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A peculiar paradise: tribal place, property and the peripatetic tradition in African American literature

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A peculiar paradise: tribal place, property and the peripatetic tradition in African American literature

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Content A Peculiar Paradise:
Tribal Place, Property and the Peripatetic Tradition in African American Literature
By
K. Avvirin Berlin
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
August 2022
K. Avvirin Berlin August 2022
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My advisor Kara Keeling deserves big thanks for her scholarly example and for her willingness
to read and re-read drafts, commenting on and conversing about their changing contents. Kara, it
has been a joy to work with you. My committee member John Carlos Rowe has been similarly
dedicated. In the early stages of my studies, he encouraged me to sit in on his classes and guided
me to turn a critical eye onto certain canonical novels that may otherwise have escaped my no-
tice. Professor Francille Rusan Wilson, you are a powerhouse of knowledge about African Amer-
ican history and, as such, were the first to turn my attention to Nell Painter’s Sojourner Truth,
which sparked my first dissertation chapter. Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus’ kindness and willingness
to speak about my chapters (even during school holidays!) is much appreciated.
The work of this dissertation would not have happened without my husband, Michael Paul
Berlin. As my intellectual partner, you read my work with a critical and generous eye. Your pa-
tience and love in the face of my tempests is my life’s main blessing. I’d also like to thank my
mother, Alexis Gray, whose formidable intelligence has long been a source of inspiration. To my
late grandmother Anne Howard, “I love you madly.” To my late father Seymour James Gray Jr.,
so much of me is you. Caprice, Summer and Seymour, my siblings, you are a part of me. Nicole
Richards Diop and Racquel Simone Bernard, friends whom I met on this “long and winding
road” to the doctoral degree, thank you for being a part of my extended family. To my cats Bean
Bella Berlin and Igmulala (Iggy) Berlin, thank you for being my sweet study buddies.

i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
PREAMBLE
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY

i-ii
iii-vii
1-14
15-42
44-69
70-96
97-121
122-129

130-139

i
ABSTRACT
I structure the four chapters of my dissertation around the principle of the peculiar: homosocial
relations between itinerant women. My argument begins chronologically with the Narrative of
the Life of Sojourner Truth. “The Mathematics of Truth: Peripatetic Freedom Calculations in
Narrative of Sojourner Truth" reads passages in Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave
that pertain to walking and Black motherhood. In doing so, it theorizes Truth’s 1843 walking mi-
gration as a political pilgrimage whose spatial-temporal schema challenged federal and state pol-
icy. Casting a critical eye on Truth’s White feminist co-author Olive Gilbert’s representations of
motherhood in Narrative of Sojourner Truth, “The Mathematics of Truth” seeks to intervene into
the reception of Truth’s life and political work. First, it draws attention to Truth’s determination
of the date and time at which she walked away from her owner’s farmstead and thus emancipated
herself and her infant daughter as a peripatetic freedom calculation. It argues that this calculation
instantiated a series of freedom walks that contrasted with the prolonged temporality of New
York State’s gradual emancipation laws. Interrogating novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and poet
Frances Dana Gage’s writerly fabrications of Truth’s speech pattern and gait, this chapter also
establishes White feminist investment in Truth’s “increase.” A term that appears in a 1705 Vir-
ginia law related to the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, “increase” was central to slavehold-
ers' capacity to imagine their own propertied futures. Gage, a White abolitionist feminist, ex-
ploited the rhetorical value of Truth’s “increase” by strategically multiplying the five children
Truth parented during her lifetime in liberally embellishing the famous phrase, “I have borne thir-
teen children and aren’t I a woman?”” In chapter two, I further explore relationships between
i
women through an analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula. In this chapter I theorize protagonist Sula’s
sociality as “peculiar” in respect to gender norms and sexual desire. My scholarly encounter with
Sula is part of the larger project of the dissertation, wherein what I call “the peculiar” acts as a
bedfellow to “queer,” yet seeks to branch off into the beginnings of a new terminological geneal-
ogy. By situating this chapter within conversations instigated by Black feminist theory and queer
of color critique, I contend that Morrison’s Sula lays bare an aspect of “the peculiar” that relates
to the gendered organization of Black social life in Ohio’s tribal territories. Building my argu-
ment through an analysis of Frances Washburn’s Elsie’s Business in chapter three, I address the
aftermath of Afro-Lakota, titular character Elsie’s brutal sexual assault through Elsie’s relation-
ship with her mother, a Deer Woman of Lakota tradition. Contextualizing the protagonist’s sexual
assault within the failures of Federal Indian law, I make the claim that Elsie and her mother’s
homosocial kinship relation is peculiar in that it facilitates a form of justice wrought by other-
than-human actors on behalf of Afro-Native women. Concluding with “Paradise: Gender and
Poverty in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” I argue that the Black and Native women and girls who
live in a convent on the outskirts of the town of Ruby in Morrison’s Paradise expose the undesir-
ability and impossibility of the U.S. state’s promise, post-emancipation, to democratize property
ownership to Black male-headed households. Reading the novel in the historical contexts of its
setting, I argue that its Native and Black women characters— outsiders because of their peri-
patetic practices, homosociality and bisexuality— transform the largely abandoned convent, a
former mission school for Native American girls, into an alternatively governed Afro-Native
space.
i
PREAMBLE
I grew up in Harlem, the once-and-always-will-be Black mecca in New York, the tower-
ing city to which my maternal foremothers fled from the unbridled terror of the unreconstructed
American South. Harlem is Lenape land, tribal homelands that are far from that of my father’s
grandfather James’ Hunkpapa Lakota nation. When we were children, my three siblings and I
walked almost everywhere when school was out of session. Our mother in the lead, we became
so accustomed to walking, I would venture that we could have walked the entire island of Man-
hattan in a single day. My father, too, would walk us four children across the bridge that connects
East Harlem to Randall’s Island, where we would play in the patches of young trees that are so
populous there. In its long history, Randall’s island had been home to its share of asylums and
reform homes; one for civil war veterans; one for children, and a cemetery, all erected during the
late 19th century. Sometimes as we walked, my footprints, damp from summer showers, would
evaporate in the noonday sun and questions about the children who had walked the island before
me would rise in my mind. How had they arrived in New York, and why had they been confined
to a tiny island, tucked away from the hurried happenings of neighboring boroughs? If they’d
wanted to, could they have walked away? Found someplace else to stay? Today, I am preoccu-
pied with questions of arrival: of the dreams migrant women like my maternal great-grandmoth-
ers might have carried with them as they left the South for New York; of settler colonialism and
the wreckage it has wrought, and of the distances left still to travel between here and paradise.
In truth, I am not sure that my sisters, brother and I could have walked Manhattan island
in a day as young children. Yet, I wish to remain “attuned to the possibility of the impossible” as
i
Kara Keeling puts it. I, too, want to “make room for past possibility” as I consider the encoun
1
-
ters that walking engenders, both those that are missed and, fewer still, those that are realized.
Indeed, Keeling’s call to “deterritorialize present feminisms” in order to make room for past pos-
sibility is particularly pressing in a settler colony like the United States, on whose lands non-Na-
tive peoples too often make claims to tribal place as their own property.

The peripatetic, as a
perennial seeking, does not sink into the tired tracks paved by the U.S. settler project, but, rather,
it treads routes that reveal the contingent nature of the settler state.
As my siblings and I walked, I learned about power. The city changed as we meandered
from East Harlem to the Upper East Side. The waves of brown faces that engulfed Harlem streets
were replaced by pallid ones downtown. In downtown Manhattan, there were no precariously
employed poor folks selling hastily-collected objects on street corners where young men
gleamed and gathered. Unbeknownst to me as a child, they, and we, were participants in the
“Harlem fine art” of “street strolling,” “a grounded, dynamic way of knowing.” We didn’t have
2
much money to spend on our excursions, but even if we had, my parents made clear, New York
didn’t need it. Any money we did spend entered circuits of capital on Wall Street and beyond.
Wall Street, the already occupied site of the movement known as Occupy Wall Street,
which reached an impassioned zenith during my New York college years, seemed worlds away to
me while I was growing up uptown. Before its legions of Occupy protesters, Wall Street and its
surrounding neighborhood had already been thick with Indigenous and African American histori-
Kara Keeling, “Electric Feel: Transduction, Errantry and the Refrain,” Cultural Studies 28, no.1
1
(2014): 49-83.
Ula Taylor, “Street Strollers: Grounding the Theory of Black Women Intellectuals” in Afro-
2
Americans in New York Life and History 30, no. 2 (July 2006): 155.
i
cal and contemporary presence, and was, as poet Heid Erdrich makes clear, “pre-occupied.”
Though the original wall on Wall Street was erected by Dutch settlers who sought to keep
Lenape peoples out, there is no denying contemporary Native presence in the area. During my
adolescence, the American Indian Community House bustled with Native peoples from the tri-
state area. The Community House was located not far from the National Museum of the Ameri-
can Indian, whose contemporary art exhibit “HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor” inspired an
early iteration of the project that culminated in my master’s degree in American Indian Studies. A
short distance from Wall Street, at an Underground Railroad stop on Chambers street, Frederick
Douglass first arrived in New York as a free man. Walking to and from these places as a teenaged
member of the American Indian Community House’s Youth Council was an active engagement
with the land, peoples and cityscape of the place where I grew up.
Today, I remain interested in what happened in life and literature when African-descend-
ed peoples encountered Native peoples, who were dispossessed of their lands, in the Americas.
What happens next? How do we reconcile the “here” that is tribal land base as an “elsewhere”
for Black people on this continent? Ojibwe poet Heid Erdrich’s offers one possibility, “Contrary
to popular belief... / We'd claim them, give them some place to stay.” “The Theft Outright,” the
3
poem from which these words are drawn, makes clear the poet’s stance that Native land is by no
means shared. Yet, Erdrich’s capacious corpus and the poem itself, in the line, “could be
Heid Erdrich, National Monuments (Michigan State University Press, 2008), 31.
3
i
cousins,” suggest that, recognizing Native peoples’ jurisdiction and land rights, African Ameri-
cans might be regarded as relatives— as Afro-Native people certainly are— and harbored.
4
My mother’s paternal grandmother must have needed a place to stay upon her arrival in
New York at age fourteen. Nana Dotha, as I came to know her through stories, got caught in cap-
ital’s urban circuits after migrating to Harlem as a young teenager, working, as so many young
Black migrant women did, as a domestic for the city’s wealthy elites. Dotha, my mother tells me,
had been warm, feisty, and enterprising. She’d played basketball, baked immaculate cakes, and
spoke so southern that, “it was like the North didn’t touch her.” My mother’s maternal grand-
mother, Ellen Pryce, who passed away when I was sixteen, raised ten children in the Bronx and
Harlem, of whom my beloved grandmother Anne Howard was the eldest. Miles west of Harlem,
my father’s mother, Hortense Gray, née Hortense Frances Brown, was daughter to an African
American mother and a Lakota father, James Brown, who was born in the late 1870s, according
to tribal rolls. My paternal great-grandfather James ended up migrating to the outskirts of Des
Moines, Iowa, where he farmed hogs and taught my father the things he knew about hog farming
and about his Hunkpapa Lakota traditions, until he died in the 1950s.
The practice of stating one’s “lines of descent and lines of dissent” as I have done here
stems from oral traditions and histories, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith has suggested. My family’s
5
multiple avenues of migration are reflected in the geographic-- sites from the urban Northeast to
Heid Erdrich, Cell Traffic (University of Arizona Press, 2012), 15. In “Now, What is She?”
4
What initially appears to be the speaker's lack of assuredness about her place in her nation's clan system
due to her multiple lines of descent is framed as a genealogical abundance rather than a deficit, for the
speaker's children make a choice to belong. The speaker's uncertainty is lived; “claim[ed]” and embodied
by her children.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New
5
York: Zed Books, 1999).
i
the Midwest-- that figure in the literary texts that I analyze in this dissertation. Following the oral
histories that were passed on to me, this dissertation aims to be a telling. To listen to the continental
cacophony of North America means to engage the respective histories of the Native and African-de-
scended peoples who dwell together on the assemblage of tribal nations’ territories that we have
come to call the United States.

This dissertation is attuned to many voices. It tells stories of migra-
tion, dispossession and dreams.
i
INTRODUCTION
The Oxford English dictionary defines peculiar in three primary ways: “strange, or
unusual”; “particular, special”; “a parish or church exempt from the diocese in which it lies.”
Though each of these definitions is relevant to the work of my dissertation, it is the first
definition that most unifies my explication of four strange literary bedfellows: Sojourner Truth
and Olive Gilbert’s co-authored Narrative of the Life of Sojourner Truth, Toni Morrison’s Sula,
Frances Washburn’s Elsie’ s Business and Morrison’s Paradise. I introduce the peculiar as a
counterpoint to studies of African American literature that have determined that Black woman
writers craft female characters who largely identify with White settler norms surrounding gender
and sexuality. By reading for the peculiar, which has its theoretical foundation in Hortense
Spillers’ work on Black women’s sexuality and signification, my project treads the limits of
literary history’s occupation with progress. To this end, I treat the push toward properly gendered
personhood that was spearheaded by the federal government before the “nadir” period of African
American literature as a circumscribed form of emancipation that indebted free Blacks as
laborers for the U.S. national body on the one hand and dispossessed Native nations on the other.
The term peculiar brings to the fore Spillers’ assessment of “African American women’s
peculiar American encounter.”
1
It also pays homage to W.E.B. Du Bois’ formulation of “double
consciousness,” which he used to describe the ontological experience of being Black in the
United States. In Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote, “It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.”
2
That
2
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Thrift, 1994), 2.
1
Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” in Black, White and In Color: Essays
on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 80. I also think about
the term “peculiar” alongside my friend and fellow scholar Nicole Richards Diop.
1
Du Bois ties the peculiar to a doubleness of being is significant. Not only does it suggest that a
kind of mathematics of estrangement characterizes the Black American experience, but it also
evokes what Saidiya Hartman calls the “dilemma, or double bind of freedom.” Both Du Bois and
Hartman criticize to varying degrees the viability of the demand that was placed upon newly free
African Americans, namely, that they represent “modern self-reliant democratic laborers.”
3
While Du Bois suggests that a people so long enslaved were ill-equipped to perform as wage
laborers, Hartman challenges the rhetoric and social realities that bound the formerly enslaved to
agricultural labor as the nation industrialized. The work of this triad of scholars: Du Bois,
Spillers and Hartman, informs my formulation of the peculiar. ‘Peculiar’ also indexes
perceptions of Black embodiment as constitutionally engaged in a form of subterfuge born of the
“un-gendering” wrought by slavery, which was euphemistically known to many Confederate
apologists as the ‘peculiar institution.’
4
Alongside the peculiar, I theorize the bodily practice of walking as a counterpoint to the
ongoing project of settler statehood. I also ask: to what extent did African-descended peoples and
Native nations view one another as allies, and why does this mutual regard matter for a shared
future? Kinship in African American and Native communities often diverges from the rigidly
gendered structure of the nuclear family. To foreground kinship in studies of sovereignty is to
question the future of gender, for, as Native scholars increasingly turn to tradition for theoretical
and practicable guidance, gender remains a primary modality through which tribal kinship is
articulated. Moreover, kinship and the fictive are linked for African Americans and Native
4
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” in Black, White and In Color: Essays on
American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 206. Spillers writes that
under the conditions of enslavement, “the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural
and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”
3
W.E.B DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 218.
2
Americans alike. Captive persons forged fictive familial bonds on the ships that transported them
to the Americas. Native American literature is rooted in oral histories that have been imparted by
families across generations. Any study that compares the racialization of these two internally
diverse communities must consider that the racialization of “Indians” accompanied the attempt to
eliminate Native nations as political entities. I choose to foreground walking as a shared practice
that both African Americans and Native peoples undertook in response to settler policy.
While historical scholarship that concerns the formation of race in respect to
African-descended peoples and Native nations in the United States informs my study, as a
literary project, my dissertation is primarily concerned with the implications, for life and theory,
of the representation of walking in African American and Native American authored literature.
Scholarly appraisals of the bureaucratic function of the short-lived Freedman’s Bureau and the
long-standing Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are vital to my understanding of how African
Americans and Native Americans negotiated the administrative arm of the state.
5
Euro American
utopian communal settlements such as the Northampton Association, which incubated the
fledgling thought of the newly self-emancipated Sojourner Truth, inform the aspect of my
argument that is concerned with Truth’s eschatological, feminist thought. This dissertation is
centrally engaged with the ways of moving and of living that were regulated by the Freedman’s
Bureau and the BIA. The literary expression of these ways of being points us toward a future
freedom.
I theorize Black freedom and tribal sovereignty through African American and Native
American literature. I do not essay, here, to offer a history of either term. Instead, I aim to sketch
5
W.E.B DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 218. Du Bois
appraises the Freedman’s Bureau as an institution that was meant to reconstitute formerly enslaved
persons as new subjects, who, through their protracted free labor, might bolster the faltering postbellum
economy. He criticizes the viability and desirability of freedmen representing “modern, self-reliant
democratic laborers” given abject labor conditions.
3
the conceptual convergence of certain historical moments and works of literature alongside an
account of the governing methods used to mark and manage the movements and migrations of
Black and Native peoples in the United States. As African American studies and Native Studies,
products of student activism in the 1960s and 70s, become incorporated into University
curricula, scholarship that concerns Black freedom and tribal sovereignty has proliferated. Tribal
sovereignty re-situates the scope of U.S. governance within the sociopolitical structures and
cosmologies of tribal nations. Good Native governance challenges liberal principles, many of
which are based upon a concept of human rights that have failed both tribal nations and African
Americans. It also places the fraught category “human” under the capacious canopy of
peoplehood. Black freedom has been popularly theorized through marronage and fugitivity.
Scholars whose work on Black freedom falls under the canopy of marronage regard
“revolutionary slaves,” such as those who formed the republic of Haiti, as the most qualified
framers of freedom for our fraught and fractured modern era, which was heralded by the age of
revolution.
6
While I, too, turn to the enslaved as the first framers of Black freedom, I align myself
with feminist historians in questioning scholarly attention to the revolutionary spectacular. After
all, armed rebellion was largely (though by no means exclusively) the domain of men. Fugitivity,
too, was a form of self-emancipation that favored the circumstances of enslaved men, who were
less encumbered by reproductive labor.
7
My theorization of the peripatetic as a freedom practice
pays homage to the ad interim nature of freedom for enslaved “truants,” largely women, who left
7
Wilma King, “Suffer With them Til Death: Slave Women and Their Children in 19
th
Century
America,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, eds. David Gasper and
Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1996), 182.
6
Greg L. Childs, “Secret and Spectral: Torture and Secrecy in the Archives of Slave
Conspiracies,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (December 2015): 35–57.
4
plantations for less surveilled areas such as the woods for short periods of time.
8
Truancy, as well
as daily forms of resistance more commonly practiced by enslaved women, were a form of
provisional freedom akin to that practiced by Sojourner Truth, the subject of my dissertation’s
first chapter.
Black freedom is also tied to the yet-to-come moment of jubilee and to the genre of the
jeremiad. Of eschatological interest relevant to my study of Truth, jubilee is a just reckoning of
the living and the dead. It is etymologically linked to temporal ends as well as beginnings.
Enslaved communities deployed the biblical concepts of jubilee and jeremiad and, in so doing,
furthered the unfinished work of emancipation. The good news of jubilee was sung in the service
of a prolonged abolitionist project; tellingly, it retained its future-oriented ideation for migrants
after the civil war.
9
During the civil war era and before, Black women who lived and labored in ways that
were deemed unruly by members of the Southern planter class and by Euro-American social
reformers stood outside of the category ‘woman.’ Although they undoubtedly labored “in excess
of the reigning logics of gender,” I refer to such individuals as “women” throughout my
dissertation.
10
I do so in deference to the work of Hortense Spillers, who has asserted that “black
women do not live out their destinies at the border of femaleness, but in the heart of its terrain.”
11
As Spillers observes, African captives were subjected to an “ungendering” during the Middle
11
Hortense Spillers, “Interstices” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol
Vance (Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1984; 1982), 95.
10
Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
(Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
9
David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (Verso Books, 2014).
8
Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the
Plantation South (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).
5
Passage in the form of a forced homogenization of variously sexed bodies that began on slave
ships. Slave ships functioned as factories for the unmaking of diverse West African sex-gender
systems. They were also the abject condition of possibility for Black feminist amendments to
gender. Black feminist activism has, at critical points in its long history, strategically staged
viable options for the project of amending the category ‘woman’ and, with it, gender, by
mobilizing womanhood and its existent associated rights. Black female-bodied persons have, as
an emancipatory strategy, forged collectives and fought to be sites upon which femininity was
articulated. Following this strategy, I deploy the term “woman” while keeping my horizon of
possibility one in which gender ceases to be an axis of the uneven articulation of power.
Historically speaking, Native women were largely viewed by social reformers as savages
who were nevertheless capable of attaining the category ‘woman’ given proper instruction.
Earning the privilege of categorical inclusion, however, meant facing forms of discipline and
punishment in federal and local institutions. Because, in the eyes of many social reformers,
Native women had to earn the right of protection readily afforded to White women, their proper
gender comportment was surveilled and demanded on multiple societal levels. Arguably, the
abject conditions of Native women and girls’ “domestication” at the hands of White women in
mission and boarding schools bred a Native nationalist and feminist consciousness whose vocal
advocates strategically deployed discourses of womanhood to the benefit of Native nations.
12
Black and Native women, then, were outsiders not only to the prevailing gender logics of
the mid 19th century United States, but also to the U.S. national body, despite the fact that their
Indigenous and/or African American identities marked the Native lands that had become U.S.
soil as their only home. As the century wore on, a critical shift in how U.S. society understood
12
Sarah Winnemukka Hopkins, Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) and
Zitkala-Sa/Gertrude Bonnin in American Indian Stories (1921) describe what is arguably a rising feminist
consciousness that would serve them in their careers as advocates on behalf of their respective nations.
6
class relations between women across the policed bounds of race took place. As liberal,
secularized notions of social reform took hold, middle and upper-class women, largely White,
strategically placed the “care” of poor and working women and their children under their
purview. White womanhood thus emerged as a category closely allied with the managerial
function of the state. The purportedly reformatory institutions of the plantation household, the
prison, the boarding school and the rescue home, which were managed, in large part, by
Euro-American women, ultimately failed at their stated goals of producing more efficient
laborers, and “proper” women who would be the moral bedrock of nuclear families. This failure
was ensured by the very Black and Native women subjected to reform, who practiced more
livable definitions of freedom and sovereignty. Moreover, and more quantifiably, the social
services that reformers whose institutions hinged upon “training” Native and Black women in
gendered vocations, failed to improve the social ascendancy of the poor. On the economic
outskirts of the professionalization of social work, Black and Native women were peregrines,
strangers to the sex-gender system of a settled state built upon lands that early European settlers
claimed as their paradise.
As early as the start of the 18th century, English settlers in colonial Virginia saw the
long-term benefits of defining Native and African-descended peoples by blood quantum. In
Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson modeled the parallel racialization of
African and Native Americans, outlining, just a year before American independence from
Britain, the extent to which the nascent nation would come to depend upon the blood-based
construction of African-descended populations as indelibly Black and therefore chattel, and
Native populations as decreasingly Indian, and therefore assimilable. Ocular logics, too,
animated Jefferson’s model of the “one drop rule,” whose application would extend the
7
enslavement of African Americans to and through bondwomen’s progeny, or “increase,” a legal
term for enslaved women’s children that was also established in colonial Virginia. After the early
colonial period, as racial categories became more concrete and the U.S., whose economy
depended almost entirely on chattel slavery, emerged on the international stage, settler claims to
Native lands, made on the ideological grounds of Native disappearance, were bolstered by the
systematic erasure of Afro-Native populations, who were exclusively folded into the category
“Black.” By the 19th century, Black and Native Americans had been constructed as races relative
to the sex-gender system of the United States, a process by which they were similarly cast as
gender outsiders through the disaggregation of extended family relationships and the
enforcement of the nuclear family structure.
Despite federal efforts to tear traditional kinship units asunder, they remain vital to
sovereignty in Native North America. Kinship and sovereignty act in relation to one another and
exist within and outside of structures that privilege heterosexual conjugal domesticity and binary
gender expression. U.S. settler models of kinship are a series of forced relations that made it
necessary for Native peoples to render themselves legible to the state by adapting nuclear family
models and altering diverse pre-contact sex-gender systems. Through the administrative
practices of the state and its appendages, and through the militarized violence against Native
communities that marred the 19th century, Indigenous forms of kinship, necessarily linked to
gender, were disallowed full expression as a form of sovereign governance.
Since the end of the 19th century, Native nations have undertaken sustained efforts to
articulate and practice tribal sovereignty outside of the domestic dependent nation framework
formally established by the United States in the 1871 Indian Appropriations Act, which enforced
a putative end to a centuries-long era of treaty-making between the United States and Native
8
tribes. Today, tribal sovereignty is articulated differently by each of the 574 federally recognized
Native nations in the United States, as well as by nations not federally recognized. Sovereignty,
in theory and practice, is broadly characterized by a “turn to tradition” in life and in scholarship.
Traditions indicate that Native peoples, at the historical juncture of the mid-19th to early 20
th
centuries, the period with which this dissertation is concerned, held a decidedly “constructivist”
understanding of identity and tribal belonging that centered “proximity, practice, principles” and
a politics of affiliation that was, at times, divorced from blood.
13
Kinship, lineage and tradition,
all of which are continually and productively in flux, are nearly as fallible as blood in any
attempt to define Native peoples as a static category that simply “is.” By viewing Native nations
as peoples that do and have done, who walk, and, in the case of the Navajo nation, “run for
beauty,” tribal practices are revealed to be less fixed than they might otherwise be regarded.
The full realization of sovereignty’s basic tenets, including the extension of tribal
jurisdiction, the right to define tribal membership, and the right of tribal governments to
prosecute crimes against their citizenries in a manner consistent, not with the reigning regime of
the carceral state, but rather, with diverse traditional forms of justice, would necessitate either
significant revisions to, or, the dissolution of the settler United States. Recognizing that tribal
jurisdiction is based, not on strict demarcations of space but, rather, on a “storied” sense of tribal
place made through the active telling of stories, both old and new, would require a reassessment
of the Marshall Trilogy—a series of 19th century legislative acts whose 20th century equivalent,
the legal case Oliphant v. Squamish, enacted lasting damage on Native women.
14
14
See Sarah Deer’s The Beginning and End of Rape, Confronting Sexual Violence in Native
America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
13
Scott Richard Lyons, X Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010).
9
An active, storied sense of tribal place combats the racial category “Indian” itself. In an
era of forced marches and migrations, for Native peoples to move from their land-bases was for
them to disappear in and from the Euro-American imaginary and polity. Not dissimilarly, White
Americans on either side of the slavery debate either feared or prayed that if African Americans
were to walk away from the plantations, households, and factories which had bound them as
laborers, they would face elimination as a people, and, on these grounds, deferred or entirely
opposed abolition. Similar threads of national discourse, which tied Americans of African
descent and Native Americans firmly to geographic and social place in the service of U.S.
nation-building, facilitated such devastating policies as the Indian Removal Act and gave rise to
literary conventions such as the “Vanishing Indian” and the “Sambo” that would persist for
centuries.
CHAPTER OUTLINES
Chapter one, “The Mathematics of Truth: Peripatetic Freedom Calculations in Narrative
of Sojourner Truth" reads passages in Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave that
pertain to walking and Black motherhood. In doing so, it theorizes Truth’s 1843 walking
migration as a political pilgrimage whose spatial-temporal schema challenged federal and state
policy. Armed with tactics borrowed from mathematics and the natural sciences, “sojourner
laws” and other federal dictates worked to confine African American mothers like Truth to
particular social and geographic places and to their status as enslaved and low-wage laborers.
Casting a critical eye on Truth’s White feminist co-author Olive Gilbert’s representations of
motherhood in Narrative of Sojourner Truth, “The Mathematics of Truth” seeks to intervene into
10
the reception of Truth’s life and political work. First, it draws attention to Truth’s determination
of the date and time at which she would walk away from her owner’s farmstead and thus
emancipate herself and her infant daughter as a peripatetic freedom calculation. It argues that this
calculation instantiated a series of freedom walks that contrasted with the prolonged temporality
of New York State’s gradual emancipation laws. Contrary to Gilbert’s assessment that Truth’s
impoverished state during her sojourns was evidence that Truth “had calculated too fast,” Truth’s
itinerancy, including ten-mile walks to and from the courthouse during the lawsuit in which she
successfully sued her former owner for the return of her son, suggests an urgent indictment of
New York state’s approach to emancipation as too slow. Second, this chapter proposes that the
importance of Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, lies not only in its content but
also in its status as a collaborative text wherein the intractable reality of Truth’s sojourns resists
White abolitionist assumptions about itinerancy, poverty and the value of Black motherhood.
Third, interrogating novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and poet Frances Dana Gage’s writerly
fabrications of Truth’s speech pattern and gait, this chapter establishes White feminist investment
in Truth’s “increase.” A term that appears in a 1705 Virginia law related to the doctrine of partus
sequitur ventrem, “increase” was central to slaveholders' capacity to imagine their own
propertied futures. Gage, a White abolitionist feminist, exploited the rhetorical value of
Truth’s “increase” by strategically multiplying the five children Truth parented during her
lifetime in liberally embellishing the famous phrase, “I have borne thirteen children and aren’t I
a woman?””
11
In chapter two, “A Peculiar Peace: Counting Death in Toni Morrison’s Sula,” I conduct
an analysis of Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula. Here, I theorize the novel’s protagonist Sula’s
sociality as “peculiar” in respect to death, gender norms and sexual desire. My scholarly
encounter with Sula is part of the larger project of the dissertation, wherein what I call “the
peculiar” acts as a bedfellow to “queer,” yet seeks to branch off into the beginnings of a new
terminological genealogy. Situating itself as an interlocutor in conversations instigated by Black
feminist theory and queer of color critique, this chapter contends that Morrison’s Sula lays bare
an aspect of “the peculiar” that relates to death and the gendered organization of Black social
life. In chapter two, I make the claim that the use of dates and numbers in the novel works in
tandem with the role of characters Sula and Shadrack to organize death and Black social life
along gendered lines in The Bottom, the fictional midwestern community of Sula. In order to
contextualize the lives of Sula and Shadrack within early-to-mid 20
th
century African American
and U.S. society, this chapter draws upon the work of Black feminist historians who recognize
the limits of and see patterns within their archives that invite speculation about the past. In doing
so, it juxtaposes speculation over a body’s capacity to produce labor for the state, an undertaking
of the biopolitical, with speculation as a Black feminist scholarly act.
Building upon this argument through an analysis of Frances Washburn’s Elsie’ s Business,
chapter three, “‘Something to be Done’: Tribal Stories, Justice and Afro-Lakota Genealogies in
Frances Washburn’s Elsie’ s Business” addresses the Afro-Lakota titular character Elsie’s brutal
sexual assault and its aftermath through Elsie’s relationship with her mother, a Deer Woman of
Lakota tradition. Contextualizing the protagonist’s sexual assault within the failures of Federal
Indian law, I make the claim that Elsie and her mother’s homosocial kinship relation is peculiar
in that it facilitates a form of justice wrought by other-than-human actors on behalf of
12
Afro-Native kinswomen. Moreover, I maintain that Washburn’s use of the Deer Woman and
other tribal stories both structures and disrupts the novel’s form. Largely unexplained, tribal
stories stand on their own, guiding human events within their force and purview. Further, I
theorize Elsie’s speech itself, which is rendered strange to the ears due to damage sustained by
her vocal cords after her assault. I identify Elsie’s Afro-Lakota voice as a ruptural form of what
Kara Keeling calls “sonic errantry” as opposed to a regulatory sound within the field of U.S.
empire.
Chapter four, “Paradise: Gender and Poverty in Toni Morrison’s Paradise” argues that
the Black and Native women and girls who live on the outskirts of the all-Black town of Ruby in
Toni Morrison’s monumental work of historical fiction, Paradise, expose the twinned
undesirability and impossibility of the U.S. settler state’s liberal promise to democratize property
ownership to Black male-headed households. I propose that the novel’s Native and Black
women, outcasted because of their peripatetic practices, poverty, bisexuality and homosociality,
transform the abandoned settler institution in which they reside, a former mission school for
Native American girls, into an alternatively governed Afro-Native space. Turning my sights to
the town of Ruby, I assert that, because its self-proclaimed freedoms are bound to property, the
nominally free town merely manages difference along the lines of gender and sexuality in order
to govern itself. I contrast the town’s governance with the convent women’s peculiar sociality
and argue that theirs is an allied form of Black freedom and tribal sovereignty that is untethered
to propertied notions of personhood and settlement. I further propose that Ruby’s formerly
enslaved founders, coerced by U.S. institutions that prolonged the conditions of free labor after
emancipation, are met with the impossibility of their participation in settler society due to their
13
race. The peculiar sociality that the novel’s Black and Native women practice, then, threatens the
failed promise of settler liberalism.
14
CHAPTER ONE
The Mathematics of Truth:
Peripatetic Freedom Calculations in Narrative of Sojourner Truth
In Akron, Ohio in 1851, a Black woman walked into the venue of a much-anticipated
convention on women’s rights and threw its predominantly White attendees into chaos. The chair
of the conference, Frances Dana Gage, a sometime poet and active abolitionist feminist, made
hasty efforts to quiet the crowd. The women gathered before her, though brought together by the
feminist cause, represented a wide range of concerns. Some were unwavering in their belief that
White women did not belong in the workforce and so clung to moral reform as their primary
sphere of influence. Others, like Gage, advocated on behalf of working poor women for higher
wages and better working conditions but assumed a managerial role over the lives and labors of
free Black women. For White women of this ilk, the pedestrian’s presence meant an
uncomfortable conversation about abolition: the end to the prevailing social and economic order
whose reforms they spearheaded, and the beginning of another. While the interloper, an
eschatological thinker and preacher, may have stood in welcome at this threshold of radical new
beginnings, those who cleaved to the singular vision of gender equality could see only the
potential for ruin at this historical moment. Fearing their own undoing, they decried the
stranger’s presence. Over a decade later, in an April 1863 letter to the Independent, Gage recalled
the desperate scene:
The leaders of the movement... tremblingly alive to every appearance of evil that might
spring up in their midst, were many of them almost thrown into panics on the first day of
the meeting, by seeing a tall, gaunt black woman... march deliberately into the church....
A buzz of disapprobation was heard all over the house, and such words as these fell upon
15
listening ears: ‘An abolition affair!’ ‘Woman’s rights and n*ggers!’.... At my request,
order was restored, and the business of the hour went on.
15
“Tremblingly” fearful and uncertain of what the pedestrian might say or do, the Akron,
Ohio convention attendees were convinced that this free Black woman’s “deliberate march”
meant a confrontation with slavery. Slavery was a social system in which White men and
women, regardless of class, were economically and libidinally invested in Black women’s
numerical increase, a colonial-era legal term used to refer to the children of enslaved women.
16
Although early advertisements for the conference had proclaimed its solidarity with the
abolitionist cause, the presence of a flesh-and-blood Black woman who held her own ideas about
abolition and women’s rights set the Akron, Ohio crowd astir. The woman in question, an
itinerant preacher and feminist lecturer known as Sojourner Truth, was certainly accustomed to
disrupting “the business of the hour” as Gage so aptly put it. In her sojourns, sermons and
lectures, Truth disturbed a temporal order that subordinated African American women laborers
and laid claim to their material futures.
In her wartime letter to the Independent Gage recounted a version of the speech that
Truth had given that day in 1850. In so doing, she heavily embellished the lines “aren’t I a
16
Acts of Assembly Passed in the Colony of Virginia from 1662 to 1715 (London: Printed by John
Baskett, 1727), xix. In the recurrent phrase, “such slave or slaves, or any of their increase” the legal term
“increase” was used to refer to the children of the enslaved in an October 1705 Act of the Virginia House
of Burgesses. Entitled, “An Act declaring the Negro, Mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion, to
be real estate,” this act bound the racial categories of Negro, Mulatto and Indian together in respect to the
both the system of slavery and the settler colonial project. It begins, “for the better settling and
preservation of estates within this dominion, be it enacted…,” language that suggests that even in efforts
to ensure that the children of enslaved women be exploitable as property after the event of their owner’s
death, chattel slavery was inextricable from the disenfranchisement of Native peoples. Not only were
Black and Native persons defined as “real estate” whose value was tied to the capacity for future labor
that inhered to their bodies, but in the upheavals of the coming century, Native land would also be
considered ripe for speculation.
15
Frances Dana Gage, “Sojourner Truth” in We Must Be Up and Doing: A Reader in Early
African American Feminisms, ed. Teresa C. Zackodnik (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2010), 297.
16
woman” by which future women’s movements would come to remember Truth. Long overlooked
in theory, Gage’s misrepresentation is mathematical in nature and embedded within one of the
most influential representations of an African American woman in national memory: “I have
borne thirteen chillen... and could bear de lash as well and ar’nt I a woman?” The association
between gender, punishment and progeny made in these few phrases is underscored by a telling
rhetorical move that Gage made: she multiplied by more than twofold the number of children
that Truth actually parented. Gage’s account of the Ohio scene would be published in A History
of Woman Suffrage in 1881, just two years before Truth’s death.
17
It was this print appearance
that cemented Gage’s version of Truth’s “Aren’t I a Woman” speech in the annals of women’s
history.
What seems to have escaped the notice of the editors of A History of Woman Suffrage is
that, heralded by the upheavals of 1860s, the latter half of the 19
th
century marked a critical shift
in how U.S. society understood class relations between women across the policed bounds of
race. As liberal notions of social reform took hold, middle and upper-class women, largely
White, strategically placed the “care” of poor and working women of color and their children
under their purview, a feminist initiative that infantilized women of color and extrapolated their
labor even as it challenged White male dominance.
18
Although slaveholding women were
impelled by their husbands and fathers to act in a managerial capacity over those enslaved in and
on their households and farmsteads, their willing brutality towards enslaved women furthered the
18
Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American
West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Pascoe’s study of the urban West links
femininity, Whiteness, domesticity and urban order.
17
Nell Painter, “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known,” The
Journal of American History, 81 no. 2 (Sept. 1994): 461-492.
17
reigning logics of domesticity.
19
Such logics suggested that working women, particularly those
who were of African descent and enslaved, were inherently masculine in their capacity to work.
African American mothers like Truth held a symbolic position proximate to masculinity
and distinct from femininity in the U.S. imaginary. Given this reality, it is unsurprising that Gage
was invested in ascribing to Truth children that she did not have. African-descended children,
whom colonial law referred to as an enslaved woman’s “increase” in a 1705 act of the Virginia
House of Burgesses, had become a corporeal currency in the United States by the middle of the
19
th
century. In this context, even those White American feminists who, like Gage, were also
abolitionists, found themselves negotiating competing investments in the future of the U.S.
nation and the future of Black life. Faced with such a wager, many rhetorically sacrificed the
latter in service of the former. In writing about the internecine tensions between Truth, Gilbert
and other White feminists in Truth’s abolitionist social circles, my use of the term ‘woman’ is not
untroubled. Affixed to ‘Black,’ ‘woman’ indexes the category’s foundational exclusions as well
as the reality that “queer…. lives in the temporal logics of modernity” as “a condition of
possibility for sociality as we know it.”
20
Truth counted many White feminists among her
personal friends, yet, in claiming that Truth’s bodily comportment was masculine, these friends
still “queered” her in respect to White femininity.
20
Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 88.
19
Thavolia Glymph, Out of The House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation
Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Glymph challenges the basic conceit of a
wave of mid-to-late 20
th
century women’s history scholarship, whose authors argued that plantation
mistresses were latent allies of enslaved women because both groups were subjected to patriarchy.
Reading a myriad of primary sources, Glymph counter-argues that the acts of violence wrought by
plantation mistresses onto their enslaved counterparts were not random or anomalous, as historians
claimed, but, rather, were performed in the service of the plantation home and its reigning as a
“civilizing” force.
18
Itinerants like Truth, who were governed by a peripatetic temporal schema that favored
impermanence over settlement, challenged modern managerial tactics as they were developed
and deployed by the state. To manage those who strayed, the federal government utilized
quantification and classification, tactics borrowed from mathematics and the natural sciences that
had been newly implemented in the census of 1840, the first to assess mental health.
21
Conducted
three years before Truth embarked upon her sojourns, the 1840 census assessed free Black
Americans and their households as mentally unsound on a far greater scale than it did the
enslaved population.
22
The administrative arm of the state quantified populations through the
census and conveniently concluded that Black Americans were more mentally fit under the
bounded conditions of slavery than in freedom, which promised social and geographic mobility.
In contrast to the prevailing logics of quantification, which pathologized Black freedom and
served population management, Truth’s peripatetic politics were governed by principles of
altruism, approximation and proximity.
Proximity to numbers characterized enslaved mothers’ identities in the eyes of their
owners, who carefully measured their rates of crop production and biological reproduction. As
commodified persons, enslaved women and their children commonly appear under first names
next to quantities of crops or household goods in ledger books, wherein slaveholders kept track
of their enslaved laborers’ productivity. Enslaved mothers like Isabella Dumont, who would first
change her name to Isabella Van Wagenen and then to Sojourner Truth, suffered what Hortense
Spillers calls “an act of commodification so thorough that the[ir] daughters labor even now under
22
Owens, 8.
21
Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 4.
19
the outcome.”
23
Narrative of Sojourner Truth illustrates the gendered process of commodification
that Truth, then called Isabella Dumont, endured as an enslaved mother on John Dumont’s
farmstead in Upstate New York. Dumont, Truth’s last legal owner, described her as “better to me
than a man-- for she will do a good family’s washing in the night, and be ready in the morning to
go into the field.”
24
Like other enslaved women, Truth was “queered” in the eyes of her owner,
who saw her as more useful to him “than a man” might have been. Dumont’s reasoning, that
Truth could finish his family’s laundry in the evening as well as perform field work, illustrates
that enslaved women were doubly tethered to the care of families and to the demands of manual
labor. In the phrase “double bind of freedom,” numbers fittingly describe enslaved mothers’
predicament and hint at the burdened nature of Black women’s work in slavery and in freedom.
25
In establishing gradual emancipation laws, New York state had made its own
mathematical calculation: that the low-wage labor extracted from free African Americans could
compete with profits made from enslaved labor on northern soil. Numbers were also a primary
way that White Americans with abolitionist leanings took stock of the situation that was slavery.
The racialization of African Americans along numerical blood lines was dramatized by
playwrights and appeared as a theme in popular novels published during the fugitive slave and
civil war eras. At the height of the Civil War, images of ostensibly “white” enslaved persons
circulated through Union camps to foster anti-Confederate sentiment. Such images were meant
25
Saidiya Hartman discusses the “double bind” of freedom in Scenes of Subjection: Terror,
Slavery and Self-Making in 19
th
Century America (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1997), 121.
24
Gilbert, Truth, 20.
23
Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” in Black, White and In Color: Essays
on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 155.
20
to illustrate the injustice of a “one drop” blood-based mathematics that enslaved those who were
“white” in appearance rather than point to the systematic injustice of bondage.
26
Where numbers failed to illicit sympathy for the abolitionist and feminist causes, Truth
was, in her person, an inexhaustible symbolic fund. Truth was a wellspring from which White
American social reformers, largely women, drew; a kind of living water that spilled over the
pages of periodicals in the 1850s. Frances Dana Gage used the language of mathematics when
she wrote of Truth, “I might multiply anecdotes... till your pages would not contain them, and yet
the fund not be exhausted.”
27
Gage’s pronouncement reflects the nature of Truth’s relationship
with many of the prominent White feminists with whom she thought, lived, and to whom she
posed a challenge in the form of her corporeality and public voice. Her contemporaries staged
their own equations when it came to Truth. They added years to her age in order to depict Truth
as a “glorious old mother,” a stereotype inextricable from the role that Black mothers played as a
fund for both the national economy and the political economy of abolition.
28
Gage penned her
recollection of the Ohio conference on the heels of the Emancipation Proclamation, when the
economic role of Black mothers had begun to shift to that of wartime nurses and laundresses. But
in 1851, the year of the Ohio convention, the U.S. economy relied upon enslaved women’s rates
of childbirth to replenish the country’s free labor force.
29
29
Wilma King, “Suffer With them ’Til Death: Slave Women and their Children in 19
th
Century
America” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, eds. David Gasper and
Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 150.
28
Gage, “Sojourner Truth,” 300.
27
Gage, “Sojourner Truth,” 300.
26
Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the 19
th
Century (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 174.
21
While motherhood was mobilized rhetorically in the pages of abolitionist texts, actual
Black mothers who traveled in pursuit of work or reunion with loved ones were policed and, at
best, pitied. Yet with the revivalist Christian fervor that swept the country beginning in the
Jacksonian era, women, many of them mothers, were increasingly on the move. Truth and fellow
itinerant preachers Jarena Lee and Rebecca Cox Jackson traversed the “burnt over district” in the
Northeast, furthering a “black episteme” in their spiritual practices.
30
The tensions between
Truth’s status as an itinerant preacher and her status as a mother play out rhetorically in the pages
of her narrative. However, accounts of the historical Truth’s parenting are markedly absent from
Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Historical record is equally quiet concerning Truth’s children.
While biographers identified a daughter who lived in Battle Creek, Michigan where Truth spent
the final years of her life, the trail of Truth’s descendants has since run cold. Where present in the
narrative, references to her parenting are refracted through the lens of “monstrous intimacies”
that cast a shadow over the text’s account of Truth’s victory in the legal battle she waged against
her former owner over her son Peter.
31
Just as Truth embraced her traumatized and beaten son
upon their reunion, I endeavor to “embrace the monstrous” in considering the role of maternity in
Truth’s narrative, life and legacy. We must also “go with the numbers” in order to understand
why there are so few accounts of Truth’s parenting in her narrative, which—whether or not it
31
Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 3. Sharpe’s definition of monstrous intimacies, “a set of known and unknown…
desires and positions produced…circulated and transmitted” sounds strikingly like descriptions of the
function of a numerical set.
30
Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Fiction and the Music of Other Worlds (Chapel Hill:
Duke University Press, 2021), 25.
22
fully was— she treated as an accurate account of her life, and so very many children in the
“aren’t I a woman” speech for which Truth is most well remembered.
32
In the main, White feminists who were present at the scene of Truth’s “Aren’t I a
Woman” speech saw Truth as an “appearance of evil”; a member of les damnés de la terre.
Recall that leaders of the feminist movement implored Gage to preemptively silence Truth,
fearing that public association between women’s rights activism and abolition would “ruin” the
feminist cause.
33
The previous year Gage had had to remind attendees of another feminist
gathering that Truth’s mere presence did not make the conference about “colored” concerns.
Undaunted in their bigotry and “having encountered what they underst[ood] as chaos” in Truth,
Gage’s fellow feminists remained afraid that their cause would come to ruin.
34
As an
impoverished domestic laborer and former enslaved mother, Truth may have stood beyond the
reach of redemption in their eyes. As an itinerant preacher, Truth rejected their role as arbitrators
of worth. She had come to the church to speak as a theologian and feminist theorist as well as to
sell her newly printed life narrative.
With the publication of Narrative of Sojourner Truth in 1850, a year before the Ohio
convention, Truth answered, with Olive Gilbert’s help, the popular demand for slave narratives,
which had seen an upsurge in the 1840s. In title and type, Truth’s text responded to the
unprecedented popularity of Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
34
Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” in Black, White and In Color: Essays
on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 156. Spillers argues
that there are certain historical moments at which degree and difference meet, language fails and power,
“to which some women belong” runs out of terms in its encounter with the chaos wrought by this
convergence.
33
Gage, “Sojourner Truth,” 298.
32
Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics, Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer 2014):
16-28.
23
American Slave, first published in 1845. Narrative of Sojourner Truth differed from Douglass’
narrative, which treated literacy as the means by which he came to acute awareness of the
pressing need for freedom. In many ways, Truth’s sermons and lectures exceeded the capacities
of writing, a reality about which both she and Douglass were well aware. Douglass penned a
short recollection of his experiences at the Northampton Association of Education and Industry,
where both he and Truth briefly resided in the early 1840s. The Northampton Association of
Education and Industry was part of a broader movement towards utopian collectivity that
reached its zenith in the United States and Canada during that same decade. Of his time with
Truth on its Massachusetts compound Douglass wrote, “Sojourner Truth...seemed to please
herself and others best when she put her ideas in the oddest forms.”
35
The pleasure Truth derived
from the peculiar forms by which she communicated her ideas must have stemmed in part from a
recognition of her own ingenuity. In the 1850s, as Truth began to speak in abolitionist feminist
circles in earnest, she found her public voice not through wide circulation of her life narrative,
which had placed her in considerable debt, but, instead, through her idiosyncrasies.
Truth’s co-author Olive Gilbert shared Douglass’ opinion that Truth’s remarkable life
exceeded the constructs and constraints of the slave narrative. However, while Gilbert asserted
that “in voice, gesture and song” Truth exceeded the formal restrictions of her narrative, in
typical fashion, Gilbert and her ilk attributed such narrative excesses to her “full-blooded African
[type].”
36
Similarly, in “Sojourner Truth: Libyan Sibyl” published in The Atlantic in April 1863,
Stowe described the lecturer and preacher as a figure who “impressed one strangely” and who
36
Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, Libyan Sibyl” The Atlantic, April 1863.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1863/04/sojourner-truth-the-libyan-sibyl/308775/
35
Frederick Douglass, “What I Found at the Northampton Association” in The History of
Florence, Massachusetts, Including a Complete Account of the Northampton Association of Education
and Industry, ed. Charles A. Sheffeld (Florence, MA: 1895), 132.
24
spoke with “a power of voice peculiar to herself.”
37
Despite her assertion of its singularity,
Stowe’s rendition of Truth’s speech pattern relied heavily on the Mammy stereotype, which
reduced Black Southern women’s various vocal inflections to sources of ridicule. Stowe’s efforts
to sonically remove Truth from her native New York state and place her, by way of a fabricated
speech pattern, in the plantation South, suggest how necessary a recognizable image of Black
maternity was to the causes advanced by White abolitionists. Stowe rendered Truth a Southern
Mammy even as she claimed that Truth was masculine in voice and gesture. These two
stereotypes worked together to encourage the belief that Black women harbored non-threatening,
even maternal feelings about the sex-gender arrangements of the White-owned farmsteads on
which they labored. This compound stereotype of masculine mother would follow Truth
throughout her public life, however much she challenged it. Truth publicly contested Stowe’s
false account of her speech pattern, dictating a letter to the press which read in part, “I never
make use of the word ‘honey.’”
38
In reality, Truth eclipsed the formal constraints of the written word not because of her
racialized embodiment, but because she flouted many of the conventions that readers and
publishers alike had come to expect from slave narratives. Books by the likes of Douglass and
William Wells Brown, both of which predated Truth’s narrative and far outstripped it in terms of
sales, upheld the acquisition of literacy as constitutive of selfhood. The biographical narrative
co-authored by Truth, who remained non-literate throughout her lifetime, presents no scenes of
literary acquisition. Moreover, the centrality of Truth’s own journey to the story of her life defied
the expectation that marriage and children would and should be foregrounded in literary works
38
Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 163.
37
Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, Libyan Sybil.”
25
by women.
39
The very format of Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave bespeaks
Truth’s ability to circumvent the limitations of illiteracy by placing her ideas in “the oddest
forms.” The text is split between two voices. One, the authoritative voice of the biographer,
relates the events of Truth’s life. The other, ascribed to Truth, interrupts narrative proceedings.
The narrative’s value to Black feminist theory lies in its twoness. First, in simultaneously
attributing Truth’s freedom to the state and to her “walk in broad daylight” the narrative presents
two distinct forms of freedom by way of its two narrative voices: provisional itinerant freedom
and state-sanctioned emancipation. Second, in the tension between its treatment of Truth as, on
the one hand, a mother deserving of freedom and full attainment of the category woman, and, on
the other, an errant figure, a “wandering maniac” in the eyes of her children.
40
Throughout her life, Truth remained marked by her former status as an “unlettered slave
mother” in the political economy of abolition.
41
In 1854, though she had emancipated herself
well over two decades prior, an article in abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The
Liberator called Truth “a very efficient laborer in the antislavery field,” praising her in a manner
reminiscent of the slaveholder John Dumont lauding Truth, who had been his most prized
enslaved worker.
42
Garrison’s use of the words “field” and “laborer” suggest that Truth
remained, in the eyes of many White abolitionists, a slave mother tethered to plantation
geographies and defined by her reproductive and manual productivity.
42
Merrill.
41
Joseph Merrill, “Sojourner Truth Lectures in Danvers,” TheLiberatorFiles.com, The Liberator,
Sept 25
th
, 1854, http://theliberatorfiles.com/sojourner-truth-lectures-in-danvers/.
40
Gilbert, Truth, 90.
39
In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (ed. Lydia Maria Child, 1861), Harriet Jacobs addresses
this expectation by writing, “My story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.”
26
Truth’s method of resisting her commodification was bodily as well as mathematical. She
began calculating freedom in relation to time and to her own labor as early as 1827. In the Fall of
that year, months prior to the 1828 general emancipation date set by the state of New York, Truth
calculated the day and hour she should rightfully be free and walked away from bondage,
carrying her infant daughter. In walking away from her master’s farmstead on the date and at a
time that she determined, Truth, then in her 30s, forged a connection between mathematical
calculation and the bodily act of walking that would become central to her eschatological
politics. In the decades that followed this first self-emancipatory walk, on-foot sojourns would
lead Truth to the destinations where she preached as well as foster conditions that enabled her
providential encounters with those she hailed as fellow sojourners. In this sense, Truth’s
pedestrianism instigated a social scheme based on chance encounters and altruism that welcomed
uncertain material outcomes. If Truth’s calculated itinerancy furthered a social system that
privileged uncertainty, and if, “in mathematics... the demonic connotes a working system that
cannot have a determined... outcome” then Truth rendered her path “demonic” or unmanageable
when she walked, challenging assumptions about the ready availability and fixed nature of Black
women’s geographies.
43
Although Truth had been legally free in the state of New York for fifteen years when she
embarked on her period of political and spiritual sojourns through the Northeast in 1843, her
freedom, even as a Northerner, was precarious. Federal policies such as “sojourner laws” and the
second Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 ensured that the freedom of Black Northerners was tenuous.
In the antebellum period, “sojourner laws” ensured the right of slaveholders to traverse free
43
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxiv.
27
states with their enslaved laborers without the injunction of manumission.
44
Such laws
acquiesced to slave states’ demands in determining how best to regulate the geographic
movement of the enslaved. Made to capitulate to the logics of an institution which
decreed/…….. that Black persons were strangers, outside of but bound to labor for the national
body, abolitionist lawyers argued that prolonged stay rather than passage through free states
should ensure that “traveling slaves’” be granted free status. In leveraging their appeals on the
grounds of wrongful enslavement, lawyers had to formally concede that enslavement itself was
just, but incorrectly applied in the case they represented. Sojourner laws as well as their appeals,
then, upheld the system of slavery even in cases where individuals were successfully
manumitted. In contrast, Truth’s itinerancy espoused the passing nature of travel as grounds for
provisional personal freedom and social transformation. Her pedestrian practice embraced
passing through rather than settlement.
Truth’s peripatetic politics both engaged and challenged the need for the various modes
of bodily passing that enslaved persons employed in efforts to secure their freedom.
45
In an era in
which the married couple William and Ellen Craft staged a bold act of gender and racial passing
in order to secure their freedom, Sojourner Truth was regarded by many White Americans as
“masquerading as a woman.”
46
In Indiana, in 1861, in order to prove her femaleness to a
disbelieving White male heckler at a gathering held in support of the civil war effort, Truth bore
46
“Sojourner Truth Dead: Sketch of the Life of a Celebrated Colored Woman,
NewYorkTimes.com, New York Times, November 27
th
, 1883,
https://www.nytimes.com/1883/11/27/archives/sojourner-truth-dead-sketch-of-the-life-of-a-celebrated-col
ored.html?searchResultPosition=1
45
See William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William
and Ellen Craft from Slavery (William Tweedie, 1860).
44
Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive Nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits and the Legal
Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 3, 107.
28
her breast to her audience. Truth’s partial disrobing illustrates the extent to which
African-descended persons had to negotiate White viewers’ demands that they offer bodily
evidence of their sex. In Indiana, Truth made use of the substance of her body and acquiesced to
an audience member’s demand that she partially disrobe in order to “prove” her gendered
identity. In doing so, she implicated her viewers at the “site of abjection,” manipulating the scene
so that it became a self-fashioned exchange that substantiated her womanhood.
47
Recognizing the
ocular logics of racism at play, Hortense Spillers contends that “Sojourner Truth’s femaleness…
sustains an element of drag.”
48
This “element of drag” was foisted upon Truth by the institution
of slavery, which, like the domestic carceral sphere, was a “cultural institution that forced the
performance of black female masculinity.”
49
“Forced drag” has long been integral to the
production of normative White femininity.
50
It is for this reason that I call attention away from
bodily forms of gender and racial passing to foreground the temporal aspect of passing through.
Estranged from the Native lands to which they were forcibly brought, African Americans can be
said to have passed through or “stayed” rather than “lived” in the United States these long
centuries. In deference to this cultural reality and to the definition of “sojourn,” I turn from the
sustained nature of Truth’s perceived gender masquerade to the less temporally determined
nature of her walking practice.
50
Haley, 95.
49
Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 95.
48
Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” in Black, White and In Color: Essays
on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 157.
47
Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom,
1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 159.
29
To walk east in the face of westward expansion as Truth did in 1843 meant, on some
level, to do so as one of modernity’s ‘others.’ In the 1840s, a new means of transport: the
railroad, cut across North America, acting as both the product and vehicle of the modernizing
and colonizing project in the U.S. and Canada.
51
Just as the covered wagon carried settlers in
family units to homesteads in the plains and prairies, the railroad transported critical goods to
federal military outposts that abutted Native nations’ territories.
52
The modernizing project of
manifest destiny was also undertaken, however ambivalently, by liberal-minded White
Americans interested in social reform. Though they may have romanticized and sensationalized
the plight of African Americans and Native Americans in their writing, for Euro-American
women of Truth’s milieu, modernity remained marked by stages whose pinnacle was Western
property ownership and literacy. In keeping with the logics of passing through, Truth’s eastern
pilgrimage went against the rising tide of the nation’s westward expansion and settlement.
In Narrative of Sojourner Truth, walking features as an emancipatory act that was
discursively distinct from “running away.” Together with her literary collaborator Olive Gilbert,
Truth recounts a comment she made to her former master John Dumont in an incident that took
place at the home of her Upstate New York employers, the Van Wagenens. Dumont accuses her
of running away and thus defecting her duties, to which Truth replies, “No, I did not run away, I
walked in broad daylight, and all because you had promised me a year of my time.”
53
Here, Truth
makes plain her reasons for emancipating herself nearly a year before the date dictated by New
York state. Truth’s reasons were temporal and possessive (it was her time that Dumont had
53
Gilbert, Truth, 29.
52
Deverell and Hyde.
51
William Deverell and Anne Hyde, Shaped by the West, Volume 2: A History of North America
from 1850 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 15.
30
robbed). Moreover, her emphasis on walking away from enslavement in the light of day suggests
that, in doing so, she aimed to lay claim to time in a manner that “running” at night and the
fugitive positionality it would have engendered may not have done. While Truth’s assertion that
she walked toward freedom suggests a proprietary relationship to time as hers, a marker of the
possessive individual, her choice in staking that claim was circumscribed by her status as a
formerly enslaved mother, a status to which she remained tied in the eyes of the abolitionists
with whom she would work in the coming years. To Truth’s recuperation of months of her time
and refusal to return to a state of bondage, Dumont replies, “Well, I shall take the child.”
54
Truth
denies Dumont’s request to repossess her infant child, refuting his calculation that the baby, her
“increase” and material future, would have been sufficient payment for a year’s worth of labor.
Later, Truth would further challenge the imposition of her master’s “third flesh” onto her familial
relationships by suing Dumont for maternal rights to her son Peter, whom he had illegally sold
South.
55
To some extent, Truth’s narrative is part of the tradition of autobiographical story, in
which self-emancipated and formerly enslaved women cultivated a “counter image” of Black
womanhood that challenged the degrading imagery that served to deny them maternal rights.
56
Yet Truth, as non-literate co-author of her narrative, offered so few instances of parenting her
daughters in the text that historians must search for them in slimmer sources. Truth’s illustrated
efforts to retrieve her son Peter from bondage notwithstanding, the Narrative includes paltry few
56
Brenda E. Stevenson, “Gender Convention, Ideals and Identity Among Antebellum Virginia
Slave Women,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, eds. David Gasper and
Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 171.
55
Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the 19
th
Century
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 54. Hunter argues that slave owners, in intervening in
enslaved unions, acted as a “third flesh.”
54
Gilbert, Truth, 29.
31
references to Truth’s status as a mother, an unusual choice for a slave narrative, whose authors
and collaborators often mobilized motherhood towards abolitionist ends. According to the
Narrative, the middle-aged Isabella Dumont (who took the name Isabella Van Wagenen after the
Dutch American family for whom she worked shortly after gaining freedom and before moving
to New York City), who had walked “in broad daylight” in order to claim her freedom and would
later walk well over twenty miles to reclaim her son from enslavement, did not tell her children
that she had left New York to begin her on-foot migrations as Sojourner Truth.
57
According to
Truth biographer Nell Painter, Truth’s daughters were living with her during much of the period
covered in the narrative; such an omission would have been deliberate. Speculating about the
nature of their absent presence, Painter read Truth’s daughters’ slim archival trace as “a fugitive
notation.”
58
Compellingly, the historian’s assessment of a note inscribed in a store ledger from
the archives of the Northampton Association reads as a kind of equation. Painter speculates that
the set of numbers that comprise this found note may reveal the presence of another, possibly
adoptive daughter who otherwise completely escaped archival notice; a “Jane” who bore the last
name “Van Wagenen.” Do the numbers recover one of Truth’s lost progeny, or do they merely
reflect the ledgers of a failed commune whose shopkeeper was yet another person invested in
Truth’s “increase?” Speculation about its authors’ erasures and about the existence and
whereabouts of Truth’s adoptive daughter challenges the speculation that was performed on
enslaved laborers to determine their potential property value. In that it recognizes the made,
non-sanguineous families that African Americans often wrought after having been torn from sold
relatives, such conjecture also invites another form of valuation that is altogether divorced from
productivity and profit.
58
Painter, Sojourner Truth, 100.
57
Gilbert, Truth, 29.
32
In want of concrete knowledge about a possible sixth child, readers must trust that
Gilbert, unlike Gage, accurately reported the number of children that Truth parented. Gilbert
writes, “In process of time, Isabella found herself the mother of five children.”
59
The temporal
collapse by which Gilbert relates this aspect of Truth’s life implies that normative time,
unfolding in its proper course, was responsible for Truth’s parental status rather than a system
that simultaneously demanded and denied enslaved motherhood. Normative time also redeems
what Gilbert perceives as Truth’s parental passivity. “But since that time,” Gilbert seems relieved
to report, “the subject of this narrative has made some advances from a chattel state towards that
of a woman and a mother.”
60
Gilbert further betrays her enmeshment in the 19
th
century logics of
quantification that pathologized Black freedom of movement in claiming that Truth’s children’s
“imaginations painted her as a wandering maniac” after they learned of her 1843 departure.
61
Olive Gilbert’s recognition that Truth was ‘too, a woman and a sister’ did not in fact redeem the
suffering that Truth endured as a mother, either in slavery or in freedom. Neither did Gilbert’s
recognition of their shared humanity extend to an appreciation of the careful calculation that
Truth made in order to ensure her son’s lawful return.
In relating the story of Truth’s son Peter’s illegal sale to Alabama and the court case that
Truth initiated in efforts to return the six-year-old to her care, Gilbert writes, “When Isabel heard
that her son had been sold South, she immediately started on foot and alone, to find the man who
dared...to sell her child...and...to bring him to account for the deed.”
62
Truth acted rationally and
62
Gilbert, Truth, 31.
61
Gilbert, Truth, 88.
60
Gilbert, Truth, 25. Gilbert’s words mirror Frederick Douglass’ chattel to man formulation, but
for Gilbert it is motherhood that makes a woman of Truth, whereas for Douglass emancipatory violence
makes a man.
59
Gilbert, Truth, 24.
33
deliberately in walking ten miles to and from the courthouse to demand accountability. Yet
Gilbert opines that reason lay with the prolonged deliberation of the state: “it was but reasonable
that she should now wait patiently the time of the court.”
63
Gilbert views the numerous times
Truth defied state logic as a gross miscalculation rather than as a strategy: “Isabella, having no
idea of this space of time, went several times in a day.”
64
As Truth again rejects the state’s
reasoning and temporal logics, Gilbert demonstrates her investment in teleological time. She
later predicates a “chattel to woman” formulation on the notion that history progresses towards a
shared human future which may include those it once terminologically denied.
65
Truth’s near
hourly return to the New Paltz, New York court of law to demand Peter’s whereabouts does not
reflect a failure to accurately calculate time, but, rather, an attempt to usher in a new temporal
order through the act of walking.
After having first arrived at the New Paltz, New York courthouse, Truth is met by the
appraising gaze of a White male courthouse attendant who speculates that Truth, flushed from
her ten mile walk and shoeless, is a “new genus of homo.”
66
The unnamed man’s view exhibits
anxieties surrounding the preservation of the national body in the face of state-sanctioned
emancipation. Throughout the 19
th
century, anatomists and social theorists who studied race and
sex struggled to arrive at valid criteria for determining discrete categories for race, sex and class.
In their studies, they often identified women’s bodies as the primary site that bore the markers
66
Gilbert, Truth, 36.
65
Gilbert, Truth, 25.
64
Gilbert, Truth, 37.
63
Gilbert, Truth, 35.
34
racial difference.
67
In the face of these myriad attempts to classify what constituted the African
‘race’ along the lines of sex, Truth’s grammatical shift from noun to verb in her walks to and
from the courthouse exemplify a form of “being human as praxis” whereby, as Sylvia Wynter
argues, “humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis.”
68
While Wynter questions the
political efficacy and social desirability of the category “human” throughout her work, here, in
her emphasis on verbs, she leaves room for a new form of human being based on Black ontology.
At the courthouse, Truth is asked to swear the veracity of her testimony on a book that
she is led to believe is a Bible. The pales of laughter that her swearing elicits from the White men
gathered there make clear that the book is not in fact a Bible but has been as indiscriminately
chosen as a proxy for the Christian text as were the books with which slave masters often
married their enslaved laborers.
69
Although a tenuous, terrifying grammar bound enslaved
couples, not “‘til death,” but until forcible separation, Gilbert attributes Truth’s separation from
her husband to his inability to successfully transition from slave to wage labor. Truth herself,
however, seems to have been unconcerned with being financially taken care of by her husband.
In the timing of her first freedom walk, Truth not only defied New York State’s gradual
emancipation policy, but also forfeited the slim possibility of being bequeathed a home with her
husband by the unyielding John Dumont. In so doing, Truth defied the ethos of state
emancipation, the success of which hinged on former bondspersons’ investment in wage labor
and proper gender comportment, which included marriage. Although the restricted,
state-sanctioned emancipation that was at long last established by issue of the Emancipation
69
Hunter, 57.
68
Wynter, 23.
67
Londa Schiebinger, “The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth Century
Science,” Eighteenth Century Studies 23, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 387-405.
35
Proclamation in 1863 was not in itself gendered, “it moved federal regulations in the direction of
encouraging monogamous marriage and privileging the position of black men” over that of
Black women.
70
In contrast to this feature of state emancipation, Truth’s provisionary itinerant
freedom operated on the periphery of the economy, challenging the biopolitical appeal of marital
union.
Unlike the speech acts derived from civic law that established marriage, the natural law
that was believed to exist between mother and child required rhetorical acrobatics for
slaveholders to undermine. The joy that Truth must have felt at her success in suing Dumont at
the New Paltz courthouse and in retrieving her young son Peter from enslavement in Alabama
was likely tempered by a “monstrous embrace” between mother and son.
71
Six years of age,
lacerated from head to toe and suffering from the mental malady such wounds elicit, Peter did
not readily acknowledge Truth as his mother. Gilbert speculates that Peter had been abused both
physically and emotionally and convinced, lest Dumont face criminal consequences for the
child’s illegal sale South, “that Isabella was...some terrible monster.”
72
Black women were
scripted as monstrous beings during contact between European travelers and African nations as
early as the 15th century.
73
Later, colonial laws such as that of partus sequitur ventrum
established in Virginia in 1662, which stated that the slave or free status of African-descended
children would follow that of the mother, established slave status as a condition tied to maternity
73
Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female
Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1
(1997): 167-192.
72
Gilbert, Truth, Narrative of the Life of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, ed. Margaret
Washington (New York: Random House, 1993), 39.
71
Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010).
70
Hunter, 172.
36
and “ensured that the relationship between the master and slave existed prior to the bond
between mother and child.”
74
The ‘prior’ nature of the bond established by this colonial law
superseded the various temporalities practiced by enslaved mothers like Truth.
Truth sought an egalitarian way of living that would afford her more control over how
she spent her time. Her residence in utopian communes during the 1830s, the years directly
following her self-emancipatory walk, illustrates her interest in alternative economies. Soon after
leaving the Van Wagenens for New York City, Truth poured the meager finances she had accrued
from working as a domestic into the so-called kingdom of a man who called himself Prophet
Matthias. Truth’s continued financial support of the dubious Matthias after the scandalous and
very public dissolution of his Upstate New York commune suggests that Truth was less
concerned with the measurable success of small-scale communal experiments than she was
invested in the fruitful yet failed dimension of utopian yearnings.
75
The Northampton
Association of Education and Industry, where Truth lived briefly during the following decade
and first encountered Frederick Douglass, was part of a broader movement towards utopian
collectivity that reached its zenith in the United States and Canada during the 1840s. Wealthy
patrons often funded these experiments, and in rare cases provided partial loans of capital to the
formerly enslaved to start schools-qua-communes.
Influenced by utopian ideals and her communal living experiments, Truth’s mounting
“indifference” toward “money and property” meant that she was employed only sporadically
during the period of her spiritual sojourns.
76
Truth, as Isabella Van Wagenen, had served as a
76
Gilbert, Truth, 79.
75
Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New
York University Press, 2009), 106.
74
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
(New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 34.
37
domestic laborer in New York City since the early 1830s, well before the Prophet Matthias days.
When Isabella Van Wagenen became Sojourner Truth in June 1843, however, “she would not be
induced to take regular wages.”
77
Truth’s refusal to continue to work for prolonged periods in the
homes of the urban elite indicates that her final name change and on-foot migration east
coincided with a rejection of domestic labor as a primary means of making a living. To Truth, the
low-wage domestic labor that was available to African American women with free status must
have seemed a mere farce next to more promising forms of Black freedom. Rather than
recognize the radical nature of Truth’s travels, however, Gilbert once again misconstrues her
collaborator’s calculated refusal to work as a domestic laborer. Citing the material poverty that
Truth endured as an itinerant, Gilbert concludes, “She had calculated too fast.”
78
Gilbert’s lament
that Truth had miscalculated the effects of freedom betrays her investment in New York state’s
decades-long time frame for gradual emancipation.
Truth’s freedom calculations were elsewhere erased by Gilbert, who, in both the subtitle
and in the opening lines of the first edition of Narrative of Sojourner Truth inaccurately reported
that Truth was emancipated by the state of New York in 1827. Just as Harriet Beecher Stowe had
accredited the ways in which Truth exceeded narrative bounds to her bodily constitution, Gilbert
claimed that Truth’s uncertainty about her birth year was a matter of bodily failure.
79
At critical
junctures in the abridged life story related in the Narrative, Gilbert muses that Truth is unable to
calculate time because of a body hindered by a prolonged period of enslavement. She writes of
the period immediately following Truth’s self-emancipation, “Isabella had not then sufficiently
79
Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Sojourner Truth: Libyan Sibyl” in The Atlantic, April 1863.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1863/04/sojourner-truth-the-libyan-sibyl/308775/
78
Gilbert, Truth, 98.
77
Gilbert, Truth, 98.
38
cultivated her organ of time to calculate years, or even weeks or hours.”
80
While the phrase “had
not then” suggests that this temporal deficiency was rectified with years, the opening lines of the
narrative present the mature Truth as having an asymptotic relationship to time. “Sojourner
Truth....whose name, originally, was Isabella—was born, as near as she can now calculate,
between the years 1797 and 1800.”
81
In a flawed attempt to further the abolitionist cause, Gilbert
asserts that the “organ of time” in Black bodies is underdeveloped due to the experience of
“slaves, that were never allowed to make any...calculations for themselves, [nor] ever possessed
an adequate idea of the true value of time.”
82
Time was, for Gilbert, a commodity of measurable
value. Gilbert misrepresented Truth’s ultimate freedom calculation, incorrectly proclaiming in
the narrative’s very subtitle that Truth was emancipated by the state. Perhaps Gilbert erased the
reality of Truth’ self-emancipation out of fear of the new temporal order that might be unleashed
by the form of emancipation instigated by enslaved persons effecting a general strike.
83
Instead,
Gilbert furthered the cause of state-sanctioned abolition.
Notably, Gilbert distinguishes between types of itinerancy, disparaging “vagrants” as
unworthy of the charity that might be bequeathed by the select few who wielded female moral
authority like a mace over the lives of others. Of Truth’s encounter with an impoverished couple
who offers her their scanty lodgings for a night, Gilbert cautions readers, “every pedestrian...is
not a vagabond...it is a dangerous thing [for] anyone to receive that hospitality from the...
83
See W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part
which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935), for Du
Bois’ thesis that abolition was brought about by a general strike on the part of the enslaved.
82
Gilbert, Truth, 54.
81
Gilbert, Truth, 3. Emphasis my own.
80
Gilbert, Truth, 9.
39
abandoned which they should have received from us.”
84
Gilbert’s ‘us’ refers to a largely White
female readership; at mid-century, access to print materials increased for Northern White women
and coincided with an era of social reform that they steered. Gilbert urges upper class
Euro-American women to manage members of an “abandoned” class of vagabonds and itinerants
who, if given the opportunity to care for one another, might pose a danger to the social order.
Well into the 1870s and early ’80s, the White literary community continued to stake their
investments in Truth’s increase. Decades after her first emancipatory walk, journalists advanced
Truth’s age in newspaper reports and even falsely reported that she was dead. Garrison pressured
Truth to stop advocating for Black migration to the Midwest by earnestly stating that her
advanced age should inhibit her movement. Garrison, who had written the requisite attestation to
Truth’s character for Narrative of Sojourner Truth wrote, “Truth is indeed a remarkable woman...
but at her extreme age (she is older than 83, probably close onto 90) it is a pity that she cannot
remain quiet at her home in Battle Creek rather than perambulating around the country.”
85
Garrison was invested in Truth’s numerical increase just as Dumont, Gage and Beecher Stowe
had been, and demonstrated as much by advancing her age by several decades. Decrying her
walking practice as untoward “perambulating,” he hoped to confine Truth and the freed people
for whom she advocated to their respective social and geographic places.
Sojourner Truth’s pedestrian practices furthered a mathematics of relation and chance
rather than enumeration. In asserting her free status, Truth instantiated a series of freedom
calculations that prize open new coordinates and conditions for the state of being free. Truth’s
calculation of the day and hour of her self-emancipation required that she discern the exact time
and date at which she would cease working for her then master, six months prior to New York
85
Painter, Sojourner Truth, 242.
84
Gilbert, Truth, 84.
40
state-wide emancipation in 1828. Her freedom calculations thus pose a challenge to the ‘all
deliberate speed’ of the state’s liberal promises. Had Truth been one of the few established
African American New Yorkers of her time, largely male, whose lives left a more enduring mark
on the archives; had her collaborative Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave not fallen
into disuse; had she not been a poor domestic laborer and formerly enslaved mother given to
wandering, we might more easily follow the path of her pilgrimage. In doing so, we might find
that her trajectory outmaneuvers the logics of devaluation and accumulation that are the
hallmarks of racial capitalism.
Despite the tensions of its dual authorship, Narrative of Sojourner Truth sketches a
system of calculation and valuation born of Truth’s itinerant relationship to time and place.
Because of its indeterminant nature, Truth’s peripatetic politics read as “chaos” to those White
abolitionists and feminists who sought to lay claim to African-descended women’s “increase” or
subordinate their labor to state interests tied to the ongoing settler project. Black women’s
children were, after all, their own to choose to care for or to temporarily leave in favor of a truant
path; their own to reclaim and embrace, however much the embrace between mother and child
was made monstrous by the lacerating letter of the law. The widely accepted practice of property
accumulation and capitalist speculation meant that Truth’s journeys were out of step with the
march of progress in the view of her contemporaries. Truth’s walking practice offers a strategy
for “being human as praxis” born of Black itinerant women who were historically positioned
outside of the modernizing project of settlement and expansion; those who may wander but are
not lost; who were constitutionally excluded from the category ‘woman’ but live nonetheless “in
the heart of” its terrain.
86
86
Spillers, “Interstices,” 174.
41
Even in the semiotics of her name, Truth challenged the logics of sojourner laws, whose
proponents upheld prolonged stay on free soil as grounds for state-sanctioned emancipation.
When Isabella changed her name to Sojourner, the change bespoke the eschatological nature of
her religious and political thought. Sojourner was a stranger traveling through, but not settling
the earth.
87
In taking a new name, Truth embraced African Americans’ status as obruni,
stranger.
88
The implications of such an embrace, monstrous in its lasting alienation yet affirming
in its recognition that those who became captives were largely outsiders to the West African
communities from which they were kidnapped and, to a lesser extent, by which they were sold,
are vast and startling. What would it mean to practice a form of Black freedom and of being
human that focalizes a verb: to walk? What would it mean to travel the forsaken, nearly
convergent paths of strangers?
In a well-worn photograph of Truth dated 1864 (below), she seems to gaze at the
coordinates of a different convergence of space and time that lies tantalizingly close to that of
our own. Perhaps those coordinates will be stumbled upon by sojourners guided by providence.
In this time and place, though, we must be content to follow the asymptotic line that inches us
away from the sold shadows of low-wage labor, which masquerades as freedom, and closer to
the substance of things.
88
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 3.
87
Painter, Sojourner Truth, 81.
42
43
CHAPTER TWO
A Peculiar Peace:
Counting Death in Toni Morrison’s Sula
In her 1973 novel Sula, Toni Morrison refers to the scalar external forces of social malady
and mayhem that Black Americans contend with as “God’s brother.” A fractious fraternal force,
God’s brother makes and destroys the social world alongside the novel’s human actors.
89
This
power, one of many “forces other than good ones” has an express purpose: for Black people “to
survive it.”
90
Yet such a treatment of evil does not elide the human actors behind social ills. After
all, the people of Medallion, the fictional Ohio town that is the novel’s setting, “determined
(without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people,
tuberculosis, and ignorance.”
91
As the quote illustrates, White people appear at the periphery of
the novel as both mundane in their ignorance and murderous in their impulses toward Black
social life. Yet, Sula does not privilege White actors in the litany of phenomena to contend with.
Rather, they are survived in stride as one of many faces of malintent. In the eyes of the
townspeople of Medallion, another such face —a darker one— is more compelling. This face is
the birthmarked visage of Sula, whose strange affections and predilections enable the
neighborhood called The Bottom, nestled high in the Ohio hills, to right itself. The Bottom is
91
Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Vintage International, 2004), 90.
90
DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 90.
89
Elsewhere in the African American literary tradition, what Morrison calls “God’s brother”
figures as that which preserves Black personhood against the onslaught of American racism. For example,
in “My Dungeon Shook,” the letter that opens the collection The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes
that to be destroyed is to “really believe what white people sa[y] about you” and to mask that negativity as
holiness. Baldwin finds causation in internalizing White lies that negate Black personhood and the
impulse to “be so holy.” It must be an unholy love, then, that Baldwin calls for and calls upon to expose
“the innocence which constitutes the crime” and to invert the social order to such an extent that, “we, with
love shall…begin to change it.”
44
founded on the detritus of its White-populated counterpart, which is built on rich valley land
conducive to agricultural bounty. The houses, shops and shanties that comprise The Bottom are
perched high on Ohioan hills whose rocky soil is considered unusable by the Whites of
Medallion. The precariousness of this community, whose schoolrooms and homes are culled
from unwanted material, is also the reason for its relative autonomy. Black life both flourishes
and flounders in the last place the novel’s White farmers thought of: up in the rocky, arid hills.
92
Sula, which spans the years 1919 to 1965, is the story of two friends, Nel Wright and
Sula Peace. The novel begins in 1919, with World War I veteran Shadrack’s on-foot return to The
Bottom from a V .A. hospital, where his physical and psychic injuries were inexpertly nursed.
Sula, who is introduced shortly after Shadrack, is the last in three generations of Peace women to
live in the Ohio hill country. The Peace home, with “no men to run it” has been transformed into
a boardinghouse by Sula’s grandmother Eva Peace, who, struggling to provide for her children at
the novel’s start, finds relative financial security from the insurance money garnered from a
much-whispered-about train “accident” in which she lost her leg.
93
Eva’s household is organized
through the welcome chaos of a made family in which differently raced “brought in” or adopted
children become siblings indistinguishable from one another by name (they are all called
“Dewey”) or face. The boardinghouse also harbors, without seeking to rehabilitate, the solitary
sorrows of differently raced persons who have succumbed to drugs and alcohol and who seek “a
place to die quietly, but not quite alone.”
94
The house’s very architecture in its many nooks and
crannies, facilitates the joy of the Peace women’s primary inheritance: “manlove,” which is
94
Morrison, Sula, 40.
93
Morrison, Sula, 41.
92
“The Last Place They Thought of” is the title of a chapter from Demonic Grounds, Black
Women and the Cartographies of Struggle by Katherine McKittrick.
45
expressed by frequent heterosexual sex. In visits to the Peace household that are presided over by
Eva’s daughter Hannah, who flagrantly disregards the strictures of marital union, young Nel
finds refuge from the oppressive orderliness of her own home. Prior to their disorderly domestic
encounter, Sula and Nel meet “in dreams” and then at school. They lose their innocence together
(if ever, as Black children, they were afforded it), or, rather, their innocence slips away from
them as the hands of a local boy called Chicken Little slide by accident from young Sula’s grip
into the waiting deep of the waters that drown him. Although Sula is Nel’s sole confidant in this
terrible secret, the accident is witnessed by none other than Shadrack, the World War I veteran
who lives alone in a hut by the river and who, once a year, calls the town together to celebrate
“National Suicide Day,” a holiday he created and named. The cause of the child’s death, which
Sula, Nel and Shadrack alone know, remains the trio’s unspoken secret. The following year, in
1922, Sula’s mother Hannah Peace dies by fire following a series of “five strange things” or
events that foreshadow her death. Sula, just thirteen at the time of her mother’s death, grows into
a woman whose disregard for marriage has solidified into a sexual practice that, like other forms
of apparent madness, has a size and shape that folks in The Bottom “fit, so to speak, into the
scheme of things.”
95
Remarkably, Hannah is not the first member of the Peace family to burn to
death. In 1921, before the accident at the river, Sula’s grandmother Eva deliberately sets her son
Plum, another suffering World War I veteran, aflame. As a young adult, Sula leaves The Bottom
without farewell in the distracted revelry of Nel’s wedding and does not return until a decade
later. At the start of the novel’s second half, Sula returns to The Bottom accompanied by a flock
of birds. Upon her unannounced homecoming, Sula resumes her friendship with Nel and shares
with her childhood playmate as she always has, but this time she shares a bed with Nel’s
husband. Roiling in an anger Sula does not understand, Nel refuses to speak to her until many
95
Morrison, Sula, 15.
46
years later, when she learns that Sula is terminally ill. Shortly after the two break their silence,
Sula experiences death. Reflecting upon her experience of passing away, Sula breaths her last
words: “It didn’t even hurt. Wait ’til I tell Nel.”
96
My scholarly encounter with Sula is part of the larger project of the dissertation, wherein
what I call “the peculiar” acts as a bedfellow to “queer,” yet seeks to branch off into the
beginnings of a new genealogy of terms. If “Black female queerness [is] a structuring logic of
American society” in that Black bodily difference was deemed a sign of an unruly
anti-heteronormativity presumed to inhere to the racialized body, then the peculiar speaks to the
chaos that attended the structuring.
97
Situating itself primarily as an interlocutor in conversations
instigated by Black feminist theorists and historians, as well as by queer of color critique, this
chapter contends that Morrison’s Sula presents an aspect of “the peculiar” that relates to death
and the organization of Black social life. Secondarily, it speaks to and with the insights of literary
critics in hopes of offering a new vocabulary for discussing Morrison’s oeuvre . While the
insights of studies of Morrison by those proximate to the discipline of English have influenced
mine, I am less interested in a disciplinary reading than in what I perceive as the mobility of the
term “peculiar” in drawing upon and proffering to studies of gender, race, sexuality and capital.
In making the claim that the use of dates and numbers in Sula works in tandem with the role of
characters Sula and Shadrack to organize death and Black social life in The Bottom, this chapter
also enters into conversation with feminist and Black science studies. In order to contextualize
the lives of Sula’s characters within early-to-mid 20
th
century African American and U.S. society,
it draws upon the work of Black feminist historians who recognize the limits of and see patterns
97
Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), introduction.
96
Morrison, Sula, 149.
47
within their archives that invite speculation about the past. In doing so, it juxtaposes speculation
over a body’s capacity to produce labor for the state, a biopolitical undertaking, and speculation
as a Black feminist scholarly act. In crafting my argument, I hope to abide in a recognition of
sexuality’s fundamental irrationality, which defies the reasoned logic of critique.
Similarly flouting the expectation that literary criticism trace linear descent from past to
present author, Hortense Spillers’ “A Hateful Passion, A Lost Love” models a form of criticism
that abides in relation rather than in direct lines of literary descent. Beyond my articulation of the
peculiar, the very structure of this dissertation draws upon Hortense Spillers’ innovations. In
placing a representative text of the genre of the slave narrative, long regarded as the foundation
of African American literature, in direct theoretical conversation with novels that span the 20
th
century, it too essays toward a genealogy of “literary ‘relatives.’”
98
In “A Hateful Passion, A Lost
Love” Spillers juxtaposes Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Morrison’s Sula for
their related yet distinct iterations of “new female being,” a form of being that is achieved
through protagonists who must navigate a society that purports to value only female virtue. In the
character of Sula, Spillers observes a “corruption of absolutes” that I appreciate for its scalar
implications; the corruption or disruption of a system of absolute value and its attendant aesthetic
principles (good, bad, worthy, unworthy).
99
Such principles collapse at the site of a Black female
character like Sula who does not choose to challenge but rather summarily dismisses those
“aesthetics” that she is so “bored” with.
100
100
Toni Morrison, Sula, 122.
99
Spillers, “A Hateful Passion, A Lost Love,” 53.
98
Hortense Spillers “A Hateful Passion, A Lost Love” in Harold Bloom, ed. Modern Critical
Interpretations: Toni Morrison’ s Sula (Chelsea House Publishers, 1999), 52.
48
“A Peculiar Peace” focalizes the function of numbers in Sula in order to theorize Sula’s
sociality as peculiar in respect to death, gender norms and sexual desire.
101
It takes up Sula as an
occasion to consider sexuality, numbers, poverty, and death. Through the jobless cast of
characters who populate the Great Depression years of the novel, I invite readers to consider
what it means to “feel surplus” as Audre Lorde put it. Rather than asking how jobless and
otherwise impoverished surplus populations might be mobilized, coalesced or politicized, I dwell
in feeling surplus as a feature of the “style” that Morrison spoke of in the preface to Sula:
In much literature, a woman’s escape from male rule led to regret, misery, if not complete
disaster. In Sula I wanted to explore the consequences of what that escape might be, on
not only a conventional black society, but on female friendship. In 1969, in Queens….
some of us thrived and some of us died. All of us had a taste.
102
For Morrison, as for her character Sula, death’s seeming finality is mitigated by “taste.” To the
townsfolk of The Bottom, it is as much Sula’s extravagant style that lends the very air about her
its “peculiar quality” as it is her relationship to sex and society.
103
A college graduate who returns
to the impoverished town of her beginnings dressed “as close to a movie star” as townsfolk had
seen, Sula herself seems gilded; she need not aspire to wealth. In her untrammeled excesses, she
is no more deliberately oppositional than she is deferential to convention. Sula’s resolute
joblessness marks her as part of the surplus population, the leftovers of the labor force. In
Morrison’s capable hands, both the excesses of capital and carnal excess—discourse around
which has marked the bodies of women of African descent as deviant—are transformed into
abundance, into the spillage of too much life over a paucity of resources.
103
Morrison, Sula, 94.
102
Morrison, Sula, xvii.
101
Morrison, Sula, 121.
49
As a term, “peculiar” essays to articulate the tremors of surplus populations, of “the
uncountable and unindexed” who do not register, “but [are] always there” giving “impressions of
life.”
104
Like the single word “always,” the arresting promise made by the character Shadrack to
adolescents Sula and Nel on the occasion of young Chicken Little’s death, peculiar socialites and
sexualities are indeed “always there,” organizing and perambulating the boundary of death to the
benefit of those who live more conventionally. In the novel, the five strange events that prefigure
Sula’s mother Hannah’s death require a system of counting that is in tune with the tremors of
these perambulations, a “new math” that recognizes and embraces “forces other than good ones”
rather than enumeration in its calculation of the value of individual lives.
105
An agent of what Kara Keeling calls an unreliable future, Sula presages, in her deathbed
utterance and its accompanying vision, one of many futures whose outcome racial capitalism,
with all its algorithms, cannot predict.
106
Because it is most fully articulated in the interstitial
moments before her death, the future that Sula envisions, one in which categories of race, sex
and gender are inverted and effaced through sex, outmaneuvers the reach of racial capitalism.
The scrambled method by which the main events of the novel are counted (event two is
presented in the novel before event one) confuse common understandings of valuation,
devaluation and accumulation, which comingle with our practices of enumerating the dead.
Logics of accumulation, related to those that valorize progress, have produced Black death as a
casualty of being out of step with the march of modernity and Black life as “an extractable
106
Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019).
105
Morrison, Sula, 90.
104
Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics, Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer
2014): 16-28.
50
calculation.”
107
For Morrison’s Shadrack, World War I veteran and founder of National Suicide
Day, Black death is so wildly out of step with the march of progress that it warrants its own
freedom parade.
The series of five strange events that auger Hannah Peace’s death by fire is part of a
system of counting that emphasizes and embraces the “deliberate” nature of death in the world of
the novel.
108
As characters play the numbers and sacrifice limbs for insurance money in hopes of
surviving a capitalist, White supremacist world, the numerical system they fabricate places the
power of life and death within a decidedly Black universe. As a feature of both its content and
form, such a system accounts for the novel’s many deaths in a manner that deemphasizes the
value of enumeration in calculations of loss. In exploring Sula’s character, the novel’s numbers
may also help us appraise what Morrison calls “Sula’s strangeness… her craving for the other
half of her equation.”
109
Desire for a balanced equation animates Sula’s friendship with Nel and
serves as just one example of how the novel’s numerical schema operates as a vehicle for the
author’s commentary on female friendship, sexuality, and independence.
Sula is organized by dates that canopy its chapters. These dates offer a numerical and
temporal directive to the reader in their navigation of the novel’s plot. In Sula there is at once “no
time” due to the pressing demands placed upon characters to survive the midwestern United
States of the 1920s and ’30s—a society stratified by race, Indigeneity and by class— and an
abundant time that enables the dead to transgress the dates that mark their gravestones and thus
109
Morrison, Sula, 121.
108
Morrison, Sula, 90. The full quote reads: “They did not believe death was accidental—life
might be, but death was deliberate.”
107
C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
51
become “words.”
110
In both its form and content, numerical indeterminacy is a feature of the
spatial-temporal schema of the novel. For example, it is up to the reader whether to count or
discount young Sula’s madness, which disrupts the affairs of the newly married couple who
board in her grandmother Eva’s house, as part of the series of events that lead to her mother’s
death. Sula’s adolescent mental malaise both numbers among the strange events and disrupts
them, confusing the order of things. The dates that stand in for chapter titles lend the novel its
coherence. They mark the stages of Nel and Sula’s development in a manner akin to W.E.B. Du
Bois’ use of African American spirituals in Souls of Black Folk, wherein bars of song canopy the
beginning of each chapter. Just as Du Bois marks stages of Black political and social
consciousness with bars of music, Morrison marks stages of Black girlhood and womanhood:
childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and death, with dates that define the novel as a work
of historical fiction.
111
Throughout the text, dates and numbers enable the reader to enter the
novel’s unusual temporal scheme.
There is a significant exception to this formal understanding of Sula. The novel’s first
chapter is undated. It is unified instead by expository writing that describes the fictional
community and furthers a strong sense of place. Morrison regretted this first chapter, which she
added at the behest of readers during the workshop stage of the manuscript. In “Unspeakable
Things Unspoken” Morrison shared that the original draft of the novel began with the chapter
“1919” and Shadrack’s sojourn. Morrison held fast to a claim she made in that essay: that despite
the advice of those who urged her to include one, Sula did not need an expository “bridge” for
the benefit of readers whose “white gaze” may have been disoriented by the Black community
111
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of the Sorrow Songs” in Souls of Black Folk.
110
Morrison, Sula, 171.
52
within its pages.
112
Morrison’s use of a decidedly geographic term like “bridge” to express her
regret about including the chapter suggests that time and, relatedly, dates, are more important
than space to understanding Sula.
Morrison’s regret at including the expository preamble in Sula stemmed from her
realization that, in the published text, readers do not enter into an “immediate confrontation with
Shadrack’s wound and scar” as they would have had she began with the chapter “1919.”
113
The
author’s emphasis on Shadrack’s scars moves readers away from a place-based politics toward a
politics based on unfolding time, measured and marked by dates. Scars like Shadrack’s recall
specific acts of wounding that may be located in personal or historical time. To consider a
character’s scars, indeed to “confront” them, is to reckon with a wounded present that calls for
accountability. Moreover, the scars that skin bears and lays bare move beyond the “aesthetics”
that Sula is so bored with, as scars may encompass both the ugly and the beautiful: the deeply
personal memory of a first love as well as the scars of a wounded inheritance. Morrison’s desire
for readers to directly confront Shadrack’s “wound” and “scar” indicate that (as is the case with
the character Sethe’s tree-shaped scar in Beloved) scars are an important expression of the bodily
ravages of capital in Morrison’s novels.
Morrison herself has affirmed that numbers play a key role in her fiction. In the
introduction to Beloved she wrote of the importance of naming, or rather numbering the house
that serves as the novel’s primary scene. Within what Morrison terms the “pathless” “terrain” of
slavery and its aftermath, the house’s numbers: 124, offer value to the formerly enslaved
113
Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken.”
112
Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: the Afro American Presence in American
Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 1-34.
53
characters, a value that is intentionally divorced from that of the Native land on which it is built.
Morrison wrote of the character Beloved:
She would have to enter the house… A real one, not a cabin. One with an address, one where
former slaves lived on their own. There would be no lobby into this house, and there would be no
‘introduction’ into it or into the novel. I wanted the reader to be kidnapped…as a first step into
shared experience with the book’s population…. It was important to name this house, but not the
way Sweet Home or other plantations were named. There would be no adjectives suggesting
coziness or… the laying claim to an instant, aristocratic past. Only numbers. (xviii).
In crafting Beloved, Morrison dispensed with the narrative “bridge” that she believed
compromised her earlier novel Sula, thrusting readers into the world of enslavement and its
aftermath with only numbers to guide their “pathless” literary “terrain.” The author’s use of the
term “population” rather than “characters” suggests that she wished to impress upon readers the
historical nature of the novel. The term “population” indexes the irrefutable coworking of
transatlantic slavery and modernity, a newly global era during which governments began to
express power through population management.
Another set of numbers: the numerous faces of the force called God, accounts for Sula’s
strangeness. “They would no more run Sula out of town than they would kill the robins that
brought her back, for in their secret awareness of Him, He was not the God of three faces….They
knew quite well that He had four, and the fourth explained Sula.”
114
Sula’s sexuality, far from
being an unnaturalness that must be intervened upon by science or medicine, is a phenomenon
explicable by the numerical fluidity of Black cosmology. The value that racial capitalism, on the
one hand, and seminal essays such as “Uses of the Erotic” on the other, place on sexuality is of
no interest to Sula. In fact, “Sexual aesthetics bored her.”
115
Instead of values such as worthy;
115
Morrison, Sula, 122.
114
Morrison Sula, 118.
54
unworthy; good; bad; “wicked” or “ugly” Sula seeks in her sexual encounters “the death of
time.”
116
This temporal end is brought about for Sula by “a gathering knowledge as her [sexual]
experiences multiplied.”
117
In Sula, the form of non-linear counting that governs Black social life
heralds the end to a temporal order that has historically dictated the impoverished labor
conditions that many African Americans face under capital. In the post-plantation geographies of
the United States, Morrison, in the character Sula, seeks not to “steal time” as African Americans
were impelled to do under the conditions of enslavement, but, rather, to end it.
In that they do not assume death’s finality, “Wait ‘til I tell Nel,” the words Sula
pronounces at the moment of her death, stand as an epistemological limit to modern, managerial
power. Sula and Shadrack’s outsider sociality and relationship to death both cohere and threaten
the Black community. Engaging questions of sexuality in the novel, I build upon Barbara Smith’s
“Toward A Black Feminist Criticism” (1978). Smith’s project in the late 1970s was to categorize
Sula as part of an unseen cannon of lesbian literature newly made visible by the lens of Black
feminist criticism. To this end Smith observes, “Sula's presence in her community functions
much like the presence of lesbians everywhere, to expose the contradictions of supposedly
‘normal’ life.”
118
I agree with Smith’s assessment that Sula performs the societal function of
queer persons and that, as a novel, Sula takes a “critical stance” toward heterosexuality and its
normalizing institutions. However, I am less concerned than Smith with what can be recovered
for the sake of cannon building. I am more interested in the marvelous fact of Sula’s
category-less-ness. As Michel Foucault has argued, sexuality emerged alongside the modern
state in response to its managerial powers, a process whose failings and fissures are exposed by
118
Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” The Radical Teacher (March 1978): 20-27.
117
Morrison, Sula, 122.
116
Morrison, Sula, 123.
55
the intractable practices of those who escape the identity categories 19th century statehood
produced, those who insist on their right to the “plenitude of the possible.”
119
Sexual identity
categories formed under the watchful eye of state powers intent on managing the ineffable nature
of erotic life do not easily shed their tractable origins. On the other hand, practices that confuse
logics that insist sexuality and gender be both defining of personhood and categorically defined
may escape the aegis of the state. Sula, through her untrammeled sexuality and deathbed vision,
challenges the notion that personhood is predicated on sexual identity.
Sula’s lingua franca is that of sheer survival. Though there is murder among the hill
people and reason enough “to try and die,” the Black people of Medallion do not “take
themselves seriously enough” to will themselves out of existence.
120
Death is everywhere
apparent in the hungry and “dirt poor” people of the area, but suicide is “beneath them.” The
Black people of The Bottom need not die by their own hand nor ceremonially celebrate suicide.
They have Sula, their own homo sacer, to traverse and transcend death on their behalf. According
to Giorgio Agamben, the figure of the homo sacer can alone transgress death.
121
Death is both
actual and discursive; “a cultural and national phenomenon or discourse, figurative silencing or
process of erasure, and an embodied entity or subject capable of transgression.”
122
The people of
Medallion need a figure like Sula to protect their children from; to guard their marriages against;
to travel the boundary of death as fearlessly as Sula walked out of the small community of
Medallion as a young woman. “Sula’s death brought a restless irritability…. mothers who had
122
Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and [Black] Subjectivity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 5.
121
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press,
1998).
120
Morrison, Sula, 41.
119
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality.
56
defended their children from Sula’s malevolence (or who had defended their positions as mothers
from Sula’s scorn for the role) now had nothing.”
123
Hannah and Sula Peace’s multi-generational
disinterest in marriage, as well as Sula’s singular disinterest in motherhood, both pose a
challenge and lend coherence to a form of governance whereby deviant sexuality is regulated by
marriage.
Such is the tragicomic failure of the character Shadrack’s National Suicide Day, whose
solitary ceremony meters the novel. With the holiday, Shadrack, a World War I veteran who
suffers from a dissociative mental illness, creates a kind of ceremony for modern power, which,
as Foucault has argued, makes free by letting die. Shadrack, who knows too well “the smell of
death” “hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it everybody could get it out of
the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free.”
124
Compellingly, only the jokingly
nicknamed character Tar Baby, who is White, joins Shadrack in his lonesome march on National
Suicide Day.
In Sula, the erotic redeems only as much as it destroys. Intimacy inverts the social order
and shows itself at times of death and bodily decay. It is mobilized through nature’s excesses and
through Sula’s indiscriminate sexuality which, together, lend the fictional Black community of
Medallion, Ohio it’s coherency. This peculiar eroticism redeems the social world by destroying
the categories that divide persons along the lines of sex and gender. Destruction in order to make
anew is a conduit of intimacy. “They’ll love me alright” says Sula on her deathbed. “After all the
old women have lain with the teenagers… after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when
all the white women kiss all the black ones…. then there’ll be a little love left over for me. And I
124
Morrison, Sula, 14.
123
Morrison, Sula, 153.
57
know just what it will feel like.”
125
Sula “knows” what the world that will harbor her kind of love
will “feel like,” knows that it will require an abandonment of the classifications that have marked
the bounds of the human along the lines of sex. Sula’s deathbed vision does not look like a
coming-into-humanness via the categories proffered by modern state formations. For Sula,
sexuality is not a defining aspect of personhood or “the stamp of individuality”; it is a practice
that pitches towards a newly [dis]ordered world.
126
It is worth noting that “interracial” same-sex
sex is a primary feature of the world that Sula imagines, but hers is not a vision of a desegregated
society wherein codified terms for same-sex encounters are at readily hand. That said, the
heteronormative racial logic behind segregation is rightly positioned as the reason for Sula and
Nel’s disenfranchisement; they are “neither white nor male.”
127
Bravely, Sula turns away from a
triumphant humanism that would offer only identity categories to cling to and toward
“something else to be.”
128
It is not insignificant that this picture of upheaval is Sula’s ideation as she trespasses the
threshold of death, for death is the epistemological limit of power in its occupation with the
management and administration of life. Death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it;
“death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private.’”
129
Yet, just as
distinctions between public and private spheres have historically collapsed at the site of Black
women’s households, Sula’s death subverts modern managerial power not because it is private,
129
Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power Over Life” in The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An
Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 43-44.
128
Morrison, Sula, 52.
127
Morrison, Sula, 52.
126
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Part I, 147.
125
Morrison, Sula, 145.
58
but because it is shared. For Sula, who utters, “wait til I tell Nel” as she passes, Nel alone may
share the intimate knowledge of the moment of her death. For Nel, as well, Sula is death’s
secret-keeper. Racked with grief after discovering Sula and her husband in the act of having sex,
Nel is haunted by the sight of a gray ball of grief that lies, ever present, at the periphery of her
vision. She muses, “Dying was OK because… there wasn’t no gray ball in death, was there? Was
there? She would have to ask somebody about that… like Sula, for Sula would know.”
130
It is the
moment of death (time) and its imprint (space) that are the dimensions of death in the world, and
that compose the interstice that death occupies. For Foucault it is the in-between nature of death
that allows its occurrences to escape the clutches of modern managerial power; death takes place,
“at the borders and in the interstices of power that [is] exercised over life.”
131
Sula’s call to
“wait” for the testimony of her witness suggests that there is something after death for novel’s
characters. The moment of Sula’s utterance lies in-between terrestrial life and that amorphous
“something.”
The Peace household, “throbbing with disorder” is “awry with things [and] people.”
132
With “no men in the house, no men to run it,” Sula’s one-legged grandmother Eva Peace is its
“creator and sovereign.”
133
But hers is not a sovereignty that manages or makes live, but one that
adopts and takes in. Eva’s is a sovereignty that enables the three children called Dewey, who
have no other home, to be cared for and that allows Tar Baby to “die quietly but not quite
alone.”
134
Eva’s is no mean feat. Since the antebellum period in the United States, African
134
Morrison, Sula, 40.
133
Morrison, Sula, 41; 30.
132
Morrison, Sula, 52.
131
Foucault, “Right of Death,” 44.
130
Morrison, Sula, 110.
59
Americans have navigated dominant discourses that assessed their own kinship structures as less
suited for their care than the plantation, prison or the state. Liberal capitalism, in order to
“locate” African Americans within its schema, displaces its burdens onto the Black family,
positioning heteronormativity as “the primary resolution to economic devastation.”
135
Yet, as the
Peace household navigates the economic depression wrought by the monumental failure of
capitalism that took place in 1929, Sula dismisses heteronormativity and goes down a path that
adumbrates “something else to be.”
Intimacy between women in Sula diverges from understandings of the erotic that stem
from Audre Lorde’s seminal “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” anthologized in Sister
Outsider. In “Uses of the Erotic” Lorde considers how the erotic circulates in fields of social
power and argues that it is a “deepest knowledge,” a feminine experience with epistemic value.
Audre Lorde's intervention in “Uses of the Erotic” is as much about labor as it is about sexuality.
Lorde writes numerous times of the importance of Black women rooting their labor in erotic
knowledge as a means of “reclaiming...our history, our loving, our work, our lives” in the face of
an anti-erotic system built upon extracting capital from Black laborers who were presumed to
lack the capacity to love.
136
Lorde theorizes eroticized labor for its potential to “lessen the threat
of difference” and thus pose a challenge to a society whose “principle horror is that it robs our
work of its erotic value.”
137
Lorde calls for an eroticism that might combat the alienation from
self, other, and labor heralded by the modern era. Lorde’s is no easy call to action. Black women
137
Lorde, 55-56.
136
Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1977), 55.
135
Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 20.
60
and their descendants felt the consequences of entering the twentieth century economy as paid
laborers whose lives were circumscribed by racial terror.
In Sula, neither same-sex affection between kinswomen nor same-sex desire are
engendered by the conditions of labor. They are born instead out of proximity to death. In the
novel, intimacy is accompanied by fires that take lives. For example, Hannah’s concern about
whether her mother loves her is deemed an “evil wonderin’” and is the fifth strange thing that
occurs immediately before the flames that kill her are set ablaze.
138
In the moments following her
violent death by fire, Hannah Peace’s singular beauty inspires the women of Medallion to dress
her seared flesh for burial, and “we[ep] for her burned hair and wrinkled breasts as though they
themselves had been her lovers.”
139
Death and its attendant grief bring the women of The Bottom
to realize their desire for Hannah, whom they stubbornly disliked during her lifetime. The
women of Medallion’s pointed dislike is rooted in a sexual economy wherein “even the whores”
resent Hannah because she put them out of business.
140
In his chapter on Sula in Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson analyzes a passage
from the novel’s final chapter, “1965” wherein the narrator laments the “shame” of the era’s sex
workers and praises the unabashed sex workers of 1921. Ferguson argues that these
newly-minted feelings of shame and embarrassment surrounding sex work in the novel are
indicative of tensions born of new class formations among Back Americans that began to take
shape in the mid-to-late 1960s. I would add to Ferguson’s analysis that African American
women’s common parlance surrounding participation in sex work during 1921, the year that
Morrison offers us in her comparison, suggests that sexual labor was less stigmatized. As
140
Morrison, Sula, 164.
139
Morrison, Sula, 77.
138
Morrison, Sula, 73; 67.
61
historian Cheryl Hicks argues, common terms like “treating” evinced an economy of sexual
favors that fell outside of the parameters of consumer capitalism. “Treating” illustrated an
unwillingness to participate or to see oneself as participating in an exploitative economy based
upon the fungibility of the bodies of the working poor; the term “treating” was
“non-commercial.”
141
It is in a world without possibility of genuine ontology that Shadrack, whose very body
has betrayed him, encounters that which grounds him: his own blackness. In the settler colony of
the United States, and in colonized societies writ large, Whiteness seems to hold the efficacy of
reality. However, White persons only inhabit the category human or hold access to “the white
world—i.e. the real world” in so far as they can deny ontological reality to Black peoples, and as
a result of this entanglement, “any ontology is made impossible in a colonized society.”
142
Imprisoned for the empty charge of “idleness” and wrangling his ungainly hands, Shadrack
“see[s] his reflection. There in the toilet water he saw a grave black face…. He had been
harboring a skittish apprehension that he was not real—that he didn’t exist at all. But when
the blackness greeted him with its indisputable presence, he wanted nothing more.”
143
It is
Shadrack’s “blackness” rather than his mind, which is damaged by the traumas of war, that
confirms his existence to himself, and thereby destabilizes the cartesian formulation, “I think
therefore I am.” Blackness also acts as a pressure on the easy association of personhood and
subjectivity. Shadrack does not suddenly take on the trappings of Western authorial
143
Morrison, Sula, 13.
142
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89.
141
Cheryl D. Hicks, “‘Bright and Good-Looking Colored Girl’: Black Women’s Sexuality and
‘Harmful Intimacy’ in Early-Twentieth-Century New York,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 3
(Sept. 2009): 434.
62
personhood after this moment of subjective recognition. He remains broken, haunted by
wartime memories, and without property. He still has, “no past, no language, no tribe, no
source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock…”
144
Yet Shadrack seems to have a
secret knowledge, the answer to the question that Nina Simone posed in her cover of “Ain’t
Got No”: without possessions, “why I am I alive anyway?” To be is to be broken, and it is
unto this brokenness that Shadrack calls the people of Medallion.
In 1919, the date of Shadrack’s return from war and first solitary sojourn through
town, idleness was criminalized as vagrancy. Vagrancy laws made so-called idleness; the
mere public presence of Black persons who were unemployed, underemployed or who could
not prove their employment readily with documentation, illegal. In Morrison’s novel, the
dangers of walking and wandering while Black being coded as vagrancy are readily apparent.
The second chapter, which Morrison regarded as the true start to the novel, begins with
Shadrack walking, as he would do so many times come January 3
rd
throughout the novel. For
Shadrack, walking is its own labor. Just as Chicken Little’s body is found on the fourth day
after his death; just as four dead robins represent Sula’s return; just as Sula’s very existence is
explained by the fourth face of God, Shadrack’s sojourn back to The Bottom begins with
“four steps.”
145
As he leaves the V .A. hospital in a disoriented mental state, walking is both
emancipatory and belabored. In the sense that it is a vehicle for him to resume his civilian
life outside the “gates” of the hospital, which “left him too weak to walk steadily,”
Shadrack’s journey aligns with a legacy of walking that began during the era of
145
Morrison, Sula, 11.
144
Morrison, Sula, 12.
63
enslavement.
146
For the enslaved in the plantation South, walking was the primary means of
travel. Physically taxing though it undoubtedly was, walking afforded rare moments of
solitude away from the constant surveillance of plantation life, as well as the chance to
commune with the natural world. It also engendered encounters with another form of
surveillance, as any and every White person may have demanded of the enslaved pedestrian a
note of passage. That Shadrack, in his mental duress, sees “paper people” and thereafter
“los[es] his way,” is perhaps suggestive of this history.
147
The passage quoted above, wherein Shadrack encounters the image of his own
blackness, suggests that in Sula, the self cannot exist unencumbered by its other. This
interrelatedness of self and other is as evident in Sula’s relationship with Nel as it is in her
response to the death of Chicken Little. Sula learns of the hold the domestic sphere wields
over Nel’s sexual impulses as their friendship falters, for Nel had been “the closest thing to
both an other and a self” for Sula.
148
Shadrack, who shares a special connection with Sula as
one of “two devils” and as the only person other than the girls to witness Chicken Little’s
death, is the only character who can curse White people publicly and not incur punishment.
Like Sula, who is rumored to bed Black and White men alike, Shadrack exists on the edge of
the Black community of The Bottom, reaffirming its boundaries by broaching them. His very
relationship to money (Shadrack sells fish for a living but acts like he is doing customers “a
favor”) suggests that Black personhood mitigates a seemingly universal system of
148
Morrison, Sula, 119.
147
Morrison, Sula, 11.
146
Morrison, Sula, 12.
64
valuation.
149
Let us not forget that Shadrack is a veteran of a global war that invited Black
participation in totalizing trench warfare that defied reason, the very faculty by which
democracy is said to be governed. Black veterans Shadrack and Plum, in their relationship to
time (Plumb attempts to climb back into his mother Eva’s womb) disrupt the concept of
shared teleological time on which global war depends.
It is not insignificant that the Deweys are “playing chain gang” outside the window as
Eva and Hannah have their critical conversation about survival and its proximity to death.
Far from being unsightly aberrations of the modern, as narratives of national progress would
have us believe, Southern forms of punishment such as chain gangs were innovations of the
modern reliance upon the continued expropriation of free labor in the service of
infrastructure. “Wild” children that they are, the three Deweys refuse the chain gang as a
technology of gender and racial construction and instead remain in the nubile state of
childhood, not growing beyond the stage they were upon their arrival at Eva’s house.
150
Compellingly, neither other members of Eva’s household nor their schoolteachers can
distinguish one Dewey from another. What can only be construed as their choice not to grow
confuses the Deweys’ schoolteachers, a vocation whose representatives are, in Beloved,
agents of graphic sexual violence. Black, Mexican American or part White, these “wild”
children confound the ocular logics of race and, during their playtime, expose the biopolitical
for its bald interest in reproducing a free labor force.
The novel’s children speak to an epistemology of the wild, whose indeterminant
principles govern a world where nature seems to have at once less of a hold over our “deeply
150
Morrison, Sula, 74; 159.
149
Denise Da Silva, “On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value,” E flux Journal 79 (Feb. 2017).
65
cultural” sexual practices and more of a hold over our planetary future.
151
Used to describe
the Deweys, the term ‘wild’ also appears later in the novel in a reference to Nel’s children.
When Sula returns to the Bottom, she takes to “walking” with a “fluid stride” to Nel’s home.
On one such occasion, her on-foot arrival reveals a wildness that bristles beneath the surface
of the domestic arrangement of Nel’s home. When Sula “stepped inside… the dust on the
lamps sparkled… and Nel’s grimy intractable children looked like three wild things happily
insouciant in the May shine.”
152
Relatedly, Sula’s jocular conversation brings out “wild free
sounds” of laughter from Nel’s throat and exposes Sula’s sense of political economy. Talk of
the household and its upkeep reveals that Sula is unconcerned with “folks stealing.” Entirely
nonproprietary, hers is a political economy that is instead invested in the belonging of
persons to places. It is dedicated to disorder. Without offering “a reason,” Sula casts out the
neighbor who brought nominal order to the Peace household by caring for the ailing Eva. Yet
the Deweys are permitted to remain in the house in a state of arrested development alongside
Tar Baby, each character content in the disorder of their racial ambiguity. Theirs is a wildness
unbeholden to normative time.
When the birds that auger Sula’s return finally depart from the Ohio hills, they leave
behind a “peculiar quality” that Nel alone feels bodily.
153
Here, the peculiar takes on a spatial
dimension, manifesting itself in the shining May air. Though it environs her, Nel perceives
this peculiar quality most acutely “in her own body,” suggesting a charged bodily connection
153
Morrison, Sula, 94.
152
Morrison, Sula, 96.
151
Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press,
2020). Halberstam articulates a pressing need for a lexicon that has the capacity to articulate the lives and
longings of those whose sexual practices were not neatly categorized by modernity. This chapter
dissertation offers “peculiar” as part of an emerging lexicon that may do so.
66
between the two women. Sula’s “odd way of looking at things” is facilitated by their
same-sex bodily connection.
154
While Sula’s perspective and presence excite Nel, Sula does
not “stir… a man’s body.” Sula’s non-proprietary relationship to sexuality leaves Nel
Wright’s upright household in shambles. Like her mother and grandmother before her, Sula’s
sexuality tears marital ties asunder in order to reconstitute Black sociality along new,
peculiar, lines. Like Hannah and Eva, Sula regards love as inhered to Black existence under
the circumstances of poverty and White supremacy. But for Sula, love is epitomized by
same-sex sociality in the face of racialized sexual violence. To Nel’s husband Jude, who,
tired from work and lamenting the plight of Black men, interrupts the two friends’ joking
exchange, Sula says, “Everything in the world loves you. White men love you. They spend
so much time worrying about your penis they forget their own. The only thing they want to
do is cut of a n*gger’s privates.” She concludes, “And if that ain’t enough, you love
yourselves. Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear
of solitary White men, but n*ggers? Can’t stay away from one another.”
155
The peculiar
quality that colors nature in the wake of Sula’s presence is most felt in the body of her most
intimate friend. In this way, Sula foregrounds intra-racial homosocial friendship as a primary
aspect of Black love. This same-sex orientation disturbs justifications for a racially stratified
society in which heterosexuality is valorized.
Especially in the context of the racial and sexual terror that Sula alludes to in the
above quote, intimacy is a constitutive practice of African American peoplehood, for “if we
155
Morrison, Sula, 104.
154
Morrison, Sula, 104.
67
had not loved each other none of us would have survived.”
156
Ties, touch and tempests
between kin and lovers stand opposed to a long history in which Black American households
were rhetorically and legally construed as unfit. In 1937, the date of Sula and Nel’s fictive
conversation, rape and lynching were, and had for decades been, related tools of domination
that served a regulatory public function. Lynching “reflected a power struggle among men”
that impacted countless wives, mothers and sisters left without loved ones and who were
themselves lynched.
157
Lynching and rape were dual forms of terror that primarily White men
perpetrated in efforts to maintain a racial and gendered economic order at whose zenith they
rested. Lynching, rape and the threat of rape were, in the prewar period, “intimately bound up
with the politics of sexuality” and are fundamental to apprehending the history of sexuality in
the United States.
158
Sula’s sexuality; that she sleeps with the “beautiful” Black men of the
town and is rumored to have slept with White men as well, incites the ire and repulsion of
townsfolk. Sula’s Black characters perceive any relations between White men and Black
women as rape because rape was the primary paradigm of sexual encounters between Black
women and White men during slavery and well into the middle of the 20
th
century in the
United States.
159
As Sula’s dark humor suggests, rape and lynching were central to the
structure of social life through the mid- 20th century and are therefore foundational to the
159
The 1959 trial of four White men for the brutal rape of Betty Jean Owen was the first court
case wherein White men were held legally accountable for the sexual assault of a Black woman. The
defendants were given community service. See Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black
Women, Rape and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise
of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).
158
Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “Mind that Burns,” 328.
157
Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “’The Mind that Burns in Each Body’: Woman, Rape and Racial
Violence” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 1983),
335.
156
Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.
68
workings of American capital.
In Sula, in the face of death’s ubiquity, the question of intimacy between the Peace
women, who express affection neither in the free-choice terms legible to liberal logics nor in
the terms of queer of color erotics is obviated by the reality of survival. As Sula’s
grandmother Eva quips to her daughter in response to the second strange thing, “what you
talkin' bout did I love you girl I stayed alive for you can’t you get that through your thick
head or what is that between your ears, heifer.”
160
160
Morrison, Sula, 69.
69
CHAPTER THREE
“Something to be Done”:
Tribal Stories, Justice and Afro-Lakota Genealogies in Frances Washburn’s Elsie’ s
Business
In Frances Washburn’s 2006 novel Elsie’ s Business, the story that wants to be told is the
one that unfolds. Elsie’s tale is not conveyed by way of a well-laid plot, for the author relates
what has befallen the protagonist, who is deceased at the novel’s start, within its first pages.
Rather, the many stories that comprise Elsie’ s Business center the value of living in relation, an
important tenant of tribal governance.
161
Indigenous people not only define relational belonging
through stories, but also mark tribal place and [re]claim land through narrative practices,
including place-based storytelling.
162
Because they help make tribal place knowable to Native
peoples, stories and storytelling are integral to Native North American epistemes. Tribal stories
not only contain the inter-generational knowledge that is transmitted in their content and form,
but, to many, they also represent the boundaries of all that is knowable.
163
As the teleological
limit to what can be known, Native stories affirm the enduring capacity of tribal cosmologies to
account for the presence and place of non-Native peoples in North America.
In Elsie’ s Business, Sinte Sapela Win (Black Tailed Deer Woman), Hanhepi Win (Day
Woman), and Inktomi stories illustrate the importance of being accountable relatives, both to
163
Leslie Marmon Silko, “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective” in Yellow
Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1996).
162
Mishuana Goeman, “From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land in the
Discussion of Indigenous Nation-Building,” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 1, no. 34
(2008): 24.
161
Angela Riley, “Good (Native) Governance,” Columbia Law Review 107, no. 5 (June 2007):
1049-1125.
70
human persons and other-than-human beings. Save the occasional “long time ago,” there is no
time specification for when the stories take place. Rather, they are retold in the perennial present
of the novel to remind its characters of their cultural values and familial histories. As they are
related in the novel, Hanhepi Win, Inktomi, and Sinte Sapela Win stories stray from the path of
Western positivism, which is one-directional and oriented toward a foreseeable end. So too, do
the book’s oral histories. One oral history that is related in the novel concerning Allotment, the
federal government’s parcellation of tribal lands into individual plots, leaves a non-Native
listener craving a clear narrative ending.
164
Elsie’ s Business presents Native characters relating to
history and story by way of a verb: “to story.”
165
This emphasis on verbiage; on what in Elsie’ s
Business is called “something to be done” derives from Native North American language
structures.
Tribal stories like those that appear in Elsie’ s Business are at their most dynamic when
shared by and between tribal members, in part because “stories…create cohesive understandings
of longing and belonging.”
166
In their capacity as markers of tribal place and belonging, origin
stories have been used in legal cases to establish evidence for a community’s residence on a land
base since “time immemorial,” a requirement for Native nations that wish to become federally
recognized in order to gain access to federal recognition’s attendant rights.
167
Though tribal
stories are, in this limited contemporary capacity, endowed with truth value by the U.S. court
system, recognition does not come without its challenges and is, for many, a coerced form of
167
Jeff Corntassel and Richard Witmer, Forced Federalism: Contemporary Challenges to
Indigenous Nationhood (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011).
166
Goeman, “From Place to Territories,” 25.
165
Goeman, “From Place to Territories,” 25.
164
Frances Washburn, Elsie’ s Business (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 193.
71
inclusion in the U.S. nation state. Moreover, the broader history of the judiciary system and
Native national narratives is one in which the former enacted damaging rulings undergirded by
racist stereotypes that undermined Native nations’ status as political entities.
Historically, the rhetorical recognition of Native peoples' sovereignty in the U.S. supreme
court was undercut by its violent material negation in the form of land dispossession. The status
of Native peoples in international law is based on three seminal court decisions known today as
the Marshall Trilogy, which established domestic dependent nation status for Native nations in
the United States and concluded in 1832. Far from being a legal victory for Native nations, the
conferring of domestic-dependent nation status and the subsequent treatment of Native peoples
as wards of the federal government, “were in perfect keeping with the colonial objectives of the
U.S. government at the time.”
168
While the Marshall Trilogy has served as the legal precedent for
much of Federal Indian law and policy, Justice Marshall's decisions mark a reinvented form of
tribal sovereignty, whose true origins lie, not in recognition by U.S. courts, but in tribal stories.
While I make use of the term “sovereignty” to denote a horizon of civic possibility for
Native nations in what is now the United States, I do not do so without having grappled with the
complexities of the term. In the early republic, English settlers constructed their own status as an
emergent nation by establishing treaties with the Native nations that preexisted them in North
America, deriving the terms of their agreements from British law.
169
The Western European
origin of “sovereignty,” then, invites the question of its applicability to contemporary Indigenous
forms of self-government. Critical issues such as jurisdiction, territory and private property that
pertain to the historical usage of “sovereignty” in British common law impact how the term has
169
Barker.
168
Joanne Barker, “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,” in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of
Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self Determination (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2006), 13.
72
come to be understood and deployed by Native peoples.
170
In scholar Taiaiake Alfred’s view, the
term’s usage by colonizers of North America indicates that Native nations should aim to
denaturalize sovereignty and seek a more viable “Native political alternative.”
171
In endeavoring
on this project, Alfred turns to a plurality of Native perspectives and governing practices and
questions the state’s standing as the primary body to which Native and non-Native people turn
for rights and legibility, challenging the very geopolitical shape of nations.
172
While the
temptation to abandon the terms of sovereignty altogether is appealing because it keeps the
broader horizon of Native nations’ respective contestations with the faltering U.S. nation in sight,
I choose to make use of the term “sovereignty” in deference to more immediate struggles. Native
nations are often at odds with state interests in regard to land, fishing and water rights, as well as
over the (mis)use of sacred sites. In short, the frontline of struggle for Native nations in North
America is for greater levels of sovereignty within the U.S. and Canadian nation states.
Elsie’ s Business converses with and critiques the efficacy of the legal system in enacting
justice for Native women in the United States, portraying it as part of a failed settler state
apparatus whose courthouses are nevertheless “the center events that affect so many peoples’
lives.”
173
The judiciary system, as an appendage of a government that frames settler/Native
relations as a number of bounded historical occurrences rather than as a series of ongoing actions
that call for accountability, looms large in the background of the novel. Such a framing exempts
173
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 19.
172
Alfred, 48.
171
Taiaiake Alfred, “Sovereignty” in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and
Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self Determination, ed. Joanne Barker (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2006).
170
Barker.
73
settler colonialism as a series of unfortunate past events— temporal aberrations on the road to
progress— rather than an enduring structure tied to law, land and custom.
A work of historical fiction, Elsie’ s Business spans the years 1967-1970 in the brief life of
its protagonist, Elsie Roberts. Centering Elsie’s Afro-Lakota (Lakota and African American)
genealogy, the novel also relates moments in the lives of Elsie’s relatives that take place during
the 1940s. In foregrounding Elsie and her family members in its cast of characters, the novel
illustrates the impact of Federal Indian policy during the Indian Reorganization Act and
Self-Determination eras on the lives of ordinary Lakota people. It also depicts the influence of
the Great Migration on African American workers like Elsie’s father, George. Elsie is a fictional
victim of the widespread injustice against Indigenous women that existed in the midcentury
United States and still exists today. She, like many Native women in North America, is the
survivor of sexual violence perpetrated by White men. Elsie faces the enduring legacy of settler
colonialism, whose legal structure, as scholar Sarah Deer has argued, renders Native women
acutely vulnerable to sexual violence.
174
Elsie’ s Business, grounded in orality and story, is first and foremost a contribution to
Native American literature. Secondarily, it enters into conversation with the settler colonial
literature of the United States. In particular, the novel is conversant with William Carlos
Williams’ poem “To Elsie.” Written with liberal-minded concern for the experiences of Native
people in the United States, the poem neatly folds Indigeneity into Americanness. Encouraging
both the assimilation of Native peoples and the Americanization of White settlers through
intermarriage with Native Americans, it warns in its opening lines, “The pure products of
America go crazy—/mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey.” Liberal in
174
Sarah Deer, “Decolonizing Rape Law: A Feminist Synthesis of Safety and Sovereignty,”
Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 149-167.
74
the sense that it devalues racial purity, which is sacrosanct in the fevered ideology of White
supremacy, it presents crossings between White and Native people as strengthening “the earth
under our feet” and making Americans, maddened by poverty, sane. The poem also celebrates
“promiscuity between/ devil-may-care men who have taken/ to railroading/ out of sheer lust of
adventure.” This line effaces the railroad’s complicity in the settler project and in enlisting
racialized labor from Asian Americans. Denied status and access to “civic association and
democratic promises of equality,” unmarried migrant laborers from Asia and South Asia who
worked the railroads from the mid-1830s through the first decades of the 20
th
century were
motivated, not by “lust for adventure” but by the paltry promises of wage work.
175
The history of
the extraction of Asian American labor in service of the dispossession of Native land by way of
the railroad undergirds the history of pluralism, liberalism and multiculturalism that prevails in
our national narrative and is upheld in “To Elsie.” Furthermore, the poem’s treatment of “some
Elsie,” who is the product of a “marriage /… with a dash of Indian blood” as “a girl so desolate /
so hemmed round with disease or murder / that she’ll be rescued by an agent— reared by the
state” is steeped in the assumption that Native peoples and their descendants are wards of the
federal government; children to be “reared.” Moreover, it positions the state as an agent of
salvation for the fictive Elsie, who is ensconced by “disease,” rather than as an entity that has
mobilized biological warfare against Native people. That Elsie’s personhood is not specified; that
she is merely “some Elsie” betrays that she is a racial type whose imagined body: “great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts” is a source of fixation for “rich young men with fine eyes.”
The ‘mixed-race’ Elsie is able to “express[ing] with broken / brain the truth about us—.” The
insight born of Elsie’s Native heritage supports the ideological coherence of the United States,
175
Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacies: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North
American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
75
while she, within the frame of the poem, remains “broken.” Williams’ “To Elsie” positions White
Americans, whose colonial “imagination strains / after deer,” as the rightful inheritors of Native
subjectivities.
The national literature of the United States is inextricable from the settler project. This
unfortunate fact is evident in countless texts whose authors aimed to suture themselves to Native
land through their writing. Walt Whitman, a self-proclaimed national bard who worked for the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, is one of these writers. In “Song of Myself” Whitman imagines that the
American people, harbored by an enduring land, are invulnerable to death. In “Preface to Leaves
of Grass,” Whitman considers the role of the American bard, or national poet, relative to the
American nation. According to Whitman, one of the bard’s many functions is to express the spirit
of the land and its people by giving voice to the poetics latent in both. He calls the United States,
“essentially the greatest poem” and writes of the bard, “a bard is to be commensurate with a
people. His spirit responds to his country’s spirit… he incarnates its geography and natural
life.”
176
In the preface to his most canonized poem, Native land is transformed into the bodily
property of the U.S. national bard. Despite Whitman’s best efforts to suture settler selfhood to
Native territories, (efforts that come across in the well-known lines, “My tongue, every atom of
my blood, form’d from this soil, this air / Born here of parents born here from parents the
same”), the body of U.S. literature that furthers the settler cause has not managed to supplant the
diverse array of Indigenous literary forms that derive from Native North American languages.
Through the elder Lakota character Oscar, who speaks in English interspersed with the
Lakota language (Lakȟótiyapi) and relates the story of Elsie’s death to her African American
father George, Elsie’ s Business pays homage to the oral origins of both Native American and
176
Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. B, ed. Arnold Krupat and Robert Levine (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 2195-2196.
76
African American literature. Oscar is a respected elder to whom others, including George, turn
for advice and knowledge about traditional practices. However, Oscar and George
miscommunicate at times due to the cultural differences between them. For example, toward the
end of the novel, as George struggles to put together the money to transport his daughter’s coffin
back to Mississippi, Oscar relays an oral history about allotment at what is an inopportune
moment for George, a moment when he wants to hear “another story,” one that will give him
direct answers about his daughter’s life. When he is jokingly told to listen to the stories for “the
answer to everything,” George is perturbed. Feeling his status as cultural outsider acutely, he is
“not in the mood” for a “boring” oral history about the allotment period. The story he is told, one
in which a Lakota man, due to a rare federal oversight, is allotted a piece of land that is good for
farming, and, playing the “dumb Indian” refuses to let local White farmers threaten him into
relinquishing land rights—calls to mind African American trickster figures who outwit those in
power. The content of this story, as well as the exchange between Oscar and George, invite an
analysis of Elsie’ s Business that engages both African American and Native American literature.
Indeed, comparative analyses between the two bodies of work may lead to scholars “discovering
ways in which they signify on each other's literary and oral traditions. This kind of signifying
practice involves textual revision and rewriting of literary and oral traditions.”
177
Here, the use of
the word “signifying” echoes its homonym from the African American vernacular tradition. The
rhetorical practice of “Signifying” in the Black American oral tradition connotes a “political and
metaphysical” “confrontation” with White American culture. Signifying, here, can be a means of
177
Dean Rader, Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to
the NMAI (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).
77
exploring the productive political and cultural encounters between African American and Native
American literatures and narrative practices.
178
Native peoples have long resisted the eradication of their literary traditions, adapting
writing as an integral part of their respective oral traditions and as a vehicle for oral history.
Native and non-Native writers alike have developed what Arnold Krupat calls a “cosmopolitan”
critical perspective on Native American literature, one that is centered on “the world” and
committed to comparative methods.
179
Fundamental to the cosmopolitan critical perspective is a
recognition of the dynamic interplay between local and global knowledge systems. The idea that
local, and, in the case of Native America, tribally specific, knowledge is situated in a changing
global arena, opens up the possibility for the political transformation of Western constructs such
as the “nation-state” into Indigenous concepts such as the “nation-people.”
180
Similarly, the
cosmopolitan term “writing storyteller,” coined by scholar Brewster Fitz in his critical work on
Leslie Marmon Silko, connotes the desire to reconcile tensions between orality, the form in
which Pueblo history is largely transmitted, and writing, a form of recording history adapted
from Europeans.
181
The writing storyteller incorporates both the oral tradition and European
literary traditions, transforming writing into an anti-colonial act, even while settlers still govern
on Native soil. In Silko’s work, we are told that the horror of the history of European arrival
“can’t be called back” but must be reckoned with.
182
In Silko’s work, as in Elsie’ s Business,
182
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 128.
181
Brewster E. Fitz, Silko: Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2005), 67.
180
Krupat.
179
Arnold Krupat, “Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism: Three Perspectives on Native
American Literatures,” The Centennial Review 42, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 617-626.
178
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Language of African American Literary
Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1989; 2014), 50.
78
histories of contact cannot be called back or undone. Instead, they are situated within and subject
to the force of tribal stories.
For Silko, in whose prolific shadow many contemporary novelists reside, the terrible
impact of Western Europeans is that they “see the world as objects.” The power of Indigenous
stories rivals this deadening object-based perception of the world. Contrary to the idea that
Native languages and literatures are temporally regressive, tribal stories “embrace the whole of
creation and the whole of history and time.”
183
In the essay “Language and Literature from a
Pueblo Indian Perspective,” Silko puts forth the concept of the “word-story.” The word-story
reflects the Pueblo concept that single words contain stories. It stresses the active nature of
narrative language rather than the specific language through which a story is conveyed. This
emphasis on narrative language enables English and Spanish, colonizers’ languages that were
foisted upon the Pueblo, to convey tribal cosmology. While the word-story is specific to the
expression of Pueblo thought in English, Native North American languages, broadly, evince the
importance of linguistic relativism, the notion that one's bodily and psychic relationship to space
and time depends on one’s linguistic structure.
184
Native languages worked to establish peoplehood in the “time immemorial” past of tribal
cosmology and galvanize Native peoples to take political action in the present day. In its oral
form, the Lakota language engenders an action-based worldview. Washburn, who is also the
author of “Reading and Writing the Lakota Language: Yes, We Can!” and is invested in utilizing
184
Paul Kroskrity, “Sustaining Stories: Narratives as Cultural Resources in Native American
Projects of Cultural Sovereignty, Identity Maintenance, and language revitalization” in Telling Stories in
the Face of Danger: Language Renewal in Native American Communities ed. Paul Kroskrity (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 4.
183
Leslie Marmon Silko, “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective” in Yellow
Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1996), 49.
79
the Lakota language in both its written and oral forms, is well aware of this fact.
185
In the Lakota
language, verbs do not decline as they do in English. Instead, time markers such as “tomorrow
morning” or “yesterday” are used to communicate when an event will take place, is taking place,
or has taken place. As any Lakota language learner knows, Lakota is verb-based. English, on the
other hand, is object-based. Words that in English are categorized as nouns, fixed in their
objecthood, are verbal constructions in Lakȟótiyapi (the English “coffee” for example, translates
as “they make it hot” in Lakȟótiyapi). This linguistic emphasis on doing effectively renders the
White settler fixation on racial categorization moot. It offers a dynamic answer to the perennial
European-American question “what is an Indian?” which has damagingly defined Native people
in racial rather than political and cultural terms. The answer to the “thingness” that the question
“what is an Indian?” generates is “inseparable from language.”
186
It is also necessarily tied to
action; what Native peoples do and how they live. Compellingly, Lakota identity, linked to
language and action, is also rooted in walking.
Evidence of the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota peoples’ shared history of walking migration
is present in the Lakota language. Although little linguistic borrowing existed between Lakota
and neighboring languages prior to European contact, Lakota peoples today locate migration’s
traces in the dialect differences that exist between Lakȟótiyapi, Nakota and Dakota. As there was
a time that the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota lived as one people, linguistic breaks correspond to
the respective historical junctures at which the people broke into smaller bands, Lakȟótiyapi
being the most recent form of the Nakota language.
187
Works of literature like Elsie’ s Business
187
Conversation with Mary Bordeaux (Sicangu and Oglala Lakota), 2014.
186
Scott Richard Lyons, X Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010).
185
Frances Washburn, “Reading and Writing the Lakota Language: Yes, We Can!” American
Indian Quarterly 27, no. 1-2 (2003): 429-432.
80
that reflect the active worldview that the Lakota language and its related dialects have given rise
to, challenge the racialization of Native peoples as temporally bounded to prehistory. Further, the
history of walking migrations that is embedded within the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota dialects
challenges Western European theories of world historical time that have so negatively impacted
perceptions of Native peoples.
Native people were placed at the crux of the theory of world historic time, which
developed in the 19
th
century as social scientists sought to demarcate which human “race”
represented which stage of civilizational progress. Unsurprisingly, proponents of the theory
lauded features of the European and Euro-American sex-gender system, such as monogamous
marriage, as resting at the pinnacle of civilization. In an attempt to naturalize European
monogamy as an universal ideal, American Anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan completed a
quasi-ethnographic study of the Iroquois nation in 1851, which professed to focus on their
kinship system. Using what he perceived as the Iroquois system as representative of the kinship
practices of all Native peoples, Morgan claimed that Native nations were living representatives
of a past stage in European evolution. In his major work, Ancient Society, or Researches in the
Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization, published in 1877,
Morgan conceived of three major phases of civilization, defined by differing configurations of
property, kinship and government. The first phase, savagery, in which Morgan argued Native
peoples were situated, was characterized by few sexual regulations, lack of government, no
settlement or land cultivation, and matrilineal kinship patterns. In Morgan's work, civilized
peoples are land cultivators who organize society through writing, and are patrilineal,
monogamous, and propertied. Transforming Native realities into symbolic and primitive
81
predecessors of White America, as Morgan did, is part of the ideological underpinning of
colonial expansion.
188
By effacing the linguistic diversity of the Indigenous peoples of North America and by
writing about Native nations in terms of a lack of literacy and European institutions, 17
th
-century
European travel writers fabricated the imagined Indians who would later figure in 19
th
-century
pseudo-science and popular literature. A critical period for the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota
nations and African Americans alike, the 19
th
century saw much that changed and much that
stayed the same in literature and national discourse. During this era, even those White writers
who stated sympathy with Native peoples fell into the pitfalls of pastoralism in relegating them
to the pastures of the past. For example, poetry and prose by Lydia Huntley Sigourney, a
widely-read voice of dissent to Federal Indian policy during 1830s and 40s, fails to articulate the
alterability of the settler nation in the era of westward expansion of which she wrote in
earnest. In the poem “Our Aborigines,” Sigourney likens Native peoples, undifferentiated by
nation, region or custom, to “forests” and “valleys green.” She writes, “Where is the red-brow’d
hunter race / Who loved our leafy screen?”
189
Native land becomes “our[s]” in the poem, whereas
Native peoples’ “exile” from the Eastern United States, the region the author invokes through
verdant images and that she herself called home, requires, in the poem, no reckoning. For
Sigourney, Eastern Native nations are safely in the past; they are the “bones” that “the
farmer[‘s]” plough strikes.”
190
Native figures are “feather plumed phantoms” who have already
‘‘fled mournfully away” from the national body and any claim to land rights. The poem’s very
190
Norton...American Literature, 1039.
189
Norton...American Literature, 1039.
188
Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2001).
82
title, “Our Aborigines” suggests that Native peoples are neither proprietors of their own persons
nor nations in their own right but are instead folded within the possessive logics of U.S. national
belonging from which they are bodily “exile[d],” but nominally included. Sigourney’s poetry
betrays a fatedness. However condemnable the history of relations between European settlers
and Native peoples may have been to Sigourney, it seems to say, ‘there is nothing to be done.’
Washburn, on the other hand, does not shy away from articulating what could and should
have been done for her character Elsie, who survives a brutal sexual assault at the hands of a
group of young White men who rape her and leave her for dead. Initially, the narrative follows
the young woman from Standing Rock Reservation as she is brought up her mother Mary
Roberts, an outcast who raises her daughter on the outskirts of their reservation off of the
proceeds she makes from tanning deer hides for her much sought-after beadwork. It is no secret
to the Lakota people in the novel that Mary’s talent with traditional crafts is a gift from the Deer
Woman, a storied figure. After her mother dies of unrelated causes in the hospital while Elsie’s
injuries heal, Elsie must find her own voice. After her assault, she builds intimate relationships
and friendships in the neighboring White community where she finds employment. In chapter
two, the narrator relates the violent hate crime perpetrated against Elsie. Beaten, raped and called
racial slurs, Elsie escapes into her mind, a place where “she walks along the creek bank in
Spring…” as “a deer, wounded and run to earth, not dead yet.”
191
Elsie survives despite the fact
that the young men leave her to die, driving away in their shared vehicle. As they attempt to
escape, the teenaged perpetrators hit a “huge deer,” an apparition made flesh who appears and
disappears at the precise angle in the road that causes the car crash that kills them. Having
endured this life-threatening sexual assault, which damages her vocal cords along with other
parts of her body, Elsie regains the capacity for speech. With her voice she retains the ability to
191
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 12.
83
name those responsible, though her act of naming the perpetrators is ignored by the justice
system. Upon her release from the hospital, Elsie leaves the reservation to work as a domestic
laborer in the homes of White residents of the reservation’s neighboring border town of
Mobridge. While initially she works solely for Father Horst, a Catholic priest, the list of those
she cleans for soon grows. During her time as a domestic laborer, she is sexually harassed by a
White male employer, Donald Marks, whose wife Nancy Elsie has befriended. Elsie chooses not
to pursue this potential legal case in part because, “Any woman’s word, but particularly an
Indian woman’s word, an Indian woman who was known to have been raped” might be
dismissed in court.
192
In the eyes of residents of the small-town, a romantic relationship Elsie
enters into with the town’s alcoholic, semi-itinerant outcast John Caufield, undermines her
credibility. Several years after her initial sexual assault, Elsie is violently murdered. Though
Elsie’s former lover, John Caufield, confesses to the murder before taking his own life,
townspeople and law enforcement doubt the credibility of his testimony and continue to
speculate about who the true killer may be. Searching for clues, the sheriff and priest, along with
Elsie’s friend and employer Nancy Marks, enter Elsie’s residence. Far from finding answers, they
discover a sanctified object that raises more questions: a mummified eight-month fetus wrapped
neatly in deer skin, across whose figure lies two cedar branches.
Washburn situates the fictive events that take place on Standing Rock reservation and in
the neighboring border town within the force and purview of tribal story. The author’s use of
Lakota traditional narratives is a creative answer to scholar Craig Womack’s call in “Reading the
Oral Tradition” to regard oral narratives as a force that coheres Native nationhood. In Elsie’ s
Business, Lakota stories are unprompted; unexplained. They stand on their own, infused with a
life that both stands beyond and guides human events. One particular story, that of Sinte Sapela
192
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 148.
84
Win, or the Black Tailed Deer Woman, is told and retold in order to reroute non-Native readers’
epistemic desire for a clear beginning, middle and end. As the narrator observes, “You want to
know the rest of Elsie’s story, but…” are told “a different story.” This authorial move draws what
scholar Audra Simpson would call “an epistemic limit” around “what can be “known” about
Native lives. Deer Woman sightings, in particular, have the power to affect both Native and
non-Native people alike.
While the narrator does not say whether the deer that kills the young men is Sinte Sapela
Win, a Black-Tailed Deer Woman, Elsie’s narrative is intimately tied to that of her mother, Mary,
who has been touched by the Deer Woman. Mary is gifted with the ability to tan deer hides and
from them make art. “Men who see the deer woman go crazy,” we are told. “But women who see
her are rewarded with the ability to make beautiful things—maybe beadwork or quillwork. Mary
Roberts, they said, had met the deer woman, and been gifted.
193
The homosocial nature of the
Deer Woman’s gifts to Mary and to women like her is notable. Deer Woman carves a space for
Native women to negotiate, navigate, and transgress the at times constrictive gender roles that
get misconstrued as features of tribal traditions. Deer Woman is a pedagogical force that
constructs gendered identity and values by making men “go crazy” as she does in the novel. She
also gifts women with talents that make them outcasts, artists with a unique vision of the world.
Though Elsie’s mother Mary is one such visionary who has been touched by the Deer Woman,
she, like many contemporary Native peoples, must “learn tradition.” Forced to forget the old
ways at boarding school as a child, Mary must ask a stranger, an older Native woman versed in
traditional crafts, how to tan deer hide, a labor she eventually perfects. Living on the periphery of
their tribal community off of the proceeds from Mary’s ability to make and sell beautiful objects
out of deer hide, Elsie and her mother are peculiar figures. They are regarded by Native and
193
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 69.
85
Non-Native peoples alike as “odd” and “strange” because they are unmarried, live with one
another and do not attend church.
194
Elsie’s voice itself sounds strange to the ears, even when she laughs, “the sound bubbling
up and down the scale in a way that most people find discomforting.”
195
Not only is Elsie
sonically peculiar, but she is also bodily out of step with time in a way that invokes the cinematic
capacity for slow motion. One evening, well before he makes his first sexual advance, Elsie’s
employer Donald Marks visits Elsie’s residence so that Elsie can measure him for moccasins. As
she measures, “Time stopped, frozen, jumped forward rapidly to catch up. Elsie moved across
the kitchen like a character in an old time movie, too fast, with jerky movements.”
196
Here, in
invoking the “fluid kinetic space” of the cinema through the movements of her ligaments, Elsie
invites us to reconsider Indigenous epistemes concerning gender, time and the sacred.
197
She is
“propelled into sonic errantry” through a combination of vocal dissonance and off-tempo
movements.
198
Stalled in a present in which she is vulnerable, as a domestic laborer and as an
Afro-Native woman, to sexual assault; in a precarious “present in a process of collapsing into
unknowable futures” Elsie “allows for the opacity of that which she touches in the world.”
199
Or,
rather, whom she touches. During Mary Roberts’ lifetime, she is the primary recipient of her
young daughter Elsie’s touch. As Mary Roberts passes away in the hospital, her daughter is
199
Keeling.
198
Kara Keeling, “Electric Feel: Transduction, Errantry and the Refrain,” Cultural Studies 28, no.
1 (2014): 49-83.
197
Michele Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty and Representations of
Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).
196
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 128.
195
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 69.
194
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 61.
86
admitted, suffering severe sexual assault-related injuries. Washburn describes the two women’s
closeness: “Elsie’s mother is in the bed next her daughter…as close to Elsie as she can get,
reaching out with her hand now and then, touching Elsie’s hair…. Just in case Elsie is awake, she
hums a little tune from time to time.”
200
Mary, in asymptotic proximity to Elsie, coaxes her
daughter back into health with her touch. At a frequency and timbre that is not disclosed to the
reader, she “sings from time to time,” inviting her into wakefulness and sonic errantry. Once
awake, Elsie’s mother will pass away and Elsie will speak in the dissonant voice that is so
disconcerting to those (like Jack Mason, the father of the teenagers who rape her) who wish to
silence Elsie, and to those who employ her.
Though they employ her as a domestic laborer, White American townspeople largely
“steer[ed] clear of Elsie, remembering her mother and the oddness of Mary’s past in the town. It
wasn’t that they were unkind to Elsie, but that they were a little afraid of her, being as she was
the embodiment of past transgressions.”
201
The primary transgression that Euro American
townspeople are so wary of is that of the intimate crossing between Native and Black that Elsie
embodies in her parentage. Romantic love and notions of free choice in partnership have been
regulated by law and custom in gendered ways that serve settler presence in the U.S. and
Canada. Laws regarding Native peoples in settler states have not overlooked the romantic
choices that Native women make. In fact, “much of the governing of Native peoples centered on
redefining traditional kinship structures to that of marriage and defining... Native women.”
202
As
202
Mishuana Goeman, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
201
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 68.
200
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 31.
87
Elsie learns, romantic love and intimacy are not outside of settler policies, but, rather, at their
crux.
African American and Native intimacies have been highly regulated throughout U.S.
history. In the early colonial period, English settlers and early Virginia planters made great
efforts to narrativize and claim Native territory as vacuum domicilum, or unoccupied land.
203
During this same era, African American bondspersons often allied themselves with Native
nations, escaping the clutch of enslavement for areas like Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp, where
Black and Native peoples formed semi-autonomous maroon communities beyond the surveilling
gaze of the planter elite. Elsie’s African American father, whose name, tellingly, is George
Washington, is an agricultural laborer whose work brings him to Lakota/Dakota country one
fateful summer. Being a farmer, he shares both a name and an occupation with the constitutional
framer. Of this spurious connection, Elsie’s father laughingly proclaims, “no relation to the
original.”
204
Despite his protestation, and despite their radically different positionalities—Elsie’s
father George Washington being the direct descendant of enslaved peoples and the historical
George Washington the unabashed owner of enslaved laborers— the two Georges are connected
through the history of property rights, enslavement, and dispossession in the settlement of North
America. In presenting an impoverished Black George Washington as Elsie’s father, Washburn
creates an alternative genealogy, one wherein Afro-Native peoples do not trace the origins of
their Americanness to the flawed constitutional framer.
In the novel, Elsie’s father is “homesick” for the swampy regions of Mississippi, where
he is from, but he revels in the chance to walk, even briefly, off of the tired path trodden by
204
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 33.
203
Jill Lepore, The Name of War, King Phillips War and the Origins of American Identity (New
York: Knopf, 1998), 85.
88
Black farm workers into the embrace of Elsie’s Lakota mother and “join dark skin to darker
skin.” Though the reader is privy to the brief series of encounters that lead to Elsie’s conception
and birth, Elsie’s genealogy is disrupted by settler coloniality on both her Black and Native sides.
Elsie is not born where her mother grew up. Her mother, Mary, gives birth to the infant Elsie in a
mission school where she seeks shelter one day, heavy with child. While Mary agrees to fill out
Elsie’s birth certificate with the words “George Washington, Farmer” under the ‘father’ category,
she “refuses to let her daughter attend the mission school” when she reaches school age. No
small wonder. In mission schools, Christianity was deployed as a condition of sexual
colonization, to manage, regulate and discipline the diverse expressions of gender and sexuality
among Native youth.
As an adult, Elsie stalwartly refuses to attend church even though she is on friendly terms
with Father Horst, the priest whose rectory and living quarters she cleans. The two are often at
odds over Elsie’s insistence on tanning deer hides in the traditional way, using deer brains and
urine, as her mother Mary taught her. At last, Elsie tacitly agrees to discontinue the practice but
instead moves her operation indoors to her living quarters, out of sight of her employer. With the
assistance of her boyfriend John Caufield, who constructs the wooden hide tanning frames to her
specifications, Elsie continues to clean and tan deer hides that she procures from a local butcher
in the seeming privacy of her home. Months later, Father Horst finds evidence of her continued
practice and takes it upon himself to enter Elsie’s house, only to find ample support for his
suspicion that Elsie has not discontinued this Lakota tradition. It is no surprise that in Elsie’s
case, Horst ignores “his own compunctions about invading other’s privacy.” Throughout the 20
th
century, Native women’s domestic practices were regulated and surveilled by agents of Mission
schools, who made regular visits to Native homes in order to ensure the continued success of
89
their educational model.
205
Father Horst assumes the ready accessibility of Elsie’s home, eliding
the line between public and private in the case of this Afro-Native woman. For men like Horst,
who were conditioned by settler constructions of White masculinity, proximity to both Black and
Native women’s bodies and traditional practices is tantamount to contamination. More furious
“than he had ever been in his life,” Father Horst discards of the heavy tanning frames and hides,
then “clean[s] himself in water so hot he could barely stand it.”
206
Seemingly satisfied with his
own cleanliness, Horst reflects on the possible impetus behind Elsie’s defiance. Genuinely at a
loss, he wonders, “how could she be so insistent on neatness and still do what she had done?....
doing that kind of traditional crafts work wasn’t a cultural imperative, a religious conviction, not
like keeping the holy days of the church.”
207
After Elsie’s death, Father Horst is momentarily
overwhelmed by grief and guilt. While conducting mass, he reflects on “what he could have
done to prevent it, him, the keeper of the flock who was supposed to protect them…except Elsie
didn’t really belong to his flock, not technically, but she was a human being, part of the larger
flock of humanity.”
208
Father Horst’s inclusion of Elsie in the human family, while
well-intentioned, speaks more to the Catholic Church’s past stance that Native North Americans
were just human enough to Christianize and to enlist as laborers than it does to an expansiveness
of heart. Within the first century of European contact with Native peoples in what is now North
America, 16
th
century papist Pope Paul III issued, then rescinded the Sublimis Deus, which
affirmed the humanity of Indigenous peoples of North America and warned against their
208
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 167.
207
Washburn, Elsie’s Business, 157.
206
Washburn, Elsie’s Business, 157.
205
Katherine Osburn, Southern Ute Women: Autonomy and Assimilation on the Reservation,
1887-1934 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).
90
enslavement. In regions where Catholicism was the Christian denomination that accompanied
colonization, sexual violence took a different, though no less damaging, form.
209
Contained within another Lakota story in Elsie’ s Business is the pressing knowledge of
the need to enact justice in the face of sexual violence against Native women. Such knowledge is
expressed in the story of Inktomi, the trickster man of Lakota tradition who is also a spider,
presented in the novel’s first chapter. “I can make your business be my business’” Inktomi says
to Hanhepi Win, or Day Woman. “Give me your consent and I will make it happen.” Asking for
Day Woman’s consent before he acts on her behalf, Inktomi models allyship and illustrates that
good relations between human beings and other-than-human persons hinges on both parties’
capacity to assent or refuse. In contrast, the relationship between Native peoples and the United
States is characterized by a lack of consent that is felt both at the level of tribal governance and
in the lives of Native and Afro-Native women like Elsie. The right of the federal government to
prosecute crimes on the territory of Native nations is complicated by the “coercive consent” that
discolors the history of tribal peoples’ inclusion in the U.S. system of governance as domestic
dependent nations. The frequency with which Native women are victims of violent crimes is a
matter of human rights that is exacerbated by the Western judiciary system, which is at best
ineffective and at worst an institution that produces Black and Native subjects through
criminality.
210
In the Inktomi story from chapter one of Elsie’ s Business, Hanhepi Win collapses
210
Duane Champagne and Carole Goldberg, Captured Justice: Native Nations and Public Law
280 (Durham: Carolina Academic Press 2012), 5, 41.
209
Maria Raquel Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and
Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880 (University of Nevada Press, 2009). Both the Spanish,
under the Catholic Church and the English, under the Church of England, faced the same challenge in
North America: how to bring their social system to the so-called New World and how to control, through
the creation of racial categories that corresponded to social status, the peoples who emerged from colonial
sexual contact. The Catholic model encouraged intermarriage, but only in conscious effort to supplant
Indigenous populations.
91
the division between social actor and observer: “She sees the situation and she demands / she
demands that something be done.”
211
Through figures like Inktomi and Hanhepi Win, readers of Elsie’ s Business are confronted
with the force of other-than-human agency. Although, as Oscar observes, “Some folks think only
people are alive,” the novel’s deer show us that they are corporally and spiritually living,
working against the animus against Native lives that infects the border town. In fact, it is “the
spirits [that] take care of justice.”
212
The “huge deer” that blocks the road in the moments after
Elsie’s assault and who leads Elsie’s rapists to their deaths illustrates that, for Native women,
justice is often wrought, not by lawmakers, but by figures from tribal stories. The White sheriff
of the town to which Elsie relocates chooses not to investigate the case for the sake of his
political career, shrugging dismissively, “What about justice? For all practical purposes, justice
has already been served by that damn deer.”
213
To some small extent, it has. Spirits and
other-than-human persons intervene when “people upset the order of things” by shirking the
responsibility that comes with knowledge of systemic wrongdoing.
214
Washburn’s novel calls us to “force [our] eyes back to Elsie” and in so doing see those for
whom nothing is done.
215
Like Hanhepi Win who “sees the situation and demands that something
be done” we, too, must see and vocally demand laws that extend the reach of tribal jurisdiction
so that, taken out of the careless hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, violent crimes
against Native women may at the very least be prosecuted in tribal courts. Though the fact of her
215
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 165.
214
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 68.
213
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 36.
212
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 185.
211
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 7.
92
survival is Elsie’s business, the details of her life are all too common knowledge among the
people of Standing Rock Reservation and the predominantly White town that boarders its South
Dakota side. Elsie’s character; her endearing strangeness; her ease with children and love of
candy; her tenderness and her reticence, reads as real as the event her death. Elsie “craved all the
sweetness of life, but not the salt.” It is this sweetness that spills with her blood and oranges in
the snow the day, three years after her initial sexual assault, that she is found murdered. In our
society, so discolored by settler colonialism, the sweetness of life must be reconciled with
brutality.
In speculating about the whereabouts of Elsie’s second child, to whom she gave birth just
weeks before being murdered, White townspeople consider whether “Elsie had killed the child in
some bizarre rite and consumed the body” because no trace of the infant’s body is found
anywhere around the rectory.
216
Native peoples have been stereotyped as cannibals since contact.
Illustrations that accompanied traveler's tales, which were widely read by the European populace,
reflected the status of Native peoples in the European imaginary. The first known illustration
depicting all Native subjects, the German woodcut titled “The People and Island Which Have
Been Discovered...” dated around 1505, depicts Native peoples (who look distinctly European in
the image) as cannibals. In the illustration, they are crowded in the frame, dressed in leaves,
openly consuming human flesh and engaged in other corporal acts such as kissing. The
illustration evinces a preoccupation with Native bodies in the imaginations of colonists and
evokes passages from Amerigo Vespucci's widely read Mundus Novus (New World) of nearly the
same year, which speaks of Indigenous Americans’ “bodies.... their women, being very lustful....
the race...without government.” The townspeople’s perception that a Native woman might eat her
own child ceremonially stems from this history. Though the infant is never found, another
216
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 180.
93
explanation is much more likely: “The second child had been given to one of the Indian women
in the community.”
217
Although Elsie and her mother live as outcasts, making their own way by selling crafts to
White townspeople and tourists, Elsie is honored posthumously by her Lakota community
through both a wiping of the tears ceremony as well as a giveaway ceremony, for which Elsie’s
father is present. The Roberts family, to whom Elsie is not related by blood but by her mother’s first
marriage, hosts the ceremony, because, although Elsie “wasn’t part of everybody else” she is
nonetheless “everybody’s relative.”
218
In facilitating the ceremony, the Roberts family dislodges
blood as the only marker of Native identity and illustrates that ceremony may be as effective as blood
in constructing family. The wiping of the tears ceremony, which marks the end of the period of
mourning Elsie and takes place a year after her death, is performed not only for the sake of the dead,
but also for the coherence of the living. The Native community in the novel recognizes the power of
the deceased to exert hold on the living. Because Elsie is widely known to have been gifted by the
Deer Woman, they turn to deer woman stories in speculating about Elsie’s unsolved murder. “They
didn’t really believe that one of their own had killed Elsie. They remembered the deer woman stories.
In the stories, none of the men afflicted had ever attacked the deer woman herself.”
219
As much as
Lakota tradition guides and informs social life, it is malleable, not fixed, and the possibility that
“some new story with a far different twist had come into being in Jackson” is not dismissed. As
“Learning Tradition,” the title of chapter eight suggests, practicing tradition is an ongoing verbal
action. The capacious and changing nature of tradition means that new stories—some positive, others
dangerous—may crop up, unbidden, among the living.
219
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 183.
218
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 195.
217
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 180.
94
Jack Mason, the father of the White teenage boys who rape Elsie, also recognizes that Elsie’s
story may not be fully over, even in death. Unlike the Native community who “fear[ed] the end had
not been told yet” and choose to honor the deceased in order to encourage her spirit’s rest, Mason
arrives at Elsie’s burial unannounced. Questioned about the reason for his presence, he retorts, “I
want this over with, that’s why I’m here. I want that dead girl and you to hell and out of our lives.”
220
Elsie’s father replies, “You never know what bones someone might dig up.”
221
George leaves “open
the possibilities of haunting” in speaking to Mason, an outsider who is complicit in the violence
inflicted upon his daughter.
222
At the same time, he works to put his daughter’s spirit to sacred rest
with the Native community he has been welcomed into. At the end of Elsie’ s Business, the open
possibility of haunting raises the question of return to tribal place for Afro-Native women like Elsie,
who are enmeshed in non-tribal life.
Elsie’ s Business orients Native American literature toward the periphery of Native
community life, where Afro-Native persons are frequently, though certainly not always, relegated.
The novel treats the periphery as the site where traditions flourish and ancestors find new voices to
speak through. The Roberts family and the character George illustrate that both Black and Native kin
have the responsibility to carry out justice for Native women when justice otherwise fails. George
speaks the penultimate line of the novel, “We're going home, daughter” to Elsie’s closed casket as he
prepares to transport it back to his home state of Mississippi, where he has worked for decades as a
janitor. Elsie's father's participation in the giveaway ceremony on Standing Rock shortly before he
intones this final promise of homecoming constructs a Black and Native family that elides the divide
between community member and outsider. That he carries her remains “home” to Mississippi in the
222
Raheja, 147.
221
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 209.
220
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 209.
95
wake of the ceremony suggests that Lakota practices retain meaning for Afro-Lakota women's
diverse geographies and increasingly diverse genealogies and kinship networks.
Many stories—tribal and otherwise— wind their way into the taut tapestry that makes up the
novel, in part because, “Elsie’s story [is] too big to be told all at once.”
223
Her tale must instead be
told in pieces; pieces that are reminiscent of the torn garments Elsie is left in by those who rape her;
reminiscent also of what Toni Morrison has called “the pieces I am”; the broken, beautiful
subjectivities of Black women who have survived.
224
224
Toni Morrison, Beloved.
223
Washburn, Elsie’ s Business, 186.
96
CHAPTER FOUR
Gender and Property in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Oklahoma, as African American migrants saw it in the late 19
th
century, is perhaps best
described by the fictive founders of the “free town” of Ruby in Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel
Paradise: “Oklahoma is Indians, Negroes and God mixed.”
225
Refugees from the reign of racial
terror that plagued the unreconstructed U.S. South, Black migrants to Indian territory claimed
their newfound freedom by leaving the southern region whose brambles and byways had bound
them while they were enslaved. Beginning in the late 1870s in small, though not insignificant
numbers, formerly enslaved persons and their descendants left the South to establish “free
towns” in what was then federally designated Indian territory. In Oklahoma, Black migrants
encountered members of tribal nations who had been dispossessed of and forcibly removed from
their homelands. Newly arrived in Oklahoma, they envisioned and made social worlds by
becoming kindred. They forged relations with each other, as well as with the Choctaw,
Chickasaw and Cherokee, nations that had been forcibly marched to the region just four decades
prior.
226
These migrants also interacted with “Colored Creek,” African-descended citizens of the
Creek nation who had been enslaved by Creek planters, then granted tribal citizen status after the
Civil War. From members of the recently relocated Creek and Choctaw nations, African
226
The forced marches of Indian Removal and other federal policies mar the history of walking in
Native autobiographical literature. However, personal migrations undertaken by such literary figures as
John Rollin Ridge offer insight into the intersections of literature, removal, and travel as a means by
which Native persons and their kin groups negotiated the pressures of federal policy. Rollin Ridge was a
member of a prominent Cherokee family and the first published Native novelist.
225
Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1999), 56.
97
American migrants sought opportunities to lease and work farmlands.
227
From one another, they
sought solace.
Though federal policy encouraged both African Americans and Native Americans to
participate in subsistence agriculture, life born of agricultural labors was never meant to be
sustainable for either of these groups. The national demand for agricultural laborers dictated the
logics of federal policy and neglect. Neither African Americans nor Native Americans were
perceived as needing intellectual training; agricultural and manual labor was thought sufficient
for both peoples. Farming also informed the Dawes Severalty Act, which aimed to assimilate
Native peoples by parceling tribal landholdings into individual plots. Farming proved difficult on
the lands to which many Native nations had been confined, a challenge that existed by federal
design. Henry Dawes, the primary architect of the act, used genocidal language in describing the
assimilation project.
228
Assimilation, through farming and other means, was meant to be the final
step in the genocide of Native peoples irrespective of tribal affiliation. Although its dictates
initially exempted the Choctaw, Cherokee and Sac and Fox of federally designated Indian
territory, within a few short years of the Dawes Act’s enactment, Oklahoma’s Native nations
were subjected to its strictures as well. Just a few decades after the devastation of Indian
Removal, the economic transformations that came with Oklahoma statehood in 1907 hurt the
state’s Native and Black populations but benefited its rapidly growing number of White
228
Henry Dawes, the architect of the eponymous Dawes Act, stated, “They have got as far as they
can go because they own their land in common… There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of
civilization.” See Hearings Before the Committee on Indian Affairs, House of Representatives, Seventy
Third Congress (Open access).
227
David Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation and the Politics of Landownership in
Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 55. Free towns or
“colored towns” in Indian territory were established by African American migrants from the South
alongside “Colored Creek,” who formed makeshift villages upon their emancipation after the Civil War.
Free towns housed both “Colored Creek” and migrants.
98
settlers.
229
The transition from territory to statehood permanently disadvantaged the state’s Native
nations economically. Oklahoma’s small Black population suffered too, as statehood left “free
towns” vulnerable to violence from an influx of White settlers intent on further appropriating
Native lands.
230
Far from willingly sharing land and labor, African Americans, “Colored Creek” and the
Cherokee, Choctaw, and Sac and Fox Nations had frequent contestations over both. These
ambivalent relationships had their roots in the institution of slavery. Early in the 18
th
century,
Cherokees accepted fugitive slaves into their communities, but in the middle of the 18th century
an elite group of landholding Cherokees began to enslave Black fugitives. For the next half
century or so, Cherokee nationals and their African-descended enslaved laborers vied with equal
fervor, uneven power, and at times conflicting, at times aligned, aims. Although they also
benefited from enslaved labor, the Cherokee tribal government may have been more equipped
than the U.S. government to recognize their enslaved laborers as kin.
231
Kinship operates as a
form of governance for tribal nations.
232
Especially because “the earliest forms of Cherokee and
African relations were identification and interdependence,” Cherokee tribal kinship
configurations, operating fully as governance, may have been capacious enough for
African-descended laborers to become kin by means of adoption.
233
Settler kinship, on the other
233
Miles, 4.
232
Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and
Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Rifkin places the concepts of kinship and
sovereignty in conversation, articulating both as “threshold concept[s]” that exist both within and outside
of settler structures that privilege normative domestic arrangements and gender expressions.
231
Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of An Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4.
230
Chang, 77.
229
Chang, 77.
99
hand, has operated as a series of forced relations in respect to Native nations and African
Americans.
234
These forced relations made it necessary for Native peoples to reconfigure kinship
networks that had previously operated as sovereign peoplehood in order to be legible as
sovereign nations to the U.S. state.
Tribal kinship patterns and their diverse attendant gendered categories were deliberately
torn asunder by settler institutions. Indian mission schools, for example, were established with
the aim of enforcing Victorian gender ideals in the domestic education of Native youth. The
primary goal of such institutions, in their roles as appendages of the federal government, was to
transform students into assimilated Christian citizens.
235
In mission schools, Christianity was
deployed as a condition of sexual colonization, to manage, regulate and discipline the diverse
expressions of gender and sexuality among Native youth. Indeed, the move toward Native
American and African American education in the early 19
th
century was undergirded by the
Second Great Awakening.
236
While mission schools initially focused on educating Native boys
and young men, girls’ education, considered vital to the success of the assimilation project, was
introduced mid-century.
237
Under the mission model, the education of Native girls was laborious.
Its success was often measured by the number of goods a class produced.
238
Moreover, mission
schools instituted a gendered racial order based on a quasi-domestic arrangement in which White
238
Devens, 229.
237
Devens, 225.
236
William Pease and Jane Pease, Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America
(Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963), 7.
235
Carol Devens, "‘If We Get the Girls, We Get the Race’: Missionary Education of Native
American Girls,” Journal of World History 3, no. 2 (1998): 219-237.
234
Rifkin, 19.
100
women, in their roles as teachers in live-in schools, managed young Native women’s sexual
expression.
Despite the best efforts of the U.S. settler project, the institutions of slavery and Indian
boarding schools failed at their professed goal of producing efficient laborers and “proper”
women from so-called “savage stock,” a failure ensured by Black and Native peoples
themselves, who practiced livable definitions of freedom and sovereignty. More quantifiably,
mission schools, which extracted labor from Indigenous students under the guise of training
Native youth in gendered vocations, did little to improve the social ascendancy of poor and
working-class Native women. Furthermore, Euro-American assumptions about what constituted
civilized life, namely, privatized property and laws that “focused on the male” relegated tribal
practices and knowledges to marginal status in respect to the category human, outside of which
African-descended peoples had been firmly placed.
239
Needless to say, the American Revolution,
which did away with primogenitor as the only avenue for social ascendancy for White settlers,
did little by way of their property: African captives. Privatized property, tied in practice to White
men, and in discourse to White masculinity, drove the allotment of Native lands into private
property holdings and thus facilitated the monumental land loss that Native Americans endured
over centuries of European contact. While the right to acquire property has historically defined
citizenship and its associated civic rights in the United States, many tribal nations saw the
extension of property rights to Native lands as a form of forced inclusion in the U.S. nation
state.
240
240
Daniel Heath Justice, “Rhetorics of Recognition” The Kenyon Review 32, no. 1 (2010):
236-261.
239
Vine Deloria Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact
(Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 1997), 50.
101
The impossibility and reality of African American and Native American intimacy in
Oklahoma under the pernicious shadows of White settlement, the mission school system and
slavery cannot be understated. Under the unique conditions of chattel slavery and in its
immediate aftermath, kinship bonds like that between mother and child required rhetorical
acrobatics to attempt to undo.
241
In the project of settlement, the domestic sphere was a common
denominator that worked to concretize class across the bounds of race, Indigeneity and region. In
the settlement of the West and Midwest, domesticity, order and femininity were tied to
Whiteness.
242
As a protest and détournement of this legacy, I offer the “peculiar” as an alternative to
domesticity. In life and literature, peculiar socialites are practiced by so-called wayward women
for whom “the domestic offers no refuge,” only a derailed future.
243
Peculiar socialities are
peripatetic in that they seek a path that diverges from the domestic destinies viewed as manifest
by settlers. I place this emancipatory practice in the purview of women and girls because
historically, Native women were subjected to settler sexuality in unique and violent ways.
244
244
Sarah Deer, “Decolonizing Rape Law: A Native Feminist Synthesis of Safety and
Sovereignty,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 149-167. As Deer observes, the “equal rights”
promised by the liberal democratic project in the United States do not mean equal protection for Native
women who are victims of sexual violence, one of the primary violent tactics by which Europeans
colonized North America. Deer identifies several established methods of tribal justice, such as the Navajo
Peacekeeping courts, to discern whether pre-contact forms of justice for sexual assault might effectively
mediate the crime of sexual violence today.
243
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social
Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 157.
242
Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American
West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Pascoe’s periodization and broad
geographic reach effectively illustrate that the logics of assimilation and elimination converged along the
axis of gender in respect to Native nations in the urban West.
241
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” in Black, White and In Color: Essays on
American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 206. Spillers attests that
under the conditions of enslavement, “the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural
and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”
102
Peculiar socialites and sexualities disrupt reproductive order. They are therefore unsettling to a
settler state founded upon the co-workings of the plantation household, which was at once
private sphere and public factory, and the Indian boarding school, which sought to train Native
youth in forms of labor based on diametric gender roles. The plantation and boarding school
worked in consort with one another to codify settler sexuality and gender norms and to construct
the raced category “woman.”
Paradise is a work of historical fiction that follows a group of African American
migrants to Indian territory through the course of several generations after the establishment of
two neighboring free towns, Ruby and Haven. It foregrounds the lives of a group of
semi-itinerant Native, Black and White women who take refuge in abandoned convent on the
periphery of the towns. Paradise establishes walking as a female practice with the
pronouncement, “It was women who walked… only women. Never men.”
245
These women
arrive at Ruby’s outskirts on foot. Their ways are irascible, intractable and, to the townsfolk of
Ruby and Haven, inscrutable. Several have personal histories that are shaped by men whose
violence or indifference drove them to seek new society. The character Sweetie, one of several
“abandoned wom[an] with no belongings” initially seems to find respite from the desperation
born of her teenage runaway status with a wealthy, unhappily married woman, but, cast aside by
the woman, she seeks the haven of the former convent. The “peculiar” enables me to describe
and theorize the social practices of these “women who walk”; Morrison’s unpropertied,
semi-peripatetic Native and Black female characters whose outsider homosociality and hetero
and bisexualities might otherwise be designated “queer.” “Peculiar,” the term I propose, is more
fitting than “queer” in part because queer genealogies, when divorced from models of
245
Morrison, Paradise, 270.
103
governance, have often excluded Native peoples.
246
In contrast, the term “peculiar” accounts for
Black and Native crossings. The following chapter enters the complex history of Black and
Native relations in Oklahoma at the crossroads of the fictionalized historical subjects who
populate Morrison’s Paradise. Focalizing the historical contexts of the novel, it follows the paths
trod by the Native peoples and Black migrants whom Oklahoma statehood and settled townships
failed. As such, it considers the novel’s treatment of African American refugees who walked to
Indian territory in search of labor and a life free from racial terrorism. It is also interested in
Morrison’s depiction of members of Native nations who, historically, were forcibly marshaled
toward Indian territory and away from the tribal land bases that they had known since time
immemorial.
Paradise’s founding violence mars its opening pages. Therein, the Ruby and Haven’s
propertied African American men slaughter the women who reside together in an abandoned
convent, or mission school established to assimilate Native American girls. The women and girls
who live and pass through the former mission school have long been blamed for the various
mishaps that take place in the towns of Ruby and Haven. As the failed dream of a patriarchal
Black community wherein the nuclear family is the primary laboring unit that furthers social life,
Ruby, the town that is at the center of the novel’s goings-on, is decidedly the vision of men.
Founded in 1879 by a group of men hailed as the “Old Fathers,” Ruby crawls its way into the
first demanding decades of the 20
th
century. As Morrison puts it, “Freedmen who stood tall in
1889 dropped to their knees by 1934.”
247
By the 1960s, when the harrowing opening event of the
247
Morrison, Paradise, 5.
246
Qwo-Li Driskill, “Double Weaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances Between Native
and Queer Studies,” GLQ 16, no. 1-2 (2010): 75. Driskill critiques queer analytics that “un-see Native
people” by not accounting for the ways that empire has been built in relation to Native nations and
sexualities. Driskill calls for a critique that is truly intersectional, or rather “double woven,” a
methodology derived from Cherokee basket weaving techniques.
104
novel takes place, Ruby is a shadow of its former self. Because its youth have begun to leave
town for urban centers, the men of Ruby seek new blood, lest their town’s inhabitants be
“scatter[ed] among all nations.”
248
And blood they get. They, the few remaining men of
Oklahoma’s “free towns,” massacre women—outsiders because of their gender and sexual
expression as well as their peripatetic, unpropertied lifeways—to satiate the 20
th
century’s
relentless hunger for violence.
The interracial nature of the convent women’s domestic arrangement threatens
established order. Native, Black, and White, the “road women” are Paradise’ s outsiders. They
are “detritus: throwaway people” a group of unpropertied and impoverished women and
teenaged girls who stay together for want of other company.
249
Because they defy the strict
divisions between Black, White, and Native that ground heteronormativity, and because of their
sexual fluidity, the men of Ruby and Haven brand these women as social and sexual deviants.
Throughout the novel, the women are blamed and despised for disrupting weddings, engaging in
“repulsive sex,” performing abortions on townswomen, and for their status as women who were
cast away.
It is no surprise, perhaps, that the upright townspeople of Ruby and Haven blame these
recalcitrant residents of the former Indian mission school for their own failure to reproduce
social life under the conditions of settler capitalism. In order to be granted incorporated town
status, the townsfolk of Ruby must engage in agricultural labor and perform propertied
personhood and diametric gender roles.
250
Morrison’s Ruby, like its historical counterparts,
250
A similar demand is reflected in the 1880 census record for the free town of Nicodemus,
Kansas. In the 1880 census, women were exclusively listed as housewives even though they worked
249
Morrison, Paradise, 4.
248
Morrison, Paradise, 192.
105
experiences state-condoned extralegal violence from neighboring White populations and
witnesses the ravages of farming on Native soils. Ruby also falters in the face of the 20th
century’s rapid urbanization. As its youth begin to leave, Morrison’s population-starved Ruby
violently excises the peculiar homosocial practices of the primarily Black and Native women and
teenaged girls who live at the town’s limits.
Throughout the text, Morrison juxtaposes the lifeways of the convent women with those
of the townspeople of Ruby and Haven, who have been successfully pressured to aspire to
property ownership. Like former bondswomen who, historically, walked away from plantation
households in pursuit of a way of life that “ends with freedom, not in the usual way, with
marriage,” the Native and Black women who walk to the convent house in Paradise radically
rearrange the settler sex-gender system as they move.
251
The practices of the novel’s gendered
outsiders, then, offer a viable alternative to the form of compulsory social reproduction that
governs the towns of Ruby and Haven. Certain characters also seek, but do not find, refuge for
their children. In so doing, they assert a civic right to travel towards an elusive someplace where
they and their children may live outside of male dominion and domination.
Paradise takes spatial-temporal liberties. It is governed, not by the abstraction of space
and the segmentation of time that defines modernity, but by a form of “time” that “you can’t
start… and you can’t stop.”
252
This is a temporality that, like the novel, and like so many
historical traumas, has no definitive end. The convent house, heavy with history, centers the
252
Morrison, Paradise, 98.
251
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature, eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y . McKay (New York: W.W Norton & Co.,
1997), 245.
alongside their husbands, brothers and sons as agricultural laborers. 1880 census of Nicodemus Township,
Graham County, Kansas. https://www.kshs.org/km/items/view/210689.
106
women’s wanderings. Like the house called 124 in Morrison’s Beloved, it holds within itself
multiple temporalities—those of ghosts and the living alike. The convent house, and the women
who walked to arrive there, are decisively out of step with the march of progress. The convent
women deliberately disturb the legacy of the Victorian era racial values upon which the school
was founded. Such values betrayed an investment in an evolutionary hierarchy of primitive to
civilized whereby only those deemed “civilized” had culture. Liberal proponents of social reform
saw themselves as progressive because they believed that environment, not race, was the reason
behind the so-called “unbridled” nature of certain women. They further believed that any
woman, regardless of race or Indigeneity, could be instructed in proper gender behaviors and
thereby saved. In Paradise, “the white girl” needs saving too. For a White woman to dwell
among Black and Native women and girls, not as their matron or manager (as only the convent’s
laughably ineffective Mother Superior is) but as their friend, defies the expectations that the U.S.
government placed upon her historical counterparts. Like Sweetie and Seneca and Clarissa, just a
few of the Black and Arapaho women and teenaged girls who traverse the unholy halls of the
convent in the seventy or so years spanned by the novel, she ultimately finds salvation, not in the
Church, but in the company of those whom the Church, in its long history of arbitrating which
global populations could be saved and which would be damned, has marked as fallen:
dispossessed and discarded women.
253
The character Grace, also called Gigi, whose “mother is unlocatable,” as well as the
character Mavis, whose remaining children remain in the ham-fisted grasp of her abusive
husband, illustrate that the nature of the convent women’s dispossession is not just material, it is
253
Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View” in Race, Discourse and the Origin of the
Americas: A New World View, eds. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1992).
107
also maternal.
254
During the long, disastrous durée of settler presence in North America, Native
mothers have been disallowed their respective maternal rights due to legal measures such as the
Indian Act.
255
In Paradise, rather than recovering their children in place, Black and Native
mothers must seek to care for their children beyond the parameters of the novel. Gigi and others
must locate their otherwise “unlocatable” relations in time.
256
The African American character
Mavis, for example, does not return to her husband in order to claim her living children. Rather,
the ghosts of her deceased twins grow up amidst the clutter of other young ghosts in the convent
house. Though most of the school’s Native girls are “snatched away by their mothers” and thus
returned to the network of kin who govern and care for them, they leave their imprint in the form
of the novel’s ghosts and of their two living friends: Penny and Clarissa.
257
The convent women’s intimacies are fit neither for the heteropatriarchal paradise on
whose outskirts they live, nor for the understanding of the erotic that has come to inform many
queer-identified women of color’s politics since the foundational work of Audre Lorde. They do
not redeem each other in the ways we think they might, for they do not love each other as they
ought. The “road girls,” as they are known to the townsfolk who so fear them, practice what
257
Morrison, Paradise, 227.
256
Kara Keeling, “Looking for M— Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility and Poetry
from the Future,’’GLQ 15, no. 4 (2009): 565-582. Keeling’s methodological imperative to look for films’
missing youth of color in time rather than in place so as to circumvent the spatial regimes that render
youth of color absent presences in civic society, provides a framework through which to understand
Paradise’ s ghostly presences in relation to care.
255
In Canada, amendments to the 1876 Indian Act continue to regulate movement for Aboriginal
women through marriage, membership and property rights. Prior to 1985 “status” Indian woman lost
status when they married a non-Indian or non-status man and did not retain rights to their matrimonial
homes after divorce. They and their children lost rights associated with the Indian act in perpetuity,
including the right to live on their home reserve. Bill C-31, which restored rights to women stripped of
status, but not their children or their children's children coupled with Bill C-49 regulates marital property
and ensures inheritance rights for First Nations women only as long as the Indian Act is operable.
254
Morrison, Paradise, 257.
108
Morrison elsewhere in her considerable corpus calls “manlove.”
258
They also “kiss on each
other” and, in the same bated breath, fight.
259
The convent women’s internecine violence does not
erase their love, for in Paradise, love redeems as much as it destroys. Jobless and “unredeemed
by Mary” the convent women are part of a class of persons who are outside of what Sylvia
Wynter calls the “sanctioned universe of obligation” and are therefore both unprotected from and
the direct objects of society’s rage.
260
In Paradise, the spirits of Native girls call the living home from the harmful mission
school to tribal land bases, which hold spatial knowledge. Shades of the Native girls who
attended the convent in its days as a boarding school, the novel’s ghosts seem to know that
historical trauma has no definitive end. They crowd, unsettled, at the convent’s threshold.
Notably, it is only the Mother Superior, the White nun, who seems disturbed by their presence.
The ghosts of the Native girls press Mother Superior to act. “They bunch around [her] door” and
“worry [her] sleep at night. They’re always so hungry.”
261
Here, unlike in much of U.S. literature,
Native spectral presences do not figure as ghostly presences deployed to alleviate colonial
nostalgia and reinvigorate the settler state. Instead, they demand a labor of recovery; what Avery
Gordon names as “something to be done.”
262
In calling Native women home, the ghosts herald in
a future, something that will be; a temporality that is too often foreclosed to Native people by
262
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 139.
261
Morrison, Paradise, 48.
260
Toni Morrison, Paradise, 18; Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My
Colleagues,” Forum N.H.I. Knowledge for the 21
st
Century 1, no. 1 (1994): 44.
259
Morrison, Paradise, 275.
258
Morrison, Sula, 2116.
109
literature that locates Native lives in the past. In that they are hungry and need sustenance, the
novel’s ghosts are endowed, even in death, with other-than-human personhood.
The ghosts crowd at the doorways and bring the force of their tribal lands with them,
rendering thresholds useless. In the “bad” winter, snow, one of the many aspects of land, is
animated; it enters the house unbidden, seemingly of its own volition. In relating this worrying
fact, Mother Superior’s English language fails and she begins to express herself in Latin, an
ancient tongue. Her description of what and how to feed the girls soon breaks down into a
free-associated description of settler “sin” that she can only make sense of in Latin. She intones,
“the winters are so bad we need coal a sin to burn trees on the prairie yesterday the snow sifted in
under the door quaesumus, da propitious pacem in diebus nostris.”
263
The Latin phrase, which
translates as “we beg you, give peace in our days quickly” suggests that power relations have
been inverted. Mother Superior begs the ghosts of the girls, who would have been her students in
life, to impart peace with alacrity. The startling urgency of this request speaks to the ghosts’
power. Here, Native ghosts, like their living counterparts, are located in the past, present and
future. Moreover, the pressing snow makes clear the power of Native land when it is untethered
to the Western European conception of property, which is linked to slave labor and which,
“obfuscates the power of land to possess us.”
264
What temporalities does vernacular reveal? In her analysis of Morrison’s Beloved, Sharon
Patricia Holland argues that Morrison’s characters, “find no apparent value in dominant language
264
Mishuana Goeman, “From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land in the
Discussion of Indigenous Nation-Building,” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 1, no. 1
(2008): 27.
263
Morrison, Paradise, 48.
110
except in economic terms.”
265
Whereas death, devaluation and forgetting are the qualitative
elements of settler colonial societies, non-dominant language systems offer “remed[ies] for
forgetfulness” in their insistence on a different grammatical tense.
266
Perhaps this is why
Indigenous languages were so violently disallowed at Indian boarding schools. As it was
historically, so it is in the novel. While the boarding school for Native girls is in a state of disuse
throughout Paradise, we are told that when the ghosts were living girls, school policy forbade
them to speak their languages. The structures of Indigenous North American languages differ
from English in their expressions of space and time. They place into perspective the experiences
of monumental material loss of land and relatives that Native nations have suffered in the
settlement and conquest of what is now North America.
267
If the public spaces of settler colonial
societies retain the structures of inequality upon which they were founded, then they might also
recall or “remember” specific acts of violence, as Morrison proposes in “The Site of Memory.”
268
In the ever-present temporality of Paradise, land and relatives both cry out for repatriation.
Perhaps it is in hope of repatriating lost objects and material worlds that Penny and
Clarissa, two Native girls who stay at the convent, insist upon visiting “the Indian and Western
museum advertised on the road” when the group embarks on a rare journey together.
269
Mother
269
Morrison, Paradise, 241.
268
Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2d
ed., ed. William Zinsser (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 83-102.
267
Scott Richard Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010), 54. Lyons examines Native heritage languages, mainly Ojibwe, for their
linguistic definitions of terms like “mixed blood” and concludes that Native people, at the historical
juncture of the mid-19
th
to early 20
th
centuries held a decidedly “constructivist” understanding of identity
and tribal affiliation that centered “proximity, practice, principles” and politics that was largely divorced
from blood.
266
Holland, Raising the Dead, 73.
265
Sharon Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000), 56.
111
Superior, also known in the novel as Mary Magna, refuses their earnest request. It is interesting
to speculate about her reasons for so firm a refusal. Not insignificantly, the trip occurs in a part of
the novel that takes place in the 1960s. The decade of the 1960s saw Native people’s increasingly
vocal demands for the repatriation of objects from museums and from the holdings of the
Catholic Church. While much of the conversation about repatriation of artifacts and ancestral
remains is, understandably, about the rights of the deceased, Penny and Clarissa threaten to bring
the discussion of repatriation into the purview of the living. They aim to humanize any sacred
objects or bones the museum may hold in its coffers.
270
Soon after Mother Superior refuses the
girls’ request, they are unceremoniously sent East. In their eastern journey, the girls “escape[d]
from the bus one night” and “were never heard from again.”
271
Penny and Clarissa’s remarkable
escape from settler geographies suggests that the fictive—in the form of stories rather than the
novel—harbors Native women and girls when all else fails. The girls later signify their safety by
sending a note back to Oklahoma “signed with a storybook name.” By offering only this storied
signature, the girls interrupt the linear progression of the novel form, which is predicated on a
“developmental temporality located in empty, homogenous time” and simultaneously claim a
more dynamic fictive form: stories.
272
Moreover, their disappearance from the state appendage of
the former Indian boarding school and from a the very frame of the novel represents a refusal of
272
Grace Hong, Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of
Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 68.
271
Morrison, Paradise, 241.
270
For further reading, see Heid Erdrich’s poem, “Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred
Objects,” which artfully considers the issue of the repatriation of bones and sacred objects. The poem is a
directive, instructing readers on how to care for repatriated objects.
112
the organizing, linear logics at play in novelistic form.
273
By signing their storied names, Penny
and Clarissa offer their “Native signatures of assent” to contemporary presence and futurity.
274
Even in the days when the convent house was an operating mission school that
functioned under the watchful gaze of White nuns, its teachers had difficulty governing the
intractable Native girls who were housed in its halls and who wanted nothing more than to
“escape the clutch of nuns.”
275
Under the auspice of its current residents, the former mission
school flies in the face of the federal assimilation and eradication project. With the exception of
Mother Superior, White female characters (there are otherwise very few) dispense with efforts to
make proper women and assimilated citizens of Penny and Clarissa before the two leave,
towards the end of the novel, with nary a word or backward glance. In the world of the novel’s
past, however, the state sent the school those whom it characterized as “wicked, wayward Indian
girls” so that they might be reformed. The ongoing struggles of the novel’s Native girls against
the clutch of Church and state encapsulate the tensions between tribal sovereignty, the most basic
tenet of which is self-determination, and settler democracy.
The history of American Indian education under the liberal democratic ideal is one of
standardization, in which mission and boarding schools were primary cites of cultural genocide.
Especially prior to the Indian Self Determination and Educational Assistance Act of 1975, and
even thereafter, tribal nations struggled to wrest control of their children’s education from the
federal government, which had long treated the domestic training of Native girls as central to the
275
Morrison, Paradise, 233.
274
Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010).
273
Keeling, “Looking for M—: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility and Poetry from the
Future,” GLQ 15, no. 4 (2009): 565-582. For Keeling, visibility offers a false sense of civic security.
Disappearance from state appendages such as the military and from the very frame of a film, on the other
hand, represents a refusal of the organizing visual logics at play in mainstream cinema and the state.
113
assimilation project.
276
In Morrison’s novel, many young women had been interred at the convent
house in its days as a mission school, for the U.S. state defined wayward loosely when it came to
Native girls; “wayward could mean anything from bedwetting to truancy.”
277
In the convent
house, wayward and truant take on new meaning. Though the nuns “warn the Indian girls against
drift” Penny, Clarissa and their African American friend Mavis abscond from chores in favor of
their dreams. “Instead of plans they had wishes.”
278
In this sense, they are proud to be the truants
the state has marked them as.
Paradise’ s Native peoples know especially well the pitfalls of incorporation into and
inclusion in the U.S. national body, for they have seen firsthand the sickness of settler society. A
story set in 1920, just four years before U.S. citizenship was foisted upon Native nations through
the Indian Citizenship Act, suggests as much. In the narrative style that typifies the oral histories
related in Paradise, readers are told of an encounter that a Haven townsman, Big Daddy, had
with Sac and Fox men as he traveled through White Oklahoma towns on his way back to Haven,
laden with much-needed medical supplies for the community. Stopped at night with unseen
“strangers on both sides” Big Daddy must decide in which direction to go. Calculating that the
music he hears emanating from one direction “might be amusing lynchers” he turns, only to run
into three Sac and Fox men. After a brief exchange, “The men welcomed him and, learning of
his destination, warned him against entering the [White] town” on his way back to Haven.
279
The
settlers’ town, called Pura Sangre or ‘pure blood,’ is sick with its own exclusions; an anathema to
279
Morrison, Paradise, 153.
278
Morrison, Paradise, 222.
277
Morrison, Paradise, 227.
276
K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa L. McCarty, “When Tribal Sovereignty Challenges
Democracy: American Indian Education and the Democratic Ideal,” American Educational Research
Journal 39, no. 2 (2002): 279-305.
114
Black and Native life in that it is disruptive of Afro-Native kin relations. Readers soon learn that
the Sac and Fox men “had come to rescue a family member, who had been drinking in there
[Pura Sangre] for twelve days.”
280
After a brief stint of under two weeks in a settler town, the Sac
and Fox men’s family member needs relatives to “rescue” or save them, just as settler discourse
has promised to save Indigenous and Black populations in an ill-disguised cover for centuries of
exploitation. The false settler promise of salvation is borne out in the town’s geography. “At its
northern edge was a sign: No N*ggers. At its southern edge a cross.”
281
In contrast to Pura Sangre’s bounded geographies, Ruby’s geographic limit its also,
confoundingly, the town’s center. Within the world of the novel, these impossible boundaries
become concretized by way of exclusion on the basis of gender and sexual expression. They are
disrupted spatially at the town’s interstice, the “road between Ruby and the convent where
“women drag[ged] their sorrows.”
282
When traveling this road to seek shelter, new society, or to
meet their sexual partners, the convent women forge an affective rather than territorial map.
Rather than transform the interstitial space of the road into territorial place, the women allow the
in-between space of the road act upon them.
283
The character Consolata, for example, frequently
meets her married lover on this road. One day, after he does not come at the time they have
arranged to meet, Consolata waits for hours in a state of arrested movement on the road, before
Penny and Clarissa gently “le[ad] her away.”
284
These female travelers’ affective attachment to
284
Morrison, Paradise, 234.
283
Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2009). Flatley proposes that an affective map “is a map less in the sense that it
establishes a territory than that it is about providing a feeling of orientation and facilitating mobility.”
282
Morrison, Paradise, 270.
281
Morrison, Paradise, 154.
280
Morrison, Paradise, 153.
115
this well-worn road is an active doing, a kind of energy that mobilizes Paradise’ s most discarded
persons and enables them to form a community. In the phrase “led away” Morrison suggests, not
a return to bounded place, but, rather, a divergent path whereon this company of women set foot.
Described as “too small for a map,” the town of Ruby is geographically marked, not by
cartographic lines, but by a landmark that is most easily viewed from the outskirts of town.
285
A
rock formation in the shape of embracing lovers is located at Ruby’s periphery. The road women
alternately perceive the lovers as two men or a man and a woman. Their peculiar sexuality,
which both brings the women together and tears their individual lives asunder, enables them to
see the amorphous, amorous shape of the land. Like the townspeople of Ruby, African American
migrants to the Midwest during and after Reconstruction mapped place affectively. Social
architects though many of them were of “free towns,” many new “arrivants” made use of the
woods as a transient site of political possibility, a place to revel and rebel religiously, convene
secularly and to plan travel, just as they had made use of the woods as a religious and secular
meeting ground during the Civil War era.
286
One Kansas migrant, John Solomon Lewis , hid for
weeks in the deep woods to escape his submergence, “‘deeper and deeper into debt.’”
287
There
Lewis, a Union army veteran, secured passage with his wife on a boat, refusing to be refused a
means of travel on the grounds of race. Lewis’ story illustrates an important tension between
landed-ness, wilderness and water in Black social histories of migration and suggests the salience
of Tiffany King’s concept of the Black shoal, which connotes the geopolitical convergence of
287
Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (Alfred A.
Knopf Publishers, 1977), 1.
286
Here, I use Jodi Byrd’s term “arrivants” from Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of
Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
285
Morrison, Paradise, 64.
116
Black and Native lives, history, and thought.
288
Inspired by Lewis and those like him, this chapter
has thus far staked its interest in the tension between settlement and transience.
Ruby and Haven’s self-proclaimed freedoms stand in stark contrast with the peculiar
sociality and sexuality of its female outsiders. The governors of the two towns valorize place and
property, an aspiration that was simultaneously demanded of and disallowed African Americans
as a stipulation for basic civic rights. Ruby is not a carceral town; it “neither had nor needed a
jail.” In Ruby justice is carried out, not through incarceration, but through the eerie exile of
wayward women, which culminates in slaughter. In their massacre of the convent women in the
opening pages of the novel, the “married and propertied men of Ruby” and Haven aim not to
manage women, but to maintain a small pocket of paradise.
289
The townsmen’s sense of liberty is
a qualified form of freedom that is place-bound and propertied. This circumscribed freedom
manages the movement of Ruby and Haven’s townswomen, binding them to social and
geographic place. In contrast, the convent women escape the grasp of patriarchy and property.
Therein lies the convent women’s capacity to offer true haven to townswomen. Judgmental
though they are of the convent women’s homosocial and bisexual way of life, several of the
townswomen take temporary refuge at the convent at various points in the novel before returning
to the clutch of their community. One must wonder at the extent to which these peripheral
characters, who bemoan too short skirts and public intimacies, are truly invested in a cult of true
womanhood from whose ranks they are definitionally excluded. The men of Ruby and Haven
know that freedom for women under state-sanctioned emancipation can only mean living in a
state of purported protection under male dominion. They revel in this knowledge. As one
289
Morrison, Paradise, 147.
288
Tiffany King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke
University Press, 2019).
117
prominent townsman reflects, “There wasn’t a slack or sloven woman anywhere in town and the
reasons, he thought, were clear. From the beginning its people were free and protected.”
290
Ruby’s origin story harkens back to the days of the “Original Fathers” who founded the
town at the end of the 19
th
century. The Old Fathers are a discarded people, too poor for the
region’s fellow Black freedmen who dwelled in towns already built by willing hands. Yet they
soon come to valorize property and its attendant gender roles. The men who establish Ruby keep
a wide girth between themselves and unpropertied, unmarried women; the “abandoned women
with no belongings” whom they meet along the road to Ruby and who will, in subsequent years,
find themselves at the doors of the convent.
291
Ruby’s origin story involves a solitary "walking
man" who silently leads Ruby’s founders to the place where they erect the bedrock of their
community in 1879.
292
The men yearn to find a patch of land on which to build some semblance
of a life. As if in answer to their yearning, a silent male figure emerges from "the palest part of
the sky" from an unknown direction. In that it establishes the town, this mythic figure’s emergent
presence is a geopolitical act that, troublingly, echoes tribal national origin stories.
293
At the sight
of the unnamed walker, one of the Old Fathers commands, "Gather the people.”
In contrast to that of the convent women, the patriarchs’ travels are linear and
hierarchical. They reenact a spatial violence fundamental to the respective national mythologies
that form the ideological backdrop of settler colonial societies. Unlike the convent women,
whose sojourns are interstitial, the Old Fathers attempt to parcelize tribal place. While the Old
Fathers are recently enslaved refugees—by no stretch of the imagination settlers— they
293
White Buffalo Calf Woman story.
292
Morrison, Paradise, 97.
291
Morrison, Paradise, 14.
290
Morrison, Paradise, 8.
118
inadvertently parallel a Euro-American form of mythmaking as they hasten to paradise. Settler
myths suggest that North American land is shared with Native people. These national myths, like
national monuments, work to situate settlers as the first people to develop North American soils
with the implication being that this status garners them equal rights to tribal homelands.
294
The
symbolic use of Indigeneity by “arrivants” who seek legibility within the field of empire has
worked to materially displace Native people from their landbases.
295
In their patriarchy, the Old
Fathers fail to engage the geographies of Black women, who express an alternative and affiliated
sense of space in their “subjectivities, imaginations, and stories.”
296
Instead, they embrace aspects
of the very settler sex-gender system that has rendered them refugees. To the Old Fathers, the
novel’s women “were just women, and what they said was easily ignored by good brave men on
their way to Paradise.”
297
With this witticism, Morrison critiques the Old Father’s embrace of a
pioneering American spirit that forcibly excises gendered outsiders.
Pura Sangre’s violent exclusions both contrast and foreshadow Ruby’s downfall. In the
decades after its establishment, the town’s founding figures’ unadulterated black skin takes on
mythic proportions in the stories that their descendants tell. In the substantial portion of the novel
that takes place in the 20
th
century, the town’s genealogist and historian recalls the
onyx-complexioned first families of Ruby who had “walked from Mississippi and Louisiana to
Oklahoma and got to the place described in advertisements carefully folded in to their
shoes…only to be shooed away” by the “fair skinned colored men” who governed the free towns
297
Morrison, Paradise, 201.
296
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiii.
295
Byrd, 221.
294
Sherene H. Razack, “When Place Becomes Race” in Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a
White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002).
119
already established in the region.
298
Just a few decades after this founding injustice, the
propertied men of Ruby begin to enact their own violent exclusions on the basis of gender and
property ownership, rejecting impoverished, jobless women and relegating them to the
community’s outskirts. Ironically, as their forefathers travel on foot, hungry and without shelter,
it is a woman—an Afro-Native townsperson— who attempts to meet their pressing need. Met
with the band of hungry travelers, “Celeste Blackhorse sneaked back and got the food…secretly
passing it to her sister Sally Blackhorse… to distribute to the children.”
299
Celeste Blackhorse’s
clandestine act of care, done in defiance of her husband’s wishes, collapses the divisions between
community member and outsider, stranger and kin. In being good relatives, even to those
travelers regarded as strangers, the Blackhorse sisters affirm kinship as an intersubjective doing
that transgresses the contours drawn by race, colorism, property ownership and poverty.
300
Paradise sketches a way of being that emerged in the socially inviable circumstances
faced by African Americans and Native Americans in Oklahoma. The novel’s convent women’s
way of dwelling and being is untethered to the settler notion that the value of human personhood
is tied to property. In their internecine battles and in their intimacies, the convent women lay bare
the contours of more viable governing principles for the future of Black and Native life. As they
lay together one evening and draw the outlines of each other’s bodies on the convent floor, the
women adumbrate the contours of a “darkness afar—beyond what could be anticipated”; a
300
Morrison uses the tribally specific terms “Arapaho” and “Sac and Fox” in Paradise. She also
uses “Indian.” While I have by no means excavated the use of the term in African American literature, its
usage in reference to Indigenous people of North America is a legacy of European literature, in the
broadest sense of the word. Columbus' initial designation of the Indigenous peoples he encountered as
“Indian” took place in a 1493 letter. This mis-appellation, which has persisted for nearly six centuries,
was a parenthetical violence with catastrophic consequences. See Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’ s
Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
299
Morrison, Paradise, 195.
298
Morrison, Paradise, 195.
120
society whose populace might, or, rather, must abandon and invert the categories around
racialized gender that have so thoroughly dispossessed its most vulnerable populations.
301
The aforementioned “darkness afar” speaks to the unformed dark between paradigm shifts
from which Morrison, in her literary criticism, has insisted African American literature was born. In
“Unspeakable Things Unspoken” Morrison explains the processes by which African Americans were
erased from the U.S. literary cannon, a cannon that nevertheless reflects a social world in which
Black presence has been perversely and pervasively invoked. Morrison argues that the cannon,
reflective of both literary texts and social contexts, is unsustainable as is because of its intimate
relationship to the other it erases. Those who foreclose the cannon’s transformations cleave to the
deliberate, epistemological erasures of Black presence it has been called upon to perform. It would
seem, then, that the precarious constitution of U.S. literature in contradistinction to Blackness has
inadvertently formed something akin to a black (w)hole, a dense, seemingly absent, though deeply
mattering body of literature. To theorize Black life though Morrison’s body of work, then, means to
embrace this monstrous, miraculous dark, and to assert the right to refuse what has historically been
refused us: propertied, diametrically gendered personhood—in favor of a form of Black freedom that
is allied with Native nations in their respective struggles for sovereignty and self-determination.
301
Morrison, Paradise, 228.
121
CONCLUSION
In A Peculiar Paradise: Tribal Place, Property and the Peripatetic Tradition in African
American Literature, I have juxtaposed state-condoned emancipation, tied to property
accumulation, with itinerant freedom, as it has been represented in select works of African
American literature and practiced historically . The interests of my dissertation are as follows:
African American migrants’ encounters with tribal nations, as well as the people, alternatively
called Afro-Native, or Black (in keeping with settler efforts to diminish Native populations and
simultaneously maintain an enslaved and low wage labor force) that were born of these
encounters. In navigating the scholarly journey that lead to this manuscript, I have asked myself
what it would mean to draw a literary map of the so-called “New World” that traces these
encounters “without the imperative for conquest,” as Toni Morrison proposes at the beginning of
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Is such an endeavor possible? Is it
even desirable?
Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko, behemoths of African American and Native
American literature, respectively, seem to have thought so. Silko produced something that both
approximates and exceeds a literary map in the colossal novel Almanac of the Dead; Morrison
parts of one in various novels, including Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise and, more recently,
A Mercy. By way of conclusion, I return to scenes of Black and Cherokee crossings in Beloved,
which raise the question: are not Black and Native Americans both a fugitive people, slated by
the settler state to die, yet living?
Let us follow the Beloved character Paul D., himself once enslaved, then re-enslaved, for
all intents and purposes, at a prison camp in Georgia. Paul D. escapes the prison labor camp on
foot with forty-five other Black men to whom he is chained. The men, encumbered in their
122
travels, manage to walk to a Cherokee encampment. Seeing that the newcomers are still forcibly
linked together, the Cherokee men whom they encounter graciously break their metal chains.
Described as, “decimated but stubborn…among those who chose a fugitive life rather than
Oklahoma” the Cherokee men refuse Oklahoma statehood and further incorporation into the U.S.
national body and are therefore “fugitive.”
302
The forty-six Black men are fugitives because they
are running from the emerging carceral state. I conclude with this scene, not because I address it
in my dissertation, but precisely because I do not. Black and Native men are markedly absent
from my dissertation. Instead, I chose to focalize historical women and female characters:
Sojourner Truth, Sula and Nel, Elsie, and the host of “convent women” in Paradise. The reason
for this choice is that I am most interested in the social practices of those whom Morrison calls
“women who walk”: unpropertied, semi-itinerant Native and Black female characters and
historical persons whose outsider homo-sociality and hetero and bisexualities were queered in
respect to normative gender due to their peripatetic practices. In my dissertation I refer to these
women as peculiar.
At its heart, my project concerns poverty, migration and the peculiar company that is
often kept between and among women. I deliberately chose texts that speak to these topics: Toni
Morrison’s Sula and Paradise, Frances Washburn’s Elsie’ s Business, and Sojourner Truth and
Olive Gilbert’s Narrative of Sojourner Truth. In the project’s earliest iterations, my interest was
most piqued by the historical content found within 19
th
century African American and Native
American life narratives, but I soon realized that it is not mere historical fact that compels me. If
that were the case, I would have situated my project in the discipline of History, not English.
(Though of course I am well aware that history is not a series of facts, but the work of
historiography that is performed in order for historians to narrativize those facts.) Still, the facts
302
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage International, 2004), 131.
123
of our shared and shattered history remained a large part of the story I wished to tell in my
dissertation. The novels that I chose, works of historical fiction, and my method of analysis:
literary history, reflect this desire. However, I am more concerned with the intangible; what
African American migrants believed they were moving towards, an impulse that Toni Morrison
alluded to in 1998 during an interview about Paradise. In seeking to locate the belief, or social
vision, that animated African American migration to federal Indian territory and elsewhere, I
learned that many migrants, particularly those who lived during the civil war era and postbellum
period, simply sought reunion with estranged and beloved kinspersons in a place that might
harbor them. This seeking—along with dodging the demands of gendered labor— is what
animates and antagonizes the unusual Peace women in Sula; what drives generations of migrants
to Indian territory in Paradise and what brings together titular character Elsie’s Black and Lakota
parents in Elsie’ s Business.
On foot travel is a radical impulse whose practice revised the domestic arrangements of
the “plantation household” and attempted to alter its legacy, which is rooted in the antebellum
period. Proponents of plantation and post-plantation domesticity argued that laborers,
particularly Black laborers, needed the guidance of state institutions in order to learn proper
gender roles and thereby become civically worthy. Relatedly, settler domesticity was a civilizing
project mobilized by the Bureau of Indian Affair’s so called “matrons,” who were deployed to
Native households in order to monitor Native women’s desires and reroute those desires away
from kinspersons and toward capitalist consumption.
303
The purportedly reformatory institutions
of the plantation household, the prison, and the Indian mission school, all of which were
managed, in part, by Euro American women, ultimately failed at their stated goals of producing
303
Katherine Osburn, Southern Ute Women: Autonomy and Assimilation on the Reservation,
1887-1934 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).
124
more efficient laborers, “proper” women and nuclear families, a failure ensured by Black and
Native women themselves, who practiced more livable definitions of freedom and sovereignty.
In the tradition of these women, I rail against domesticity and its attendant gender categories. I
want abolition, not reform.
The trouble is that walking is not in and of itself emancipatory. This somewhat
disquieting fact is born out in African American history and literature. Walking was the primary
means of travel for the enslaved. Physically taxing though it undoubtedly was, walking afforded
rare moments of solitude away from the constant surveillance of plantation life as well as the
chance to visually map the surrounding area. Walking also engendered encounters with another
form of surveillance, as any and every White person in the region may have demanded of the
enslaved pedestrian a note of passage. In the early 20
th
century, vagrancy laws made so-called
idleness; the meandering public presence of Black persons who were deemed unemployed,
underemployed or who could not readily prove their employment with documentation, illegal. In
African American literature, walking is equally fraught. In Beloved both the 30 Mile Woman and
Sethe’s swollen feet after she walks miles and miles pregnant and bleeding to reach the Ohio
river, on whose opposite bank freedom lies, bear witness to this fact. Another concept, then, was
needed to make my conceptualization of walking in the African American literary context work,
for lack of a better term. This is where the peculiar came in. Sometime in 2019, my colleague
and friend Nicole Richards Diop and I spoke excitedly about the peculiar as it relates to
sexuality. In the years since that conversation, peculiar has, for me, come to describe unruly
persons for whom sexual acts do not constitute an identity category. These individuals, like
Morrison’s Sula, are necessarily a thorn in the side of any capitalist state, which, as Kara Keeling
observes in Queer Times, Black Futures, are all too quick to fold identity-based critiques of
125
power into predatory algorithms that aim to predict human futures. Since college, I had admired
the character Sula, who craves, not sexual expression, but the “death of time” in her sexual
experiences. Here again was my political desire for abolition, not reform. Not a revision of the
temporal logics that for centuries, have subordinated Black life and literature to linearity, but an
end to it: the death of time. Sula, brash and unabashed, has her own vision of the world, which
stands opposed to the global vision presented by capitalist algorithms whose actualization means
the devaluation and death of vast swaths of the human population.
As a term, “peculiar” aims to articulate the tremors of these so-called surplus populations,
those whom Morrison calls “throwaway people.” Peculiar relations are those in which categories
of race, sex and gender are inverted and effaced through the force of female friendship and
relations. For example, the Sula’s “longing for the other half of her equation,” a longing that is
largely satisfied in her friendship with the female character Nel, invites a “New Math,” one that
is not beholden to the tactics of quantification that bolster the U.S. government’s efforts to
manage, make live and let die. It is imperative that scholars answer this invitation, because the
alternative is all too clear. The modern administrative state relies upon another kind of math,
based on quantification and speculation; that is, speculation over Native land as potential
property, and speculation over a body’s capacity to produce labor for the state, a biopolitical
undertaking. I have sought, as a secondary effort in this dissertation, to sketch a mathematics of
relation rather than enumeration, a spatial-temporal schema for which “too many to name” or “as
numerous as the stars” is not a quantity, but a quality that shapes the scope of social vision.
This scholarly impulse lead me to consider how literary works such as Sula and Narrative
of Sojourner Truth engage with and revise the place of numbers in Black cosmology. In Sula,
Sula’s sexuality, nay, her very existence, is explained by “the fourth face of God.” Sula’s
126
strangeness is accounted for by a unique African American understanding of the multifaceted
nature of the Christian Trinity. Sula’s boundless sexuality, far from being an unnaturalness that
must be intervened upon by science or medicine, is, in the novel, a phenomenon explicable by
the numerical fluidity of Black cosmology. Historically, African American cosmology emerged
both through and against a Christian messianic tradition that was foisted upon Black and Native
Americans as a part of the settler project. So inextricable is messianic thought and the Black
radical tradition that, for example, Harriet Tubman was known as Moses. Messianic thought also
informed Pan-Indian movements among Native nations. The Paiute leader Wovoka’s messianic
vision politically galvanized those whose feet enacted the first tremors of the Ghost Dance in
Paiute territory and carried the message across tribal boundaries. The Ghost Dance’s momentous
messianic longing threatened to decimate a settler social order that divided persons [White] from
non-human persons; from Native nations; and from property [Black persons].
304
Messianic thought is equally inextricable from the ideology that undergirded the
settlement and expansion of the United States. In fact, the history of the United States is a history
of European settlers who were convinced that they were forging a path toward an earthly
paradise, building a promised land for themselves and for their descendants on tribal territories;
justified in the eyes of their God. It is for these complex reasons that “Paradise” has been part of
the title of my dissertation from its earliest drafts. I am still not certain that I have successfully
sketched the dissonant clamor of all those settlers and arrivants—to use Jodi Byrd’s term—who
attempted to make a paradise out of Native places. There were many such efforts.
304
Benjamin Kracht, Religious Revitalization Among the Kiowas: The Ghost Dance, Peyote, and
Christianity (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 89. Kracht describes the Ghost Dance as “a
syncretic amalgam of Christianity, prophecy, tribal beliefs, and the Peyote right.” Compelling for the
interests of this project, the instructions that Wovoka was given in his vision were both bodily and
mathematical in nature; Native peoples across tribal nations were to perform the dance “at intervals, for
five consecutive days at a time.”
127
For example, the longing for paradise made its way into the African American free press
in the 1870s, whose advertisements enticed potential migrants with claims, emblazoned in bold
print, that Kansas was a promised land. The Northampton Association of Education and Industry,
where Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass briefly and concurrently lived, was an utopian
effort established by liberal-minded White Americans. While I address its value to Truth’s life
and thought in my first chapter, I am deeply critical of liberalism and am far more interested in
African Americans’ impulse to create paradise from this series of tribal places called the United
States. The United States, to paraphrase Beloved’s Baby Suggs, loved neither Black hands,
which were put to work and cut off as punishment for resistance, nor Black bodies, which were
raped, bound, muzzled and shackled, nor their souls. The African American inclination to “make
a way out of no way” a paradise out of this hard-worked land, remains unique because it was
born of a refugee people marred by the worst form of enslavement ever seen upon the face of the
earth. That is not to say that the African American longing for paradise was, in practice, in any
way ideal. In certain iterations, it was tied to property, a troubling reality and a word that is
foregrounded in the subtitle of my dissertation. It is critical to keep in mind, however, that in
those instances where Black freedom dreams were tied to property, namely in free towns, only
debt peonage and sharecropping, unimaginably bleak forms of indebted labor, had been
presented to Black Americans, who had themselves been property, as a viable avenue toward
civic freedom.
Early on in my research, I read Nell Painter’s Exodusters with a hunger I cannot fully
describe. I learned of the economic and labor imperatives that drove African Americans away
from the grip of the newly reestablished White planter class in states like Texas and Kentucky
and toward Kansas and the Midwest, but, at that stage in my studies, I still had appeased the
128
spirit of migration; that inexplicable animus that moves through torn and tired bodies and
enables them to get up, walk toward an uncertain future, and then look back and wonder, “How
Did I Get Over?” This unanswered, plangent question brings me, as I conclude, back to the
disciplinary intersections between African American literary studies, the study of Native
American literature and, for the first time in the space of this dissertation, to poetry. If tribal
place is constituted through practiced, accountable kin relations that are critical to tribal
governance and sovereignty, then it is critical for the future of Afro-Native life and literature that
we find ways to reconcile the “here” that is home for Native people and still, after four centuries,
an “elsewhere” for African Americans. Poetry, in its capacity to collapse temporal and
geographic boundaries, may offer one way to reconcile these diverse geographic longings. I
conclude my dissertation with the following poem, my poet’s offering to the Afro-Native
character Elsie of Washburn’s Elsie’ s Business.
For Elsie:
The sweetest way to grieve her: place cedar branches over flesh
excised from body at eight months.
Wrap in deer hide.
Incubate.
Shake rain from your hair after work some days, slip
into the bedlam of sleep, where occasionally she lives:
squealing at the slipperiness of turtles at three,
eating cake at six, beading at sixteen, touched
by the deer woman, outcasted
from the world of men
for the sake of beauty
129
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Creator Gray Berlin, K. Avvirin (author)

Core Title A peculiar paradise: tribal place, property and the peripatetic tradition in African American literature

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/27/2024

Defense Date 05/26/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African American literature,migration,Native American literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,the peculiar,United States history

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Keeling , Kara (committee chair), Daniels-Rauterkus, Melissa (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member), Wilson, Francille Rusan (committee member)

Creator Email Avvirin@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111375266

Unique identifier UC111375266

Legacy Identifier etd-GrayBerlin-11027

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Gray Berlin, K. Avvirin

Type texts

Source 20220728-usctheses-batch-962 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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