facet of the Queen B figure, the Queen Bitch.
Once we reject established borders of Western sexual and gender categories, we
then move from Queen Bee and Queen Bulldagger to the Queen Bitch in black culture.
The mutability of the figure and its value of providing a discourse for black female
sexuality not only occurs in literary texts by black “lesbian” writers, but also in the
productions of values produced in other black cultural forms. Most recently, the p0pular
urban vernacular form of hip-hop has adopted the Queen B figure to deal with black
female sexuality. Hip-hop’s, specifically Lil’ Kim’s aka Queen B’s, embrace of the term
Queen Bitch (Queen B) has nothing to do with the rnisogynist contextualization of the
term, and everything to do with Queen B’s original folk presence in black culture. In her
song, “Suck My Dick,” Lil’ Kim exclaims:
What? I’m loving this shit/ Queen Bitch !/ What bitch you know can thug
like this? Imagine ifI was a dude and hittin’ cats from the back/ With no
strings attached/ Yeah nigga, picture that!/ I treat y’all niggas like ya’ll
treat us.140

Kim’s lyrics emphasize that she is no “bitch,” contextually an attribute ascribed to

females who are assertive or aggressive in pursuing what they want. “Bitch” in that

 

”0 From The Notorious K.I.M. Atlantic, 2000.

288

context is at the same time condemned by bourgeois and feminist critics alike. However,
as we have noted quite often in this work, “woman,” or the constructs of white
womanhood have never applied to black female subjectivity. In the same way that the
Bad Nigger in the folk manipulates his non—citizenship in the US. to ignore society’s
laws, the Queen B figure works to do the same with the constructs of womanhood. Lil’
Kim is a Queen Bitch. She makes a distinction between the two by asking what ordinary
female (“bitch”—assertive females struggling to fit themselves into the model of
womanhood) can transgress established boundaries (thug) as she (the Queen Bitch) does.
She creates an alternative discourse practice for herself in her proclamation as the Queen
Bitch, telling “feminist critics” who reprimand her for her refusal to submit to their
standards of what defines revolutionary discourse for black female subjectivity, “You
wanna be this Queen B but ya can’t be. That’s why you mad at me.”141
The Queen B figure also allows Kim to position herself on the margins of the
binaries of sexuality so that her sexuality does not become fixed or located in the remains
of racialized sexuality. Of her sexuality, she boasts: “One that get up in a nigga’s ass
quicker than an enema/Make a cat bleed then sprinkle it with vinegar...Kim got him in a
zone beating they dicks/ Even got some of these straight chicks rubbing their tits. What?
I’m loving this shit.”142 As with the Bad Nigger, there really is no homophobia present

in Lil Kim’s persona of the Queen Bitch because there is no final acceptance of the

constructs of gender. An interesting metaphor, the enema is associated with anal

 

'4' “Big Momma Thang” from HARDCORE. Atlantic, 1996

”2 “Suck My Dick” From The Notorious K.I.M.

289

penetration of the male body, but Kim also turns towards the traditional penetration of the
female body. The cat serves as a reference for female genitalia that bleeds from either
rough penetration or breakage of the hymen. Despite the implied roughness of
penetration, it appears that she does not wish for the act of penetration to be solely tied to
male representations of penetrating—hardness, edges, or phalluses—, and so she also
focuses on the fluid aspect of the enema. Furthermore, when she speaks explicitly of
sexuality through body parts of “dicks” and “tits,” Kim imagines herself as sexually
appealing to both sexes, and dodges the heterosexual trope of the Queen Bee figure. As
the Queen B, Lil’ Kim remains not only capable of being entered as a female in the act of
sexual intercourse, but in entering from behind, of being male and female at once. Her
sexuality is changeable. Continuing a process of unnaming that began with gender, Lil
Kim’s persona of Queen Bitch harkens back to the folk configuration of the Queen B
figure in black culture. Queen B provides the model needed to subvert the misuse of the
black body in “The Mistress and the Slave Girl,” counter the limited vision of the
“Sapphic Sisters,” eliminate the need for passing in “Holly Craft Isn’t Gay,” and develop
a way to construct a black female self in the hip-hop nation. The Queen B figure allows
black female subjectivity, in regards to gender and sexuality, to remain indefinable as it
evolves from one generation to the next.

Racialized sexuality leaves an indelible print on the production of sexuality in
black communities. Finding a way to conceptualize the most personal and intimate
moments of black life and identity without the intrusion of problematic public discourses
complicates the social and political existence of blacks. However, as artists such as

Morrison, Williams, and Shockley have shown, black folk traditions and figures solidify

290

Sylvia Wynter’s theory that the folk is a source of cultural guerilla resistance to the

plantation system of commodifying and pomotroping black bodies.

291

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