S P E A K I NG

POWER

Black Feminist Orality in

Women’s Narratives of Slavery

D O V E A N N A S. F U L T O N
Speaking Power
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 Speaking Power
Black Feminist Orality in
Women’s Narratives of Slavery

DoVeanna S. Fulton

State University of New York Press

Cover photo, “Speak Lord,” courtesy of Nina Starr Howell

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© 2006 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fulton, DoVeanna S., 1967–

Speaking power : Black feminist orality in women’s narratives of slavery /
DoVeanna S. Fulton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6637-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7914-6637-X (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. American prose literature—African American authors—History and criticism.
2. American prose literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Women
slaves—United States—Biography—History and criticism. 4. African American
women—Biography—History and criticism. 5. Slave narratives—United States—
History and criticism. 6. Slaves’ writings, American—History and criticism.
7. Autobiography—African American authors. 8. Feminism and literature—United
States. 9. Oral tradition—United States. 10. Autobiography—Women authors.
11. Slavery in literature. 12. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title.

PS366.A35F85 2005
818'.08—dc22 2005006548

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of my grandmother

Doveanna R. Watkins

v
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 Contents

Preface Black Feminist Orality: Identifying

a Tradition ix

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction “So my mother told me”: African

American Women’s Writing and
Oral Traditions 1

Chapter 1 Speak Sisters, Speak: Oral

Empowerment in Louisa Picquet,
The Octoroon; The Narrative of
Sojourner Truth; and Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl 21

Chapter 2 Tale-Baring and Dressing Out:

Black Women’s Speech Acts That
Expose Torture and Abuse by
Slave Mistresses in Our Nig,
Sylvia Dubois, and The Story of
Mattie J. Jackson 41

Chapter 3 Strategic Silence: Respectability,

Gender, and Protest in Iola Leroy
and Contending Forces 61

Chapter 4 “Will the circle be unbroken”:

(Dis)Locating Love within the
Legacy of Slavery in Their Eyes
Were Watching God and Corregidora 81

vii
viii CONTENTS

Chapter 5 Black Girls Singing Black Girls’

Songs: Exploring the Wounds of
Slavery to Heal Contemporary Pain
in Beloved, Dessa Rose, Kindred,
and The Gilda Stories 101

Coda Sister Griot-Historians: Representing

Events and Lives for Liberation 123

Notes 127

Bibliography 145

Index 159
 Preface

Black Feminist Orality

Identifying a Tradition
/

[S]he called and the hearing heard.

—Toni Morrison, Beloved

As an African American woman and scholar of African American litera-

ture and culture, I often think of my reasons for choosing these research
interests. I know that my love of books and reading ground my choice,
but my motivations are more deeply embedded in the consciousness of
who I am and how African Americans, women, and the economically dis-
advantaged historically have been treated and represented in America.
In my work, I want to respond to Ntozake Shange’s plea for “somebody/
anybody/sing a black girl’s song” (4). Additionally, I feel my subject posi-
tion as a Black woman who was raised by a poor Black divorced mother
gives me a unique angle of vision to critique texts.1 Thus, it is because of
my life experiences as a poor Black female child that I am concerned with
examining race, gender, and class issues in American culture.
Looking back over my life, it is difficult to identify moments in which
I first realized there were disadvantages to being Black and female. Similarly,

ix
x PREFACE

although I knew we were not rich, I did not specifically think of myself as
poor. Instead of specific events that mark racial and gender awareness, I re-
call how white patriarchal representations of beauty suffused our lives. For
instance, my mother placed great emphasis on skin color, hair texture, and
facial features as beauty signifiers. My sisters and I were continually in-
structed to “tuck in your lips” or “pinch your nose so that it won’t spread all
over your face.” Though these instructions were impossible to follow, their
reiteration reinforced both European aesthetic standards and our inability
to ever meet those standards. Certainly, these were not words of empower-
ment, though ironically, they were intended to be.
While this internalized oppression negatively affected our relations
with one another and our subjectivities, we learned strength and in-
tegrity through the examples of perseverance and resistance to dehu-
manization shown in the actions and speech of my mother and other
Black women around us. These examples became reference points to cre-
ate a philosophical understanding of Black women’s struggles to build
and maintain strong healthy identities in opposition to a world that con-
stantly devalues and negates our existence. In her book Black Feminist
Thought, Patricia Hill Collins contends, “The ideas we share with one an-
other as mothers in extended families, as othermothers in Black com-
munities, as members of Black churches, and as teachers of the Black
community’s children have formed one pivotal area where African
American women have hammered out a Black woman’s standpoint”
(15). The lessons taught by Black women’s approaches to living and
struggle demonstrate a combination of theory and practice in which the
ways Black women respond to and cope with adversity reveal their exe-
gesis of the world. The use of language as a weapon to combat oppres-
sion and dehumanization illuminates a critical interpretation of the
world that demands Black women practice active resistance to invisibil-
ity and objectification by using our voices to represent intelligence and
integrity in a society that denies Black women these qualities.
My mother represented theory and practice in her response to the
failing grade I was initially given by the white female teacher of my third
grade class—of which I was the only Black child—who speculated that, be-
cause I came from a “broken family,” I lacked the necessary tools to pass
the class. My mother retorted, “Not my child. She’s been reading and
spelling since she was four. And I know she does her homework right be-
 PREFACE xi

cause we always work on it together.” By the end of the school year, I not
only passed, I was at the head of the class. My mother recognized that this
woman bought into both the “pathology” of Black family structures para-
digm that sociologists and analysts like Daniel Patrick Moynihan pre-
sented as the explanation for the lack of African American progress, and
that, as “pickaninies,” Black children were not nurtured and protected by
their parents.2 In her refusal to accept objectification and failure, my
mother represented Black women’s tradition of “testifying” to experience
as resistance to injustice.
Linguist Geneva Smitherman defines “testifying” as telling “the truth
through ‘story’. . . . The content of testifying, then, is not plain and simple
commentary but a dramatic narration and communal reenactment of one’s
feelings and experiences. Thus one’s humanity is reaffirmed by the group
and his or her sense of isolation is diminished” (151). Testifying as a
method of resistance to objectification and injustice takes many forms.
Whether through song, oral or written storytelling, or naming, testifying
challenges racist assumptions and provides examples others can identify
with and emulate. This resistance is subversive and empowering but dis-
missed, unrealized, and unappreciated by the dominant culture. African
Americans face this dismissal in ordinary daily experiences, which are
sources of pain and humiliation. For example, as a college freshman I had
a white male professor who began every class on the first day by calling roll.
When he called every white person’s name, he would comment on the eth-
nic heritage that their surname indicated. He would say, “Kalinski, that’s
Polish right? I love Polish foods.” Yet when he got to a Black person, he sim-
ply called our names and never made any comments. I perceived that he
clearly assumed one or more of the following: our names did not have
value; our surnames were adopted from former slave masters; we either did
not know our history or did not have a history to be proud of; and we had
no cultural features of interest to him. This incident enraged me, but I felt
powerless to act or respond in an effective manner. I wanted to testify that
my first name is the same as my mother’s and grandmother’s and I consider
it a treasure. I view my name as a family heirloom that embodies the love,
strength, perseverance, and courage my foremothers displayed in the face of
adversity. Unfortunately, this testimonial probably would have been met
with derision. As a student, my feeling of powerlessness was understand-
able. However, that feeling of discomfort has now driven me to put myself
xii PREFACE

in a position to disseminate African African culture and help Black stu-

dents feel powerful, armed with the knowledge and relevance of African
American culture.
The tradition of testifying reveals resistance to structures of domina-
tion that permeate our lives and how these structures impact people of
color. At the same time, testifying presents a paradigmatic critical theory
that is relevant to all struggles for social justice. According to Collins in
“Black Feminism at the Crossroads,” three essential questions should be
raised to assess the cogency of any theoretical approach to fighting oppres-
sion. Collins calls these “questions of epistemology”: “Does this critical so-
cial theory speak the truth to people about the reality of their lives? Does
this critical social theory equip people to resist oppression? Does this crit-
ical social theory move people to struggle?” When we apply these ques-
tions to the theory manifested in Black women’s resistant testimonials of
experience, all answers are affirmative. I call oral manifestations of this the-
ory Black feminist orality. Because this orality is grounded in African
American cultural practices, and specifically in testifying, and resistance to
domination, it is political in nature and life affirming in substance.
While awareness of the hegemonic culture’s representations and ide-
ology is essential to cultural criticism, I am interested in oral resistance to
these representations and the marginalization proscribed by mainstream
white society. Although I initially found evidence of resistance in texts
written by African American women, I became increasingly intrigued by
resistance strategies demonstrated in African American oral traditions
and, specifically, the features of orality in written and oral narratives. In
contrast to the valorization of literacy by white culture, oral traditions ex-
pressed in oral history, signifying, storytelling, sermons, and Blues, even
when these take written forms, exemplify African American culture’s
unique and oppositional nature. This is not to say that African American
culture does not value literacy, for historically the quest for literacy has
been of primary concern to us. Yet through Black feminist orality, African
American culture not only exhibits its connection to African cultures, it
also presents an alternative worldview that places African Americans at the
center of narratives and values Black subjectivity. My grandmother illus-
trated Black feminist orality when she recounted past and present events
in various family members’ lives during her annual visits. Through these
stories, I became closely acquainted with distant relatives I had never met
 PREFACE xiii

(or were dead, and thus, would never meet) but whose experiences inform
my life. For instance, she told of a California cousin who gained economic
stability and owned oil wells in Texas. My mother related her childhood
memories of this same cousin’s generosity and affection toward her and
her siblings. From these narratives, I learned that economic deprivation
was not an inevitable condition of Black experience, and therefore, my
life’s possibilities increased. Due to my parents’ divorce and the early death
of my maternal grandfather, my foremothers necessarily became the pur-
veyors of family history. I recognize and appreciate my foremothers’ effort
to sustain family ties within a world that forces separation and negation of
Black families. Black feminist orality manifests both affirmation of African
American life and resistance to oppression with alternative and opposi-
tional images of Black subjectivity.
I hope my study of orality will reveal instances of bell hooks’s concept
of radical Black subjectivity. Self-definition and commitment to sustaining,
affirming, and liberating people from political and social marginalization
are characteristics of radical Black subjects. This project explores Black fem-
inist orality found in narratives of slavery, both fictional and nonfictional,
that contribute to the formation of radical Black subjects. Ultimately, I
want to understand and establish the influence of African American oral
traditions on choices made and actions taken (or what hooks terms “habits
of being”) by individuals who exhibit radical Black subjectivity and the de-
pictions of this influence in history, literature, film, and popular culture.
Hooks defines a radical Black subject as an individual who holds “an op-
positional worldview, a consciousness, an identity, a standpoint that exists
not only as that struggle which also opposes dehumanization but as that
movement which enables creative, expansive self-actualization” (“Politics”
15). Representations that portray the effect of orality on radical Black sub-
jects may reinforce the importance of African American oral traditions as
resistance to oppression and Black subjectivity. Contrary to the controlling
images presented by white culture that have been a source of pain in my
life—and many Black women’s lives—representations that are self-actualized,
self-determined, oppositional, and engaged in Black liberation promote
healing, understanding, and commitment to the struggle for both political
and social rights for all individuals.
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 Acknowledgments

This book would not have come to fruition without much support and
encouragement. I want to thank the University of Memphis for awarding
me the Early Career Minority Research Grant to complete the research
for this project. A very special thanks to Michelle Banks for recognizing
and addressing my needs. To P. Gabrielle Foreman for your unfailing en-
couragement and insightful comments; you know my appreciation knows
no bounds. Jacqueline Brown at Wilberforce University’s Archives and
Special Collections Rembert E. Stokes Learning Resource Center con-
tributed valuable archival information. I am grateful to the editors at
State University of New York Press, James Peltz, Katy Leonard, and Kelli
M. Williams, for their patience and consideration.
My colleagues, Verner D. Mitchell and Ladrica Menson-Furr, read
numerous versions of the manuscript and always provided thoughtful
feedback. Thank you Mitch and Drica, you are a major reason why I
stayed put. Ernestine Jenkins was immensely helpful by opening her
library of artwork to me. Research assistants, Melanie Jackson and Anna
Esquivel helped my life run smoother when things were bumpy. I am
very thankful to my cousin, Carolyn Grant, who drove me around
Cincinnati, to Wilberforce University, and sat right beside me while I
struggled through research on Louisa Picquet. Carolyn, when the world
felt like a rollercoaster, you held my hand. I cannot show enough grati-
tude to Brenda Deener. Without your support my work and my life
would not be nearly so fulfilling. Thank you Candis Morris, Raymond
Black, and Jürgen Grandt for offering intellectual stimulation and laugh-
ter to keep me sane.

xv
xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My family—parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and a whole host of

cousins—were a constant fount of encouragement. I am profoundly grate-
ful to my grandmother, Doveanna R. Watkins, for giving me faith and
teaching me to listen for history. My father, William Fulton, consistently
expressed interest in my work. Thank you Daddy for believing I could. To
my son, Israel Jeremiah, you were the inspiration to complete this project.
Most especially to my mother, Doveanna R. Garner. You came when I
asked and stayed when I asked for more.
 I N T R O D U C T I O N

“So my mother told me”

African American Women’s
Writing and Oral Traditions
/

Learn it to the younguns.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’

on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me.”
—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

I begin this introduction with these epigraphs because they represent two
of the many reasons African Americans use oral traditions to pass on his-
tory. Ellison’s “Learn it to the younguns” —the dying words of a former
slave in his novel Invisible Man—reflects the need to teach and know his-
tory, particularly family history in a hegemonic society that would like to
exclude African presence. The passage from Hurston speaks both to oral
traditions surviving from African cultures and the institutionalized illiter-
acy of slaves. The fact that Nanny wanted to preach a sermon—rather than
write a book—about Black women’s accomplishments reflects a tradition
of speaking history derived in part from the tradition of the African griot
and from antiliteracy and pro-Christian slave policy. However, the lack of
a pulpit indicates both the absence of publicly sanctioned space and lim-
ited methods available for Black women to relate their history. Despite the
monumental efforts of abolitionists in the nineteenth century, generally

1
2 SPEAKING POWER

the public sphere prevented women and African Americans—in particular,

African American women—from telling their stories, while the illiteracy of
all but a small though important group of fortunate or elite Blacks pre-
cluded writing history, even in the private forms of letters and diaries used
by white women.1 Thus, African American family histories were related
through various forms of oral traditions that emerge from syncretic cul-
tural productions and practices of African legacies within the American
historical context.2 Art historian Babatunde Lawal finds that this syn-
cretization is a result of two forms of memory—habitual and collective—
held by Africans transported to America (43). Through habitual memory—
behaviors or skills obtained through convention or repetition—and collec-
tive memory—knowledge acquired through education and historical con-
sciousness—Africans in America, and then African Americans, propagated
the tradition of passing on history orally. In the hands of African Ameri-
can women writers, this cultural tradition became the foundation of a lit-
erary tradition.
This project explores different forms of oral traditions in African
American women’s oral and written narratives of slavery that I call “Black
feminist orality.” In short Black feminist orality is a form of empowerment
using vocal and oral means and is the foundation of a literary tradition of
African American women’s writing that is the progeny of a cultural tradi-
tion of verbally articulating the self and experience. This tradition comes
out of the nexus of African American cultural practices and oppressions
experienced through race, gender, and class dynamics. The following chap-
ters demarcate the tradition of orality through a variety of Black women’s
texts, including the oral narratives of ex-slaves Sojourner Truth, Louisa Pic-
quet, Sylvia Dubois, and Mattie J. Jackson. Alongside these oral narratives
are analyses of written narratives produced by African American women—
Harriet A. Jacobs and Harriet E. Wilson—who detail their personal expe-
riences in bondage.3 From narratives of personal experience, the text
moves to African American women’s imaginative formations of experi-
ences during slavery with a focus on the strategies of orality in those texts.
Since the nineteenth century, Black women novelists have frequently re-
turned to the historical period of American slavery to represent African
American experiences, beginning with turn-of-the-century novels by
Frances E. W. Harper (Iola Leroy) and Pauline Hopkins (Contending Forces)
and moving through the twentieth century with Zora Neale Hurston’s
 INTRODUCTION 3

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Sherley Anne
Williams’s Dessa Rose, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved,
and, finally, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories.

BLACK FEMINIST ORALITY AS A

CULTURAL TRADITION

Through African American women’s oral formations of experiences

during slavery, expressed in mediums both spoken and written, I identify
constructions of the past that are useful (or what I call “usable pasts”) for
the storyteller/author to negotiate, validate, or simply to understand
their present and effect self-representation. Focusing on a wide range of
texts across historical periods (from 1850 to 1988) and genres, this book
demonstrates how African American women have consistently employed
African American oral traditions—embedded within lived or imagined ex-
periences—to relate not only the pain, degradation, and oppression of
slavery, but also to celebrate the subversions, struggles, and triumphs of
Black experience in the midst of slavery and afterward.
I highlight the significance of family history in this study because
passing on family history orally is a form of historiography that resists the
dominant culture’s efforts to negate African American identity. Although
I recognize that in some ways both men and women carry and pass on his-
tory, this project focuses on forms specific to African American women
and their discursive practices in relating personal and family histories be-
cause they, especially grandmothers, are often the gatekeepers of African
American families. Because of Black men’s absence from Black house-
holds due to their high mortality rates and large scale unemployment and
incarceration rates, historically Black women have struggled to maintain
the integrity of Black families.4 In our efforts to combat the disruption
of our families by social, economic, and political forces, African Ameri-
can women “re-member” families through oral traditions.5
This need to recall family and personal histories because of family
disruption began with African enslavement. In her essay “Mama’s Baby,
Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers claims
that because slaves were routinely sold and separated, “kinship loses mean-
ing since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the prop-
erty relations” (74). Spillers asserts that even though slaves “followed the
4 SPEAKING POWER

condition” of their mothers, female slaves could not claim their children
because property relations superseded familial relations. Niara Sudarkasa’s
essay “Interpreting the African Heritage in Afro-American Family Organi-
zation,” however, examines African American family structure and illus-
trates that rather than eradicating kinship ties, slavery necessitated that
African Americans modify preslavery African family organization so that
the foundational values and beliefs on which family consciousness were
based remained in spite of the forced change in family structure. Sudar-
kasa states that “it is possible to argue that even though the constraints of
slavery prohibit the replication of African lineage (‘clan’) and family life in
America, the principles on which these kin groups were based, and the val-
ues underlying them, led to the emergence of variants of African family
life in the form of extended families which developed among the enslaved
Blacks in America” (29). Thus while Spillers’s argument is compelling and
supported in theory by slave laws, I submit that in practice slave women ex-
hibited more agency than Spillers allows by actively resisting the forced
separation of their families and inscribing kinship through oral traditions.
Indeed, Sojourner Truth is just one example of a woman who used
oral expression to recall her disrupted family and illustrate how slavery
could physically rupture the family unit but not eradicate the memories
and affections that bind them. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth illustrates
a nonliterate ex-slave woman’s use of oral traditions to affect agency and
autonomy. Truth’s Narrative is an as-told-to narrative published in 1850.
Although Truth did not write her Narrative, the oral traditions she
learned as a child from her parents clearly inform the oral discourse she
employed as an adult that authorized both her life and her Narrative. As
a child Truth listened to her parents’ stories of the escapades of her older
brother and sister who were sold away when Truth was an infant.6 In the
chapter of the Narrative titled “Her Brothers and Sisters,” Truth relates
how her parents perpetuated the memories of her siblings through oral
history. Truth’s interviewer, Olive Gilbert, writes,

Of the two that immediately preceded her in age, a boy of five years,
and a girl of three, who were sold when she was an infant, [Truth]
heard much; and she wishes that all . . . could have listened as she
did, while Bomefree and Mau-Mau Bett . . . would sit for hours, re-
calling and recounting every endearing, as well as harrowing cir-
 INTRODUCTION 5

cumstance that taxed memory could supply, from the histories of

the dear departed ones. (Gilbert 5)

Such storytelling not only demonstrates African American oral traditions

in practice, but establishes the foundation of one of Truth’s rhetorical
acts of resistance. Margaret Washington points out in her introduction to
the Narrative of Sojourner Truth that Truth named at least four of her chil-
dren after her parents and siblings, illustrating how through oral tradi-
tions Truth recreated her family and expressed their identities. To extend
Washington’s assessment, it is possible to argue that, in contrast to theo-
ries suggesting the obliteration of identity through forced separation dur-
ing slavery, Truth’s naming practices represent an oral resistance to the
physical destruction of familial relationships caused by slavery.7 Lawal sug-
gests that “since the process of recollecting also involves reconstructing,
and vice versa, memory is a form of history and history a form of mem-
ory. Being a recollection or interpretation of the past, memory not only
facilitates the transfer of cultural property from one geographical space to
another, it is also a catalyst in the construction and negotiation of new
identities” (43). By naming her children in this manner, Truth recon-
structs history and facilitates her children’s identity constructions. While
naming has been viewed as a writing practice in that writing one’s name
on documentation sanctions and makes the name—and by extension, the
individual—official, naming is also an oral practice that recalls the pres-
ence and existence of the individual every time the name is voiced.8 This
oral tradition parallels the practice of calling the names of ancestors for
the purpose of remembering and connecting with those on the other side
of the circle of life during African libation ceremonies.9 Though I recog-
nize that many European cultures also hold the practice of naming chil-
dren for parents or other relatives, the Black historical experience of
forced separation of families differentiates this naming practice for Black
communities. Thus, while the purpose for this practice, that is, remem-
bering absent kinfolk, may be similar, the need for this practice differs
from other cultures.
As part of a larger study, I am particularly interested in how and why
histories are passed from mother to daughter to granddaughter. For in-
stance, I know that mothers orally pass on family history to their daugh-
ters through recipes or over kitchen tables while preparing food. Paule
6 SPEAKING POWER

Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones illustrates the powerful effect on a

daughter who not only learns of her mother’s past in this manner, but
learns from her mother that “in this white-man world you got to take yuh
mouth and make a gun” (70). Additionally, daughters and granddaugh-
ters receive oral history “lessons” between the knees of our mothers and
grandmothers while we are getting our hair dressed or braided. Through
the long, and often tedious, hours spent braiding hair, Black women re-
late experiences that daughters later use to inform their life choices and
define themselves. However, this book is limited to two important com-
ponents: one, identifying forms of passing on family and personal history
orally found in Black women’s narratives of slavery that subvert oppres-
sion, assert agency, and create representations of the past that counter the
master narrative of both American slavery and culture; and two, recog-
nizing the use of oral traditions to relate Black women’s experiences as
the foundation of a literary tradition that looks to African American
experiences and communities to define Black women’s identities.
This work focuses on narratives of slavery because not only is slavery
“the historic national sin that no holy water will ever wash away,” but it is
a particular historical epoch that crystallized Black women’s experiences
of oppression and continues to inform Black identities and experience.10
Moreover, that Black women writers repeatedly return to this historical
period to explore African American subjectivity indicates the powerful
impact of the abuses experienced during slavery to determine African
American lives. The life choices and activism of Black women under the
political economy of slavery represent the strength and development of
self in the most extremely oppressive conditions. African American
women’s imaginative writings regarding slavery reveal experiences and de-
tails many ex-slave women were unable or reluctant to discuss. In her
essay “The Site of Memory,” writer Toni Morrison describes the unspo-
ken details of the pain and degradation of slavery as the “memories
within” slave narratives. She observes, “These ‘memories within’ are the
subsoil of my work. But memories and recollection won’t give me total ac-
cess to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the
imagination can help me” (302). Oral traditions constitute one tool of
the imagination Black women writers use. Reconfiguring or constructing
the past in contexts that recognize and make use of oral traditions per-
mits narrators and writers to control representations of Black women and
 INTRODUCTION 7

their experiences that writings unconnected to these traditions do not.

Oral traditions amplify and expand written narratives. In her discussion
of oral traditions and narratives in African novels, Eileen Julien speaks to
this amplification of written texts. She asserts, “We have come to recog-
nize that speech and oral traditions cannot be grasped adequately from
paper representations. Thus it is not simply a matter of ‘collecting stories’
but, ideally, of understanding performances as do their participants” (27).
Similarly, the oral aspects of Black women’s narratives of slavery demand
readers’ attention to the texts as performance narratives that more com-
pletely convey experiences in slavery than print-language descriptions un-
informed by these aspects are able to do.
Although I choose to focus on narratives relating to slavery, African
American women’s narratives on a variety of subjects demonstrate a tra-
dition of passing on family histories through various forms of oral dis-
course that emerge from a combination of cultural productions and
practices of African communities and African American experiences of
race, class, and gender injustice. This practice is then demonstrated in
written texts in which the author combines the oral and written to pro-
duce literature in which race and gender (and often class and sexuality)
inform narratives so that readers simultaneously read and hear the
“sounds of Blackness.” For instance, without centering on slave experi-
ences, Paule Marshall’s novels Brown Girl, Brownstones and Praisesong for
the Widow depict protagonists who hear and recall the oral narratives
transmitted by their foremothers. These women then define themselves
and exhibit agency vis-à-vis these oral histories.
My work follows in the wake of an increasing body of scholarship
on and by Black women writers resulting from the relatively recent ac-
knowledgment of cultural diversity by the academy. Since the 1980s,
African American women’s writing has become an area of study in liter-
ary criticism. The growth of Black and women’s studies programs in uni-
versities in the 1970s—and critiques from Black feminists when these
programs failed to address African American women’s issues—in large
part contributed to the academy’s interest in Black women’s literature.
Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition,
1892–1976 (1980) was the first book-length study of Black women’s writ-
ing by a Black feminist critic. Although innovative for its time because it
validates Black women’s writing as a subject for scholarly inquiry and
8 SPEAKING POWER

identifies a specific tradition that African American women writers prac-

tice, Christian’s text largely examines the works as refutations of popular
stereotyped images of African Americans. My project extends Christian’s
work by demonstrating that Black women resisted oppression and devel-
oped identities not only in opposition to stereotyped images, but in
acknowledgment of the oral traditions of African American culture that
reflected fundamental aspects of their community.
Subsequent studies of African American women’s writing have fur-
thered Christian’s work by considering the dominant culture Black
women write within and against. Hazel V. Carby’s Reconstructing Woman-
hood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987), historically
contextualizes authors and their texts and employs Black feminist liter-
ary theories to produce a “cultural history and critique of the forms in
which [B]lack women intellectuals made political as well as literary inter-
ventions in the social formations in which they lived” (7). Carby’s work
is an example of cultural studies scholarship on Black women’s literature
that focuses on the production of Westernized cultural forms without
concentrating on the unique aspects of African American culture writers
incorporate into texts to make them distinctly their own. Similarly,
Frances Smith Foster’s Written by Herself: Literary Production by African
American Women, 1746–1892 (1993) demonstrates eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century African American women writers’ use and modification of
accepted literary conventions, but fails to identify African American cul-
tural forms that mark the writing as different from writings by whites.
Like Carby and Foster, I examine Black women’s writing to understand
the pertinent issues that concern them and how the authors choose to de-
pict characters’ circumstances. Unlike Carby and Foster, I emphasize the
importance of oral traditions as determinate in texts that reflect African
American culture and affirm Black subjectivity in an environment in
which it is negated and dehumanized.
This work also differs from previous studies of slave narratives on
several other counts. First, this book does not privilege one narrative or
narrative construction over any other. Both Marion Wilson Starling’s The
Slave Narrative and the collection of essays The Slave’s Narrative edited by
Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. value written narratives over
oral works and position Frederick Douglass’s 1845 text Narrative in the
Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave as the paradigmatic slave nar-
 INTRODUCTION 9

rative. This scholarship has created a hierarchy within the study of slave
narratives that has excluded many oral narratives from analyses as African
American “writing.” Although in the introduction to The Slave’s Narrative
Davis and Gates, Jr. contend that the “slave narrative represents the at-
tempts of Blacks to write themselves into being” (xxiii), oral traditions in
slave narratives demonstrate the power of the voice to substantiate iden-
tity and subjectivity.
As a study of African American ex-slave women’s narratives, this
book deviates from past scholarship on slave women because of the focus
on analysis of oral traditions found in oral and written narratives and the
broad period and multiple genres covered. Using oral and written slave
narratives, Dorothy Sterling’s We Are Your Sisters presents a history of
nineteenth-century Black women as a means of “hear[ing] the genuine
voices of slave women” (4). Yet what Sterling overlooks in both the oral
and written texts are the oral traditions through which slave women de-
fine themselves and resist oppression. Carla Peterson’s Doers of the Word
recognizes the “cultural hybridity” produced by nineteenth-century
African American writers’ adaptations of Africanist practices and tradi-
tions and adoptions of Euro-American literary forms to “dislocate [the
dominant discourse] from their privileged position of authority and
adapt them to the local place” (14).11 Unfortunately, the text focuses on
Black women’s oratory, largely to the exclusion of slave narratives. Finally,
no study examines narratives of slavery over a length of time and in mul-
tiple genres. My project recognizes continuity between oral narratives,
such as Dr. L. S. Thompson’s The Story of Mattie J. Jackson; written slave
narratives, such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and
imaginative narratives of slavery such as Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. This
study differs from previous works in its analysis of both nonfictional and
fictional narratives to show continuity in Black women’s practice of rely-
ing on African American culture and communities to determine and
inform identities.

BLACK FEMINIST ORALITY AS LITERARY TRADITION

While Black women writers’ use of oral traditions has not gone un-
noticed by critics of African American literature, scholars have not iden-
tified the use of African American oral traditions as central to defining
10 SPEAKING POWER

Black women’s identities or across a spectrum of African American

women’s writing as a literary tradition. For instance, Gates recognizes the
oral features of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple as “speakerly text[s]” that explicitly work to
represent African American speech. According to Gates, “It is the text’s
imitation of these examples of traditionally [B]lack rhetorical rituals and
modes of storytelling that allows us to think of it as a speakerly text. For
in a speakerly text certain rhetorical structures seem to exist primarily as
representations of oral narration, rather than as integral aspects of plot or
character development” (The Signifying Monkey 194). Gates’s assertion falls
short of full consideration of Hurston’s uses of oral discourse. Aside from
the aural structures Hurston’s text presents, one of the central themes of
the text is Janie Crawford’s self-definition in response to the oral history
of Nanny, her grandmother. This work is framed with theories posited by
Black feminist critics. Black feminist criticism recognizes the “multiple
jeopardy, multiple consciousness” of African American women because
of race, gender, and class oppression and speaks directly to these posi-
tionalities in ways other critical theories often overlook.12 Furthermore—
despite Houston Baker’s claim that Black women do not do
theory—Black feminist scholars theorize discursively in a manner that ap-
plies easily to African American texts.13 According to Carole Boyce
Davies, “The understanding of ‘theory’ as ‘frames (or modes) of intelligi-
bility’ through which we see and interpret the world or as ‘discursive ways
of making sense of structures of values and belief which circulate in any
given culture’ and not as reified discourse for the privileged few offers
ways of breaking through the binary ‘theory or no theory’” (41). Black
feminist critics use language that disrupts the distinction between acade-
mic writing and African American discourse but is still insightful and en-
visages new understandings. Black feminist critics such as Barbara
Christian realize that “people of color have always theorized—but in forms
quite different from the Western form of abstract logic . . . often in nar-
rative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play
with language” (68). In an effort to disrupt the academic writing/African
American discourse distinction, throughout this chapter I often use
“our” and “we” pronouns when referring to African American women to
reflect my subject position in connection with the texts and my analysis.
A Black feminist epistemological standpoint creates a space wherein
 INTRODUCTION 11

the ideas and experiences of Black women are “at the center of analysis
[to produce] a new angle of vision on feminist and African American con-
cerns, one fused with an Afrocentric feminist sensibility” (Collins, Black
Feminist Thought 16). This angle of vision constitutes an epistemology that
emerges from both Black women’s experiences of racial, gender, and class
oppression and from a culture developed in opposition to these oppres-
sions. African American women’s narratives often express this standpoint
by incorporating African and African American modes of cultural pro-
duction, centering on issues that oppose dehumanization and define and
affirm Black subjectivity.
Scholars such as Ann duCille have criticized Black feminist theory
as a “self-limiting discourse” that tends to privilege a single historical ex-
perience of Black Americans without considering the “multiple, complex,
and often contradictory” ways in which race, gender, and class influence
African American cultural productions.14 While valorizing a single (or
any) experience as the Black experience limits and excludes the multiplic-
itous effects of race, sex, and class constructs that produce the polyvalence
of African American culture, Black feminist criticism has the potential
to incorporate a profusion of experiences known by African Americans
that aid in our production and understanding of history, art, literature,
politics, and so forth. This potential is unprecedented in that many other
critical theories, Marxism and mainstream feminism for example, simply
cannot or do not readily accommodate analysis of the complex manner in
which race, gender, class, and sexual positionalities affect oppression.
DuCille’s question “Can a critical practice claim any [B]lack experi-
ence without privileging it as the [B]lack experience, without valorizing it
as the master narrative of the race?” assumes that Black feminist criticism
narrowly defines “Blackness” within a set of predetermined circum-
stances (6). Keeping in mind that no single defining set of governing fac-
tors marks Black experience, issues of race, sex, and class “always already”
inform our experiences, producing varied responses that actuate multi-
plicitous African American cultural productions.15 It is this always already
aspect of our experiences that generates Black feminist theory.
Along with its multiplicitous nature, the most valuable tenets of Black
feminist criticism are its rejection of hierarchical dichotomies and recogni-
tion of a both/and worldview that allows the simultaneous existence of the-
ory and practice. This worldview, not exclusive to Black feminist criticism,
12 SPEAKING POWER

is an essential element of African American culture. Discussing the slave

poetry of Elma Stuckey, Miriam DeCosta-Willis maintains, “The blues aes-
thetic expresses an ironic worldview and an ambiguous philosophy of life;
it manifests an attitude toward life not found in either/or binarisms but in
a both/and acceptance of reality” (395). Because this philosophy is derived
from lived experience, a praxis is developed in which the historical experi-
ence of Blacks in America informs theoretical concepts of life and identity
construction. These aspects inform my approach to understanding African
American women’s lives and writings.
The connection of experience to theory parallels the correlation of
speech to language found in oral traditions in African and African Amer-
ican cultures. Indeed, the African American oral practice of “signifying”—
which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes in The Signifying Monkey—that
directly relates the meaning of a word to the act of speech is an African
survival promoting resistance to domination by white society. Similarly,
Cynthia Ward insists on the fluctuating meanings and nonfixedness of
African languages. According to Ward, when analyzing texts by authors
who write out of oral cultures, scholars must listen/read for reflections of
oral traditions in order to understand these texts. She observes, “This
hearing does not privilege textuality; it does not keep the marginal in
their marginally defined place, furiously but marginally appropriating
and reinscribing the words of the authorities. Neither does this hearing
seek to construct from the text a unified meaning; rather, it is attentive to
the text’s refusal to mean” (108–109). Ward’s assertion demonstrates
Black feminist criticism’s emphasis on the oppositional nature of writing
by Black women, an opposition found in the oral culture inscribed in
texts that disrupt traditional Western writing characteristics.
Instead of reifying concepts or worldviews that privilege Western be-
liefs and values of literacy, linearity, and “logic,” oral discourse, and what
I more specifically term “orality,” in texts by African Americans illustrates
an alternative epistemology that affirms Black subjectivity without re-
stricting identity. I broadly define oral discourse as an interchange of
ideas, thoughts, and actions that can be as simple as an orally transmitted
narrative or as complex as incorporating African American Blues music
into a written text. In her book African Novels and the Question of Orality,
Eileen Julien recognizes multiple definitions of orality. She cites critics
who believe that “the oral nature of African novels refers to the represen-
 INTRODUCTION 13

tation of everyday conversation, or the inclusion of proverbs, tales, rid-

dles, praises, and other oral genres” (26). According to Julien, some schol-
ars identify orality as the “narrative form, the adaptation of principles of
oral narrative genres” (26), and other critics find that orality is “a formal
device that manifests a cultural privileging of rapport between addressor
and addressee” (27). While all of these definitions have merit, I identify
orality as a speech act that resists or subverts oppression, and controls rep-
resentations, thereby substantiating subjectivity.16 This definition ex-
pands Harryette Mullen’s term “resistant orality” by recognizing both the
oppositional and confrontation element and the ability to define identity
and authorize representations. The major distinction between oral dis-
course and orality is the political nature of orality found not only in re-
sistance to domination and dehumanization, but in its validation of
African American culture and communities as significant to the develop-
ment of self-determined, self-defined subjects.
On one level, Black feminist orality can be understood as related to
the African American women’s tradition of “sass” in which one responds
with independence, knowing, and force to an individual in authority.17
On another level, Black feminist orality is a more abstract notion with fea-
tures of circularity and multiplicity that counter the hegemony of writing
in Western cultures. The very nature of orality diverges from Western fa-
vored concepts: it emphasizes oral rather than written forms; it stresses
cyclical over linear structure through retelling; and retelling also allows
modification, which contrasts with the singular “logic” written texts often
present. While Black feminist orality does not privilege Western ideology,
it is not exclusively based on African concepts. In fact, orality in African
American texts displays a complex fusion of linguistic and literary tech-
niques from African and Western cultures to produce discourse that ex-
presses Black Americans’ unique positionalities in a cultural milieu in
which we are generally dominated socially, politically, and economically.
In this use of orality, Black women negotiate the challenges marginalized
people experience. Mae Henderson calls this negotiation “speaking in
tongues” and declares that Black women writers “enter simultaneously
into familial, or testimonial and public, or competitive discourses—
discourses that both affirm and challenge the values and expectations of
the reader” (20). Consequently, writings by African American women
that use Black feminist orality substantiate African American culture,
14 SPEAKING POWER

identity, and values even as they are informed and contextualized by or

refer to the larger American culture, and so are not as alienating to read-
ers as many texts written by white male Americans often are.18
In focusing on African American women’s oral traditions, I mean to
illustrate the fluid relationship between the written and oral in Black
women’s narratives. In the introduction to her book Narrating Our Pasts,
Elizabeth Tonkin points to the interconnections of literacy and what she
terms “oracy” in communities with strong oral traditions.19 She shows
that to make a distinction between them is exceedingly complicated. In
fact, Tonkin points out the difficulty of even defining literacy and what
determines literate from nonliterate individuals. She insists, “The com-
plexity of what we can mean when we talk of literacy is matched by the
complexity of orality, and so, although one can argue that literacy’s entry
into the world altered the dimensions of human consciousness, I do not
accept all the claims made for literacy as in itself causing cognitive
change” (14). I view the oral traditions found in African American
women’s narratives, written or verbally communicated, as part of a whole
system of communication that has its genesis in West African cultures
(from which our ancestors were stolen) compounded by their transplan-
tation to the “literate” American society.20
This belief confronts the mutually exclusive distinctions of oral and
written cultures theorist Walter Ong describes in his book Orality and Lit-
eracy. While Ong’s sharp polarities between literate and oral cultural char-
acteristics help identify various aspects of communication, like Tonkin, I
disagree with the argument that literacy produces a profound cognitive
change. The dichotomies Ong posits reflect the either/or construction of
Eurocentric masculinist thought. Patricia Hill Collins maintains, “This
emphasis on quantification and categorization occurs in conjunction
with the belief that either/or categories must be ranked. The search for
certainty of this sort requires that one side of a dichotomy be privileged
while its other is denigrated. Privilege becomes defined in relation to its
other” (Black Feminist Thought 225). In contrast to Ong’s either/or con-
struction, I claim African American women’s narratives demonstrate a
both/and conceptual status. For instance, Ong asserts oral cultures have
an empathetic and participatory way of knowing rather than the dis-
tanced objectivity found in literate cultures. The oral narrative of Louisa
Picquet, which I examine in chapter 1, is just one example of an African
 INTRODUCTION 15

American woman’s narrative that refutes Ong’s categorization by exhibit-

ing both empathy and distanced objectivity in relating her experiences.
In addition to the obvious significance in orally related narratives,
orality is also found in the written texts of ex-slave women. In Written By
Herself, Frances Smith Foster examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury African American women writers’ alterations of Euro-American lit-
erary traditions. She maintains, “They appropriated the English literary
tradition to reveal, to interpret, to challenge, and to change perceptions
of themselves and the world in which they found themselves” (16). Ex-
panding Foster’s argument, I contend one modification of the English lit-
erary tradition was the incorporation of oral traditions and the use of
orality within the literary text. For example, in Harriet Jacobs’s narrative,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs’s literacy does not discount the
power of orality. Jacobs utilizes the tradition of oral history, transmitted
by the grandmother, juxtaposed with the conventions of the sentimental
novel to construct characters that represent the particularities of Black
slave women’s experiences.
Jacobs’s written narrative use of orality is not unique among slave
narratives. In his 1845 narrative, Frederick Douglass describes instances
in which slaves were punished by whites for telling the truth. He reveals
the slave philosophy, “that a still tongue makes a wise head” (62). Yet
among themselves, slaves regularly expressed resentment and resistance.
In her collection of poems The Big Gate, Elma Stuckey presents poems
created from stories she heard as a child from ex-slaves. Stuckey’s poetry
depicts the militancy and opposition to slavery and slaveholders found in
oral traditions passed among slaves. In his analysis of Stuckey’s work,
David Roediger maintains, “In the tales they tell each other, the slaves re-
veal a Fanonesque willingness to contemplate revolutionary violence as a
cathartic agent and as an equalizer of master and slave” (691). While
slaves were forced to suppress their opposition, Jacobs’s narrative demon-
strates the use of oral traditions to address the racial dynamics inherent
in texts by Black authors addressed to white audiences.

THE MATRIX OF BLACK FEMINIST ORALITY

The oral traditions exhibited in African American women’s narratives

demonstrate a combination of theory and practice commonly identified in
16 SPEAKING POWER

Black women’s work. In fact, Elsa Barkley Brown affirms that Black
women’s theory and practice “are not distinct and separable parts of some
whole; they are often synonymous, and it is only through her actions that
we clearly hear her theory” (218). The manipulation of oral history in order
to represent oppression, subjectivity, and kinship is a practice that supports
a Black feminist critical standpoint arising out of the nexus of Black
women’s experience, African and African American cultures, and repre-
sentations of Black womanhood—including controlling images and resis-
tance to those images by depicting Black female subjectivity.21 These
elements combine to produce a theoretical approach to the world that is
clearly delineated in the practice of language and living. Writing about
nineteenth-century Black women’s spiritual autobiographies, scholar Nellie
McKay speaks of Black women’s theory and practice. She declares, “[Nine-
teenth-century Black women] explored the power of words and used them
to express developing thoughts. For those who could read, even in rudi-
mentary ways, language and literacy came together for them in the reflec-
tion that occurs when the oral and written traditions meet and mingle”
(150). Black women writers’ use of oral traditions in written texts collapses
the distinction between “intellectual” and “folk” traditions found by many
scholars.22 Black women’s narratives show that oral histories are not merely
“anecdotal” tales, but are frames through which Black women develop
identities and understand the world. Moreover, the mingling of oral and
written traditions, and theory and practice with those traditions, by African
American women suggests a paradigm shift from either/or dichotomies to
inclusive both/and concepts that delimit our understanding of literature
and history. In this model, Black women are oral and literate, folk and in-
tellectuals, theorists and practitioners. This understanding produces a ma-
trix in which the concepts of oral, written, theory, practice, folk, and
intellectual combine in mutually inclusive ways that oppose Ong’s mutual
exclusivity discussed earlier.
This matrix is also displayed in African American women’s fictional
narratives of slavery. From the first novel written by an African American
woman, Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, to contemporary novels by Toni Mor-
rison and Gayl Jones, the fusion of oral and written discourse to portray
Black women’s experiences is a constant though often unrecognized feature.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, Black women novelists incor-
porated oral discourse in multiple ways to represent fictional slave
 INTRODUCTION 17

women’s experiences. Written in 1859, Wilson’s Our Nig challenges the

tenets of the Cult of True Womanhood by exposing Black women’s abuse
by white mistresses, the supposed members of the Cult of True Woman-
hood, through the protagonist’s orality. In an era in which the leading
white feminist abolitionists such as Angelina Grimké, Lydia Maria Child,
and Abby Kelley Foster used the rape of Black slave women to link
women’s rights issues with antislavery concerns, in its orality Our Nig pre-
sented an aspect of Black women’s experience that revealed intragender
race and class dynamics that many white women exploited and Black
women confronted and resisted.23 Black women novelists writing later in
the century and around the turn of the century represented characters
who held middle-class values concerning work, education, and religion,
but understood how the dynamic of race and gender impacted African
American women. Both Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins
constructed characters who use a combination of voice and strategic si-
lence as opposite sides of the same coin to tell slave women’s experiences.
As I will demonstrate in chapter 3, the silences in these novels—particu-
larly about sexual abuse—speak loudly and become an aspect of orality
that cannot be ignored.
Black women writers not only present characters who express oral-
ity through dialogue, but use oral traditions in the forms of folktales, ser-
mons, or the Blues to demonstrate the combination of rich African
American oral cultural traditions and writing. My discussion of the use
of oral traditions differs from other scholars’ examinations of oral tradi-
tions in texts by African Americans, particularly African American
males. Many critics acknowledge the African American oral traditions
found in works by African American males—for example, Ralph Ellison’s
use of the Blues in Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s representations of
the work songs, toasts, and the “dozens” in his many works. In her land-
mark study of Black English Talkin’ and Testifyin’, linguist Geneva
Smitherman labels Wright the “father of all modern Black American lit-
erature” whose extensive use of Black oral traditions represents the “folk-
oral tradition of the [B]lack masses” (102–103). While Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. identifies intertextuality and the trope of the talking book as
literary techniques that derive from the African American oral tradition
of signifying, I identify the folktales, sermons, and the Blues African
American women writers incorporate into their texts as modes that resist
18 SPEAKING POWER

African American cultural negation and represent Black women’s expe-

rience and identity development in the context of the Black community.
For example, in Invisible Man, Ellison uses the Blues as a form of ex-
pression and Black culture the protagonist accepts only after he has con-
fronted and been rejected by the white world.24 Barbara Christian contends
that many Black male novelists focus on their characters’ identity growth
through confrontation with white society. She writes, “It is through this con-
frontation, buttressed by their often imperfect understanding of their own
communities, that they seek their identity” (Black Women Novelists 241). In
contrast to Ellison, as I show in chapter 4, Gayl Jones uses the Blues as the
vehicle through which the protagonist in Corregidora, Ursa, understands and
delineates the experiences of her foremothers in slavery, and thereby begins
the process of self-definition. In response to her mother’s condemnation of
the Blues, Ursa declares, “[L]et me give witness the only way I can” (54). The-
orizing the Blues as a way of analyzing African American texts, Houston
Baker identifies the Blues as a crossroads that performers use to understand
history, oppression, difference, and multipositionality. “The singer and his
production are always at this intersection,” Baker claims, “this crossing, cod-
ifying force, providing resonance for experience’s multiplicities. Singer and
song never arrest transience—fix it in ‘transcendent form’ . . . blues and its
sundry performers offer interpretations of the experiencing of experience”
(7). Jones’s use of the Blues illustrates the crossroads Ursa occupies as a great-
granddaughter and granddaughter of rape and incest, a sterilized woman,
and someone caught in the anguish of her inability to develop a full love
relationship. Thus, the Blues is not only a manner of relating that history, it
is a way of coming to terms with that history and defining one’s identity in
relation to history.
Black women’s writings such as Jones’s reflect the centrality of oral
traditions in African American women’s lives and experience. This cen-
trality supports my argument that oral discourse leads to an orality
grounded in personal and family history, and that this is, in fact, a liter-
ary tradition that Black women writers have used over time. This literary
tradition celebrates African American subjectivity, history, and culture.
Orality becomes then a celebration that is oppositional to race, gen-
der, and class dominance in American society. In her book Talking Back:
Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks identifies Black women’s
speech as oppositional, self-affirming, and celebratory. She writes, “[S]peak-
 INTRODUCTION 19

ing is not solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance, a

political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us
nameless and voiceless” (8). I view the literary tradition of passing on fam-
ily and personal history orally as resistance to voicelessness. This tradition
is an example of the forces hooks asserts “can be healing, [and] can protect
us from dehumanization and despair” (8). The fact that African American
women change and modify this tradition over time represents the effort to
negotiate the ever-changing but ever-present forces that work to deny Black
subjectivity and disrupt African American families. This negotiation re-
flects historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s notion of “invent-
ing traditions.” Regarding this concept Regina Bendix writes,

Traditions are always defined in the present, and the actors doing
the defining are [concerned with] whether the manifestation will ac-
complish for them what they intend it to accomplish. “Inventing
traditions” is then not an anomaly but rather the rule, and it can be
particularly well studied in industrial and postindustrial nation-
states exposed to extensive intercultural contact. (132)

I intend for this book to illuminate the negotiation of African American

oral traditions by African American women in the face of “intercultural
contact” as well as to celebrate the resistance—expressed by various forms
of orality—inherent in the negotiation.
This page intentionally left blank.
 C H A P T E R 1

Speak Sisters, Speak

Oral Empowerment in LOUISA PICQUET,
THE OCTOROON; THE NARRATIVE OF SOJOURNER TRUTH; and
INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
/

The “I” of oral tradition also seems linked to a concern with a whole
African American personality telling his or her own story and control-
ling the moral perspective of it, the images, the conceptions of value,
the selection of events, the dramatic structure and significant conflicts.
—Gayl Jones, Liberating Voices

American slave owners institutionalized prohibitions against slaves reading

and writing to prevent slaves from challenging their authority, on the
premise that without the ability to read or write slaves could not partici-
pate in legal or public discourses. This premise disregarded or failed to rec-
ognize other forms of literacy, forms that facilitated slave agency,
resistance, and freedom. Oral literacy provided a cogent means for slaves
and ex-slaves to challenge authority and for empowerment both in slavery
and freedom. By 1860 thousands of slave narratives were published.1 Al-
though many narratives were actually written by ex-slaves, many others
were orally dictated to amanuenses and published by the abolitionist press.
In 1845, Frederick Douglass published Narrative of the Life of Freder-
ick Douglass, An American Slave. His narrative is considered the paradig-
matic slave narrative, containing the most famous example we have of a
man who attained freedom through reading and writing literacy. In con-
trast, women’s slave narratives emphasize orality rather than reading and

21
22 SPEAKING POWER

writing as a means to empowerment. The orality, which slave women

demonstrate in their narratives, conveys both their sense of identity and
familial relationships and some of the ways they resisted oppression and
facilitated their freedom.
I begin this chapter by citing Harryette Mullen’s essay “Runaway
Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl, and Beloved,” in which she argues that because Black women
were excluded from the nineteenth-century ideals of the Cult of True
Womanhood—which included values of modesty, decorum, piety, and pu-
rity—they employed orality as a method of resistance to oppression and self-
defense. Black women’s speech, which white society termed impudent and
insolent, was used to resist and expose “the implicit contradictions of the
sex-gender system which render her paradoxically both vulnerable and
threatening” (Mullen 246). Extending Mullen’s argument, I posit that, un-
like Frederick Douglass’s emphasis on freedom through literacy and man-
hood, women’s slave narratives illustrate freedom through orality, which,
according to the ideological constructions of American nineteenth-century
society, was most viable for slave women. Moreover, Frances Foster’s essay
“‘In Respect to Females . . .’: Differences in the Portrayals of Women by
Male and Female Narrators” proves that—contrary to the passive victims de-
picted by male slave narrators—female ex-slave narrators portrayed strong
courageous females enmeshed in supportive familial relations. Recognizing
Mullen’s resistant orality in conjunction with Foster’s observation, it is
clear that although literate women ex-slave narrators could direct the con-
tent and form of their narratives, both literate and nonliterate freedwomen
employed verbal communication and Black feminist orality to exert autho-
rial control within a discourse that would normally exclude them.2 The oral
resistance demonstrated in ex-slave women’s narratives constitutes a form
of rhetoric, or to use Mullen’s term, a rhetoric of “resistant orality” that dis-
plays subjectivity, power, and purpose. This rhetoric has a dual function:
to control experience and to control the representation of experience.

STRUCTURAL SUBVERSION AND

BLACK FEMINIST ORALITY

Although Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon, and the Narrative of Sojourner

Truth were recorded by amanuenses and are structured differently, the
 SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK 23

narrative subjects illustrate how nonliterate freedwomen used orality to

regulate the representation of their lives and to express their strength, per-
severance, and humanity.3
In 1860, Louisa Picquet traveled throughout the states of Ohio and
New York to raise money to purchase her mother’s freedom. She agreed
to relate her life story in order to publish a slave narrative for fund-raising
purposes and as a tool for the abolitionist cause. Picquet was born some-
time around 1828 to a mulatto slave woman, Elizabeth Ramsey, and her
white slavemaster in South Carolina. She and her mother were soon sold
because the baby Louisa looked too much like the mistress’ child. Later
when Louisa was thirteen she and her mother were sold separately—her
mother as a cook to a Mr. Horton of Texas, Louisa as a concubine to a
Mr. Williams of New Orleans. At Williams’s death Picquet and her chil-
dren (all four fathered by Williams) were freed, after which she moved to
Cincinnati, Ohio, were she married Henry Picquet.
The Octoroon has a question and answer structure that allows the
interviewer, Hiram Mattison, a white Methodist minister, to determine
the nature of the questions. Mattison’s questions reveal his preoccu-
pation with miscegenation and the abuse, both sexual and physical,
of slave women. However, Picquet cunningly both answers and evades
the questions in a discursive manner that permits her own subjective
representation.
Picquet chooses to evade Mattison’s intrusive questions regarding
physical abuse. For example, Mattison asks:
Q– Did your master ever whip you?
Picquet answers:
A– Oh, very often: sometimes he would be drunk, and real
funny, and would not whip me then. He had two or three
kinds of drunks. Sometimes he would begin to fight at the
front door, and fight ever [sic] thing he come to. At other
times he would be real funny. (7)
Clearly, Mattison’s question demands a response that describes Picquet’s
whippings in detail. However, not only does Picquet not describe the
whippings, or their number, for that would leave the impression of a pas-
sive victim, but she comments on her master’s (Mr. Cook’s) character and
24 SPEAKING POWER

uses language that strongly suggests how actively she resisted him. By re-
lating Cook’s intemperance, Picquet constructs an immoral image of him,
which is particularly significant given the concern and activism of temper-
ance advocates during this period. In fact, in the same issue of the Cincin-
nati Gazette, the newspaper in which Picquet’s notice announcing the
manumission of her mother appears, a chapter of an early version of
Frances E. W. Harper’s temperance novel Sowing and Reaping is published.4
The readers of The Octoroon, who we can also assume were potentially the
audience for the Gazette and, therefore, interested in abolition and tem-
perance, would find Cook’s inebriation vulgar and disgraceful. Further-
more, Picquet’s use of the word “fight,” implying two or more persons in
active combat, instead of “whip,” which Mattison uses, illustrates her re-
jection of the victimization status Mattison would ascribe to her. Finally,
Picquet dismisses Cook’s threatening image with her description of him as
“real funny.” Instead of fear and terror, Cook inspires Picquet’s disdain
and contempt. After reading this exchange, Picquet’s integrity and
strength are more brilliantly displayed than either Cook’s menace or
Mattison’s literary intrusion.
As opposed to the question and answer structure found in The Oc-
toroon, the Narrative of Sojourner Truth is written in traditional paragraph
form. Truth dictated her narrative to an amanuensis, abolitionist Olive
Gilbert, over a three-year period beginning in 1846. The text is narrated
in the first person from Gilbert’s perspective, with relatively few direct
quotations from Truth and many of Gilbert’s personal convictions. How-
ever, being nonliterate did not confine Truth to the passive position to
which biographical subjects are usually relegated. Presented as an after-
thought late in the narrative, Truth’s rationalization of the veracity of bib-
lical scriptures explains the basis of the narrative structure. Gilbert writes,

I had forgotten to mention, in its proper place, a very important

fact, that when she was examining the scriptures, she wished to hear
them without comment . . . in that way she was enabled to see what
her own mind could make out of the record, and that, she said, was
what she wanted, and not what others thought it to mean. She
wished to compare the teachings of the Bible with the witness
within her and she came to the conclusion, that the spirit of truth
spoke in those records, but that the recorders of those truths had
 SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK 25

intermingled with them ideas and suppositions of their own.

(87–88; emphasis added)

This passage suggests Sojourner Truth’s understanding the art of self-rep-

resentation and the need to distinguish her story from others’ subjective
representations. She recognized that the recorder of her narrative,
Gilbert, could not truly depict every aspect of her identity without in-
serting foreign ideas and implications. In her essay “Sojourner Truth: A
Practical Public Discourse,” Drema R. Lipscomb substantiates my argu-
ment by identifying Truth’s memorization of biblical passages as “crucial
to her being able to draw her own interpretations” (232). While one
might argue that Gilbert could have simply recorded Truth verbatim, I as-
sert that Sojourner Truth’s lack of reading and writing skills made con-
clusive knowledge of Gilbert’s narrative content impossible for her, and
thus, she knew better than to assume the accuracy of the Narrative. There-
fore, the passage indicates that Truth knew the written text must
inevitably be structured according to Gilbert’s point of view.
This dilemma of authenticating Truth’s voice in relation to the
structure of her Narrative parallels other scholars’ concerns in their ex-
aminations of Truth’s work. In her essay “Finding Sojourner’s Truth:
Race, Gender and the Institution of Slavery,” legal theorist Cheryl I. Har-
ris analyzes Truth’s Narrative and speeches and suggests Truth’s relation-
ships with her transcribers must be viewed within the racial and sexual
framework of the historical contexts to understand Truth’s authorship.
Harris observes, “Racial hierarchy, which positioned white over Black, in-
fused the relationship between writer and author with additional tension.
In considering whether the speech [“A’n’t I a Woman”] ever was or re-
mains hers, issues of ownership and control and the racial and sexual di-
mensions of these concepts are evoked. These are issues that are at the
center of the institution of property” (12). Olive Gilbert’s status as a lit-
erate white woman then would designate her as the Narrative’s author. Yet
I contend Truth’s authority is substantiated through orality. Regardless of
the Narrative’s point of view, Truth’s authority is displayed in the actions
and results evoked by her orality. Throughout the Narrative, Truth illus-
trates time and time again the power orality has to not only create positive
changes in her and her children’s lives, but it also impacts the represen-
tations and impressions of her by those she encounters.
26 SPEAKING POWER

Scholars have long recognized Sojourner Truth’s rhetorical abilities

demonstrated through her antislavery and women’s rights speeches. Lip-
scomb examines Truth’s rhetoric and calls it a “‘practical public dis-
course,’ a deliberative discourse that sought to inspire human action on
the issues of slavery and women’s rights” (231). While Truth’s rhetoric is
admitted and admired in her speeches, her Narrative remains unexam-
ined for its rhetorical power. Truth’s Narrative demonstrates the founda-
tion of the oral discursive strategies she learned as a child from her
parents that she later employed in public speaking. Lipscomb fails to
identify Truth’s connection to African American communities as a pos-
sible aspect of her rhetoric. Although she cites Truth’s initial religious in-
struction from her mother as the foundation of her religious interests,
Lipscomb does not link the oral traditions Truth learned in these sessions
to Truth’s rhetoric. Instead, Lipscomb chooses to speculate that Truth
only learned her discursive style from other antislavery speakers of her
day. This failure to relate Truth’s rhetoric to the oral traditions of African
American communities limits Lipscomb’s analysis because she forcibly
fits Truth into the frame of traditional rhetorical analysis without dis-
rupting assumptions or ideas. Truth’s negotiation with her orality and
Olive Gilbert’s position as narrative recorder illustrate a complex model
of rhetoric for which traditional rhetorical analysis does not apply.

COMBINING THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN

Picquet’s and Truth’s narratives exemplify the both/and concept of

Black feminist criticism discussed in the introduction to this book. These
narrators demonstrate a speaking subject’s ability to theorize concepts and
language within a writing environment that could silence nonwriters. Pic-
quet’s and Truth’s narratives diffuse the primacy of Western logic and writ-
ing as the definitive form of intellectual communication. Black feminist
theorist Barbara Christian corroborates this observation in her discussion
of principles of Black literature. In her essay “The Race for Theory,” Chris-
tian asserts African Americans “have always been a race for theory—though
more in the form of the hieroglyph, a written figure that is both sensual and
abstract, both beautiful and communicative” (68). Combining emotive
with abstract knowledge, these narrators present a direct opposition to pre-
vailing ideas concerning communication and logic of oral cultures.
 SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK 27

Cultural linguist Walter Ong finds distinct polarities in oral and lit-
erate cultures. According to Ong, people from oral cultures think and
communicate in ways explicitly different from those of literate cultures.5
Ong asserts oral cultures have an empathetic and participatory way of
knowing rather than the distanced objectivity found in literate cultures.
He insists, “For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving
close, empathetic, communal identification with the known, ‘getting with
it’. Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up con-
ditions for ‘objectivity,’ in the sense of personal disengagement or dis-
tancing” (45–46). Louisa Picquet’s oral narrative illustrates the fallacy of
Ong’s categorization.
Throughout the narrative she displays both empathy and distanced
objectivity according to the occasion. When asked about a specific whip-
ping, Picquet declines to satisfy Mattison’s desire to relate her degrada-
tion and shame.
Q– Well, how did he whip you?
A– With the cowhide.
Q– Around the shoulders, or how?
A– That day he did.
Q– How were you dressed—with thin clothes, or how?
A– Oh, very thin; with low-neck’d dress. In the summertime
we never wore but two pieces—only the one under, and the
blue homespun over. It is the striped cloth they make in Geor-
gia just for the colored people. All the time he was whippin’
me I kept sayin’ I forgot it, and promisin’ I would come an-
other time. (12)
The responses to the first and second questions show Picquet’s reluctance
to describe the whipping. However, following Mattison’s repeated
“how[s],” Picquet realizes he does not want to know her state of dress, but
her state of undress. She employs distanced objectivity by deliberately fo-
cusing attention on the number of articles and type of clothing worn by
slaves. Moreover, by using the term “we,” she shifts the attention away
from herself and concentrates on the slave community in general. Finally,
to subvert Mattison and control the representation, Picquet reverts back
to the subjective “I”—an empathetic and participatory form—in her re-
sponse to the whipping. With the agentive “I,” she exemplifies strength
28 SPEAKING POWER

and courage, and counters the beggings and pleadings Mattison appar-
ently expects her to report.
Picquet asserts her agenda throughout the narrative in spite of Mat-
tison’s insinuating and often inane inquiries. While recounting the sales
and separation of her mother and herself, Mattison asks,
Q– It seems like a dream, don’t it?
A– No; it seems fresh in my memory when I think of it—no
longer than yesterday. (18)
She goes on to describe how her mother prayed for her while she was on
the auction block, and says, “I often thought her prayers followed me, for
I never could forget her. Whenever I wanted any thing [sic] real bad after
that, my mother was always sure to appear to me in a dream that night,
and have plenty to give me, always” (18). Picquet refuses to trivialize and
temper the gravity and import of the emotions caused by the forced sepa-
ration. The reality of the auction block produces the dream of maternal
sustenance. She redefines the word “dream”—which Mattison uses to de-
pict something lost and intangible—and imbues it with strength and im-
mediacy that emphasize her connection to her mother rather than the
separation. Her emphasis on the maternal bond that remains in spite of
the physical severing is a discursive maneuver to promote her self-repre-
sentational agenda, which is to increase the sales of her narrative in order
to raise money to buy her mother’s freedom.
Picquet’s narrative demonstrates what Elizabeth Tonkin calls “rep-
resentation of pastness.” This phrase describes not just “the past” or lived
or recorded history, but rather the construction of the past. Tonkin ar-
gues that “one cannot detach the oral representation of pastness from the
relationship of teller and audience in which it was occasioned” (2). In
their study of the use of historical evidence After the Fact: The Art of His-
torical Detection, James Davidson and Mark Lytle illustrate the effect of au-
dience on ex-slave representations of slave experiences. Davidson and
Lytle examine two narratives of Susan Hamlin recorded by separate in-
terviewers (one Black, one white) collected in the 1930s by the Works
Progress Administration (WPA). The dramatic differences in the narra-
tives demonstrate the affect interviewers can have on the responses of ex-
slaves. Similarly, in her essay “Exploring the WPA Narratives: Finding the
Voices of Black Women and Men,” Melvina Johnson Young identifies
 SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK 29

the problematics of race, gender, and class dynamics in the WPA inter-
views. She asserts, “The dynamics of the relationship between the inter-
viewer and the person who had been enslaved made honest discourse
impossible on the basis of the racism, sexism, and/or classism of the in-
terviewer. It would seem, then, that when these factors are eliminated, we
get truer impressions of what Black women and men felt their experi-
ences in bondage to have been” (57). Although Young claims that con-
sidering the subject positions of the interviewer and narrator and their
relationship leads to the “true voices of those who experienced bondage,
first hand,” I am more concerned with the rhetoric or the language used
to subvert the interviewer and control the representation. Considering
this relationship, the politics and tensions between the ex-slave and the
white amanuensis are factors in Picquet’s text that increase the impor-
tance of her orality.
As a Black woman, Picquet’s racialized body and sexuality are un-
derlying issues that impact the narrative. In his essay “Black Bodies,
White Bodies,” Sander Gilman traces the use of Black women’s bodies,
as epitomized in the form of the Hottentot female, in both discourse and
artworks in relation to the Victorian ideals of womanhood. Gilman illus-
trates how the racial ideology of the time positioned Africans and African
Americans as deviant sexual beings whose very bodies indicated carnality.
Picquet’s alternate use of distance and empathy suggests her recognition
of her position as teller and Mattison—or even readers of the narrative—as
audience. In fact, in his introduction to the Schomburg Library of Nine-
teenth-Century Black Women Writers edition of the Picquet narrative,
Anthony G. Barthelemy acknowledges Picquet’s recognition of her rela-
tion to Mattison as a re-creation of the slave auction block. Barthelemy
observes, “Picquet clearly understands her relationship to Mattison.
Once again she is on the block; something is for sale. . . . Mattison exam-
ines Picquet with an unrelenting prurient interest. Picquet’s strategy here
pays off; she deflects the minister’s prying questions and maintains some
control over the examination” (xli). Picquet contextualizes her interview
with Mattison within her slave experience and nineteenth-century race
and gender constructs. Consequently, her oral representation of the past
is informed by these factors and must be read with this fact in mind.
Ordinarily Louisa Picquet and Sojourner Truth’s nonliteracy would
have silenced and relegated them to object positions. However, through
30 SPEAKING POWER

orality, Picquet and Truth control the narratives and position themselves
as subjects. Thus, these speech acts empower them to overcome oppres-
sion and assert their identities though the interviewers’ mediation.

ORALITY SUBSTANTIATING FAMILY INTEGRITY

Although Frederick Douglass’s equation of literacy equals freedom is

widely viewed as the exemplary route slaves adopted toward empowerment,
in his 1845 Narrative this equation is conflated with violence, which explic-
itly suggests a masculine application. Contrarily, an examination of women
slave narratives illustrates a de-emphasis on literacy and an emphasis on
orality as a means to empowerment. This oral power manifests itself in var-
ious forms of orality, which convey a sense of identity and familial relation-
ships, and it was used as a method of resistance to injustice.
One form of orality is the practice of history passed on orally found
in written and as-told-to narratives. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
Harriet Jacobs (using the pseudonym Linda Brent) relates the history of
her grandmother.6 She writes,

She was the daughter of a planter in South Carolina, who, at his

death, left her mother and his three children free, with money to go
to St. Augustine, where they had relatives. It was during the Revo-
lutionary War; and they were captured on their passage, carried
back, and sold to different purchasers. Such was the story my grand-
mother used to tell me. (5)

This account reveals not only the grandmother’s history, but also that of
the great-grandmother and illustrates Brent’s lineage. Therefore, a literate
Jacobs is able to express, in writing, a facet of her identity that was passed
to her orally and of which there is no written documentation.
As Hazel Carby has demonstrated, Jacobs employs the language and
conventions of sentimentalism to confront the ideals of the nineteenth-
century Cult of True Womanhood that constructed “true” women as
pious, pure, domestic, and submissive. Unfortunately, the tenets of the
Cult of True Womanhood excluded African American women.7 Carby
shows that nineteenth-century race ideology viewed Africans and African
Americans as excessively sexual and deviant and that this racial ideology,
 SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK 31

marking Black women as overly sexual, precluded recognition of their

chastity (27). Nevertheless, Jacobs constructs the slave grandmother as a
member of the Cult of True Womanhood.
In the first paragraph of the text, however, Jacobs relates the grand-
mother’s history, which has been passed on orally. In childhood, the
grandmother was sold to an innkeeper and later had five children.
Jacobs writes, “I have often heard her tell how hard she fared during
childhood. But as she grew older she evinced so much intelligence, and
was so faithful, that her master and mistress could not help seeing it was
for their interest to take care of such a valuable piece of property” (5). Ev-
idently, the grandmother was unprotected in an environment where she
encountered a variety of white patrons. Jacobs maintains, “The slave girl
is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the
foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers” (51). That Jacobs is
silent concerning the paternity of the grandmother’s children—coupled
with the reiteration of the corruption of slave girls—points to the grand-
mother’s undisclosed, but salient, experiences regarding sexual harass-
ment and abuse.
With this silence, Jacobs can depict a grandmother who exudes virtue
throughout the text. Brent’s sexual transgressions with her chosen white
lover, Mr. Sands, resulting in the birth of her two children, stand in contrast
to the grandmother’s ostensible virtues. Bruce Mills recognizes the impor-
tance of the grandmother’s morality in his essay “Lydia Maria Child and the
Endings to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” and suggests,
“Because of the narrator/protagonist’s ‘degraded’ past, the grandmother
must stand as the primary exemplar of and mediator for redemptive femi-
nine virtue” (259). For the grandmother, the value of purity becomes un-
questioned and undiscussed. While Jacobs cannot truthfully represent the
grandmother as pure, she endeavors to inscribe the grandmother’s purity
both through the representation of the past the narrator has learned orally
and by means of nineteenth-century sentimental images of domesticity.
The grandmother’s commitment to chastity is translated through
her reaction to Mrs. Flint’s announcement that Linda was pregnant by
her master, Dr. Flint. The grandmother laments,

“O Linda! Has it come to this? I had rather see you dead than to see
you as you now are. You are a disgrace to your dead mother.” She tore
32 SPEAKING POWER

from my fingers my mother’s wedding-ring and her silver thimble. “Go

away!” she exclaimed, “and never come to my house, again.” (56–57;
emphasis added)

In her outrage, the grandmother invokes the image of Linda’s “dead

mother,” who has previously been characterized as “noble and womanly,”
and strips Linda of the traditional symbols of domesticity (wedding-ring,
silver thimble, and house). Because she must challenge racist assumptions
of African American women’s promiscuity, it is important for Jacobs to
have the audience believe the grandmother would not condone Brent’s
actions. Even when Brent explains her situation and choice of a sexual re-
lationship with Mr. Sands, the grandmother sympathizes and under-
stands but does not forgive her. Therefore, we have a grandmother who
believes in chastity and purity without particularly revealing her own sex-
ual experiences.
The result is a juxtaposition of the oral history passed from the
grandmother against the imposed conventions of sentimental discourse—
a linking Jacobs uses to delineate Black slave women’s dilemma. She por-
trays characters that simultaneously hold values of chastity and honesty
even while circumstances force them to violate these ideals. Because of
the degradation of slavery and the exclusion of Black women from the
Cult of True Womanhood, Jacobs entreats her readers to consider that
“the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others”
(56). This is not to say that these qualities are not always valued; simply,
they are not always viable.8 Clearly Jacobs’s concern for her target audi-
ences’—northern white women—attitude toward Black women affects the
use of oral traditions in the narrative.
Like Jacobs, Truth’s Narrative establishes orality’s capacity to provide
a sense of familial continuity in resistance to the disruption caused by
slavery. In the Narrative, Truth recounts the experiences of her brother
and sisters before they were sold away and the circumstances of their
sales. These experiences were passed on to Truth by her parents through
oral transmission. In her biography of Truth, Nell Irvin Painter identifies
this oral history as a source of pain and terror for Truth (then Isabella
Bomefree). Painter asserts, “Seared by frequent, detailed tellings of these
losses, Isabella’s earliest years lay in the shadow of her parents’ chronic de-
pression and her own guilt as a survivor” (12). Truth relates how, through
 SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK 33

oral history, her parents perpetuated the memories of her siblings who
were sold to slave traders. Truth’s interviewer, Olive Gilbert, writes,

Of the two that immediately preceded her in age, a boy of five years,
and a girl of three, who were sold when she was an infant, [Truth]
heard much; and she wishes that all . . . could have listened as she did,
while Bomefree and Mau-Mau Bett . . . would sit for hours, recalling
and recounting every endearing, as well as harrowing circumstance
that taxed memory could supply, from the histories of the dear
departed ones. (5; emphasis added)

Although Painter suggests these tales were a traumatic experience for

Truth, this passage demonstrates her family’s tradition of oral history to
resist oppression. The passage illustrates the necessity of tellings and
retellings of family experiences to provide continuity and history in
African American slave families. While slaves were the legal property of
their masters who had the power to dictate much of slave life, this passage
points to slave oral empowerment to construct identities and representa-
tions. Her parents’ orality instilled in Sojourner Truth the knowledge of
their experiences, which assisted Truth in defining her identity. Addi-
tionally, their oral representations were a foundation of her ability to cre-
ate a subjective representation that informed readers of the Narrative.
Cheryl I. Harris notes that “the Narrative functioned as a commodity cru-
cial to Truth’s survival; it was Truth’s major source of income for the
greater part of her life after slavery” (18). Thus, the narratives of the legal
property of slave owners become not only a source of identity actualiza-
tion, but Truth’s property ownership of the Narrative subverts the usual
income production of slavery.
Moreover, orality becomes a powerful method to claim parental
identity and challenge the prohibition of slave women naming masters
as the fathers of their children.9 Though in Douglass’s later autobiogra-
phies—My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Doug-
lass—he is less ambiguous about the identity of his father, in the 1845
Narrative he states that “the opinion was also whispered that my master
was my father; but of the correctness of the opinion, I know nothing; the
means of knowing was withheld from me”—which discounts orality (48).
Conversely, Louisa Picquet uses the orality passed from her mother to ex-
press her identity definitively, and thus, to subvert the circumscriptions
34 SPEAKING POWER

imposed by slave masters on slave women regarding their children’s

paternity. Of her parentage, Picquet states, “Mother’s master, Mr. Ran-
dolph, was my father. So mother told me. She was forbid to tell who was
my father but I looked so much like Madame Randolph’s baby that she
got dissatisfied, and mother had to be sold” (6; emphasis added). Clearly,
for Douglass literacy supersedes orality and some form of written docu-
mentation is necessary to establish his parentage. However, for Picquet
not only is her mother’s word enough to substantiate her claim, but the
physical resemblance between Madame Randolph’s child and herself is
sufficient evidence of her parentage. Therefore, an official document or
acknowledgment is unnecessary. Also, this passage displays a tradition of
orality in that Picquet’s mother was forbidden to divulge her child’s
parentage; yet, she does tell Picquet, who in turn tells the world.

ORALITY TO FREEDOM

Like Douglass’s freedom through literacy, orality was also a viable

method to freedom. For Sojourner Truth (whose birth name was Isabella
Bomefree) oral resistance can be directly attributed to her freedom.10 Isa-
bella’s master promised to emancipate her for faithful service and hard
work one year before the legal statute set by the state of New York. Yet at
the appointed time he refused to free her and she decided self-emancipa-
tion was in order. When her master accused her of running away, Isabella
retorted, “No, I did not run away; I walked away by day-light and all be-
cause you had promised me a year of my time” (29). Not only does she ex-
press contempt for his deception, the fact that she left “by day-light”
illustrates her honesty and integrity vis-à-vis his actions. That this con-
frontation occurs before a respected physician and his family further em-
powers Truth. She recognizes the threat to her master’s reputation and
public image by voicing his dishonesty.11
For deeply spiritual African Americans, extraliterary forms (including
prayer and prophecy) provide a significant channel to oppose and counter
the hegemonic practices of society. Sojourner Truth’s spirituality feeds her
orality and provides a powerful discourse, foreign to the literate patriarchal
order, with which to suppress secular authority. Following the illegal out-of-
state sale of her son, Truth raises the community’s ire by traveling through-
out New York—from Hurley to New Paltz to Kingston to Poppletown and
 SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK 35

back to Kingston—reporting the crime to everyone she encounters. Her

insistence for justice brings her before the Ulster county circuit judge, who
declares that the “boy be delivered into the hands of the mother” (38). Thus,
through orality Truth utilizes the oppressor’s legal system to counter oppres-
sion. She exclaims, “Oh my God! I know’d I’d have him again [sic]. I was
sure God would help me to get him. Why, I felt so tall within—I felt as if the
power of a nation was with me” (31). While Truth expresses the power she
felt, this act demonstrates the power of orality. This is an extralegal, extralit-
erary act because, although it is by the judge’s decree that her son is re-
turned, she relies on God’s decree. Instead of man’s law—the law that
sanctioned slavery, the law that separated mothers from their children—she
appeals to God’s law—the highest law. Instead of the powerlessness ascribed
to nonliterate Black slave women, she experiences power of national pro-
portions. In a world that said, you are nothing without the power of literacy,
Sojourner Truth relies on the power of orality sustained and nurtured by
spiritual conviction. Rather than exclude her from participation in public
discourse and confine her to a subordinate status, Sojourner Truth’s de-
mand for justice—fueled by an absolute certainty of her spiritual relationship
with and support from God—manifest in Black feminist orality subverts the
very discursive system intended to suppress her.
In her discussion of this event, Cheryl I. Harris identifies Truth’s en-
counter with the legal system as a contestation of the concepts of “mother-
hood” and “womanhood” that the court solved through the examination
of property rights. Harris maintains,

The contingent character of Isabella/Truth’s claim to motherhood

is rooted in her exclusion from “womanhood” which is racially
identified. The story offers a textual description of how property as
concept, legal metaphor, narrative and positive law proceeded from
and reinforced that premise. (22)

Truth’s orality then becomes not just a tool used to obtain her son, but a
strategy to confront the dominant culture’s construction of gender.
Truth’s speech act parallels her famous question, “A’n’t I a woman?” That
her orality results in the court awarding her custody of her son legally cer-
tifies her position as “mother,” which in turn problematizes the exclusion
of Black women from “womanhood.” If a “true” woman’s most important
36 SPEAKING POWER

vocation was motherhood, then Black mothers possessed the primary

quality of “womanhood.”12
Louisa Picquet relies on the extraliterary form of prayer for agency,
empowerment, and freedom. When Picquet is troubled by her position as
Williams’s mistress and fears divine retribution for her sins, Williams en-
treats her that as long as she maintains her fidelity to him God would not
hold her responsible. Picquet declares,

But I knew better than that. I thought it was of no use to be prayin’

and livin’ in sin. I begin then to pray that he might die, so that I
might get religion; and then I promise the Lord one night, faithful,
in prayer, if he would just take him out of the way, I’d get religion
and be true to Him as long as I lived. If Mr. Williams only knew
that, and get up out of his grave, he’d beat me half to death. (22)

Soon after this prayer Williams experiences a lingering fatal illness.

Picquet then reassesses her position.

Then, when I saw that he was sufferin’ so, I begin to get sorry, and
begin to pray that he might get religion first before he died. I felt sorry
to see him die in his sins. I pray for him to have religion, when I did
not have it myself. I thought if he got religion and then died, I knew
that I could get religion. . . . Then, in about a month or three weeks,
he died. I didn’t cry nor nothin’, for I was glad he was dead; for I
thought I could have some peace and happiness then. I was left free,
and that made me so glad I could hardly believe it myself. (22–23)

Picquet’s confidence in the power of prayer supersedes her fear of

Williams’s wrath. She maintains the very faithfulness and fidelity insisted
on by Williams, only she is faithful to herself and her beliefs, not to him.
Even though she is sympathetic to Williams’s plight, she never regrets
praying for his death, and instead prays for his redemption before death.
For Picquet freedom for the soul through religious conversion is only pos-
sible with physical freedom from slavery. It is significant to note that her
desire for freedom is articulated in the context of spirituality.
Picquet’s emphasis on spiritual redemption places the narrative in
the tradition of spiritual narratives. In addition to her journey to free-
dom, Picquet narrates her journey to religious conversion. She describes
 SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK 37

the troubling in her spirit she experienced whenever she thought of her
mother’s enslavement.

It was a great weight on my mind; and I thought if I could get reli-

gion I should certainly meet her in heaven, for I knew she was a
Christian woman. . . . I made up my mind that I would never hold
up my head again on this earth till the Lord converted me. I prayed
hard that night. . . . And the moment I believe that the Lord would
relieve me, the burden went right off; and I felt as light as if I was
right up in the air. (28)

After this conversion Picquet begins to search in earnest for her mother
and work to free her. Joycelyn Moody maintains that “the spiritual narra-
tive by definition forswears the temporal to revere the eternal” (104–105).
Picquet recognizes her conversion and her adherence to Christianity will
ensure reunion with her mother after death. Yet the prospect of eternal
reunion does not negate the desire for freedom and meeting her mother
in this life. The belief of freedom in eternity inspires the determination
for freedom on earth. Consequently, unlike traditional spiritual narra-
tives, in Picquet’s narrative the temporal is not dismissed in favor of the
eternal. The temporal is made possible because of the eternal. In this in-
stance, Black feminist orality, manifested in prayer and faith, empowers
Picquet to achieve freedom for her mother, her children, and herself.
Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents is the only book-length slave narrative au-
thored by a Black woman. Despite Jacobs’s literacy, the power of orality is
central to the empowerment of Linda Brent and her children’s freedom.
For Jacobs orality provides means both to assert Brent’s rights as a mother
and to free her children. Brent’s use of her voice to gain her children’s
freedom is exceptionally consequential when contextualized within the
construction of familial relations in the slave institution. In his book
American Slavery, 1619–1877, Peter Kolchin observes, “Legally, slave fami-
lies were nonexistent: no Southern state recognized marriage between
slave men and women, and legal authority over slave children rested not
with their parents but with their masters (122). In My Bondage and My
Freedom, Douglass acknowledges the legal denial of slave families but as-
serts, “When they do exist, they are not the outgrowths of slavery, but are
antagonistic to that system” (51). Therefore, Linda Brent’s use of orality
38 SPEAKING POWER

to secure her children’s freedom is particularly significant. Brent risks ex-

posing her hiding place to force her children’s father, Mr. Sands, to free
them. Using the element of surprise, Brent detains Sands and says, “Stop
one moment, and let me speak for my children” (126; emphasis added).
She goes on to remind Sands of his responsibility toward her children.
Her assertion not only results in his promise to free her children, but also
expresses her rights as a mother to protect and shield them from the in-
justice of slavery.
Just as Truth’s use of orality questions the gender construct of wom-
anhood, Brent’s maternal speech act repositions Black slave mothers
within the nineteenth-century ideological construction of motherhood.
John Ernest contends, “To be a mother in opposition to law and custom
was to announce an ideological reconstitution of motherhood” (183).
Thus, orality in Jacobs’s and Truth’s narratives exhibits Black women’s in-
terrogation and redefinition of hegemonic ideologies of gender and race.

ORALITY TO RESIST SEXUAL EXPLOITATION

In addition to the power to challenge dominant cultural ideologies,

orality was valued for multiple reasons, including those of economics, au-
tonomy, and representation. Orality offered slave women the power to re-
sist sexual victimization. Literacy makes Linda Brent susceptible to sexual
exploitation, which she counters with orality. Her licentious master, Dr.
Flint, chances upon twelve-year-old Brent teaching herself to read. He dis-
cretely begins passing her notes detailing his sexual intentions. Brent re-
turns the notes, saying, “I can’t read them, sir,” and forces Flint to read
them to her (31). The verbal denial of literacy subverts Flint and empow-
ers Brent to escape active participation in her victimization. Later, Linda
Brent’s decision to choose her lover “allows her to appropriate speech
rights” (Foreman, “Manifest” 80). In her essay “Manifest in Signs: The
Politics of Sex and Representation in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,”
P. Gabrielle Foreman examines use of the self-construct “Linda Brent”
and points to markers both in Jacobs’s text and historical data that sug-
gest she was in fact raped by her master. Foreman insists the act of choos-
ing another white man as her lover, and naming him as the father of her
children, confuses the children’s paternity. This confusion negates the
master’s excuse to sell her or her children for revealing the father’s iden-
 SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK 39

tity. While Foreman makes clear that her reading is speculation based on
evidence, her reading substantiates orality as a cogent method to reject
victimization while simultaneously creating a subjective representation.
When we consider the possibilities Foreman’s reading occasions, Jacobs’s
text becomes a written embodiment of orality. The speech acts of choos-
ing her lover and identifying him as the father within a text written under
a pseudonym exemplify the fluidity of orality. Not only does oral resis-
tance empower Brent, Jacobs’s orality creates a multivalent text that offers
“competing stories about versions of herself as her subjectivity is dis-
placed by one or multiple representations.”13
Louisa Picquet uses oral resistance for personal gain and to circum-
vent her master’s sexual intentions. Picquet uses the money given to her
as a bribe for sexual favors by her intoxicated master, Mr. Cook, to pur-
chase material for a dress. When sober, he asks for the money and she
tells him that she lost it. Picquet insightfully notes, “I had sense enough
to know he would not dare tell any one that he gave me the money, and
would hardly dare to whip me for it” (13). Orality empowers her to silence
Cook and escape physical abuse. In another instance, Picquet employs
speech strategically to avoid being raped by Cook by informing Mrs.
Bachelor (the owner of the boardinghouse in which she and Cook reside)
of his order to visit his room that night. Mrs. Bachelor’s deft maneuvers
permit Picquet to elude Cook for a day and a half. However, Cook finally
confronts Picquet and orders her to come to his room and not tell Mrs.
Bachelor. Picquet admits, “[Y]ou see there he got me. Then I came to the
conclusion he could not do any thing [sic] but whip me—he could not kill
me for it; an’ I made up my mind to take the whippin’. So I didn’t go that
night” (12). At this point, Picquet realizes that her recourse to orality is ex-
hausted and accepts physical abuse over sexual exploitation. She priori-
tizes these forms of abuse; thus, the act of accepting a whipping becomes
an empowering device to thwart Mr. Cook.

AUTHORITY AND ORALITY

While Douglass’s Narrative is proclaimed as the exemplary model of

slave narratives and his emphasis on literacy as a vehicle to freedom was fre-
quently adopted, these female narratives illustrate that there were various
ways “to tell a free story.”14 Yet Tonkin’s assertion, “When we consider that
40 SPEAKING POWER

representations of pastness enter continually into different kinds of dis-

course and are produced in different kinds of society, any discussion leads
inevitably to debates on agency, that is to the status of the ‘I’ who authors
statements, and of the subject, a topic of literary and social analysis alike”
(4), demands attention to issues of authorization in orally transmitted nar-
ratives. Despite Picquet’s and Truth’s empowerment through oral resis-
tance, my discussion of orality is problematized by virtue of the fact that The
Octoroon and the Narrative of Sojourner Truth are ultimately written by the
amanuenses, Mattison and Gilbert. In The Octoroon, Picquet’s voice gets
lost or silenced in the second half of the narrative. It is Mattison who di-
rects the reader’s attention to the proceeding events in Picquet’s life and, al-
though there are some instances related in Picquet’s voice, for the most part
Mattison’s narrative voice is privileged over hers. This dilemma presents it-
self in other narratives written by amanuenses and causes texts like The Oc-
toroon to be excluded from being classified as part of African American
women’s literary tradition. Consequently, when scholars examine and at-
tempt to situate these texts into a specific literary tradition, the authority
and positions of the writer and narrator are confusing and questionable.
Nonetheless, if one carefully examines these texts, there are spaces
and tensions, which we might call windows of opportunity, that contain
moments of orality or oral resistance in which the nonliterate freed-
woman wrests narrative agency from the amanuensis and creates a sub-
jective representation. Furthermore, the oral traditions inherited from
African cultures and perpetuated in slave communities are the founda-
tion of resistant orality used as self-defense and self-authorization. The
knowledge acquired in both slave communities and the larger society re-
garding race and gender constructions informs the orality African Amer-
ican slave women used to control experience and representations of
experience and, therefore, becomes an identifiable form of rhetoric. In
fact, Jacqueline Jones Royster asserts that rhetoric “occurs through the in-
ternalization of a complex system of understandings that provide the con-
text within which we decode and encode texts, make meaning, and
operate with autonomy, power, and authority” (177). These speech acts
point to a tradition that employs diverse methods of orality to overcome
oppression and assert one’s identity. These women realized “the master’s
tools [would] never dismantle the master’s house” and instead used dif-
ferent means to effect agency.15
 C H A P T E R 2

Tale-Baring and Dressing Out

Black Women’s Speech Acts That Expose
Torture and Abuse by Slave Mistresses in
OUR NIG, SYLVIA DUBOIS, and THE STORY OF MATTIE J. JACKSON
/

This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the fron-
tiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose in-
side has been turned outside.
—Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”

Even if the mind chooses to forget, the body bears the signs of the
past violation.
—J. Michael Dash, “Writing the Body”

The slave body as a text that reveals an alternative version of the master
narrative is an intriguing concept. If we think of the body as a cultural
text, the outside displays the smooth, untainted skin—a text that is ap-
pealing to the eye—but the inside exposes the corporeal blood and veins
beneath the skin, the ugliness that undergirds the appealing outside. The
inside of the cultural text revealed by slave women shows the brutal, de-
humanizing nature of the institution that slavery advocates endeavored to
mask. This chapter examines orality in the context of narratives of slave
women who used the abuse inflicted upon them by slave mistresses to re-
late a cultural text that exposed the reality of the members of the Cult of
True Womanhood.

41
42 SPEAKING POWER

To begin to understand these acts of orality, it is important to explore

two significant features of slave society: first, the power dynamics of torture
in relationships between abusive slave owners and slaves; and the distress
and impact of abuse by slave mistresses onto young slave women. Elaine
Scarry and Nell Irvin Painter provide interesting approaches to these as-
pects of the slave institution. Through the frames of the dynamics of tor-
ture and soul murder Our Nig, Sylvia Dubois, and The Story of Mattie J.
Jackson use orality to reveal slave mistresses as vicious, hateful, and even
deadly women who not only did not represent the Cult of True Woman-
hood, they failed as human beings with a concern for humanity.
In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry details the dynamics be-
tween torturers and prisoners. She explains that the act of torture is struc-
tured in a three-tiered fashion that is ultimately meant to empower the
torturer. Scarry describes this structure as,

First, pain is inflicted on a person in ever-intensifying ways. Second,

the pain, continually amplified within the person’s body, is also am-
plified in the sense that it is objectified, made visible to those out-
side the person’s body. Third, the objectified pain is denied as pain
and read as power, a translation made possible by the obsessive me-
diation of agency. (28)

Thus, the torturer is empowered because of the continual ability to

objectify and translate pain with instruments of torture.
Furthermore, Scarry illustrates that the “translation of pain into
power” is intimately connected with the conversion of the body into voice,
a conversion that is attributed to the dichotomous relationship of body
and voice. This relationship is relevant to both the torturer and the pris-
oner. For the torturer, the body is “the obsessive mediation of agency,”
and is less significant than the voice, which is represented by interrogation
consisting of questions and threats. For the prisoner, pain is representative
of the body and is more relevant than the voice, which is represented by
screams, confessions, or any verbal response to pain. According to Scarry,
“The torturer experiences his own body and voice as opposites; the pris-
oner experiences his own body and voice as opposites; the prisoner’s ex-
periences of the two is an inversion of the torturer’s. Hence there are four
sets of opposites” (45–46). She shows that the process of torture empha-
 TALE-BARING AND DRESSING OUT 43

sizes the separateness of the body and self; a self that is “‘embodied’ in the
voice.” “The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphati-
cally and crushingly present by destroying it” (49). Therefore, the torturer
eliminates the “self” of the prisoner who opposes him.
Although torture works to obliterate the “self ” of the prisoner,
Scarry demonstrates that restoration of the prisoner’s voice can alter the
results of torture. She describes instances in which prisoners are re-
humanized through contact with human speech and writes, “As torture
consists of acts that magnify the way in which pain destroys a person’s
world, self, and voice, so these other acts that restore the voice become
not only a denunciation of the pain but almost a diminution of the pain,
a partial reversal of the process of torture itself ” (50). Scarry’s claim is not
an instance of synecdoche, in which the self is wholly represented or “em-
bodied” in the voice, rather the restoration of the voice (if only tem-
porarily) partially relieves and eases the condition of the prisoner.
Scarry’s discussion of the nature of torture, the torturer, and the pris-
oner directly parallels the nature of abuse by slaveholders onto slaves in
nineteenth-century America as illustrated in slave narratives. Like Scarry’s
model, the laws granting slaveholders the ability to inflict abuse and deny
the presence of pain empowered slaveholders to eliminate slave selves and
voices by destroying their bodies. However, the abuse did not always si-
lence slave voices and, thus, did not automatically destroy slave identities.
As historian Nell Irvin Painter proves, this abuse and torture in-
evitably resulted in what psychologists call “soul murder;” the accumulated
effects of persistent, determined abuse: “depression, lowered self-esteem,
and anger” (Southern 16). Soul murder acknowledges a distinct separation
but intimate connection between the body and the “soul,” or the conscious
self; the soul is “murdered” through abuse and trauma inflicted on the
body. Therefore, if slave mistresses aimed to make slave voices “absent” by
making the body “present” through protracted abuse, then these acts
marked slave mistresses as perpetrators of “soul murder” and responsible
for maimed and injured slave “souls.” Painter asserts that, unlike early slave
historiography that found the dehumanizing practices of slavery so debili-
tating to slaves that they were unable to recover, “slaves had two crucial
means of support that helped them resist being damaged permanently by
the assaults of their owners and their fellows,” supportive communities and
spirituality that provided an alternative belief system in human equality and
44 SPEAKING POWER

divine retribution (30–31). Additionally, Our Nig, Sylvia Dubois, and The
Story of Mattie J. Jackson prove slave women used speech acts and physical ac-
tions to combat soul murder. These acts were designed to restore their
voices and expose the mistress’ cruelty and abuse to the public. Thus, by
highlighting their mistresses’ conduct, the power relationship Scarry de-
scribes is inverted as the ex-slave women in these narratives’ critique and
question their mistresses’ inclusion in the Cult of True Womanhood.
Moreover, as they circumvent the torture dynamics, these narrative subjects
avert soul murder, and instead, project whole, healthy souls who are pro-
gressive and self-determined.
The gender conventions of the nineteenth century marked a strict sep-
aration of the public and private (domestic) spheres. The public sphere was
reserved for men and included corporate, government, and intellectual
realms; basically, anywhere outside the home. The private sphere was re-
served for women and consisted only of the home, which the phrase “home
and hearth” signified. The Cult of True Womanhood emerges out of this
division. Bourgeois ideology of the domestic space held that (white) women
were relegated to the home; their labor, child rearing, and any activities
must take place within the domestic space. Nineteenth-century domestic
ideology was based on a complex belief of women’s physical weakness and
inferiority on one hand, and their moral strength and superiority on the
other hand. However, the dictates of the Cult of True Womanhood dif-
fered for Northern and Southern women.1 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese points
out these differences and shows that though the gender conventions por-
trayed women as delicate, modest, pious, and maternal, “[slave] mistresses,
even the kindest, commonly resorted to the whip” (24). Despite the com-
monality of using the whip, the larger society—particularly the North—did
not perceive Southern women’s whip-wielding capabilities. Marli F. Weiner
shows slaveholding mistresses were expected to exhibit benevolence and
kindness to slaves, thereby alleviating slavery’s viciousness. Thus, even
though slave mistresses often whipped slaves, this image was not widely rep-
resented by the Cult of True Womanhood.
Hazel Carby’s discussion of the Cult of True Womanhood shows
that for white women “any power or influence a woman could exercise
was limited to the boundaries of the home” (49). That this power was
used to oppress and dominate Black women domestic slaves is made clear
in numerous slave narratives. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet
 TALE-BARING AND DRESSING OUT 45

Jacobs, using the pseudonym Linda Brent, demonstrates the severity of

slave mistresses. Carby writes, “Many of the relationships portrayed be-
tween Linda Brent and white women involve cruelty and betrayal and
place white female readers in the position of having to realize their impli-
cation in the oppression of black women” (51).
Male slave narratives also relate instances of slave women’s abuse by
their mistresses. Frederick Douglass’s Narrative contains an incident of a
slave mistress who murdered a young female slave because she fell asleep in
the middle of the night while attending the mistress’ baby who awoke cry-
ing. He writes, “Mrs. Hicks, finding the girl slow to move, jumped from
her bed, seized an oak stick of wood by the fireplace, and with it broke the
girl’s nose and breastbone, and thus ended her life” (68–69). Douglass re-
counts this event within a chapter that tells of several incidents of cruelty
by slaveholders. However, unlike Jacobs, his purpose is not to specifically
indict white women for their oppression of slaves, but to show that the law
does not punish slaveholders in general for killing slaves. He continues,

I will not say that this most horrid murder produced no sensation
in the community. It did produce sensation, but not enough to
bring the murderess to punishment. There was a warrant issued for
her arrest, but it was never served. Thus, she escaped not only pun-
ishment, but even the pain of being arraigned before a court for her
horrid crime. (69)

This passage demonstrates Douglass’s contempt for slave law, but does
not illustrate a particular indictment of slave mistresses vis-à-vis the Cult
of True Womanhood.
In opposition to Douglass, Harriet E. Wilson’s novel Our Nig specifi-
cally exhibits white women’s oppression of Black women. Our Nig, the first
novel written by an African American woman, details the life of a Black fe-
male indentured servant in a Northern household. Although this is a
novel, which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls a “fictionalized third-person auto-
biography,” it so closely resembles slave narratives that one can safely eval-
uate it as such. For example, P. Gabrielle Foreman contends, “Wilson’s is a
tale of the suffering of the flesh; Our Nig discloses more unreserved
violence than do many of the narratives related by slaves themselves” (By
the Help of God 121).2 Therefore, for the purpose of my discussion, I will
46 SPEAKING POWER

consider some of the events in Our Nig as an example of the torture rela-
tionship of slave mistresses and slaves and the restoration of the Black
woman’s voice.
Throughout the novel Frado, the protagonist, is tortured and
abused by her mistress, Mrs. Bellmont. This abuse continually escalates
without any effective intervention.3 Mrs. Bellmont is a “she-devil” with a
sadistic nature. Wilson asserts, “No matter what occurred to ruffle her, or
from what source provocation came, real or fancied, a few blows on Nig
seemed to relieve her of a portion of ill-will” (41). Her favorite method of
abuse is to use a piece of wood to prop open Frado’s mouth, thereby, si-
lencing her. Mrs. Bellmont desires to render Frado voiceless for various
reasons. Often she means to silence Frado in her efforts to defend herself
against accusations made by Mary, Mrs. Bellmont’s youngest daughter.
The wedge of wood is also used to keep Frado from screaming during
beatings, which not only silences her, but effectively denies her pain.
Thus, Mrs. Bellmont is empowered to abuse and dehumanize Frado and
exemplifies the third tier of Scarry’s structure of torture.
If, according to Scarry, the body and voice are intimately connected,
then Wilson illustrates that Frado’s black body and the notion of “truth”
to Mrs. Bellmont are incompatible. For instance, at one point she asks Mr.
Bellmont, “Will you sit still, there, and hear that black nigger call Mary a
liar?” (34). Not only is Frado unable to tell the truth according to Mrs. Bell-
mont, but when her story refutes Mary’s story, Frado exposes Mary as a
liar. This circumstance is unacceptable to Mrs. Bellmont because, if Frado
is believed and exposes Mary, then she has the power to expose Mrs. Bell-
mont as well.
Despite Mrs. Bellmont’s attempts to deny Frado’s voice or her ability
to tell the truth, Wilson shows that Mrs. Bellmont fears Frado’s voice. For
example, after Frado tells James, the eldest Bellmont son, that Mrs. Bell-
mont forbid his Aunt Abby from visiting his death bed, Mrs. Bellmont
seized Frado and “said she would ‘cure her of tale-bearing’ and, placing the
wedge of wood between her teeth, she beat her cruelly with the raw-hide”
(93). Once again, Mrs. Bellmont attempts to silence Frado by punishing her
body. However, the fact that Mrs. Bellmont wants to “cure [Frado] of tale-
bearing” shows she is afraid Frado’s tale might bare or expose her behavior.
In a similar circumstance, Mrs. Bellmont becomes alarmed when a neigh-
bor tells her Frado “related her experience” in church.
 TALE-BARING AND DRESSING OUT 47

“What experience?” asked she, quickly, as if she expected to hear

the number of times she had whipped Frado, and the number of
lashes set forth in plain Arabic numbers. (103; emphasis added)

Clearly, the possibility that Frado will expose her is a threat to Mrs. Bell-
mont. The threat is emphasized through the language Wilson uses. Not
only is Mrs. Bellmont’s behavior counter to the ideals of the Cult of True
Womanhood, but Wilson demonstrates how Frado’s treatment parallels
slavery. With the phrase “the number of lashes set forth in plain Arabic
numbers,” she employs the language of slave law. For example, for various
offenses slave law dictated specific amounts of lashes in whippings. This
language further aligns the text with slave narratives in that slave narra-
tors often recount whippings and include the number of strikes slaves re-
ceived.4 Mrs. Bellmont’s violence both distances her from the gender
dictates of the North and positions her in the public (male) sphere. Given
that Southern women’s role in slave punishments were not commonly
known in the North, slave punishment was viewed as a male domain.
Thus, Wilson positions Mrs. Bellmont not only outside the Cult of True
Womanhood, but within the masculine realm of society.
Many critics note the moment in which Frado discovers her voice
and asserts a degree of autonomy. This moment occurs following Mr. Bell-
mont’s advice to avoid punishment because “[she] cannot endure beating
as [she] once could” (Wilson 104). The next time Mrs. Bellmont attempts
to beat her, Frado finds her voice. Wilson writes, “‘Stop!’ shouted Frado,
‘strike me, and I’ll never work a mite more for you,’ and throwing down
what she had gathered, stood like one who feels the stirring of free and in-
dependent thoughts” (105).5 Clearly, this scene parallels Frederick Doug-
lass’s fight with Mr. Covey in his Narrative that marks his coming to
consciousness. Yet the scene also demonstrates how the reclamation of the
voice inverts the power relationship between Frado and Mrs. Bellmont.
While Douglass’s moment of agency rests on his ability to physically whip
Covey and regain his manhood, Frado employs orality to retrieve not just
her womanhood, but her personhood as well. Wilson states,

Frado walked towards the house, her mistress following with the wood
she herself was sent after. She did not know, before, that she had a
power to ward off assaults. Her triumph in seeing her enter the doors
with her burden, repaid her for much of her former suffering. (105)
48 SPEAKING POWER

The statement “she did not know, before, that she had a power to ward
off assaults,” signals Frado’s coming to consciousness. Recognizing the
power of oral resistance to defeat Mrs. Bellmont, Frado is able to dimin-
ish her pain. With Frado’s restored voice, Wilson illustrates Scarry’s
claim that speech acts can partially reverse the process of torture.
Following this episode, Frado uses her voice to both expose Mrs.
Bellmont’s cruelty and privilege her experience over Jenny’s, Mrs. Bell-
mont’s daughter-in-law. Mrs. Bellmont despises Jenny and does every-
thing within her power to destroy Jenny’s marriage to her son, Jack. She
denigrates Jenny at every opportunity, tells both Jack and Jenny lies re-
garding the other’s infidelity, and intercepts and destroys their corre-
spondence. However, Frado is instrumental in arranging for Jack to
relieve and liberate Jenny from his mother’s yoke (113–115). Significantly,
given Frado’s role in this affair, Jack does not rescue her from Mrs. Bell-
mont, although he is well acquainted with the treatment of Frado. Wil-
son implicitly condemns this desertion of Frado by completing the
paragraph that recounts this incident with the following:

Many times would Frado steal up into Jenny’s room, when she knew
she was tortured by her mistress’ malignity, and tell some of her
own encounters with her, and tell her she might “be sure it would
n’t [sic] kill her, for she should have died long before at the same
treatment.” (115; emphasis added)

This speech act not only reveals to Jenny the full extent of Mrs. Bellmont’s
cruelty, but by privileging her experience, Frado negates Jenny’s perceived
trauma and displays her strength in the face of adversity. Instead of sym-
pathizing with Jenny’s plight, as the reader might expect, Wilson empow-
ers Frado, silences Jenny, and denies her pain. Indeed, throughout the text
Jenny’s voice is never heard. Although Jack tells his mother, “Don’t judge,
till you see her” (112), we never “see” Jenny because she does not speak
within the text. This is not to say that Frado is complicit in torturing
Jenny. The very fact that she befriends and helps Jenny negates this idea.
Yet Frado’s strength and endurance of the repeated and intense abuse by
Mrs. Bellmont stands out much more clearly than Jenny’s helplessness.
Although there are few instances within the text where Frado actually
speaks, because Wilson-as-“Our Nig”-as-Frado is the author of the text, the
 TALE-BARING AND DRESSING OUT 49

entire text is one long speech act in which the author’s subject position
empowers her to unmask Mrs. Bellmont and her aberrant conduct in op-
position to the Cult of True Womanhood. 6 Wilson’s speech act takes the
contents and discourse of the domestic sphere, which by nineteenth-
century standards is considered private, and publicizes them, thereby, sub-
jecting her mistress to public censure. Recognizing African American
women writers’ mediation of various discourses, Mae Henderson writes,
“These writers enter simultaneously into familial, or testimonial and pub-
lic, or competitive discourses—discourses that both affirm and challenge
the values and expectations of the reader” (20). Therefore, Wilson’s act
of publicizing the private challenges the reader’s expectations of the do-
mestic sphere. Additionally, with the language of slavery, she disputes the
dichotomy of public and private spheres and demonstrates abusive mis-
tresses’ nonconformity to nineteenth-century gender ideals.
Wilson’s empowered speech act reveals that occurrences in the do-
mestic space are replicated in diverse female slave narratives, both per-
sonally written and oral narratives recorded by amanuenses. Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese’s statement, “The privileged roles and identities of slave-
holding women depended upon the oppression of slave women, and the
slave women knew it” (35), forces the historian and literary critic to ask,
How did the slave woman react to this recognized system of oppression?
If she did resist, in what form did the resistance take shape? The narra-
tives of Sylvia Dubois and Mattie J. Jackson provide reasonable answers to
these questions. Although both narratives were recorded by amanuenses,
they reveal instances of orality that empower them to publicly disclose
their mistresses’ cruelty.7
The narrative of Sylvia Dubois was recorded in 1883 by Dr. C. W.
Larison when Sylvia was said to be 116 years old.8 Sylvia was born into
slavery on New Jersey’s Sourland Mountain sometime between 1768 and
1789. Her mother purchased her and her children’s freedom with a loan
from Dominicus Dubois when Sylvia was only two years old. Unfortu-
nately, when her mother failed to repay the loan, she and her children be-
came Dubois’s slaves. To regain their freedom, she had to seek work
outside of Great Bend, Pennsylvania, where she left her children with Do-
minicus Dubois. Left without her mother’s protection, young Sylvia suf-
fered incredible abuse from her mistress, Mrs. Dubois, who used a variety
of tools to abuse the young girl.
50 SPEAKING POWER

As with other dictated narratives, the authorship of the text is com-

plicated by the roles of the amanuensis and ex-slave. In the case of Sylvia
Dubois’s narrative, authorship is more complex because Larison writes
the narrative following the rules of spelling advocated by the Committee
on the Reform of English Spelling. The purpose of this reform move-
ment was to modify written English so that the written text would reflect
the sound of its oral manifestation. According to Larison, this system of
phonetic spelling conveys Sylvia’s voice and intentions more clearly than
standard English spelling. He asserts,

As mu+ch o + v the ma+tte+r e+nte+ring +} nto. the+ co+mposishu

+n o+ v th+} s bo.k
wa. s go+ te+n fro+ m he+r, +} n å co+loquiål ma+nne+r, +and +as th+} s wa. s pu.t
u+ po+ n pape+r, in short-ha+nd, just +as she spok +} t, +and +as by g+} v+} ng he+r
on wu+ rds +} n the orde+r +and styl +} n wh+} ch she spok the+m, portras
mor o+ v the ca+ra+cte+r, +} nte+l +} ge+nç, +and forç o+ v the heroin tha+n ca+n
po + sibly be g+} ven +} n any u+ the+r wa, I ha+v rite+n the most e+se+nshål parts
+ov +} t, e+xa+ctly +as she related the f +acts to. me. . . . In the na+rat+} v, my
am +} s mor to. sho the ca+ra+cte+r, forç +and sp+} r+} t ov +} nde+pende+nç o+ v
the heroin, tha+n to. mak out å lo+ ng lin o+ v yers; or to. te+l w+} th ho. m
she dwe+lt. To. +ac o+ mpl+} sh th+} s, I mu+ st us thos wu+ rds +and frase+s
pecul+} ǻr he+rself, hw+} ch ǻlon är +adequat to. the+ tǻsk befor me. (3–4)

[As much of the matter entering into the composition of this book
was gotten from her, in a colloquial manner, and as this was put
upon paper, in short-hand, just as she spoke it, and as by giving her
own words in the order and style in which she spoke them, portrays
more of the character, intelligence, and force of the heroine than
can possibly be given in any other way, I have written the most es-
sential parts of it, exactly as she related the facts to me. . . . In the
narrative, my aim is more to show the character, force and spirit of
independence of the heroine, than to make out a long line of years;
or to tell with whom she dwelt. To accomplish this, I must use those
words and phrases peculiar (to) herself, which alone are adequate to
the task before me]. (3–4; translation)9

Larison’s intervention, with the phonetic spelling, stands between Sylvia

and the reader. He insists the narrative was recorded in this manner to
represent Sylvia’s speech and character more fully. However, the awk-
wardness of the spelling contributed to dismissal of the narrative by schol-
 TALE-BARING AND DRESSING OUT 51

ars for many years; thereby, rendering Sylvia mute. Yet the narrative ex-
emplifies Black feminist orality through Sylvia’s unique command of lan-
guage in spite of Larison’s attempt at standardization.
The viciousness of Sylvia Dubois’s mistress, Mrs. Dubois, rivals that of
Mrs. Bellmont. Throughout the narrative Sylvia tells Larison of her mistress’
cruelty. When he asks if Mrs. Dubois was always kind to her, Sylvia replies,

Kind to me? Why, she was the very devil himself. Why she’d level me
with anything she could get hold of—club, stick of wood, tongs, fire-
shovel, knife, axe, hatchet, anything that was handiest—and then she
was so damned quick about it too. I tell you, if I intended to sauce
[sic] her, I made sure to be off always [sic].

Q– Well, did she ever hit you?

A– Yes, often. Once she knocked me till I was so stiff that
she thought I was dead. Once after that, because I was a little
saucy, she leveled me with the fire-shovel, and broke my pate.
She thought I was dead then but I wasn’t. (Larison 64; em-
phasis added).
Sylvia’s identification of Mrs. Dubois as “the very devil himself” recalls
Wilson’s naming of Mrs. Bellmont as a she-devil. However, the associa-
tion with the actual male devil undermines and negates Mrs. Dubois’s po-
sition as an example of modest, pious womanhood. Moreover, her
statement, “if I intended to sauce her, I made sure to be off always,” rep-
resents Sylvia’s continued agency following Mrs. Dubois’s abuse. She
shows that physical abuse did not neutralize resistance or silence her.
Furthermore, Sylvia illustrates that, like Mr. Bellmont, her master
is ineffective in preventing the abuse. Larison asks,

Well, Sylvia, what did your master say about such as was done by
your mistress?

A– Say? Why, he knew how passionate she was. He saw her

kick me in the stomach one day so badly that he interfered. I
was not grown up then; I was too young to stand such. He
didn’t tell her so when I was by, but I have heard him tell her
when they thought I was not listening that she was too severe—
that such work would not do—she’d kill me next.
52 SPEAKING POWER

Q– Well, did his remonstrating with her make her any better?
A– Not a bit—made her worse. Just put the devil in her. And
then, just as soon as he was out of the way, if I was a little
saucy, or a little neglectful, I’d catch hell again. But I fixed her.
I paid her up for all her spunk. I made up my mind that when
I grew up I would do it, and when I had a good chance, when
some of her grand company was around, I fixed her. (64–65)
That Sylvia plans to “[pay] her up for all her spunk . . . when some of her
grand company [is] around” indicates a realization that the most potent
threat to Mrs. Dubois lies in embarrassment or public exposure.
Sylvia describes the events that precipitated her retaliation as follows:

It happened in the barroom. There was some grand folks stopping

there, and she wanted things to look pretty stylish, and so she set
me to scrubbing the barroom. I felt a little glum and didn’t do it to
suit her. She scolded me about it and I sauced her. She struck me
with her hand. Thinks I, it’s a good time now to dress you out, and
damned if I won’t do it. I set down my tools and squared for a fight.
The first whack, I struck her a hell of a blow with my fist. I didn’t
knock her entirely through the panels of the door, but her landing
against the door made a terrible smash, and I hurt her so badly that
all were frightened out of their wits, and I didn’t know myself but
that I’d killed the old devil. (Larison 65; emphasis added)

Like her earlier declaration of resistance, Sylvia’s statement “I felt a little

glum and didn’t do it to suit her” demonstrates purposeful opposition
and is an example of what James C. Scott calls “weapons of the weak.”
Scott describes these forms of resistance as “the ordinary weapons of rel-
atively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance,
pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth” (29).
According to him, these weapons “require little or no coordination or
planning; they often represent a form of individual self-help; and they typ-
ically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite
norms” (29). Yet Scott’s description fails to account for the premeditated
resistance Dubois’s narrative reveals. While Sylvia’s opposition is not a
formal organized revolt, her agency demonstrates preplanned direct con-
frontation to Mrs. Dubois’s violence and the authority she holds.
 TALE-BARING AND DRESSING OUT 53

This instance proves unprecedented for two reasons. First, Mrs.

Dubois strikes Sylvia with her hand. Mrs. Dubois’s use of objects for in-
struments of torture heightens the violence but depersonalizes the beat-
ings and distances the abuser. However, using her hand removes the
mediating device Scarry discusses and changes the torturer/prisoner re-
lationship. Mrs. Dubois’s hand personalizes the abuse and Sylvia re-
sponds in kind. Second, Sylvia’s expression “to dress you out” implies her
desire to expose and unmask Mrs. Dubois to prove that she is not the del-
icate feminine woman that society would have her to be. Moreover, her
realization of the timing illustrates the need for an audience in order to
publicly humiliate her mistress. Given the location, involving Mrs.
Dubois in a barroom brawl further damages her claim to ladyhood.
When Larison asks Sylvia “What did they do when they saw you
knock your mistress down?” she replies,

Do? Why they were going to take her part, of course. But I just sat
down the slop bucket and straightened up, and smacked my fist at
’em, and told ’em to wade in if they dared and I’d thrash every devil
of ’em, and there wasn’t a damned one that dared to come. (65–66).

Here Sylvia uses orality in order to defend her person. Her challenge to
“wade in if they dared” suggests her recognition that her potential attack-
ers would be cautious of a Black woman that is courageous, or insane,
enough to fight her mistress in public. Furthermore, the fact that this
event takes place in a public space and Sylvia places the slop bucket—
which is undoubtedly part of the private space—between herself and the
crowd symbolizes her mediation of these spheres. I read this act as a cri-
tique of both spheres. It is as if she is throwing their shit (if I may be so in-
delicate) back into their faces. That she is not attacked and is able to
escape indicates the transposed power dynamic with Sylvia as an agent in
the dominant position.
Sylvia Dubois relates her experiences in humorous language that dis-
plays the ability of slave women to view and represent past experiences with
wit and levity. Rather than detract from the seriousness of the situation, this
humorous attitude reinforces their agency and triumph. Through the use
of humor, Dubois controls the construction of the narrative and affects the
reader’s response to it. Although white writers depict humorous situations
54 SPEAKING POWER

involving slave women, they fail to portray humor that solicits readers iden-
tification with slave women. For example, both in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mark Twain’s short story “A True Story,” Aunt
Chloe’s and Aunt Rachel’s language and expressions are often cheerful and
meant to elicit the audience’s laughter. These characters’ dialect and defer-
ence shown to whites reinscribe racial hierarchy and represent Black women
who “know their place.” In her analysis of Aunt Chloe’s speech, Harryette
Mullen contends, “This rendering of a black woman’s speech is not an ex-
ample of a textual representation of orality, but rather an instance of jocu-
lar acquiescence, owing more to the conventions of minstrelsy (whites
caricaturing blacks who are mocking/“marking” whites) than to African
American women’s traditional deployment of sass as verbal self-defense”
(255). In his study of the character Jim in Twain’s The Adventures of Huckle-
berry Finn, Jon Powell identifies Aunt Rachel’s lamentation as the origin of
Twain’s development of Jim (146). Aunt Rachel claims, “I hain’t had no
trouble. An’ no joy” (Twain 582). Powell points to Jim’s reiteration of the
words “trouble” and “joy” as evidence of Twain’s sincere portrayal of Blacks.
He claims, “Why a minstrel parody, a racial stereotype, would be given two
of Aunt Rachel’s most important words, words of interracial admonition di-
rected at Twain himself, remains to be satisfactorily answered” (146). While
he raises questions regarding Jim’s minstrelsy, Powell’s argument does not
consider the possibility of minstrelsy represented by Aunt Rachel. Unfortu-
nately, the absurdity of these depictions ridicule slave women and diminish
their humanity. Contrarily, Dubois’s narrative humor substantiates her au-
thority and celebrates resistance. Her narrative embodies Michele Najilis’s
observation that “being able to laugh at one’s tragedies presupposes the for-
mation of a pretty solid identity.”10 Thus, humorous representations of slave
experience by former slave women demonstrate Black women’s complex
identities and allow readers to laugh with instead of at Black women.
The Story of Mattie J. Jackson also highlights the cruelty of her slave
mistress, Mrs. Lewis. Similar to Dubois’s narrative, Jackson’s story is dic-
tated to an amanuensis through whom she both exposes Mrs. Lewis’s per-
fidy and malevolence and represents her mother’s, Ellen Turner Jackson,
and her own resistance to and triumph over Mrs. Lewis’s cruelty.
In 1866 Jackson, a nonliterate twenty-year-old ex-slave woman, related
her slave experiences to Dr. L. S. Thompson, Jackson’s stepmother. Through
Jackson’s narrative, we see slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, just before the end
 TALE-BARING AND DRESSING OUT 55

of the Civil War. She begins the narrative with a description of her paternal
heritage, and her parents’ marriage and forced separation due to slavery.
Jackson tells of her family’s multiple attempts to escape and eventual recap-
ture. The narrative concentrates on the machinations Jackson and her fam-
ily endure to obtain freedom. Joycelyn Moody identifies this narrative
as written in the tradition of Black women’s spiritual narratives because of
“its inescapable reconstruction of the sins of slavery and the sinners who
executed them” (105). Both Jackson and Thompson assume positions as
authors of the text through discursive means: Thompson as the actual liter-
ate writer, and Jackson through the orality expressed in her critique of slav-
ery and slave mistresses and her projection of a virtuous young woman
striving for self-improvement and personal growth.
Thompson’s authorship is plainly stated on the title page: “Written
and Arranged by Dr. L. S. Thompson (formerly Mrs. Schuyler,) as given
by Mattie.” In addition to the authority Thompson claims through liter-
acy, conveyed with the phrase “written and arranged by,” she assumes
added credibility and authority as a professional with the title of doctor
and use of initials. The formality indicated through the initials is com-
pounded with the parenthetical note “formerly Mrs. Schuyler.” First, the
phrase (printed in small type) is the only indication of Thompson’s gen-
der and, thus, disrupts the reader’s assumption that the author is male.
Second, the title “Mrs.” signifies respectability. The transition from
“Mrs.” to “Dr.” suggests the narrative is produced by an upwardly mobile,
respectable, educated woman who, the reader later learns, is also African
American. Moody contends, “The Story of Mattie J. Jackson is indeed a nar-
rative that ‘tests’ readers’ amenability to accepting the discursive author-
ity of a nineteenth-century black woman” (124).
Jackson’s discursive authority supersedes Thompson in narrative
agency and rhetorical control. Although Jackson cannot write, both she
and Thompson reiterate several times that Jackson can read and has pro-
duced the narrative to finance her continued education. “The narrative
emphasis of The Story is less on the skills Jackson lacks than on those she
virtuously pursues” (Moody 107). The skill of orality Jackson already pos-
sesses sustains the narrative through the episodes of abuse she chooses to
relate and how she relates them. She repeatedly recounts various inci-
dents that exemplify Mrs. Lewis’s severity toward her mother, another
slave girl, and herself. She states,
56 SPEAKING POWER

[Mrs. Lewis] was constantly pulling our ears, snapping us with her
thimble, rapping us on the head and sides of it. It appeared impos-
sible to please her. When we first went to Mr. L’s they had a
cowhide which she used to inflict on a little slave girl she previously
owned, nearly every night. This was done to learn the little girl to
wake early to wait on her children. But my mother was a cook as I
before stated, and was in the habit of roasting meats and toasting
bread. As they stinted us for food my mother roasted the cowhide.
It was rather poor picking, but it was the last cowhide my mother
ever had the opportunity to cook while we remained in his family.
(Thompson, 10)

By depicting Mrs. Lewis’s viciousness and her mother’s subversion of

that cruelty, Jackson confirms Black women’s active opposition to abuse
by slave mistresses and undermines the representation of the delicate
femininity of Southern white women. Also like Dubois, Jackson’s nar-
rative introduces orality through levity and self-determination. The last
statement in this passage conveys Jackson’s audacious confidence as a
result of her mother’s bold act. Jackson, then, learns by her mother’s ex-
ample and her humor dismisses Mrs. Lewis as a viable threat to her sub-
jective consciousness.
Jackson goes on to relate Mrs. Lewis’s inhumane behavior and
hypocrisy toward her slaves. Jackson’s younger brother died as a result
of Mrs. Lewis’s demand that he be kept in a box because the time it
took to attend him interfered with her mother’s household duties. Jack-
son narrates,

The night previous to his death we were aware he could not survive
through the approaching day, but it made no impression on my mis-
tress until she came into the kitchen and saw his life ebbing away,
then she put on a sad countenance for fear of being exposed, and
told my mother to take the child into her room, where he only lived
one hour. (Thompson 12; emphasis added)

Once again, the anxiety of exposure is prevalent for the mistress. How-
ever, instead of precipitating further abuse, as in the cases of Mrs. Bell-
mont and Mrs. Dubois, Mrs. Lewis orders that the child be taken from
the room, and thus, erases the source of her possible guilt.
 TALE-BARING AND DRESSING OUT 57

Similar to Sylvia Dubois, Mattie Jackson performed a physical act

that signaled the end of her acceptance of abuse. Both Dubois’s and Jack-
son’s acts are reminiscent of Frederick Douglass’s fight with Mr. Covey.
Jackson shows her resistance to physical abuse in the proceeding passage:

One evening, after I had attended to my usual duties, and I sup-

posed all was complete, [Mrs. Lewis], in a terrible range [sic], de-
clared I should be punished that night. I did not know the cause,
neither did she. She went immediately and selected a switch. She
placed it in the corner of the room to await the return of her hus-
band at night for him to whip me. As I was not pleased with the
idea of a whipping, I bent the switch in the shape of a W, which is
the first letter of his name. (Thompson 15)

Jackson’s switch bending is a speech act in which she subverts both the
mistress’ and master’s authorities. First, by destroying the switch, the mis-
tress is undermined in her attempt to have Jackson whipped. Then, by
specifically creating the letter W, she signifies that the switch is intended
for Mr. Lewis. Furthermore, Mattie’s recognition of the significance of
the W implies her realization that an inverted W is an M, which is the
first letter of her name; and therefore, indicates the power reversal
involved in her assertion of agency.
These acts are empowering precisely because of the sex-gender system
of the nineteenth-century’s Cult of True Womanhood. White women’s in-
clusion in and threat of expulsion from this ideology allowed African
American women to exploit their (white women’s) behavior for subjective
purposes. Male slaves could not easily employ this tactic because slave mas-
ters were not as threatened by the exposure of their behavior and because
the male gender ideology rested not on delicacy and purity, but on
strength and vitality. Douglass’s 1845 Narrative illustrates this fact when he
tells his master that Mr. Covey has beaten him. His master tells Douglass
that he “must not trouble him with any more stories, or that he would
himself get hold of me” (110). Although the threat of exposure was not as
viable for males, Douglass’s paradigm of literacy equals freedom—which is
explicitly connected to manhood and violence—was not as practical for
female slaves. Therefore, Black women were forced to employ various tac-
tics to protect and defend themselves, including orality.
58 SPEAKING POWER

Interestingly, these three texts all represent slave mistresses abusing

children; they demonstrate adult women speaking for children. Painter’s
discussion of “soul murder” recognizes child abuse as a foundational fac-
tor of adult psychological trauma. For Harriet Wilson, Sylvia Dubois, and
Mattie J. Jackson this child abuse perpetrated by slave mistresses (particu-
larly, in the cases of Frado and young Sylvia) are analogous to abuse by a
mother toward her child. “With slave families constantly subject to dis-
ruption,” Painter explains, “mistresses often functioned as mothers—good
or bad—to their young female slaves” (28). As mothers, then, these mis-
tresses failed in their duties to nurture and protect their children. In high-
lighting this failure, the narratives expose the hypocrisy of Southern slave
women’s gentility and beneficence. The narratives assume support, pro-
tection, and caretaking for African American children as a commonly
held principal, and thus, readers will certainly agree with the condemna-
tion of these slave mistresses. Although Cynthia Davis argues “Few were
the black women who lived to tell of such beatings, and many of those
that did survive were often silenced in the process,” these narratives il-
lustrate that African American women did survive protracted abuse; they
even lived to tell about it (393). These narrative subjects subverted their
mistress’ cruel intentions and prevented their own soul murder through
the empowered orality of narrating their stories.
Many critics question the validity of oral narratives such as Sylvia
Dubois’s and Mattie Jackson’s.11 For example, throughout his introduc-
tion to the Schomburg edition of Dubois’s narrative, Jared Lobdell ques-
tions the historical accuracy of Dubois’s accounts and suggests the text be
considered as mere folklore rather than as a valid historical narrative. He
even doubts her version of the confrontation with Mrs. Dubois because,
according to his research, Mrs. Dubois was pregnant at the time. He in-
sists that “surely she would not have knocked her mistress down if she
had been obviously pregnant” (12). Not only is Lobdell’s disbelief injuri-
ous to Sylvia and the text, but it is disingenuous because he uses the value
judgments of historical analysis and constructs a hierarchical dichotomy
between history and folklore that privileges history based on documenta-
tion. His definition of folklore seems to be stories that are unverifiable,
and so are untrue. However, if we understand folklore as material passed
on without continually referring to a fixed source for confirmation; ma-
terial that is constantly changing to reflect historical, cultural, and indi-
 TALE-BARING AND DRESSING OUT 59

vidual influences—all of which surround its performance—then Sylvia

Dubois’s narrative can be classified as folklore without the negative value
judgment Lobdell applies.
Scholars must recognize the rhetorical strategies employed by these
women when constructing and relating their narratives to the amanuen-
sis; strategies that signify oral resistance by addressing the gender conven-
tions of the day through the African American tradition of “signifyin[g]”
described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his book The Signifying Monkey. For
instance, Lobdell’s assertion that Dubois’s narrative explains how she
“represented herself to [Larison]” denigrates the text (16). However, what
Lobdell fails to recognize and value is the self-construction of the text that
Sylvia relates. This self-representation marks her agency, resistance, and
independence. When we as scholars begin to identify and honor these
rhetorical strategies, then—and only then—we will understand the wider
dimensions of the African American women’s literary tradition; a tradi-
tion rooted in resistance and endurance. James Scott insists,

The history of resistance to slavery in the antebellum U.S. South is

largely a history of foot dragging, false compliance, flight, feigned ig-
norance, sabotage, theft, and not least cultural resistance. These
practices, which rarely if ever called into question the system of slav-
ery as such, nevertheless achieved far more in their unannounced,
limited, and truculent way than in the few heroic and brief armed
uprisings about which so much has been written. (34)

Yet these texts demonstrate that the “weapons of the weak” were indeed
very powerful. I must disagree with Scott and argue that these acts illustrate
challenges to the system of slavery by questioning the gender ideals and the
patriarchal society that created the system. Scott’s reasoning implies a sim-
ple binary in which daily resistance opposes planned organized rebellion
and the two cannot occur simultaneously. The resistance exhibited in these
narratives challenges Scott and attests to the complexity of Black women’s
defiance and opposition. These women were aware of the basic tenets of
the nineteenth-century’s ideology regarding Black and white womanhood
and by relating their stories according to their subjective representations,
they were, ultimately, able to place themselves in the subject position,
reversing Scarry’s power dynamic of torturer and prisoner.
This page intentionally left blank.
 C H A P T E R 3

Strategic Silence
Respectability, Gender, and Protest in
IOLA LEROY and CONTENDING FORCES
/

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the
quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and with-
out suing or special patronage, then and there the whole race enters
with me.” (emphasis added)
—Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South

On Saturday, July 28, 1917, under the early morning summer sun, an
estimated 10,000 African Americans marched down New York City’s
Fifth Avenue in what became known as the Silent Parade. The parade
participants—the men in dark suits and women and children in white—
carried banners questioning American democracy and condemning
lynchers to eternal damnation.1 With only muffled drumbeats for ac-
companiment, the parade proceeded up Fifth Avenue. This event was or-
ganized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) in protest against the East St. Louis, Illinois, race riot
in which 150 Blacks were killed and over $1 million in property de-
stroyed.2 According to David Levering Lewis, the Silent Parade was “the
second impressive sign (after the picketing of [D. W.] Griffith’s film
[Birth of a Nation]) that there existed an aggressive national civil rights or-
ganization representing black people” (539).3
Founded in 1909, the NAACP demonstrated through the Silent Pa-
rade the mentality of many middle-class Blacks at the turn of the century.

61
62 SPEAKING POWER

The Victorian era’s ideals of decorum and dignity did not escape African
Americans. In particular, Blacks striving for economic, educational, and
social equality endeavored to represent themselves as respectable citizens
worthy of American integration. In opposition to the prevailing racist ide-
ology of Black immorality and lack of civility, many African Americans
adopted middle-class bourgeois values. Thus, this silent protest repre-
sented both Black civility and resistance within the context of the politics
of domination at the turn of the century.
In her essay “‘Civilization,’ the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness,
and Ida B. Wells’s Antilynching Campaign (1892–94),” Gail Bederman ob-
serves that the rise of the Victorian middle-class identity demanded indi-
viduals “differentiate themselves from other social elements by stressing
their gentility, respectability and adherence to evangelical Christian values”
(408). These values included not only an accumulation of wealth, material
goods, and education, but extended to essentialist notions of gender pro-
prieties. Among other things, masculinity constituted rationality, courage,
aggressiveness, self-control, and the ability to protect women and children.
Conversely, femininity prescribed spirituality, motherliness, modesty, gen-
tleness, and dedication to the home. These virtues circumscribed the con-
cept of civilization in the Victorian era. Yet, Bederman demonstrates that
this concept depended not only on gender dichotomies, but was intimately
linked to racial hierarchy as well. “In the Darwinist 1890s,” Bederman as-
serts, “‘civilization’ had become a racial concept. Rather than simply mean-
ing ‘the west’ or ‘industrial advanced societies,’ ‘civilization’ denoted a
precise stage in human evolution—the one following the more primitive
stages of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’” (410). “Savage” or nonwhite races were
understood to have minimal or nonexistent gender distinctions. By blur-
ring the demarcation of gender characteristics, white supremacists pro-
nounced nonwhite males unmanly, nonwhite females unfeminine, and
“naturalized white male power by linking male dominance and white su-
premacy to human evolutionary development” (411). Needless to say, the
conflation of racial ideology with “civilization” problematized African
Americans’ adoption of bourgeois values. Nevertheless, middle-class
African Americans chose the accoutrements and behaviors of the hege-
mony while simultaneously protesting racial discrimination and agitating
for civil rights. In this manner, many Blacks held middle-class values with-
out necessarily accepting this raced notion of civilization.
 STRATEGIC SILENCE 63

During the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, thousands

of Blacks attended and matriculated from schools founded by Northern
missionaries after the Civil War. In his controversial study Black Bour-
geoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class, E. Franklin Frazier locates the birth
of Black middle-class values in the educations these schools provided.
Whether focused on industrial or liberal education, these institutions
stressed what Frazier called the “Puritan” values of piety, thrift and re-
spectability (71). Liberal arts institutions produced an elite class of Blacks,
the “Talented Tenth,” that W. E. B. Du Bois later championed. In her
book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist
Church, 1880–1920, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham illustrates that the con-
cept of the Talented Tenth did not begin with W. E. B. Du Bois but grew
out of “northern white [Baptists’ hopes] to transform—albeit indirectly—
the illiterate and impoverished black masses into American citizens who
valued education, industriousness, piety, and refined manners” (25).
Northern white religious organizations, particularly the American Baptist
Home Mission Society’s sponsorship of educational institutions for
African American men and women attest to their level of commitment to
this transformation. Colleges such as Spelman and Morehouse were
founded expressly for the purpose of developing a class of African Amer-
icans that would be leaders of the race. Brooks Higginbotham demon-
strates that white Baptist leaders saw the Talented Tenth not only as a
group that would transform Black masses, but also act as a buffer between
white and Black Americans in the event of racial disturbance. According
to white Baptist leaders, the Talented Tenth would control and restrain
the majority of African Americans through the espousal of white middle-
class values.
Moreover, Talented Tenth females were central because of the belief
in women’s “role in spreading ‘correct’ values throughout black commu-
nities” (28). Through the formation of mission schools, Talented Tenth
females were taught and then themselves disseminated middle-class val-
ues and morals regarding homemaking, hygiene, temperance, and reli-
gious expression, among other things. This instruction produced what
Brooks Higginbotham identifies as “the dialectic between the conserva-
tive and progressive implications of their [Northern Baptists] educational
philosophy” (28). Northern Baptists correctly anticipated that this com-
bination would build a class of assimilated African Americans who in
64 SPEAKING POWER

every respect identified with middle-class white culture. An example of

this dialectic is the Spelman teachers’ endeavor to give Black women a
sound education and simultaneously to instruct them to cease their emo-
tional expressions in religious worship. Spelman students were encour-
aged to work among rural and nonliterate African Americans in order to
disseminate these values.
Female members of this elite class formed secular and religious or-
ganizations for the expressed purpose of “racial uplift.” Paula Giddings’s
groundbreaking text When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women
on Race and Sex in America details the history of the Black women’s club
movement. From its inception in 1896, the National Association of Col-
ored Women (NACW) advanced middle-class values in its efforts to re-
form and uplift the race. In fact, Giddings parallels the NACW to the
General Federation of Women’s Clubs, NACW’s white counterpart.
Giddings contends, “Neither group questioned the superiority of middle-
class values or way of life, or had any romantic notions of the inherent no-
bility of the poor, uneducated masses; education and material progress
were values that Black and White women shared” (95). However, unlike
their white counterparts, Black club women were forced to confront
racist gender ideology that castigated Black women because they were be-
lieved to lack virtue and exhibit “low and animalist urges.”4 Likewise,
Black men were condemned as weak brutes, lacking self-control and lust-
ing after white women. Based on these beliefs, whites propagated what
Ida B. Wells called the “thread-bare lie” as a rationale for lynching
Blacks.5 Indeed, this propaganda became so accepted that by 1894 the
number of Blacks lynched in that year rose to 134 without condemnation
and intervention by U.S. federal or state governments or the mainstream
American public.6
Black women were propelled to defend themselves and the race in
response to this increased racial violence. Giddings asserts, “Black
women activists believed that their efforts were essential for reform and
progress, and that their moral standing was a steady rock upon which the
race could lean” (81). These women concentrated on what Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham calls “the politics of respectability,” which included a dis-
course that “emphasized manners and morals while simultaneously as-
serting traditional forms of protest, such as petitions, boycotts, and verbal
appeals to justice” (187). Consequently, Black “race” women formulated
 STRATEGIC SILENCE 65

a multipurposed activism that aimed to refute racist gender assumptions;

uplift the race through education, economics, and morals; and fight
against lynching and for African American civil rights and women’s suf-
frage. Bettina Aptheker identifies antilynching activism as central to the
struggle for women’s suffrage. She maintains, “It was in their crusade
against lynching, however, that Black women made their most important
and unique contribution to the cause of woman [sic] suffrage” (66). All
the while, this activism was framed by late-Victorian middle-class values.
Turn-of-the-century African American women’s activism took vari-
ous forms, including (a) fund-raising that provided kindergartens and
nurseries for Black children and scholarship loans for women to attend
college; (b) government lobbying to raise Black teachers’ salaries and im-
prove infrastructure in Black communities; and (c) establishing health
care centers that provided medical and dental care and parental educa-
tion for African Americans.7 Additionally, Black women’s activism ex-
hibited itself on an artistic level. From opera singer Marie Selika to
sculptor Meta Warwick Fuller, African American women made their
mark in European cultural productions influenced by African American
experience and culture. Yet, the most widely selected art form Black
women embraced was literature.
Although Harriet Wilson’s novel Our Nig (1859) was the first novel
published by a Black woman and Frances E. W. Harper’s three recently
rediscovered serialized novels Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869–1877), Sowing and
Reaping (1876–1877), and Trial and Triumph (1888–1889) illuminate a
more expansive literary tradition than scholars had previously consid-
ered, the dramatic increase in published fictional works by Black women
at the turn of the century reflects a definite rise in educational and eco-
nomic status for Black women in the post-Reconstruction era.8 The pub-
lication of the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women
Writers series in 1988 made many of these works available to contempo-
rary readers. Its companion series, African American Women Writers,
1910–1940, published by G. K. Hall in 1995, supplies scholars with
heretofore unknown examples of Black women’s self-expression.9 Two of
the most studied works by Black women of this period are Harper’s Iola
Leroy (1892) and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900). These texts
and their authors exemplify the character of African American women’s
activism in this era. These writers use voice and silence strategically to
66 SPEAKING POWER

construct characters with undeniable middle-class values who relate orally

imaginative narratives of slavery. Through orality, and strategic silence as
a component of orality, the texts present morally sound characters that
substantiate Black femininity and masculinity and actively oppose racial
violence and discrimination.
Feminist critics have not generally regarded silence as a weapon for
empowerment. Silence is considered a condition of the powerless, the
unidentified, the objectified. Tillie Olsen’s book Silences incited criticism
that has become a focal point for feminists. Calls to “break silence,” “hear
women’s words,” and find lost “voices” have mandated a disapprobation of
silence. In “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,”
Audre Lorde urges readers to break silence because “[y]our silence will not
protect you” (41). Similarly, womanist author Alice Walker insists, “No per-
son is your friend who demands your silence.”10 Indeed, this book recog-
nizes and celebrates Black women’s voices as tools that affirm identity and
subvert oppression. Yet, this celebration does not entirely negate silence as
an empowering device. For example, in his discussion of religious confes-
sion, Michel Foucault identifies the power the silent listener has over the
confessor, or speaking subject (60–61). In her essay “Between Speech and
Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender,” Susan
Gal maintains that “it appears silence, like any linguistic form, gains differ-
ent meanings and has different material effects within specific institutional
and cultural contexts” (407). Thus, the power of silence lies in its potential
to convey significance within a particular set of circumstances.
Strategic silence may then be the discursive inverse of vocal orality.
Strategic silence resides within contexts of orality. I choose to label this dis-
cursive practice “silent orality.” It is my premise that orality may include
both print language and speech acts that resist and subvert oppression, or
control representations, and substantiate subjectivity. Sociolinguist Adam
Jaworski maintains that “the main common link between speech and si-
lence is that the same interpretive processes apply to someone’s remaining
meaningfully silent in discourse as to their speaking” (3). Thus, strategic si-
lence is the counterpart of vocalized speech and resides in the domain of
orality. Consequently, strategically employed silence is a mute demonstra-
tion that can be used in both affirmation and protest.
Harper’s and Hopkins’s novels possess commonalities found in do-
mestic novels by African American women at the turn of the century.
 STRATEGIC SILENCE 67

They have been criticized for creating mixed-race characters that hold
middle-class ideals of the late-Victorian era. For many critics during the
Black Arts movement, mulatto characters presented racial ambivalence
and lack of commitment to racial struggles. Claudia Tate, however, de-
mands that critics contextualize domestic novels in the “value construc-
tions of their own era” (81). Tate insists,

Insofar as Hopkins and these women writers were concerned, dark-

and white-skinned mulattoes were inclusive parts of the African
American population. . . . [W]hat the black protest writers and the
proponents of the Black Arts movement have disparaged as racial
ambivalence or denial in the mulatto characters of early black liter-
ature, their post-Reconstruction counterparts probably saw as evi-
dence of the altered genetic stock of African Americans, a change
that made them distinctly different from their enslaved African pre-
decessors. (80–81)

Moreover, Hazel Carby contends that “historically the mulatto, as narra-

tive figure, has two primary functions: as a vehicle for an exploration of
the relationship between the races and, at the same time, an expression of
the relationship between the races” (89).11 Thus, read within their proper
cultural context, Black women writers’ use of mulatto characters created
the opportunity to raise the subject of interracial sex. Victorian ideals in-
hibited the discussion of sexual intercourse altogether. Hence, interracial
sex, especially sexual assault, were particularly difficult subjects to address
and still maintain the character’s virtue. Furthermore, although power
and control are now understood as the true motives for rape, for turn-of-
the-century readers, rape was a crime of passion in which desire and
pathology were inextricably linked.12 Because of the acceptance of white
European aesthetics, the physical appearance of the mulatta character fa-
cilitated discussion of white male desire and rape of African American
women. Kate McCullough demonstrates in her essay, “Slavery, Sexuality,
and Genre: Pauline Hopkins and the Representation of Female Desire,”
the mulatto figure’s instrumental function of protest in early African
American women’s novels: “By rewriting the ‘mulatto’ narrative to fore-
ground white male rape rather than African American lust as the source of
miscegenation, Hopkins counters the post-Reconstruction racist, white,
supremacist appropriation of the mulatto figure” (25). In this context of
68 SPEAKING POWER

rape and racial discourse, Harper and Hopkins each explore interracial sex
in similar but unique fashions.
The use of the mulatta illustrates Harper’s attempt to create a char-
acter representative of sexual violence by whites and Black women’s sur-
vival of that violence. Although Iola is not a product of sexual violence,
in slavery she is victimized by white men and experiences “a fate more
cruel than death” but lives to name her abusers and assert her integrity.
In response to Dr. Gresham’s comment that she was “tried and tempted,”
she retorts,

Tried, but not tempted. I was never tempted. I was sold from State
to State as an article of merchandise. I had outrages heaped on me
which might well crimson the cheek of honest womanhood with
shame, but I never fell into the clutches of an owner for whom I did
not feel the utmost loathing and intensest horror. I have heard men
talk glibly of the degradation of the Negro, but there is a vast differ-
ence between abasement of condition and degradation of character.
I was abased, but the men who trampled on me were the degraded
ones. (115; emphasis added)

In opposition to the racial ideology of the day, this passage displays the
African American woman’s capacity for moral integrity and indicts white
men for their sexual violence against Black women. In an age in which
sexuality and the discussion of sexuality by women is deemed improper
and unlady-like, Harper resorts to metaphorical language to depict Iola’s
rape. While Claudia Tate discounts evidence of Iola’s rape, the language
Iola uses to describe her experiences clearly conveys sexual exploitation.13
That her owners “heaped” “outrages” and “trampled” on her suggest vio-
lence and abuse perpetrated against Iola’s person.
Despite cultural suppression of sexual discourse, Harper deftly ad-
dresses Black women’s sexual abuse during slavery by rejecting a lexicon
of desire and temptation. Iola’s assertion that she was “never tempted” re-
futes the desire component of rape and the pathology of African Ameri-
can women as temptresses or morally weak victims. Clearly however, just
because Iola was “never tempted,” the possibility that she was compelled
is not negated. Read within the context of Black women activists’ insis-
tence that Black women’s virtue could not be dismissed in environments
of sexual exploitation, Iola speaks in language that simultaneously con-
 STRATEGIC SILENCE 69

firms her rape and her virtue.14 In fact, in Contending Forces, Hopkins re-
inforces this distinction through Mrs. Willis’s speech. As the leading so-
cial activist in the novel, Mrs. Willis maintains, “I believe that we shall
not be held responsible for wrongs which we have unconsciously commit-
ted, or which we have committed under compulsion. We are virtuous or
non-virtuous only when we have a choice under temptation” (91; empha-
sis in original). Thus, Iola’s declaration marks her as a virtuous woman
both because as an “article of merchandise” she was denied the choice of
chastity and because she exhibits morality and agency in her denuncia-
tion of her abusers.
Iola contradicts racial ideology by exhibiting an identity that is out-
side the limited dictates of white society. She does not represent the sex-
ualized identity mainstream American society ascribed to all Black
women, nor is she defeated and subdued by her victimization. Instead,
she speaks of her oppression and names her oppressors. Her speech act
embodies Patricia Hills Collins’s observation: “By insisting on self-defin-
ition, Black women question not only what has been said about African
American women but the credibility and the intentions of those possess-
ing the power to define. When Black women define ourselves, we clearly
reject the assumption that those in positions granting them the author-
ity to interpret our reality are entitled to do so” (Black Feminist Thought
106–107). Iola asks, “Did not the whole nation consent to our abase-
ment?” (115). With this question, Iola not only rejects America’s author-
ity to define and denigrate Black women, but she holds the nation
responsible for Black women’s abuse.
Like Harper, Hopkins too addresses African American women’s sexual
exploitation in an age of sexual repression, but unlike Harper’s Iola, Hop-
kins’s female characters do not explicitly speak of Black women’s sexual
abuse. Contending Forces uses silent orality to relate sexual violence during
and after slavery and confirm virtuous Black womanhood and Black man-
hood. Verner D. Mitchell reveals Hopkins’s novel promotes a “transforma-
tive vision of race and nation,” and emits a “reverberating call for a
reformed, non-racist nation” (164). From this radical position, Hopkins chal-
lenges racist assumptions of Black women’s sexuality and posits a new para-
digm of marriage that promises a new nation of racial and gender equality.
Contending Forces begins with the tale of the deaths of Charles and
Grace Montfort. Charles Montfort is a slaveholder from Bermuda who
70 SPEAKING POWER

moves to North Carolina to forestall the decrease of his wealth by the

abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. Montfort plans to divest
his slaveholdings in five years and free his slaves. Grace Montfort’s
“creamy” skin causes suspicion and a rumor that she possesses a “black
streak” in her blood (23–24). This rumor, in conjunction with Montfort’s
plan, becomes known by resentful whites in the region who form a vigi-
lante mob to raid the Montfort plantation. This mob is lead by Anson
Pollock, who envies Charles and is sexually obsessed with Grace. Charles
is killed immediately and Grace commits suicide after being whipped by
two vigilantes. Pollock seizes the Montfort children, Charles, Jr. and Jesse,
and Lucy, Grace’s maid, as his property to assuage his unfulfilled posses-
sion of Grace. Having previously been described as Grace’s “foster sister,”
Lucy replaces Grace for both Pollock and the Montfort children. Hopkins
intimates Lucy’s repeated rapes and connects them to the providential
comfort she gives Charles, Jr. and Jesse. “Pollock elected to take Lucy in
the place he had designed for Mrs. Montfort. God’s mysteries are past
man’s understanding; and thus the poor black girl became his instrument
to temper the wind to the shorn lambs” (43; emphasis added). Hazel
Carby argues Hopkins uses Grace’s whipping to represent her rape
through metaphor. Carby maintains that the “replacement of the ‘snaky,
leather thong’ for the phallus was a crude but effective device, and ‘the
blood [which] stood in a pool about her feet’ was the final evidence that
the ‘outrage’ that had been committed was rape” (132). Although the im-
plication of Lucy’s rape is more explicit, Hopkins shrouds it in Lucy’s care
for the children as an act of divine providence. Therefore, even for read-
ers who miss Grace’s metaphorical rape, Lucy’s black body becomes the
text on which is written the history of Black women’s sexual exploitation
and divinely bestowed motherhood. Instead of describing Lucy’s suffer-
ing, Hopkins writes, “Night after night she stole away to the little attic
under the eaves laden with dainties to tempt the appetite of the children”
(43). As opposed to Pollock tempting and stealing Lucy’s body “night
after night”—a description readers might expect—Lucy is the active agent
of resistance and virtue. These representations of rape foreshadow Hop-
kins’s subsequent presentation of Black women’s rape and integrity in
the remainder of the novel.
The balance of the text is set at the end of the nineteenth century
and concerns the Montfort and Pollock descendants. Charles, Jr. and
 STRATEGIC SILENCE 71

Jesse are separated when Charles is sold to an Englishman. Charles

regains his freedom and wealth after the Englishman investigates and
confirms the Montfort tragedy. Jesse Montfort becomes a fugitive slave
while on an errand in New York. He moves to Boston and later to New
Hampshire where he marries the daughter of the Black man who aids
him in avoiding recapture. Jesse Montfort lives as a Black man, and there-
fore, as the novel’s main characters, his grandchildren, Will and Dora
Smith, represent African American New Englanders at the turn of the
twentieth century. “Hopkins appears to argue, rather poignantly via the
initially ‘white’ and subsequently ‘black’ Montforts,” Mitchell contends,
“that racial definitions exist not as innate truths but only within the con-
fines of geography and history” (168). With these generations of Mont-
forts, Hopkins emphasizes the arbitrariness of race and racial definitions.
Rather than privileging lighter-skinned characters, Hopkins—like
Harper—is more concerned with eradicating hierarchical racial concepts
of white supremacy and Black inferiority.
The main plot surrounds Will’s and Dora’s romances with the other
two central characters, Sappho Clark and John P. Langley. Dora is en-
gaged to John, yet unbeknownst to the other characters, John is the
grandchild of Anson Pollock and Lucy. John inherits Pollock’s treachery
and dishonesty. Not only does John collaborate with white politicians to
diffuse the Black community’s protest of lynchings, but his sexual obses-
sion with and subsequent proposition to Sappho causes Dora to dissolve
their engagement. Dora eventually marries Dr. Arthur Lewis, an African
American educator in the Black Belt. While the interrelated history of
their foreparents presents an interesting backdrop for Dora’s and John’s
relationship, Will’s and Sappho’s romance provides the central crisis of
the novel.
Both Will and Sappho seem to possess the conventional features of
fine upstanding man- and womanhood. Will is not only “tall and finely
formed, with features almost perfectly chiseled, and a complexion the
color of an almond shell,” but he is an intellectual with “the natural
chivalry of a generous nature toward the weak and helpless” (54, 102).
While he passionately loves Sappho, his desire is tempered by a gentle-
manly restraint that recognizes Sappho’s “extraordinary moral sensitive-
ness and high intellectual development” (103). Correspondingly, Sappho
is a mulatta from Louisiana whose beauty is “a combination of ‘queen
72 SPEAKING POWER

rose and lily in one’” (65). Sappho supports herself through stenographic
work that she brings home to transcribe on her typewriter. Her beauty is
enhanced by a quiet self-possession that attracts women as well as men.
Indeed, before Will even meets Sappho, Dora forms a relationship with
Sappho that “seemed to fill a long-felt want in her life, and she had from
the first a perfect trust in the beautiful girl” (59). Kate McCullough
points to the significance of Sappho’s name and asserts, “Whether we
read the original Sappho as the forerunner of the modern lesbian or
merely as the leader of a spiritual community of women, Hopkins’ use of
the name to signify friendship, love, and community among women is ex-
plicit” (34). Hopkins inscribes additional meaning through Sappho’s sur-
name, Clark. At the turn of the century in England, typewriting was
deemed acceptable employment for women and the practioners were
sometimes referred to as clerks who performed the job of clerking, or
“clarking.”15 Thus, Clark reinforces the image connoted by her profession
of clerk typist. Even though this work is completed inside the domestic
space, it illustrates Hopkins’s effort to depict a self-sufficient African
American woman who inspires loyalty and trust. We might identify fur-
ther significance in this name when we consider that Sappho Clark is an
alias through which Sappho chooses to rewrite, so to speak, her experi-
ence, and thereby, the experience of all sexually exploited Black women.
Yet for all her striking qualities, Sappho exhibits an unexplained
melancholia from which Will desires to relieve her. Hopkins hints at the
source of Sappho’s despair in the chapter entitled “The Sewing Circle.” In
this chapter the aforementioned Mrs. Willis expounds on the “Woman
Question” and moral virtues. Sappho laments, “So many of us desire purity
and think to have found it, but in a moment of passion, or under pressure
of circumstances which we cannot control, we commit some horrid sin,
and the taint of it sticks and will not leave us, and we grow to loathe our-
selves” (94). Mrs. Willis assures Sappho, “We are not held responsible for
compulsory sin, only for the sin that is pleasant to our thoughts and palat-
able to our appetites” (94). Mrs. Willis presses Sappho to discuss her expe-
riences and relieve her troubled heart. Sappho resists this entreaty and
recontextualizes her concern as worry for a proverbial “friend.” Sappho’s in-
ability to relate her exploitation to this mother figure—indeed Sappho never
personally relates her experience to anyone in the text—demonstrates the
strategic silence Hopkins constructs for her female characters. As a proper
 STRATEGIC SILENCE 73

Victorian lady, Sappho cannot articulate her exploitation because she fears
recriminations and because cultural proprieties dictating proper subjects
for women prohibit her expression.
Nevertheless, the reader does learn the details of Sappho’s abuse in
a distinct and radical manner. Instead of representing Sappho’s experience
through narrative action or the voice of an omniscient narrator, Hopkins
presents Sappho’s abuse in the narrative of Lycurgus “Luke” Sawyer. Luke
recounts his narrative during a meeting called by the American Colored
League, a fictive civil rights advocacy organization, to protest increased
Southern lynchings. To emphasize the need for protest and agitation, Luke
tells two stories that exemplify Southern racial violence. The first narrative
concerns the racial violence perpetrated against Luke’s family in which his
father was lynched, his twin baby brothers were killed and his mother and
sisters were beaten and “otherwise abused . . . so that they died the next
day” (157). Fortunately, Luke escaped the mob and was rescued by Mon-
sieur Beaubean, a wealthy ex-slave freed by his master-father. Luke informs
his audience, “But that’s not the only story I can tell. Here’s another. I will
tell it to you, and you can digest it at your leisure” (157). This statement
implies the next story will be even more horrific than the first. The subse-
quent narrative relates the experience of Monsieur Beaubean’s daughter,
Mabelle. Mabelle was a beautiful child who enjoyed the center of her fam-
ily’s attention. At the age of fourteen, Mabelle is kidnapped and raped by
her father’s white half brother. After three weeks, Beaubean and Luke find
Mabelle, a “poor, ruined, half-crazed” prisoner in a brothel. In response to
Beaubean’s confrontation and accusation, the half brother justifies his ac-
tions. He declares, “[Y]our child is no better than her mother or grand-
mother. What does a woman of mixed blood, or any Negress, for that
matter, know of virtue? It is my belief that they were a direct creation by
God to be the pleasant companions of men of my race” (159). After ex-
pressing his intent to charge his brother in “the Federal courts and appeal
for justice,” a mob fires Beaubean’s home and shoots the inhabitants. For-
tune again smiles on Luke and he escapes with Mabelle in his arms. He de-
livers Mabelle to a convent, where she dies after giving birth to a child of
rape. At this point in the narrative Sappho faints, and the reader and John
Langley correctly surmise that Sappho Clark is in fact Mabelle Beaubean.
Although Sappho fails to articulate her own abuse, by narrating
Sappho’s exploitation via Luke Sawyer’s voice, Hopkins contrasts the
74 SPEAKING POWER

unspoken and spoken in a way that both refutes the master narrative of
Black women’s immorality and substantiates Black man- and woman-
hood. Sappho’s silence, by committing the most ladylike act of fainting,
reinscribes her claim to femininity. Obviously, Luke’s narrative demon-
strates that Sappho’s rape is not caused by her lack of virtue. Yet, his nar-
rative also stands as a vindication of Black women by Black men. If
Victorian manliness demanded men be the protectors of women and
children, then Luke’s defense reinforces Black manhood. Luke compares
the struggle for racial justice to the struggle for American independence.
His conclusive proclamation, “When the grave has closed over me and
my memories, I shall have peace,” echoes American Revolutionary hero
Patrick Henry and illustrates African American men’s commitment to de-
fend the race—and Black women in particular—and fight for Black civil
rights (160). This comparison conveys a sense of patriotism, nobility, and
manliness to African American men, even as it indicts America for not
living up to its ideals. If as Mitchell claims, the novel calls for a reformed
nonracist nation, then Luke’s declaration provides a foundation on
which to build that nation; a nation filled with righteous, courageous
men who recognize their commitment to justice, liberty, and equality.
While Hopkins’s use of silent orality affirms the integrity of Black
womanhood as well as manhood, her technique also contains an implicit
critique of her Black male contemporaries. That a female writer is forced
to construct male characters who protect Black women speaks to the la-
cuna of Black male voices in defense of Black women. Paula Giddings
identifies this criticism as one motive for Black club women’s activism.
Giddings contends, “Many men, they felt, left something to be desired
when it came to seeing their women in the proper light and to protecting
their virtue—literally as well as figuratively” (113). Hopkins’s criticism ef-
fectively protests African American men’s failure to vindicate Black
women’s assaulted dignity. Through virtuous Black male characters who
defend Black women’s honor, Hopkins locates Black men’s responsibility
for supporting Black women without explicitly accusing Black men of
negligence. With this technique, Hopkins could not be accused of foster-
ing divisiveness or “male-bashing.” Therefore, Hopkins’s juxtaposition of
silence and speech is radical not only in the confirmation of African
American morality, but silent orality facilitates her critique of Black men,
and thus, is a radical form of protest of intraracial gender conflict.
 STRATEGIC SILENCE 75

Given Harper’s and Hopkins’s investment in middle-class Victorian

ideals, one might not expect their criticism of these ideals. Yet, while they
privilege middle-class Victorian values, their novels challenge these values
on multiple fronts within the framework of racial uplift. The characters
in Iola Leroy and Contending Forces redefine nineteenth-century gender
and marriage constructs. They represent a sophisticated negotiation of
Victorian definitions of womanhood and marriage with notions of a pro-
gressive modern woman.
Harper’s main female characters, Iola and her sister-in-law Lucille
Delany, exemplify this negotiation. Iola not only breaks the silence of
African American women’s oppression, but she posits different roles for
women that extend beyond the domestic space. She confronts race dis-
crimination in her search for employment in her struggle for self-suffi-
ciency. She tells her uncle, “I have a theory that every woman ought to
know how to earn her own living” (205). At the end of the novel, Iola
marries Dr. Latimer, a Black intellectual, moves back to the South, and
is a Sunday school teacher working beside her husband in racial uplift.
She is not content to limit herself to the maintenance of home and
hearth. Similarly, Lucille Delany, one of the novel’s most intellectual and
politically engaged characters, works with her husband “at the head of a
large and flourishing school. Lucille gives her ripening experience to her
chosen work, to which she [is] too devoted to resign” (280). If, according
to Hazel Carby, “Harper wanted to conclude her novel with the proposi-
tion that the life of two young intellectuals would be based on a mutual
sharing of intellectual interests and a common commitment to the ‘folk’
and the race,” then Harper suggests not only a different role for women,
but also a radical idea of marriage (80). Instead of the traditional mar-
riage that produces biological offspring, these marriages produce morally
and intellectually uplifted racial subjects—subjects whose identities are
formed and shaped by Iola and her family’s examples.
Though Hopkins’s text negotiates traditional and progressive
womanhood more subtly than Harper’s, this negotiation too demon-
strates a powerful critique of marriage and bourgeois values. Unlike
Sappho, Dora Smith claims every aspect of “true womanhood”; she
is submissive, pious, domestic, and pure. Although she is an astute
manager of her mother’s boardinghouse, Dora’s economic indepen-
dence lies in the domestic space. On the surface, Dora is an admirable
76 SPEAKING POWER

character. Her flaws, however, rest in her bourgeois ideals and a will-
ingness to subjugate her identity.
Well before they are engaged, Dora’s eventual husband, Dr. Arthur
Lewis, inculcates his beliefs in her. Arthur is a Booker T. Washington-
esque character who counsels Black accommodation and conciliation for
racial discrimination to gain racial progress and “thinks that women
should be seen and not heard, where politics is under discussion” (76).
Although her brother Will vehemently disagrees with Arthur, Dora poses
no opposition and even reiterates his statements. In a discussion with
Sappho on the merits of Black franchisement, Dora’s remarks are often
prefaced with “Arthur says.” Finally, she concludes the exchange with an
analysis of economics and power. Dora asserts,

I say to you, as Arthur says to me when I tell him what I think of his
system: “If you want honey, you must have money.” I don’t know
anything about politics, as I said before, but my opinion won’t cost
you anything: when we can say that lots of our men are rich as Jews,
there’ll be no question about the franchise, and my idea is that
Arthur’ll be one of the Jews. (76)

The first part of Dora’s statement suggests her prior disagreement with
Arthur. Then she minimizes and dismisses her own beliefs and opinions,
as Arthur most certainly does. Yet the balance of the statement reflects her
affinity with Arthur’s approach to racial progress. Dora equates money
with power and so privileges economic power over political power. Fur-
thermore, her reference to Jewish economic success reflects her acceptance
of superficial stereotypes that belie human complexity. Thus, this accep-
tance signifies Dora’s failure to critically assess the dynamics of race, eco-
nomics, and power. Although Dora believes her “opinion won’t cost you
anything,” through increased disenfranchisement of Blacks—aided by
Washington’s accommodation strategy, which Dora echoes—African
Americans paid the high price of racial injustice and discrimination. The
final state of Dora and Arthur’s marriage suggests Hopkins’s criticism of
their ideals. Following their marriage, Dora’s voice is virtually silenced. As
the wife of the director of a well-endowed industrial school, Dora’s con-
cerns extend no further than her front parlor. She is content in a passion-
less marriage in which her “individuality [is] swallowed up in love for her
 STRATEGIC SILENCE 77

husband and child” (241). This domestic situation implies their political
stance, like Washington’s, is flawed and unfulfilling; it does not foster
change and progress but apathy and stagnation.
By contrast, Will and Sappho’s marriage is a paradigmatic union
based on love, respect, and collective racial uplift. Although Sappho can-
not claim the attributes of “true womanhood,” her “mother-love” marks
her integrity and virtue. After Langley discovers her true identity and
propositions her, Sappho decides to end her engagement to Will and re-
turn to New Orleans to raise her son Alphonse. Initially, Sappho refuses
to acknowledge Alphonse who, as a product of her rape, is a constant re-
minder of her degradation. However, following Langley’s disclosure, she
determines to accept Alphonse as her child and provide enough love to
compensate for her former negligence. She declares, “I will never part
with him again on earth” (211). Motherhood redeems Sappho and com-
pletes her identity. Hopkins writes, “The mother-love chased out all the
anguish that she had felt over his birth. She wondered how she had lived
without him. In this new and holy love that had taken possession of her
soul was the compensation for all she had suffered” (213). In this re-
deemed state, Sappho reunites with Will and enjoys marital harmony.
This harmony is not based on love alone, however; Sappho and Will’s
marriage becomes exemplary through their joyous survival of painful ex-
periences. Hopkins writes, “United by love, chastened by sorrow and self-
sacrifice, he and she planned to work together to bring joy to hearts
crushed by despair” (248). These contrasting marriages represent Hop-
kins’s simultaneous critique of Victorian ideals of gender and marriage
and reconfiguration of these ideals. While Dora and Arthur’s marriage
offers contentment as a result of a dominant/submissive relationship,
Sappho and Will’s marriage offers fulfillment and equality through their
collective social work. The juxtaposition of the two marriages highlights
the power relations and provides an effective device for critique.
Harper and Hopkins collapse the dichotomy between the intellectual
and the folk and, thus, present another challenge to Victorian ideology that
encourages exclusion and privilege. Although the texts center on intellectual
African Americans—the Talented Tenth—Harper and Hopkins include char-
acters that represent the masses of African Americans whom critics call the
“folk.” These folk characters are signaled through the use of dialect. Though
Carby contends, “Harper placed in the mouths of her folk characters a
78 SPEAKING POWER

poorly written dialect that was intended to indicate their illiteracy,” I suggest
the dialect is a form of orality that represents the intelligence, diligence, and
industriousness of the masses of Black people (78).
Through a sign system and coded language, Harper depicts the sub-
versive methods African Americans employed to facilitate communica-
tion in the dominant literate culture. Although slave codes prohibited
teaching slaves to read or write, Harper’s folk characters demonstrate
ways the concept of “literacy” can be redefined. At the beginning of the
text, the folk characters use coded language to pass information about the
Civil War. Later, Aunt Linda, for example, proclaims, “I can’t read de
newspapers, but ole Missus’ face newspaper nuff for me” (9). P. Gabrielle
Foreman insists Aunt Linda’s comment “emphasizes the power of the
read more than an explicit directive to write” (175). This expanded no-
tion of literacy challenges the Enlightenment’s equation of writing with
rational, logical thought. Harper illustrates the folk’s ability to reason that
whites ignore. She writes that “under this apparently careless exterior
there was an undercurrent of thought which escaped the cognizance of
their masters” (9). Harper’s folk characters are examples of Black subjects
in that they modify the dominant culture’s definition of a literate self
and, simultaneously, facilitate Black liberation.
Hopkins’s folk characters too manifest ingenuity and industry in
spite of their former slave status. Although Sarah Ann White’s and Ophe-
lia Davis’s antics provide the novel’s comic relief, their successful laundry
business demonstrates the industrious labor of the Black masses. Addi-
tionally, that the intellectual characters freely associate and commune
with the folk characters suggests Hopkins’s effort not to distance the Tal-
ented Tenth from the masses. The interactions of these characters suggest
Harper’s and Hopkins’s representation of inclusive both/and concepts
that reduce distinctions between folk and intellectual and oral and writ-
ten communities. This inclusive model then contests the Victorian ideals
the novels seem to promote, and therefore redefines these ideals as inclu-
sionary rather than exclusionary. Instead of excluding and dismissing
characters because of their lack of education or economic standing, the
more privileged characters engage socially and professionally with the
folk. These interactions exemplify the authors’ recognition of injustices
and discrimination common to all African Americans, regardless of class.
Recognizing the common experiences of African Americans, these texts
 STRATEGIC SILENCE 79

reflect racial uplift in action and embody the motto of the National
Association of Colored Women: “Lifting as we climb.”
Similar to the challenge to Victorian values through the interaction
of folk and intellectuals, Harper’s and Hopkins’s engagement of fiction
with history and revolutionary historical figures recalls the African Amer-
ican naming tradition discussed in the Introduction and demonstrates
both/and inclusiveness by endowing respectable characters with the
names of radical Black women and men. In what she terms “histotextu-
ality,” Foreman identifies the ways in which Harper radicalizes the text by
encoding characters with names that reflect African American intellectu-
als and activists in the historical moment in which Iola Leroy is written. In
the early 1890s, the dynamic African American journalist Ida B. Wells,
became one of the most widely known antilynching activists in the na-
tion. During Wells’s visit to Harper in Philadelphia in 1892, the offices
of her newspaper, Free Speech, were destroyed and she was threatened with
lynching if she returned to Memphis. She continued to write and travel
throughout the North and the United Kingdom “tell[ing] the world for
the first time the true story of Negro lynchings.”16 She was also commit-
ted to women’s suffrage, attending marches, rallies, and events over the
objections of many Southern white women. Wells’s pen name was Iola.
For readers of Iola Leroy in 1892, Harper’s character Iola was directly as-
sociated with Wells’s activism. According to Bettina Aptheker,

In defending the racial integrity of Black manhood, Wells simulta-

neously affirmed the virtue of Black womanhood and the indepen-
dence of white womanhood. For the dialectics of the lynch
mentality required the dehumanization of Black men (as rapists),
Black women (as prostitutes), and white women (as property whose
honor was to be avenged by the men who possessed them). (62)

As a literary representation of Wells, then, Iola Leroy stands as a model

champion of civil rights and suffrage for all three groups, Black and white
women and Black men. Likewise, the character Lucille Delany summons
up association with Lucy Delaney, whose 1891 autobiography From the
Darkness Cometh the Light details Delaney’s enslavement and struggle for
freedom through legal measures. Delaney gained her freedom through,
and triumphed over, the Southern racist judicial system, the very system
80 SPEAKING POWER

that sustained slavery. Harper’s Delany recites a poem that demands

active resistance to lawlessness and racial violence (251–253). The poem
conveys a militant stance that underscores P. Gabrielle Foreman’s claim
that both Lucille Delany and Lucy Delaney are “spiritual daughters to
Martin Delany, one of the most forceful Black activists of the nineteenth
century” (199). Therefore, in addition to the characters’ respectability, im-
plicit association with these real life revolutionary Black subjects illus-
trates Black women as both refined and radical, virtuous and vehement
resistors of injustice and inequality. Hopkins, too, draws on historical fig-
ures to construct and radicalize characters. Mitchell illustrates that Hop-
kins used the Colored National League and its president, Judge Edward
Garrison Walker, as the model for the fictive American Colored League
and its president, Judge Watson (187). Walker was the son of David
Walker, abolitionist and author of Walker’s Appeal (1829), a pamphlet call-
ing for slave rebellion and prophesizing divine retribution to whites for
slavery. Rather than an insignificant minor character, Watson moves the
text closer to radical antilynching politics aligned with antislavery radicals
of the previous generation.
Just as their foremothers, Louisa Picquet and Sylvia Dubois, em-
ployed orality to confront the Cult of True Womanhood in their narra-
tives, Black women writers at the turn of the century also employed
orality to refute racist ideology in the late-Victorian era. The narrative
strategies of orality used by Harper and Hopkins expedited their negotia-
tion of Victorian ideals and the politics of domination inherent in con-
ceptions of “civilization” by countering these with portrayals of Black
women’s integrity. The explicit orality in the texts served the enterprise of
racial uplift by Black women activists. These texts uplift African Ameri-
cans and protest racial, gender, and cultural discrimination. Further-
more, by her use of strategic silence, Hopkins substantiates not only
Black womanhood, but Black manhood as well. The subtlety of this tech-
nique has been overlooked or dismissed by scholars. Yet, this very subtlety
enhances the text and signals the multivalenced protest of turn-of-the-cen-
tury Black women writers.
 C H A P T E R 4

“Will the circle be unbroken”

(Dis)Locating Love within the Legacy of Slavery in
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD and CORREGIDORA
/

Being Black [is] not enough. It [takes] more than a community of

skin color to make your love come down on you.
—Zora Neale Hurston

Everything said in the beginning must be said better than in the

beginning.
—Gayl Jones, Corregidora

These epigraphs signal the dilemmas experienced by many African Amer-

icans when contemplating participation in heterosexual love relation-
ships with other African Americans. The history of racial oppression
from slavery to the present informs concepts of love, sexuality, and mar-
riage. Although psychologists and sociologists identify the sex/ratio im-
balance and Black male economic constraints as causes for increased rates
of singlehood, separation, and divorce among African Americans, ar-
guably the greater number of Black females to males (because of the high
mortality and incarceration rates of African American men) and limited
economic opportunities are results of racial oppression and the lingering
effects of slavery; or the legacy of slavery.1 This argument reflects Houston
Baker’s notion of the “economics of slavery” in that the history of African
Americans as property begs recognition in any discussion of Black sub-
jectivity and interaction among Blacks.2 While Zora Neale Hurston’s

81
82 SPEAKING POWER

statements suggest her disdain for a narrow essentialized racial solidarity

that fosters love and its attendant emotions (affection, tenderness, desire,
passion, etc.), her statements do not negate the common history of racial
domination that influences the affinity Black men and women hold for
one another. Gayl Jones’s declaration indicates the modification of his-
tory required in order to occasion positive consequences. Therefore, our
understanding of the history of racial oppression and the disruption of
African American families caused by slavery demands modification and
negotiation when we address and attempt to resolve conflicts between
African American males and females in heterosexual love relationships.
To begin this discussion of the legacy of slavery and African American
heterosexual love, I start with Frederick Douglass’s concept of the circle of
slavery to understand how subjective points of location influence praxis
of this legacy in African American lives. In his 1845 Narrative, Douglass
describes the intensity and significance of slave songs and states,

I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude
and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle, so
that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.
They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble
comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they
breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bit-
terest anguish. (57–58)

He goes on to admonish anyone who believes slaves sing because they are
happy and points out that singing relieves sorrow and pain. Given this de-
scription, an individual’s locus of knowledge determines understanding of
slave expressions, particularly the oral traditions. Douglass suggests that
slaves, themselves, being within the circle of slavery—or more importantly
outside the realm of freedom—cannot fully comprehend the utter degra-
dation their expressions convey because they have never experienced the
breadth of freedom. For freeborn descendants of slaves this locus of
knowledge is much more complicated than merely being within or with-
out the circle of slavery. It is this complicated position that the protago-
nists of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gayl
Jones’s novel Corregidora occupy. With these characters, Hurston and Jones
explore the location and dislocation of love within the legacy of slavery
through the main characters’ dislocation vis-à-vis the circle of slavery.
 “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” 83

Hurston and Jones use history, particularly oral history, to reveal

truths or resolutions applicable to the present dilemmas of their characters.
Specifically, I want to focus on the ways in which these authors present
characters that negotiate received oral histories that are both counterhege-
monic and problematic for them in order to facilitate an understanding
and healing of the ruptures in male/female love relationships caused by the
legacy of slavery. This legacy includes, but is not limited to, the impact of
patriarchal gender ideology, domestic abuse, and the truncation of Black fe-
male sexuality. My project echoes Ann duCille’s argument in her book The
Coupling Convention that African American women’s novels critique the
bourgeois model of the traditional marriage plot “to explore not only so-
called more compelling questions of race, racism, and racial identity but
complex questions of sexuality and female subjectivity as well” (4). How-
ever, my argument attempts to pick up where duCille ends and discusses
not only why the “coupling convention” does not work for the protagonists
because of the legacy of slavery, but how they modify the notions of cou-
pling received from their foremothers to create usable, more functional
pasts that promote satisfying present love relationships expressed in forms
of Black oral traditions (particularly, oral history).
The protagonist of Their Eyes, Janie Crawford, confronts the history
imparted orally by her grandmother, Nanny. Janie then develops a past
that is both satisfying to her and usable for others. Although the oral his-
tory is passed down from Nanny who had been caught within the circle
of slavery, Janie is outside the circle and, therefore, must locate her (post-
Emancipation) subjective experience from this point of dislocation.
Janie must contend with the culturally inscribed representations of
women from African American culture that are influenced by the dom-
inant white culture. She then rejects these representations, discovers a
self in opposition to the cultural prescriptions, and proceeds on a quest
of self-fulfillment.
Many critics identify Janie’s development of an independent, self-
defining voice as the ultimate achievement in Their Eyes. Scholars such as
Barbara Johnson and Cheryl Wall recognize that Janie’s self-actualization
is intimately connected to her ability to articulate herself both to Pheoby
and within the larger community.3 Missy Dehn Kubitschek emphasizes
not only Janie’s vocal achievement, but the community’s oral tradition
of storytelling as important to fulfilling Janie’s quest. According to
84 SPEAKING POWER

Kubitschek, “Participation in [storytelling] is also crucial for the individ-

ual’s self-definition since communal traditions define available roles”
(61). While Kubitschek identifies the significance of African American
oral traditions to Black subjectivity, she does not recognize the history of
slavery that informs and limits the “available roles” that Janie must nego-
tiate and redefine.
Although Michael Awkward disregards the power of voice as a com-
ponent of Janie’s fulfillment, he acknowledges the relation of voice to ac-
tion that Their Eyes seems to valorize. He suggests this relation privileges
action over voice through Janie’s strategic silences and the narrative’s con-
flation of Janie, Pheoby, and the narrator’s voices. Awkward admits his
suggestion is contrary to African American culture that, because of the in-
stitutionalized illiteracy of slavery and cultural survivals from African cul-
tures, approbates oral traditions as expressions of communal and
self-definition (18). Consistent with Awkward’s argument, Hurston cre-
ates Janie as a figure that disdains “talk jus’ for talk’s sake” and instead
values acts. In contrast to Awkward’s argument, I contend that while
Janie privileges action over voice, she finds that oral history must be mod-
ified, but heeded, to effect positive change.
Early in the novel, Janie learns Nanny’s definition of the signifier
“wife” when Nanny arranges for Janie to marry Logan Killicks to ensure
Janie’s economic security. With the declaration, “De nigger woman is de
mule uh de world” (14), Nanny voices the history of oppression of many
African American women. As a slave, Nanny experienced sexual ex-
ploitation by her master and physical abuse by her jealous mistress. She
was forced to run away with her newborn daughter, Leafy, and hide in the
swamp until emancipation. While she never married because of her con-
cern for Leafy’s well-being, Nanny worked hard to provide a home and ed-
ucation for Leafy. Janie’s birth is the result of Leafy’s rape by a
schoolteacher. After Leafy abandons her child, Nanny invests in Janie all
of the hopes and desires she held for Leafy. In her concern for Janie’s wel-
fare, Nanny states, “Ah can’t die easy thinkin’ maybe de menfolks white
or black is makin’ a spit cup outa you” (19). Nanny places all of her unre-
alized dreams in Janie and views a life without toil as the goal to which
Janie should aspire.
While Nanny’s aspirations for Janie are counterhegemonic in that
she does not want Janie to occupy the subservient position the dominant
 “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” 85

racist society assigns to Black women as the “mule[s] uh de world,” for

Janie, Nanny’s wishes are problematic because they rest on material cir-
cumstances and the “economics of slavery” rather than the love and af-
fection Janie expects in a marriage. Janie knows that she requires more
than property and economic gratification to substantiate her life.
Moreover, Nanny’s history does not have a space in which African
American men and women exist in compatibility. Both she and her
daughter were raped by white men and, according to her, Black men ex-
ploit Black women just as shamefully as white men. When Janie com-
plains to Nanny that she has no affection for Killicks, Nanny advises her
to allow time to change her mind (23). However, in order for Janie to de-
velop a fulfilling, loving relationship with a man, she must forge an area
in her life that mediates the history received from Nanny and her desire
for “things sweet [with her] marriage” (23). The narrator’s statement, “Fi-
nally, out of Nanny’s talk and her own conjectures she made a sort of
comfort for herself,” illustrates Janie’s initial acceptance of Nanny’s nar-
rative mediated by her own desires through which she develops a tempo-
rary consoling vision of marriage (20).
Unfortunately, Nanny’s lessons are born of pragmatism based on
lived experience circumscribed by the institution of slavery that does not
include a mutually satisfying heterosexual relationship. With this ab-
sence, Janie’s contentment with her marriage is short-lived. Hurston
writes, “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first
dream was dead so she became a woman” (23–24). This statement is sig-
nificant given the narrator’s description of female psychology in the be-
ginning of the text: “Now women forget all those things they don’t want
to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The
dream is the truth” (1). If Janie only becomes a woman after she finds
emptiness in marriage, then her selective memory is at work because she
“forget[s]” the painful history Nanny shares and remembers only the
ecstasy of her gilded fantasy.
Through her experience, Janie learns that—although exploration of
life’s possibilities is essential to self-fulfillment—selective amnesia is detri-
mental to independence and subjectivity. When Janie meets Joe Starks,
she sees the possibilities life with him may offer. However, before she em-
barks on a new life, “Janie pulled back a long time because [Joe] did not
represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far
86 SPEAKING POWER

horizons. He spoke of change and chance. Still she hung back. The mem-
ory of Nanny was still powerful and strong” (28). This passage demon-
strates the conscious decision Janie makes to break out of the confining
subject position of “wife” defined by Nanny and Killicks and to desert the
oral history she’s been taught. That Janie recognizes the “far horizons”
and “change and chance” Joe represents suggests her rejection of the oral
history Nanny presents. Although she feels the weight of this history and
cannot easily disregard it, nevertheless, she can conceive of a different way
of existing than that dictated by her community.
However, that Janie disregards the fact that Joe “did not represent
sun-up and pollen and blooming trees” shows the consequences of com-
promising the self. For when Janie chooses to leave Killicks for Joe, she ex-
periences patriarchal domination by Joe and constrictions and pressures
imposed through the cultural representations surrounding her position
as the “mayor’s wife.” Ann duCille points to how the text addresses self-
compromise in the following way: “Part of what Their Eyes confronts is the
consequences for women of buying the myth, of seeking personal fulfill-
ment in a primal male partner and equating sexual pleasure with mar-
riage” (117). While duCille’s argument is worth noting, I want to
emphasize the consequences of totally disregarding Nanny’s oral history
with its experiential basis and replacing it with the uncertainty of Joe’s
“change and chance.”
Although Nanny’s aspirations for Janie are constructed on an aspect
of bourgeois philosophy that emphasizes privilege and wealth, her expe-
riences during and after slavery indicate the sense of strength and in-
tegrity African American women must hold for themselves to withstand
oppressive circumstances. Nanny’s flight from an impending whipping
because of the mistress’ jealousy, her choice to remain a single mother to
ensure Leafy would not experience abuse at the hands of a stepfather, and
the purchase of a home so that Janie would know stability and security
demonstrate Nanny’s refusal to compromise herself and her position as
a mother/grandmother. Nanny declares, “Ah wanted to preach a great
sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit
for me” (15). That Nanny desires to tell a narrative of instruction about
Black women’s triumphs is a testament to the instruction inherent in her
own oral history. Yet because her society does not contain a space for her
to speak to a public audience, she resolves to relate her personal narrative
 “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” 87

to Janie, an audience of one. Understood in this way this resolution

exemplifies Black feminist orality. In opposition to the restrictions placed
on her, Nanny manages to leave her narrative with Janie (both in her
head and on her person). The narrative is meant to empower Janie so
that she will not suffer as Nanny did. Unfortunately, Janie ignores
Nanny’s history and, thereby, subjects herself to Joe’s domination. It is
not until after Joe’s death and her relationship with Tea Cake that Janie’s
experiences can compare to Nanny’s and she is able to understand and
define herself in opposition to the community’s expectations and live her
life in the manner that most pleases her.
Janie views the love she and Tea Cake share and the work they do as
her life’s fulfillment. The mutual labor between Janie and Tea Cake is a
manifestation of her negotiation of Nanny’s history to create a functional
relationship in her own present. Although Nanny would have Janie liber-
ated from work with “uh prop tuh lean on all [her] bawn days” (22), the
satisfaction found in their joint industry is more fulfilling than what
Janie experienced in either one of her previous marriages. In response to
Tea Cake’s worry that her working demonstrated his inability to provide
for her, Janie contends, “It’s mo’ nicer than settin’ round dese quarters all
day. Clerkin’ in dat store wuz hard, but heah, we ain’t got nothin’ tuh do
but do our work and come home and love” (127). Tea Cake’s concern is
representative of the economic contraints that impede the progress of
many Black heterosexual relationships. In her study of African American
families, Carol Stack finds, “The emptiness and hopelessness of the job
experience for black men and women . . . militate against successful mar-
riage and long-term relationships (108). Yet with Tea Cake, Janie experi-
ences self-fulfillment by doing all the things and going to all the places
she desires. She declares, “Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and
now Ah kin set mah house and live by comparisons” (182). Janie explores
life’s possibilities and measures her fulfillment and subjectivity to those
around her.
As opposed to Nanny’s view that “Dat’s de very prong all us black
women gits hung on. Dis love” (22), Janie is not paralyzed by love. Tea
Cake and Janie’s love is not static but dynamic and unique. In response
to the townspeople’s reaction to her relationship with Tea Cake, Janie re-
marks, “Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes
its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore” (182).
88 SPEAKING POWER

Janie reconfigures the concepts of love she has encountered from Nanny
and her community and experiences a powerful relationship in which she
becomes self-defined and fulfilled.
This self-definition is manifested through her refusal to conform to
community standards of race, class, and gender. Kubitschek identifies
Janie and Tea Cake’s love relationship as a form of the African American
oral tradition of call and response in which Tea Cake and Janie alternate
in their roles of performer and audience (64). This role switching corre-
sponds to their negotiation of traditional gender roles. While Janie works
in the fields with Tea Cake, he helps her prepare meals. Similarly, the dy-
namic nature of love Janie describes parallels her negotiation of history
and tradition. She shapes subject positions such as woman, wife, and
lover into a form that best defines her.
Despite the love Janie finds, she must still recognize and face the
legacy of slavery that informs her life. Both the segregated Jim Crow soci-
ety she and Tea Cake reenter in Palm Beach and the reaction of Tea
Cake’s friends following her acquittal for his death represent the in-
escapable limits placed on African Americans in a racial society. Similarly,
Janie’s experience of domestic abuse by Tea Cake because of the per-
ceived threat to their relationship by Mrs. Turner’s brother is a reflection
of slavery’s legacy in African American life. Although Mrs. Turner’s
brother is Black, Mrs. Turner’s adoration of white features and descrip-
tion of her brother as having “dead straight hair” (136) serve to represent
him as a “white” rival to Tea Cake. This representation recalls white male
sexual exploitation of Black females and Black male powerlessness against
this exploitation during slavery. Thus, Tea Cake’s rage, though misdi-
rected, is a reaction to this powerlessness. This misguided rage, coupled
with patriarchy, produces domestic violence.
The violence Janie experiences results, in part, from the residuum of
the patriarchal slave institution. The sense of ownership and domination
of another human to the point of physical abuse are aspects of slavery
that sustain Black domestic violence. These aspects surface within mar-
riage and mirror the power relations inherent in slavery. Alice Walker
speaks to this phenomenon and contends,

At the root of the denial of easily observable and heavily docu-

mented sexist brutality in the Black community . . . is our deep,
 “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” 89

painful refusal to accept the fact that we are not only descendants of
slaves, but we are also descendants of slave owners. And that just as
we have had to struggle to rid ourselves of slavish behaviors we must
as ruthlessly eradicate any desire to be mistress or “master.”4

Ann duCille comments, “Part of the novel’s force lies in its exploration of
the implications and effects of patriarchal values and male domination
on the lives of black women” (123). While she identifies the significance
of patriarchy on African American women’s existence, duCille fails to rec-
ognize the role the legacy of slavery plays in domination. Not only is pa-
triarchy to blame for domestic violence, but African American women
and men’s relationships function within a larger context of white domi-
nation of Blacks that originated in the institution of slavery.
These love relationships coupled with domestic violence—that Patri-
cia Hill Collins terms the “love and trouble tradition”—are a consequence
of the society’s inclination to view women as possessions and objects. Par-
ticularly, the objectification of Black women, which Collins discusses in
relation to patriarchal gender ideology, is a major component of the rela-
tionship with Tea Cake with which Janie must contend.5 In contrast to
Nanny’s observance that “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world,” Tea
Cake’s friends state that “uh white man and uh nigger woman is de freest
thing on earth” (180). Janie must mediate between these two statements
that reflect the rupture in understanding and loving between Black
women and men caused by slavery and patriarchy. Although Nanny is
critical of the ways Black women are treated, her statement objectifies
Black women as laborers for everyone but themselves, and therefore, the
property of everyone but themselves. The second statement also objecti-
fies Black women, but these men are deluded into thinking that (instead
of being owned by the world) Black women are privileged over Black
men. This idea emerges from the misapprehension that African Ameri-
can women received preferential treatment by white men in slavery. That
the statement is prefaced by the phrase “you know whut dey say” indi-
cates the historical dimensions of this folk belief. However, it ignores the
domestic and sexual abuse Black women experience at the hands of both
Black and white men who regard them as possessions.
Houston Baker asserts that the text is “a commentary on the con-
tinuing necessity for Afro-Americans to observe property relationships
90 SPEAKING POWER

and to negotiate the restrictions sanctioned by the economics of slavery if

they would achieve expressive wholeness” (59). Although Baker is con-
cerned with real or material property, my concentration is on the figura-
tive property relationships between men and women that require
mediation. This is not to say that Hurston presents a comfortable resolu-
tion or acceptance of these relationships. Yet, what she does is delineate
some elements in African American love relationships that need to be ob-
served in order to facilitate understanding, and thus, builds “a founda-
tion for a Black feminist analysis of domestic violence.”6
Finally, Janie’s negotiation of history and subjective experience is ev-
idenced in her storytelling motives that differ from Nanny’s motives.
Nanny tells Janie her history so that Janie will not have to experience the
same kinds of oppression. The lessons from her narrative are experiences
and examples to avoid. Furthermore, Nanny relates her story so that Janie
will understand why she wants Janie to marry Killicks. Thus, Nanny
means to influence Janie’s actions in a manner that pleases Nanny. This
fact is further evidenced in Nanny’s slap to Janie’s face when Janie does
not respond to the arranged marriage to Killicks in a manner that Nanny
thinks appropriate. Kubitschek asserts, “The slap both punishes and
prompts Janie toward the one acceptable response, acquiescence” (66).
Additionally, Nanny’s oral history is singular and static. She insists on
telling her narrative without interruption, change, or revision. That she
forces sixteen-year-old Janie to “set in her lap lak yo’ use tuh” (14) repre-
sents Nanny’s resistance to change, a resistance to Janie’s physical and
personal growth.
Unlike Nanny’s static tale of avoidance, the narrative Janie imparts
to Pheoby is an inspirational model that invites revision. After listening
to Janie’s narrative, Pheoby declares, “Ah done growed ten feet high from
jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie. Ah ain’t satisfied wid mahself no mo’” (182).
Despite the motivation her experience elicits, Janie’s experience is not
without pain. Though in the end Janie resolves her conflicts, I submit her
narrative is a story of trauma in that the pressures, constrictions, and
abuses she experiences are part of the trauma of the legacy of slavery for
an African American woman striving for love and independence. Ac-
cording to Dori Laub’s analysis of narratives of Jewish Holocust survivors,
the relationship between narrator and listener in a testimonial situation
is paramount to the process and flow of witnessing or narrating a story of
 “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” 91

trauma and to healing the testifier. Instead of satisfying the hostile towns-
people’s curiosity, Janie tells her story to an understanding and sympa-
thetic listener. She tells Pheoby that “we been kissin’-friends for twenty
years, so Ah depend on you for a good thought. And Ah’m talking to you
from dat standpoint” (7). Pheoby’s position as “kissin’-friend” mirrors
Janie’s subject position and, thereby, fosters understanding and resolu-
tion to the trauma imposed on Black identities and heterosexual love
caused by the legacy of slavery.
Furthermore, because Janie is not opposed to revision of her narra-
tive and is confident Pheoby will not misrepresent it, she offers a history
that is functional for subsequent listeners. Although she refuses to speak
personally to the Eatonville “porch sitters,” Janie permits Pheoby: “You
can tell ’em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat’s just de same as me ’cause
mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf” (6). While Michael Awkward reads
this action as Hurston’s use of call and response to modify the genre of
the novel by combining Janie and Pheoby’s voices “into a single voice to
communicate a single text” (54), I understand this situation as creating
space for the revision needed to make history usable. Although Janie’s
story influences Pheoby’s actions, she also intends that her story is not
misunderstood by Eatonville even as it allows Pheoby to relate the story
in a manner conducive to Pheoby’s own situation.
Janie’s distrust of the community’s response to her narrative recalls
Robert Stepto’s “discourse of distrust” and demonstrates a form of oral-
ity that combines oral and written traditions to represent Black experi-
ence and identity (195–215). Stepto’s discussion of African American
story writers’/tellers’ distrust of American readers/listeners shows that
the distrust is revealed in the interpretation of the text (200). This dis-
course of distrust is further exhibited in Hurston’s use of “free indirect
discourse” that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes.7 Gates explains the nar-
rator’s use of Black idiom and standard English as free indirect discourse
marks Janie’s developing consciousness and “resolves that implicit ten-
sion between standard English and Black dialect” (The Signifying Monkey
191–192). He defines free indirect discourse as “not the voice of both a
character and a narrator; rather, it is a bivocal utterance that no one
could have spoken, yet which we recognize because of its characteristic
‘speakerliness,’ its paradoxically written manifestation of the aspiration to
the oral” (208). While I agree with Gates’s assertion that Hurston’s free
92 SPEAKING POWER

indirect discourse demonstrates her mediation of standard literary En-

glish and Black vernacular speech, I would go further and suggest the free
indirect discourse is a vehicle that conveys Hurston’s distrust of written
traditions to fully relate Black experience.
Mixing Black vernacular speech in the narrator’s commentary dis-
plays Hurston’s suspicion of standard English to disclose meaning in her
tale. According to Stepto, texts written by African Americans and focus-
ing on storytelling use rhetoric and narrative strategy to indicate the un-
reliability of literate culture to impart knowledge and, thus, readers’
inability to fully understand the text (202–203). Stepto’s argument sug-
gests the need to distinguish inside readers from outside readers.
Hurston’s orality—manifest in free indirect discourse—is arguably a way to
force every reader/listener to hear the text. This technique is also a way
to negotiate the distrust in that she “talks out of both sides of [her] mouth
for those who have two ears.”8 In this way Hurston diffuses narrow de-
finitive meaning in the text and demands readers use their ears as well as
eyes to comprehend the text. Cynthia Ward insists texts by authors from
oral cultures require scholars to listen/read for representations of oral tra-
ditions to understand the texts. She claims the use of oral traditions does
not “seek to construct from the text a unified meaning; rather, it is atten-
tive to the text’s refusal to mean” (89). Therefore, Hurston’s use of free in-
direct discourse does not restrict meaning in Janie’s oral history or her
subjectivity but provides a context through which to explore Black expe-
rience and identity.
Janie’s negotiation of history and subjective experience coupled with
Hurston’s free indirect discourse produces a subject that is self-actualized
and finds resolution in a love relationship that is satisfying to her. Al-
though one can claim Janie’s resolution is problematic in that she retreats
from the community into her world of memories, I submit that she learns
through experience what Nanny may have known implicitly; that is, al-
though the horizon is limitless, there are limits to one’s life and one must
be content at some point. Though early in the text the narrator maintains
that Janie hated Nanny because she “had taken the biggest thing God
ever made, the horizon . . . and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing
that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to
choke her” (85), the text ends with Janie draping her horizon over her
shoulders (184). This action signifies the transformation from rejection to
 “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” 93

negotiation to resolution and fulfills Nanny’s prophecy to Janie, “Wait

awhile, baby. Yo’ mind will change” (23). For instead of the suffocating
reality Janie experiences from Nanny, from her point of dislocation she
locates love and finds a resolution that is less restrictive but still finite.
This negotiation of history to form a usable past represents a form of
“inventing traditions.” Individuals redefine traditions for subjective pur-
poses. Regina Bendix writes, “Traditions are always defined in the pre-
sent, and the actors doing the defining are [concerned with] whether the
manifestation will accomplish for them what they intend it to accom-
plish” (132). Janie’s advice to Pheoby reveals her realization of the need to
experience and formulate tradition subjectively. She declares, “It’s uh
known fact . . . you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo’ papa and yo’
mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things every-
body’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got
tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves” (183). Here Janie acknowledges
Nanny’s narrative alone is insufficient as a directive for living. Though
she privileges lived experience over oral history, her own oral history
serves to motivate Pheoby. Thus, she reconstructs the oral history tradi-
tion by formulating her past into a usable model for Pheoby in opposi-
tion to the usefulness of the past Nanny relates through oral history.
With Janie’s invented tradition, Hurston projects a character that refuses
to conform to societal constructions and lives a life in which love and
happiness are privileged over wealth and materialism.
Like Janie Crawford, Ursa Corregidora, the protagonist in Gayl
Jones’s novel Corregidora, receives oral history that is counterhegemonic
and problematic. However, unlike Janie, Ursa cannot disregard or forget
this history. Ursa’s great-grandmother’s (Great Gram) and grandmother’s
(Gram) reiterations of their experiences under Brazilian slavery and ex-
hortations to make “generations” are intended as a record and indict-
ment of sexual abuse they experienced by their master, Corregidora.
Because Brazilian slaveholders burned records documenting slavery, Ursa
is taught, “The important thing is making generations. They can burn
the papers but they can’t burn conscious, Ursa. And that [sic] what makes
the evidence. And that’s what makes the verdict” (22). On the one hand,
this strategy is ideologically oppositional in its aims to leave “evidence”
for incrimination. Oral history both counters and expands the oppres-
sor’s literary history whose institutional documents would neither relate
94 SPEAKING POWER

slavery’s horrors or slave agency and humanity. On the other hand, this
narrative is stagnant, does not allow modification, and as Amy S. Gott-
fried points out, “The Corregidoras’ agenda severely limits their sexual
identities” (559). From her position outside the circle of slavery, Ursa
must find self-definition that acknowledges family history but moves be-
yond it to create a space for sexuality in order to develop a whole, full love
relationship with a man.
Initially, Ursa’s identity as a sexual being is defined by Great Gram
and Gram’s oft-repeated oral history that Mama and Ursa memorize. The
charge to make “generations” defines sexuality within a framework of the
womb and her ability to bear children. This definition does not include
female sexual agency. Ursa’s assertions, “A woman always waits to be
fucked” (76) and “A man always says I want to fuck, a woman always has
to say I want to get fucked” (89), display her inability to conceive of
female sexual power.
Just as Nanny’s narrative excludes African American men and, thus,
the possibility for mature African American male/female love relation-
ships, so too does the history passed down to Ursa. That the white Por-
tuguese master, Corregidora, fathers both Gram and Mama, and that
Ursa initially knows nothing about her own father omits African Ameri-
can male presence. Moreover, when Black males are present in Corregi-
dora history, they are emasculated victims. For instance, Gram tells the
following story,

There were two alternatives, you either took one or you didn’t. And
if you didn’t you had to suffer the consequences of not taking it.
There was a woman over on the next plantation. The master
shipped her husband out of bed and got in the bed with her and
just as soon as he was getting ready to go in her she cut off his thing
with a razor she had hid under the pillow and he bled to death, and
then the next day they came and got her and her husband. They cut
off her husband’s penis and stuffed it in her mouth, and then they
hanged her. They let him bleed to death. They made her watch and
then they hanged her. (67)

In this account the woman is the active agent and she and the male suffer
the consequences of her actions. Not only is he unable to protect his wife,
but one way to read this incident is to blame her for his castration. This
 “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” 95

reading recalls the statement by Tea Cake’s friends regarding Black

women’s supposed freedom in that the agency exercised by Black women
has at times been wrongly perceived as privilege and a source of Black
men’s emasculation.
This reading sets up an antagonistic relationship between Black men
and women that results from white male hegemony. Again, Collins’s dis-
cussion of Black heterosexual relationships speaks to this discord. She
writes, “Much of the antagonism African American women and men feel
may stem from an unstated resentment toward Eurocentric gender ideol-
ogy and against one another as enforcers of the dichotomous sex roles in-
herent in that ideology” (Black Feminist Thought 185–186). If Eurocentric
gender ideology delineates males as protectors and females as passive vic-
tims, then Black women’s nonreceipt of defense by Black men and the im-
plication of Black men’s victimization because of Black women’s agency
fuels antagonistic relationships.
Additionally, this incident exemplifies the ineffectiveness of slave
marital bonds to protect African American women from transgression by
white men. DuCille’s discussion of the nonlegal status of slave marriages
in the United States sheds light on this Brazilian circumstance. DuCille
contends William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel promotes confidence in the
protective rights of the institution of marriage. She asserts that Brown’s
use of “marriage rites and the right to marry—rather than such ‘manhood
rights’ as suffrage, property ownership, or literacy—function as the pri-
mary signifiers of freedom and humanity” (19). Yet, Gram’s story con-
notes the futility and powerlessness of slave marriages. Thus, instead of
viewing marriage as a union in which one finds love, healing, and refuge,
Ursa allows the white slave master—manifested in her memorized knowl-
edge of Corregidora—and her foremothers’ constant reiteration of that
history to disrupt her marriages and the security she might experience in
these relationships.
Ursa’s acceptance of her foremothers’ oral history is brought to cri-
sis when she has a hysterectomy after her husband, Mutt Thomas, pushes
her down a flight of stairs. Lacking the ability to make “generations,”
Ursa must discover an alternative method to leave “evidence.” Linda
Hutcheon argues that “the past exists for us—now—only as traces on and
in the present. The absent past can only be inferred from circumstantial
evidence” (73). Hutcheon’s argument suggests that the evidence Ursa
96 SPEAKING POWER

wants to leave will have more import for the present than the past. Her
observation “Shit, we’re all consequences of something. Stained with an-
other’s past as well as our own. Their past in my blood” (45) speaks to the
influence of the past on the present and Ursa’s inability to escape the
past. However, she must create room in her narrative of the past for self-
definition and understanding of love relationships.
Ursa finds her alternative method in the Blues. In response to
Mama’s condemnation of the Blues, Ursa declares, “[L]et me give wit-
ness the only way I can” (54). Theorizing the Blues as a way of analyzing
African American texts, Houston Baker identifies the Blues as a cross-
roads that performers use to understand history, oppression, difference,
and multipositionality. “The singer and his production are always at
this intersection,” Baker claims, “this crossing, codifying force, provid-
ing resonance for experience’s multiplicities. Singer and song never ar-
rest transience—fix it in ‘transcendent form’ . . . blues and its sundry
performers offer interpretations of the experiencing of experience” (7).
Using the Blues, Jones illustrates the crossroads Ursa occupies as a
great-granddaughter and granddaughter of slavery, rape, and incest; a
sterilized woman; and someone caught in the anguish of her inability to
develop a full love relationship.
Infused in the tone and melody, Ursa’s Blues relate Corregidora his-
tory. However, the history taught to her is not enough to make her song
complete. Corregidora history must be expanded to include Ursa, both of
her parents, and Great Gram’s agency in her escape from her master. In
his essay “The Uses of the Blues,” James Baldwin describes the Blues as a
craft that allows the artist to distance himself or herself from their pain
and inspires agency. For Baldwin the Blues is “this passionate detach-
ment, this inwardness coupled with outwardness, this ability to know
that, All right, it’s a mess, and you can’t do anything about it . . . so, well,
you have to do something about it” (132). Given Baldwin’s description,
through the Blues Ursa can step outside her trauma to claim Black agency
in the face of systematic injustice. Ursa laments,

They squeezed Corregidora into me, and I sung back in return. I

would have rather sung her memory if I’d had to sing any. What
about my own? . . . Oh, I don’t mean in the words, I wouldn’t
have done that. I mean in the tune, in the whole way I drew out a
 “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” 97

song. In the way my breath moved, in my whole voice. How could

she bear witness to what she’d never lived, and refuse me what she
had lived?” (103)

Ursa’s questions foreground the need to modify the tradition of passing

on slavery’s horrors. Gottfried asserts that Ursa “needs to see herself as a
child born of love rather than rape” in order to be comfortable with her
sexuality and have a satisfying love experience (564–565). More impor-
tantly, she needs to see her parents (including Great Gram) as active
agents in order to comprehend the dimensions of love and what Audre
Lorde calls the “erotic.”
Indeed, when Ursa focuses on Great Gram’s agency, she begins to
understand the connections between the history she is taught and her
own history with Mutt. Ursa contemplates Great Gram’s actions and says,
“I knew it had to be sexual: What is it a woman can do to a man that make
him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking
about her and can’t get her out of his mind the next?” (184). Focusing on
agency, Ursa deduces Great Gram’s act, amplifies the limited definition of
sexuality she has learned, and finds power in the “uses of the erotic” Audre
Lorde describes. Lorde writes, “Recognizing the power of the erotic within
our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our
world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same
weary drama” (“Uses of the Erotic” 59). As opposed to the repressive un-
derstanding of erotic that simply refers to the physicality of sex and sexual
intercourse, Lorde defines the erotic as that which we do that fulfills us
and moves us toward our most perfect selves. This fulfillment and move-
ment is powerful because it frees one to explore change and the self. The
self-fulfillment Ursa discovers in the Blues is erotic orality and empowers
her to contextualize the relationships of her parents and foreparents, and
that of Mutt and herself within the larger frame of the dynamics of race,
gender, and sexuality in slavery. While the erotic can empower one to in-
spire positive change, in the hands of hegemonic forces sexuality can be a
tool of suppression. Collins maintains, “Sexuality becomes a domain of re-
striction and repression when this energy is tied to the larger system of
race, class, and gender oppression” (166). Rather than sexuality that is de-
fined by objectification, subjugation, and violence, Ursa’s erotic Blues lib-
erates her to question and modify historical narratives to make meaning
98 SPEAKING POWER

that moves her toward psychological and emotional wholeness. Ursa real-
izes, “It was like I didn’t know how much was me and Mutt and how much
was Great Gram and Corregidora. . . . But was what Corregidora had
done to her, to them, any worse than what Mutt had done to me, than
what we had done to each other, than what Mama had done to Daddy, or
what he had done to her in return?” (184). She perceives the interrelated-
ness of her and Mutt’s history with that of her foreparents and locates
their love from their dislocated positions outside the circle of slavery. With
what Jones calls “ritualized dialogue,” Ursa sings a duet with Mutt that sig-
nifies their initial steps toward understanding and healing.9
Similar to Janie’s redefinition of oral history and Hurston’s free in-
direct discourse, Ursa’s Blues and Jones’s ritualized dialogue negotiate
traditions to bring about resolution. Through the Blues Ursa masters her
foremothers’ text to create a usable past for her. The Blues is a negotia-
tion tool that allows her to sing the oppression by Corregidora, Great
Gram’s agency, the anguish of her parents’ brief marriage, and her own
sexuality and history. Likewise, ritualized dialogue negotiates language
and allows Jones to represent the give and take of a relationship that cus-
tomary dialogue lacks. In her description of ritualized dialogue, Jones
notes that “sometimes you create a rhythm that people wouldn’t ordinar-
ily use, that they probably wouldn’t use in real talk, although they are say-
ing the words they might ordinarily use. But you change the rhythm of
the talk and response and you change the rhythm between the talk and re-
sponse” (M. Harper 359). Ritualized dialogue parallels call and response
in African American oral traditions in which the rhythm of speech and
response is as important as the content to convey meaning. These nego-
tiations resonate with what Jones calls the “in process” aspect of oral tra-
ditions and reflect the motion and fluidity of Baker’s Blues theorizing.10
Hurston’s and Jones’s negotiations and modifications represent the
constant need to reference, revise, and modify African American history—
particularly oral history—to recognize how the legacy of slavery affects those
outside the circle of slavery. Walter Benjamin writes, “There is no docu-
ment of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also
the manner in which it is transmitted from one owner to another” (256).
Given this pronouncement, Hurston’s and Jones’s characters’ confronta-
tions of the history of the lasting pain and disruption caused by slavery and
 “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” 99

the brutal circumstances in which they learn and negotiate their respective
family histories indicate the effort to both master barbarous documents—
and I consider an oral history text as a type of document—and extract
knowledge that aids in salving slavery’s wounds to the sex/gender relation-
ships African Americans experience. The benefits of revision and negoti-
ation are embodied in the statement with which I began this essay,
“Everything said in the beginning must be said better than in the begin-
ning” (Corregidora 54). Resolution of one’s position outside the circle of
slavery vis-à-vis history and tradition leads to self-definition and self-actual-
ization. These texts demonstrate formulations of usable pasts that, through
negotiation of passed-on histories, generate explanations and understand-
ing of the characters’ present dilemmas.
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 C H A P T E R 5

Black Girls Singing Black Girls’ Songs

Exploring the Wounds of Slavery to
Heal Contemporary Pain in
BELOVED, DESSA ROSE, KINDRED, and THE GILDA STORIES
/

somebody/anybody
sing a black girl’s song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you
but sing her rhythms
carin/struggle/hard times
sing her song of life
she’s been dead so long
closed in silence so long
she doesn’t know the sound
of her own voice
her infinite beauty
she’s half-notes scattered
without rhythm/no tune
sing her sighs
sing her song of possibilities
sing a righteous gospel
let her be born
let her be born
& handled warmly.
—Ntozake Shange

101
102 SPEAKING POWER

This plaintive cry issued in Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem to Broadway

audiences in 1976 became an urgent wail that many contemporary
African American women writers have endeavored to answer.1 The de-
mand for works focused on the experiences of Black women has in-
creased steadily since the late 1970s. Accordingly, Black women writers
have produced what has been identified by literary critics as the Black
Women’s Literary Renaissance that includes a wide variety of genres:
from novels to short stories to poetry to essays to historiographies. Both
this literary movement and the demand for these works emerged in re-
sponse to the rise in political and social consciousness of the 1960s and
1970s concerning race, gender, class, and sexuality.
The Black Arts Movement, the artistic counterpart to many Black
nationalist groups, fueled the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and
was comprised of works by and about African Americans that examined
Black culture within the hegemony of white America. Writers of the
Black Arts Movement criticized American literary and cultural critics and
historians for privileging white Western culture and values and negating
or ignoring African American participation and relevance to American
culture and history. Many artists of this period endeavored to define a
Black Aesthetic that celebrated African American life and culture in all its
various features, from music to cooking to dress to folklore. Additionally,
these artists identified African survivals inherent in African American
culture. LeRoi Jones’s Home: Social Essays and Addison Gayle’s The Black
Aesthetic represent the Black Arts Movement writers’ approaches to liter-
ature, history, and cultural productions.
Unfortunately, the Black Arts Movement, grounded in Black na-
tionalism, often promoted patriarchal values that denied Black women’s
significance to liberation struggle. Black nationalists replicated patriarchal
domination, claims bell hooks, by “equating black liberation with black
men gaining access to male privilege that would enable them to assert
power over black women.”2 Black liberation groups such as the Black Pan-
thers not only often privileged Black male experiences, but demanded
submission and silence from Black women. Black feminist writer and ac-
tivist Toni Cade Bambara rejected this demand and recognized a parallel
between it and slavery. Discussing Black women’s positions within Black
nationalist struggles, Bambara asserts, “She is being assigned an unreal
role of mute servant that supposedly neutralizes the acidic tension that
 BLACK GIRLS SINGING BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS 103

exists between Black men and Black women. She is being encouraged—in
the name of revolution no less—to cultivate ‘virtues’ that if listed would
sound like personality traits of slaves.”3 Bambara’s reference to slavery res-
onates in contemporary writings by Black women.
The Black Women’s Literary Renaissance is a response, in part, to
this failure of the Black Arts Movement. While Black women writers of
this period focus on African American culture, they concentrate on and
celebrate Black women’s experiences and strength in the face of race,
gender, and class oppression. Critic Farah Jasmine Griffin recognizes the
power of contemporary Black women’s writing to affect change and heal-
ing in the lives of readers. Griffin declares, “In addition to its literary
merit and theoretical implications, part of the power of some writing by
black women is its transformative potential for the lives of all of us who
continue to be haunted by the legacy of white supremacy and male pa-
triarchy” (521). Some of the novels written by Black renaissance women
return to the historical moment of slavery to explore the lives of African
American women within the context of overwhelming pain and subju-
gation. In her essay “The Silence and the Song: Toward a Black
Woman’s History through a Language of Her Own,” Barbara Omolade
discusses the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and cites this return
to slavery as a vehicle to investigate suffering resulting from American pa-
triarchal cultural hegemony. Omolade maintains, “Many renaissance
women use slavery as a reference point—the ‘slave within us’ as a present
place of confusion and limitation while emancipation, the ‘laying down
of the world,’ comes from reliance on feelings and passion” (291). Four
novels that represent Black women’s slave experiences are Toni Morri-
son’s Beloved, Sherley Anne Williams’s ‘Dessa Rose, Octavia Butler’s Kin-
dred, and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories. Writing in the late twentieth
century, these writers use African American oral traditions to create
imaginative narratives of slavery that allow contemporary readers to ex-
amine the holocaust of nineteenth-century slave experiences. This ex-
amination fosters understanding and healing of the anguish and pain
caused by Black women’s denied history and subjectivity by twentieth-
century racism, sexism, and classism. My definition of healing is derived
from Farah Jasmine Griffin’s use of the term in her essay “Textual Heal-
ing: Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Con-
temporary Novels of Slavery,” and Athena Vrettos’s metaphorical use in
104 SPEAKING POWER

her essay “Curative Domains: Women, Healing and History in Black

Women’s Narratives.” Griffin uses healing “to suggest the way in which
the body, literally and discursively scarred, ripped, and mutilated, has to
learn to love itself, to function in the world with other bodies and often
in opposition to those persons and things that seek to destroy it” (524).
Unlike Griffin’s emphasis on the body, Vrettos argues Black women
writers use “healing as a metaphor for spiritual power, [that] emphasize[s]
the restorative potential of their own narrative acts. Through represen-
tations of healing, black women writers seek the inspiration and author-
ity to heal, locating in language a new curative domain” (456). For my
purposes, healing involves both the body and the spirit and is facilitated
by exploring the past and oral histories to contextualize, understand,
and inform the self. These novels act as “testimony not merely to record,
but to rethink and, in the act of [their] rethinking, in effect transform
history by bearing literary witness to [slavery].”4 In so doing, they are a
critical element of the healing process for an America that has yet to con-
front and accept the horrors and legacy of slavery in existence in the con-
temporary moment.
These texts exhibit Black feminist orality in multiple forms that
demonstrate the writers’ reliance on African American culture, particu-
larly the Black women’s tradition of passing on history orally, to construct
Black identities and represent experiences. While the narrative features of
each of these novels establish their claims to other writing traditions—that
is, Beloved as a ghost story, Dessa Rose as an adventure tale, Kindred as sci-
ence fiction, and The Gilda Stories as a vampire legend—the structures of
the narratives, relying as they do on Black vernacular and musical prac-
tices, reflect various African American oral traditions that substantiate
Black culture and African American subjects’ abilities to communicate
American historical experiences previously unwritten, untold, and un-
known. Furthermore, the oral histories presented in these texts become
what Athena Vrettos terms “curative domains” where healing takes place
within discursive acts that represent a form of orality. These discursive
acts mark a pattern of resistance. If as the Vietnamese Buddhist monk
Thich Nhat Hahn declares, “The purpose of resistance, here, is to seek
the healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly,” then orality—
manifested in the oral foundations of these novels—is inherently a healing
agent because its purpose is resistance to domination and oppression.5
 BLACK GIRLS SINGING BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS 105

BELOVED: SCATTING A SONG OF PAIN TO HEAL

Many critics identify Toni Morrison’s remarkable ability to weave

African American oral traditions into her storytelling as an outstanding
feature of her work. For example, in their analyses of Morrison’s Song of
Solomon, both Joyce Irene Middleton and Marilyn Sanders Mobley discuss
the oral aspects of the novel. In Beloved Morrison continues her incorpo-
ration of African American oral traditions through the structure of the
narrative and the characters’ experiences. Maggie Sale claims the text’s
“[c]all and response patterns provide a basic model that depends and
thrives upon audience performance and improvisation, which work to-
gether to ensure that the art will be meaningful or functional to the com-
munity” (41). While Sale cites call and response as the basic structure of
the text, Eusebio L. Rodrigues reads Beloved as

an extended Blues performance, controlling the release of these

memories, syncopating the accompanying stories of Sixo, Stamp
Paid and Grandmother Suggs, making rhythms clash, turning beats
into offbeats, and crossbeats, introducing blue notes of loneliness
and injustice and despair, generating, at the end, meanings that hit
. . . listeners in the heart, that region below the intellect where
knowledge deepens into understanding. (153–155)

Peter Capuano finds that the repeated acts of singing by characters in

Beloved “offers [them] the opportunity to express their personal testi-
monies while remaining within the framework of their larger cultural ex-
periences—all without actually speaking of their shame and trauma” (96).
Although these critics’ points are well taken, I further argue Morrison
employs a variety of oral traditions grounded in Black culture that, taken
together, recalls the Jazz singing form of scatting. The piece-by-piece
method Morrison chooses to reveal the experiences of the residents of
124 Bluestone Road simulates the note-by-note—sometimes even broken
and half notes on top of notes—form of scatting that ultimately produces
a complete (and often nonreproducible) melody. Scatting exemplifies the
improvisational nature of Jazz and serves as a vehicle of exegesis through
which Morrison’s text renders multiple dimensions of dehumanization
and degradation Blacks experience. Moreover, within each of these pieces
are oral traditions that stack up, so to speak, to form lyrics that relate a
106 SPEAKING POWER

history of Black, particularly Black women’s, culture and experiences.

These lyrics and scatting form a melody that, in the words of Ntozake
Shange, “sing a Black girl’s song.”
This form of scatting is exemplified in the telling of the history of
the main character, Sethe Suggs. Sethe’s experiences on the plantation
Sweet Home, her escape, and the eventual murder of her child to avoid
recapture is told incrementally in the first part of the text without re-
gard to chronology by various characters, specifically Sethe, Denver,
and Stamp Paid. Although this form of writing is not uncommon, es-
pecially for postmodern writers, the fragmented, disrupted, revisited,
revised method through which Sethe’s narrative is told is representa-
tive of scatting in the Jazz tradition in that understanding her experi-
ence is determined by multiple factors surrounding the narration. In
his analysis of the vocal styles of Jazz performers Billie Holiday and
Betty Carter, William R. Bauer recognizes the significance of the sepa-
rate roles of composer and performers in classical music and insists,
“In the Jazz world, however, no clear boundary separates composer,
arranger, and performer, and thus the song can function as a vehicle
for the performer’s own personal expression” (99–100). Therefore,
with the scatting structure Morrison employs, interpreting Sethe’s his-
tory depends as much on the teller and the situation in which it is
told, as it does on the actual events themselves.
This method of storytelling conveys simultaneously the teller’s
(writer) reluctance to relate and the near impossibility of relating such
horrific experiences and a concern for the listener’s (reader) ability to
comprehend. According to Sale, Morrison uses oral traditions to facili-
tate understanding and acceptance of slave (and former slave) reactions
to the horrors of slavery by contemporary audiences. She writes, “The
text of Beloved functions in a similar way for contemporary readers: as a
textual space in which the horrors of slavery and the sometimes equally
horrific responses to it by the (formerly) enslaved are not simply denied,
or justified, or explained away, but are presented through an empower-
ing use of oral traditions and language so that they become digestible”
(44). Morrison begins this scatting process in what I call Sethe’s “testi-
mony” to Paul D. After he expresses concern about the unusual occur-
rences at 124, Sethe outlines her experience and demands silent
acceptance. She proclaims,
 BLACK GIRLS SINGING BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS 107

I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in be-

tween but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more run-
ning—from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this
earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell
you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me?
It cost too much. Now sit down and eat with us or leave us be. (15)

The tone of finality that Sethe uses here makes this initial testimony act
as an independent, stand-alone melody. The pain and anguish she feels is
evident without a specific blow-by-blow explanation. By itself, this decla-
ration conveys a Blues song that weighs heavily on the soul.
Although at first she refuses to provide details of her experience,
Sethe’s eventual testimony elicits questions whose answers explicate “the
price of the ticket.”6 Implicit in Sethe’s testimony is a warning to examine
carefully and “handle warmly” the events in her life between the acquisi-
tion of the “tree” and the haint in her house in order to understand and
heal her. Paul D begins by asking Sethe to explain what she means by “a
tree on my back.” Sethe’s explanation is reminiscent of Blues lyrics that
repeat the first two lines and reveal the meaning in the third. Her initial
focus on the milk in her breasts that she was determined to deliver to her
baby daughter seems unrelated to the tree. Yet when Paul D reminds her
“[w]e was talking ’bout a tree,” Sethe describes the sexual abuse and beat-
ing she received from Schoolteacher’s nephews. Paul D’s surprise and
shock that she was beaten while pregnant is overshadowed by Sethe’s re-
peated “And they took my milk” (17). For Sethe the theft of her milk
equals an assault on her humanity and identity and is infinitely more rel-
evant than the beating alone. More than sexual assault, this theft doubly
reinscribes the dehumanization Sethe experiences. The ability to provide
sustenance for her child helps establish the bond of the mother–child re-
lationship. The theft of her milk corrupts the relationship between Sethe
and her baby. More than the humiliation caused by Schoolteacher’s mea-
surements, for Sethe, the nephews’ act denies her subjectivity as a human
mother and suggests that she—like a cow or goat—is an animal whose milk
can nourish anyone or anything. Thus, the tree on her back becomes a liv-
ing representation of the pain and dehumanization she experienced.
Just as the tree on her back has roots that have grown deeply into
her body, the pain of degradation and the murderous act of killing her
108 SPEAKING POWER

child is so deeply embedded in Sethe’s sense of self and humanity that no

simple salve will heal her wounds. When the baby spirit reacts violently to
Paul D’s caress of Sethe and the “tree,” his response is equally violent and
drives the spirit from the house. His actions illustrate his effort to love
and heal Sethe the only way he knows how. Unfortunately, Paul D’s com-
passion is only a portion of the antidote needed to heal Sethe. That he
fails to note her emphasis on the theft of her milk demonstrates his in-
ability to fully understand and heal her. Although Paul D’s caress makes
Sethe feel that “the responsibility for her breasts, at last, was in somebody
else’s hands,” he cannot erase the pain of her experience or replace her
stolen self (18). His response reflects traditional masculine traits that ad-
dress the physical surroundings to solve problems rather than attend to
the emotional and psychological circumstances of Sethe’s inner turmoil.
Sethe must find wholeness through another avenue.
In addition to the Blues evocation of Sethe’s testimony, Morrison
uses the tradition of relating history orally across generations to advance
the text and offer a vehicle for insight and reclamation of the self. Sethe
recounts her memories of her childhood and her mother to Denver and
Beloved following Beloved’s often unintelligible questions. Although she
initially finds relating these memories painful, “she found herself wanting
to, liking it. Perhaps it was Beloved’s distance from the events itself, or
her thirst for hearing it—in any case it was an unexpected pleasure” (58).
In one instance Sethe’s oral history triggers her memory of the story told
to her by Nan concerning Sethe’s mother’s slave experiences. Nan insists,

Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe. . . . She threw them
all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the is-
land. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without
names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man.
She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her
arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you, small
girl Sethe. (62)

This oral history serves dual purposes. On one hand, it illustrates Sethe is
a product of a—if not love, at least a mutually accepted—relationship be-
tween her parents. On the other hand, this narrative demonstrates the
practice of infanticide by African slaves. That as an adult this memory in-
duces Sethe’s anger intimates her condemnation of her and her mother’s
 BLACK GIRLS SINGING BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS 109

actions. However, this oral history suggests a practice of infanticide by

slave women as resistance to both rape and the dehumanizing practice of
breeding slaves in which Sethe might begin to understand that her own act
of infanticide was not an isolated act of desperation. Sethe’s anger ac-
knowledges the heinousness of her crime but inhibits her acknowledg-
ment that the inhumanity of slavery caused her and her mother to act
inhumanely. While we have no statistics quantifying slave infanticide, in
her book Ar’n’t I a Woman? Deborah Gray White documents rare but mul-
tiple accounts of slave women killing their children to save them from slav-
ery.7 Armed with this knowledge, Sethe might forgive herself and assuage
her guilt-ridden conscience, and thus possibly begin to heal her wounds.
Similarly, Sethe’s own oral history functions as a reference point for
Denver. Sethe’s escape from Sweet Home and Denver’s subsequent birth
is told largely through Denver’s recollection of Sethe’s storytelling. The
circularity displayed through Denver’s oral transmission of Sethe’s oral re-
count emphasizes the ever-present nature of history and the importance
of passing it on to successive generations. In her lonesome reveries and
again in her efforts to satisfy Beloved’s inquisitiveness, Denver replays, re-
constructs, and revises Sethe’s escape and subsequent interaction with
Amy Denver, the white girl without whose help Sethe would not have sur-
vived. Denver revels in telling this story “to construct out of the strings
she had heard all her life a net to hold Beloved” (76). Denver, then, be-
comes the historian who constructs one more melody of Sethe’s (and her)
narrative. Shoshana Felman defines narrative as “verbal acts consisting of
someone telling someone else that something happened” (“Camus’ The
Plague” 93). Felman observes, “That ‘something happened’ in itself is his-
tory; that ‘someone is telling someone else that something happened’ is
narrative. If narrative is basically a verbal act that functions as a historio-
graphical report, history is, parallelly but conversely, the establishment of
the facts of the past through their narrativization” (93). By establishing
the past through this oral history, Denver not only accounts for Sethe’s
experiences, she provides a foundation for her identity as well. Morrison
writes, “This was the part of the story she loved. She was coming to it
now, and she loved it because it was all about herself; but she hated it too
because it made her feel like a bill was owing somewhere and she, Denver,
had to pay it. But who she owed or what to pay it with eluded her” (77).
Just as Sethe’s mother’s oral history has multivalent importance for
110 SPEAKING POWER

Sethe, likewise Sethe’s oral history illuminates the complexity of Denver’s

character and her role in this cross-generational oral history.
While telling this story affirms her existence, it simultaneously con-
firms her obligation to honor, through storytelling, the struggle of those
who came before her. In recognizing and honoring this history, Denver
bears witness, and so begins an essential part of the healing process. Ac-
cording to Felman, “To bear witness is to take responsibility for truth. . . .
To testify is thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to com-
mit the narrative, to others: to take responsibility—in speech—for history or
for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes
beyond the personal, in having general (nonpersonal) validity and conse-
quences” (“The Return of the Voice” 204).8 As Denver bears witness both
she and the reader take responsibility for validating and recognizing the
history in the narrative. This recognition and validation are the essential
impetus for progress beyond the pain of history. Indeed, only the memory
of the oral histories related by Sethe and Baby Suggs’s, Denver’s grand-
mother, encourage and compel Denver to venture out of 124 and into the
community to solicit food and work. When Denver hesitates to leave 124,
the voice of Baby Suggs’s spirit insists, “You mean I never told you nothing
about Carolina? About your daddy? You don’t remember nothing about
how come I walk the way I do and about your mother’s feet, not to speak
of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can’t walk down the
steps? My Jesus my” (244). This passage substantiates the argument for
passing on oral history. For only through reflecting on these oral histories
does Denver gain the courage to rescue Sethe from Beloved’s destructive
power and begin to repay her “debt.”
These oral histories place Beloved within the tradition of Black
women’s writing that relies on the oral histories of foremothers to inform
characters’ identities, determine actions, and affect healing. Despite Sethe’s
admonition that Denver avoid “rememory” (36) and the seeming insistence
in the last chapter that “[t]his is not a story to pass on” (275), Beloved
demonstrates the importance of remembering and passing on experiences
orally to change and heal succeeding generations. Although Sethe’s trau-
matic “rememories” force her to avoid the past, the text illustrates that his-
tory is ever-present and cannot be evaded. In fact, I understand the
statement, “this is not a story to pass on,” as an urgent warning not to pass
on or dismiss and ignore this history. Certainly these are not acts to pass
 BLACK GIRLS SINGING BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS 111

on, or perpetuate. However, these are stories to pass down to successive gen-
erations, to recognize as history, and potentially, to foster healing for those
of us directly impacted by this history. Additionally, they have the poten-
tial to elicit empathy from those who have not had to confront these expe-
riences but nevertheless must understand individuals caught in the nexus
of racial, gender, and class oppression. The scatting form of storytelling
Morrison employs produces a narrative that both blunts some of the
trauma and emphasizes the horror of the slave experience through its in-
cremental form. In this manner, readers hear these stories as short melodies
of pain and suffering that form a longer song of struggle and survival.

DESSA ROSE: SIGNIFYING A SONG OF

HISTORY AND SELF-DEFINITION

Like Beloved, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose exhibits the uses of
orality in narrative structure and content to promote healing for both
characters and readers. While Beloved’s structure resembles scatting notes,
the tradition of trickster tales in African American folklore informs the
structure of Dessa Rose. In the introduction to his collection of Black folk-
tales, Afro-American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World,
Roger D. Abrahams finds distrust of representations by others a funda-
mental element of the worldview represented in African American trick-
ster folklore. Abrahams contends characters of African American
folktales demonstrate this distrust and confront misrepresentations
through the practice of signifying that permits a degree of control over
representations of self and circumstances.9 According to Abrahams,
African Americans use signifying “not to prevent being talked about but
to control as much as possible what is being said about you, to control
your name as fully as possible, often by making choices about whom you
leak information to and under what conditions you hide it” (8).
Williams’s Dessa Rose clearly confronts misrepresentations of African
Americans. Yet, not only does resistance to misrepresentations take place
within the characters’ dialogue, but the structure of the text is a form of
the African American tradition of signifying that establishes Dessa as the
author of her narrative whose version is at variance with and often oppo-
sitional to the interpretations offered by the white male and female,
Adam Nehemiah and Rufel, who attempt to “read” her.
112 SPEAKING POWER

The body of the text is divided into three parts—the darky, narrated
from Adam Nehemiah’s point of view; the wench, from Rufel’s perspec-
tive; and the Negress, in first person from Dessa—with the third part sig-
nifying upon its predecessors. The titles of the first and second parts
indicate how Dessa is a defined object by Nehemiah and Rufel, respec-
tively. As “the darky,” Dessa is offensively defined by race alone. Rufel’s ap-
pellation of “the wench” defines Dessa by gender, class, and—as wenches
are thought to be wanton and promiscuous—sexuality. Dessa’s first-person
narrative in the final part is exemplified in the title “the Negress.” It is sim-
ply a narrative of a Black woman, defined by race and gender without
pejorative designations to her sexuality, class, or race. This signifying struc-
ture is an overarching motif significant to understanding the novel.
Williams’s text suggests recorded history of American slavery—written
largely by white males—both objectifies Black women and ignores them as
historical actors with agency and humanity.10 The novel demands revised
histories, including those recorded by Black women, that account for
African American and women’s experiences and recognize that historiog-
raphy is a subjective practice.
The first section demonstrates how traditionally historiographers
have written American slavery histories that substantiate the historian’s
agenda. Nehemiah’s questions to Dessa about her participation in the
slave uprising are meant to elicit material for a book he is writing on slave
revolts. He ignores any pain, physical or emotional, she might be feeling
and dismisses her advanced pregnancy as a reason to attend to her com-
fort and care. Unfortunately for Nehemiah, Dessa’s responses do not con-
cern the uprising but are her recollections of the love she shared with her
husband Kaine, his death, and her violent reaction. “These moments,”
according to Farah Jasmine Griffin, “of remembered touching, pleasure,
affirmation, playfulness and laughter are not in and of themselves acts of
resistance, but they are acts of nurturing and sustenance that become re-
sources for resistance” (529). Moreover, these “resources for resistance”
become tools for healing not only Dessa’s psychological wounds, but, as
part of her oral history, the loving relationship she shared with Kaine—
combined with their mutual resistance to hegemony—are behavior mod-
els for descendants to emulate and, thus, heal selves disfigured by racial,
gender, and class injustices that are the legacy of slavery.
 BLACK GIRLS SINGING BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS 113

Yet, Dessa’s experiences are not perceived by Nehemiah as relevant

to the “official” history Nehemiah is writing. Because he is alternately
bored, frustrated, and enthralled by Dessa’s narration, Nehemiah does
not connect these events with the coffle revolt and so fails to record
Dessa’s story immediately but “decipher[s] the darky’s account from his
hastily scratched notes and he reconstruct[s] it in his journal as though he
remembered it word for word” (7). Thus, his representation is hardly un-
biased. The result is his construction of a one-dimensional image of
Dessa that is devoid of humanity and informed by his ideological beliefs.
We see this image in his description of Dessa—“Dark complexed. Spare
built. Shows the white of her eyes”—given to the sheriff to prove her iden-
tity as the escaped slave woman he has hunted for months (169). The
sheriff’s response, “Nemi, that sound like about twenty negroes I knows
of personally,” demonstrates Nehemiah’s inability to identify conclu-
sively, and thus, know Dessa.
In the second section of the text, Rufel too fails to receive a first-
hand account of Dessa’s past from Dessa. In fact the only personal in-
formation Dessa ever offers Rufel comes on the heels of Dessa’s effort
to destabilize Rufel’s possessive ownership of the person she called
Mammy. Following Rufel’s nostalgic reminiscences of her life with her
servant Dorcas (Mammy), Dessa initially confuses the identities of
Rufel’s “Mammy” and Dessa’s own mother. Nevertheless, even after
Dessa realizes the mistake, she challenges Rufel’s knowledge of and re-
lation to “Mammy.” She chides, “‘Mammy’ ain’t nobody name, not they
real one. . . . You don’t even not know ‘mammy’s’ name. Mammy have
a name, have children” (87). In the absence of Rufel’s knowledge, Dessa
recites a litany of her “mammy’s” children’s names and personal histo-
ries “[r]emembering the names now the way mammy used to tell them,
lest they forget, she would say; lest her poor, lost children die to living
memory as they had in her world” (87). Although Dessa’s recital assures
their remembrance for her, Rufel’s flight from the room truncates the
possibility of her knowing Dessa through Dessa. Her curiosity concern-
ing Dessa’s life is satisfied by Harker and Nathan, not by Dessa. These
acts suggest it is necessary for African American women to represent
history to ensure Black identities and experience are not dismissed or
ignored. In her essay “Negotiating between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery
114 SPEAKING POWER

after Freedom—Dessa Rose,” Deborah McDowell argues, “Dessa’s refusal

to confess the intimate details of her life to either Nehemiah or Rufel is
both an act of resistance (she is the repository of her own story) and a
means of containing her pain by forgetting the past” (155). Without
wholly disputing McDowell, I assert the third part of the novel demon-
strates Dessa’s reticence is an act of signifying on the first two parts—in
the form described by Abrahams—that thwarts Nehemiah, maintains
distance between herself and Rufel, and contests the “master’s” author-
ity to define and name her.
Unlike the preceding sections, the third section is narrated in the
first person by Dessa in the vernacular. Dessa’s account illustrates both
agency and uncertainty that together constitute her identity as a complex
individual worthy of consideration. Dessa’s trickster behaviors are illumi-
nated when she is identified by Nehemiah and held pending a physical ex-
amination to confirm the presence of scars on her hips and thighs. Dessa
recalls the interactions with Nehemiah before her final escape. She admits,
“I’d had to say something to get out that cellar; now, I didn’t know what
all I had said. Just about Kaine, I told myself, just about Master busting in
his head with that shovel” (171). Certainly then Dessa’s response to Ne-
hemiah’s interrogation was not merely to escape her painful past but for
immediate relief from the depressing scene of the cellar. However, her un-
certainty reveals her multidimensionality. “But I was scared I’d talked
more than that, had to be more than that. Else why this white man track
me down like he owned me, like a bloodhound on my trail?” (171). Simi-
larly, Dessa acknowledges purposeful efforts to alienate Rufel when she is
informed of the outrageous charges against Dessa. Dessa concedes,

I had done some things to make her think the worst of me. I
guessed she was membering that, too. And she knowed about my
scars, about the coffle, something about how the white folks done
me; Nathan had told her. But these things I’d never spoke about to
her. If one thing was true, I knowed she must be wondering what
else was, too. (174)

Because of her intentional antagonism and neglect to discuss her past,

Dessa fears Rufel does not “know” her, and that Rufel—believing Ne-
hemiah’s misrepresentations—will abandon her. Consequently, Dessa’s
 BLACK GIRLS SINGING BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS 115

agency and later unsettling doubts substantiate her complexity vis-à-vis

the perceptions of Nehemiah and Rufel in the preceding sections.
Furthermore, this section signifies particularly on the first section
by contesting both Nehemiah’s authority to write history and the ac-
tual history he writes. In her essay “Everybody Knows Her Name: The
Recovery of the Past in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose,” Mary
Kemp Davis discusses the origins of Adam Nehemiah’s name and as-
serts that “it is no accident that Adam Nehemiah . . . bears the name
of that archetypal namer, Adam, whose ‘first recorded activity’ was the
giving of names” (547). As the original namer, Nehemiah’s text repre-
sents the master narrative. However, his text is a fallacy because it is re-
constructed and written “as though he remembered it word for word”
(7). With Nehemiah as original namer, Williams suggests the unrelia-
bility of traditional historiography. Dessa’s confession regarding the ac-
curacy of her account stands in opposition to Nehemiah’s text. She
confesses, “This not exactly what he say, you understand; what none of
them said. I can’t put my words together like they did. But I under-
stood right on, now; wasn’t nothing wrong with my understanding.
And this what Nemi meant; I was something so terrible I wasn’t even
human” (173). While Nehemiah boasts, “I got her down here in my
book,” Dessa’s recount demonstrates a history that, though not defin-
itive, at least contains honesty in perception and mediation (176). She
recognizes the subjective element of relating history. McDowell main-
tains, “Dessa’s story is mediated, largely by the operations of memory,
but the suggestion is that, by virtue of her social and material circum-
stances, her version of her story must be seen as more reliable than Ne-
hemiah’s could ever be” (156). Thus, even though in the novel’s
epilogue we find nonliterate Dessa relating her history to a grandchild
who writes it down and “say[s] it back,” Dessa’s oral history holds au-
thority to represent and substantiate Black subjectivity (181).11 The text
does not privilege writing over oral communication. Instead, the trans-
formation from oral to written narrative is for posterity’s purposes
only, not to certify its authority. Despite her mother’s belief, “Note
ain’t never got a nigga nothing but trouble” (54), noting (or writing)
Dessa’s history heals successive generations by informing them that
Black ancestors “have paid for [their] children’s place in the world
again, and again” (181).
116 SPEAKING POWER

OCTAVIA BUTLER AND JEWELLE GOMEZ:

ANTIDOTE—RECOGNIZING THE FLUIDITY
OF HISTORY THROUGH ORAL TRADITIONS

Like Beloved and Dessa Rose, Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Jewelle
Gomez’s The Gilda Stories examine the wounds caused by slavery and posit
strategies for healing contemporary pain. Unlike Beloved and Dessa Rose,
these texts present more overt references to the interconnection between
slavery in the nineteenth century and race, gender, and class oppression
in late twentieth-century America. Butler’s and Gomez’s explicit empha-
sis on the links between the past and the present suggests contemporary
healing is only possible when we recognize history as a fluid substance
that binds human experience through ages regardless of race, gender,
class, or sexuality. These texts evoke the African American oral traditions
of call and response and the ring shout in structure and content, and
thus, actualize Black feminist orality.
In Kindred the plot itself affects the call and response form. The pro-
tagonist, Dana—a Black woman who lives in Los Angeles in 1976—is
transported through time on a number of occasions to a plantation in Mary-
land in the early nineteenth century. Dana’s time travel experiences are in-
duced by the need to save her slaveholding ancestor, Rufus Weylin, in life-
threatening circumstances. Conversely, she travels back to 1976 when her
own life is in danger. Dana must ensure Rufus’s safety until he fathers Hagar,
Dana’s several times great-grandmother. In his introduction to the Black
Women Writers edition of Kindred, Robert Crossley compares the method
of time travel in Kindred to the vehicle featured in H. G. Wells’s science fic-
tion classic The Time Machine. Crossley maintains though Wells used the
time travel vehicle as proof of the fantastic journey, “[a]n irresistible psy-
chohistorical force, not a feat of engineering, motivates Butler’s plot” (x).
This reciprocal time travel is representative of call and response and grounds
this science fiction text in African American culture. Call and response es-
tablishes a relationship between the caller (Rufus) and the responder (Dana).
Butler’s work reinforces the conjoined experiences of nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century Americans. Dana mediates coexisting time continuums that
are dependent on one another. That Dana is forced to respond to Rufus’s
“call” for help demonstrates their mutual dependence. The call and re-
sponse travel that abruptly interrupts Dana’s twentieth-century life mirrors
 BLACK GIRLS SINGING BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS 117

the trauma of the Middle Passage kidnapped Africans experienced. “In her
experience of being kidnapped in time and space,” Crossley asserts, “Dana
recapitulates the dreadful, disorienting, involuntary voyage of her ancestors”
(xi). In this manner call and response affirms the fluidity of history and the
interdependence of historical actors over time.
In addition to using call and response, Butler emphasizes the signif-
icance of orality by incorporating information from published narratives
written by actual ex-slaves. For example, several times Dana mentions the
texts she has read as reference points for the scenes she witnesses. How-
ever, Butler illustrates the insufficiency of writing and visual media to rep-
resent slave experiences. Rather, Kindred suggests that stimulation of all
five senses, particularly the aural sense, is imperative to relate the terror
and injustice of slavery. In her journey into the past, Dana witnesses a
slave’s beating and laments,

I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry,
every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing,
straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on. My
stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and
keep quiet. . . . I had seen people beaten on television and in the
movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their
backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain
nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying,
shamed before their families and themselves. (36)

As opposed to written and film representations of history, Dana’s experi-

ences and the oral histories she learns rouse multiple senses that produce
a greater understanding of slavery and its painful legacy. Smelling, seeing,
and, particularly, hearing the reality of slavery are essential to Dana rec-
ognizing that written and filmed historical representations of slavery are
static and never fully convey slave experience. In this position, Dana ex-
periences living history that impacts her body as well as her mind. In-
deed, the very wounds she suffers each time she returns to the twentieth
century are metaphorical wounds of slavery and stand as physical evi-
dence of the embeddedness of history in the contemporary moment. Just
as Dana is left permanently maimed when her arm is literally ripped from
her shoulder in her final return, the history of slavery has permanently
marked African American selves.
118 SPEAKING POWER

Through time travel Dana discovers African American humanity and

subjectivity during slavery. With these experiences she gains understand-
ing and appreciation for the endurance and minute efforts of resistance
slaves mounted in the face of insurmountable obstacles. These lessons are
most glaringly displayed in her perception of Sarah, the cook. Dana ini-
tially scorns Sarah for submitting to slavery without apparent resistance.
Describing Sarah, Dana observes, “She had done the safe thing—had ac-
cepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman
who might have been called ‘mammy’ in some other household. She was
the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant
nineteen sixties. . . . I looked down on her myself for a while” (145). After
she herself experiences punishment for attempting to escape, witnesses the
brutal treatment other slaves receive, and hears the oral histories of Sarah,
Luke, and Alice, Dana learns what slaves like Sarah already know, specifi-
cally, the price of survival in an environment indifferent to Black life.
When the field hands mistakenly accuse Dana of accepting Rufus as her
lover, Dana points out the submissions slave life sometimes necessitates.
She redefines the word “let” as a form of resistance to death and destruc-
tion. She asserts, “‘Some folks’ let Fowler drive them into the fields every
day [sic] and work them like mules. . . . Let him! They do it to keep the skin
on their backs and breath in their bodies. Well, they’re not the only ones
who have to do things they don’t like to stay alive and whole. Now you tell
me why that should be so hard for ‘some folks’ to understand?” (238).
Clearly, Dana’s experiences force her to reevaluate her ideas of submission
and resistance. Her assertion parallels Harriet Jacobs’s belief that “the
slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others” (56).
By witnessing the totality of slavery, Dana’s twentieth-century concepts—
informed by inadequate representations of history in books and films and
Black nationalist rhetoric—undergo a radical reconfiguration to account
for experiences previously unknown and untold.
While Butler’s time travel evokes call and response, Jewelle Gomez’s
The Gilda Stories chronicles the experiences of Gilda, the main character,
from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth-first century in a
cyclical format that draws on multiple literary and oral traditions, and is
thus reminiscent of the African American oral and dance tradition, the
ring shout. Each chapter of the novel depicts an episode in Gilda’s 200-
year life span. Gomez examines issues of the past, identity, sexuality, and
 BLACK GIRLS SINGING BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS 119

healing through a Black lesbian vampire protagonist who lives and

engages in different African American communities in various historical
and future eras. With Gilda, Gomez exhibits Black feminist concerns of
race, gender, and class oppression. Actually, Miriam Jones insists, “while
lesbianism is arguably foregrounded, it is indivisible from categories of
race and class: Gilda’s outcast status is situated within a nexus of ex-
ploitation” (154). As a vampire, Gilda wields power and strength coupled
with sexual desire that make her an unprecedented heroic figure in Black
women’s writing. Unlike traditional vampires, Gilda uses violence only in
self-defense and exchanges thoughts and ideas for blood with her victims.
The vampire figure is polyvalenced. Instead of representing alien-
ness, “Gomez’s vampires,” Jones claims, “construct an inclusive vision of
those traditionally absent from literary discourses in general, and [sci-
ence fiction], horror, and especially vampire tales in particular” (154).
Additionally, the vampire construct represents the continuities and in-
terconnectedness of history. Moreover, this aspect of vampirism—in con-
junction with the chronological episodes of the text with a cyclical
format—resembles the ring shout tradition found in African diaspora
communities.12 The ring shout is a sacred oral and dance ritual that
functions as a vehicle to collapse time and space dimensions so that par-
ticipants experience and are sustained by history. In his premier study
of African American culture, Black Culture and Black Consciousness,
Lawrence W. Levine confirms, “The shout often became a medium
through which the ecstatic dancers were transformed into actual partici-
pants in historic actions” (38). With the immortality of vampirism,
Gilda becomes a ring shouter who mediates history and the communi-
ties she inhabits. Therefore, The Gilda Stories reconfigures the vampire
tale as a uniquely African American woman’s narrative with strength
and power. By constructing a character who occupies, across centuries,
the marginal position African American women have historically inhab-
ited in America, with the preternatural vampiristic powers of immortal-
ity and healing, Gomez’s locates Black women at the center of American
history and essential to global progress.
The novel begins in Louisiana in 1850 with the tale of an escaped
slave girl who kills a white man to prevent her rape and recapture. The
Girl is discovered and rescued by the original Gilda, a white lesbian vam-
pire who owns a brothel. Gilda’s partner, Bird—a Lakota woman—nurses
120 SPEAKING POWER

the Girl through her traumatic experience and teaches her to write by
telling stories of her Lakota past after she realizes that the Bible and news-
papers do not reflect either of them (21). Correspondingly, the Girl re-
lates stories of her past to Bird. Jones maintains, “In this sense of ‘stories,’
then, the text itself can be read as a simultaneous sharing, and seeking,
of personal and collective histories in the face of a monolithic, exclusion-
ary discourse” (156). This sharing becomes a form of call and response
that establishes the relationship between the Girl and Bird. They offer
themselves equally and sustain the other through sharing. Once the orig-
inal Gilda decides to take the “true death,” the Girl is transformed into a
vampire and adopts the name Gilda. Even though she’s living a new life,
the Girl remembers her slave experiences, particularly her mother
and the oral narratives of the Fulani past and the Middle Passage (10).
Ellen Brinks and Lee Talley contend these stories are the Girl’s spiritual
legacy bequeathed by the mother. They write, “Seen in relation to their
double dispossession—the denial of the right to possess material property
as women and as African Americans—these words and images of her
mother’s cultural tradition become the symbolic property that the slave
owners cannot confiscate or control” (159). Thus, the oral narratives
of her mother and Bird become touchstones that sustain and nurture the
Girl. The fluidity of history empowers her to become a woman who
embraces the past to heal the future.
Gomez seems to suggest that, although memory and the past are in
constant danger of being lost and negated, the hypermnesia that accom-
panies the preternatural powers of vampirism mitigates this danger. Be-
fore she is transformed into a vampire, the Girl struggles to remember her
mother and is willing to dismiss the past. For instance, when she strives
to overcome her fears while running away from the plantation, “The Girl
tried to remember some of the stories that her mother, now dead, had
pieced together from many different languages to describe the journey to
this land. The legends sketched a picture of the Fulani past—a natural
rhythm of life without bondage. It was a memory that receded more with
each passing year” (10). At another time when she is reminded of her
mother’s scent, the narrator tells us, “The Girl rarely allowed herself to
miss her mother or her sisters, preferring to leave the past alone for a
while, at least until she felt safe in this new world” (21). However, after
the Girl becomes a vampire and takes Gilda’s name, she understands the
 BLACK GIRLS SINGING BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS 121

permanence and pervasiveness of the past. Gilda observes, “The past

does not lie down and decay like a dead animal. . . . It waits for you to
find it again and again” (126). In fact, 120 years after becoming a vam-
pire, Gilda vividly remembers her prevampire past. Gomez writes,

The inattention of her contemporaries to some mortal questions,

like race, didn’t suit her. She didn’t believe a past could, or should,
be so easily discarded. Her connection to the daylight world came
from her blackness. The memories of her master’s lash as well as her
mother’s face, legends of the Middle Passage, lynchings she had not
been able to prevent, images of black women bent over scouring
brushes—all fueled her ambition. (180)

History is a sustaining force for Gilda because it tells a story of struggle and
survival. It is this knowledge that later preserves her life in the apocalyptic
environment that earth becomes. In the tradition of the ring shout, Gilda
conjures historical experience, thereby, embodying a history of pain and
injustice so that she may speak for and to those with similar experiences.
Like the ring shout, this novel comes full circle in the end. The final
chapter is set in the year 2050 in which the earth’s environment is hope-
lessly contaminated, government structures have disintegrated, and vam-
pires are hunted for their life’s blood. These circumstances reproduce
oppressions of the past. “The horror was slavery come again” (235). Simi-
lar to the beginning of the text, Gilda becomes a runaway intent on sur-
vival. Gilda finds herself hiding in a cave preparing to run away and
become a member of an isolated community of vampires at Machu Pic-
chu. Before she begins her journey, however, Gilda happens upon Ermis,
a woman attempting suicide. Gilda exchanges blood with Ermis to make
her a vampire and together they journey toward Machu Picchu. Gilda rec-
ognizes Ermis as the lover/partner she has searched for for 200 years.
When the women are assaulted by hunters and Gilda is almost killed,
Ermis nurses Gilda as they continue on their journey. Although Ermis at-
tends to Gilda’s physical needs, Gilda is sustained by Bird’s telepathic
thoughts that encourage Gilda’s will to live. Bird thinks, “We remain be-
cause this [sic] our home. We both have lost land here. Should we leave it
all to them? I will not” (250). Thus, Bird, a figure from the past, again nur-
tures Gilda following a traumatic encounter. Like their initial exchange of
122 SPEAKING POWER

oral stories used to teach and heal Gilda, this interaction restores Gilda’s
strength. Yet, Bird’s telepathy is extra-oral because she goes beyond speech
and ministers to Gilda’s psyche to affect physical healing. In this way,
Gomez reinforces the spiritual power of orality as a “curative domain.”
Gomez infers that the earth’s future and healing rests in the hands
of the vampires of Machu Picchu, all of whom represent marginal indi-
viduals: two Black lesbians, a white lesbian, a straight Black male, two
white gay men, and a Native American lesbian. Born of a history of op-
pression, this community of “outcasts,” with their values of collectivity,
nonviolence, and tolerance, is earth’s salvation.
Clearly, these novels foreground the past as an essential element of
the present. For each author, exploration and understanding of the past is
a prerequisite for healthy living in the present. African American women
in particular gain authority, power, and healing through reclaiming their
pasts and disseminating it themselves. Using orality, they demonstrate the
complex relationship between oral and written forms. These writers firmly
ground their texts in African American oral culture and, therefore, expand
the other literary traditions of which these texts are a part. Certainly, sci-
ence fiction and horror literature are greatly amplified by the African
American oral traditions and Black women’s experiences showcased
in Beloved, Kindred, and The Gilda Stories. Both texts clearly lay out Black
women’s vital position to humanity: time after time we are called on to
save the world, to keep life forces circulating. We birth, nurse, nurture,
and even rescue the human population, not just for others, but for our-
selves as well. In the same manner, science fiction and horror elements en-
hance the writing tradition of Black feminist orality. These novels
demonstrate that Black women’s writing and orality are not incompatible
with science fiction, adventure tales, and horror stories. In fact, they mag-
nify one another and reflect the flavor Black women bring to American
culture, a flavor that is rooted in the painstaking survival of African Amer-
icans that began with slavery and is vigorously present today.
 Coda

Sister Griot-Historians
Representing Events and Lives for Liberation
/

The horror of slavery appeared to reap endless returns.

—Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories

It ain’t my job to know what’s worse. It’s my job to know what is and
to keep them away from what I know is terrible.
—Toni Morrison, Beloved

In opposition to race, gender, and class dominance, Black feminist oral-

ity is a method of resistance and empowerment that African American
women learn from our foremothers and practice daily. The specter of slav-
ery, always lurking in American racial contexts, informs Black feminist
orality. The narratives of slavery examined in this project reveal Black
women’s use of oral traditions to “write” history that includes Black
subjects who are self-actualized and self-determined. These women be-
come “sister griot-historians” who combine literary traditions with
African American oral traditions in narratives that resist and confront
the silenced, dehumanized representation of Black women in the master
narrative.1 According to Barbara Omolade, “The ‘griot-historian’ is and
must be a warrior breaking down intellectual boundaries along with the

123
124 CODA

destruction of political limitations to her people’s—and, indeed, all hu-

manity’s—liberation” (284). With Black feminist orality, sister griot-histo-
rians cross boundaries of oral and writing traditions, folk and intellectual
thought, and theory and practice. Moreover, the imaginative slave narra-
tives diffuse the borders of fact and fiction so that the past becomes more
pertinent and useful for contemporary readers. For example, Black
women writers at the turn of the nineteenth century used strategic silence
as a form of orality in fictionalized narratives to assert Black women’s and
men’s claim to womanhood and manhood, respectively, in a period of in-
tense racial violence and denial of their humanity. Whereas turn-of-the-
century Black women writers used silence strategically, some Black
women writers of the late twentieth century employed oral traditions in
musical forms such as Blues and Jazz to create imaginative narratives of
slavery that represent and heal painful wounds to Black women’s subjec-
tivity and sexuality that are the legacy of slavery.
As we have seen, Black feminist orality is found in multiple incarna-
tions of oral discourse. While oral traditions such as call and response
and signifying have been analyzed by various linguists and literary critics,
orality demonstrated in conversational speech has received less critical at-
tention. Nevertheless, the narratives in this project illustrate verbal asser-
tions and rhetorical strategies in conversations and dialogue that
empower Black women to affirm and defend Black identities and, simul-
taneously, resist and subvert hegemony and oppression. The narratives of
Louisa Picquet and Sylvia Dubois exemplify the powerful and potentially
liberating articulations of Black women’s speech acts.
These manifestations of Black feminist orality in written texts might
also be identified in more recently published audio and visual representa-
tions. The 1998 publication of the tape recorded interviews with former
slaves by interviewers employed by the Works Progress Administration in
the 1930s, for example, provides audio samples of Black women’s repre-
sentations of experiences that, possibly, demonstrate instances of Black
feminist orality.2 Additionally, Black feminist orality can be found in
film representations of Black women’s slave experiences. Julie Dash’s film
Daughters of the Dust is a fictional portrayal of a Black family’s experiences
in slavery and freedom and the grandmother’s efforts to sustain her
descendants’ sense of their African heritage by passing on oral history and
religious rituals. Daughters of the Dust points to the potential film repre-
 CODA 125

sentations have to affect America’s understanding of not only the infusion

of African cultural traditions into American culture, but of Black women’s
determined efforts to ensure Blacks recognize integration into American
society does not negate the significance of African origins.
Using Black feminist orality, as a method and tradition, the work of
sister griot-historians becomes an exemplary model for all cultural studies
and civil rights advocates. By relating the reality of Black women’s lives in
disempowering contexts, this model provides tools to resist oppression and
fosters liberation struggles against social injustice. Thus, we learn of a cul-
ture of resistance that empowers individuals to struggle and become sub-
jects, and teach others how to struggle, for independence and freedom.
This page intentionally left blank.
 Notes

PREFACE: BLACK FEMINIST ORALITY

1. I use Black and African American interchangeably because not

only are we of African descent, but in a color conscious society like the
United States, one’s Blackness is immediately noted. Furthermore, I
argue that Black deserves capitalization because it reflects the political
and cultural consciousness of a group of people who historically have
been oppressed politically, economically, and socially and are identified
first by skin color in America. It is this identification that forged a group
of Americans who subsequently created a rich and vibrant culture.
2. The “pathology” of African American family structures has been
the foundation of many sociological studies of Black culture and is exem-
plified in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s study The Negro Family. Moynihan
concludes that the reason Blacks do not succeed in America is because
Black families are often headed by women, “matriarchs,” and this struc-
ture is so different from mainstream white families that Blacks are ill-
equipped to integrate into American society. Moynihan’s report was
based on the work of E. Franklin Frazier and suffered from not only a
lack of understanding of race, gender, and class issues, but a disregard of
practices, beliefs, and traditions that survived the transference from
African to African American culture, thereby, producing a study that held
African Americans—particularly African American women—responsible
for our oppression. Unfortunately, Moynihan’s report determined public
policy with respect to African Americans for over two decades.
The “pickaninies” stereotype depicted Black children as animalis-
tic, unkempt, dirty, and unloved and unnurtured by parents. Numerous

127
128 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

representations of pickaninies portrayed them as alligator bait, implying

they were dispensable. The film Ethnic Notions explores this stereotype
and suggests white Americans developed these stereotypes to dehuman-
ize African Americans and justify racial injustice.

INTRODUCTION: “SO MY MOTHER TOLD ME”

1. Historically, literacy has been of prominent importance to African

Americans for a variety of reasons; the foremost being resistance to racist
theories of Black inferiority. Beginning with the European Renaissance,
Western civilization considered the act of writing indicative of a reasonable,
rational human being. The fact that many West African cultures did not
meet this qualification was used by philosophers such as G. W. F. Hegel,
Immanuel Kant, and Sir Francis Bacon to justify their racist theories of
Black inferiority. Therefore, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Blacks
used literacy not only to express themselves, but to prove their humanity.
Unfortunately, the valorization of literacy helped produce class divisions
within African American communities that carry over into contemporary
settings. Yet that Black women able to read and write still incorporated oral
traditions into their texts shows the fluidity of orality between African
American class differences. For more on the relation of literacy and hu-
manity, see Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s introduction to
The Slave’s Narrative.
2. The issue of traditions and rituals survived from African cultures
in African American culture is complex and disputed by various critics.
In the introduction to his book Slave Culture, Sterling Stuckey examines
the evolution of African cultural practices within the American cultural
landscape. Particularly, Stuckey draws out the modifications of religious
practices by kidnapped Africans in America because of the prohibitions
and restrictions by slaveholders on traditional African rituals. Anthro-
pologists Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price illustrate that through his
studies of West African cultures, Melville Herskovits determined that
Africans and African Americans shared a “culture area” illustrated by cul-
tural similarities that prove direct continuities survived from African cul-
tures transmitted to African American culture. However, Mintz and Price
contend, “In considering African American cultural continuities, it may
well be that the more formal elements stressed by Herskovits exerted less
 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 129

influence on the nascent institutions of newly enslaved and transported

Africans than did their common basic assumptions about social relations
or the workings of the universe” (11). Although identifying African sur-
vivals in African American culture is a complex and controversial project,
the similarities cannot be ignored or discounted. See Mintz and Price’s
The Birth of African-American Culture for more on African survivals in
African American culture.
3. Although Wilson’s novel concerns the life of a Black indentured
servant in the North, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls it a “fictionalized third-
person autobiography,” that so closely resembles slave narratives that one
can safely evaluate it as such. Therefore, for the purpose of my discussion,
I will consider Our Nig as an example of a slave narrative that exemplifies
the torture relationship of slave mistresses and slaves and the restoration
of the Black woman’s voice. See Gates’s introduction to Our Nig.
4. Jacqueline Jones’s premier study of Black women’s labor history,
Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, documents Black women’s efforts to sustain
their families at, often, any self-sacrificing costs.
5. I take this term from Toni Morrison’s book Beloved in which the
character’s “rememory” both recalls events and reinstates the process of
remembering. By remembering family, family members are not only
recalled, but brought together again. The structure and disruption of
Black families has been the subject of multiple scholarly studies in various
disciplines. Specifically, sociologists have long investigated the effects of
slavery in African American families. Although E. Franklin Frazier con-
cluded that slavery destroyed the African American family, later scholars
acknowledge the devastation caused by slavery but identify various as-
pects such as oral traditions, naming practices and extended family struc-
tures as strengths that sustained Black families. See John Hope Franklin,
“A Historical Note on Black Families”; Wade W. Nobles, “African-Amer-
ican Family Life: An Instrument of Culture”; George P. Rawick, From Sun-
down to Sunup; and Andrew Billingsley, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.
6. In her biography of Sojourner Truth, Nell Irvin Painter asserts that
these retellings negatively impacted Truth (then Isabella Bomefree). She
writes, “Seared by frequent, detailed tellings of these losses, Isabella’s earli-
est years lay in the shadow of her parents’ chronic depression and her own
guilt as a survivor. A fear of inevitable disaster, a ‘cruel foreboding,’ lay over
this home: Isabella dreaded separation, which she would experience when
130 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

she herself was sold” (12). While Painter’s view is well taken, I focus on the
resistance to this “fear” through the practice of naming.
7. Frazier and scholars like Stanley Elkins argued that the condi-
tions of American slavery not only destroyed the Black family, but erased
all memories of African culture and identity.
8. The importance of naming and naming one’s self has long been
a recognized feature of African American culture. Autobiographies of
African American males such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washing-
ton, and Malcolm X illustrate Black male subjects who choose names that
either align themselves with America’s “founding fathers” and Western
culture (i.e., Douglass and Washington) or point to the crime of culture
erasure of kidnapped Africans committed by American white slavehold-
ers (i.e., Malcolm X).
9. In his revolutionary text The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom,
Herbert Gutman discusses slave naming practices and quotes W. E. B.
Du Bois’s observation that although African Americans cannot “trace an
unbroken social history from Africa . . . a distinct nexus existed between
Africa and America.” Du Bois pressed scholars to search for evidence that
could show “the broken thread of African and American social history”
(196). Keeping Du Bois’s observation in mind, I draw the connection be-
tween the oral tradition of naming and African libation ceremonies
loosely. While there is no scholarly evidence of direct descent of these
practices, I surmise the purposes behind the practices are analogous, and
thus, we need to acknowledge their relation. This practice of naming has
personal significance for me because both my mother and grandmother
are named Doveanna. I am continually conscious of their histories; thus,
their pasts inform my past, present, and future.
10. In 1987 at the English Institute a session was held entitled “Slav-
ery and the Literary Imagination.” Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold
Rampersad edited a collection of essays from the session with the same
title. The phrase I use characterizing slavery comes from McDowell and
Rampersad’s introduction to this text (vii).
11. Peterson borrows this phrase from Peter Stallybrass and Allon
White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. See Peterson (9, 12–14).
12. This phrase is taken from the title of Deborah King’s article
“Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black
Feminist Ideology.”
 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 131

13. Baker goes on to state that only three Black women do theory,
Hortense Spillers, Hazel Carby, and Barbara Smith. As quoted in Car-
ole Boyce Davies’s Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the
Subject (39).
14. For more extensive critique of Black feminist criticism, see the
introduction to Ann duCille’s The Coupling Convention (3–12).
15. The phrase “always already,” as used by Houston Baker, refers
to Black experience that is informed by the inherent and consistent
presence of racism, sexism, and classism in the white dominated, patri-
archal, capitalist American society. See Baker’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-
American Literature.
16. My definition is derived in part from Harryette Mullen’s dis-
cussion of oral resistance employed by slave women. This definition is
similar, though not identical, to Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of the nature
and role of the subaltern means of communication. Spivak centers her
discussion on the subaltern’s use of rumor as a method of resistance. She
contends that because the original source of a rumor is unknown, it is an
illegitimate form of writing and is thus “accessible to insurgency.” While
I agree with Spivak’s assessment of rumor, my purpose for examining
orality here is to cite specific speech acts and their sources that are acts of
agency and moments of insurgency. See Harryette Mullen, “Runaway
Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved” and Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies:
Deconstructing Historiography.”
17. I identify this as a tradition because historically Black women
have used sass for subjective purposes. Harryette Mullen refers to Black
women’s sass in her argument that because Black women were excluded
from the nineteenth-century ideals of the “Cult of True Womanhood”—
which included values of modesty, decorum, piety, and purity—they were
able to employ orality as a method of self-defense and resistance to op-
pression. Black women’s speech, which white society termed impudent
and insolent, was used to resist and expose “the implicit contradictions of
the sex-gender system which render her paradoxically both vulnerable
and threatening” (246). Furthermore, I specify this tradition as female be-
cause not only are men rarely accused of sass, but when they are it is usu-
ally in a racial context in which the male is feminized, that is, a Black
male accused of sassing a white male.
132 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

18. Often people of color, including myself, express a sense of frus-

tration and alienation when reading many texts written by and about
white Americans, particularly those considered as canonical American lit-
erature, in which people of color are either absent or degraded. In con-
trast to this experience, Black women writers often produce texts that
depict Black experiences (sometimes without even one white character in
the text) in a manner that appeals to mass audiences. The wide attention
and acceptance of the works of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker offer
contemporary examples of this affinity.
19. For Tonkin, oracy is an alternative form of communication that
differs from literacy in its preference for oral rather than written tradi-
tions. I view orality differently from oracy because of the opposition to
hegemony inherent in orality.
20. I choose to put literate in quotation marks because the word tra-
ditionally refers to writing, which Western societies value over other forms
of communication. However, if one understands literate as the ability to
think and communicate in any manner through language, then the defin-
ition is expanded to include all forms of communication, not just writing.
21. See Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? and Patricia Hill
Collins’s Black Feminist Thought for a complete discussion and description
of the “controlling images” Black women must confront.
22. For an in-depth discussion of the distinctions of these tradi-
tions, see Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture. Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing
Womanhood implicitly reinscribes these distinctions in her discussion of
nineteenth-century Black women’s writing as representative of African
American intellectual thought.
23. In her book Women and Sisters, Jean Fagan Yellin demonstrates
white feminist abolitionists’ transfer of their emotions and reactions to
the sight or knowledge of abuse of Black slave women to parallel white
women’s positions in marriage and society. Yellin shows that the aboli-
tionist motto “Am I not a woman and a sister?” served as a link between
antislavery and women’s rights causes that mobilized thousands of north-
ern white women in the abolitionist movement.
24. In his essay “Children of Legba: Musicians at the Crossroads in
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” Thomas F. Marvin identifies Jim True-
blood as a “child of Legba,” the West African folk figure who connects
the visible world with the spirit world through music and oral traditions.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 133

According to Marvin, Trueblood’s Blues singing, which the educated

Blacks at the college see as “primitive” and embarrassing, is only under-
stood by the protagonist after he has been rejected by white society. “Only
when he begins to lose faith in the college’s promises of acceptance into
the white world does he begin to understand the importance of the
African American folk heritage” (591).

CHAPTER 1: SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK

Material in this chapter appeared as “Speak Sister, Speak: Oral Empow-

erment in Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon,” Legacy: A Journal of Women Writ-
ers, 15 (1998): 98–103.
1. In her unprecedented study of slave narratives The Slave Narrative,
Marion Wilson Starling documents 6,006 slave narratives published sep-
arately, in anthologies, and in antislavery newspapers and periodicals. See
Starling (339–350).
2. I define “orality” here as speech acts that empower the individual
to resist or subvert hegemony.
3. Because these texts have not been widely criticized, I am forced to
quote extensively from them.
4. Although Frances Smith Foster recovered Sowing and Reaping as a
serialized novel from The Christian Recorder, that version was published in
1876–1877, whereas the version in the Cincinnati Gazette was published in
1860. My next project is to recover this novel and understand its implica-
tions for the study of American and African American literary history.
5. In his book Orality and Literacy, Ong designates primary oral cul-
tures as “oral cultures untouched by writing” (31). Yet he often uses the
phrase “oral culture” interchangeably with “primary oral culture.” For
this reason, I identify the slave communities from which these narrators
emerge as oral cultures. The institutionalized illiteracy of slaves combined
with the oral traditions transferred and transfigured from African cul-
tures created a culture whose members primarily relied on oral commu-
nication. While nonliterate slaves were aware of writing, the systematic
denial of education and punishment for acquiring literacy increased the
incentive to develop a complex oral culture.
6. In this chapter I will refer to Jacobs when the analysis concerns
the author and Linda Brent when referring to the protagonist in the text.
134 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

7. For an extensive discussion of nineteenth-century gender con-

ventions and the ideologies held in the North and South regarding white
and Black women, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation
Household (60–64).
8. African American women’s problematic relation to the Cult of
True Womanhood and its ideology is evidenced in various aspects of nine-
teenth-century society and signals the complex consciousness of some
Black women. In what she terms the “politics of respectability,” Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham discusses Black Baptist women’s appropriation of
some of the values of the Cult of True Womanhood in order to advance
racial uplift. However, Higginbotham accurately points to the inherent
contradiction of this ideology. Black Baptist women were so concerned
with white society’s perceptions that, while it was a tool for racial uplift,
the politics of respectability advances white middle-class values and holds
African American’s responsible for adopting and representing these ideals.
See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent.
9. Slave owners who fathered children by their slave women often
prohibited mothers from revealing the identity of the child’s father. In
her narrative, Harriet Jacobs relates a situation in which a slave mother is
sold because she disclosed her master as the father of her child. Jacobs ob-
serves, “She had forgotten that it was a crime for a slave to tell who was
the father of her child” (13).
10. Although she did not become legally free until July 1827, Truth
left her master’s home in November or December 1826 and never worked
as a slave again. Following her religious conversion, Isabella Bomefree
changed her name to Sojourner Truth because she said God told her to
sojourn the world and tell the truth.
11. Truth’s realization of her master’s concern for his reputation
parallels the situation between Harriet Jacobs and her master. Jacobs un-
derstood the advantages living in a small town offered her. Her master’s
concern for his reputation as a respected physician often restricted his
abusive acts.
12. The advocates of the Cult of True Womanhood held mother-
hood as the major goal for women. Indeed, numerous books were pub-
lished to instruct young women and mothers in the proper duties of
motherhood. These duties entailed self-sacrifice for the child’s benefit
and child rearing through discipline and instruction. Three of the most
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 135

popular texts on motherhood were William Martin’s The Young Mother’s

Delight in the Guidance of Her Child’s Intellect. . . . Also, The Duties of Moth-
ers (1840), Lydia Maria Child’s The Mother’s Book (1844), and Catharine
Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy, For the Use of Young Ladies at
Home and at School (1845).
13. This quote is taken from Foreman’s essay in which she identi-
fies Jacobs’s “overlaid voicings” as an example of Sidonie Smith’s asser-
tion that a woman narrator “may even create several, sometimes
competing stories about versions of herself as her subjectivity is displaced
by one or multiple representations.” See Foreman, “Manifest in Signs”
(93) and Sidonie Smith The Politics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality
and the Fictions of Self-Representation (46).
14. This phrase is taken from William Andrews’s text To Tell a Free
Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1860.
15. I adopt this phrase from Audre Lorde’s insightful essay in which
she discusses the need for feminists to recognize and represent categories
of difference regarding race, sexuality, and economics in order to resist
and counter the racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic patriarchal social
order. See Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the
Master’s House” in Sister Outsider.

CHAPTER 2: TALE-BARING AND DRESSING OUT

1. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese finds class recognition the major differ-

ence in gender conventions of the North and South. While the South rec-
ognized societal class stratification as a determinant of female behavior, the
“model of womanhood that emerged in the northeastern part of the coun-
try rested upon a view of class relations that sought to deny the significance
of class divisions—that sought to promote the illusion that all men were truly
equal.” For an extensive discussion of nineteenth-century gender conven-
tions and the ideologies held in the North and South regarding white and
Black women, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household.
2. Hazel Carby agrees with Gates and asserts that “Our Nig can be
most usefully regarded as an allegory of a slave narrative” (43). Further-
more, P. Gabrielle Foreman points out the parallels between Our Nig and
various slave narratives and shows that the novel’s subtitle, Sketches in the
Life of a Free Black, is congruent with Frederick Douglass’s Narrative in the
136 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl. See P. Gabrielle, Foreman “By the Help of God and a Good Lawyer:
Domesticity, Nostalgia, and Subversive Revision in Ante and Postbellum
Narratives of Slavery” (125).
3. The male members of the Bellmont family, Jane (one of the two
daughters), and Aunt Abby (Mr. Bellmont’s live-in sister) attempt to
intervene; however, none ever fully protect Frado from Mrs. Bellmont.
4. See Douglass’s description of Colonel Lloyd’s whipping of Bar-
ney in the Narrative (61).
5. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. compares this incident with Douglass’s
confrontation with Mr. Covey, his overseer, and writes, “Frado at last
finds a voice with which to define her space. A physical space of one’s
own signifies the presence of a more subtle, if equally real, ‘metaphysical’
space, within which one’s thoughts are one’s own” (Our Nig, lii).
6. Gates notes of Wilson’s use of the epithet “Our Nig” and writes
that “its inverted commas underscore the use of an ironic one, one in-
tended to reverse the power relation implicit in renaming-rituals which
are primarily extensions of material relations” (li).
7. Because these texts have not been widely criticized, I am forced
to quote long excerpts.
8. Although in his introduction to the republication of the narra-
tive Jared Lobdell contests Dubois’s age, I accept Dubois’s assertion
because Lobdell’s “evidence” is unconvincing.
9. I include this passage, as originally written by Larison, to illus-
trate the impediment between Sylvia Dubois and her audience caused by
the phonetic spelling. This translation is my own because in the Schom-
burg edition of Dubois’s narrative, the preface is not translated, and in
fact, the translation only begins at, what I consider, an arbitrary point at
the beginning of the narrative.
10. This quote is from an interview with Najilis entitled “Women’s
Solidarity Has Given Our Lives a New Dimension: Laughter” in Margaret
Randall’s Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (64).
11. Jared Lobdell questions Larison’s (Dubois’s amanuensis) charac-
ter and says that Larison “preserved for us Sylvia Dubois as she represented
herself to him. But was this the ‘real’ Sylvia Dubois?” (16). Lobdell’s concern
for the “real” Sylvia disregards the postmodern concept that we can never
know the “real” anything, everything is a representation of the “real” thing.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 137

CHAPTER 3: STRATEGIC SILENCE

1. Some of the banners read “Mr. President, Why Not Make Amer-
ica Safe for Democracy?” and “Mother, Do Lynchers Go To Heaven?” For
more on the Silent Parade, see David Levering Lewis’s W. E. B. Du Bois:
Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (539).
2. For a detailed account of the riot and the lack of effective action by
Illinois Governor Lowden, see Ida B. Wells’s Crusade for Justice (383–395).
3. After its release in 1915, D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation
was praised by President Woodrow Wilson, Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court Edward White, and numerous congressmen. Wilson proclaimed
the film was “like writing history with lightning.” The film’s glorification
of Ku Klux Klan violence against Blacks prompted instances of racial vio-
lence in Lafayette, Indiana, Houston, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri. The
NAACP organized protests, including “well-dressed” picketers at theater
openings, and “succeeded in blocking its showing in Pasadena, Califor-
nia, and Wilmington, Delaware.” David Levering Lewis observes, “The
paradox was the Birth of a Nation and the NAACP helped make each
other . . . the fight also mobilized thousands of black and white men and
women in large cities across the country (outside the Deep South) who
had been unaware of the existence of the [NAACP] or indifferent to it”
(507). For more on the NAACP’s protest, see Lewis (506–509).
4. Black women’s lack of morality was a foregone conclusion for
many whites at the turn of the century. In 1902, a writer for the magazine
The Independent declared, “I sometimes hear of a virtuous Negro woman
but the idea is inconceivable to me. . . . I cannot imagine such a creature
as a virtuous Negro woman” (as quoted in Giddings 82).
5. In 1892 Ida B. Wells repudiated Black men and disdained the re-
peated justification of lynching as Black men’s punishment for raping
white women. In an editorial in her newspaper Free Speech, Wells displays
cynicism and insight: “Nobody in this section believes that old thread-
bare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are
not careful they will over-reach themselves and a conclusion will be
reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their
women” (Crusade for Justice 65–66).
6. In his book The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950,
Robert L. Zangrando provides lynching statistics for whites and Blacks
138 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

from 1882 through 1968. Data shows that throughout these years 3,445
Blacks were lynched.
7. See Giddings for a more detailed account of the accomplish-
ments of the NACW and Black club women (135–136).
8. Though published in 1859, Harriet Wilson’s novel Our Nig, or
Sketches in the Life of a Free Black quickly went out of print and was not
known as the first novel published by an African American woman until
it was recovered by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1983. Before Gates’s recov-
ery, critics cited Harper’s Iola Leroy as the first Black woman’s novel. Like
Our Nig, Harper’s first three novels were condemned to obscurity before
Frances Smith Foster recovered them in 1994. Harper’s novels were seri-
alized in the Christian Recorder, the journal of the A.M.E. Church. See
Frances Smith Foster’s introduction to Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reap-
ing, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper for
more on the history of these novels (xi–xxxvii).
9. I researched the biographical information and literary work of
two authors in this series. I can attest to the excitement and possibilities
these republications offer American and African American literature
scholars. While this series has yet to be explored by scholars, a more
complete picture of American literature will elude us if we fail to study
these texts.
10. As quoted in Famous Black Quotations, Janet Cheatham Bell,
editor (9).
11. Building on Carby’s observation, Tate later asserts, “Iola Leroy
does not validate the presumed social privilege associated with mulat-
toes that contemporary readers have come to expect; rather the novel
uses the mulatto’s inherent transitional racial and class status to con-
struct emancipatory resocialization, grounded in virtue, education, and
hard work” (147).
12. This idea particularly applies to popular understandings of in-
terracial rape by and against African Americans. In her discussion of the
myth of the Black rapist, Angela Davis maintains, “For once the notion is
accepted that Black men harbor irresistible and animal-like urges, the en-
tire race is invested with bestiality. If Black men have their eyes on white
women as sexual objects, then Black women must certainly welcome the
sexual attentions of white men” (182). For an analysis of sexual pathology,
see Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies.”
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 139

13. Tate disdains Elizabeth Ammons’s argument that Harper used

coded language to communicate Iola’s sexual abuse. She insists Ammons
does not provide specific textual evidence of rape (262n.36).
14. Paula Giddings documents Black women activists such as Fannie
Barrier Williams and Anna Julia Cooper’s defense of Black women’s
virtue. She notes their replacement of the responsibility for Black women’s
sexual exploitation on white men and not on Black women. “By implying
that white men were the real culprits,” Giddings observes, “Williams at-
tacked not only the myth of Black promiscuity, but the notion that women
themselves were wholly responsible for their own victimization” (86).
15. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, clark was an early
spelling for clerk in the verb form. See Oxford English Dictionary at
<http://dictionary.oed.com/>.
16. See Wells (47–57).

CHAPTER 4: “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN”

The opening to this chapter is taken from Famous Black Quotations, Janet
Cheatham Bell, editor (100).
1. For a discussion of demography and relationship status among
African Americans, see Tucker and Taylor.
2. Baker posits the “economics of slavery” as a subtext that recog-
nizes “commercial deportation” and Black bodies as property. He asserts
that this subtext “informs any genuinely Afro-American narrative text”
and every African American author must consciously or unconsciously
address this reality (38–39).
3. For more detailed discussion of Janie’s self-possession and de-
velopment of voice, see Barbara Johnson, “Metaphor, Metonymy and
Voice” and Cheryl Wall, “Zora Neale Hurston.”
4. As quoted in Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (186).
5. See Collins’s “Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood” in Black
Feminist Thought (188).
6. Collins argues Hurston’s depiction of Tea Cake and Sop-de-
Bottom’s conversation following Janie’s beating is “a foundation for a
Black feminist analysis of domestic violence” because it demonstrates
how the domination of Eurocentric gender ideology is used to oppress
Black women (Collins, Black Feminist Thought 188–189).
140 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

7. See “Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text” in Gate’s The
Signifying Monkey (170–213).
8. This phrase comes from P. Gabrielle Foreman’s essay “Looking
Back from Zora.” She derives the phrase from an African American folk-
loric expression, “talking out of both sides of your mouth,” that generally
refers to signifying speech acts that contain covert messages sent to select
individuals within a wider audience. This expression also might be used
pejoratively to refer to a dishonest speaker.
9. The phrase “ritualized dialogue” is Jones’s own description of
the ritual embodied in the language and rhythm of the dialogue. See
Michael Harper, “Gayl Jones, An Interview.”
10. Jones describes “in process” as a feature of storytelling in which
the story is being created as it is being told without the teller previously
knowing the story’s outcome, see Michael Harper.

CHAPTER 5: BLACK GIRLS SINGING

BLACK GIRLS’ SONGS

1. In her introduction to the published text of for colored girls,

Ntozake Shange discusses the development of the choreopoem from its
initial inception and performance in San Francisco in 1971 to the Broad-
way production at the Booth Theater in 1976. Shange ends the intro-
duction with an explanation of her work. She writes, “i am offering
these to you as what i’ve received from this world so far” (xvi). See
Shange (ix–xvi).
2. This view is expressed by bell hooks in her essay “The Politics
of Radical Black Subjectivity.” Hooks contends that Black nationalist
movements ultimately failed because of these patriarchal values and
the inability to critique sexism. She maintains, “Thorough critiques of
gender would have compelled leaders of black liberation struggles to
envision new strategies and to talk about black subjectivity in a vision-
ary manner” (16).
3. As quoted in bell hooks’s “The Politics of Radical Black
Subjectivity” (17).
4. I borrow this quote from Shoshana Felman and her discussion
of Albert Camus’s novels The Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956). Felman
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 141

argues that Camus explores the Jewish Holocaust in these texts through
larger, seemingly, unrelated historical events (“Camus’ The Plague,” 95).
5. As quoted in bell hooks’s essay, “Homeplace: A Site of Resis-
tance,” in her book Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 43.
6. This phrase is borrowed from the title of James Baldwin’s col-
lection of essays and nonfiction The Price of the Ticket (1985). Both Bald-
win’s title and Sethe’s statement allude to the price of freedom and
humanity for Blacks in America.
7. This is not to suggest that infanticide by slave women was com-
monly practiced. However, the evidence that infanticide did happen is
unmistakable. Although she cites at least four instances of slave infanti-
cide, White supposes many deaths of infant slaves were caused by Sudden
Infant Death Syndrome. She finds “that some of the infant deaths that
planters attributed to infanticide and some that whites blamed on mater-
nal carelessness were actually due to causes which even today baffle med-
ical experts” (89).
8. Felman argues testimony, and narration of history imposes an
implicit oath or responsibility on both the narrator and the listener/reader
to recognize and admit the validity of events and experiences. (“The Re-
turn of the Voice” 204).
9. As mentioned in the introduction to this book, the practice of
“signifying” in African American culture is thoroughly explored in
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey. The practice of signifying
is an African American oral tradition that is a discursive strategy in
which the meaning of words or actions is determined by the situation or
identities of both speaker and listener and is generally used to subvert or
triumph over an adversary. With this practice one can signify to, about,
or upon someone or something. Signifying takes multiple forms but con-
sistently “entails formal revision and an intertextual relation” (Gates,
The Signifying Monkey 51). See Gates for a discussion of signifying as a lit-
erary technique.
10. Dessa Rose is Sherley Anne Williams’s acknowledged response to
the acclaim and credibility given William Styron’s novel The Confessions of
Nat Turner. In the author’s note to Dessa Rose, Williams expresses her out-
rage over the historical distortions and racist misrepresentations in Styron’s
text. Donna Haisty Winchell’s essay “Cries of Outrage: Three Novelists’
142 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

Use of History” examines both Styron’s and Williams’s texts and Morri-
son’s Beloved and concludes,

The real women who were the basis for Williams’s novel and for Morri-
son’s were not famous, and therein lies much of the reason why the
response to these two novels was nothing like the response to Styron’s.
Had Styron simply written a novel about a fictional slave leader, black
readers might still have taken offense at his presentation of slavery and
might have disagreed with that fictional character’s motivation, but
there would not have been the sense that a white man, amid the Civil
Rights turmoil of the late 1960s, was trying to take away the meaning
of the life of a cultural hero. Styron took a hero and made him
impotent; Williams and Morrison took little known slave women and
made them heroines—or at least made them live for a twentieth-century
readership. (741)

In the author’s note to the novel, Williams explains her inspiration for
writing the novel. She describes the two historical events on which the
text is based and her outrage at the fictionalized as-told-to memoir of slave
rebel Nat Turner written by William Styron. First published in 1986,
Dessa Rose was written as a response to the outrage Williams felt as a
result of the acclaimed novel.
11. This act parallels Sojourner Truth’s method of learning biblical
scriptures and affirms Dessa’s control of her representation. See the dis-
cussion in chapter 2 for more on how Sojourner Truth learned, remem-
bered, and interpreted the Bible.
12. In Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Lawrence W. Levine
describes the ring shout and records eyewitness accounts of the ritual.
According to Levine, “The shout, which the slaves had used as an out-
let for their physical and spiritual passions as well as to bridge the thin
line between past and present, continued to exist well into the twenti-
eth century, but more and more it was on the defensive” (165). Addi-
tionally, Paule Marshall, in her novel Praisesong for the Widow, portrays
the ring shout ritual among Black residents of Carriacou. Like Levine,
Marshall suggests the ring shout collapses time and allows participants
to know their ancestors.
 NOTES TO CODA 143

CODA: SISTER GRIOT-HISTORIANS

1. I borrowed the term “griot-historian” from Barbara Omolade’s

essay “The Silence and the Song: Toward a Black Woman’s History
through a Language of Her Own.”
2. These interviews are published in a companion set to the collec-
tion Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Expe-
riences of Slavery and Emancipation, edited by Ira Berlin, Mark Fabreau, and
Steven Miller.
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Aptheker, Bettina. Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in Ameri-
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Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. 1943. New York: Inter-
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Awkward, Michael. “‘The Inaudible Voice of it All’: Silence, Voice, and
Action in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Inspiriting Influences: Tra-
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Baldwin, James. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948—1985.
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———. “The Uses of the Blues.” Playboy Jan. 1964: 131+.
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the Jazz Vocal Line.” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 6 (1993):
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Ladies at Home and at School. New York: Harper and Bros., 1845.
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Bendix, Regina. “Tourism and Cultural Displays: Inventing Traditions
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Berlin, Ira, Mark Fabreau, and Steven Miller, eds. Remembering Slavery;
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 Index
abolition(ists), 1, 17, 21, 23–24, 70, 80,
132n23
Abrahams, Roger, D., 111
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The
(Twain), 54
African American oral tradition(s), xii,
xiii, 3, 5, 9, 17, 19, 84, 88, 98,
103–105, 116, 122–123, 141n9
African griot, 1
African legacies, 2
African libation ceremonies, 5, 130n9
African survivals, 2, 84, 128n2
agency, 7, 36, 40, 42, 47, 51–52, 55, 57,
59, 69, 94–98, 112, 114–115, 131n16
amanuensis(es), 21–22, 24, 29, 40,
49–50, 54, 59, 136n11
American Baptist Home Mission
Society, 63
Ammons, Elizabeth, 139n13
Andrews, William, 135n14
anti–lynching activism, 65, 79–80
antislavery, 17, 26, 80, 132n23, 133n1
Aptheker, Bettina, 65, 79
Awkward, Michael, 84, 91
Bacon, Francis, 128n1
Baker, Houston, 10, 18, 81, 89–90, 96,
98, 131n13, 131n15, 139n2
Baldwin, James, 96, 141n6
Bambara, Toni Cade, 102–103
Barthelemy, Anthony G., 29
Bauer, William R., 106
Bederman, Gail, 62
159
Bell, Janet Cheatham, 138n10, 139
Beloved (Morrison), ix, 3, 22, 101,
103–111, 116, 123, 129n5, 131n16,
141n10,
Bendix, Regina, 19, 93
Benjamin, Walter, 98
Berlin, Ira, 143n2
Birth of a Nation, 61, 137n3
Black Aesthetic, 102
Black Arts Movement, 67, 102–103
Black feminist criticism, 10–12, 26,
131n14
Black feminist literary theories, 8
Black feminist orality, ix, xii, 2, 9, 13,
15, 22, 37, 51, 87, 104, 116, 122–124,
127; as cultural tradition, 3–9; as liter-
ary tradition, 9–15; matrix of, 15–19
Black feminist theory, 11
Black nationalism, 102
Black Panthers, 102
Black Women’s Literary Renaissance,
102–103
Blues, xii, 12, 17–18, 96–98, 105,
107–108, 132n24
Bomefree, Isabella. See Sojourner Truth
both/and concepts, 11–12, 14, 16, 26,
78–79
Brent, Linda. See Harriet A. Jacobs
Brinks, Ellen, 120
Brown, Elsa Barkley, 16
Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall), 6–7
Brown, William Wells, 95
Butler, Octavia, 3, 101, 103, 116–118
160
Capuano, Peter, 105
Carby, Hazel V., 8, 30, 44, 45, 67, 70, 75,
77, 131n13, 132n22, 135n2, 138n11
Carter, Betty, 106
Child, Lydia Maria, 17, 31, 134n12
Christian, Barbara, 7–8, 10, 18, 26
Christian Recorder, The, 133n4, 138n8
Cincinnati Gazette, 24, 133n4
“circle of slavery,” 82–83, 94, 98–99
Civil War, 55, 63, 78
Clotel (Brown), 95
collective memory, 2
Collins, Patricia Hill, x, xii, 11, 14, 69, 89,
95, 97, 132n21, 139n4, 139n5, 139n6
Color Purple, The (Walker), 10
Colored National League, 80
Committee on the Reform of English
Spelling, 50
Contending Forces (Hopkins), 2, 65, 69–80
Cooper, Anna Julia, 61, 139n14
Corregidora (Jones) 3, 9, 18, 81–82, 93–99
Crossley, Robert, 116–117
Cult of True Womanhood, 17, 22, 30–32,
41–42, 44–45, 47, 49, 57, 80, 131n17,
134n8, 134n12
“cultural hybridity,” 9
Dash, J. Michael, 41
Dash, Julie, 124
Daughters of the Dust (Dash), 124
Davidson, James, 28
Davies, Carole Boyce, 10, 131n13
Davis, Angela, 138n12
Davis, Charles T., 8–9, 128n1
Davis, Cynthia, 58
Davis, Mary Kemp, 115
DeCosta–Willis, Miriam, 12
Delaney, Lucy, 79–80
Dessa Rose (Williams), 3, 101, 103, 104,
111–116, 141n10
Douglass, Frederick, 8, 15, 21–22, 30,
33–34, 37, 39, 45, 47, 57, 82, 130,
135n2, 136n4, 136n5
Du Bois, W. E. B., 63, 130n9, 137n1
Dubois, Sylvia, 2, 49–54, 56–59, 80,
136n8, 136n9, 136n11
duCille, Ann, 11, 83, 86, 89, 95, 131n14
INDEX
either/or binaries, 12, 14, 16
Elkins, Stanley, 130n7
Ellison, Ralph, 1, 17–18, 132n24
Enlightenment, 78
Ernest, John, 38
Ethnic Notions, 127n1
Euro-American literary tradition, 15
extra-literary form(s), 34, 36
extra-oral, 122
Fabreau, Mark, 143n2
Felman, Shoshana, 109, 110, 140n4, 141n8
folklore, 58–59, 102, 111
folktales, 17, 111
for colored girls who have considered suicide
when the rainbow is enuf (Shange), 140n1
Foreman, P. Gabrielle, 38–39, 45, 78–79,
135n13, 135n2, 140n8
Foster, Abby Kelley, 17
Foster, Frances Smith, 8, 15, 22, 133n4,
138n8
Foucault, Michel, 66
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 44, 49, 134n7,
135n1
Franklin, John Hope, 129n5
Frazier, E. Franklin, 63, 127n2, 129n5,
130n7
“free indirect discourse,” 91–92, 98
From the Darkness Cometh the Light
(Delaney), 79
Fuller, Meta Warwick, 65
Gal, Susan, 66
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 8–10, 12, 17, 45,
59, 91, 128n1, 129n3, 135n2, 136n5,
136n6, 138n8, 140n7, 141n9
Gayle, Addison, 102
General Federation of Women’s Clubs,
64
Giddings, Paula, 64, 74, 137n4, 138n7,
139n14
Gilda Stories, The (Gomez), 3, 101, 103,
104, 116, 118–122, 123
Gilbert, Olive, 4, 24–26, 33, 40
Gilman, Sander, 29, 138n12
Gomez, Jewelle, 3, 101, 116, 118–122, 123
Gottfried, Amy S., 94, 97
 INDEX 161

Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 103, 104, 112 Jewish Holocaust, 141n4

Griffith, D. W., 61, 137n3 Johnson, Barbara, 83, 139n3
Grimké, Angelina, 23 Jones, Gayl, 3, 9,16, 18, 21, 81–83, 93–99,
griot-historian, 123, 143n1 140n9, 140n10
Gutman, Herbert, 130n9 Jones, Jacqueline, 129n4
Jones, LeRoi, 102
habitual memory, 2 Jones, Miriam, 119–120
Hahn, Thich Nhat, 104 Julien, Eileen, 7, 12–13
Hamlin, Susan, 28
Harper, Frances E.W., 2, 17, 24, 65–66, Kant, Immanuel, 128n1
68–69, 75, 77–80, 138n8, 139n13 kinship, 3–4, 16
Harper, Michael, 98, 140n10 Kindred (Butler), 3, 101, 103–104,
Harris, Cheryl I., 25, 33, 35 116–118, 122
heal(ing), xiii, 19, 83, 91, 95, 98, 101, Kolchin, Peter, 37
103–104, 108, 110–112, 116, 119, 122 Ku Klux Klan, 137n2
Hegel, G. W. F., 128n1 Kubitschek, Missy Dehn, 83–84, 88, 90
Henderson, Mae, 13, 49
Henry, Patrick, 74 Larison, C.W., 49–53, 59, 136n9, 136n11
Herskovits, Melville, 128n2 Laub, Dori, 90
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 63–64, Lawal, Babatunde, 2, 5
134n8 Levine, Lawrence W., 119, 142n12
“histotextuality,” 79 Lewis, David Levering, 61, 137n1, 137n3
Hobsbawm, Eric, 19 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Holiday, Billie, 106 (Douglass), 33
hooks, bell, xiii, xiv, 18–19, 102, 140n2, Lipscomb, Drema R., 25–26
140n3, 141n5 literacy, xii, 12, 14–16, 21–22, 30, 34,
Hopkins, Pauline, 2, 17, 65–78, 80 37–39, 55, 57, 78, 95, 128n1, 132n19,
humor, 53–54, 56 133n5
Hurston, Zora Neale, 1–2, 10, 81–93, 98, Lobdell, Jared, 58–59, 136n8, 136n11
139n3, 139n6, 140n7 Lorde, Audre, 66, 97, 135n15
Hutcheon, Linda, 95 Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon (Mattison), 14,
21–24, 27–30, 33–34, 36–37, 39–40, 124,
illiteracy, 1–2, 78, 84, 133n6 133
“inventing traditions,” 19, 93 Lytle, Mark, 28
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs),
9, 15, 21–22, 30–32, 37–38, 44, Malcolm X, 130n8
131n16, 135n2 Marshall, Paule, 5, 9, 142n12
Invisible Man (Ellison), 1, 17–18, 132n24 Martin, William, 134n12
Iola Leroy (Harper), 2, 61, 65, 68–69, 75, Mattison, Hiram, 23–24, 27–29, 40
77–80, 138n8, 138n11 Marvin, Thomas F., 132n24
McCullough, Kate, 67, 72
Jackson, Mattie J., 2, 54–58 McDowell, Deborah, 114–115, 130n10
Jacobs, Harriet A., 2, 9, 15, 30–32, McKay, Nellie, 16
37–39, 44–45, 118, 133n6, 134n9, memory, 2, 5, 85–86, 108–110, 115, 120
134n11, 135n13, 135n2 Middleton, Joyce Irene, 105
Jaworski, Adam, 66 Miller, Steven, 143n2
Jazz, 105–106, 124 Mills, Bruce, 31
162 INDEX

Minnie’s Sacrifice (Harper), 65, 138n8 111, 117, 122, 128n1, 131n16, 131n17,
Mintz, Stanley W., 128n2 132n19, 133n2
Mitchell, Verner D., 69, 71, 74, 80 Our Nig (Wilson), 16–17, 22, 41–42,
Mobley, Marilyn Sanders, 105 44–49, 65, 129n3, 131n16, 135n2,
Moody, Jocelyn, 37, 55 136n5, 136n6, 138n8
Morehouse College, 63
Morrison, Toni, ix, 3, 6, 16, 103, 105–111, Painter, Nell Irvin, 32–33, 42–43, 58,
123, 129n5, 132n18, 141n10 129n6
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, xi, 127n2 Peterson, Carla, 9
mulatta/o, 23, 67–68, 71, 138n11 pickaninies, xi, 127n1
Mullen, Harryette, 13, 22, 54, 131n16, Picquet, Louisa, 2, 14, 23–24, 26–30,
131n17 33–34, 36–37, 39–40, 80, 124
My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass), “politics of respectability, the,” 64, 134n8
33, 37 post-Reconstruction, 63, 65, 67
postmodern, 106, 136n11
Najilis, Michele, 54, 136n10 Powell, Jon, 54
naming, xi, 5, 79, 129n5, 129n6, 130n8, Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall), 7,
130n9 142n12
Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Gilbert), 4–5, Price, Richard, 128n2
22, 24–26, 32–35, 40
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An radical Black subjectivity, xiii, 140n2,
American Slave (Douglass), 8, 15, 21, 33, 140n3
39, 45, 47, 57, 82, 135n2 Rampersad, Arnold, 130n10
National Association for the Advance- Ranger, Terence, 19
ment of Colored People (NAACP), 61, Reconstruction, 63
137n3, 137n6 “re-member,” 3, 129n5
National Association of Colored Women “rememory,” 110, 129n5
(NACW), 64, 79 “resistant orality,” 13, 22, 40, 131n16
Nobles, Wade, 129n5 rhetoric(al), 5,10, 22, 26, 29, 40, 55, 59,
92, 118, 124
Olsen, Tillie, 66 ring shout, 116, 118–119, 121, 142n12
Omolade, Barbara, 103, 123–124, 143n1 “ritualized dialogue,” 98, 140n9
Ong, Walter, 14–16, 27, 133n5 Rodrigues, Eusebio L., 105
oral discourse, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 18, 124 Roediger, David, 15
oral history, xii, 4, 6, 10, 15–16, 32–33, Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 40
83–84, 86–87, 90, 92–95, 98–99, 104,
108–110, 112, 115, 124 Sale, Maggie, 105–106
oral literacy, 21 Scarry, Elaine, 42–44, 46, 48, 53, 59
oral resistance, xii, 5, 22, 34, 39–40, 48, scatting, 105–106, 111
59, 131n16 Schomburg Library of Nineteenth–Cen-
oral tradition, xii–xiii, 12, 14–19, 21, 26, tury Black Women Writers series, 29,
32, 40, 82–84, 88, 92, 98, 103–106, 65
116, 118, 122–124, 128n1, 129n5, Scott, James C., 52, 59
130n9, 132n24, 133n5, 141n9 selective memory, 85
orality, xii–xiii, 2, 12–15, 17–19, 22–23, Selika, Marie, 65
25–26, 29–30, 32–35, 37–42, 47, 49, sentimental discourse, 32
54–58, 66, 69, 74, 78, 80, 91–92, 104, sentimental images, 31
 INDEX
sentimental novel, 15
sermon(s), xii, 1, 17, 86
sexual exploitation, 38–39, 68–70, 84, 88,
139n14
Shange, Ntozake, ix, 101–102, 106, 140n1
signifying, xii, 12, 17, 59, 111–112, 114,
124, 140n8, 141n9
silence, 17, 26, 29, 31, 39, 43, 46, 48, 51,
58, 65–66, 74–76, 101–103, 123, 143n1
silent orality, 66, 69, 74
Silent Parade, 61, 137n1
sister griot-historians, 123–125
slave(s), 1, 3–4, 15, 21, 29, 31, 42–45, 56,
70, 80, 82, 84, 103, 106, 118, 124,
129n3, 134n10, 134n11, 142n12; as legal
property, 33; breeding of, 109; clothing
worn by, 27; descendants of, 82, 89; do-
mestic, 44; fugitive(s), 71; humanity of,
118; illiteracy of, 1, 21, 78, 84, 133n5; in-
fanticide by 108–109, 141n7; punish-
ment of, 15, 47; traits of, 103
slave agency, 4, 6, 21, 94, 131n16
slave auction block, 29
slave body, 41
slave children, 37
slave code(s), 78
slave community(ies), 27, 40, 133n5
slave experiences, 7, 28–29, 54, 103, 108,
111, 117, 120, 124
slave expressions, 82
slave families, 33, 37, 58
slave historiography, 43
slave identities, 43
slave institution, 37, 42, 88
slave law(s), 4, 45, 47
slave leader, 141n10
slave life, 33, 118
slave marriage(s), 95
slave master(s), xi, 23, 34, 57, 95
slave men, 37
slave mistress(es), 41–45, 55, 129n3; abuse
by, 41, 56, 58; as mothers, 58; cruelty
of, 44, 49, 51, 54, jealousy of, 86
slave mothers, 38, 134n10
slave narrative(s), 6, 8–9, 15, 21–23, 30,
37, 39, 43–45, 47, 49, 124, 129n3,
133n1, 135n2
163
slave owners, 21, 33, 42, 89, 120, 134n10
slave philosophy, 15
slave poetry, 12
slave policy, 1
slave rebellion, 80
slave resistance, 118
slave revolt(s), 112
slave society, 42
slave songs, 82
slave traders, 33
slave uprising, 112
slave voices, 43
slave women, 4, 6, 9, 15, 17–18, 22–23,
32–34, 38, 40–42, 44–45, 49, 53–54,
58, 109, 113, 118, 131n16, 132n23,
134n10, 141n7, 141n10
slavery, 6–7, 15, 18, 21, 25–26, 32–33,
37, 41, 44, 47, 49, 54, 59, 67, 80–82,
88, 96, 98, 102–103, 109, 113,
116–118, 122, 130n9, 130n10, 141n10;
abolition of 70; American, 2, 6, 37,
112, 130n7; and patriarchy, 89; Brazil-
ian, 93; degradation of, 3, 6; dehu-
manizing practices/nature of, 41, 43;
economics of, 81, 85, 90, 139n2; expe-
riences during/in, 2–3, 7, 86, 124;
forced separation of families, 3–5, 55,
129n5; freedom from, 36; historical
moment of, 103; history of, 84, 117;
horror(s) of, 94, 97, 106, 121, 123; in-
humanity of, 109; injustice of, 38, 117;
institution of, 85, 89; language of, 49;
legacy of, 81–83, 88–89, 91, 98, 104,
112, 117, 124; narratives of, xiii, 2,
6–7, 9, 16, 103; political economy of,
6; reality of, 117; representations of,
117; sexual abuse/violence during,
68–69; specter of, 123; totality of, 118;
wounds of, 98, 101, 116–117
slaveholders, 15, 43, 45, 69, 93, 128n2,
130n8
Smith, Sidonie, 135n13
Smitherman, Geneva, xi, 17
Song of Solomon (Morrison), 105
“soul murder,” 42–44, 58
Sowing and Reaping (Harper), 24, 65,
133n4, 138n8
164 INDEX
“speaking in tongues,” 13
Spelman College, 63–64
Spillers, Hortense, 3–4, 41, 131n13
spiritual narrative(s), 36–37, 55
Spivak, Gayatri, 131n16
Stack, Carol, 87
Starling, Marion Wilson, 8, 133n1
Stallybrass, Peter, 130n11
Stepto, Robert, 91–92
Sterling, Dorothy, 9
Story of Mattie J. Jackson, The, (Thomp-
son), 9, 41–42, 44, 54–57
storytelling, xi–xii, 5, 10, 83–84, 90, 92,
105–106, 109–111, 140n10
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 54
strategic silence(s), 17, 61, 66, 72, 90, 84,
124
Stuckey, Elma, 12, 15
Stuckey, Sterling, 128n2, 132n22
Styron, William, 141n10
Sudarkasa, Niara, 4
Sylvia Dubos, A Biografy of The Slav Who
Whipt Her Mistress and Gand Her Fredom
(Larison), 41, 42, 44, 49–54, 58, 59
Talented Tenth, 63, 77–78
Talley, Lee, 120
Tate, Claudia, 67–68, 138n11, 139n13
temperance, 24, 63
testifying, xi–xii
testimony, 104, 107–108, 141n8
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 1,
3, 10, 81–93, 139n3
theory and practice, x, 11, 15–16, 124
Thompson, L.S., 9, 54–57
Time Machine, The (Wells), 116
Tonkin, Elizabeth, 14, 28, 39, 132n19
torture(r), 41–44, 46, 48, 53, 129n3
Trial and Triumph (Harper), 65, 138n8
“True Story, A” (Twain), 54
Truth, Sojourner, 2, 4, 24–26, 29–30,
32–35, 38, 40, 129n6, 134n1, 134n11,
142n11
Turner, Nat, 141n10
Twain, Mark, 54
usable past(s), 3, 93, 98–99
vampire(s), 104, 119–122
vampirism, 119–120
Vrettos, Athena, 103–104
Walker, Alice, 10, 66, 88, 132n18
Walker, David, 80
Walker, Edward Garrison, 80
Walker’s Appeal (Walker), 80
Wall, Cheryl, 83, 139n3
Ward, Cynthia, 12, 92
Washington, Booker T., 76–77, 130n8
Washington, Margaret, 5
Weiner, Marli F., 44
Wells, H.G., 116
Wells, Ida B., 62, 64, 79, 137n2, 137n5,
139n16
White, Allon, 130n11
White, Edward, 137n3
white feminist abolitionists, 17, 132n23
White, Deborah Gray, 109, 132n21,
141n7
Williams, Fannie Barrier, 139n14
Williams, Sherley Anne, 3, 103, 111–113,
115, 141n10
Winchell, Donna Haisty, 141n10
Wilson, Harriet E., 2, 16–17, 45–49, 51,
58, 65, 129n3, 136n6, 138n8
Wilson, Woodrow, 137n3
women’s suffrage/rights, 17, 26, 65, 79,
132n23
Works Progress Administration (WPA),
28–29, 124
Wright, Richard, 17
Yellin, Jean Fagan, 132n23
Young, Melvina Johnson, 28–29
Zandgrando, Robert, 137n6
AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES / LITERARY CRITICISM

SPEAKING POWER
Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery
DoVeanna S. Fulton

In Speaking Power, DoVeanna S. Fulton explores and analyzes the use of oral traditions
in African American women’s autobiographical and fictional narratives of slavery.
African American women have consistently employed oral traditions not only to
relate the pain and degradation of slavery, but also to celebrate the subversions,
struggles, and triumphs of Black experience. Fulton examines orality as a rhetorical
strategy, its role in passing on family and personal history, and its ability to empower,
subvert oppression, assert agency, and create representations for the past. In addition
to taking an insightful look at obscure or little-studied slave narratives like Louisa
Picquet, the Octoroon and the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Fulton also brings a
fresh perspective to more familiar works, such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and highlights Black feminist
orality in such works as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gayl
Jones’s Corregidora.
“In this book, Fulton provides an engaging and pedagogically commanding inves-
tigation of the interconnection between Black women’s oral agency and literary
representation. Her study documents and celebrates the oral continuum that
describes the merger of African American folk and literary cultures. Speaking Power
emerges as a point of reference for nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century
African American literary analysis.” — Joyce A. Joyce, author of Black Studies
as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews
DoVeanna S. Fulton is Associate Professor of English at Arizona
State University.

State University of New York Press

www.sunypress.edu