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Peculiar poetics: towards a queer-feminist theory of Black fatherhood

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PECULIAR POETICS:
TOWARDS A QUEER-FEMINIST THEORY OF BLACK FATHERHOOD

by

Nicole Danielle Richards

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

Copyright 2022 Nicole Danielle Richards

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For Great-Grandma Jane and Grandma Rose

iii

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my dear friends. I am so fortunate to have so many friends who love me.

Thank you to my committee members and ASE faculty for believing in me and supporting me.

Thank you, Moustapha, my husband. You have been my cheerleader, particularly during the last
few months of writing. You are amazing.

Thank you, Freddie, for making me a mother and giving me a reason to live.

Thank you, daddy, for inspiring this entire project.

Thank you, mommy. When I was nineteen, and watched you graduate with your doctorate, I said
that I would follow you. Here I am. I did it, mommy. I love you.

Nicole Danielle Richards
April 14, 2022

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Abstract
Nicole Danielle Richards: Peculiar Poetics: Towards a Queer-Feminist Theory of Black
Fatherhood
(Under the Direction of Drs. John Carlos Rowe, Lanita Jacobs, and Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus)

My dissertation, Peculiar Poetics, establishes a theoretical framework for Black
fatherhood, by way of Black feminist and queer of color theory. It envisions Black fathers as
more than absent, patriarchal, monstrous, dead—breaking open these enduring social tropes
across the social sciences and humanities. It begins to imagine more expansively, the existence
of Black fathers under chattel slavery, which rendered them legally, spatially, affectively outside
of the father function and family construct. This scripting outside of white patriarchal New
World kinship logics does not present a dead-end, however, but rather, a peculiar possibility. It is
not that the Black father is lacking/non-existent, but that he emerges in fugitive form; he marks a
surplus of potential for fathering otherwise in our Black social worlds.
Working through scholar Hortense Spillers’ provocation that the Black male, and the
Black father by extension are touched under slavery, by the “power of the female within,” (80), I
argue that the social/symbolic subjectivity of the Black mother is the means through which we
can theorize anew, Black fathers as social beings. Armed with the power of the Black female
within, which I read expansively as maternal, womanist, and queer, this dissertation evaluates
this power in the peculiar poetries of Black fathers’ lives. To do so it highlights four central
themes– “home,” “the spirit,” “touch,” and “love”—in literature and film. Peculiar Poetics
ultimately invigorates discourse on Black paternal epistemology. It emphasizes the ever-
generative characteristics of Black fathering–decoupled from the limits of Black patriarchy.

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Table of Contents
Dedication…...…………………………………………………………………………………....ii
Acknowledgements……….……………………………………………………………………...iii
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...iv
Introduction:
Go to the Water and Find your Bones: Black Fatherhood Reimagined…………….……..………1
Chapter 1:
A Space for Dwelling, for Belonging
Black Fathers, Slavery, and the “Endless Work of Black Home”……………………….28
Chapter 2:
Black Father God, Black Father Race Man
Uncovering the Black Father’s Soul……………………………………..………………68
Chapter 3:
Black Father’s Touch
A Peculiar Poetic………………………….……………………………………………..97
Chapter 4
Black (Paternal) Love………...……………………………………………………….………...127
Afterword
Incarcerated Black Fathers and the Persistence of Black Paternal Futures……….……………168

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Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………175

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Go to the Water and Find your Bones: Black Fatherhood Reimagined

Preface: Song for my Father

Black cultural scholar and brilliant theorist, Saidiya Hartman, states that “the
autobiographical example is not a personal story that folds onto itself”; it is not about “navel
gazing,” but rather, an attempt “to look at historical and social processes and one’s window onto
them” (7). Finding opportunity then, in this call to read the self as a window onto Black social
history, I open this dissertation on the peculiar poetics of Black fatherhood, with a father reading
of my own.
My father is the first sight in my memory. I remember crawling down the stairs and
seeing his face for the first time, lit up by a small TV in a carpeted room. I must have been two,
then. With my mother gone now, hazy in form—my father is the only thing left in my memory.
The only thing left from my beautiful Black childhood.
My mother once said that if anything, my father is a father. A Black man who wrapped
me up in a Black world. Seething with pessimism, toughness, and tender melancholy–he raised
me to be defiantly optimistic. He wanted me to be like Zora Hurston and he would quote this one
verse to me: “No, I do not weep at the world; I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife” (941).
With my father, I knew nothing of Blackness and the sobbing school; there was no sorrow
embedded in my skin. But then sometimes he would utter life “ain’t no crystal stair,” too
(Hughes). He had a Blues about him; and I understood.
Loss has animated my father’s entire life. When my parents divorced, it was too much
death or perhaps too much memory–having watched his mother die slowly when he was seven. I
often heard stories as a child about how my father was raised by his father until his untimely

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death two years later–my grandfather, who was a visual artist and son of a Civil War veteran.
This was 1957; and my father’s father refused to put him in the care of any other relative,
insisting that he, as a Black man, was fit to raise his only child. It is a good thing, too, that my
grandfather was so defiant. For, before his father died, my father learned the value of friendship,
and the value of fatherhood.
My father taught me something special about Black freedom, Black friendship, feminism,
joy, Du Bois, J.A. Rogers, and Garvey; my father and I–we traveled to Kenya and Egypt before
we ever went to France. My father made a Black home for me; my father, he wrapped me in a
Black home; together we circuited a Black world.
My father is not exceptional, and even though he is good, that does not stop him from
being immensely complicated. Difficult. Wrong sometimes. With a rich life of the mind that at
times reaches clairvoyance. There is a strange beauty about my father. Even more so now that
my mother is gone.
My father, if anything, is a father, and because of this, in academic discourse, I find that
he has yet to be discovered. My father remains un-named, untraceable, unthinkable— “culturally
unmade”—lost in the trafficking of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean, into New World
enslavement. (Spillers 72).
But we do not mourn what we do not know–my father, who does not fit into ready-made
father tropes. For he is neither lacking and dead-beat, nor horrifically hypermasculine in his
presence. He cuts through what Kara Keeling calls our Black common sense–the “sensory motor
link that chains us to our past” (566). Certainly, there is a bodily sensorial memory attached to
our Black fatherhood and its frames, its forms–its worn out (over)prescriptions. Certainly, when

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we think of Black fathers, a sense of yearning–a bitter taste–a frozen image seizes our
consciousness.

The Black Father as Problem, Opened Up: Towards a Peculiar Poetics
Yes, within Black Studies, my principal ground of interest, the Black father is more of a
“closed question” (Moten 48) in Black life, than a breathing entity. He is a question that pulls at
your arms, asking, not, Black father, who are you, but rather– “how does it feel to be a problem”
(Du Bois 7)? Indeed, the Black father is strung up before us–haunting us wherever we turn,
bound up in the infamous interrogation, when W.E.B. Du Bois speaks of the racial color line. I
ask aloud then, evoking my father’s spirit: Black father, how does it feel to be a problem–for
thought, for being, for relation?
Scholar Kara Keeling has noted that Black Studies has a “particular investment in the
father” (2017). And yet within the field of Black Studies, and further straddled across the
disciplines of sociology, anthropology, history, American Studies, the Black father’s form
always commingles with this closed question—petrified with only two sides—two sides that are
both flattened and ill-fated.
The Black father in our post-Civil Rights context has emerged overwhelmingly, on the
one hand, as an absence—as literally dead, lacking, physically and figuratively non-present, or
otherwise shuttled away from the disastrous and disorganized Black matriarchal family. This is a
trope so predominant that it leads Black queer theorist, Sharon Holland, to write that
“fatherlacking” is the very founding condition and meaning of Blackness (387). Indeed, the hole
left by our fathers makes up the very substance of our Black being.

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On the other end, the Black father has been rehabilitated sometimes–the ghost appears out
of this space of social deviance; yet he must often carry white heterocapitalist paternal
attributions. Indeed, when the Black father does arrive, he must be scrupulously patriarchal,
heterosexual, religious, masculine, respectable. He must be financially and most importantly,
socially “fit”—formally educated, escaping criminal and sexual trappings. He is our savior and
cannot fail–albeit he often does, to our chagrin. And the aftermath is more often than not, a most
monstrous occasion.
Although the latter delineation is a more insidious debilitation, both negotiations of Black
paternal forms along this axis of absence and presence, bind Black families, Black lives, and
performative experience; they stamp out Black love and Black knowledge into restricted
articulations. Further, both sides stem from the same equation; the Black father for Black
thought, is a site of a perennial negation. The Black father must be modified, (state) recognized;
he is a signifier of a most grotesque (spiritual) decay.
Black father, how does it feel to be a problem? My dissertation puts tension on this
existential and relational question, to ultimately, shake it open–to break open our father-logic,
father-grammar, our sensory motor trained common sense and ask not, how does it feel to be a
problem, but rather how does it feel to exceed it? How does it feel, Black father, to rupture the
problem presented in thought; to live not towards normative destinations; but rather, to be an
improvisatory site? To not live repeating white paternal attributions, but to run on the outside. To
live an otherwise Black life—to carry us, his Black kin, his Black children.
Peculiar Poetics is an endeavor to imagine the Black father–to really imagine him. To go
back to the ocean and find his bones—to search for the Black father in all his mucky luminosity.
Yes– Peculiar Poetics is a window into my Black father and many Black fathers I have known,

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who offer a counter-discourse to Black paternal thought in Black scholarship. Employing
readings of Black literature, Black cinema, alongside historiographical and sociological analysis,
this dissertation is a call to reconsider the Black father in the Black family by establishing a
framework for thinking assiduously about him. Most importantly, this theory is not simply about
reaffirming patriarchal prescriptions, but emphasizing how Black fathers have accessed what lies
in excess to white patriarchal definitions. Indeed, there is a reservoir that emerges on the outside
of Western patriarchy, patrimony, patrilineality–or the hollow transfer of money, power,
property from (white) man to man generationally. There is a space wherein Black paternity and
(Black/white) patriarchy can be stunningly untwinned, and that is where the work, the mess, the
wealth, the knowledge is. Peculiar Poetics is an endeavor to find the Black father and the Black
father function through this breach–through this splitting off from patriarchy–through this
rerouting from heteropatriarchal mimesis. There is another route, there must be, and that is
through Black feminist and queer of color theory. A finding of the paternal self, a finding of
relational possibility that is not about the ever-present fear of emasculation, but a power gifted
from Black feminist and queer teachings. Indeed, I will later elaborate this as “the female within”
(Spillers 80)—the Black mother’s epistemology. In the end, I call this power a poetry –Black
fathers’ peculiar poetics. What is the poetry that our Black fathers craft for us as kin? What is
this peculiar poetry that wraps us up in our Black fathers’ arms?
My arrival at the term “peculiar” to flesh out new Black paternal possibilities came after
many months of rumination. I yearned for a word that moves towards the ambiguity, complexity,
friction, anomalous marvel of that which was never meant to exist. For the Black father was
never meant to exist, (which I will return to) and yet somehow, he is here with us, even if at
times critically mis-seen, like my father. Even if at times strange and in excess to our

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conventional lines of thinking, as is my father. Following this thought, the Black father is most
certainly queer– in that he is an untimely and unusual arrival, in that he is a racial, gendered,
sexual socio-economic outcast from nation-state narratives and strivings, to paraphrase Roderick
Ferguson’s queer of color critique, which is grounded in intersectional Black feminist theory
(17). Yet, I find the term queer to be too overdetermined and given this overdetermination, I
searched for another phrase that would get to the impossible possibility of Black paternal life.
Black queer scholar E. Patrick Johnson celebrates his grandmother’s knowledge in her
use of the term “quare,” which connotes “something that might philosophically translate into an
excess of discursive and epistemological meanings grounded in African American rituals and
lived experience” (126). Although peculiar connotes this strangeness, this excess that lends to
epistemological openings, the substance of quare did not fully capture for my purpose, the
meaning and work of Black fatherhood. It was in my study with a colleague, Israel Durham that
he turned my attention to “peculiar” (2015). And I paused. Peculiar; I let it curl in my throat and
paid attention to the feelings that it raised–hazy, uncomfortable slightly–but novel, curious,
flowing. Peculiar–like the “peculiar sensations” of Blackness that W.E.B. Du Bois used to
describe our particular Black and felt experience. Peculiar struck me as a fitting word.
Peculiar is most certainly historically pertinent to the Black father’s experience. Scholar
Aaliyah Abdur Rahman in her writings on Black sex, desire, and nationhood notes the word
peculiar and its strange connections to Blackness by way of our enslavement under America’s
“peculiar institution.” There are other connections of note, however, if we look to peculiar’s
etymology. As a Latin word, it emerges as early as the mid-15th century as synonym to “one’s
particular wealth in cattle”; this meaning of cattle or shall we say chattel, morphs over the course
of two centuries into more generalized connections to “property” and “private property.” It

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finally settles into its contemporary framing as “curious,” “queer,” “eccentric,” “anomalous,”
within the 18th century. Peculiar is queer’s grammatical bedfellow, yes; and yet if we trace its
etymology from “property,” to “personal property,” to its dual meaning as both “queer” and
“distinctive” peculiar sticks with particular (racialized) adhesion to the trafficking and
movement of Black men’s bodies as they are moved from slave ships, into a peculiar institution,
and a peculiar postslavery world (OED 2007).
Peculiarity, then, is a historically and linguistically apposite and evocative word. It is not
only indicative of the distinctive racialized and animalizing violence of the Black experience but
also indicative of a queer opportunity that this distinction affords. A queer opportunity that leads
to multifarious ways of feeling, being, doing otherwise in a peculiarly antiblack world, I contend.
Peculiar Poetics therefore, defines the uncanny and marvelous pathways for Black fatherhood
and (Blackness more generally), opened up by this curious word. Peculiar is an
acknowledgement of the historically unique, particular, strange, sometimes uncomfortable,
fraught, messy, and awe-aspiring novelty of Black paternal life. The “peculiar sensations”, the
“peculiar emphasis” of Blackness (Du Bois 7). For again, Black fatherhood was not meant to
exist in the New World yet still found itself here. It still found a way to live otherwise–to seize
through its fingers, pen, and feeling--the beauty of Black social existence.
1

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Writing on the peculiar it is less important to me that the reader latches onto this grammatical choice; I am
invested only in the wide open and strange beauty of Black father potential. At times I use queer, Black feminist,
and peculiar interchangeably–finding that these words work in communion to evince the ways that Black fathers
emerge, teach, and free us as Black kin and children. This is what is paramount in the dissertation–not a word, but
rather Black fathers’ laborious worldmaking. On the outside of over scripted prescriptions and psycho-state
recognition, what Peculiar Poetics sets the ground for, are Black fathers and their marvelous endeavors to craft a
Black social life for themselves and for their kin.

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Social Death, Social Life by way of the “Female Within”

Indeed, it is paramount for me to elaborate that the Black father is an arresting occasion
and improvisation of Black social life–a social life that is contested, fraught, ephemeral at times,
and yet in still, a qualified existence. Yes, the Black father is evidence of social life; he is a push
against, in Black Studies, a predominant existential tension that wrestles with and often concedes
to the fact of antiblack “social death.” Set into motion through Black sociologist Orlando
Patterson’s opus, his 1982 Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, social death is a
term that universalizes a historical signature of the slave. In his monumental dynamic and wide-
ranging survey of slave societies from Greece, to East Asia, to Africa, to the American South,
Patterson argues that all of these regimes, converge on one specific characteristic–the slave as
absolutely subjugated, unhuman and socially immaterial. The life of the slave, Patterson
contends, is not really life, but is marked by the master’s supremacy and the slave’s shameful,
nameless, homeless (non)existence, or “permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and
generally dishonored persons” (Patterson 13).
Patterson’s work has been picked up by a cadre of scholars in Black Studies, but perhaps
most notably by Saidiya Hartman. Saidiya Hartman’s groundbreaking Scenes of Subjection and
even Lose Your Mother, both contend with Blackness before and after Emancipation–imagining
Blackness as an experience of perennial homelessness and ongoing disaster. Blackness has been
afforded a travestied freedom where power over it post-Emancipation, has not attenuated but
merely shifted. Indeed, the marker of social death is not lifted following the American Civil War;
Black people float from living under bondage, non-existence, dishonor, namelessness, into what
she calls the “afterlife of slavery:” where Black lives simply meet new shackles of “skewed life

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chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and
impoverishment (Hartman 6).
Yet, in a brilliant critique of this epistemology, historian Vincent Brown reminds us of a
disciplinary incongruence. He writes: “having emerged from the discipline of sociology, “social
death” fits comfortably within a scholarly tradition that has generally been more alert to
deviations in patterns of black life from prevailing social norms than to the worldviews,
strategies, and social tactics of people in black communities” (1233). Brown is in communion
with Fred Moten’s Black optimist observation, that sociological inquiry into the study of Black
life has been organized largely around what is pathological about this racial condition. When in
fact there is nothing dishonorable–nothing wrong with us (Moten 48). Vincent Brown reminds us
that Patterson’s enlightenment is but a distillation– a “theoretical abstraction” that cannot
account for the lived experiences of the enslaved, so much as “reduce them to the common
denominator” that reveals something about slavery’s essence (1233). In my own words, social
death’s social hollowing of Black life says more about the slave regime’s deathly intentions, than
it does about the rush of Black living.
2

Nevertheless, the study of social death, or the continued haunting of this Western
command, bears importance, for its illumination of certain contours of Black fatherhood and
Black family that still trouble the common sense of our present. For slavery and its social death
result (at least officially) in the unfathering of Black men, who are cut off both literally and
metaphysically from kinship and ancestors–from “ascending and descending generations” (13).

2
Brown accounts for sociology’s position, but what of Fanon, who we might say leans toward a similar critical
negativity; and yet he emerges from the field of psycho-analysis. Fanon, in his explosively stunning Black Skin,
White Masks, writes that the racist gaze renders him under the colonial-slave condition, “sealed in crushing
objecthood” (82). There is the same impulse here in Fanon as Patterson to speak of the Black condition as a space of
absolute and unrelenting domination relegated to an arid and sterile “zone of non-being”–adding to this framework
that the only destination for a Black man into the realm of the living is white (Fanon 3).

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This occurs by way of a peculiar slave code that rose in popularity in the United States. The
slave code’s name, partus sequitur ventrum bears further elaboration. Enacted first in Virginia in
1662, this law of social death quickly spread across southern slaveholding states bearing the
legal enclosure that children follow the line of their mothers. This following of the mother’s line
to determine social standing ensured that offspring regardless of the racial status of the father,
were bound in perpetuity. Of course, this social disinheritance was in the name of sexual, social,
material profit to white planters; but its underside stained Black women as the progenitors of
Black dishonor. Read through the lens of social death then, Blackness, the Black family unit, and
Black being is thus sealed into subjection quite literally by way of the Black mother’s
(re)production.
Hortense Spillers’ groundbreaking, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,'' pays deeper attention
to the Black mother’s violated and paradoxical position–her emergence as the only recognized
Black subject–and yet her consumption simultaneously as “mother” and “mother dispossessed”
(Spillers 80). Hauntingly re-telling the origin story of Black enslavement Spillers writes of this
brutal process of New World slavery, which amounts to the powerlessness of the Black body that
moves forth onto American soil, pivoting on the axis of ungendering. There is a gendered
fungibility to Black women–a simultaneous hypergendering and unraveling of gender.
But what falls out of Black discourse surrounding the brutality of partus sequitur
ventrum, and the invasion of the Black mother and Black family, is what Hortense Spillers says
about the powerlessness too, that this law enacts on Black fathers. Spillers writes that in addition
to splintering the Black mother function, New World slavery sets a “dual fatherhood into
motion”– “comprised of the African father’s banished name and body and the captor father’s
mocking presence” (80). In the thick of this sordid movement–this exiling of the Black father’s

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function, honor, purpose–we find the Black male powerlessly pantomiming the white master,
who stands behind him as the rightful owner of the Father’s Right, the Father’s Law (Spillers
80).
Black discourse has focused much of its attention on this white father figure that emerges
in slavery as both master and father. But what moves me is that the Black father within this
southern family nightmare is rendered a site of absolute negation then. For on the one hand the
Black family suffers the mournful reality of what Spillers calls “fatherlacking”—the formal loss
of the Black cultural privilege of fatherhood, which belongs distinctly to a free, white
community. Further, on the other end of the Father’s law, we lose the right to the white
patriarchal benefit of patronymic transfer. Patrimony, or the passing down of real estate,
entitlements, titles, “cold hard cash,” (Western) liberation, is what of course underwrites white
fatherhood and sustains white heteropatriarchal supremacy. What Spillers is gesturing towards
then is that the Black mother as determinant of status and the Black father as legally,
ontologically, and relationally nonexistent (or at best a flailing copy of whiteness) is a stunning
reversal of what Friedrich Engels in his comprehensive Origins of the Family underscores as the
very foundation of Western familial arrangement, nationhood, and conceptions of freedom. By
deduction, it appears that only by way of the white Father’s recognition, can the Black family be
liberated. What an alarming foreclosure, and yet a telling one if we consider our Black father
formulations.
Importantly however, Hortense Spillers does not end her analysis here in this history of
social death, in Black capture, which she calls a “high crime against the flesh” (67). In this
historical New World high crime–the splitting of the African captive body from liberated self-
determination that casts the Black mother as equivalent to non-being and the Black father

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ostensibly into a cultural nowhere—the body is taken by white hands, yes, but, as Alex Weheliye
writes through Spillers–Blackness is given the flesh (2). Blackness, if we remember, is still given
the flesh–however shackled, beaten, whipped, cut. Better, Blackness steals the flesh as a
possibility for life--life lived errantly to and in refusal of its captivity. Blackness is bereft of a
body, yes, but Blackness finds through the flesh a hieroglyphic code of/for retaliation, a line of
flight, the fuel for freedom. The capacity to enact what Fred Moten calls a “stolen moment”–-the
capacity to create an otherwise in the face of white legal, social, etc. logic, frame, containment.
Outside of the master’s desires, the master’s slave law, the Black body finds the flesh, and
therefore finds through it, a Black freedom. A Black freedom, a Black social life that liberates
the Black family in excess to white patriarchal law.
Acknowledging this fleshly birthright, Rivzana Bradley writes: “the possibility of
embodying this degenerative fleshy condition—of being radically ungendered only to be
regendered anew—marks the black feminine’s differential resistance to (gendered) enclosure”
(196). But again, what can be said of Black fathers? What can be said of Black fathers
ungendered, “suspended in the ocean,” who I argue, somehow, someway, resist? Hortense
Spillers ends her essay articulating that the Black male is also granted a line of flight–a fugitive
sense, an alternative route to freedom–not death or un-arrival but rather emphatically, a wealth
of Black social life through the mother’s flesh:
The African-American male has been touched… by the mother, handed by
her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white American male
is allowed to temporize by a fatherly reprieve…The African American
woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful
and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated—the law

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of the Mother—only and precisely because legal enslavement removed
the African-American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view
as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father’s name, the Father’s
law… The black American male embodies the only American community
of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within
itself… It is the heritage of the mother that the African American male must
regain as an aspect of his own personhood—the power of “yes” to the
“female” within. (80)
Under the duress of the slave regime, “father” is written off of the Black male body, with such
violence that it might appear that he cannot stand. And yet the Black male’s flesh is touched by
the profound power of the Black mother. The Black male is touched by the mother, distinctively;
and he cannot escape her fleshly demand. The Black male is touched queerly, peculiarly, and
within it lies his distinctive power to become a father. The touch that renders him queer under
New World social law is his marvelous pathway, his peculiar opportunity into Black paternal
being.
By way of the female within, the Black father emerges inchoate, raw, and beautiful
material. Emergent–not quite settled, still taking shape within our social world (Lowe 2015). By
way of the Black mother’s expansive influence the Black father incites a refusal to be drowned–a
refusal to be suspended in the oceanic–a refusal to be unmade, unthought, unknown, unthinkable,
a site of negation.

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Black Fatherhood and Black Feminism
I read this “female within” that Spillers brilliantly points to expansively, as a symbolic
legal-social extension of the Black mother–an inner knowledge of the maternal, female, femme,
feminine, feminist, queer that breaks way into fuller fleshly freeing Black father possibility. This
wide reading of the female within is what conjoins what I am calling Black fathers’ potential–
their peculiar poetic– to a Black feminist fugitivity and theoretical tradition. This might seem to
some a counterintuitive maneuver, for one of the most celebrated contributions of Black feminist
study alongside intersectionality is its incisive critique of Black patriarchy. And yet, Peculiar
Poetics concerns itself with the “break,” the flight, the slippage between white patriarchal law
and Black paternal fugitivity. Peculiar Poetics improvises on Spillers’ contention that the key to
Black fatherhood is an inward turn and embrace of the Black mother’s teachings.
Predominant Black feminism’s monumental contribution of intersectionality has been so
fruitful to the academy that Black feminism and intersectionality in many contexts have become
synonymous. It is Kimberlé Crenshaw who coins this term in 1989, but the seeds of it in the 20th
century emerge over a decade prior through The Combahee River Collective. These and other
Black women such as bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, turn our attention to the ways in which
the experiences and oppressions that Black women face diverge from white women, white men,
other people of color, as well as Black men. The cleaving of Black women from Black men was
a crucial point through which Black women’s lives could be evaluated more meticulously–as
they were often placed in the shadows of their Black male counterparts in the push towards
liberation. Therefore, Black feminism turns our eyes to the factors that create between Black men
and Black women an unevenness–a divide, using markers of difference that interlock or
“intersect” with race and gender–so that sexuality, disability, class, etc. are key indicators that

15
are evaluated along with race that open up the array of difference, disparity, and the vastness of
socio-political work that needs to be done.
Part of the vital work of intersectionality, has been to pinpoint the ways in which Black
women are multiply and simultaneously oppressed–multiply and simultaneously oppressed by
the violences of double patriarchy. For it is not simply that Black women are subject to the hand
of white male hegemony but also Black men’s violences, be they domestic, sexual, political,
intellectual, within intramural life. Often citing a greater good of community uplift, Black
patriarchy violences and silences and reigns over Black women and girls–creating a hierarchy of
power by way of sex and gender. Black feminists beginning at least in the twentieth century have
bemoaned what Rolland Murray calls the limits of this presumed route to freedom that arises
amongst Black leftists, Black cultural nationalists, Black integrationists, Black conservatives —
or the emancipatory “limits of Black patriarchy”—Black patriarchy defined as the disciplining of
the Black family and community through a male headed figure such that the Black nation can
(presumably) realize its dreams. This is taken up by many Black feminist and male feminist
scholars, like Deborah McDowell, Michele Wallace, female novelists like Alice Walker, Toni
Morrison, and will be explored more fully in my second chapter–the rise and the limits of what
Hazel Carby calls “race man” and what Ronald Neal calls the “messianic masculinity.” The
Black male, in the Black family romance is pedestalized as our representational leader and our
savior. However, this Black patriarchy is the more subtle deleterious side of that coin ill-fated,
aforementioned. It is reactionary–in a contemporary frame in particular as it speaks back to the
nefarious Moynihan Report –to which I shall return– a voluminous study, charging Black women
with hyper presence, hypermasculine tendencies that enfeeble Black men and account for their
low social performance. To counteract, Black men primarily, have championed the repositioning

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of Black men at the forefront of Black social and political representation–not by way of the
mother but instead by following the trail of Western tropes. Rolland Murray calls our attention to
Black investment in this politic as “the wobbly crutch of a disenfranchised, segregated polity that
never ends in liberation” (123). For Black patriarchy’s preoccupation with the seductive power
of masculine leadership is overwhelmingly a distraction from the violence of the white
heteropatriarchal state.
One finds that one of the most prolific Black writers, Toni Morrison, engages quite
brilliantly with the woes of patriarchy as it gained currency in Black communal space post-Civil
Rights. Although her works are not always categorically feminist, Toni Morrison’s 1977, Song of
Solomon, is concerned specifically with the tragedies of Black masculinity and the nuances of
Black female labor. In a sense, tracking the work of Michael Awkward, Song of Solomon takes
on the lines of a Black odyssey, intimating the making, unmaking, remaking of Milkman Dead,
who, propelled by a hunger for a “living life,” strikes out to discover a white man’s treasure. But
one quickly gathers that as Milkman ventures along his youth filled and fated rush for gold, it is
Black women who must nurture him, sacrifice themselves, and ultimately crumble in his path.
Although by the end Milkman’s actions might be redeemed, Morrison seems to pose the
question: why must Black women unravel and fall so that Black men might fly free?
Significantly, in this tale of materialist quest turned self-discovery, what Morrison
brilliantly explicates is that (Black) freedom post Moynihan has become disastrously
synonymous with Black patriarchal wealth and misogyny, just as patriarchal wealth and
misogyny are conflated with the fundamental function of Black manhood, and by extension
Black fatherhood. Each notion winds around the other under Western liberalist rubrics—such

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that the quest for money, property, ownership, status, and the objectification of women, are
equivalent to what Morrison’s characters envision as “Black man (father) free.”
Liberalist logic’s patriarchal pulse, for Morrison, is what has weighed Black men down in
Black Power/Post-Civil Rights. And Milkman Dead’s baggage—the shit of avarice, disregard,
hubris, and the “hogs gut” between his legs hanging down —is predisposed and foreclosing,
draping him like a stole—passed down from his father, who learned this lust for keys, cars,
property, and violence from his formerly enslaved father, Macon Dead I, before him. With all
three generations besotted with accumulation, they fail to realize that a Black freedman might be
another dead-end. Or rather, they cannot recognize that a Black man seeking freedom through
white validation/whiteness/white patriarchy, might as well be dead and father gone already. The
question that resounds, is what can Black men find of themselves, if, bereft of self-knowing and
only presented with a white patriarch’s face?
We know very well the limits of Black patriarchy and Black male capitulation to white
patriarchal form. But with respect to the salience of Black patriarchal critique and the brutality
still enacted by Black patriarchy, the analysis of it within Black Studies is arguably, threadbare.
Yes, indeed, to emphasize, it is a dead-end and deadening like Macon Dead. And yet, we must
remember that heteropatriarchy is but one, slender frame of existence that has been rendered
hegemonic through Western ideology, state apparatus, and history’s linear march.
Heteropatriarchy is but one way of reading Black fatherhood’s mimesis more concerned with
public and nation, than the micropolitical and intimate provinces of father potential in family life.
There is not a limit to Black paternal being as such, but rather, a limit to our Black paternal
thinking. Black fathers can emerge polymorphous, outstretched with multifacetedness, with
social life.

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Peculiar Poetics, therefore, will not bear the labor of unpacking heteropatriarchal Black
fathers that emerge in our public forum–Black fathers that emerge in forms benign and more
vicious. The reader will not hear much about former President Obama, for example. For although
he is kind, although he supports his Black wife and Black daughters' advancement—although he
is led, in fact often publicly by his Black wife in ways that I recognize as beautiful–his suturing
to the state that advances national and imperialistic violence is heteropatriarchal to the core.
Need I mention the politics of respectability–the adoption of white middle class mores of
propriety, puritanical work ethic, and decorum– evinced in Obama’s address to Black fathers in
his oft-critiqued Father’s Day speech (2008). His passionate call to Black fathers to pull
themselves up by their bootstraps and assume healthy roles as fathers misses of course, the
brutality of the nation-state that constrains presently and constrained historically, Black fathers’
capacity to father–to even be–even while Obama empathetically connects himself to the narrative
of absent fathers in our community by way of his own history as fatherlacking.
On a more nefarious end, we have Bill Cosby, a “race man” who has made similar
charges against Black fathers publicly (2004), but most notoriously at an NAACP award
gathering. Cosby, who built his entire acting empire on a respectable, universally palatable, and
delightful brand of Black fatherhood most notably in The Cosby Show, seems to have now “eaten
himself alive” with his own clamoring for conservative state recognition. Charged with rape, one
of the most un-respectable crimes, and one of the most wedded to the avaricious and sordid spirit
of misogynistic patriarchy, there is so much sorrow and irony wrapped up in this bitter end.
Cosby–and though I do not doubt his love for Black people and his belief in the importance of
Black fatherhood–seems to have been ultimately consumed by the very thing he desired–eaten
alive in his scramble for a supremacist brand of patriarchal dominion.

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We have more public Black father figures– Black patriarchs like Will Smith and others
falling in between; although I would not call Smith a patriarch and admire the ways in which he
fathers on the ground, queerly, beautifully–thinking here of the framework that he has provided
for Willow, and his queer and philanthropic son, Jaden.
The point is Black feminist thought has been a driving force in our criticism of these
highly public Black patriarchs–Black women have fallen victim to Black patriarchs– and yet it is
precisely through other modes of Black feminist thinking that we can more carefully parse
through the multifarious ways of being Black father that split from this harmful lineage. Through
Black feminist theory and living we can wander through and imagine Black fatherhood anew–in
ways that are not only generative to him but generative and nourishing to us. Indeed, Black
feminist thought is not only brilliant for its critique, but also brilliant for what it germinates–the
endless creativity and wide-openness of its workings that make sense of endless possibility for
Blackness and being in the everyday.
Thus, we turn back to Black fatherhood as a site not simply of heteropatriarchy but of
peculiar poetry. Importantly, I stress that although I speak of Black fatherhood as peculiar, as
queer, as otherwise, and maternal, I root this theoretical intervention in Black feminism. I am
forever reminded of what Brittany Cooper declares in her essay “Love No Limit: Towards a
Black Feminist Future (In Theory).” Finding queer of color critique by the late Jose Munoz and
Alex Weheliye culpable of an unsettling trend, Cooper cautions that in terms of their academic
positioning, “women of color feminisms are a mode of inquiry to be surpassed (14) –often by cis
men. Cooper and scholars like Black feminist scholar Jennifer Nash, have started doing the
crucial work of emphasizing the importance of figures such as Audre Lorde in particular, Toni
Morrison and bell hooks etc., as foundational to queer of color interventions. For decades these

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luminaries have been exploring new pathways and modes for thinking through notions that are
often celebrated as the contributions of queer analysis: that of gender, spirit and memory, anger
and rage, sex, eros and love, sisterhood, and motherhood as forms of homosocial bonding, dance
and movement, cooking and the domestic, sound and music, and onward. Even in the case of
hooks, Black feminism has done work to provide a frame where Black men might also heal and
empower themselves–empower and heal us if they are willing to change.
Black feminist theory and practice then, becomes a vital and viable garden to sustain
novel considerations of Black fatherhood–considerations within which I only incite a beginning.
The questions taken up by Peculiar Poetics are: in what ways have Black fathers turned towards
these Black feminist forms handed to them by the event of slavery, and handled them with care?
How have Black fathers brushed with feminist, femme, feminine, queer, peculiar knowledge,
used this epistemology to emerge–and in that emergence, care for us, his Black kin and children?
Peculiar Poetics stands firm in its contention that Black fatherhood is more than a counter to a
cultural theme of absence but is a form of rebellious relation by way of the female within. Black
fatherhood is a scream–an announcement that it is not pathological, but rather in excess to our
closed thinking– an alternative epistemology of spirit, homemaking, touch, love–a beautifully
freeing thing.
Too, by engaging the female within, or Black feminist and queer of color strivings, we
can better evaluate Black fathers meticulously, outside of the demands of the Black nation,
which is more often than not still wrapped up in a broader yearning for the seductive advantage
of whiteness and/or nation-state recognition. In this spirit, this work is always engaged with what
Black feminist theorist and poet Elizabeth Alexander calls the Black interior. Alexander is
speaking to an inner life where Black people dream and realize themselves outside of what

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Blackness ought or ought not to be (x). Outside of our restricted Black father formulations that
must always concede to a kind of respectability or public performance. This newer path in Black
study is what I argue is an answer to what Sharpe is saying when she says that our “thinking
needs care” (18). Indeed, the Black father that still looms in theory as publicly obscure, opaque,
flat, yet deified, that still drowns in bad math, to play on Katherine McKittrick’s claim that Black
bodies are inundated publicly by logs, lists, statistics (17)–needs caring thought, caring
evaluation of his full fleshly experience. The Black interior–the acceptance of a rich inner life,
what Kevin Quashie calls “the sovereignty of our quiet” as a kind of resistance, is our pathway
then, into the intricacies of Black fathers’ fleshly flight. Our pathway into intricacies that in this
dissertation follow important Black feminist and queer of color themes: of the Black home, the
spirit, physical touch, and lastly, love.

Chapter Synopses

This dissertation is broken up into four chapters: the chapters unfolding, overlapping, and
speaking back to one another sometimes harmoniously and sometimes with tension and friction.
Indeed, sometimes this speaking back is choppy, uneven, messy, making room for the
multiplicitous imaginings of Black fathers. They come together, however, here in this order:

Chapter One, concentrates on Black fatherhood’s most profound pathological framing–
Black fatherhood as absent from the Black home. It offers an overview of how this indelible
trope of absent Black dads came to stand-in for Black fatherhood as a whole–how it came to be
such a public cultural norm. Highlighting the infamous Moynihan Report published by former

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Senator Moynihan in 1965, which grounds the “deadbeat” feeble Black father and
hypermasculine Black mother as predominant symbols of the Black household, it looks to how
literature on the Black home has spoken back to this damning study yet remains forever in its
chokehold. Black literature and art, on the other hand, have been a space to imagine differently,
what was and is possible for Black fathers in relation to Black homes–outside of abysmal
statistics that are used to corroborate Moynihan’s claim of a household lascivious and
backwards. The majority of the chapter then, drives my contention that Colson Whitehead’s
contemporary novel, The Underground Railroad and Barry Jenkins’ cinematic adaptation offer a
novel way of thinking through Black fathers and homes during an unthinkable moment–Black
fathers in Black homes under the duress of chattel slavery and other spheres of unfreedom.
Employing their works and their disparate visions of Black fatherhood, I scaffold through this
chapter my most salient arguments, that Black fathers offer to us not only an insistent presence
but also peculiar modes of being with us and offering space for our freedom. Black fathers do
emerge–and chart, under impossible conditions, ways to care and nurture us in our Black worlds,
derived from our Black mothers’ gardens. Black fathers, in short, find a space with us to belong–
not towering over us but alongside us touched by way of the “female within”.

Chapter Two, evaluates another conventional and enduring strain of the Black father
problem. It argues that when the Black father does arrive, he arrives in the form of a masculine
God. It contends that there is a conflation of not only God and Black male leadership, but also
God and Black fatherhood on a domestic scale. Yet, just as it does in his absence from the home,
this (demonic) deification of the Black father diminishes his capacity to be knowable–as full
flesh–to his children and kin. This is a phenomenon that emerges in a myriad of literary texts on

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the Black family; and I tease out this argument by way of two canonical texts: James Baldwin’s
Go Tell it on the Mountain and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. While Baldwin’s work
capitulates to this troubling and opaque father God, finding some temporary relief from him by
way of the Holy Ghost, Walker offers another route to the soul, to knowing God, to Black
deliverance, and to Black redemption entirely, by way of a womanist spirituality. Walker allows
a flight into a territory where we might see and feel not the Black father’s Godly pedestalization,
but the Black father’s soul. I use this pathway as an entry into the second half of this chapter,
which endeavors to see the Black father’s spirit by way of an unlikely public figure. Indeed, I
turn to the scholar, activist, literary giant, W.E.B. Du Bois, who has been readily conflated with
messiah, prophet, perhaps secular God, to imagine his/a Black father’s soul informed by his own
beloved mother through the most intimate window into his domestic sphere. Offering an
alternative reading of Du Bois’ writing on his son’s passing in Souls, I argue that this is not an
instance of phallocentric performance, but rather an instance of a spiritual poetics, with a
“peculiar emphasis” of the Black mother. Through Du Bois’ writing we gain entree into the
interiority of a Black father’s soul that detaches him even if for a moment from nationalist
strivings, to evince what Leroy Wilson calls a maternal protest, which I argue is endemic to the
emergence and articulation of a Black queer-feminist fatherhood.

Chapter Three, assumes a more experimental turn, as I evaluate a submerged problem
with Black paternal life–a problem as grave and as large but one that is often unnamed. I am
interested here in arguing that there is a suturing of Black fathers to sexual and physical violence,
such that the thought of Black fathers and touch gives rise to uncomfortable feeling. Black
paternal touch fosters feelings of tension and shame. Touch is an under-excavated sense of

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knowing the world, and yet I argue that touch offers in relationship to Black fathers, an
expansive knowledge. In light of this, I turn to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Known for its
exploration of visuality, image, beauty, I look to what it teaches also, about the life of touch.
Concentrating on the Black girl protagonist’s father, Cholly Breedlove, I delineate a touch origin
story, that gives rise to the ignoble nadir of the novel—when Cholly rapes his blood daughter.
Although Morrison approaches Cholly’s character with empathy, I contend that Cholly’s
character is evidence of touch’s predominant conceptualization in Black hypermasculine life–
that a Black fathers’ touch is always already representative of death and danger. Looking to
Barry Jenkins however, in his groundbreaking visual text, “Moonlight,” Black fathers’ touch
finds life to be otherwise for a queer Black child. Touch here is rendered tender, spiritual, love
giving, and makes space for the protagonist to find and venture through the many variations of
love and spirit with his childhood love nourished near and within the queer Atlantic water of this
Miami setting. Long after it is impressed upon the flesh, Black fathers’ touch has a peculiar
potential, to rejuvenate and free his kin–a peculiar trace that is of course rooted in fleshly
possibilities offered by way of Black maternal theory.

Chapter Four deepens the experimental by offering a provocative look on Black fathers
and love. Indeed, I look at this provocation from both sides. And I write first of Black children
and the challenges of them loving their Black fathers, largely through a close reading of scholar
David Marriott’s work on Black fathers and Black sons. Marriott appositely pairs masculine
giants Richard Wright with James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John Edgar Wideman before finding
a break into love by way of the film, “Boyz in the Hood.” I employ Marriott’s framework that
evinces the trouble of love between Black fathers and their sons as a homosocial preoccupation,

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to think about the ways Black fathers might love us back in loving ways that emerge by way of
Black feminism and queer of color theory. To do this, I take on a controversial text with a
controversial father–that of “Beasts of a Southern Wild,” centered on a Black girl child and her
dying father at the end of the world. In a blend of the magical and real, Black girl and father float
on a vulnerable, environmentally precarious maroon island, where he teaches her to survive.
Despite the ways in which it is derided, I choose to stick with this film text as a site of Black
paternal loving knowledge because I am interested in turning to the messiness of its love. A
messiness, decolonial, de-canonical, un-respectable mode of loving informed by queer of color
and Black feminist interventions. In the end, I argue, what this love offers is the potential for a
wayward Black girl to emerge. A Black father’s emergence in love effectively arms a Black girl
with the capacity to refuse all that has been named as better, but all that will leave her
asphyxiated by the world like a “fishbowl with no water.” A Black father’s love, I argue, allows
a Black girl to find joy in a Black world. In many ways this text reminds me of me.

A Note on Method

The method within Peculiar Poetics is multi-disciplinary. There are pieces of critical
auto-ethnography that conjoin with secondary historical analysis to ground the concerns,
foreclosures, and potentials that open up for Black paternal life. Too, Peculiar Poetics wrestles
with, in particular, the sociological dilemma presented in the Moynihan Report, which outlines
the alleged diseased contours of Black fathers and the Black family as a unit. My contributions
are evinced through my hermeneutical readings of Black literary and cinematic texts, which
makes again, primary use of Black feminist and queer of color theory for analysis.

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The reader will note that the language in this dissertation is expressive, poetic,
meandering, sometimes mournful, quixotic–often raising questions that are meant to linger and
leave residue–that strive first and foremost to offer space for the complexities and ambiguities of
Black human life rather than offering authoritative answers. This writing style is deliberate and
sutures my spirit already always to a Black feminist lyricism. Black feminist prose poetics
honors the fullness of Black expressiveness–an expressiveness that is never singularly prose but
is animated by singing, aliveness, movement. This is a Black feminist prose poetics that stresses
the importance of voice representing the expanse of the vocalizer without shame and with
contradistinction to disciplined, disciplinary prose, and dominant speech. Here I think of Audre
Lorde, who writes that “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the
quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change,
first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (53).
My writing carries my quality of light–my hopes and dreams, my survival, and pressing
toward change that exceeds institutional demands–that privileges Black freedom above all else. I
am my mother and father’s sensitive, curious, Black femme child. I am a jazz singer, a
(democratic) socialist and mother, a wife to a West African and you will hear all of that (poetic
knowledge) I hope. As I hope and dream and survive, I want you to hear all of that—I want it to
leave its residue. My writing carries, too, the quality of light that I have witnessed and have the
honor of studying as the peculiar poetry of our Black fathers.
I invoke the term “we” and “our” at many points in this dissertation. For this dissertation
is most significantly a conversation with Black people and for Black people, and those who
value Black life. “We” is an invitation into the work–to break down the walls between

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authoritative “I” and the reader. It is a reminder that we all have knowledge–this is but my voice
entering the circle.
Lastly, I focus here on Black cis men as fathers in particular–understanding that not all
Black men are fathers and not all fathers are cis men. But given the ways that cis male fathers are
often held within critical discourse suspiciously, or shall I say upheld as always already failing
and abysmal in function and output, I endeavor to give them more love, more conscientious
attention. I endeavor to imagine them more expansively as sites of great flaw and also great
potential before moving outward to the myriad enfleshments of Black folk. The late bell hooks
says this about men, and my intervention wants this for our fathers: “to create loving men, we
must love males” (139). To love the father, we must try to understand him. We must try to
understand all the work that he did and does for us, to create a Black world, a Black home. A
Black freedom. We must go to the water and find his bones.

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A Space for Dwelling, for Belonging: Black Fathers, US Slavery, and the Emerging
Black Home
When I wonder at Black fathers in relation to our homes, I am arrested by the thought of
homemaking on a plantation. What did such a space feel like to make a home–to be at home? To
carve out space for. To dream of. How could Black fathers make sense of home if they were
always already on the outside. If they were always, within America’s peculiar institution, a
strikingly peculiar displacement.
Indeed, how could such a refuge shaped by our fathers even materialize under what Black
feminist geographer, Katherine McKittrick calls “Man’s geographies”—southern territories that
embody the legacy of white male propertied subjects’ dominion, conquest, enterprise (948).
What sense of home could a Black father have, if he was rendered at least doubly erased, amid a
white and white cotton filled landscape. And it is not simply sovereign geographies within which
Black fathers must find a bed to rest, but the Black slave home’s predominant makeup, as it
stands in Black critical discourse. Saidiya Hartman has penned this in place, and we repeat it like
a litany–the Black antebellum household as a twisted dance of sable mothers, bastardized
children, and licentious white men (2007).
I should say then, that in thinking about Black fathers and homes and plantation life, I am
arrested by the seeming impossibility of it. The unthinkability of it in Black study that again,
remains highly invested in the Black father yet habitually follows only slave mother and
children---the reality of partus sequitur ventrum. What is interesting is that this legal and spatial
law did not simply create a certain sullied coalescence of the Black home but legally spit the
Black father out into the unknown outdoors. The Black father in relation to slave home and its

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afterlife appears to be “ungeographic” then; and here I am borrowing words from McKittrick,
whose theory will predominate in this first chapter (948). In this legal command, the Black father
is rendered unmappable, unlocatable, placeless, in our cartographies of Black home life.
Yet, I am stuck thinking about this because I contend that there must be a Black father
somewhere if Black discourse changes the substance of its searching. Following this thought, I
am ushered to the door of two works in Black letters–the first by the remarkable Harriet Jacobs
in her fugitive testimony, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Published in 1861, four years shy
of Emancipation, Jacobs’ narrative is often twinned with her male counterpoint, Frederick
Douglass. Yet, Jacobs does not relay the journey of a heroic male slave sired by a white master,
who physically surmounts another to become “a man” on his route to liberation, but rather, a
Black woman’s extraordinary efforts to make refuge – to find freedom not in marriage but in
making a home in the North for her two children. In this phenomenal rendering of a Black
mother’s transcendence of a brutal slave reality, I remain spellbound, however, by something
else, something subtle, wrapped up in an oft-overlooked moment. This moment, or incident,
occurs rather early in Jacobs’ text, and involves her observance of her Black father–who teaches
her something vital about home, belonging, liberation.
Through Jacobs’ writing, we witness the unthinkable presence of a Black father in
plantation space and the presence as well, of at least two houses in Black life. Indeed, there are
two overlapping geographies in Black existence that offer two depictions of the Black
household–one with the Black father and one with the master/mistress. Harriet carefully
delineates the day her dear baby brother William is summoned by his blood father and plantation
mistress at the same time. There is a hesitancy as her brother looks out at the two intersecting
paths–one to the house of her father and one to the master. It is in his choice to answer the

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mistress’ call –to draw nearer to the master’s house, that we come face to face with the Black
father’s will. Jacobs recalls her father’s furious reprimand of William in the aftermath of his
innocent betrayal, where he shouts: “I am your father; come hell or high water you come to me”
(Jacobs 9). Perhaps this might evoke Fred Moten who thinks of sound as the Black object
resisting (1). And yet this incident offers more of note; for the Black father not only shakes
himself into being through a sonic self-naming; but with it, also carves out a trace of home
dreams–carves out a space, however meager, for (self)belonging.
Belonging is a theory of home that I desire to hold tightly. Belonging is what crops up
here for me and in the second text that enters. In it, we have a less emblematic figure–a Black ex-
slave who writes his wife following the Civil War. This is a text that emerges through the
luminary Herbert Gutman’s rigorous historiography of the Black household. In a written letter
the ex-slave discloses that during slavery he was sold–estranged from his dear wife and children
and has since remarried. He is remarried, and yet he still grieves his first home; and in poignant
prose he discloses his undying love for his former wife and their offspring. To mend the ache of
being homeless, of being powerless, and unhomed, he asks his former wife for something so
precious—a loc of each of his children’s hair (Gutman 3-10). A loc of their hair–thick strands of
genetic code, love, loss, memory. A loc–a space to dwell, a space for hope, relief, belonging, in a
weary world of loss, severance, and existential suffering.
Jacobs’ father dies shortly after his reprimand of William in a timing that seems a bit
more than coincidental. Further, the fate of the former slave who longed to tether himself to
home by clasping onto hair from his beloved children remains, elusive. For the purposes of this
study though, I place less emphasis on the outcome. Whether these moments were successful or
failed, is not what holds significance. Jack Halberstam argues in his brilliant Queer Art of

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Failure that “under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing,
unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising
ways of being in the world” (2). Yet, again, success or failure are not what captivate me, but the
ineffable territory in-between. What I am most captivated by are the creative traces that these
fathers make–traces of Black fathers striving to make a refuge for themselves and with others–
traces of their hope to come in from the margins, their hope to belong and their trying so very
hard to secure connection to their kin, their children. A striving that plants seeds within Harriet
Jacobs to make a home for her children in freedom, in the face of ongoing insecure connections
in a monstrous time and place. A planting of seeds. Black fathers’ homemaking is an inspiration
that I contend had to be queer–that had to be creative, cooperative, and at times, surprising to us.
Making dwelling didn’t always have a structure–making home was rarely a slave cabin, or a
“house” to reference Toni Morrison’s revelation (3). Home was and is a coming together of the
bound father and his kin–where he and we all might break free from psychic, literal, and
otherwise bondage that always looms but most certainly is not all that there is to us.
What I argue here, in thinking about the sum of a father’s voice and withering material
then, is that home is not about an arrival, but what Toni Morrison calls the “endless work”
toward a Black communion (318). Yes, Morrison speaks of endless work, which scholar Mark A.
Tabone pulls from her writing– sacred affective labor–a moving work of the spirit that strives
toward a Black coming together in space where we all belong. This is a Black being with each
other that disrupts the geography of Man; and it strikes me as an unfinished project–or in a more
optimistic turn–the continued emergence of Black home across space and across time. Home
figured in this way echoes Jose Munoz’s imagining of a queer utopia (3), which he relays as a
hope in and for the future. When you belong, you have space for safety– a space to grow, to eat,

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to hold and nurture your flesh tenderly. When you belong, you might have hope of “something to
look forward to” (Duvernay 2019).
Here, what details Black fathers’ home/making defies normative characteristics, or what
we might imagine as home’s conventional meaning. It is queer—or peculiar, what I’ve outlined
in my introduction as: those uncanny, marvelous pathways opened up to/by Black father’s
impossible emergence. Uncanny marvelous pathways opened up by way of their lacking in time
and space and definition—their lack of what Hortense Spillers calls their gender specificity,
gendered integrity (66). I add to Spillers’ foundational text that Black fathers, lacking in
prescription or function under New World slavery, created out of this space not a dead-end but a
foundation for possibility. In this space of no-space, Black fathers live lives of spiritual, tactile,
emotional wealth in our worlds, which provide an alternative, I contend, to our closed senses.
Yes, Black fathers are a peculiar occasion, emergent, and their homemaking is a peculiar
practice. Homemaking becomes akin to crafting, artistry, claiming space for connection in “the
last place they thought of” for a Black father (McKittrick 37). And yet I do appreciate home as it
is largely imagined in the life of Blackness– the transnational, the national, of claims and
longings for land and places both material and imagined. Home as Africa, home as somewhere in
the American South that one grows nostalgic for when boll weevil and lynching “sets us flowin”
during the Great Migrations North and West, to reference Farah Jasmine Griffin (3). Home as a
tenement slum, a ghetto. Yes, home as land that Black folks were wrested from forcibly or left
for a myriad of racist, racialized, economically fueled reasons. And too, I appreciate home as a
house– a fixed structure, an architectural structure supported with iron, wood, stone brick,
mortar. This is the patriarchal definition that sets “Man” as the home’s rightful ruler; and this
emerges for criticism quite often in relation to Black fathers that do emerge in literature. From

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August Wilson’s Troy Maxson to Toni Morrison’s Macon Dead and even to Alice Walker’s
Mr.__., there is an effort on the part of Black fathers to recover the Black home by way of Man’s
geography–in a gravitation towards house keys, house ownership that leaves them spiritually
evacuated.
But for those beings, those Black fathers who could not own property, who were property
themselves—for those fathers stripped from home in its myriad meanings–home as land, as
family, as mother tongue–again, what can home mean? How can these Black men unfathered,
father still, and make home in a terrible place? And not simply make home as a house
hegemonically masculine, puffed out with their essence or their vision for a rising Black nation,
but home in a queerer, subtler sense.
Again, to reiterate from my introduction, (and it bears repetition here in length and not in
footnote) I do focus here on Black cis men as fathers in particular–understanding that not all
Black men are fathers and not all fathers are cis men. But given the ways that cis male fathers are
often held within critical discourse suspiciously, or shall I say upheld as always already
heteropatriarchal in function and output, I endeavor to give them more love, more conscientious
attention. I endeavor to imagine them more expansively as sites of great flaw and also great
potential before moving outward to the myriad enfleshments of Black folk. The late bell hooks
says this about men, and my intervention wants this for our fathers: “to create loving men, we
must love males” (139). To love the father, we must try to understand him.
The work here is not to offer a new definition of home. The work preceding me in Black
feminist studies and its queer of color offspring holds a wide-spanning knowledge. The work
here is to draw Black fathers a little closer to these visions–to un-nail them from patriarchal
domestic concerns and understandings. Certainly, patriarchy is only one way to comprehend

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Black fathers in the home–certainly there is more to Black fathers than a project of reclaiming
manhood and ruling our households like a nation under their feet.
3
Certainly, Black fathers, I
contend, do want to belong; they desire to create a home–to craft a home with all of its intimate
intricacies, with us.
In this vein, this first dissertation chapter will begin with an overview of Black fathers’
troublesome relationship to home–aimed at foregrounding the problem that the Black paternal
project/object presents–the problem of the Black paternal object, which will appear with
variation in each subsequent chapter. It outlines salient texts in sociology and history that have
colored our approach to this theme, before breaking open into African American literature, to
present two men’s fresh revisions of a threadbare trope, by way of Colson Whitehead’s The
Underground Railroad and Barry Jenkins’ cinematic adaptation. I turn to Whitehead and
Jenkins' timely and contemporary works, because they enable us to examine Black fathers’ home
function before Emancipation. Indeed, I employ their work to chart Black fathers’ legacies of
non-hegemonic masculinities before the state recognized the formal end of bondage.

3
Despite overlooking the father or perhaps giving up the search endeavor, Black discourse has paid ample attention to Black
men’s strivings for home—and often how this has played out on an external register. It has, in other words, focused on Black
manhood’s yearning for home as it pertains to the national, transnational, and material. And in this vein, Black men’s dreams of
home have been far-reaching, encompassing what Robin D.G. Kelly calls the fleeting and actualized “freedom dreams” of Black
return to African homeland, to property ownership of land and home that Toni Morrison problematizes in her literary odyssey,
Song of Solomon. Maurice Wallace’s work draws us a bit closer to what I am getting at. In his writing on Black men’s veiled
longings of and for home, he asks a most insightful question: “What of [Black] men who linger longer indoors?” Indeed, if the
Western world has been guided by a sexist binary logic that places man outdoors and woman as the home’s rightful ruler, what
do we make of the curious cadre of Black men who yearn for home and tarry a touch longer inside its walls? In his survey,
Wallace underscores the actual architectonics of the house in Black life, as a reflection of Black masculine consciousness.
Building off of the notion that the soul of a place is the soul of a man who occupies it, Wallace sutures the structuring of Black
houses as reflective of Black men’s interior longing. And this structural reflection becomes most intriguing to Wallace in the case
of the home’s closet, the home’s study, the cellar, the basement. These modest and often darkened spaces of seclusion are where
Black men’s subjectivity can bloom and also where Black men, outside of the racist eye, can shed their secrets. Yet, what is
brilliant about Wallace’s work, is his scaling down of home to the interior—to the purported “womanly” inner space of the
domestic zone and Black men’s placement within it.
But, if as Maurice Wallace says, Black masculinity can only flourish in its descent—can only be alive and light in the darkened
enclosure of the closet, prison, cellar as illumined within Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Jean Toomer’s Cane, then what do
we make of curious case of Black fatherhood in the home? For surely the isolation of these various spaces, sequestered from the
virulence of the white hand, is often about Black manhood nursing only itself—about manhood in singularity. What then is the
case of domestic space and Black fathers who must exist not only for self but others.

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Furthermore, I place their work here to prime the reader’s senses for budding forms of Black
paternity’s queer-feminist or peculiar poetries. This chapter rests in the contention that through
these imaginative landscapes, Black fathers labor by way of and alongside Black women’s
epistemologies of the domestic, offering us queer visions of Black paternal belonging with us
and most importantly, for us. Black homemaking is an endless work so that we might belong to
each other–breaking free from slavery’s severing, intrusive, bifurcating, and deathly intention.
This belonging engenders space for hope–hope for Black children’s freedom and hope for Black
father’s freedom too. Like the trace of Jacobs’ father and the unnamed and literate ex-slave, this
movement to craft spaces of belonging, are what Hartman calls “beautiful experiment[s]”—
wayward practices on the part of our fathers to be unmappable, unlocatable, ungeographic. Let
us imagine and insist on the endless work to transform and make meaning of the Black home—to
maybe one day come together, live together, embrace each other “snug and wide open,” without
fear of anybody hurting us (Morrison 9).
Black Fathers and Home: A (Sociological and Historical) Dilemma
The question of how Black fathers have found home, have found their way home, have
made something of it–has always been stopped in the face of a resounding problem. Census
statistics show that “in 2020, there were about 4.25 million Black families in the United States
with a single mother. This is an increase from 1990 levels, when there were about 3.4 million
Black families with a single mother” (U.S. Census Bureau 2021). There is little space for further
nuance when the question of Black fathers in the home, has always drowned in abysmal
statistics–has always been wound so tightly around his presumed and mathematically
corroborated absence. Before navigating Black fathers making home for themselves, their kin,
their Black children, how do we contend with predominant themes that understand the Black

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home as dysfunctional, socially and materially dilapidated and ridden with fatherlacking (Spillers
80). Black fathers are always tethered to the outside–never belonging–again, the Black father in
relation to our household is a shorthand for deadbeat/deadweight.
For at least a century, academic disciplines, but namely those of backgrounds
sociological, anthropological, and historical, have converged on this point of tension— the Black
home as a broken thing with the Black father dangling somewhere on the exterior. This is an
alien household figure–at best a transient presence–a “male house guest” without “respect” or
“responsibility” to quote Du Bois’ bristling phrasing at the turn of the 20th century. The Black
home as fatherlacking is the prime entry point into any discussion of the Black family unit, with
literature on the Black household hitting a cacophonous rise, following the publication of Senator
Patrick Moynihan’s infamous Report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”.
This report by Patrick Moynihan was disseminated like a state of emergency at the apex of Civil
Rights in 1965, just as Black people marched across the expanse of American legal-political
terrain toward a citizenship more fully realized. What is so striking about Moynihan is that he
distracts America from the faults of their travestied democratic nation, by casting our eyes at
Black home function–libeling the Black family as a “tangle of pathology” (Moynihan 30). Thus,
the Black family–the Black home–despite dignified attempts to attain freedom on a national
plane is framed yet again for the public eye as lascivious, backwards, and disorganized. Citing
statistics of Black underachievement and poverty coupled with prior, more rigorous academic
findings, Moynihan concludes that Black families in America are the “principal source of the
most aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior.” Although Moynihan does concede that Black
people did not establish this social deficit, he holds that their patterns in domestic space

37
perpetuate its materially and otherwise impoverishing effects–thereby stagnating themselves
amid a progressive and progressing American civilization.
Glossing the work of Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier in particular, Moynihan
centers his attention on matrifocality or the maternal centeredness of the Black home from the
antebellum era into its afterlife. To offer a grounding definition, matrifocality is “a system of
familial relations focused upon women in their role as mothers, with an associated lack of
emphasis upon the conjugal relationship” (Smith 56). Debates over matrifocal origins in Black
American life abound but are lively; they spill out to include possibilities of matrilineal cultural
retentions from West Africa as well as the brutal withering of Black family formation under
slavery’s duress. For certainly slavery doled out a host of traumatic experiences that
compromised Black will to make home with a Black male presence—trauma not limited to Black
women’s rape, Black men’s economic insecurity, Black men’s demoralization over family
separation, and higher Black male mortality. Yet in a distortion of Frazier’s findings, Moynihan
points to this social phenomenon of matrifocality in Black households as the principal culprit for
Black social lack. Indeed, targeting Black households that are female-headed, he ultimately
caricatures for the reader, an overbearing and masculinized Black mother figure—a Black
mother who ultimately fails Black kinship, by not only transgressing proper gendered norms, but
for also effeminizing and alienating Black fathers. Through Moynihan’s academic-political work
Blackness, again, becomes bound—represented as a weary world or perhaps an unraveled home,
of strong Black mothers and feeble runaway Black fathers (Moynihan 75).
Certainly “The Report” is flawed in many respects. And yet, it is so polarizing and
incendiary in its claims that it has spawned intellectual conversations about the Black household
that persist until this very moment. Of note are Black feminists, who were troubled over

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Moynihan’s castigation of mothers and “othermothers”—or what Patricia Hill Collins terms the
rich historical network of Black surrogate mothers, aunts, grandmothers, that have been endemic
to the Black home’s persistence (178). By way of Black feminist literature, intersectional theory,
political activism, Black feminists spoke back to Moynihan and continue to shoot through the
misogynoir. Yet a significant portion of socio-political formations and intellectual leanings on
the other end have been and continue to be strikingly empathetic to Black men, often at Black
women’s literal, emotional, corporeal expense.
Given the Black home’s salience as a gender charged debate, which really, flattens the
potential and what is at stake, it is paramount to return and survey in more depth, the discourse in
Moynihan’s wake. Indeed, the following will locate the Black father, “the male house guest”,
within this historical, sociological, literary landscape, split largely into two flattened camps or
spatial logics—one a damnation and one defense, but always, one sees, in the shadow of
whiteness (white standards for making home). This is by no means an extensive take, but it
offers contours of the sense of Moynihan that has(not) made. Yes, this is about gender
dysfunction, gendered severance—never gendered communion– always in the face of white
patriarchy’s looming demand/hand. For as Frantz Fanon states in Black Skin, White Masks, “the
white family is the educating and training ground for entry into society” – the “guardian of a
certain structure” that Black homes/Black fathers and mothers always stand outside of (127).
As aforementioned, the legal foundation for racial slavery in Anglo-America was
constituted in the subjugation of Black women and instantiation of Black women as synonymous
with the Black home. The 1662 Virginia slave law followed by similar slave state codes, which
demanded that slave children follow the mother’s line, rendered the fate of the Black home as

39
such–the family unit reduced to and conceivable only as Black mother and child—which
(dis)placed the Black father legally, spatially, etc, on the outside.
Left with Black paternal extraction as social reality, historians like Deborah Gray White
speak back to the investment in the father’s house. In her groundbreaking historical venture,
Ar’n’t I A Woman, White cites how enslaved men and women were often paired in order to
increase production and profit; with the master intervening at the level of reproduction. Black
fathers and Black mothers could be little more than breeder—out of control of the very means of
regulating home, marriage, sexual bonds, and kinship. Further, without minimizing fathers’
roles, White celebrates Black women stating that: “motherhood bolstered the status of women in
the slave society” (142). White delineates women’s endless work–their moving labor of love
through the rigor of daycare, nursing, spinning and gardening, and even vigilance during
courtship to maintain bonds-households.
What comes to mind first is Herbert Gutman’s voluminous work, Black Family in Slavery
and Freedom 1750-1925–published eleven years in the wake Moynihan. This comprehensive
work stands fervidly in the canon as a corrective agenda. Pushing against a series of works that
corroborated Moynihan and cited a Black household in perennial decay, Gutman counters with a
revisionist history of Black familial liveliness, strikingly so, even before Emancipation. Gutman
asserts that not only were Black households existent under slavery, but they were impressively
resilient—withstanding the strain of slavery through their capacity to remain adaptable (3-44).
Gutman’s work is crucial for a myriad of reasons—firstly, in his debunking of white paternalism,
that emerges through earlier historian Stanley Elkin’s Sambo theory (Elkins 1959). Commingling
with works of Moynihan and the like, Elkins is attributed for offering a pervasive thematic,
which claimed that plantation bound Black men were suspended in a childlike dependency as a

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result of the slave master’s absolute power. Gutman’s work not only refutes Black masculine
infantilization but works to carefully place Black men at the head of house—a house that he
portrays as both durable and dual-headed formed largely without white paternalist influence.
Although Gutman’s work is a stunning feat, his scholarship remains devoted to
portraying the Black home as nuclear, male headed, and self-determined. This is apparent from
the work’s opening lines, which of course commence with that unforgettable narrative of an
enslaved father writing to his estranged wife before the Civil War. Taking the title for his first
chapter from this painful love letter, “Send me Some of the Children’s Hair” Gutman calls us to
meditate on an enslaved and forcibly alienated Black father and ex-husband who has since
remarried yet writes his former wife in anguish—pleading for a loc from each of his children’s
hair. Importantly, Gutman’s work highlights Black fathers’ and husbands’ maintenance of Black
intimacies, amid precarious circumstances that fracture the household. Furthermore, he
underscores the emotional attachment of Black men to Black women and children, which strains
against opaque narratives of Black male commodities sold down the river or Black male
fugitives freedom bound. Even if spatially distanced, out of bounds of the literal house, there is
through Black fathers’ efforts, a connectedness. Even in the face of severance, Gutman is
insistent on Blacks’ ability to maintain “home”. Gutman offers a tale of Black home–a Black
domestic landscape that triumphs.
Yet, for all of these theoretical innovations—boxing us out of thinking through Blackness
only in relation to white paternalism and pathological form—Gutman’s work relies on
recuperating the Black home through what we call now, a heteronormative lens. That is, he
methodically centers Black maleness, resounding his contemporary, Eugene Genovese’s
interrogative cry: what kind of evidence and how much of it is needed to convince skeptics that

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the essential story of black men in slavery lay with the many who overcame every possible
hardship and humiliation to stand fast to their families (485-486)?! One can imagine that he does
so in order to displace the twentieth century’s persistent theme of single-headed, loosely
cohering, mother-headed slave cabins, which arguably, stunt Black people’s lives. Albeit
historian Tera Hunter relays a much more realistic picture—that bigamy, adultery, promiscuity,
homosexuality, breeding, and the like went unchecked in the slave world (241). There is ripe
possibility for queer imaginings of kinship that Hunter leaves space for–queer imaginings of
kinship and being that I will return to later.
Certainly, many historical works that do engage fatherhood, imagine Black paternity in
the context of a family unit—never singularly and with assiduity but always an addendum in a
holistic survey of redeeming the deleterious Black household, by way of Black manhood. This
framework reflects a constant capitulation to heteronormative and patriarchal kinship
renderings—with a model of white middle class, male headed, nuclear, with solidified home
boundaries as a starting and end point. In other words, white households are still the persisting
standard for social appraisal. One sees this enduringly even in more contemporary surveys such
as the groundbreaking sociological survey of 2014, Doing the Best I Can. Although scholars,
Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson, set out to study and shed light on urban, working-class
fathers’ attempts to parent in spite of incarcerated pasts, low income, and separation from their
children’s mothers, one sees that even in the very title of their work, “best'' is the unreachable
benchmark—and the benchmark is synonymous with the standard set by the white middle class
heteronormative house. This is the social fitness for which everyone strives—a household
headed by the authority and financial success of the patriarch.

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The Underground Railroad and the Black Mother’s Home Visions
Black literature in stark contrast has been a space where the Black home and our fathers
in it, find a refuge for breathing—find refuge for movement and depth outside of a static
shorthand—of “problem” and dysfunction. Black literature contains a reservoir for remembering
and imagining Black home and our fathers relation to it, outside of what Katherine McKittrick
calls the mathematics of Blackness (17)–outside of the logs and lists, and numbers and statistics
that stand in for full emotional beings. Literature surmounts the reigning fraction: two-thirds of
homes, single headed by mothers. Two-thirds of Black homes with fathers gone. Black
households “doing their best” in the face of more respectable models.
Black literature carves out an origin story for the Black home with little use for
Moynihan–weaves together bits of historical record, oral history, folktales, art, and memory–to
give us an alternative vision of our houses in all of their queer character and enactments. Perhaps
the most predominant example of home delineations during American chattel slavery is Toni
Morrison’s Beloved, which tells the haunting tale of a household wounded by a fugitive slave
mother’s commitment of infanticide. But what I want to offer here is a fresh evaluation of Black
home in the literary canon–rendered through the eyes of a Black male writer, Colson Whitehead.
How are we, in a contemporary context, framing home and our fathers’ possibilities within and
for it?
Whitehead’s celebrated novel, The Underground Railroad, might be conceived of as a
Black feminist text, inspired largely by the narrative of Harriet Jacobs aforementioned. It traces
the extraordinary escape of a Black girl from the depths of the plantation towards freedom along
a literal railroad underground–a Black girl yearning to escape the hell of her antebellum home, in

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order to find home elsewhere with and through her mother. The Black girl, Cora, encounters the
haunting of the plantation wherever she arrives, however. Indeed, she encounters bondage even
in putatively free spaces. This migratory phenomenon of the plantation is what Katherine
McKittrick names, “plantation futures” —the geographic or spatial haunting of bondage that
trails Black bodies’ traverse of other dwelling regions even in slavery’s afterlife (2-3). Meaning
that even after Cora’s flight she faces enslavement: forced sterilization and encasement–
“playing the slave” for a museum in the free state of South Carolina, confinement to an attic
crawl space amid virulent racial violence in North Carolina, and an encroaching whiteness upon
a Black farm that is too free, in Whitehead’s vision of Indiana. Indeed, here there is a thematic
scaffolding of Black home as always haunted by the dynamics of what Christina Sharpe refers to
as “the hold” —the floating specter of the slave ship hold, which surfaces on the plantation, in
ghettos, prisons, etc (69).
I find then, in my rehearsal of the novel’s deceptive intricacy that really, Whitehead’s
antebellum charting of the Black home is a deeply spatial project, which carries the influence of
Black feminist work in the field of geography. It is through mapping the Black mother and her
movement across time-space that Whitehead ultimately offers for us a working template–a
potential for thinking through homemaking as practice of Black feminist freedom. Yes, this is
where we arrive. Home here is very much about belonging, hope, and transformation, but
specifically about how these states of being fold into Whitehead’s understanding of freedom.
Indeed, for Whitehead freedom is home. Yet despite the brilliance of Whitehead’s vision
rendered by way of Black women’s epistemologies, its home sightings, and sites for the Black
paternal leave us deeply wanting. With regards to home, Black fathers are to be sighted alive, but
sited on a different terrain entirely, and although refreshing, benevolent in their emergence in our

44
homes, we must ask ourselves why. Why such a disparate space and why such a capitulation to
home for our fathers conflated only again to ruling a Black nation.
Whitehead’s literary opus is grounded in the Black home as a wounded, powerful, and
deeply intimate place–routed through the wound and the power–the moving memory of the
symbolic Black mother. It is a literary opus where Black fathers find only subtle breath–
flowering in the end as community leaders. For first and foremost, this is a tale of matri-
circularity. The novel opens with a spotlight on Ajarry, grandmother of the protagonist who is
kidnapped off of the Gold Coast of Africa, brutally orphaned, and “sold so many times you
would think she was cursed” (5). On a string of plantations, she then bears five children with
two unnamed men whom she outlives–and another unnamed man who is eventually sold. Having
lost nearly every conceivable type of home, she deems running away from the plantation zone
where she is constrained, impossible. Thus Ajarry, clinging to the only home she has left,
resigns. Ajarry dies amid the bobbing cotton fields (3-8).
Through this journeying with Ajarry, Whitehead unfolds with sparse prose the Black
home’s fundamental injury–its position amid what historian of Black enslaved women’s
everyday lives and resistance, Stephanie Camp, outlines as a “geography of containment.” It is
not simply that Ajarry is physically constrained from making home elsewhere, but that
psychological violences, brutal practices, ‘laws, customs, and ideals [come] together to
systematically constrict her homeward journey through the establishment of [the] slaveholders'
sense of mastery” (Camp 8). The Black home emerges as such, through the meddling white
hand, which renders it indistinguishable from economic demands. Again, it is Katherine
McKittrick who delineates the slave home as a by-product really, of an international economic
establishment. For the plantation is not constructed for the slave beyond enclosing them within

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its borders as hands of production. The plantation is not a space of retreat, refuge, shelter then,
but a self-sustaining town. Consider its typical layout: “a main house, an office, a carriage house,
barns, a slave auction block, a garden area, slave quarters and kitchen, stables, a cemetery, and a
building or buildings through which crops are prepared, such as a mill or refinery” (McKittrick
8). With mastered subtlety, Whitehead illuminates how the home represents, for the trafficked, a
place where they are first and foremost commodities. Black people are not afforded the
opportunity to grow and spread out in space or be rocked gently, but rather, crushed into a
nowhere zone of absolute vulnerability.
The Black home as an instrument of the global economy that casts Blackness out crushed
and homeless–naked and dishonored–into what Orlando Patterson calls the realm of “social
death,” bores into our genetic memory–a genetic memory of this terrifying house, which houses
the reality of our unbeing. Under the geography of Man, it is never able to assemble completely,
never sacred, never afforded intactness as a possibility. It is never purely a “cradle” that holds
softly, lulls softly like an extension of our mother’s womb. Here I am reminded of continental
philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s illuminating work on the poetics of the house– where he
elaborates the house like a mother’s protective covering (43). But of course, a Black shelter is
not like a Man’s site of comfort, nurturing, where a mother can hold and shield us with her
bosom– but rather a space where the Black mother battles death. Cora carries the heavy load of
this accumulated geographic knowledge–even more so than her grandmother, who, despite
losing her motherland of Africa, was not abandoned by her mother in the flesh. But we see that
even encircled by this home hell, Cora still strives towards making room for her refuge, for
dreaming, for art. Through the flesh of Black women, Whitehead fleshes out the ingenious
expanse of the Black home imaginary as a subtle brilliance. More pointedly, Cora makes room

46
for refuge by creating unthinkable geographies for home–in, to paraphrase McKittrick, the last
places they might think of (37).
Thus, even amid a regime that froze Black women in its landscape, young Black women
like Cora fashioned what Edward Said calls and Camp adopts in her rendering of bondswomen,
“rival geographies'' or “alternative ways of knowing and using plantation and southern space that
conflicted with planters’ ideals and demands”–alternative ways of knowing and charting home
that conflicted with planters’ dominion (Camp 7). This is what Stephanie Camp might call
Cora’s “third body:” a homespace that extends from her very flesh, beyond the public and private
forces of control exerted upon Blackness by the antebellum stranglehold—a homespace for
fugitive pleasure and quotidian disruption (68). This third body seems related to what bell hooks
calls “homeplace” where Black women transform the feminine contours of the domestic into a
more forceful site of feminist resistance. Indeed, this is what Katherine McKittrick’s work
honors–-the third body and homeplace as a “Black [women’s] sense of place” (948).
Indeed, amid the impossibility of home, Cora makes it possible nevertheless–in modes
that might strike us with peculiarity. Modes unfamiliar yet disarming—queer, enchanting. Cora
enacts the third body, homeplace, a sense of her own geography and through that–belonging.
Even in her plantation home, she tends to her mother’s garden that she left behind started by her
grandmother, Ajarry, in their cabin’s backyard. It is a meager ground–but Cora tends to it and
nurtures life and connection amid the paltry square footage–every Sunday. Every holy day she
makes home with her fingers–evoking her maternal line’s memory. This is a home outdoors and
Cora defends this home armed with a weapon. Thus, belonging becomes tactile, spiritual, as this
space symbolizes vitality and artistry and communion of the maternal flesh surrounded by death–
even when she is thrown in the Hob on the slave cabins’ outskirts with the other lot of

47
undesirable women. Even in the Hob, which might remind us of the utopian homeplace where
those plagued with unbelonging find belonging in the convent, as it is imagined in Toni
Morrison’s Paradise. Both “homes”, the garden and the Hob created through Cora, represent a
disruption of Man’s geographies, that engulfed, displaced, dispossessed her grandmother along
the slave journey–that threatened to bifurcate her and yet she arms herself with weapons, seams
herself together/to others, and plants herself anew–with knowledge rooted in maternal memory.
This concerted effort on the part of Cora, to make a Black home for herself out of a death
zone crystallizes through the novel’s most vibrant symbol; indeed, a literal underground railroad.
Taking the historical metaphor for a network of anti-slavery activists assisting fugitives to
freedom quite literally, when Cora escapes from the predominant space of containment,
Whitehead propels Cora along in her odyssey to various sites of America by way of this mighty
underground black freight train and its rickety tracks. Referencing the work of Neil Roberts here,
if there is any instance of marronage in the text, it is through Cora’s strivings and not the Black
masculine. It is through Cora’s movement within and by way of what John Carlos Rowe calls
this “mobile home” (2022)
I am of tarrying in Cora’s formation because I want to emphasize that the Black mother
symbolically is the key, the seed to home. She holds the artistry of finding belonging in a
withering world, that is always what Morrison calls the endless work to feel at once the thrill of
Black communion and borderlessness (absolute safety).
Finally, in Cora’s final stop on the railroad—her arrival at the Black settlement of the
Valentine Farm, Whitehead leaves the reader with bones for imagining a Black home ignited by
the presence of the Black paternal form. This is where the figurative Black mother meets the

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Black father’s home. It appears that the Black father, for Whitehead, is unthinkable on the
plantation, but emerges here on the outside in something more akin to a house. A house of and
for a future Black America. Indeed, importantly, Black men occupy a different Black geography
entirely, in Whitehead’s world of the Black home; and we are left to ponder the significance of
these spatially disparate home visions.
On the Valentine Farm, Black paternity and home materialize clearest in three
patriarchal forms—taking on the model of a holy trinity. This does not appear to be informed by
any maternal memory, but it does feel spiritually ordained–a theme that I will engage in the
succeeding chapter on the conflation of Black fathers, preachers, and God. But focusing here on
Black fathers and home, which of course anticipates, overlaps succeeding chapters, the father
emerges and can only emerge in our house as a leader in another country. Leader of a free nation
or a free community in a liberated place. Not entirely in a maroon zone that is seized and fought
for tensely–but in a land that is free only in that it is recognized under the master’s law as such–a
nominally free state territory.
Black home here is not quite nurtured but led by the political ideals of its figurative
fathers, and is represented through the characters of Elijah Lander, Mingo, and John Valentine.
John Valentine, the settlement’s creator, emerges as a benevolent patriarch— who ultimately
uses his ability to pass for white, to a Black advantage. Purchasing his wife Gloria and his
children in Virginia, he relocates his home to Indiana with more of an enterprising vision.
However, over time his work transforms into service for the Black community—repurposing this
soil into a new home—a Black home vision. Nihad Farooq, literary scholar, reminds the reader
that Whitehead's rendering of the Valentine Farm echoes real life settlements—“new black
community networks and alliances freed from the yoke of literal enslavement, though not always

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freed from the pervasive and predatory structure of white surveillance that surrounded them”
(95) Black home under Black men’s thumb becomes for Whitehead a cipher for the making of a
new Black nation–home is conflated here conventionally with a broader utopian image of racial
progress, community solidarity, and Black men as a stand in for Blackness at large.
If John is the father, the Black Godlike figure in what Nihad Farooq recognizes as this
novel’s Black Eden–then Elijah Lander is seated at his father’s right hand. Holding aspects of
W.E.B. Du Bois and his forefather Frederick Douglass, Lander is described as a “highly
educated biracial man” and great orator, esteemed on the abolitionist circuit. Interestingly,
however, Lander might be figured as the progenitor of even more capacious ideological
offerings, as noted by historian Manisha Sinha. Sinha writes that “the figure of Elijah Lander,
whose lecture at Valentine’s farm is a highpoint, does not just represent the great black
abolitionist Frederick Douglass, as many reviewers have speculated, but the entire interracial
abolitionist movement. Indeed, Lander: “like David Walker he has published an Appeal, like
William Lloyd Garrison he has authored a “Declaration of the Rights of the American Negro,”
run afoul of Maryland law, and been nearly lynched in the streets of Boston.” Mingo, the last
“race man” in this triad is presented as a foil to the others. Perhaps at a disservice to the well-
intentioned Booker T. Washington, upon which his character is built, Mingo is an exclusionary
paternal figure who is repulsed by fugitives, criminals, and the like who find refuge at Valentine.
I detail the characteristics of these three patriarchs to highlight the formulation of
Whitehead’s novel, which offers a grand vision of Black male race leaders making Black home
at large–Black home as Black worldmaking in a community sense. These political-philosophical
debates of our figurative forefathers are significant, fresh, important. But the question of whether
or not these Black patriarchal strivings to establish home are non-hegemonic, is a question that

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proves important to this chapter’s end and this dissertation more generally. For here Whitehead
seems aligned with more conventional masculine representations that might trend toward
respectable leadership, and too, what Hazel Carby in her monumental feminist critique calls
“race men.” Race men, or Black male leaders of the race such as Miles Davis and the towering
Du Bois aforementioned, represent what Carby cuts down as a national project of recuperating
Blackness by way of Black men with many holes in it. It is an effort to redeem Blackness
through Black men that amounts to the representation of a threadbare masculinity–a masculinity
worn out, hollow, patriarchal, phallocentric, excluding women’s voices, and in need of new
stitches. Carby’s important text is one to which I will return in a subsequent chapter where I
analyze Du Bois alongside other Black feminist scholars with more grace, but here I touch upon
it to suggest that despite the depiction of a type of Black father in this new zone of home, the
rhetoric and representation of these figural fathers are not offering the reader something novel.
Here is the Black father never grander, filling up the Black house and leaving little room for
others.
What Whitehead misses perhaps, or perhaps cannot contain within this project are the
ways in which his stunning Black feminist renderings of home can inform Black fatherhood as
well. How do Black fathers within the plantation and the larger antebellum experience or what
Saidiya Hartman calls slavery’s afterlife (6), experience the power of homemaking by way of
Black women–by way of the thematic chorus of this dissertation–the “female within” (Spillers
80). For the white patriarchal hand still informs and lords over seemingly benign, righteous,
“good” depictions of our Black fathers’ house in Whitehead’s Valentine sanctuary. Take for
instance this:

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When Valentine inherited his white father's estate (the first public acknowledgment of
paternity “outside the walls of their house”) and enlisted a few freedmen to farm potatoes
on his new and sparsely populated land in Virginia, people assumed that they were his
slaves. When he “purchased” his wife, Gloria, “no one thought twice. … Only John,
Gloria, and a judge on the other side of the state knew she was free.” As for his choice to
set his own sons free, the neighbors found it to be a “broad-minded,” if somewhat
“wasteful,” decision. And although Valentine was “out” to his fellow settlers in both
Virginia and Indiana as black, he “did not disabuse” his white neighbors in either state of
“their assumptions” about him (Whitehead 263).

Does it matter, for instance, that John Valentine’s utopian farm is financed through an
inheritance from his white father? And further, that he works the ambiguity of his skin and
features, to purchase his family’s freedom? This passage is reminiscent of an arresting
introduction from Christina Sharpe’s, Monstrous Intimacies where she cites a biracial woman’s
feeling of freedom that is incited only through her white father’s paternal recognition (14). If the
white father is the gateway to freedom–to feeling at home in this world–what can be said of the
Black father’s position?
Perhaps it is the reality that the legacy of white paternalism and white patriarchy in the
New World cannot be disavowed. It cannot be disavowed, but neither can the touch of the Black
mother that forms new modes of being in all Black life. A more fitting question for the remaining
dissertation then becomes, how might this shadowy figure of the white father be turned away
from—in Black fathers’ march towards new visions of Black homemaking and becoming. In

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their march towards finding a space for belonging and making room for hope through the home,
how have Black fathers, the peculiar house guest in the home and the world, contribute
alternatively, richly, queerly to their Black kin?
One can contend that Barry Jenkins’ film adaptation strives in this direction—of offering
capacious visions of Black fathers—queer visions that imagine new strains of not only Black
men’s place, but Black father’s queer workings in the home unconflated with manhood and
patriarchy. Again, I do focus here on Black cis men as fathers in particular–understanding that
not all Black men are fathers and not all fathers are cis men. How can these Black men
unfathered, father still, and make home in a terrible place? And not simply make home as a
house hegemonically masculine, puffed out with their essence or their vision for a rising Black
nation, but home in a queerer sense.

Jenkins’ and Black Fathers’ Queer Potential for/in Black Homes
Barry Jenkins’ cinematic adaptation of The Underground Railroad, is, in the words of
New York Times columnist James Poniewozik, a “series of stunning visual compositions” where
he “has figured out how to funnel more feeling through the camera than anyone else” (1). I turn
for the remainder of the chapter then, to Jenkins’ mastery of distilling Black emotion through
vision, and how emotion might open up Black fathers’ efforts to make Black refuge possible
beneath the peculiar institution’s twisting hand. If Whitehead offers the bones for Black fathers
and home, albeit set off in another country, Jenkins work fills out the form further—to (re)make

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the Black household, born out of violence and spatial severance, into something strikingly queer
in appearance. It is not simply about space, but something ephemeral, moving, healing, without
walls, fugitive, borderless–home as less embodied or material than a gesture toward belonging,
even if it cannot always arrive at home’s threshold. And yet this gesture is paramount in that it is
a turning away from white patriarchal sense of home; it is a refusal of Man’s territorial
domination and his meddling demands. It is a turning toward what is outlined in Black women’s
theory as home—-and in particular Toni Morrison’s refreshing definition.
Inspired by the work of scholar Mark Tabone who notes a “utopian impulse animating
the work of Toni Morrison that is best manifest in the figure of “home,” I follow his exceptional
distillation of Morrison’s understanding of home across several of her works, but namely her
later novel that hosts this theme in the novel’s title. This is a formulation of home as more than
material structure, more than space but principally philosophical, affective, and relational.
Because really in Home, as Frank the protagonist tries to find a home in the dull and painful
segregated world of America– his little sister Cee is his home–when he rescues her from the hold
of a white doctor’s malpractice and holds her tenderly. This is home as a shelter that wraps
around Black folk’s souls–an incidence of exquisite relational beauty but most importantly, an
experience of safety and belonging and hope —an experience where you can be and become
with other kin—- in a suspended time-place where “nobody’s going to hurt you” (Morrison 9)
Nobody’s going to hurt you. This is home as a spiritual sanctuary where everyone and anyone
can be redeemed. Even if, in the words of Morrison, not everybody likes you. The greatest thing
that home belonging can offer is hope. If home is done right, it is the most reliable space where
seeds of hope can be fostered and nurtured.

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Before delving into Jenkins’ elaboration of Black fathers’ home potential, I want to talk
about similarities between The Underground Railroad in cinematic and in written form, given
that one informs the other. Both Whitehead and Jenkins paint the plantation home space as a
Black deathworld—an extension of what Achille Mbembe, following Orlando Patterson’s
groundbreaking theory of social death marks infamously as the necropolitical foundation of US
chattel slavery. Meaning this “zone of nonbeing” (13) to put it in Fanon’s words, where Cora
resides, dictates “how some people may live and how some must die”. This life at home is what
Agamben might call here, “bare” (16)–only preserved to the extent that it serves the slave
regime’s production. However, to approximate the housing condition of the plantation more
closely there is, of course, even more than this undoing of the Black home into a kind of
geographic nowhere as McKittrick asserts, which goes hand in hand with the demands of a bare
capitalist and global economy. There are its psycho-affective, ineffable contours, which split the
plantation simultaneously in Black life and consciousness, as the only known world for many,
and yet, most certainly home’s negation.
More than presenting this space economically hemmed up and precarious, what Jenkins
is able to capture on screen is this ghastly feeling that reminds us of what postcolonial scholar
Homi Bhaba calls, “the unhomely”, a condition that provides tension between what is possible
for Black home and what is foreclosed under antebellum’s duress and the afterlife of slavery
(445). Bhaba, in his arresting piece, describes the unhomely as more than homelessness or
displacement, more than a matter of property or spatial loss, but, a sublime emotional terror in
ones dwelling place—an uncanny intrusion in the home of something most frightening because it
is at once familiar and foreign (445). Bhaba elaborates this mainly as a postcolonial condition–
again the looming white hand in the home of those diasporic, displaced, exiled bodies who must

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contend with lingering utterances of colonial violence in their abodes. But Bhaba’s work really
streams from Toni Morrison’s theorizations; American chattel slavery told through the eyes of
this Black feminist writer is central to his formulation. For there is something particular about the
Black trafficked—actively unhomed from innumerable villages and rezoned in a gaggle with
innumerable tongues through the transatlantic voyage and slave trade. Indeed, there is something
particular about the Black trafficked, whose return to a home somewhere unknown in Africa is
impossible (nearly, ostensibly) and endeavors to make home anew outside of a plantation
deathworld impossible (nearly, ostensibly) as well. The Black trafficked host a very particular
experience of what Bhaba scaffolds as the seething intrusion of the outside, of history, of a
terrible present into the home’s fragile borders. From the Middle Passage onward the unhomely
hangs over the Door of no Return, and infested ships, thorny crop fields, auction blocks,
separation of kin, and the invasion of cabins with masters, patrollers, overseers. This horror–this
feeling is paramount–this felt experience of such unraveling alienation in the face of one’s only
familiar residences is what Moynihan misses when he blankets our families with a mere trope, of
overbearing mothers and absent dads. This is the paradoxical emotional state, the genetic
affective memory of the unhomely that Bhaba names by way of Toni Morrison and Jenkins
evokes through his moving art.
The unhomely materializes through Jenkins’ plantation vision as searing and
otherworldly–more of a shock of the white hand in the home than a creeping or seething. It is
awe evoking –malevolently supernatural–emblazoned in those blazing white cotton fields, which
stretch beautifully for miles in the miniseries. The viewer senses the unhomely through Cora’s
estrangement–the frames that present her still and singular and lonely alongside frames of her
being ripped from her slave cabin as it is scrubbed of Africana spiritual traces. But what Jenkins

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also reminds the viewer, without removing our minds from Cora, is that Black men and Black
men as fathers are experiencing in this space, the emotional cost of the unhomely too.
Jenkins attunes our eyes and senses to this through several scenes–the most important
perhaps streaming from a Black father’s acute grief. A Black father who loses his wife to suicide,
his forcibly and transiently adopted children to homicide, and several biological children to
stillbirth. A stunning character edition to Whitehead’s literary opus, Jenkins imagines onscreen
how it might feel for a Black father to walk straight backed into his slave cabin, only to stagger
out unconscious from the sight of his wife and the twins she has suckled covered in red blood. A
Black father falling to his knees outside of a home rocked by the unhomely– a home that should
be sacred, and yet it is brushed with the meddling planter’s hand. For it is the cruel Randall
brother who orders the Black father’s wife to nurse another slave’s children, and then give them
back despite the reality that she has just lost her own. Yes, the Black father is rocked by the
unconscionable state of this bewildering home that could cause such a catastrophe and then to
add more injury, whipped outside of it, as punishment for his master’s plummeting profit due to
this suicide-homicide. This is what Jenkins, ingenious in his renderings, relays as not
homelessness or placelessness but the uncanny state of home in bondage. The Black father’s
uninhabitable presence in a world most bizarre–his unliving life.
This and another scene stick out as an elaboration of Bhaba by way of Toni Morrison–
although Jenkins does not visualize a Black father necessarily, but a Black man. In this scene,
field hands are gathered, to witness their friend, maybe father, brother, lashed and set afire— Big
Anthony, the caught runaway, which features less sympathetically in Whitehead’s novel. Finding
Big Anthony pregnant for theory, Jenkins draws out for us the runaway’s suffering. Through this
we are able to sense that perhaps the runaway’s desire is not simply to find freedom, but to find

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another home–a better one–only to die defiled, unprotected, unhomed in the attempt. In Jenkins’
imaging, Big Anthony is strung up and castrated, while the runaway is literally gazing out
wearily upon his white master’s white house–gazing at the other sweeter home inside his
residence, while white guests, families watch and eat (him) as he is whipped and burned alive.
Within this alarming cannibalistic sadistic suturing of alimentation and the gaze, we are forced to
grapple with the pleasurable disruption of Black paternal perpetuity–forced to grapple with the
literal un-manning of Black men–the literal gutting away of reproductive paternal possibility
from the hands of our Black fathers. This is at least partly due to the Black home’s vulnerability–
the Black home as an unconscionably disorienting and disintegrated world for Black men, for
Black fathers–an utterly bizarre space for some that would be fathers perhaps, in another world
that does not dangle from the house of a master. With this we are forced to grapple with
Blackness looking out upon the house of white America–the only home which many Black folks
have inhabited–to realize without a shadow of doubt that it is a “bitter house” of unbelonging,
“whose shadows lie”. Yes, it is a bitter house whose shadows lie, in the words of Toni Morrison,
which Black enslaved watch from the margins, as they are scorched by its violences and burned
to dust (x).
But this feature of the unhomely that casts light on the runaway’s emotional strivings, is
also the foundation for the work’s fugitive movement–the fugitivity of Black men and potential
fathers’ strivings to belong within Jenkins’ plot. This is a movement within the hold of the
home–the hold of the white hand. For Big Anthony’s fugitive example as he shouts defiantly at
the plantation house’s veneer is what prompts the male ingenue Caesar to break, with his lover
Cora, from this unconscionable home. Cora holds our grasp in the novel, with Caesar draping the
background; yet onscreen, Caesar has more prominence, and is our entry point into Black

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paternal homemaking dreams–their endeavors to not only enter our houses or build them with
their materials, but nurture the home otherwise–outside of the looming white hand. For Jenkins,
Caesar is in dual service to the narrative, as he reflects the structural limit that precludes Black
paternity from approaching home in a white world, while also providing a useful path to imagine
home otherwise. Even in light of his premature death at the hands of a slave master and an even
crueler slave catcher, Big Anthony and Caesar’s traces are felt–their seeds of home desire
impress themselves upon us.
In contrast to the novel, the film audience is acquainted with Caesar as Cora’s love
interest. Yet we view his power to act on love and make a home with Cora interrupted in several
instances–as is the price of the unhomely condition. This emerges first when a crueler planter,
following the death of his sibling, takes over Cora and Caesar’s wing of the plantation, thereby
putting new conjugal rules in place. Upon Randall’s order, Caesar must lay with another woman
to produce a child. Caesar first attempts to refuse this command to make home under such
monstrous conditions and is interestingly accused by his “breedmate” for being queer—for
escaping at night to the swamp in order to surreptitiously engage in sexual acts with men. This is
left open for the audience to contemplate the sexual foreclosures and possibilities for Black men
on the slave plantation and in the break of its borders–and how this might inform fatherhood.
Yet, Caesar’s resistance, his refusal to lay with a woman he does not want—his rupturing
of reproductive bondage and the capitalist system, amounts to a direct invasion of his Black
home, to enhance the chances that he might exist for his master’s house. Jenkins imagines the
interior of the Black home, the slave cabin, where Caesar must lay with the woman that he does
not love—paired not only forcibly by the slave master’s will—but while the master sits gazing
upon him. To elucidate this, Jenkins inserts a scene that illuminates Caesar, candlelit—engaging

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in sex with the breedmate while he is watched by the white master’s lascivious and avaricious
eye. This scene is reminiscent of historian Tera Hunter’s work on white interference in Black
sacred and familial life, by way of what she terms a “third flesh”. Black marriage is haunted by
white patriarchal intentions, and so too is the Black house. For Caesar, this is an instance where
he, in a reference to Black feminist theorist, Hortense Spillers, is suspended in a kind of
pornographic stillness (67)—vulnerable to the captor’s whim and the captor’s sundry use. This
becomes the terrible materialization of the Black home’s permeable architecture and compulsory
exposure as an ultimate site of sovereign surveillance–perhaps beside Michel Foucault’s
rendering of the modern prison and Simone Browne’s description of the slave ship. Indeed,
Randall sits in a chair, lighting a smoke, while Caesar aims to procreate. This is the spark of
slavery—signifying the manner in which white patriarchal lines historically, incinerate the
potential for a sacred and whole(some) Black home life.
Caesar’s quest within the film to find a home that ruptures this oppressive limb then, is
incited not only by a self-focused desire to assert his manhood, but arguably a drive and yearning
to make a home as a future father. To belong with Cora, specifically—to offer her what he later
confesses to wanting audibly at a dinner party in freedom— marriage and two children in a freer
land. This flight towards becoming Black father in and for the home is signified by Cora and
Caesar's physical break from the site of bondage—across the threshold of the swamp towards the
literal railroad. Again, this railroad is what John Carlos Rowe calls the Black bond people's
“mobile home” — always in the making by way of an unnamed collective of freedom striving
souls. This railroad is what shuttles Cora and Caesar to their first and last stop together, trailing
home-freedom in this fugitive tale–although one can argue that Cora carries Caesar beyond.

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In South Carolina, Caesar and Cora emerge walking and working in a picturesque town;
and yet, in this picture of Black-home-free, cracks gradually start to form. As Caesar grasps for
autonomy through work and Cora grasps for literacy, the ghosts of the unhomely still follow.
Both Black man and woman, now presumably self-liberated, are being poisoned, threatened,
deterred from surviving, and most importantly, from reproducing. In freedom what Caesar and
Cora face, is the reality that their potential union and progeny are not nearly as profitable to their
American house when they are free versus when they are bound. Outside of their antebellum
abode where reproduction doubles as production, death of the Black is optimal. In other words,
when Black breeding is untethered from profit, the Black breeder must be eliminated, and this is
the new American dream project that intrudes their lives in this space of purported liberation.
More pointedly, Caesar is being indirectly sterilized, which is also the impending threat
to Cora. Here, there is the haunting of a “plantation future,” to remind us of McKittrick, as
Caesar, fictitiously alive during slavery, is ensnared in the horror of a very real twentieth century
scientific experiment. For the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, to which Whitehead and Jenkins
allude was a social Darwinist study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, where despite
holding a cure for syphilis that could have treated its patients, researchers withhold medicine, in
order to study whether the rise of venereal disease in a poor and southern Black community
resulted from Black sexual promiscuity that was fated to eliminate Black existence, or on the
other end, socio-economic status and access to health care.
This is more precisely not only indirect sterilization of Black male sharecroppers of the
South—of Caesar in fiction—but poisoning the entire paternal line. The Tuskegee study not only
caused Black fathers to die out, but their infected partners as well as their children. In effect,

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Black patrilineality becomes a sexual dead end, which I examine with a sharper eye in Chapter 3.
In effect, the Black home hosts disease and withers under white patriarchal malice-neglect.
Caesar does not die at the hands of this poisoning but by another white hand–those of the
slave catcher Ridgeway. It is on Cora then, to carry Caesar, his home Blues but also his home
dreams. By Blues, I mean more than the music of course, but what James Baldwin calls a
metaphor for Black living. And yet, Grace Hong’s work, building off the monumental work of
Fred Moten and others, elucidates how Blues is also about futurity and improvisation. The Blues
carries seeds for germination.
Caesar is this Blues future for our home—this hope and endless work for belonging and
becoming together with Black kin—dwelling with us in another place. Caesar is a Black father
unraveled before he can be or even become—and yet in still, a trace—his legacy felt in the Black
social world as it emerges throughout the series with subtlety and with louder tones. In a turn to
the subtle, Jenkins’ work offers an improvisatory instance. This is yet another Jenkins edition to
the narrative, where an unnamed runaway is sprinting through the woods carrying a crying
newborn child. Slave catchers alerted, the runaway is struck down and killed as he pleads for his
child to be spared. This might look like failure in its bloodiest realization but is really a brilliant
revolt—one that could be read as the endless work. Home is reached for as he holds the infant
tightly in his arms—home is held for a moment. This is where he belongs.
Here in this peculiar rendering of home as an ephemeral moment in the woods–home as
without material, structure, space, but rather home as feeling, dwelling, coming together– I am
reminded of a similar addition to radical abolitionist, transnationalist, and emigrationist, Martin
Delany’s episodic novel Blake: Or the Huts of America. In this novel from the antebellum era,

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Delaney features a father whose wife is sold from him to an unknown territory. Blake, the father
flees to freedom on what might be read as a chivalric quest to rescue his wife but must be read
differently given the lack of agency to marry and to hold bonds sacred, under the containment of
Black plantation life. Yet what becomes brilliant, is Delany’s narrative decision to have the
husband Blake return and literally carry on foot, his child, from slavery into the terrain of
northern freedom. How can we think about this trace of resistance imagined here through Jenkins
by way of Martin Delany’s literary influence, as a crest of home-imagining, thankfully saved
from drowning in the archive. Again, I am more interested in the gesture toward home than the
establishment of it. Home is in the trying to provide a space where relation can wrap their hands
around each other with the thrill and safety that comes with belonging, even if the fruit remains
elusive.
And the trying continues in the Valentine Farm. Although this might be the most legible
form of Black home as an arrival of utopia, Jenkins has arguably offered us up until this point,
several homemaking imaginings by way of the father that hold parity in their significance and
weight. Nevertheless, this is the place that offers, within Jenkins’ opus, a vision of Black fathers
and home most clarion, just as it does in Whitehead’s work. Jenkins invites the reader into this
Edenic home vista through rich fields with their arms wide open. There is no cotton crop in sight,
but dark wine grapes that signify indulgence, love, passion—dark berries representing Black
surplus in this world that reflects pleasure and social life in the face of painful and bound
subjection. This is a home where Black folks can afford optimism–where they can afford in a
paraphrase of the brave Cora, to try to live–to try to make home.
Jenkins showcases Black male leadership at the farm, but in ways that are not so
characteristically paternalistic. The viewer notes that the figure of Elijah Lander vanishes from

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Jenkins’ lush landscape—melded with the characterization and ideals of John Valentine. Thus,
the triad of Black fatherly potential is replaced with dual strain of father progenitor and foil,
which propels the question and problem of making Black home in a new nominally free territory.
Yet, the depiction of the great Black father figures here, rendered with less patriarchal
benevolence in Jenkins’ vision, is of significance to Black discursive thinking about the traces of
Black fathers’ possibility for and in the home on scales that speak to both intimate settings and
community. Jenkins is more interested in a project of Black fatherhood that speaks to belonging
with kin at home, rather than ruling.
Indeed, rather than principally cis male, the farm is, alternatively, flanked by Black
women’s and girl’s voices—as one enters this land through the utterances of Valentine’s wife
who, beside her husband, hold community, prominence. Cora of course takes central vision; and
interestingly the first thing we hear upon our arrival here, is a young bright Black girl rather than
the Black boy on the Randall plantation, reciting the Declaration of Independence. In scholar
Nihad Farooq’s words, “here fugitives like Cora find shelter, receive a practical and political
education, debate the future of the race, where fugitives become fugitive slave abolitionists.” The
concept of Black freedom futurity is a radically gendered integrated project—one that
incorporates an ever-widening range of Blackness held with integrity, collaboration, gendered
connection, and borderlessness: man, woman, child, those born free, to the most abject fugitive
(Farooq 96). This is the Black familial romance, a picturesque model of Black household—and
one that contains, even in its ostensible heterosexual contours, hints of queerness—hints of
peculiar possibility that lay a groundwork for an otherwise world where Black fathers belong
with us.

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Conclusion
But where does Jenkins leave us? Where does Whitehead? Even the Valentine Farm is
burned down by white violence and the supremacy of Man, which always threatened this
spiritually ordained and perhaps millenarian Black community on the outside. Even with arms
wide open in this idyllic space where Black women and men come together like the very real
Exodusters–the 6,000 Black people who migrated to Kansas in the 1870’s–or the millions of
Black people that migrated all over America during the two Great Migrations–there is only
ephemeral belonging. Encroaching whiteness eventually overtakes and everything of home
seems to be lost, as Cora destroys her foil the slave catcher, Ridgeway, and escapes again on the
underground railroad. As Whitehead relays, Cora “put miles behind her, put behind her the
counterfeit sanctuaries and endless chains, the murder of Valentine Farm” (310).
But Cora persists in this “putting behind”, and we can believe through her, Black home
dreams can persist as well–Black home dreams including the dreams of our fathers that she
learns–that she carries preciously like seeds in her palms. This is represented symbolically for
the reader; despite the tragic exposure of this sanctuary to be yet another iteration of the hold, for
prior to leaving the Valentine Farm, Cora plants seeds in the ground. These are seeds taken from
her grandmother’s garden in Georgia–the seeds if we remember, that enable Cora to craft home
creatively through her very own fingers everywhere that she plants her feet, however transiently;
and it is significant to remember what type of seeds she carries–that these seeds are okra. Okra is
“noteworthy for the preservation of slave history and food culture and is commonly remembered
through oral tradition” (Yentsch 59). Historical documentation shows that trafficked Africans, in
what I argue was most certainly a striving to find belonging amid a most harrowing
displacement, fundamentally changed and reshaped the ecology of the New World, by carrying

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pieces of their African home–carrying seeds with them, which they hid as they boarded slave
ships and rocked for months amid pus, death, putrid waste in their transport to the Americas.
Despite the forced movement of their bodies they carried these seeds in their hidden crevices, to
create a sense of home or a feeling of belonging by way of the flesh even as they were suspended
nowhere, destined for an unknown world.
These seeds of memory–seeds that remind her of home–are also seeds of creation then–
the regrowth of home rooted in a very real African-American history. Through the seeds there is
hope rejuvenated, for Black deliverance from the sphere of nowhere to the arms of belonging
somewhere again. And in this endeavor, the grandmother and mother are re-seeded
interminably—in this endless work, Black people find the space to grow and regrow against the
burning, shackles, ruins of the New World. Home is made, Black home becomes a queer residue
and a queer substance for social life across America nurtured lastly, “between Cora and an elder
Black man’s care” (Rowe 2022).
Yes, interestingly in the end of Whitehead and Jenkins’ visions, Cora meets an older
Black man after being passed by a tall white man and then a redheaded fellow in her ceaseless
fugitive run. She is finally lifted into the wagon of a grandfatherly figure who she describes as
kind and who asks her, “You hungry” (Whitehead 312)? Interestingly this narrative has always
been about a hunger for home and we can think about Cora’s seeds as the central metaphor. A
Black hunger for home–evidenced in African desire to carry seeds for growing familiar foods as
a home reminder in addition to desiring a sense of rootedness across shifting terrains and
unknown soil. This hunger is satiated symbolically with the Black man’s offering of food to the
starving Cora. Here we see the multifarious queer enfleshments of belonging that unfold.
Belonging in space through sound, seeds, a loc, alimentation.

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The conversation between this man who goes by “Ollie” and Cora, begins with a
determination of the route for the wagon. Ollie explains that he is venturing out West first to St.
Louis and then to California. Cora’s narrative for the reader ends while she nestled under a
blanket cover wrapped in a mobile home that Ollie makes while moving the duo out towards yet
another promised land—another home potential.
This is a curious move, because John Carlos Rowe reminds us that American Westward
expansion and the question of Black folks’ home place within America was a heated debate
during and after the antebellum era. From the Dred Scott case to the Kansas Nebraska Act, the
question of Black freedom or unfreedom in Western states spawned conflict between pro-slavery
and abolitionist activists. Amongst the myriad ideas rattled off for what to do with the enslaved if
slavery were to be abolished, a cadre of northern abolitionists suggested, in addition to Central
America, and a return to Western Africa, that the largely unconquered territory of the West could
provide a viable solution to the problem of Black place(ment) in America–to those folks that
essentially do not belong here.
Cora and Ollie’s movement out West towards another home thus evokes a rich history
routed again through specters of continued bondage—the continued encroachment of Man
geographies represented by even the most benevolent participants in our state apparatus.
Certainly Whitehead and Jenkins are not suggesting that we incorporate Cora and Ollie’s home
quest into the bloody unethical ventures of Manifest Destiny. Nor are they ending the story in
pessimistic tones that figure Cora as symbolic of perpetual unbelonging. But rather, wrapped in
this Black paternal figure’s blanket, Cora leaves the reader with traces of home that again
become a window into the endless work–labor that now conjoins her to a father figure. In the end
Cora communes with a nurturing Black man who offers her food, fuel, his own seeds to freedom

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in a subtle gesture. Ollie does not declare himself in an awe-inspiring stature atop a hill; he is but
a man, who she can see has witnessed similar horrors. Between Cora and Ollie in the wagon, I
am reminded of the father of Harriet Jacobs, who never made it to freedom with his children, but
constructed it, however meager. Jenkins and Whitehead leave us with a father that, like Jacobs’
father, Ollie, Caesar, the runaway father in the woods with this infant, offer just a handful of the
multifarious spaces where the Black father does more than construct his house to find a space to
be master. Black fathers have the capacity to make home for themselves and home with us–to
dwell with us in the most intimate and tender modes. This is the beautiful experiment of refusal
that enables Black fathers and kin to come together, to emerge–to spread out and cover one
another. This is a beautiful experiment where Black fathers can do more than shine their light on
a Black nation. Where they might enter our homes, and belong, with hope that one day nobody
will hurt us.

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Black Father God, Black Father Race Man: Towards Black Fatherhood and an Alternative
Spiritual Being/Belonging

The Underground Railroad is brilliant in its renderings of Blackness and home as a form
of Black deliverance. And yet there is a theme missing of note–for where is God and Christianity
in this Black home landscape? How is God taken up, explicitly, not simply by white characters in
the form of critique, but rather the Black intramural, throughout slavery and its many resounding
spaces? For Black discourse evinces that God and the Black church are central to Black social
life, and also, I argue, central to our beautiful, yet at times limiting constructions of Black
fatherhood. The following chapter will examine the beauty of God in Black paternal life, but
begins first with its spiritual hindrances.
Historical works spanning W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folks, written in 1903 to
Albert Raboteau’s comprehensive work of 1978, Slave Religions, evince God as a force in Black
life that encompasses both terror and beauty. The terror of the slave regime, often employed to
justify Black bondage, was through Black hands, beautifully repurposed—spawning multifarious
modes of Black resistance, one being the belief in earthly liberation by way of divine
intervention. This belief, or what James Cones calls Black liberation theology, materialized in
the seeding of the Black church at the center of Black plantation life. The Black church was an
extension of the Black bound community; it became inextricably tied to the journey towards
being free. The Black church is therefore, indelible to Black existence and consciousness–a
bedrock, to such an extent that W.E.B. Du Bois notes, the Black church antedates the Black
home’s arrival in any form (175). Du Bois examines as well, significantly, that out of the Black
church, alongside shouting and music, the masculine figure of the Black preacher emerges as a

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core feature. The Black preacher and his proximity to power, and in some cases, his capacity to
read, elevated him to the status of God in the minds and eyes of the enslaved. As Black folks
found themselves aligning Biblically with the stories of the Israelites, the preacher relaying the
word of God became the foundation for their deliverance. The Black preacher was the principal
gateway to liberation–a medium to freedom–an interpreter and a path to Black fate/faith.
The Black preacher is what I would like to single out, for I am curious about the Black
preacher’s power, which is so forceful that W.E.B. Du Bois writes in his chapter, “Of the Faith
of Fathers” in his monumental Souls, that “the Preacher is the most unique personality developed
by the Negro on American soil.” Du Bois goes on to elaborate the preacher’s stunning
multifacetedness, as he is: “a leader, a politician, an orator, a “boss,” an intriguer, an idealist, —
all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in
number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with
consummate ability, gave him his preëminence, and helps him maintain it” (175). The preacher
emerges across century and space, a political visionary and mainstay of the Black community–
charted from Bishop Richard Allen rising up as founder of the African Methodist Church, to
Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and his fervid push for a return to Africa. Extended into the 20th
century with the activism of Pastor Adam Clayton Powell in Harlem as a US House
Representative, to yes, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. our great leader of Civil Rights in the
American South. The preacher is an all-encompassing force–a leader of law, a speaker, a
businessman, a dreamer, an intellectual, a leftist–gifted with omnipresent expansiveness that
sustains his prowess and predominance in Black life. Yes, the preacher is all things, but most
importantly for my purposes, in the face of Black fatherlacking, the preacher is for the Black
community, its most preeminent Black father figure. Its chosen one.

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The Black preacher is a figurative father–evidence of what scholar Ronald Neal calls in
his evaluation of Blackness in a public arena, the importance of “messianic masculinity” to
Black life. Messianic masculinity refers to “a utopian model of Black manhood that tasks Black
men with liberating the Black community” –a “political view of black men as saviors of African
Americans” from Martin Luther King to former President Obama (52). What I am most
interested in, however, is that this figurative father tasked with saving the Black masses, also
carries the baggage and limits of Black patriarchy, which becomes integrated in the real,
everyday existence of Black families, in the Black home. There is a mixing of public longing and
private desire, that I argue leads to the Black father in the flesh, being synonymous with God the
Almighty, God our ultimate salvation. I contend that when the father does appear in our homes,
his presence is deified; but even in his impressive wingspan, he is rendered flat, opaque, limited
while his human flaws, needs, intricacies dangle in our blindspot.
This chapter will examine the conflation of Black father with God in the home, our
heteropatriarchal minister, savior, and the like, as a beautiful potential but often problematic
form by way of two canonical works: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple. Through Baldwin’s and Walker’s spiritual texts, I frame the
dangerous twinning of God and the Black father to explore how the positioning of our fathers as
messiah has done damage to ourselves in our Black homes as much as it has done damage to our
Black fathers. Indeed, tasked with being God, this utopic demand at times impoverishes the soul
of our would-be Black fathers while simultaneously, spiritually breaking us. And I am left with
questions: where in the life of a Black father is the human form? When the Black father does
arrive, where is his soul? Where are the Black father’s bones?

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While Baldwin’s earlier work offers an ephemeral, queer repudiation of God, there is
something within Walker’s framework of womanist redemption that offers a pathway to the
Black father’s potential for the soul. It is a pathway that is really a connection to a previous
intervention, penned by Du Bois in Souls. Indeed, I opened with a discussion of Du Bois’
contributions to our understanding of “preacher” as Black father figure, but in Du Bois’ brilliant
genealogy there lies the emergence of an alternative Black father form. This is his form
personally, and this form does a most magnificent work, for it reveals not a conflation of the
Godly figure with Black father, but rather a human– mourning God’s time, God’s decision.
Through Du Bois’ chapter on the passing of his son, I evaluate how the Black father might
evince instead, outside of the pressure to deliver us, a more generative or more capacious
spiritually humanized function for his children, kin, and our own learning. I am interested here in
how Du Bois uses himself, his pain, as an intervention that revises our threadbare Black father
framings. Indeed, Du Bois emerges through his revelation of a soul and with it a new paternal
subjectivity–a poetic interior with a “peculiar” maternal emphasis.

Go Tell Its Family Romance: A Distant Father, An Opaque God

Go Tell it On the Mountain tells the story of a queer Black boy and his becoming (saved)
against the daunting backdrop of the Black church and the Black family and a Black father’s
(overbearing) presence. The urban Black family and a storefront Harlem church are featured
prominently– tightly interwoven–and the significance of Black Christianity to the thematic
framing is fortified through Baldwin’s very choice of character naming. The protagonist, based

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largely on James Baldwin himself, is called John, like the prophet bearing news of the Messiah;
and his mother’s name is Elizabeth from the same Biblical family. John’s stepfather’s name is
not Zechariah, but rather Gabriel, and appositely, like the famous archangel, Gabriel is the
medium between the human and the spirit world. The use of these Biblical names in particular
should allude to the coming of Jesus–the coming of mercy, kindness, salvation in this Black
family’s life. Yet, the coming of redemption never seems to arrive fully. And we might hold
Gabriel at fault.
Like Gabriel of the Bible, John’s stepfather is one of God’s most important messengers–a
source of strength, dream interpretation, vision–a deacon and a dutiful minister of the Black
church. Yet his strength manifests more like a rigid fist hold in John’s family life. Gabriel
seethes with hatred directed primarily towards John–his illegitimate son, who he describes as
ugly with the “face of Satan”–while favoring his recalcitrant blood son, Roy. Rather than being a
pathway to God in John’s eyes then, his stepfather is an obstruction. A glaring representation that
John’s very being and his yet to be articulated sexuality are not divinely aligned, although his
queer desire for Elisha and conflict are understated in the narrative. In this sense, the Black father
is John’s (the Black son’s) antagonist–he is not a provider, a propeller, but a hurdle to salvation
and other otherworldly gifts. Gabriel is the malevolent gatekeeper; the curious personification of
a God figure; for God and the Black father are conjoined here by their opaqueness, absolute
dominion, and affective distance.
Baldwin makes the connection between his stepfather and God–specifically the Godlike
patriarch that rules the Old Testament, through stunning and meticulous imagery. In this imagery
the stepfather is akin to a sovereign entity with cloudy affect or lack of feeling entirely. Indeed,
he describes the way that his stepfather, like an awe-inspiring yet frightful God reflects and

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shapes his surroundings: “as Gabriel rose and started out to work, the sky was low and nearly
black and the air too thick to breathe. Late in the afternoon the wind rose, the skies opened, and
the rain came…The world turned dark, forever, everywhere, and windows ran as though their
glass panes bore all the tears of eternity, threatening at every instant to shatter inward against this
force, uncontrollable, so abruptly visited on the earth” (Baldwin 16). This is not a benevolent,
tender God the father of the New Testament, but a storming and almighty deity, antithetical to
the safety and acceptance that John longs for. This is a homophobic and misogynistic God with
acute anger, omnipresence, omnipotence–melting our sinful bodies to dust.
Indeed, the impenetrability of Gabriel’s interiority and the mighty control that he exerts
externally, takes on the mysterious character and workings of a distant and temperamental God.
We are not immediately acquainted even with Gabriel’s name at the beginning of the text, and
the way that he unfolds through prose is austere and harsh. The affective character of the novel
offers a deeper knowledge of how the Black father as a person is and remains (un)conceived.
Even in Baldwin’s chapter devoted to Gabriel’s own coming to God (or failure) there is a certain
flatness, detachment, a misty dark unknowability–indeed, an inhuman formation of a living
thing.
Gabriel is characterized as a recovered sinner who once laid with sex workers, until he
disciplined himself to walk a righteous pathway. A narrow path, that we might say is “straight”
and narrow – straight like the alleyway that he traverses with John as a teaching moment–as
linear and thin as much as it is heteropatriarchal. Interestingly, this overwhelmingly misogynistic
patriarch is redeemed through the symbolic mother; he is redeemed through a promise to his
biological mother on her deathbed; and he lifts himself up higher through marrying a woman
named Deborah before John’s mother. Deborah, a victim of sexual assault–is something like a

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Mary Magdalene. Yet, unlike Mary Magdalene, all women that cross paths with Gabriel become
victims rather than reaching (earthly) salvation. His redemption by way of Black women comes
at a cost to all women involved, as he steals, cheats, abandons, assaults, and tramples upon them.
There is a split between the man Gabriel holds himself up to be in a spiritual sense as God’s
faithful preacher–and the malevolently selfish husband, father, friend, son that he is in the flesh.
This Godlike figure merely preaches and does not deliver us, for "he ain't thought a minute about
nobody in this world but himself.” The reader is acquainted with a myriad of Gabriel’s fatal
patriarchal flaws-yes-but the austerity of the telling, still leaves him indecipherable. Gabriel is
monstrously deified without access to a rich inner life beyond hatred, a hunger for power and
sexual desire.
Due to the opacity of Gabriel, and his seemingly singular otherworldly mission, made
ironic in the face of his sinful nature, there is, between John and his father, a love rendered
seemingly impossible–a theme of Black fathers and love that I explore more richly in my final
chapter. For John looking up toward his father-God there is an impasse in understanding, which
renders the Black father and son bond unthinkable/untenable. This inconceivability of love
exchange turns John away from God/the father even though he desperately wants to be favored.
Although he is destined to become a preacher just like his dad; Gabriel’s steel-hearted character
makes John obstinate with regards to a fuller spiritual acceptance. Baldwin writes: “John's heart
was hardened against the Lord. His father was God's minister, the ambassador of the King of
Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father”
(Baldwin 20). The father–a direct line to God– in fact breaks the spirit of his children–hardening
them. Thus John, throughout the course of his fourteenth birthday, which ushers him into the
journey towards manhood, fantasizes about surmounting his father or splitting off from the line

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of his spiritual calling–his generational tie, this hate-filled bond, completely. As he states, “he
would not be like his father, or his father's fathers. He would have another life.”
John’s ultimate route to God thus involves a queer veering away from his father; and this
rite of passage occurs on what is called in the Pentecostal religious space of the novel, the
“threshing floor.” On the day that John becomes saved from sin, he is ultimately pulled by the
spirit to the floor near the church altar; he sees a route to God through the Holy Spirit in this
corporeally freeing space of redemption.
Yes, John finds freedom from his father’s judgment, distance, hate by way of the Holy
Spirit, and yet, perhaps another spiritual life is not possible, fully. For there is, within this father-
son bond, a Biblical curse that binds them in interminable horror. The novel’s lessons on
Gabriel’s father form remain to spiritually haunt us. I end this analysis–captivated by a particular
scene of exposure and connection between John and his father that does emerge. Baldwin’s twist
of the God-father trope crystallizes most, when John finds his stepfather in a bathtub–naked; and
John’s gaze is affixed for far too long. What Baldwin is brilliantly recalling here, in the hovering
of the gaze of a Black child on his father, is what is named historically in hermeneutical readings
of the Bible as the Hamitic Curse.
The Curse of Ham or the Hamitic curse is an instance within the Old Testament, and
functioned in particular during the course of US chattel slavery to justify the continuation of
Black bondage. In this pregnant verse, the son of the great Noah–our behemoth of a forefather–
who saved humanity and all life by ushering us into an ark before a disastrous flood, is imaged
one night drunk and naked. His son Ham witnesses his father Noah in this stunningly vulnerable
exposure; and because of this he is cursed. Rather it is not Ham who bears a stain, but his son
Canaan and all of Canaan’s descendants–who, because of the stillness of Ham’s gaze upon his

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father, will be blackened and eternally damned, oppressed as the enslaved of greater masters
(Gen 9:20-29).
The evocation of Ham watching Noah seems to set into motion an irredeemable father
line within the Black family that Baldwin writes out for us between John and Gabriel; Black
fatherhood is created Biblically by way of a sexually instantiated generational stain/shame. But
significantly, there is a curse due to the uncovering of the Black father–the uncovering here, of
the stepfather’s mortal flaw. Peering into the Black father unclothed–the Black father’s interior,
therefore, bears a punishment most absolute. This dangles here as an unsettling dilemma for our
understanding of Black fatherhood.

Alice Walker’s Womanism: Where Even Black Fathers Might be Free

In a different take on the Black father as God, we have Alice Walker’s brilliant womanist
text, The Color Purple published an era later than Baldwin’s text at the tail end of Black feminist
movement in 1982. Walker’s work, like her predecessor, Baldwin, is also interested in troubling
the rise of the Black patriarch–the limits of the Black patriarch as a kind of Godly savior.
Meaning she also seems to problematize Black paternal elevation–as her novel evokes a myriad
of questions: what happens when we conflate the Black father’s significance with the
significance of a deity? And that deity dances with the devil? What do Black mothers do amid
such impossibly violent occasions? And most importantly, what happens to Black girls—
vulnerable and violated to the point of unravel?

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The Color Purple, evinces Black familial strain against the Jim Crow rural setting of
Georgia that centers primarily on the interior life and perspective of a young Black queer woman
named Celie. Celie, deemed dumb, ugly, nothing, similar to John, bears the trauma of losing all
of her blood kin–ripped away from her sister and her two children through the abuse of her Black
stepfather and husband. Celie is rendered meek and voiceless through this severance from her
blood and lifeline–however she finds a space to tell us her story through her letters. In the end
Celie finds her voice aloud and carves out space to spread out as a fully realized, self-assured,
loved, and beautiful Black woman.
Within this epistolary novel’s opening lines, we are made privy to the ignoble transaction
that sets Alice Walkers magnum opus and spiritual quest into motion—a stepfather’s rape and
impregnation of the Celie, rendered even more piercing by the stealing away of her two newborn
babies/siblings. Further injurious, in the face of his own unspeakable enactment of terror, Celie’s
stepfather marks Celie’s body and consciousness with the curse of his deplorable actions: “you
better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy” (3). Sealing her into silence, with
the threat of God and mother loss it is arguable that God in the life of Celie, is but a threat
imposed by a paternal demon. He is a threat, and yet in this twisted bildungsroman punctuated by
the loss of the mother’s power, he is formulated as her only possible sustenance, solace. For as
Celie writes: never mine, never mine, long as I can spell G-O-D I got somebody along” (18). He
is reformulated in a vein most unconscionable, as her only saving grace.
Within the narrative, Celie transfers from one oppressive and omnipotent father God to
the next–leaving her stepfather’s house to shuffle underneath the angry footsteps of Mr. __, her
husband. We see here in Baldwin and Walker, similar patterns of hierarchy and distance—the
naming of her husband without name, but rather with title, bears evidence that he is not only her

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superior, but also a detached and strained connection. Mr. __ matches her stepfather’s cruelty–
raping her and beating her consistently. I argue, therefore, that even though Celie refers to God
as “big and old and tall and gray-bearded and white”, in Walker’s imaginative critique, God is
not white and Western, but a double–symbolic of the Black patriarch. God is a Black patriarch—
stolid and unswayed by the crumbling of a Black girl on southern, barren land. He appears to
find likeness in the body of Black paternal monsters.
What Walker does effectively, is behoove us to re-examine our investments in a
fatherlike God or Godlike father that towers over the lives of Black women and Black girls in
what can be described at best as an abusive familial romance. For it becomes clarion that the God
as stepfather—the stepfather resurrected into the only viable God, has long forsaken Celie. God
is central to her suffering. And Celie begins to recognize this as she unveils her sorrows:

What God do for me? . . . he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of
a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see again. Anyhow…the God I been praying
and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know׳. Trifling, forgitful
and lowdown (199).

All should be lost in this barren soil, and yet suddenly a field of purple emerges
figuratively–wide rich possibility. We find that Celie’s life is not without pleasure, love, and
learning. In spite of the silence imposed upon her—a male perpetrated violence passed down
from the stepfather’s stained hand, to the fists of her patriarch-husband, to those of Harpo, her
own stepson—Celie endures long enough to learn a Black feminist ethos–what Alice Walker
shapes as a womanist theology.

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If God as Black father rendered Celie’s body as he does John’s, as sites of curse and
shame, the uplifting of eros in a richly alternative spiritual plane offers a pathway for the queer
Black adolescent to reclaim their discarded bodies by way of flesh. When Shug, the intermittent
lover of Albert arrives in Celie’s home, her flesh incites the breach of Albert’s conflation with
God. The shift from God as father to our mother’s gardens, or perhaps a divine womanist spirit,
is catalyzed first through Shug Avery and Celie’s queer erotic connections. It is through Shug
that Celie realizes that she has lovable flesh—that she is more than poor and ugly. Shug is queer
in her gendered upturning behavior as well as desire, as Celie notes: “Shug acts more manly than
most men. I mean she upright, honest. Speak her mind and the devil take the hindmost […] Shug
will fight […] she bound to live her life and be herself no matter what” (244). Importantly, too,
Shug this assertive, sexually free, Blues vocalist is on the outside of the Black church.
Shug inaugurates a new cosmology. And in this cosmology there is no human hierarchy.
There is no towering fatherlike God—not even via her, as the idolized object of Celie’s
affections. In contrast, God is diffused. Meaning Alice Walker writes of the divine spirit as/in
everyone, every relationship, and everything. And it accompanies not only the queerer aspects of
Black relation, but the power of sisterhood as well. Indeed, the relationship between Nettie and
Celie—the love that they nurture and hold across impossible time and space, reflects the deep
beauty of Walker’s alternative visioning for the Black family. For it is really Nettie’s letters to
Celie that interrupt Celie’s shame-filled surreptitious letter writing to a masculine and oppressive
God—her calls for love are answered materially and beyond through her younger sister. Spiritual
knowledge and nourishment spills out in all directions; everyone has the power to heal and be
healed.

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"My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people.
But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it
come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all...And I laughed
and I cried and I run all around the house”
What is clear in Walker’s text, is that a spiritual transformation has taken hold—a
movement from understanding God not as a father—a blistering Black patriarch—but an
experience of pantheism—a God in all things, in nature (Bhuvaneswari and Jacob, 10), in the
human, but regardless of place, a God conception that is distinctly feminine–the Black
feminine—diffused and embodying eros as explicated by Audre Lorde as a high sexual, spiritual,
love. God is the spirit of the sister, God is the spirit of physical intimacy shared between women,
and God is even in the arms that usher Albert into restoration. This God incites the reordering of
Georgia life—away from the racist drape of patriarchy, and into a womanist world—a world
enriched with love ethic and life giving as the mother. Walker arguably calls for a radical
displacement of God as father in Black lives–replacing it with a mother centered cosmology and
tradition, particularly in the hearts of those Black women looking for salvation. Walker’s
narration seems to echo Audre Lorde’s words, “for women, the need and desire to nurture each
other is not pathological but redemptive… It is this real connection which is so feared by a
patriarchal world” (111). In the end, Celie’s world moves from vulnerable and desecrated to
spirited and liberated—a spiritual world rooted in our Black mother’s gardens.
Most significant to my own work is that this womanist theology is so capacious–so
roomy that it can even heal and redeem someone like the antagonist demonic force, Mr. ___ .
After creating perhaps what bell hooks would call a spiritual homeplace– a site of resistance,
renewal, and dignity for women as protection from the outer world, the strength incited from this

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woman-centered sacred ground opens up and makes a way for Mr., now called, Albert as well.
As Albert begins to atone his sins–recognizing he treated Celie as a waste basket for his life’s
torments, he enters this new faith not as God but merely as a man, inaugurated through his very
change of name. Albert literally and figuratively sews his life together again–joining Celie in her
sewing enterprise. He transforms himself into a man who respects and communes rather than
rules over women– a man infused with the female within. Celie sees the change in her husband:
“[Albert] look like he is trying to make something out of himself. I don’t mean just that
he work and he clean up after himself and he appreciate some of the things God was
playful enough to make. I mean when you talk to him now he really listen, and one time,
out of nowhere in the conversation us was having, he said Celie, I’am satisfied this the
first time I ever lived on Earth as a natural man. It feel like a new experience” (Walker
260)
A natural man indeed. Through the spirit of Black women, as bell hooks, Candice Jenkins
and several other Black feminist scholars note, Albert becomes a man and father, capable of
kindness, of creating alongside Black women (hooks 141 and Jenkins 969). Capable of stitching
together that which has been severed in slavery and its afterlife–those connections that are
undeniable–that bear the reality of distorted kinship ties but also lay tracks of possibility.
Albert scales himself down, humbles himself on human ground–finds that he has
something to learn rather than command. Again, when we arrive at the novel’s end, we find that
the question that animates Walker’s magnificent work is not actually where God is in the life of a
colored girl, but what God is. God is in the embrace of two sisters, Celie and Nettie, after
unconscionable years. God is felt in the embrace of Shug and Celie– two women kissing. And

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God is even in the redemption of a flawed Black man–who not only washes his hands of
Christian masculinism, self-aggrandizement but also turns toward “the female within” —
acknowledging the divine feminist–the womanist that he too is touched with. This is a spiritual
world that Walker brilliantly creates—welcoming both Black women and men in—rooted in our
Black mother’s work–our mother’s gardens. In the end we do not know much about Albert, but
we do know that even he can receive the gift of redemption.

The Black Father’s Spirit, A Maternal Poetic: Revising our Reading of W.E.B. Du Bois
The beginning of this chapter features a theoretical convergence. When the father does
arrive in our lives, it is an instance of the supernatural. But at times this otherworldly figure, once
uncovered reveals itself to be horrifically countenanced. No matter the flow of Black bodies
South or North, urban and rural, the Black father drowns in similar tropes; he is a towering force
meant to deliver the Black family from its curse, but he is ultimately bound to fall from grace. By
way of Walker’s expansive framework, this limited, and sometimes monstrous positioning of the
father can find another pathway to and through life–when stripped down to his humility–his
(feeling) humanity. The Black father, by way of the mother’s spirit, can stitch himself back to
human again. Yet, despite the brilliance of Walker’s work, the father is left still, spiritually
opaque. Yes, Albert has been reformed into a “natural man,” but this is largely through Celie’s
purview and lush, breathtaking journey. Walker’s framework pens the Black father’s potential to
be otherwise opened up, but there is much to be known about the Black father’s soul and his
complex relationship to the metaphysical world. Importantly, soul in Greco-Roman etymology
means “breath” “life” “the emotional and spiritual part of a person”; in German etymology it

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means “coming or going from the water” (OED Online) Soul is what animates a human being,
perhaps as deep and dark, and unrelenting and mercurial as a body of water. To consider a Black
soul then, is to consider Black social life.
Thus, in the face of Black paternal opacity–Black paternal distancing, elevation, mystic
indecipherability, the latter half of this chapter will turn to the Black soul–the Black soul as a
fleshly phenomenon and improvisation–soul that was not meant to exist when our flesh was
ripped from our body–and yet it does. This chapter claims that the Black father has a soul; and
the soul serves an important function. It deepens our understanding of Black fatherhood and the
richness of his Black interior—the richness of his metaphysical inner life. Elizabeth Alexander
calls the “black interior” an inner space where Black folks dream and grieve and think
themselves into existence in excess to what they should or should not be for our public
consciousness (x). Importantly, for the latter half of the chapter we are hearing from the Black
father in the flesh–his own soul translation.
The soul, the father that I speak of, bears the burden of being highly public and often
ironically, pedestalized as divine, American prophet, towering intellectual minister to the Black
masses, sometimes emerging as problematic and often, complicated. Certainly, throughout his
nearly one-hundred-year life, W.E.B. Du Bois continually mobilized and pushed the Black
community in messianic flare towards a fuller liberation sometimes failing in his prophecies and
actions and sometimes not. But what intrigues me are the ways that Du Bois was not only the
Black nation’s guiding moral and spiritual light, but how he fathered on an intimate scale. For
indeed, his most famous text, Souls of Black Folk is dedicated to his son and daughter–who he
describes as, “the lost and the found.” Du Bois was a father–a figurative father to us as
intellectuals, as activists yes--but really a father and had something particular to say about how it

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deepened his soul on a personal level; even if the potency of the sorrow song embedded into his
work has not been altogether heard. My writing–my defensive posturing to borrow an affective
Black feminist stance conceptualized through Jennifer Nash then, will explore what Du Bois is
doing when he tells us of the passing of his only son. And I must say that the fact that I must
write in defense of such a tragedy should already give us pause. It says a great deal about the
limits of our empathy for Black paternal life—the unthinkability of otherwise forms.
To offer context, in his multi-valenced, multi-disciplinary poetic text, his 1903 Souls, Du
Bois writes an oft-overlooked chapter on the short life of his only son, Burghardt, who lived until
he was two. I say short life, when Burghardt’s life was very long, as he is emblazoned in Du
Bois’ soul for the whole of his father’s existence. Du Bois’ biographer David Levering Lewis
writes that Du Bois’ entire life was troubled by his incapacity to save his son from a then
preventable child gripping disease. If Du Bois had only been in Massachusetts, it seems. Du Bois
was inevitably haunted by his incapacity to offer his son a social life or any life at all on the
Black side of the color line. Du Bois, the towering figure, the leader, the savior perhaps, was
powerless when it came to saving his ill son.
Burghardt’s death was caused by diphtheria and occurred in Atlanta, GA where Du Bois
was then researching and lecturing, four years before Du Bois’ publication of Souls. Writing for
the Journal of the Medical Association in this millennium, Karp and Garby state that: “mortality
from diphtheria had fallen precipitously in the mid-1890s, but neither city of Atlanta nor
Philadelphia, from which the family had recently moved, had made the diphtheria antitoxin
available for general use” (68). Certainly there was the fact that Atlanta and Philadelphia were
Black urban centers and the attending fact that white doctors in Atlanta refused to treat the baby

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Burghardt, also at the root of the antitoxin’s paltry availability. For we know that Du Bois had
the material means.
Not only was the death of Du Bois’ son evidence of medical apartheid, but to add further
injury to this tragedy, as he laid his son to rest in a Massachusetts cemetery, passerbys called out
“nigger” at the funeral gates. The mourning has barely begun, and he is struck in the face with a
most virulent racist grammar–the same racism that ripped his child from him, while he was just
finding his way, by his own admission, into the spiritual space of fatherhood.
And so Du Bois writes. He writes “Of the Passing of the First Born” in a kind of soul
open- and open-ended mourning. A Black father’s effort not to be God but rather to engage in
Godly practice. He writes a sorrow song, which evinces his unwillingness to forget this racially
interrupted/ruptured father-son bond—a personal story that he privileges us with hearing. Indeed,
I argue that this writing is a Black father’s soul dissent—a dissent to not be forgotten as father (a
father just as to connected to our Black experience of racism in healthcare), in the same breath as
he refuses to forget his child. Through the act of writing Du Bois offers something novel to our
conventional Black father typologies–he offers himself up–opens himself up for us to really
understand the deepest possible strife and strivings– of the Black father with a social life–of the
Black father’s soul.
This reading of Du Bois is not without hindrance. His positioning and writing of a
chapter on his son’s passing in particular, becomes ripe for criticism largely along the lines of
gender through Hazel Carby, in her groundbreaking monograph, Race Men. Written in 1993,
Carby’s work is notable for pondering the violences of Black masculine leadership and opens
with one of the most sustained readings of Du Bois’s reflection on the early loss of his first born.
Despite what she praises as “one of the most direct and passionate revelations of a male soul in

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American literature” (23) Carby critiques Dubois’ composition as a decidedly public
performance. Carby ultimately situates Du Bois not as a grieving father but a calculated
patriarch—and his elegy as a mere rumination on who shall be the succeeding messianic savior
for the Black nation.
Using the form of Souls as a text, specifically turning to its placement in between an
extensive take on the intellectual leader Alexander Crummell and a reading of Black male
religious mastery, Carby argues that at the center of Du Bois’ query over the death of his son, is
the question of “who shall inherit the mantle of intellectual [Black] leadership” as “the death…
places the fate of the race, figuratively, back within the hands of Du Bois, a leader with no heir”
(24). For Carby, Dubois’ rhetorical strivings serve more as an allegory of political loss, an
allegory of political desire, rather than a soul crisis, grief, a spiritual search, a revelation.
In conclusion then, Carby pays lip service to Du Bois’ soul as she uses Du Bois as an
opening to her salient term, “race man,” which she defines as a Black male leader of the Black
race and Black nation in similar fashion to a messiah figure, which problematically perpetuates a
thin, worn out, and exclusionary masculinity. Employing Du Bois as the progenitor of this
problem in Black discursive tradition, Carby argues that what Dubois creates in his telling of his
son’s passing is ultimately a patriarchal or patronymic enunciation—an ostensible bias towards
male authority and a preoccupation with the crisis of Black masculinity. This is a bias picked up
on by succeeding Black male intellectuals, which enable them to route and tether themselves to
DuBois as their dear Black scholar forefather, like Cornel West.
Put plainly, for Carby, there is, within Du Bois’ writing on his loss of a male progeny, a
placement of Black liberatory futures in the body-texts of Black men–a hollow and narrow
placement that leaves Black women and their intellectual contributions in the shadows. But with

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respect to such a provocative and intelligent formulation, I ask what more we lose in the face of
Carby’s figurations? Indeed, what do we lose when we collapse a Black father’s meditations
always already into patrimony and patriarchal critique and inevitably deny Dubois’ soul
complexity? His vulnerability in the face of such tragedy. In our hermeneutical suspicion, in our
readiness to collapse Du Bois and all our Black fathers into a cipher for patriarchal-political
salvation, how do we miss this intimate encounter with the soul—what a Black fathers soul could
be? Again, we must ask ourselves Black father, where is your soul? Not where are you
pantomiming God, where are you devil, but where are your bones?
Certainly, it should be stated that Du Bois’ relationship with feminism is far from perfect.
Farah Jasmine Griffin’s beautiful essay, “Black Feminists and Du Bois: Respectability,
Protection, and beyond,” praises Du Bois on the one hand, but tempers this praise with a critique
of Du Bois’ tendency to be biased with regards to both class and color (31-35). Black feminist
theorist Joy James also acknowledges that although Du Bois was profeminist, there was a clear
masculinist impulse to his leadership and intellectual enterprise. Indeed, Joy James can be
credited for bringing to our attention Du Bois’ curious flattening of the Black woman intellectual
Ida B Wells and his overwhelming suppression of Anna Julia Cooper who might arguably
precede his anti-imperialist insight (146-147). Moreover, Black male feminist theorists such as
Gary Lemons position Du Bois alongside Frederick Douglass, as a champion of Black women’s
freedom and suffrage; yet he falls short in the control he exerts over his second born daughter’s
marriage to the queer poet Countee Cullen.
Despite Du Bois’ messy relationship to feminism, however, Farah Jasmine Griffin
articulates that Du Bois would have certainly been taken aback by Carby’s flat out vehemence,
as he very well thought of himself aligned with Black feminist pursuits (30). But not only would

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Du Bois be taken aback by Carby’s charge regarding his feminism, I argue he would have been
shaken by the disavowal of his space to feel as well, within his text–within this working of God
and the spirit (understanding that Du Bois’ faith in God fluctuated throughout his life). Carby’s
choice to critique Du Bois as perpetuating a structure of feeling regarding male intellectual
supremacy within such a vulnerable verse, undermines Du Bois’ potential to literally feel, to
love, to question, to be insecure, to grieve, to construct a “site of memory” (Morrison), as a
father. Carby arguably is perpetuating the same patriarchal practice that she admonishes. And
here I think of the late bell hooks, rest her soul, for in her foundational text, The Will to Change
she states that: “men cannot speak their pain in patriarchal culture.” She presses further to state
that “everyone knows how sexist masculinity has assaulted the spirits of men” (140). Reading
through hooks, I contend that approaching Du Bois’ text as a mere site of phallocentric
intellectualism, is a patriarchal practice of reading the Black male as without capacity for
complex emotion–indeed, perpetuating a hegemonic structure that denies Black fathers’ capacity
to be full beings. And how full he is indeed. For Du Bois is, on one front, urging through his
writing a re-seeing, a re-feeling, a new engagement with the Black father form. And on another, I
argue, he is doing this while aligning himself and routing himself through the Black mother’s
spirit, to which I will return. We must think with care about Du Bois fathering, a childless father
in the wake. We might think of him with care; Indeed, our thinking needs care (Sharpe18).
Returning to Griffin’s work, Griffin claims that Du Bois would not have thought of
himself as gender biased; rather he would have thought of himself as a protector of Black women
(31). Certainly, for all of our fixation on the subtext in Du Bois’ work, Du Bois writes very
explicitly about his care, concern for, and allegiance to the advancement of Black women. In his
proto-feminist chapter in Darkwater, the “Damnation of Woman,” Du Bois asks questions that

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echos still within Black feminism. He asks, what of the lives of Black women who are burdened
by poverty, reduced bodily agency, unfulfilling Black male partners–deprived of a life of work
outside of the home–of economic independence? Recalling the four most prominent women of
his childhood, ranging in colors white to brown and occupying various familial points of relation,
Du Bois turns our eyes in the early twentieth century to the suffering that pervades Black
women’s lives. But he does not end here. This is not only a critique of the economic and racial
forces that bear down on Black women, but a fuller call for how Black women are endemic to
the manner in which we must craft a Black future! What he leaves us with, is what he calls the
“spell of the African mother”--laying out this spell by way of the great Harriet Tubman and
Sojourner Truth–positioning them as the gateway to Black transcendence.
This is quite a marvelous embrace of the Black mother long before she becomes fodder
for Moynihan’s rotten report; and it is a recuperation most certainly inspired by Du Bois
watching his own mother; Du Bois’ mother was a single mother who died when he was just a
teen. Du Bois writes of her as this: “My mother and I were good chums. I liked her. After she
was dead I loved her with a fierce sense of personal loss” (Du Bois Online Reader) The building
intensity of feeling that Du Bois relays here is fascinating. It seems that he can only understand
the immensity of the Black mother’s importance in her death. He finds deeper connection to his
mother through loss–through mourning there is a deepening of knowledge that comforts,
unsettles, arguably, opens up.
Indeed, contrary to Carby’s claim that for Du Bois the Black male body-text represents
the range of Black possibilities, there is within Du Bois’s oeuvre what scholar Rebecka Rutledge
Fisher alternatively calls his “mother-imperative.” Fisher hones in on this in Du Bois’ fiction,
namely Dark Princess published in 1928; yet, in a bright and fresh dissertation from Leroy

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Wilson, Wilson extends this rhetorical impulse back as early as 1897, in Du Bois’ writing on the
“Conservation of Races.” Wilson claims that Du Bois’ wide-ranging work, of fiction, non-
fiction, academic, journals, and also importantly, his poems, beckon a closer reading of their
Black maternal episteme, which sutures to his term, “quare poetics”. Stemming for E. Patrick
Johnson’s term “quare” to mean epistemologically excessive and thus generative, Wilson
advances quare poetics to account for the “fluidity of gender and sexual performance, spiritual
syncretism, and diasporic Southernness that African American poetics makes possible” (Wilson
23-24); and further, to “demarcate the oft-unacknowledged role of black maternal voices in the
development of black art forms,” “political identities and critical positions” (Wilson 2) Wilson is
particularly interested in the Black maternal wails, screams, shrieks, moans that emerge through
Black letters, sound, and song as a form of mourning–mourning meant to comfort as well as to
unsettle/resist. Quite brilliantly, Wilson draws out the connection between the Black maternal,
Black song, and Black elegy, to argue that within twentieth century writers, including Black
men, there is not simply a turning away from, but a turning toward this Black maternal voice
within.
Understanding what Fisher calls the mother imperative in Du Bois’ writing, and what
Wilson calls his “quare poetics” then, Du Bois might be opened up differently–opened up for an
alternative reading, imagining, consideration of not simply his Black male, but his Black
paternal soul–his Black paternal subjectivity.
The epigraph that opens up Du Bois’ poetic meditation on his son, sets the tone for this
queer spiritual reading. It is important to note that Du Bois ushers the reader into this work by
way of an Algernon Swinburne poem, inspired by a legend of a mother’s refusal to cease
grieving her dead son. In this Greek myth, a childless mother is transformed into a nightingale

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bird forever in mourning–a mourning that is insurgent in that it does not cease to demand
recognition for her child’s tragic premature death. Interestingly enough, a male nightingale bird
is the only one that sings in nature. There is already here an ungendering a regendering a
reordering and birthing through lamentation. Appositely Du Bois opens:
O sister, sister, they first-begotten,
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child’s blood crying yet,
Who hath remembered me? Who hath forgotten?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget (191).
We can contend that Du Bois’ peculiar deployment of Swinburne’s lamentation gestures
towards his empathetic understanding of the mother’s sorrow song here. Indeed, we can contend
that Du Bois’ is setting the tone for the “motherhood imperative.” But more than empathy, even,
Du Bois is framing his spiritual alignment with the mother–a spiritual alignment or incorporation
of the mother’s grief. A soul alignment that is really a refusal to surrender to death–refusing to
let his son enter oblivion. Indeed, “the world shall end when [she, the mother and Du Bois
himself] forgets” (191). Thinking about the epigraph rigorously as the (Black) mother’s powerful
grasp of social life even in the face of the most tragic of endings, I am reminded here of several
scenes–the first, evoked by historian Vincent Brown and theorist Fred Moten. Speaking of Black
social life evident even onboard the death doling slave ship in our Black memory, Brown
brilliantly recounts a peculiar event aboard the Hudibras of 1786. In it, he evinces a stirring
image of trafficked African women bound for the New World in mourning–drawn together in
concentric circles–gasping, moaning, shrieking in joy and pain. After a celebrated and a beloved

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shipmate dies, in an act nothing short of a most beautiful rebellion, Brown tells that the women
protested the slavers on the deck, insisting that they watch her lowered into the sea. Further, they
stood by her corpse beseeching that she carry their memory home to Africa–embedding
themselves in her flesh as much as she was embedded in theirs (Brown 1231-1232). Indeed, what
Brown reminds us of is a spectacular instance of what Christina Sharpe calls wake work–a
remembering and holding tightly with intention and consciousness, our Black dying and dead
(8).
Brown lingers, not in the irrecoverable, lost, unnamed, unknown, brutally violenced,
permanently dominated, but rather the subtleties of Black women’s resistance to the command of
social and physical death. There are echoes of this within Du Bois’ choice of preface, which
ushers me to another living example of what Moten names through his ever generative collection
of poems, essays, books, as the Black object’s resistance, Black fugitivity, the sonic break.
Taking the infamous fugitive slave Frederick Douglass witnessing of his Aunt Hester’s
pornographic violation on the plantation, Moten focuses on the scream, the shrieks that escape
her mouth (21). What is embedded in that sound and what it tells us is paramount. Aunt Hester
through her enunciation, her refusal to be silent, her lamentation, she breaks away–she bears her
story upon Douglass. She does not go quietly. And through that she cannot and will not be
forgotten.
I would like to figure Du Bois’ articulation of fatherhood within this lineage of Black
women and Black feminist theory–those attending to themselves and to their dead loved ones.
Du Bois is a fleshly extension of this same vision of sonic resistance that lays claim fervently to
the soul–to breath, to life–to a refusal of non-being. Maybe the soul emerges with most clarity in
the face of a loved one’s death. Maybe this is the work of the wake.

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Yet, continuing, Du Bois can be read alongside this as well as other male forms evoking a
maternal spirit, a maternal memory. This leads me yet to another text: Maurice Wallace’s
“Precious Lord: Black Mother-Loss and the Roots of Modern Gospel.” Wallace, the great Black
masculinist theorist that he is, writes of Thomas Dorsey, recognized as the father of gospel–
gospel, which of course rises out of the sorrow songs that Du Bois’ praises as the sound of the
color line (Wallace 1). Focusing on the lyrics of the famous song “Take My Hand, Precious
Lord,” Maurice locates within them, Dorsey’s grief over the recent loss of his wife and child
during childbirth. The grief of the song of course evinces a larger racist history of Black maternal
and child mortality–the same racism that haunts Du Bois and the death of his son (Wallace 2). In
this sonic remembrance, Wallace argues that Dorsey reveals “a black womanist structure of
feeling, intensely and excessively sonified” in ways that hauntingly “gave new birth, mother and
child, to black religious music” (9).
The beauty of Wallace’s analysis can make one shake—and so I will repeat it—“a black
womanist structure of feeling intensely and excessively sonified.” Is this not what Du Bois is
offering years earlier? And the comparisons go on; need I remind the reader of John Coltrane and
the stunning melody of “Alabama.” Coltrane, who was explicitly less political throughout his
career, would have made a fitting site of interrogation for Hazel Carby’s “race man” analysis–a
race man that certainly generates marvelous understandings of what a Black man–a Black father
is and can be outside of exclusionary and tired masculinities. Coltrane, I would argue, embodies
this same womanist or perhaps womanish spirit (that Wallace names) in his Blues homage, to the
spirit of the four girls that died in that bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. “Alabama” is
unforgettable for its opening—the deep dark, auspicious diminished piano chords and the lonely,
meandering solo; and yet just when you’ve settled into its grief, the song’s story swings with a

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cacophony of cymbals and an ephemeral tenor sax improvisation; Coltrane surrenders to the
girls’ fleshly beauty, their memory, and faith that they and maybe we will one day be free. There
is a Black home here. Belonging here. There is a feeling and feeling for each other here, that
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call a Black love (97). There is through Coltrane’s evocation of
the womanist spirit, a peering into, an understanding of the Black man’s soul.
Considering the lineage that I have just charted, I contend that there is a womanist spirit
carried through Du Bois’ sorrow song–a womanist spirit in Du Bois’ soul that he wants us to
read, to hear. Not simply as a man but as a father in relation to others. Within Du Bois’ sonic
prose lie the “spectral bodies of mother and child” (Wallace 2) that keep both himself and his
wife and his child at the center–alive. Thus, we enter the opening lines of Du Bois’ prose more
fully aware, more attuned to his intervention. Indeed, with this new insight, we are opened up to
its utter vulnerability.
When Du Bois receives the announcement that his son is born, Du Bois tells us that feels
afraid. He writes that “the fear of fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of creation” (191) as he
rushes with incredulity and trepidation to his wife’s side. It is through the gaze on his wife–the
mother–that he gains a kind of solid footing, however. His footing into fatherhood is grounded
through the mother’s image.
Surprisingly by Du Bois’ own admission, his fatherly love was not instantaneous.
Perhaps it was the fear of emerging as a father, but nevertheless he writes: “I did not love it then;
it seemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I loved, my girl–mother, she whom now I saw
unfolding like the glory of the morning…Through her I came to love the wee thing, as it grew
strong; as its little soul unfolded itself in twitter and cry and half–formed word, and as its eyes
caught the gleam and flash of life. How beautiful he was” (192).

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However, as he is opened up to the wonder of the mother, the wonder incited by his
child’s growth enraptures him. It enraptures him until death takes his child’s hand and he cries
out in existential angst to trade his death to spare his death. Indeed, and of course, Du Bois
desires to sacrifice himself not over masculine anxiety but the spiritual vertigo that we can only
imagine accompanies that kind of grief.
What Du Bois is doing in this slim note is wedding his father-being, his father
subjectivity, to what Maurice Wallace calls the womanist spirit of sound, what Leroy Wilson
calls quare poetics, what Fisher calls the mother imperative. He is wedding himself to the Black
feminist mode of resistance, which offers him the space to be. He is wedding himself to the
wails, shrieks, moans, that emerge as a working of the soul, of the spirit in a Black will to not
forget his son. In a Black will to not be forgotten as a father as well–who, however, fearful,
hopeful, devastated–loved. Emphatically, importantly, the Black mother, for Du Bois, is the root
of the Black (paternal) soul. It is what draws him into this spiritual fold. It is only through the
knowledge of the Black mother that he is privileged to be and become–to know the power and
promise of Black fatherhood. Indeed, it is only through her that he has entree into the deep
understanding wrought from grief and mourning–grief mourning that is more than lamentation
but also a site of insurgency–a site of the Black father’s refusal to forget, to be blotted out. In this
sense Du Bois, as Leroy Wilson claims before me, anticipates a cadre of Black feminist theory
related to the spirit. Anticipates Walker’s womanism, anticipates a reading of the Black feeling
rendered so beautiful through Audre Lorde while he succeeds and carries many mothers. Indeed,
through his slim text, what Du Bois is really telling us is: “The white father told us: I think,
therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us— the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel,
therefore I can be free” (38). Du Bois’ poetry then, has a peculiar emphasis, the peculiar poetics

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of a Black father feeling and therefore be(coming) free. As he touches the golden curls that were
cradled with love.

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Black Father’s Touch: A Peculiar Poetic
At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the early stages of slavery’s afterlife, Du Bois’
writing inaugurates a new Black paternal form. As he remembers his beautiful son, Du Bois’
writing affords us the opportunity to imagine a Black father’s subjectivity and with it a Black
paternal soul. The Black father waiting by our cradle, begins to wield something with his hands
though, too, as he touches his son’s golden curls.
Trailing the image of Du Bois embracing his son in joy and then in mourning, I move from
the metaphysical to a preoccupation with what Black fatherhood does with the sensorium. My third
dissertation chapter takes a more experimental turn, as I am interested not in sight and sound, but
rather the peculiar life of physical touch–Black fathers touching us–its impact, its knowledge,
history, and its implications.
4

The terrifying beauty of touch —its duality as both death doling and lifeline, has been lost in
Black paternal life. For although it remains unnamed as such, Black fathers’ touch has always been
understood as decrepit in Black discourse. Black paternal touch has always been approached with
distrust and yet, I contend, it can free us. This chapter will examine both sides, both liberation and
bind, through the Black literary tradition and Black cinema.
Thinking about Black fathers and the tactile, I am reminded of a reading from scholar Kevin
Quashie’s work on Black aliveness, which pushes us to imagine a Black world not cast against the

4
It is interesting to write about touch during the COVID pandemic, even though my thinking about touch precedes
this moment. But the pandemic has shaken up our lives and taught us more about what is important. For many, touch
has become the first thing on our minds–touch and its thickness (Morrison 164). We have come to realize that touch
is crucial to life, but touch sometimes without us knowing, can also be deadly.

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harm of antiblack social death. This work is crucial to my own, and yet there is something within
his fourth chapter that gives me pause; it is Quashie’s choice of poet Toi Derricotte’s work, “Beds.”
Derricotte, in a kind of retrospective glance on her Black father and childhood, writes the following
words:
“[My father] was the ruler of my body…like the commander of a submarine during times
of war…My father and I shared a new bedroom, and my mother slept on the pullout in the
living room so that she couldn’t wake us when she got dressed in the morning for work.
We slept in twin beds, pushed up close together, as if we were a couple. I could have slept
with my mother in the bedroom…I could have slept on the pullout. My mother shopped
after work every Thursday, so my father could come home and fix dinner for me…He’d
bring it [the steak] home and unwrap the brown paper…like someone doing a striptease…I
was never happier than when I was with my father and he was in a good mood…He was
so handsome that I felt proud when people noticed us…I had dressed up as if I were his
girlfriend…I thought maybe, if he saw I was almost a woman and could do what beautiful
women do, he might find a reason to love me. At the end [of the dance], I spun around and
around until most of the drapes, towels, and my mother’s nightgown fell to the floor. I
don’t remember what remained to cover me” (Derricotte 52-57)
There is certainly a life to the touch that Derricotte outlines–the two beds pressed together, the
way that the steak lies on unwrapped brown paper, and the dress layers that adorn her while she
dances. There is life to this touch and yet that touch leads to an unsettling bend, as it features a
Black father and girl child pulled together with dead-end sexual implications.

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Derricotte’s father was an undertaker–a variation on Black father God–a medium between
death and the unknown other side. Derricotte’s childhood Detroit house was a funeral home.
Meaning the Derricotte refuge was filled up with death and her prayers to the spirit world. The
touch of her father follows this course as Derricotte recounts the looming sexual abuse: “after my
father had beaten me, he made me bathe” (57).
In Quashie’s brilliant efforts to figure Derricotte’s work in an archive of Black poetics of
being—to figure this imagery as a reflection of the capaciousness of human experience, I pause
and consider this fraught exposure of touch that brushes with dis-ease around and against
Derricotte’s Black father and, further, what Quashie’s placement of it means in considering a Black
world. For it seems that in Black worldmaking, Black paternal sexual and physical abuse–or rather,
the harmful hand of Black fathers still looms. My work considers these grave and momentous
implications—their bearing on Black fathers’ possibility and their bearing on all of our lives—
even in my holding space for the lived experiences of abuse survivors.
Derricotte’s poetic prose is not an uncommon emergence in the Black canon. Black fathers’
touch is often digested as an unsettling occurrence—a force that, when it does appear, forces itself
upon us. With a rain of fists and its lingering in hushed places, it is unnamed yet understood, as a
touch that stings the skin, chilling it, filling our throats with the bitter of bile, feeding away at our
insides. Our innocence. Like Deacon Gabriel’s sudden spring upon our necks. Like the bite of Mr.
___’s belts. Like the wretchedness of a father raping his daughter on a cold afternoon. To recall
Black paternal touch is to recall a stickiness—is to recall an ickiness that burns the tongue “as
quiet as it’s kept”. To recall Black paternal touch is to stiffen, lose consciousness, and find oneself
open—too close to R. Kelly and Bill Cosby—allegedly. Too close to the bedside of Cholly
Breedlove (Morrison 161).

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Wandering through this thicket of feeling, trailing paternal figures touched on in the
previous chapter and offering several more allusions, my chapter opens, exploring Black fathers’
touch as a criminal sense, as a kind of contamination. It opens, proposing that Black paternal
fingers in our “common sense” of Black relations (Keeling 566) are registered, dirty, uninvited,
violent—creeping and seeping, submerged and exposed throughout our Black family history.
Following Saidiya Hartman’s intelligent formulation of slavery’s malevolent continuation into the
present, this is a touch we might imagine snaking its way from the brutal side of Black enslavement
onto this side of our incomplete emancipation—marking us, I contend, with its afterlife extension
(Hartman 6 and Sharpe 8). Black fathers’ touch is arguably known to us an antebellum elaboration
of blood red realities: incest, attack, assault, and rape.
Slavery’s animalization shadows Black patriarchal limbs that like white supremacist
patriarchy itself, cannot fulfill our Black freedom strivings. It shadows them, that like white
supremacist patriarchy, cannot cover us, rub salve on our backs, wrap our wombs like Black
midwives. It cannot clean our wounds like aunts, mothers, grandmothers, or even slit our throats
to grace us like Sethe does for Beloved—to grace us with (after)life outside of bondage (Morrison).
No, there is no theoretical room for such wide open empathy, for such redemption, for what Anissa
Wardi names as our Black mother’s healing balm potential, embedded in their “laying of hands”
(207). To recall Black paternal touch canonically, is to recall simply, and again, a dead-end, a
deadening. To recall it is to recall our Black capture.
Accordingly, my chapter routes through this revelation—sifting first through the soiling of
paternal touch in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, to ask with care, with caution, if Black fathers’
fingers can do more than decompose us. I ask, can they be anything other than sullied? Can they

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be anything other than pathological; can they be ultimately, unclenched otherwise, and re-known
to us?
I am interested ultimately in how Black fathers might touch otherwise; and there is within
this writing a firm contention. Black fathers hold the capacity for otherwise touch: what Ashon
Crawley might call a touching horizon of vibrancy, elaborating the plenitude for Black life.
Through touch, I argue, Black paternal lives offer “otherwise worlds of possibility” (32). Yes,
otherwise touch is Black paternal worldmaking– lively, rich, abundant, generous–already
happening around us. And otherwise touch might move us out of the bondage of patriarchal flexing
to the flying, underwater embrace of Black feminist and queer of color theory.
Black paternal touch can be that Black familial counter knowledge, which reminds us, even
in the hold of slave, state, prison capture, that “we are held”
5
(Sharpe, 73) . For this writing is a
writing that calls us to imagine the powerful possibility of Black fathers holding and unfolding—
unfolding and ontologically becoming by way of hands. Yes, if my first two chapters interrogate
Black fatherhood as unfinished, or in more optimistic tones, emergent, then my third and fourth
chapters look to Black father’s capacity sent into our Black worlds to be in service to us, nourish
and grow us. In my turn to the tactile then, I am theorizing a Black paternal touch that is not an
outstretch of Black manhood’s trending toward antisociality and heteropatriarchal violence, but
rather what my monograph charts as the power of Black maternal memory within our fathers, as
our fathers only route into being, in all of its polymorphous, spiritually transcendent, viscous
outreach. This is a peculiar social potential, outside of respectability, outside of assimilation and

5
Sharpe takes inspiration for this from Dionne Brand’s poem about the Middle Passage. For further reference see:
Brand, Dionne. Thirsty. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2002.

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reification, which ushers us ultimately, into the palms of Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” at the water’s
edge—at this chapter’s closing.
Appositely, this chapter will engage vigorously and assiduously with touch; and I will take
care, therefore, in my elaboration of it. For when I talk about Black paternal cracked fingers on
our backs, hardened hands outstretched for ours, I am interested in how it speaks to life,
development, the intimate. Thus, before the metaphoric, before the figurative, before the
(trans)national, geographic, diasporic, I commence with touch’s overwhelmingly physical
characteristics. I pour through touch as primarily tactile, direct and immediate contact with a
proximate body. I linger in touch’s more rudimentary form—the action of the hand, body, finger.
And from there I stretch outward, enriched with the understanding that this corporeally catalyzed
touch of the Black father, rushes strikingly into the psycho-affective, knocking us to our feet—
gesturing towards an action that can be interpreted as not simply physical, but also, deeply
visceral—emotional, intellectual (Birch-Bayley 2-5).
6

I am writing about touching skin–yes. Black skin. Yet, I write through a touch that
acknowledges, reaches for more than just the skin as surface. Here I evoke recent queer of color
interventions from the late Jose Munoz and a 2018 special issue entitled “Skin, Surface,

6
Indeed, my writing is infused with the notion that Black fathers reaching out, carries emotional impact. Or what
feminist scholar Sara Ahmed might call the grazing of the skin surface with various impressions, which makes some
subjects align with some others, and against other others (25). Indeed, I am interested in how Black patriarchal touch
might make us recoil, back away, cringe, as it descends upon our nervous system; or in other words, the feeling that
contact imprints when it meets unsavory skin. That and too, what Brian Massumi might call touch’s “affect”—the
unlearned or learned intensity, which precedes it coming to pass. Indeed, what hangs over and prior to Black fathers’
touching act? What hangs over and somewhere in between—“perception and consciousness, stimulus and response,
physiology and psychology”? And further, derived from Patricia Ticinento Clough’s The Affective Turn: Theorizing
the Social, is it an emotional force that augments or diminishes touch’s capacity—the ability of Black fathers’ touch
to ever reach its skin destination?

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Sensorium,” where, intelligently, these inquiries cohere on the concept of racialized skin as
considerably more than thin in their intellectual richness. Indeed, skin and its touching, in a bevy
of queer of color scholars’ formulations, exceeds superficial knowledge — skin is more than a
delicate unsubstantial covering for something deeper. But rather, it is generative in and of itself—
slippery, erotic, seductive, folding, affective, morphing. Like the sultry, slickness of Grace Jones,
minoritarian skin has a feeling and holds within it, an entire life (McMillan) Skin holds an
otherwise dimension, or what Rivzana Bradley calls a haptic personality (130). Skin as material
tells us something special about feeling queer and non-white; while touching that skin tells us
something unique about kinship and relation.
But attuned with my dive into Blackness, Black studies, Black feminism, my chapter asks,
what of the flesh and Black fathers’ engagement? What of the flesh, that like skin and surface, is
more than empty in meaning, more than falsity, deception, vacuous covering that we must mine
for deeper understanding. What of the flesh, that like skin surface, richly elaborates (kin) relations,
senses, and feeling. What can flesh and touching flesh mean between ourselves and our fathers?
For it seems that flesh, more than skin and surface, activates what Alex Weheliye calls a “line of
flight” or a “fleshly surplus” (2) an otherwise opportunity, to brush into agape, spiritual,
metaphysical, aquatic, para-ontological, fugitive excess of Black (feminist) theory—to fuse
fathers’ touch with Black feminist iterations and articulations of Black freedom being.
This claim for Black manhood’s queer reach, requires a return, and a rootedness not simply
in queer of color intervention then, but Black feminist theory. We might find it paramount to tease
through our Black origin story from “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”—Hortense Spillers’
ingenious 1987 offering. Again, to remind us, Spillers pushes back on ubiquitous delineations of
Black family life as distorted and pathological—its delineation of Black paternity as diseased—

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focusing alternatively on not deviance but gendered excess, gendered resistance. Spillers talks
about this high crime against Black humanity, which commences with the ripping of Black body
from flesh. Ripped from flesh—from self-possession, from self-direction—trafficked Africans
ushered to the New World, became but a mere commodity—a victim of arithmetic, of lists. They
were sprawled out as bodies without gender-specificity, gender integrity, and re-purposed for the
white master’s sundry use (66). This violent event, forced Black women and Black men together
in a space of gendered negation, but also created in its wash, a novel and generative gendered
occasion created literally by way of touch. As Hortense Spillers writes, and here I am repeating at
length again:
The African-American male has been touched...by the mother, handed by her
in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white American male is
allowed to temporize by fatherly reprieve...The African American woman,
the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy
evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated—the law of the mother—
only and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African-American
male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing
social fiction of the Father’s name, the Father’s law...the black American male
embodies the only American community of males which has had the specific
occasion to learn who the female is within itself...It is the heritage of the mother
that the African American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood—
the power of “yes” to the “female” within. (80)
The Black male is more than extension of the violent hands of whips, chains, rape, belts. (Sharpe
8). The Black male, by way of its movement across to the New World is afforded a peculiar

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potential. This is a counter power of the Black mother impressed upon Black fathers by way of
touch. Touch is the very basis of Black paternal being and elaboration. This power of mother touch
is what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten afford further nuance in their theory of [Black] hapticality
(97). If we recall their fresh abolitionist work, The Undercommons, Harney and Moten read
closely, Spillers’ Middle Passage rendering of bodies piled on top of bodies—indeed, bodies
touching, as a site of rupture, a site of Black resistance, for in that piling, flesh lingers and touches
literally. For they assert that the “terrible gift” of the slave ship’s hold “was to gather dispossessed
feelings in common...skin, against epidermalization, senses touching. Thrown together touching
each other, we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce
sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Though forced to touch and be touched,
…though refused sentiment, history and home we feel (for) each other” (Harney and Moten 98).
Within enslavement’s wounding there is the gift of Black tactile memory—our mothers’
memory—which generates the collective feeling for each other that is an insurgent potential. Put
plainly, by way of bodily communion, there is the possibility for Black resistance by way of this
Black touching. Black paternal flesh touch then—its fugitive excess-- is not a dead-end and
diabolic extension, but rather a possibility for Black freedom, for Black love.

Black Common Sense: The Predominance of Vision and Sound in the Black Archive
Before placing my hands at the core of this argument I would like to course through what
is fulfilled in thinking Black paternity, touch, and freedom/memory together, as it pertains to Black
fathers and Black kinship studies. Or in other words, I would like to examine what can be amplified
through such a lens—through such a sense—through such a particularity. Because to think through

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touch is to turn necessarily to the underside of our known sensorium—to contend with the bottom
of the theoretical totem.
In Western thought, within the Western imagination, it is visuality rather than touch that
holds preeminence, such that to see is to know and thus to possess intellect. Indeed, to see is to
possess light, to be sun-filled, enlightened. Plato opens the Western canon in this manner, deeming
sight the noblest and most Godly of senses. Fittingly as we fall down the pole of human
experience—encountering sound, taste, smell—sensations descend in importance accordingly,
until we hit at the arguable base of human perception. Touch is rendered thusly, base in both senses
of the word— akin to an intellectual, moral impoverishment—a depravity, an ignorance.
Similar to its humble province in thought, touch is tossed to the underside of the Western
imperial project— grotesque to the Western (white) intellectual, turned explorer turned colonizer,
who would rather observe “the Other”—brown, black, yellow that it encounters—at a distance.
And as time marches on—indeed as Michel Foucault tells us—power reorganizes in a modern and
postmodern context. Under said (post)modernity, we find that the need for bodily approximation
recedes significantly, as visual technologies fine tune their control, domination, segmentation
through the eye—regulating and contorting melanated subjects by way of slave ships, prisons,
surveillance (Foucault 205).
Black Studies, in many ways, is bound by this sensorial inheritance—the violent
implications of the white gaze on Black bodies. Indeed, it is bound by the privileging of sight as
knowledge—for Black people cannot escape the visual tag of their skin. Yes, it might be said that
Black Studies is animated as much by Du Bois’ closed question of, “how does it feel to be a
problem” (Du Bois 7), as it is by the imperative “look a Negro!” —the phrase thrown at

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philosopher Frantz Fanon, as cold hard evidence of Black deformation under the colonial condition
(Fanon 82).
Turning to this wintry day in colonial France more closely, which will be echoed and
fleshed out more thoroughly in the subsequent chapter, when Fanon’s shivering is mistaken for
monstrous stirring in the eyes of a frightened white boy, we find that Fanon ingeniously elaborates
on the manner in which visuality produces and limns a social schema for Blackness by way of the
Black epidermis. Through the white eye–“the only [eye] that matters” (85)—Fanon is veritably
gutted of his insides and remade—abject, criminal object, perennial outsider— laid bare, barren,
non-being, in the snow.
As we move across time-space we encounter this terrible echo of white looking that Fanon
evokes—a visual echo that distorts us beyond recognition, beyond relation. There is a severance
of our flesh from our bodies begotten from the sheer terror that whiteness coerces us to behold.
Through Saidiya Hartman again, we relearn the wounds inflicted in Frederick Douglass’ startling
eyewitness account of his handsome Aunt Hester stripped and clinging, mangled by a lascivious
white master (17). Our eyes are pried open to view the equally pornographic vision of Saarjie
Bartman arriving from South Africa encaged—akin to how Black feminist Hortense Spillers
provocatively describes Black women as “the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced,
misseen...awaiting their verb” (53). Continuing on, in a list nowhere near exhaustive, we trace with
horror, the visual outlines of lynched Black corpses, Black men gunned down in the streets, Black
babies born in jail nurseries, fugitive slave bills. Yes touch, is cloaked and forgotten, and perhaps
for good reason, receding from our minds as we remember, as we re-envision these Fanonian
nightmares that split us, that separate us from each other and from ourselves. We remember
through Hartman’s luminous insight, that through white sight on the racialized Other, empathy

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becomes a precarious thing—as Blackness is slipped on, curled into, and yet never understood as
human (4).
Look! A Negro. (Fanon 82). A thing.
Indeed, amid this legacy, Black bodies, and Black men’s bodies in particular, as Black
cultural theorists of masculinity, Maurice Wallace and David Marriott relay, begin to resemble
overtime not being, but something like a Kodak moment. Black men are a staged photograph, like
what Maurice Wallace names “spectragraphia,” a visual logic of Black masculinity that blinds us
with false optics—an “illusory…cultural vision” (Wallace 31). Or Black men are a snapshot that
auto-reads as “imbecilic, oversexed, criminal, murderous, feckless, rapacious”--the “phobic
object” to which we are drawn and repelled from again and again (Marriott 13). But of course
these are false visions bearing false dreams of Blackness that create only further distance–further
relational rifts.
Given the omnipotence of sight in measuring and subjugating Black life, Black studies
becomes in turn, a kind of fugitive dance to reference Fred Moten—a fugitive movement through,
within, and against visuality’s potent photographic capture (179). This is achieved through the
deployment of a counter-gaze, as theorist bell hooks displays—a kind of Black look and looking
back (4). And it also takes the form of a rupture through the power of the sonic. Indeed, sight and
sound form the bedrock of Black sensorial and wider resistance, from Du Bois early twentieth
century delineation of Black folks’ sorrow songs, to Fred Moten’s intelligent noting of the captive
Aunt Hester’s shrieks as phonic escape. In both instances white sight is foiled by the very sound
of the Black voices—Black voices, which hold memory of Black life in putative zones of Black
non-being. Further, from Daphne Brooks’ recalling of the fugitive slave Henry Box Brown’s

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restaging of his hypervisible yet unseen freedom journey to the North in a box, to Simone
Browne’s highlight of surveillance and Black resistance through their ingenious deployment of
“sousveillance” (Browne 21), scholars evince how Blackness thwarts, subverts, overturns the
white eye that threatens to split open Black being potential.
Yes, as bell hooks summarizes powerfully, “the natives are gazing and talking back.” The
natives have always gazed and talked back, yet, our evaluation of looking and voicing has given
way to engagement with the lesser senses. Indeed, innovative scholarly approaches to Black
counterintelligence have carried us, in a contemporary context, toward smell, taste, touch, where
we find ourselves amid a “low down, underground” communal knowledge. Or in other words, they
are routing us toward Black feminist and queer of color theory, where we find fresh surveys on
Blackness in relation to taste, or Blackness and smell—opening up Blacks’ well tracked counter-
sonic, counter-visual possibility. Black literary feminist theorist, Kyla Tompkins, for instance,
engages the implications of the alimentary as Black metaphoric consumption—as a continued
Black commodification within Western systems of empire and market—and how early Black
novelists play on eating to feed us alternative understanding of Black being (202). Too, the fresh
provocative work of L.H. Stallings swells our understanding—playing on the scent and sonic
meanings of “funk” (music) to imagine the power of the micropolitical or the seeds of Black
revolution embedded in what they offer as a “funked” up erotics: the freaky, aberrant,
“unrespectable” love and sexual aspects of the Black quotidian, from porn to polyamory (11).
Yet, to return to the heart of this matter, what else can be known if we descend all the way
to where the light barely touches—to contend with what Kara Keeling calls “a subaltern common
sense” (7) that shoots through hegemonic ways of assuming knowledge? What other “scripts of
black skin” can be gleaned when we resist colonial, antebellum, state violence, not through

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countering, thwarting, subverting, but through (touching) connection. To find power or more
importantly freedom, in the notion that we are touched otherwise. That we are touched lightly on
our flesh. That through this flesh touch we are held.
Subaltern common sense of the haptic moves us gently away from patriarchal, masculinist
logics inextricably tied to vision, towards the multitude of feminist and queer possibilities afforded
through fleshly connectedness, afforded through relation. Indeed, affording us the Black feminist
potential that flesh atop flesh begets. This touch has the already here potential of rupturing our
lines cut around gender while telling us something more about Blackness, Black fatherhood, Black
familial form—pulling in the drift, annihilating the sordid expanse consigned to Black paternal
tactility, as we dive through literary and cinematic works.
The Bluest Eye: Black Fatherhood and Decrepit Touch
If my writing is interested ultimately in Black father’s flesh touch as a kind of paternal
unfolding—a fleshly memory of paternal connection that engenders a sense of freedom, then Toni
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye might represent, ostensibly, a theoretical obverse. The Bluest Eye
surfaces in the most brilliant sense, as a kind of Black death, a train wreck, a run-on sentence of
Black unraveling—climaxing with a series of primal questions. What comprises the spoiling of a
Black girl? What catalyzes the unmaking of a Black family? What incites the distortion of Black
freedom dreams? And how does the Black father’s hand arise as a monstrous culprit—to shred
Black child, Black mother, Black domesticity, at their seams?
In its most clarion form, The Bluest Eye is a story of a Pecola Breedlove—a story of a
(presumably) ugly Black girl—poor and downtrodden. Peeking out from a shame-filled Blackened
world, Black Pecola dreams only of blue eyes. And by the novel’s end, we understand that blue

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eyes represent for her, white beauty, white family, and ultimately (the impossibility of) white
freedom afforded by a white life. But while Morrison brilliantly weaves a story of Black girlhood
as anti-bildungsroman—Black girlhood as life stunted in the face of racist ideologies—what makes
us shudder in our seats and touches us indelibly, is the incest that freezes and operates as the
novel’s haunting frame.
A making of Toni Morrison’s imagination, Pecola’s father Cholly Breedlove, unfolds
symbolically as a nadir in this overwhelmingly tragic story. Or perhaps more clearly, Cholly raping
his only girl child, reflects how, through self-hate and Black patriarchal toxicity, Black fathers foil
Black familial possibility.
In this sense, Cholly raping his daughter reminds us of those multi-phonic echoes of
Senator Patrick Moynihan’s legacy that we encountered in the first chapter—a legacy captured in
his infamous “Report” of 1965, which Morrison’s 1970 publication trails closely. To rehearse
briefly, the Report touts Black failure, and was published curiously at the same moment that Black
folks realized another elevation of freedom. Moynihan’s The Negro Family: the Case for National
Action, borrows largely from prior, more rigorous findings, which paint Black American kinship
structures as gender reversed, deteriorating and broken. Rather than citing ongoing oppression,
Moynihan holds Black families responsible for producing Black deprivation. And more
specifically, Moynihan faults the all too powerful Black mother. It is the mother figure in this
family romance that fails Black kinship by not only transgressing proper gendered performances
but also effeminizing and alienating Black fathers (75). Thus, through Moynihan’s political,
academic work, which trickles insidiously into the public arena, we are ushered into Blackness as
a weary world of strong Black mothers and runaway fathers—fathers running away from
themselves, from us—like Cholly Breedlove.

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Morrison’s work suspends Moynihan’s tangle of pathology before our eyes—ripping the
covering off of our obscured vision to see its ugliest interior materialization. Yes, surely visuality
is predominant—evident in her work’s very title—but I would like to offer touch equal breath—
equal importance in our evaluation of the Black father and the Black family.
We can say that Morrison’s engagement with touch has been critically engaged on levels
that are mainly metaphoric. Certainly, there is often already (implicitly) a metaphoricity to our
approach to Blackness— which bespeaks Kevin Quashie’s claim, again, in the Sovereignty of
Quiet–of the Black as obligatorily public and impossibly private in our national consciousness
(11). Nevertheless, the forcible publicness or cleaving open of Black bodies and Black domesticity
in relation to touch becomes of interest, for me, in my turning to the provocative brilliance of
Aliyyah Abdur Rahman’s Against the Closet. Importantly, Rahman works through the curious rise
of incest as motif in post-Civil Rights Black women’s literature—evaluating the rape of Pecola in
Toni Morrison’s 1970’s publication, as not simply an instance of individual sexual injury, but as
“a figurative sexual arrangement that epitomizes black familial ruin in the post-civil rights period”
(117). Or in other words, as a manner of speaking back to the masculinist Black nationalist agenda
fueled by the nation’s deleterious charge that overbearing Black mothers are the cause of Black
stagnation, Black women’s textual strategies offer an unforgettable counter-narrative. That is,
through the potent symbolic of father-child incest, these formidable writers that Rahman cites,
position Black children and their mothers as the ultimate victims of totalizing state failure—a state
that catalyzed black familial disintegration “under the pressures of civil rights retrenchment,
reinvigorated black patriarchy, dwindling communal supports, negligible economic resources, and
urban decay” (117) Yes, the onus falls on the state. But the Black father figure, yet again, is directly
to blame. For the Black father here, conflated with Black patriarch, stands in mimicry of white

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hegemonic masculinity, from which Black patriarchal touch originates— mirroring the hands of
state destruction.
Rahman’s maneuvering brilliantly adapts the theoretical legacies of what Black literary
scholar, Claudia Tate, calls our Black “allegories of political desire” (7). Tate defines this as the
use of Black gendered, domestic intricacies within literature to shape or trouble overarching Black
national, political projects. Rahman works in the vein of troubling; and rightfully, Rahman’s focus
is on a Black girl (and mother) nation-state victimization—or perhaps the ways in which nation-
state and the fundamentally lacking Black father press devilishly upon Black adolescence. This is
what happens, on a meta-level, when Black manhood runs “dangerously free”—becoming the
nightmare that arises in Birth of a Nation—the Black rapist phantom of white dreams. And yet,
what does this meta-scalar pointing toward Black paternal tactility as pathology do to their
possibility? What possibility can be made of Black fathers’ hands representing only a vacuous
trope—a socio-political proxy, a puffed out stand-in, a national foil?
Delivering us back into palms of The Bluest Eye more directly then, what Toni Morrison
offers us, is more than an analysis of the civic, but an entree in the intimacies of Black paternal
touch scaled down from the level of platform, of public. “As quiet as it’s kept,” this textured
privateness or rather interior invitation into Blackness offers a multi-layered approach and feeling
to Cholly and the Black father’s touching— freezing it in frames prior to its foiling, or prior to its
spoiling of Pecola’s bodily integrity. This freezing enables us to not only ask the most important
question of what happens to Pecola and her mother at the receiving end of Cholly’s bitter hands,
but what might strike us as something of equal importance. Indeed, what does touch do to Cholly?
What is Cholly’s haptic history? His touching origin story?

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Asking this series of questions opens us up further, to ask not only: what does touch do to
Cholly, but also what has touch done? And in the case of Cholly, what has touch not done. Or
further still, what can touch undo in the history and present of the Black family?
Morrison presents for us, what we might understand as a site of memory for a dangerously
free touch. Taking a tour through Cholly Breedlove’s coming of age, or rather his age becoming
stunted, we are acquainted with a body exposed and unembraced. Through Cholly, I contend, we
are beckoned to ask if we can feel what it feels like to only know touch as the sum of “two blankets
and one newspaper” as we are placed on a “junk heap by a railroad” (Morrison 132). We are
beckoned to question what havoc such an untouched passage into life would derive. To stand
deprived of mother and father touch. To have one’s life marked by tactile evaporation.
Yes, this is where Morrison begins—illuminating Cholly as a Black baby boy un-held,
untouchable—a Black baby boy thrown away on trash—like trash. We can understand his
subsequent Black masculine performance then, through the trauma of discarding and negation—-
the trauma of (self) alienation. Made a stranger to touch, it is not surprising that Cholly becomes a
stranger to his daughter, and to us. We can understand, too, what Hypatia Voluminaris asserts:
“unrequited touch is an unrequited world” (233). Although Cholly is recovered by his dear Aunt
Jimmy, the indifference to loving touch has already coiled through him; she is already too late.
And so Cholly grows—shuddering in the face of touch, such that even his Aunt’s death cannot
bring him to reach out his hands to commemorate—or embrace the woman under whom he is
raised. As Morrison writes, “even at the graveyard he felt nothing but curiosity, and when his turn
had come to view the body at church, he had put his hand out to touch the corpse to see if it were
really ice cold like everybody said. But he drew his hand back quickly” (143).

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Morrison continues—honing in on a scene of Cholly’s first sexual becoming. It unravels
in the moment that it begins, as he lays with his lover Darlene in her white cotton dress. Cholly
reaches for climax but is stopped short in the gaze of white men who stumble upon them in the
field and demand to watch the end of Cholly’s performance. The hands and the body of this
pubescent Black boy in an instant are bound up suspended in what Black feminist scholar, Hortense
Spillers might call the fated brush of trafficked Africans in New World slavery and thereafter—
cut from self-will and recast as a victim of pornotroping—recast for the white captor’s lascivious
use (67). Powerless.
And here Cholly lays—suddenly shocked into impotence as the white men’s flashlight
shone on him and filled him with shame—as the flashlight spilled into his soul, “wormed its way
into his guts and turned the sweet taste of muscadine into rotten fetid bile.” And in the face of his
shame he casts his gaze hatefully on Darlene, his lover, who is covering her face—remarking that
her hands have changed in this distorted scene of love, under distorted light: “they look like baby
claws” (Morrison 151). The hands that Cholly touched with the tenderness of romantic love, have
transformed in this sullied interaction—deformed—taking on the appearance of “baby claws”—
prefiguring, foreshadowing his ultimate taboo of incest, which strikes us as only fitting for a Black
brute—his ultimate socio-familial transgression.
Thus, when we arrive at the latter half of Morrison’s epic offering, we find Cholly raping
Pecola while he is fumbling in the dark. Indeed, it is afternoon, enveloped in the “thin light of
spring—” a spring light that we might imagine heralding birth, newness, novelty, the brightness
of possibility (161). But Cholly falters in pitiful contrast, unable to reap harvest, unable to bear
fruit with his hands—fumbling with them instead. In the dark. Cholly is wading—stumbling
through the blindness of his drunkenness. Moving in the darkness of his inebriated haze into the

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most interior, the most symbolically feminine and domestic space. Into his kitchen home, where
the unassuming Pecola stands at the sink, washing “around and around,” a frying pan. This is
where Cholly fumbles and falters—stumbling and weak (Morrison 161).
Morrison tells us that Cholly saw his daughter “dimly and could not tell what he saw or
what he felt” (161). Her words are reminiscent of a phrase—that when we cannot see, touch is our
last means of guidance. Intrigued by Michel Serres’ claim that “touch is the last remaining means
of guiding yourself” (Serres 18), Cholly, with distorted sight—mystified—touch deprived, thus
feels his way into relational knowing, paternal knowing with terrifying resolution. While Morrison
characterizes Cholly with the intention of evincing how he loves his daughter, (and I am here to
receive her quite gracious delineation in my subsequent chapter) this stretch of his body to us,
might be a more deeply contextualized instance of what Christina Sharpe marks as Black life’s
“monstrous intimacy.” Yes, invoking Sharpe and her seminal work on Black sexuality, desire, and
bodily merging, Cholly’s touching condition co-mingles with, “a set of known and unknown
performances, inhabited horrors, desires and positions” that are “produced,
reproduced...transmitted” throughout US chattel slavery (8). Thus, what is unknown and known to
Cholly as love, is brushed with the white information, transformation, deformation of our Black
bound histories, as he casts his body blindly upon his girl child.
Yes, like Pecola, Cholly is bound too to whiteness—touched by white history and
stumbling—fumbling through the blindness with drunkenness—stumbling through rage—through
a desire for/to give love and tenderness. Cholly is stumbling through guilt, cowardice, inadequacy.
Through a palpable self-hate that leads him to a white destination. For he asks, “what could his
calloused hands produce to make her smile” Indeed, what could his hands do to bring joy to a

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Black child? Yes, Cholly Breedlove endeavors to “breed” joy, to breed “love,” through touch, but
instead breeds the most terrifying material.
This ushers me into Orlando Patterson’s most celebrated formulation touched on at several
points in this work for what Cholly indeed breeds. For here in the kitchen space between Pecola
and Cholly, is what Morrison offers, really, as “social death” not simply abstracted, but rather,
standing in the flesh as a material afterlife extension of slavery in all of its nightmarish potential.
Acknowledging this correlation, between Morrison’s dark family and Patterson’s distillation, we
might read again and read differently then, a phrase from the novel’s opening pages. We are, in
other words, enriched or perhaps disillusioned by the reality that when “the marigolds did not
bloom,” it is more than a harbinger of Pecola’s despoiled, barren station—carrying her father’s
child—stillborn. It is this but also more; it is a history of Black subjection—of Black abruption at
the very hands of the father.
Morrison’s play between marigold’s bloom and the daughter’s blight and barrenness, offers
us a way of understanding how Black paternal touch in the aftermath of our not yet complete
emancipation, replicates through its very hands, Black decay and Black unfreedom. Importantly,
it is not only the Black mother’s womb, tasked with the strain, with the violence of reproducing
slave hands. It is not simply the Black mother watching from across the line, reproducing
Blackness as “bare life,” or what Agamben intelligently calls subjects’ barring from state
recognition and social acceptance. The Black father is found here, too, in his most familiar
understanding, not absent, but most certainly lacking – stretching out fingers that brush his
daughter with what Christina Sharpe might call a monstrous intimacy stained with a familiar
antebellum legacy, a familiar antebellum brutality of shackles, chains, whips, incest-rape (11).
Stretching out fingers that may understand before they ever reach their destination, that they are

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unable to bear fruit from or to “descending and ascending generations.” If, for Christina Sharpe’s
work, the discovery, confirmation, and acceptance of white paternity paves the path to freedom,
then surely this reinforces Cholly Breedlove’s doubling as both symbolic of the Black paternal and
a permanent, interminable Black bondage. The Black father is symbolic of perennial Black
enslavement behind the Black mother’s shadow.
In short, the result of these fingers that pantomime the lascivious historical violence of
white captors and white masters, is death, the Black paternal line’s unceasing interruption—a death
resounding as social, mental, as well as literal. For when Cholly touches Pecola such that she
miscarries her baby—such that her and her unborn child are exempted from perpetuity, this
resonates too, as both communal and psychological. Yes, Pecola, sexually touched in the most
severe and taboo sense, is simultaneously cast out, out of touch, touched in the head. She is
consigned ultimately, to wander in the delusion that she is somehow more proximate to the
whiteness her heart desires, while ironically slipping from Black familial ties and all that these
might offer, if she would only refuse the touch of whiteness, in all of its seduction.
All of this, and then back to the desire for any love, for any tenderness, such that the
tenderness and love become tainted by years of monstrosity—by memory of monstrous intimacy.
This is what ignites Cholly’s paternal touch. As he stumbles toward Pecola in her most vulnerable
state—back turned, unaware his touch carries with it the traces of these overwhelming emotions
that bear the unbearable load of his memory.

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“Moonlight” and the Peculiar Poetry of Touching Otherwise
Morrison writes a poignant Black bildungsroman of Black girlhood stunted by touch, set
in 1940 before the formal Civil Rights era and the Second World War. She writes of course in a
time and place set before Civil Rights’ putative gains, before the rise of a Black power’s fierce
proclamation of “I’m Black and I’m proud!,” which pierces through those tired overvaluations of
blue eyes, blonde hair, and white ways. She writes on touch, pressing against, away from, to cleave
open a nuclear, heteronormative all-American Dick and Jane world, that “Moonlight” trails by
nearly half a century, though the quality of Black (family) and socio-political life remains largely
unchanged. In “Moonlight,” we are merely on the other side of Jim Crow, only to find Jim Crow
upheld insidiously through Reagan’s conservative Eighties. On the other side of Black feminist
movements and Black LGBT, only to find the persistence of misogynoir, homophobia, transphobic
violence. But Barry Jenkin’s perhaps through the strength of his literary forefathers, James
Baldwin, Baynard Rustin, or perhaps simply with the desire to tell a different story, offers us a
space where Black touch engenders not death but life— where Black touch offers not concession,
but a will to live in the soul of a Black pariah boy.
To acquaint us, Moonlight is Barry Jenkins’ 2016 stunning cinematic—an adaptation of a
play entitled, “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” evincing a Black queer boy’s coming of age
in the broken streets of Miami. Although Morrison’s novel drips with the visual, here we have a
visual product in the flesh. And importantly, Jenkin’s film provocation is a bildungsroman that
does not march with self-assured linearity, but rather, in queer temporal fashion, ends by circling
back to its beginning leaving us unresolved, questioning, open, swimming.

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This circling that the narrative takes, resembles the cycling pathways of water—the
Atlantic—which serves as the work’s most potent motif. Nevertheless, much consideration of
Moonlight is paid to its stunning visuality—a preoccupation that one can certainly understand. For
in its chromatic burst of blue and green hues, Moonlight drips with the magnificence of Black skin
highlighted amid a lush urban landscape. Moonlight shimmers on our flesh, and is called by The
Guardian “a ravishing portrait of masculinity” (1). But as we affix to the protagonist, Chiron, and
his beauty laid bare through a kind of translucence lingering on the verge of opacity, it is arguably
receptive touch that arguably buoys Chiron’s Black queer narrative. Or, it is through touch rather
than sight that Chiron, Black and queer, ultimately emerges— through touch that Chiron unfolds
otherwise, through others.
Chiron, or what Roderick Ferguson might call a Black aberration, struggles for space to
become, on the marginalized outside of an increasingly neoliberal world. Further elaborating on
Ferguson’s formulation, Chiron is what Ferguson might deem a cross of American racial and
sexual surplus, a peculiar outcast, and a Black ontological excess to the capitalist frame–enduring
the vitriol of an addict mother, the taunts of teens, the cyclical traps of the prison-industrial
complex, the ubiquity of cocaine. But even amid textures of capture that asphyxiate him on
familial, street, school, social, state levels—textures of capture that consign him to social death at
myriad hands—there are moments where Chiron still finds space to breathe, or room to bloom in
way that Pecola and others can’t. Indeed, as we move through the cinematic scenes, Chiron
unfolds as Black, as relational, as lover and love, as saved! —by way of touch. Yes, Chiron does
not shrivel but unfolds by way of the touch of the father—by way of the Black father’s touch and
the haptics of the ocean water.

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Yes, despite being socially, emotionally ensnared, we can contend that touch offers Chiron
a pathway to Black freedom that is at its core, a kind of Black love. And importantly, it is a Black
paternal figure cinematically deployed as a tactile vessel—as tactile bridge for Chiron, into this
otherwise world where he can be held. For in one of the movie’s most poignant scenes, we witness
the entrancing Juan keeping Chiron afloat as he teaches him how to swim in the saltwater—
offering him a tactile epistemology that reverberates throughout the film’s subsequent chapters
even as Juan visually recedes.
Juan, a Black Cuban and neighborhood drug dealer is not Chiron’s biological father, but
indubitably serves as an adoptive parent to the emotionally and otherwise orphaned queer child.
Perhaps it is cliche to offer up Juan in the name of paternal surrogacy, as it is often claimed that
Black families rely on extended kinship ties to survive the ubiquity of New World cruelty; but
Juan, albeit not blood tied, must be considered as one iteration of Black fatherhood re-routed in
the wake of white violence against Black kinship ties.
Juan is by no means “good” in a moral sense, nor is he socially respectable—or in other
words, squeaky clean, with puritanical work ethic, bootstraps striving, and paper-bag abiding
membership in the middle class. We might say that he represents the nation’s underside— a Black
man fraught, peculiar—supplying Chiron’s mother’s crack high—thus rendering him indirectly
responsible for her negligent mothering and the unraveling of Chiron’s household. And yet through
peculiarity, his thickness, which flows with the stench of Black history, Juan is able to become
something else, something otherwise, in his touching and being with his surrogate son, Chiron.
Juan therefore, on the one hand spells trouble and yet is simultaneously endowed to trouble the
logics of Black boundaries by accessing a peculiar vitality—a peculiar will and way to breathe life

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into an abandoned, untouchable Black boy. A peculiar capacity to nourish a Black boy’s
outstretching so that he might touch and be touched lovingly in return.
Indeed, in one of the most arresting moments of this epic moving picture where Chiron
learns to swim in the water in order to survive on land, he is pressed upon by his father figure,
Juan, and the ocean Atlantic simultaneously. He is pressed upon with love, as we feel Juan’s hands
become the curl of the ocean’s soft waves, as we feel the waves in the ocean ripple with Juan—of
Juan. Yes, the striking visual that I recall here from the film’s first act of Chiron immersed in a
kind of baptismal initiation—his ventral core exposed to the air as he kicks timidly then vigorously
on his back—invites us to imagine Juan and the Atlantic and Chiron, not as distinct bodies but as
one, unified entity. An entity unified that, in the words of Edouard Glissant, still “consents not to
be a single being” (5). For Juan, wading chest deep can be understood as an oceanic overflow—
an oceanic continuum—evidence of oceanic multiplicities. In other words, Juan becomes an ocean
outpouring of our Black Atlantic possibility—a spiritual, erotic, and ultimately political, other
worlding handed over to Chiron tenderly. Juan and his Black hands are an extension of Black
Atlantic potential impressed upon his young son; Juan in this New World jungle, is the ocean’s
rush, its generosity, its memory that disrupts national borders and the hold of the ghetto just as
Black cultures of resistance can. Just as Black spirituality does.
This is a scene that is as poetic, as it is transcendent. There is a feeling that the touch upon
Chiron’s flesh cascades onto our own flesh as an audience—cascading with spiritual lingering,
with spiritual resonance. It is perhaps most intuitive to turn to the ocean water in this scene of
touch as what Mbiti calls a religious object—a symbolic that is most certainly a motif of Black
religiosity and (meta)physical practice (154).

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There is something here that recalls the magnificent river baptisms in Black Christian life—
the baptisms that offer soul resurrection amid the treacherous slave and post slave wilderness—
that offer healing, transformation, metamorphosis. Indeed, through Juan wading in the water we
are reminded of this watery gift of (after)life that Black preachers hand to us. Black preachers that
through figures like James Baldwin are often the only Black fathers that we recognize within the
literary canon. Through this baptismal moment then, Juan could be read as therefore legitimized
as father through salvific touch. We might feel in this experience then, that Juan is a conduit for
love and also a medium between God and the world that colonization and slavery made. For it is
not only through Juan that Chiron can access love’s touch but through Juan that God becomes
touchable. Through Juan, Chiron is able, in effect, to touch the godly.
But as asserted in my previous chapter, it is not my endeavor to pedestalize Juan as some
variation of God. Although there is resonance, I am less intrigued by Judeo-Christian ethics and
more attuned to the peculiar reach of Black paternal spirituality. For more than simply linking Juan
to the water cultural praxis of Black North America, we might be reminded more specifically as
well, of Juan’s Caribbean, or rather Black Cuban heritage. Positioned in this manner, Juan standing
in the water can be a recalling of that queer or syncretic watery receptiveness of Cuban Santeria
that churns, that mixes African Yoruba tradition, with Euro-Catholicism, and the Indigenous. This
memory of/from Cuba arguably affords us more gendered variation than the infamous, indelible
Black father-preacher, as Juan’s tactile giving evokes not only the possibility for this putatively
masculinist figurative father figure, but also sutures him to that peculiar potential for touch offered
to us by Black feminism. Indeed, through conjuring Cuban water roots, Juan’s powerful hand laps
towards feminine remembrance, not in a kind of opportunistic gesture but through a spiritual,
cosmological understanding. In this lapping we reach at the very least, the orishas Oshun and

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Yemaya—female embodied divinities and some of the most famous Santeria entities carried and
repurposed by trafficked Africans. Yemaya— the goddess of motherhood, fertility, the ocean.
Oshun—the goddess of the rivers and romantic love.
Before venturing further into this transcendent offering that Juan unfolds through his hands,
I would like to emphasize that this positioning of Juan as an oceanic Orisha extension is
emphatically non-metaphorical—an embodied reminder of our peculiar knowledge inherited—an
actual materialization from the Middle Passage. My emphasis on Juan as ocean in the flesh streams
from Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s breakthrough “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic” where we are
reminded that Black peculiarity has always been present—that Juan’s queer potential has always
been (t)here, touching and flowing over into the New World from the ocean’s edge (199). Yes,
Tinsley reminds us that the Black Atlantic has always been queer—filled with memories of African
and European same sex bodies—the shipped and the sailing, that were more than terrorized but
also consensually and carnally entangled (199). Bodies that felt and felt for each other as they
moved from Africa to New World bondage. And these vectors along the ocean move through
Juan’s own blood memory, or what I call a maternal memory of flesh touch. Indeed, this flesh
touch embodies what Tinsley delineates as the brown, pus, blood—the violence of the ship’s
underside that the press of lips, kissing, loving bodies interrupts—the impossible beauty born of
violence that elaborates Black touch’s peculiar counter-power.
This fullness of Black touch’s peculiar counter-power ripples out from Juan’s hand into
Chiron’s subsequent coming of age experiences—a rippling of hands that affords Chiron what
Jacqui Alexander calls an “erotic autonomy”—an erotic becoming forand belonging to oneself
(156). Indeed, following Alexander, Juan offers Chiron at least the possibility to belong to himself
lovingly and sexually, beyond the state, the Miami crack era, and its many other exclusions.

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Despite the hold of his body in a hegemonically masculine matrix, as we experience Chiron playing
ball as a young boy, fighting as a middle school student, and lastly, weight-lifting, hyper-buff and
recently released from prison, his flesh holds a different memory and offers, therefore, a different
story. His flesh holds the capacious capacity for tenderness, for an otherwise masculinity, for a
sensuous loving touch.
Fatherly flesh touch here becomes refuge–fatherly flesh touch becomes an arrival of the
“endless work’ started in Jenkins’ cinematic adaptation of the antebellum text, The Underground
Railroad. This counter power of the flesh–this home of the flesh by way of Juan–returns the
victimized Chiron again and again to the ocean’s edge, to experience in different watery iterations,
erotic touch with Kevin, his childhood love. Like Oshun, rising up from the ocean, Juan’s loving
arms are recalled as Kevin tenderly brings Chiron to climax in the sand, when they reach late
adolescence. And again, after years of separation—Juan’s loving arms extend like Yemaya,
spiritually looming, as Chiron and Kevin embrace in adulthood, with loving understanding, against
the backdrop of moonlit water. Importantly, Chiron is offered, by Juan a cis Black man, the gift of
erotic vulnerability. Juan’s loving touch offers the gift of becoming otherwise Black and male
through queer, sexual, erotic, romantic feeling in a way that can only be read as disruptive or
fugitive. It is disruptive or fugitive in that he is seizing, through touch, “stolen moments” of what
we might imagine as a kind of Black freedom (Moten 179). And in this tactile movement, tactile
dance, Yemaya and Oshun carry Juan, carry Chiron and Kevin—touching the outcast Black
subjects with their memory–holding them tenderly amid an oppressive enclosure.
Chiron’s ability to receive touch, and to be changed by it, which folds into his ability to
receive love, might beckon us to ask the question: is Juan the father that James Baldwin always
wanted? Surely he was. Harkening back to the previous chapter where God is conflated with the

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father or the Black father can only be God or risk absolute failure, Juan is the answer—or at least
the pathway to the Black father that Baldwin and others, but Baldwin most fiercely, always yearned
to touch and be touched from lovingly. Juan offers the means through which we can find our
fathers and carry our mothers too. Juan’s otherwise human touch is a queer deliverance in a weary
world.

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Black (Paternal) Love

Chapter Three ends with love–love outstretched from Juan’s fatherly hand to Chiron. For
loving touch is what renders possible the impossible–the tender, queer stream of Black
connection within the homophobic, violent, drug-ridden Miami district. Love has always been in
this dissertation–in the telling here of Black paternal possibility. Thus, I find it most compelling,
to turn to what I deem, not simply love but a Black love–offering a theory of it in this
dissertation’s close. By way of literature and film, I frame a theory of Black paternal love that 1):
examines Black children’s loving looks upon their Black fathers, while 2): contending that Black
fathers love us queerly, expansively, non-normatively in return.

When I wonder at Black paternity in relation to what we might call a Black love then, I
wander first to the work of Black male poet, Robert Hayden. In “Those Winter Sundays” Hayden
writes the following lines:

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze.
No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

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When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices? (49)

Hayden’s poem is a poem of affective complexity–speaking in multiple registers to the
question of love in Black paternal life. Love is disclosed here as clouded, cold, silent, misheard.
It unfolds as a relationship not simple by any means.
To one end, Hayden’s work is a Black man’s boyhood memory of his father, which
ripples with something like elegiac tones. The poem is mournful and softly nostalgic, for as a
Black boy, Hayden does not recognize his father’s loving hands. Yet here his father is, warming
the abode—even on Sunday. An act that is seemingly incidental, mundane, habitual, and yet it
emerges here, in a backwards stare, as nurture, protection, unabating. The Black father wraps his
Black son in a cloak of warmth, with the span of his cracked and lonely blueblack hands. This is
Black paternal love in its subtlety—in its utter complication(edness).
The Black father warms his son, and yet for a time, Hayden cannot grasp this gesture as a
love worth noting—remembering now that “no one ever thanked him” (49). No, Hayden cannot
grasp his father’s love, and to another end, he cannot grasp that his Black father might have

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needed love too—as he warmed the fire. Rising from bed, he can not feel his father’s full
sentience—his father’s loneliness—the “chronic angers” of his Black father’s Black and blue
life. Love falls unrequited, misheard, frozen—despite the efforts of his father to drive out the
chill and communicate something beautiful through the warmth. Love from father to son here, is
like a Blues, which James Baldwin calls more than music; it is a metaphor for the anguish in
Black living (54). This is a metaphor for Black paternal love that in Black life always seems to
mingle with mourning—Black masculine affect that always seems to mingle with mourning.
I work through Hayden’s haunting lamentation here, because it shores up several
questions. Namely what is this peculiar love from our Black fathers and how do we account for
its failed comprehension. Why, as we see in the preceding chapters, does it emerge with such
excruciating impossibility; why does it emerge with such aching foreignness? How can Black
children learn to recognize their Black fathers’ love, and in return, learn to love them.
This chapter will explore that—to love our fathers—many of us have tried. And they
have left us heartbroken and tired because we do not feel them reaching back across the line. I
am reminded here of Lanita Jacobs’ phrasing—that love is work on all sides (Jacobs). Yes,
indeed, love is work on all sides. But I would like to add, too, that love, in the blue black cold of
Black paternal life, is, at times, mis-recognized. And our work as Black children is to find the
language.
I hereby use Lanita Jacobs’ evocative claim of love to organize a Black love theory on a
paternal register. I dive first into our complicated Black fathers and our even more complicated
love for them—before turning to how Black feminist visions of love and queer of color and
decolonial love interventions enable us to think in new ways about it. I press on these capacious
philosophies, ethics, and ethical undoings to stretch out to the other side where Black fathers

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stand—to reconsider and feel anew the love that perhaps has always been there—even if this
love is sometimes, ugly and unkempt. Even if, at times this love is understated and Blue like a
warm house on a father’s day of rest. For indeed, I am most interested in love that does not
appear in hegemonic form—a love that cuts through common sense and exceeds Western
imaginaries. This examination of Black paternal love language then, is where I end my
dissertation writing, with a reevaluation of the controversial father in the film, “Beasts of a
Southern Wild.” I contend that this film about a broken and dying father’s love for his daughter
breaks ground in Black discourse for a wider discussion of Black love–not only our Black love
for our fathers but our Black fathers’ reaching back to us with loving possibility. What more can
Black fathers show us if we let it? What (more) can Black paternal love do?

Black Children’s Love Letters

I foreground this chapter on the complexity of Black paternal love, through the work of
Black Martinican philosopher and psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon. For certainly, Fanon’s decolonial
writing is foundational to understanding the crisis of Black masculine affective formation.
Certainly his writing is foundational to understanding the crisis of Black men being rendered
object—bereft of interior, comprehension, love in an antiblack world. Again, how can we
recognize a Black father’s sentience, a Black father’s loneliness, a Black father’s need for love
too. Fanon perhaps provides the most generative starting point—for within “The Fact of
Blackness,” a centerfold of the indelible work, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon shares how love
is rendered dead for racialized objects under colonization. Indeed, colonization breeds among
Black men many dead things—an impossible love for others, rooted in the impossibility of love

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for self (82).
Fanon opens this now infamous chapter on Blackness with the unsettling experience of
being visually undermined while standing Black and cold in France on a wintry day (82). He
recounts that a white child standing with his mother shouts at his face, “Look, see the Negro! I’m
frightened. Frightened!” Repeatedly. Frightened. Frightened (82). Fanon is forced in this
petrifying moment to view himself through the eyes of another; and looking at himself he recites
in a kind of self-hating litany what he finds himself to be, to white on-lookers: “the Negro is an
animal. The Negro is bad. The Negro is mean. The Negro is ugly...the negro is quivering with
rage… Mama, the negro’s going to eat me up” (84). Ending this thick monologue with the words
“shame” “self-contempt” “nausea” (88), Fanon relays explicitly, how his racialization as monster
and beast outsider, creates an impossibility for Black self-love—a self-disgust that is visceral in
manner. Significantly, this lack of self-love in Black men that Fanon eloquently names, is
predicated upon their objectification—the impossibility of them finding love through an
interracial lens. Despite Fanon’s refusal of this child’s mismarking by way of writing (Jacobs),
this interracial misrecognition on a train in France still leaves him (affectively) chained–binding
his loving conflict up in racist ideology, in interracial preoccupations.
I turn now to the groundbreaking work of Black theorist David Marriott’s, On Black Men
which attends, albeit indirectly, to the love lost in this pivotal moment for Fanon. In Marriott’s
work on Black masculine fantasy and foreclosure, there is a gesturing towards the affective
separation of Black men from what one might call a loving gaze—from empathetic ties. Marriott
writes that just as Fanon’s body was given back to him as foreign matter—“distorted, recolored,
clad in mourning” (86)— so too are all Black men under racialized subjection, made “necessarily
strangers to [them]selves” (ix). If love is a form of knowing and being known (Schapiro, 201),

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then one might begin to understand Black fatherhood and the complexity of love through the
grief of self-alienation—like Fanon adorned in mourning. The grief of self-estrangement–of self-
negation. Of being eaten beyond self-recognition.
Made strangers to themselves, it seems that Black fathers can be nothing but strangers to
us. Or, in a reformulation of Avery Gordon’s thoughts in her seminal sociological text on
haunting, perhaps it is not only the Black father who haunts, but that the Black father is haunted
too (137). Marriott’s work On Black Men is attuned to this theoretically from beginning to end,
narrating a visual fantasy of Black masculine existence—a repetition of Fanon’s litany of
“animal, bad, mean, ugly (86)” that amounts to a self-warring—which erupts, tears Black men
apart, and separates them viciously from any sense of self or kinship. But ultimately, Marriott is
most interested in how severance, this rottenness, bears down on Black sons (95). The entirety of
his work is thinned out to a male–male dialogue. And yet this focal point of man to man and man
against himself in Marriott’s work, is paramount to crafting discourse around Black fatherhood
and love.
Ending his bright and necessary book with a chapter entitled “Father Stories,” Marriott
outlines the problem of Black manhood’s self-severance as reaching its height in reproduction. In
other words, Marriott delineates that in the case Black life, there is a passing-down of ontological
foreclosure from Black father to son to father. Again, to remind the reader, there is a passing
down of what Orlando Patterson terms, social death: a passing down of a rotten inheritance (7).
Black manhood is not only cut off from self-determination—from holistic ontological formation
through the racist gaze—but also cut off from relational/kin formation in ascending and
descending generations (7). Black manhood’s (self)alienation repeats then, as Black men are
connected by their lack of connection— connected, ironically, by the inevitability of their socio-

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emotional and otherwise estrangement. It would seem then, if we take love as the root of what
can connect Black manhood to fatherhood that this state of relation is always deferred.
Marriott opens this compelling “Father's Stories” underscoring the phenomenon of soul-
shattering Black worlds without fathers—fathers that pass nothing but rot and love’s unraveling
down the line, through the luminaries, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, all
foregrounded by contemporary novelist John Edgar Wideman. Wideman in his riveting memoir,
Fatheralong, describes his search for his father as a kind of self-lynching—“a rope a dope trope”
that will “hang you up interminably” (77). Indeed, there is more self-damage and even death than
relief to be found in the search for his Black fathers’ love. And with reference to the trope and
very real horror of lynching rope that severs through binding, one gathers that this father-search
is animated by the excruciating fact of racism’s hand—a hand that wraps around and kills Black
masculine consciousness as well as the Black family romance. Wideman’s father, bound up in
this asphyxiating social schema, thus remains elusive—a ghost for his Black son—a
heartbreaking problem. Marriott ultimately situates Wideman’s Blues as an existential
mimesis—this father story of father loss, father embitterment, father unknowability as repetitive
in the lives of Black male children. Indeed, this is an agonizing dance of constant father
deferment that conjoins him spiritually to Baldwin, Ellison, Wright, before him.
Centering Richard Wright as literary forefather and ending with a more hopeful arc to the
film, “Boyz in the Hood,” Marriott presents Wright and his narration as a primal event in Black
discourse that encapsulates for the reader the central paternal problem. Marriott focuses
particularly on conventional readings of Wright’s memoir, Black Boy and his indelible
recounting of his sharecropping father. It is worth quoting here at length so that the reader
ascertains the palpable feeling in Wright’s prose, as he writes of his Black father who essentially

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left him for dead—his Black father who abandoned him. Wright attempts to extricate his father
for this ultimate betrayal, and yet his father reemerges, like a ghost in all of his writing:

A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when I saw my father
sitting with strange woman and the time when I was to see him again, standing
alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation...though ties of blood made
us kin, though I could see a voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking
a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality...from the white
landowners above him there had not been handed to him a chance to learn
the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition...I forgave him and pitied him.
As my eyes looked past him....my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city
seeking life, but who had failed in the city...and who had at last fled
the city—that same city which had lifted me (42-43).

Marriott writes of this passage as a form of Black parricide—Wright’s endeavor to kill off his
father—even though his father is here as he is everywhere—always with him like a ghostly matter
(101). Indeed, in the words of Du Bois and Ellison, Wright strives to orphan himself from his
father, and with it, the violence and shame of his father’s station and behavior (Du Bois 132). But
what arrests me for the purposes of writing on Black fathers’ love, that is, like Black fathers’ being,
fraught and complicated, is what Du Bois and Ellison call the harshness and brutality of Wright’s
father framing (Du Bois 132; Ellison 142). This brutality strikes me more with its love—its Black
love, distinctly. Black love, shrouded in indifference that meddles with hate—Black love of a son
yearning for a father that is a deep, un-healing heartbreak. Love dissolves the possibility here, of

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full Black father extrication—a full collapse of Wright’s writing into a tale of decrepit
disconnection. Love arrests the complete severance of lines, even amid this explosive pressure—
even amid an ostensibly barren red field that hosts a sharecropping father with no gifts to bear for
his gifted son. There is love here and there is knowledge—there is more than a father story with
the shadowy hand of white patriarchy looming in the background—more than the submerged event
of Black paternal-filial disinheritance in an alienating white patriarchal New World. For Wright
understands something of his Black father’s interior life, even as he stands frozen, opaque in this
southern field, like Fanon stood frozen cold in France. He understands what it means to be
petrified, objectified, alienated even as he turns away. There is love in this affective
understanding—this writing—this loving look. There is through Wright’s gaze, a tie approaching
loving sympathy.
But again as Lanita Jacobs notes, love is work on all sides. It is not just about Black children
reaching for their fathers, which has an extensive archive. It is about Black fathers and their loving
potential to reach out for us. Appositely, moving further along this story of paternal murder and
filial betrayal, Marriott ends this chapter with a stunning affective entree into the question of Black
fathers’ capacity to do more than break us. He ends with their capacity to not simply generate death
but prevent it for their sons. This is what Marriott calls redemptive love—love through which my
own work starts.
Turning from literature to cinema and recuperating the Black classic “Boyz from the
Hood,” which centers a group of Black boys growing up amid gang and drug violence, Marriott
locates within the father-son dynamic of this film bildungsroman, a kind of Black paternal
redemption by way of a Black father’s love. Furious, the aptly named father to the boy protagonist
Tre Styles, becomes his primary caretaker on the other side of South LA when Tre’s mother

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proclaims that she does not have the proper tools to raise him. This sets the stage for Furious, a
single father, and also seems to set the stage for critique–for the single father in an urban
environment is seen as an impossibility (albeit it has and does exist). Furious might be read as
harsh in his endeavor to care for Tre–care which reads as an endeavor to make out of his son, a
real Black man who can psychically and physically transcend his environment. His parenting reads
as a dogmatic, tough loving pedagogy–a beacon of Black hypermasculinity that uses the same
tools of muscles, guns, anger, but perhaps to a more “generative” bend (here I am digesting the
dual function of hypermasculinity in the narrative). In the end, this fathering does seem to
“succeed,” as tragic as the ending is. For Tre stands unlike many of his peers; by the might of his
father’s figurative and literal fists Tre “escapes” Black space that maps Black death (although the
hood is most certainly also Black social life and Singleton shows us this) by enrolling in college.
Furious is an organic intellectual, an urban poet, and a community teacher. But more than
that Furious schools his son personally, on the war zone that is Black life. He takes Tre on a tour
to survey his Black landscape, remarking on how Black life is held in a chokehold of weapons,
liquor, and police. Furious wants something else for Tre, and so he coaches him on what it means
to be a man. And interestingly, the crux of being a man for Furious, is being an active father.
7

Furious says: “any fool with a dick can make a baby, but only a real man can raise his children”
(Singleton 1991). In the span of a sentence, Furious here untethers manhood from Black breeder
and ties authentic Black manhood not to financial prowess, guns, sports, but rather, to fatherhood.
For Furious, fatherhood becomes the substance of Black men’s social life.
What Marriott finds useful about this characterization of a father-son relationship is its
beautiful re-envisioning of Black male intimacy and the realization of a father-son bonding in the

7
Perhaps the reader hears echoes here of Obama’s oft-critiqued speech on Black men being more responsible
fathers although one is arguably public shaming/infantilizing and one is parenting.

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flesh. There is a movement from simply a preoccupation with Black men’s (social, premature,
real) death, loss, lack, estrangement, to an evaluation of Black masculine affect and its possible
healing effects. For, Furious, Marriott argues, is not perpetuating a death doling line, but rather,
standing in the face of death to save his son with care and with love from a brutal repetition (115).
This is what Marriott in the end, calls within Black father stories, the potential for love—the
potential for redemptive love—what I read as a love that grants an (after)life for Black sons by
way of their fathers. This is an understanding of love, which seats the father as progenitor of an
afterlife to the social fact of Black masculine death—an afterlife to the social fact of Black
masculine negation and (self)alienation that plagues so many of our canonical Black male writers.
This utopic vision of Black father that (hopefully) pivots from its framing in Chapter 2,
pushes against celebrated charges framed by Black Atlantic theorist, Paul Gilroy. Gilroy, former
colleague of Carby, claims that this film about Black boys and a furious father, is little more than
masculine narcissism (203). Yet, I agree with Marriott that there is more to this film than a tired
discursive phallocentrism; there is much in excess to simply reflecting Black masculinist
nationalist longings to usurp the Black mother’s place. Certainly, in Marriott’s work as well as in
Singleton’s, Black women are cut out–literally sighted in another house, which I critiqued in
Whitehead’s novel for different reasons. Certainly there is a privileging of only fathers and sons,
really — and specifically sons’ loving looks at their fathers in the face of their fathers’ emotional
lacking/absence. But I want to pause and consider how Marriott’s work is an affective
provocation—a utopic pathway for us to envision how Black men might be offered the space to
wander towards their fathers through narrative—to write with something like Black love—in a
way that is not always at the expense of Black women. To write in a way that gestures towards
more than something hegemonically masculine. I am in accordance with Marriott that John

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Singleton’s film exceeds what Black queer theorist Sharon Holland would likely call a homosocial
affair—Black discourse’s ghostly dance with The Moynihan Report. It is more than a perennial
father fantasy in the midst of an inevitable “father-lacking” that denigrates the Black female body
visibly or subconsciously with the Black father’s over-stated importance (Holland 387). It
transcends that emphatically, and it is worthy of note, if discourse is to travel toward more
capacious Black male bonds and Black masculinities. And for my writing, more capacious
understandings of what Black fatherhood and affect can be.
Indeed, how might Marriott’s work and the loving search of Black sons for the fathers
offer that entry into a wider discussion of Black love and even Black fathers’ loving
possibility—for Black fathers to reach their hand down the line and unbind us from all that rope.
And this does not have to occur with Black women and Black men sighted on different sides, nor
their theoretical provisionings, but through one finding loving knowledge in the other. It is not
that they must be differently sided, but that the Black father can learn ways to love through Black
women—through the Black mother, through even, their Black sons and daughters.
Further, how might this encounter with Black fathers’ love be among us already and
therefore opened up to us differently, with a turn to not only phallocentric love strivings, but via
the epistemological gifts of Black womanist and feminist theory, decolonial love, and queer of
color intervention. How can Black fathers’ love be theorized and not simply theorized but
theorized alternatively, by engaging love from the outside—through love’s nonnormative
utterances both subtle like cracked fingers warming the cold, as well as cacophonous. So that the
reader might be introduced to other Black father stories—other roads to (requited) Black paternal
love that not only ward off death, that are not only gesturing towards redemption for our flawed
masculinity, but offering freedom and dreaming and the sustaining of our Black worlds.

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Love Visions: Black Feminist, Decolonial, and Queer of Color

We might find an anchor for a theory of Black love first and principally, by way of
Black feminist theory. Black feminist theory not only offers a more expansive formulation of
feeling through Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, but a more expansive framework for
Black manhood and Black paternal being. Through Black feminism the Black father is found
again and again. For Black feminist theory generates the understanding that there is within Black
fathers and sons, an undeniable connection to something outside of a rotten social death, outside
of tragic objecthood—again, by way of their undeniable acquaintance with the power of the
“female within.” To echo this dissertation’s refrain— Hortense Spillers tells us that amid the
horror of slavery and its afterlife, the Black father through the Black mother’s hand comes into
being–that through the fleshly existence of the Black mother, the Black father has been offered, a
curious fleshly social vitality. In a reframing of psychoanalytic theory that pivots on the Oedipal
family romance, Spillers informs us that in the denial of gender specificity, gendered integrity,
“the Black male [under chattel slavery] has been touched by the mother” (80). This gender
ambiguity, gender non-normativity rendered from mother touch is his queerness, his peculiar and
principal inheritance in the passage to the New World that counters white patriarchal being and
epistemologies. His very flesh holds the “hieroglyphics” of his symbolic mother’s memory and
movement, as a peculiar birthright to behold—a non-normativity that is not a dead-end but a
possibility. Importantly, what can be and has been made of this fleshly inheritance is more than
shame and more than gendered ensnarement as we see evidenced in the social possibility of Juan,
Caesar, Du Bois even. More than Wright’s father withered amid a southern field, or Baldwin’s

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semi-autobiographical father Gabriel cloaked in impenetrable austerity, but a site of flight and
otherwise living outside—outside of a necro-heteropatriarchal lineage. For we see that Audre
Lorde, has already foretold that “The white father told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black
mother within each of us— the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free”
(38). The Black father, touched by the mother, can find another form, another feeling freedom,
another inner dream illumination. This is not about effeminization; this is about rich alternative
existence. And in this existence there is a capacity to love. Through this Black love gifted by
way of the female within, the Black fathers’ hands can reach back out to hold us.
This “female within” as Black love, flows out in a myriad of directions—outside of the
conventional, outside of simply (although it is certainly a beautiful ideal), love as redemption.
Black love as the female within embraces and loves from what Hortense Spillers calls our stolen
bodies ripped from our flesh—our unwholeness (66). This broken but loved and loving Black
female within, is both literal and symbolic; yet this literal-symbolic female is not pretty, modest,
mythical as I have stated previously. It is not “epistemologically respectable,” to borrow a phrase
from Shayne Lee (ix). This means that this love has the full capacity to cradle more dignified
Black scholarly explorations of healing systemic trauma, in addition to what Joan Morgan (36)
deems Black joy, Black play, and Black pleasure. The “female within” as Black love, as Black
fathers’ loving potential, understands that the history of Black gendered hyperbole and erasure—
severance and melding—makes for a love that cannot and need not be thin, flimsy, fickle.
Indeed, emphatically, this is a love that is sturdy material even when it is transient, fugitive,
fleeting.
This materiality of Black paternal love, might remind us of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and
the infamous Sethe who I will return our consciousness to later. Discourse forms for and against

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and in between Sethe, but I try to understand her. And I contend in the end that her “thick” love
is her best thing—thick love, love as thick as her mourning– thick with the stench of history,
thick with the load of a loaded sentiment, thick and always leaving its trace. Thick love like thick
flesh—like hieroglyphics—scarred and keloiding and resistant–and we touch it just the way it is
– behold it lightly in the forest, like Baby Suggs. Who am I but another human loving
imperfectly to judge. Wink holds that thickness of the “female within” – thick love that I return
to in “Beasts of a Southern Wild.” But maybe more than Sethe, his love can be a freeing thing.
Like Baby Suggs’ spiritual and tactile teaching, Black feminist discourse further, teaches
us that this “female within”—this Black love—is not perfectly boundaried, not always tender but
it is sacred and worthy of saving. But just because it is sacred, does not always mean it is godly.
Again, it is not always redemptive —at least not in a manner that washes away our immorality.
Sometimes, it is ugly and unkempt. Messy. Sometimes we drown in Black love or fall to the
ground, but it is a blessing nevertheless. One that, in the face of death, flings us beautifully into
social life as a reminder of our fierce aliveness. In this sense, Black love is what Moten (2008)
might call the uncanny case of Black living. Black paternal love is the embrace of alienated
ontological surplus—maternal excess— what Moten does not explicitly name as queer but
certainly is in his framing of Blackness as the “uncontainable outside” (33). This is the excess—
thick and paramount, thick and metaphysical—where we might find love possibility for our
fathers and their love for us—here in this peculiar and fated brush—of uncontainable,
untempered, untapped mother touch—of that which was never to be connected during slavery
and its aftermath and yet was and still is (Harney & Moten, 2013). Through remembering this,
again we might find our love for Black fathers and they might find their love for us.
This Black love that stands outside of the epistemological respectability and spiritual

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convention, stands outside, as well, of those marginal voices seeking civil justice. I speak
alongside Black queer theorists here, namely, L.H. Stallings and their fresh, ‘in yo face’ Funk the
Erotic. Stallings asks, what are our “pre-existing, affective, and personal genealogies of
imagination that are themselves movement that cannot be made to do the work of political
movements?” (xii). In line with Stallings ’endeavors to funk up our notions of eros and propriety,
how do we value the affective treasures embedded in the “scandalous”—in sex work, the
pornographic, polyamory—and how can we stretch this to think about the value in scandalous
histories etched peculiarly within us during chattel slavey? What is the value of the scandalous,
crude, riotous love inheritance—the ungodly love of Wink, for example, who wills his child to
survive against whiteness and water in “Beasts of a Southern of Wild?” Certainly, what do we
make of “the freaks”—freaks and otherwise—the Black fathers on the outside of the outside?
With no desire for liberalist notions of justice? But a desire for freedom in other forms. Perhaps
this love from the outside for those voices on the periphery, is what decolonial theorist Chela
Sandoval calls the love tone of revolution—a love from below (4).
8

This Black love lastly and most importantly is gifted to us, to Black fathers through the

8
But this love from below or from the outside, for the below and outside (FUBU if you will) does not end here. It is
not catalyzed by the romantic and filial, but love of self. This is where Fanon, ever critiqued for his masculinist
focus, could have benefitted theoretically with a Black feminist turn. This is where Fanon could have turned, upon
being filled with shame, as he was dehumanized—as his insides were gutted open. Certainly decolonial theorists like
Maldonado Torres, speak brilliantly of the colonized’s self recognition as an important primal moment in the
movement towards decolonial love. But this call for self-love has firmer roots in the discursive labor of Black
women. Black feminist theory’s privileging of self as a path to love and liberation, has roots in Audre Lorde, who
talks about defining oneself, however, comes my reading most forcefully from an analysis of Jennifer Nash’s timely
innovation in her essay “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality.” Considering a
long history of second-wave Black feminists, Nash evinces the ways in which Black feminists have not only
engaged in the important work of intersectionality or the intersecting oppressive modes of race, gender, sexuality,
and class, but also how they have thought critically about love as a way to nuance their politics of social
transformation and redress. This is important for several reasons—namely, its recuperation of Black feminist theory
as always anticipating, and its reclaiming of affect and feeling back from queer studies and queer of color of
critique. Nash’s scholarship also rather vehemently promotes a dedication to self. Referencing the more universalist,
inclusive ethos of “womanism,” Nash maintains an orientation to Blackness, and more specifically to Black women,
in her work. Again, this is where Fanon could have freed himself, loved himself, and freed others, arguably, by
untethering his articulations of love and desire from a dialectic with whiteness.

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Middle Passage—through our sacred memory of self, of the scandalous, of Black freedom. This
is about a site of memory that reverberates through our consciousness, the site of the ocean; and
here I look to Toni Morrison, for the great novelist states with striking clarity, nostalgia, and
reverence that, “still, like water, I remember where I was before I was ‘straightened out.’... All
water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back where it was” (99). This is the
watery memory that Moten stretches out as the Atlantic slave hold’s terrible gift:

The hold’s terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings in common...skin, against
epidermalization, senses touching. Thrown together touching each other, we were denied
all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce sentiment, family,
nation, language, religion, place home. Though forced to touch and be touched, to sense
and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment, history and home, we
feel (for) each other. (Harney & Moten 98)

I have quoted this as a prefiguring of Juan's arrival, as some of the most beautiful writing I have
ever read to date of Blackness and its impossible possibility (for love). For the skin talk that
Moten describes in the slave hold generates from dead space, impossible feelings. Through the
dead space of our journey touching, the impossibility of Black love emerges as something
possible. The Middle Passage produces out of nothingness, empathetic inseverable ties. And here
I extend this Black feminist theory to Black fathers, asking how can we press upon this gift, to
help the Black father and ourselves find a way back to each other—to the memory of this
impossible gift of the hold. Black love as this touch. Black love as a memory. Black love as
memory, found through the flesh of the mother. Black (paternal) love as a touch of the mother.

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Through Black feminist theories of love, which has birthed similar interventions by
decolonial and queer of color theorists, the reader is reminded of the importance not only of the
future but of memory in our understandings of wide open Black love possibility. Perhaps through
the trope of water, through its gifts that churn in our memory, we can turn from looking at Black
fathers as a problem that sticks with ease to hate and pain and death—to their loving articulations
rooted somewhere. For water has the ability to cross and crossover, and pass us by; water is
slippery, malleable, can cleanse us, can inundate us. Water can hurt us, can float us, can nourish
us. Water has birthed us and birthed our potential to love Black. We must return to the water and
meet our fathers there—plunge into the ocean and find our love, our bones. Can we follow the
“track left on the water’s surface by our ship[s]?” (Sharpe 3). Attend to the dead and abject living
and those left behind. This is what Christina Sharpe might call “wake work”—our care and
witnessing of Blackness and their brokenness (10). Our care and witnessing of Black fathers in
their brokenness so that we might witness the ways that they love us more clearly. So that we
might make space to love them again.

Love is a Battlefield

Thinking about love as it is evaluated within Black feminist, queer of color, and
decolonial theory, I write, for the remainder of the chapter, a new Black father story. Taking
Marriott’s lead, I pick up on Black paternal love’s potential to cut through the death sentence of
Black children, with a turn to the bond between a dying Black father and his daughter. I
privilege a story of a Black father from the future, who carries traces of the father of Richard
Wright, the father of Wideman—the furious father named Furious from “Boyz in the Hood.”

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And yet this father that is often discarded with the lot—is a father I would like to transcribe
outside of masculine narcissistic readings—outside of prescriptive understandings of love—as a
father named Wink, in “Beasts of a Southern Wild.”
“Beasts of a Southern Wild,” Zeitlin’s 2012 Black centered cinematic adaptation of a
white casted play named “Juicy and Delicious,” is set on a fictional island nicknamed “the
Bathtub,” adrift off the coast of American mainland. Reminiscent of New Orleans and the
Dismal Swamp under slavery, the film ripples through the magical and real, past-present-future
to reveal a forgotten bayou community. It ripples too, through the trouble that has always faced
Blackness inhabiting the Gulf Coast, which writer Anna Hartnell names under the slow violence
of capitalism and rising concern of water’s inundation, calls “liquid precarity” (2). Zeitlin’s
dazzling yet cautionary film reminds us of Black communities across the US and the world,
facing eroding shorelines, closer proximity to toxic waste, and greater distance from quality
health care (Wright 792).
Appositely, we find that the Bathtub community–a signifier for Blackness–faces
increased flooding from hurricane-like natural disasters. The cinematic story centers on the
tension between this discarded, peripheral island inundated by the whims of nature and humans
in power, and the sovereign hold of the mainland—with its medical resources and protective
barriers ensuring the life of those on the shore while deeming those on the island disposable.
This tension between protected and unprotected, exceptional and insignificant—beings given life
under law and those fated to die—is ruptured arguably, symbolically, when the subaltern island
dwellers blow up the levee erected to protect those on safer shores—blowing up the levee to save
their vanishing homeland and ultimately their way of life.
The blowing up of the levee is led by Hushpuppy at the instruction of her recalcitrant

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father—a father-daughter relationship that will shape the remainder of the analysis. Certainly,
Hushpuppy is the story’s Black girl heroine in this peculiar bildungsroman—a precocious child
running wild in the face of climate change, poverty, socio-economic hierarchies, and an
uncertain adulthood. Hushpuppy should very well be our preoccupation—the livelihood of this
most peripheral figure, the Black girl child. As notable Black queer cinema studies scholar Kara
Keeling has described, the Black female is often invisible to the cinematic eye; thus “when she
becomes visible, her appearance stops us, offers us time in which we can work to perceive
something different, or differently” (3). There is then, a significant function in Hushpuppy, who
pulls on us to re-sense our world. But there is, I contend, an equal pull to make sense of her
Black father, who shadows and shapes her growth. Indeed, what ignites this unforgettable film
journey, arguably, is more than simply a tale of Black girlhood, climate change, the sins of Man,
or even a maroon community, but also the overarching and complicated Black paternal love of a
father for his Black daughter—that transcends what Kara Keeling might call, the common sense
(566) of our father stories foretold–the “sensory motor link that chains us to our past.”
The father named Wink, on the fictitious Isle Charles Doucet, affectionately named the
Bathtub, is presented as a fiery single father, who stays with his daughter Hushpuppy in parallel
trailers on this sinking island in the sea. Wink is suffering from a mysterious blood illness and is
often away, leaving Hushpuppy alone and dreaming of her mother and auroch beasts—a long
extinct cousin to cattle re-emerging here.
The majority of queer and feminist of color critique of “Beasts,” is decidedly against the
Black paternal portrayal. bell hooks, brilliant in her contributions to Black feminist theory, love,
and even Black manhood, opens up first in a scalding critique of this film that actually prompted
for myself, a search for the love that she writes is unthinkable in the wild. hooks charges this

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controversial film for centering an abusive Black father figure who only further degrades a film
that is little more than a “pornography of violence” (1). She bemoans the lack of the love for the
vulnerable Black girl child, bearing the burden of the world at the film’s center. Jayna Brown,
who writes extensively on Black women’s performance, joins bell hooks’ concerns, citing Wink
as an inadequate father who offers his daughter only “rickety foundations” (9). And although
Tavia Nyong’o’s work on afro-fabulation could certainly be used to rethink Wink’s past-present-
future performance of cultural memory, he seems decidedly against recuperating Wink through
this framing. Instead Nyong’o passes over Wink in his writing of “Beasts,” as evidence of the
pathology that so preoccupied Moynihan–Wink as the crux of the Black family nightmare (251).
And lastly, in an even more recent piece, feminist of color Kyo Maclear charges Wink with
grievous inadequacy and care that is twisted (603).
My aim is not to strain entirely against the critique above but to place feminist of color,
decolonial theory, and queer critique in conversation with this fleshly emergence of a Black
father. I endeavor to suggest an alternative way of seeing, feeling, and understanding that argues
for a Black love that finds countenance too in the paternal. A Black love that is un-respectable—
beastly even. Untied to Western theology—on the outside of the outside as that uncontainable.
Improvisatory, circular, capacious like water. That offers a Black father the space for love—to
love and to be lovingly considered. For there is value in the father here that we find as we wade
in the water. And that value, I argue, is the value of this Black love as a Black freedom.
I urge us to sit with the discomfort that arises then—this peculiar love striving—because
that is where the loving work is—for Black discourse. The messiness, the chaos, the fraught
matter of the arguably ferociously loving Black father, Wink. I am interested in those things
about him and his loving practice that might be deemed wasteful, abhorrent, and extraneous to

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our ideologies of liberation by way of inclusion in US civil society—which are often a violence
in their exclusion of certain Black people by way of respectability politics.
To rethink Wink in this way, I ask that the reader engage Wink as more symbolic than real
and the substance of Wink’s symbolism as a fugitive ethic of care that, to borrow from L.H
Stallings, funks up our own ethics. How can we re-evaluate what Wink lovingly repurposes at
this disposal through the excess that is Black queerness—that is the Black peculiar position of
the Black father. In this last turn, I will track Wink’s love in three sections, asking: what does
Wink do with time and with uncomfortable feeling, and lastly with a distinctly Black freedom
desire, to offer Hushpuppy a peculiarly Black love—the opportunity of “now”— the opportunity
to experience joy and decolonized being—the opportunity of perhaps not futurity and afterlife
but what Kevin Quashie calls, aliveness (2).

Love In The Time of Blackness

An understanding of Wink’s Black paternal love is opened up first, through a turn to
time—particularly, the interplay of time, race, and queerness. I find entry into the significance of
Wink’s time—time in the life of a Black father—specifically, through a reference to the
publication of a groundbreaking text in queer theory entitled, No Future. Lee Edelman’s
provocative work, insightfully argues that American socio-politics engages in a continual
deferment of progress; it continually projects its aim for a better, more equitable future onto the
heterosexual family and their reproduction of “the child” (Edelman 3). As a remedy to this never
reachable freedom, conveniently put off onto the next idealized future generation, Edelman

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boldly displaces children from this pedestalized position of our socio-political investment, hope,
and vision, in a privileging of the opportunity of the now. This push against what queer studies
calls, normative time and the perhaps (over)valuation of the child, is also explored by Jack
Halberstam’s brilliant work on queerness and time—which aims to disrupt the linear progression
of human life. Halberstam critiques the monotonous sequence of U.S. existence that at times
violently excludes and disenfranchises queer subjects—a sequence that follows the following
lines: “adolescence-early adulthood-marriage-reproduction-child rearing-retirement-death”
(182).
Works like Edelman and Halberstam’s have engendered a pertinent subfield in queer
theory called Queer Death Studies, which not only unravels time’s linear progression but takes
on time and works from what we conventionally conceive of as the other end. Indeed it takes
death as the beginning of being as well as something that is ever present. Interestingly as well,
queer death studies hones in on twentieth century’s anthropocenic threat to man as usurping the
power of nature in its death doling potential. Given death and its ubiquity, Queer Death Studies
works not to elevate the human experience but to de-exceptionalize death and make us recognize
that there is more than human (death) in the world.
With respect to these important breakthroughs for breaking up our limited notions of
temporality, queer of color intervention and Black studies trouble the novelty in these strains of
thought. Jose Munoz’s queer of color critique in Cruising Utopia, questions what child in this
reproductive family Edelman really has in mind, for the protection and privileging of the child of
color has never been an American socio-political priority (Edelman 31). The late Munoz would
likely ask as well, what genre of human’s death is rendered important, given the discarding of
non-white subjects and their secured positioning as less than human since the introduction of

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New World slavery and coloniality centuries before (Munoz 95). Certainly this is where Wink
resides—and not only Wink but his daughter Hushpuppy, the forgotten Black child—vulnerable
to “no future” already. In other words, in the age of the Man, Wink and Hushpuppy’s existence
are already de-exceptionalized.
These elisions in conventional queer theory are also already accounted for by way of
Black theory, beginning most notably with the work of Orlando Patterson. Writing nearly four
decades ago, Patterson positions the slave as a figure of social or living death—extending this to
a universal slave, but pointing to the enslaved Black of the U.S. in particular. Social death
positions Black people in America literally out of the social constructs of time—out of the
capacity to build and perpetuate meaningful social lives, as they are cut off from reproductive
familial ties, in “ascending and descending generations” (Patterson 7). Having no honor in this
socially abject state outside of normal time and space, Black people are rendered, by extension,
unexceptional and less than human as their birthright.
Black woman Neo-Marxist Ruth Gilmore seems to echo Orlando Patterson’s framing of
death, Blackness, and time in her salient definition of racism in slavery’s afterlife. Gilmore states
that racism is not simply racial subjugation, hierarchy, or even the threat of the gaze, but “the
state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to
premature death” (28). I italicize prematurity, because Gilmore, who writes principally about
economy and space, lingers curiously here on the specter of time in the life of race. Gilmore
attunes our senses to the reality that Blackness under racism already lives a life surrounded by
the death that Queer Death Studies animates yet does not name.
9

9
And what of the weather? In a turn to Christina Sharpe’s innovative and gorgeous In the Wake, she talks about
how the “weather produces a climate of antiblackness” (106). From the the slave ship’s departure and arrival, Black
life was dictated by atmopsheric whims that could disrupt them, just as Hushpuppy and Wink are disrupted now.

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However, pushing towards more than critique, more than a pointing to pre-mature end to
Black lives, queer of color and Black feminist theorists offer an otherwise temporal possibility.
In a counter to work on queerness and time that leaves race undertheorized, Jose Munoz
aforementioned, digs into the future more, rather than turning away from it—by turning toward
what he calls the horizon. More pointedly, Munoz looks to the horizon where the sun touches
this world, as a queer ideality—a utopia. And Munoz defines this utopia as the ever press
towards queerness that has not yet arrived but is in the distance, visualized, and realizable, as an
important elsewhere for queer of color folk to unceasingly strive towards. Building on this
reinvestment in the future as a source of liberation, Black theorist, Kara Keeling, places
Blackness, queerness, time, and desire together in a push off from Fanon. She, in short, turns to
time and affect in cinema to think about the future as a way to rupture the historical colonization
of Black bodies—a rupture that draws a “poetry from the future” in the frame of the present and
past in an effort to locate fuller Black beings.
Amid queer of color, Black critique and their interventions, is where the reader might
begin to locate Wink and his uncontestably queer life—a life vulnerable to prematurity as a
result of state-sanctioned and extralegal exploitation and the insecurity of a heteronormative
reproductive timeline. This is where the reader might, too, locate his daughter Hushpuppy,
whose future as a Black father’s child, fallen outside of U.S. safety nets, is most certainly not
bound up in hope; it is most certainly not pedestalized. Wink’s ontological orientation toward
death and the similar fate of his child, Wink’s inability to safely move along the lines of
normative time, crystallizes quite early for the viewer of “Beasts” even if it is overlooked in the
face of other thematic strivings. Yet I will consider here how this deep contextualization of time
offers a new way of seeing a Black father’s peculiar life, and the peculiar expression of his love.

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I will consider an early scene that features a swampy clearing near Wink and Hushpuppy’s island
home, where Wink staggers bloody in a hospital wristband and nightgown.
Wink is labeled in shorthand as “absent,” in bell hooks’ critique, which echoes a familiar
grammar for Black paternity. And yet, with a turn to time in this cinematic frame, perhaps there
is more to Wink than father-lacking. Suspending the grammar that collapses Wink into an object
then—allowing him to breathe but for a moment—it becomes clearer that as Wink limps across
the clearing to meet his child, he is muscled yet feeble, formidable yet vulnerable. His ragged
flesh is loaded with knowledge. He is absent from Hushpuppy for several days not out of twisted
care— but rather self-care. Or more closely, a desire to prolong his existence for his daughter.
Re-sensing Wink, the viewer might find that he reflects more closely what Tavia
Nyong'o' might call “endangered life” (3)—a Black paternal life always already facing a
premature death threat. Indeed, Wink—symbolic of the Black father, culturally unmade—may
very well reach extinction. Wink in the context of the wild, is literally outside of time—as a
symbolic double to the long extinct aurochs in Hushpuppy’s dreams—exterior to the laws of the
sovereign and of nature. This is a knowledge that ever presses upon him at every turn, as he runs
outside of time in a multi-scalar sense—as the film teeters on the end of Man’s time and the end
of his own time, quite personally.
More pointedly, what becomes discarded in critique is the importance of the reality that
Wink is dying. (And what is discarded also is our loving sympathy). He is being physically
ravaged. Time’s end for Wink is closing in as it is revealed that Wink is suffering from an
unnamed disease that will lead to his early demise—a disease that can be nothing other than
racially and queerly haunted. His sickness remains unnamed like HIV/AIDS once was, or
syphilis if we recall the US Tuskegee Project—allowed to fester or veritably disregarded. Wink’s

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time then, is running out because of an unsettling medical apartheid. Wink’s time, in the
language of queer death studies, is already de-exceptional.
And this “mysterious blood illness” (hooks 1) is further wrapped up in ecological
disaster— as Wink, a double of the auroch, is doubly vulnerable—wrestling with the avaricious
palms of Western, property owning “Man” on the mainland. The weather is raining down on
Wink and Hushpuppy’s Black home adrift on their beloved island, and as Christina Sharpe tells
us, the weather is always anti-black (102).
What then does it mean to feel Wink’s time bound up in the sovereign’s ecological malice?
What can life and love look like in such a mess? I contend that there is a peculiarity of love, that
looks and understands the future for himself is foreclosed but the future might be a horizon of
otherwise possibility for his child. And through this Black queer knowledge, of Blackness
running out of time, with time running out, Black love cannot afford to be smooth—it must split
through time if it is to accomplish anything—it must split through it to thwart this racialized fate.
Indeed, Wink is arguably an answer to Nyong’o’s question of how we might begin to
make sense of the “paradoxical vibrance of a form of life endangered or even erased by efforts at
documentation and representation” (3). One finds that Wink’s love staggering in from the edges
might begin to answer Moten’s stirring question for Black life via his fleshly resistance: “how
can we fathom a social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death, and
which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly beautiful vitality"(188)?
For, how does Wink fling himself daringly in death’s face as an act of Black love that stretches
from the terrible to the beautiful? We have looked for the terrible in Wink and perhaps in a
suspension of grammar we can find the beauty, knowledge, aliveness that is Black paternal
love’s exigent enactment and necessity, as he fights for the survival of his kin on the brink of

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living. A queer love force where Black paternal love rocks through a susceptible moment, a
delicate time frame that requires urgency, that requires time’s ignition—that steals the moment
to articulate itself before time is exhausted.
Therefore, Wink’s case is a case most urgent—as he limps across the clearing. Wink—
limping—-is running against time; and though he cannot save himself, he must love urgently,
perspicaciously to offer this time to his daughter. He cannot carry her into an ark of salvation but
he can arm her with a spirit of defiance. He can arm her with the ferocity of what Kevin Quashie
might call, a utopia of a Black world not cowing to whiteness—a beauty of Black aliveness (3).
What becomes important in a reading of Wink is his loving resistance to his death
sentence—his shaking of the fiat, “no future.” His only reason to shake it is rooted arguably in
his paternal love for his Black daughter who he tells, “I’m your daddy, and it's my job to keep
you from dying” (Zeitlin 2012) This is Wink’s mission—to protect his daughter from early
death, even as he is facing it. Wink therefore offers a new understanding of love and time, in the
life of Blackness, as a love that is racing against multiple endings towards a horizon of
possibility for his child. His Black love can be digested first as a temporal resistance—a fight
against time—in the wink of an eye—to teach and free his daughter. To ensure for his daughter,
what Munoz calls a queer utopia (3), Moten calls a springing in death’s face (188), and Keeling
reimagines as poetry from the future (565).

Raging Love

I situate Black time as crucial to understanding what ignites Wink’s Black being and also

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his Black love. Yet here I turn to the core of this Black love more directly and the knowledge
that love as feeling might provide. In other words, the following section will move from
exploring the impetus behind his love, to examining his love’s emotional substance. This is a
peculiar substance that might strike the viewer with discomfort—for at the center of Wink’s love
is rage.
Certainly, the emotion most sensed by the viewer of “Beasts” is rage—rage as more
hyperbolic and constant than anger. It is marked by the words “Beast it!” which seem to enter
each cinematic frame—for Wink, to be certain, possesses a brusque intensity reminiscent of how
Frantz Fanon describes the Black colonized as ready to explode and tensely muscled. Indeed,
too, he possesses the brusque intensity that the viewer encounters from the aptly named and
equally critiqued father, Furious, from “Boyz in the Hood.” Whether or not this feeling is
appropriate and most pertinently appropriate in its approximation to love, is what might give the
reader pause; and yet this is what interests me in thinking about Black paternal love’s queer,
feminist, and/or decolonial possibility—Black paternal love decolonized, made, and opened up.
Consider the scene of Wink and Hushpuppy seated at a communal table in their island
home, where they are eating crab. This is a turning point in Wink’s life instruction for his
daughter, as he forces her with fellow watchers to split the sizable crab open with her hands.
Pounding his fists on the table and barking with intimidating noise, Wink tells his daughter to
“beast it” until she tears open the flesh and consumes it. How can the viewer imagine such
scenes as love, when rage appears here as love’s ugliest pole, under normative logic?
I would like to offer some context here on rage, for rage is often limited under Western
senses. It is first, regarded as an irrational emotion—or shall we say feeling in its most base form.
Under Western discourse, it is a theoretical throwaway that sits in opposition to reason. It has no

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place in the space in the elite mind of the sovereign. Certainly, it is so base that it morphs into a
kind of pathology—an un-respectable articulation, which, unsurprisingly, is fixed by the white
mind onto Black objects as it was in the case of Fanon. In other words, rage is in excess to social
normativity—adhering to the abject, un-tameable Black body. Rage is an unsightly outpouring,
split off from what Sylvia Wynter calls the political, property-owning Western subject held
within the span of three letters as capital “M” “Man.” It splits off from this subject that holds
predominance amid other human genres—spilling over as waste into the province of the human-
animal: the Negro. The human-animal—the beast—Wink.
But in her important piece entitled “Affect and Respectability Politics,” scholar Michelle
Smith troubles this conventional discourse on rage, which she puts in conversation with Black
freedom strivings. Smith writes that in Black endeavors towards civil legibility, civil acceptance,
social mobility, Black uplift by way of integration projects, there is often a push against ugly
feelings like rage and their attending unsightly behaviors. These raging behaviors are most
evident in riots, which are, in Smith’s readings, unfairly castigated as a hindrance to Black
freedom—rather than a legitimate form of expression of those who are disenfranchised, still
bound, and unheard (2-4).
In addition to rage’s bestial, uncivilized associations, rage is also quite often likened to a
gross immorality. What is interesting about love framed in this manner, however, is that our love
pedagogy is gifted to Black objects through the unimaginable hands of a historical and holistic
imperial violence. Turning to the contributions of decolonial feminism, Yomaira C. Figueroa
building off Chela Sandoval points to this glaring conundrum, as she argues that the same ethical
doctrine that we turn over and around in as the foundation of love, was not only pressed down
upon Blacks and those of color violently but by a spiritually violent Western world order that

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also ushered in the commands of colonialism, imperialism, and I add here, New World slavery,
Jim Crow, and the modern prison (49). Figueroa asks as I do as well, why Western nations are
the gatekeeper in our love definitions (50-51). Perhaps Black love must break the chains of white
ownership as Wink seems to be doing, in his strivings; perhaps there is more to love outside
white colonial frames.
Indeed, as Blackness has largely sutured itself and its chances of attaining freedom to
virtues of patience and kindness, what love might there be outside of this ideal that is still useful
in a Black world? What else is there external to a love that bell hooks seems to desire for
Hushpuppy, understandably—the one that lifts us higher—in a symbolic gesture to a path to
salvation by way of resurrection. Or too, can a turn away from a love that is tethered to notions
of cleanliness and cleansing do more for Black fathers and their children—away from the love
that echoes Jayna Brown’s urge that we bundle the dirty Hushpuppy living amid animals and
mess, and give her a loving bath. In a holistic cultural sense, the U.S. has been pulled
increasingly toward this kind of love as a key to Black salvation, and yet there might be
something more, which is to say something less sanitized, peaceful, and ahistorical about Black
love that is worth holding onto and out for.
A turn to Smith and the epistemological wealth in Black women’s and decolonial theory
specifically then, looks to the rage embedded in love, which exceeds Western discursive
limitations. Boldly, rage can guide not only an opening up of Black ethics and insight, but an
opening up to a more honest kind of Black loving. Here, Black queer writer Audre Lorde sets the
stage, in her pivotal essay, “Uses of Anger,” where, in response to charges of the world and
white feminism for displaying an off-putting anger, Lorde radically repositions anger not as a
wasteful emotion but as radically generative. The reader finds that anger is not an impediment to

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freedom, love, and intelligence, but can rather “be a powerful source of energy serving progress
and change” (Lorde 9). If used with intention and precision, Lorde calls anger or rage, a crucial
response to racism. For Lorde, rage has an invaluable function. For Lorde there is no gap
between anger and love—but one can be found in the other. Anger is a righteous loving
knowledge—a loving epistemology. This is where Black queer Buddhist scholar, Lama Rod
Owens draws his insight for the love embedded in rage and the rage embedded in love. A raging
love that is the peculiar life giving position of Blackness—much more than nihilistic, hyper-
masculine pathology.
This understanding of rage as endemic to Black love is reminiscent of what Sharon
Holland teaches us in her article, In “Black (Queer) Love.” Holland names this queerness of
Black love as something “beyond our control and marked by the presence of the undead” (658).
Holland locates a love—a Black queer love— that not only mingles with the uglinesss of hate
but the ugliness of Blackness’ proximity to animality that is not a source of shame but genius
vision. For indeed, Black love is peculiar because Black folks are more than human in a Western
sense, but they are also, more than dead. Again, Blackness and Black love by extension are the
embrace of alienated ontological surplus. (Moten 33).
In conversation with Lorde, Holland, and Owens, is Toni Morrison’s literary imagination
in Beloved. Morrison’s co-protagonist, Sethe is the murderer (or savior or deeply complex
human) who escapes bondage–and in her fear of returning her kin to hell, slices the throat of her
third born child. She lives in a house haunted by the baby’s ghost that leaves little room for
anything else. And then Paul D comes knocking from the same hellbound plantation that Sethe
has fled– ironically named, “Sweet Home.” Paul D heals Sethe, at least for a time at 124
Bluestone Road abode. Interestingly, it is the Black man that carries a tenderness with him

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indoors–a Black man’s loving arms, making space for vulnerability like Juan with Chiron–soft
and comforting he "cradled [Sethe] before the cooking stove" (99). Paul D and Sethe become
distanced as trees though – for her mother's love, in Paul’s eyes, is too thick for his soul. Paul D
is a tender lover indeed, but loves by suppressing the presentness of his past. There is a thinness,
a transience here. Perhaps Paul D can love romantically but not as a parent; Paul D’s love is
fickle, conditional, as he stands in judgment, reminding Sethe, “you have two legs, not four”
(Morrison 165). Why did Paul D need to remind her of it? Paul D strives to make love and a
Black home in this afterlife of bondage and yet there is something that escapes his knowing, his
empathy. Morrison, however, makes room for Sethe and it is worth exploring; Morrison as
always, makes room for all lovers and all of love’s sides.
Indeed, Morrison makes room for Sethe. And in that room, Sethe’s fury or rage might
defy our ethics, and yet one can begin to consider it as a necessary response to the hell of the
slave regime. One might fall into discomfort with or aversion to its complexity, but one cannot
contend that it is not love—and further that it is not a kind of knowledge—an enhancement of
our affective and historical knowing. This is how rage funks up our neat emotional logics, for in
the case of Sethe, Toni Morrison writes: “it was the right thing to do [to kill the baby girl] but
she had no right to do it” (Morrison and Moyers 272) How might Morrison’s capacious reading
of love, fury, resistance and ethics revise the way the viewer regards the raging love of Wink?
Even if more modestly, in a figurative sense—to open one’s senses to the necessity of such
ferocious love.
Indeed, bringing time back into the conversation, when your life might be gone in the
wink of an eye, what is the right way to love your child? What is the right way to love, even if
you have no right to love that way. What is the right thing to do in the face of death—when death

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is always surrounding. Wink, in “Beasts of a Southern Wild” is caught up in this love imbroglio
that Black feminist and decolonial theory sits within rather than eschewing. Wink is a symbolic
reflection of the messiness of Black love entangled with anger—but anger as a pathway to Black
resistance.

A Love Maroon

Layering urgent time over rage in this complex love rendering, I am invested lastly, in what
this love is doing. Because that is what is most important in the end—what Black paternal love
does for Black children. I am brought to love then, as a verb.
I am brought to the function of this peculiar Black paternal love articulated in the life of a
Black girl. Indeed, this final section is animated by the question of what Black paternal love,
queer in its composition, can do; what more can a Black fathers’ love give? It is here that I attend
to Wink’s paternal pedagogy as a loving gesture—contending that his love is principally an
instructional endeavor. Wink’s love as a Black father is not one of neglect, absence, lack,
monstrosity—albeit it is certainly not perfect. There are marks of raging love, marks of leave
from care due to his withering health. His love sometimes misses the mark, falls from grace, and
yet it still does so much. For what Wink’s love does accomplish is perhaps not lifting up but
wrapping Hushpuppy in what Ashon Crawley calls “otherwise possibility” (32). Wink’s love
does not lift but ultimately demonstrates a Black girl’s worth—a frame for Black girl’s
dreaming. Wink’s love secures for his Black daughter, a place to imagine more fully, vibrantly,
diversely—a love for herself as a Black girl in a Black world.

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I do not take Wink’s love strivings as always literal—for again the space of “Beasts' ' offers
a melding of the real with the magical. Thus, my hermeneutical reading of Wink is informed by
his teaching as symbolic, chiefly—a symbolic pedagogy in conversation with what Black
discourse calls fugitivity. Essentially, this is a Black paternal love that is doing the work of Black
liberation through its teaching method. And through this work what the viewer learns is that
Black paternal love can do more than fail them, disappoint them, can do more, even, than ward
off death and loss. Black paternal love can be transcendent—Black paternal love can be a
flight—Black paternal love can be a freeing thing.
What is this love thing that I deem a kind of fugitivity—a fugitive pedagogy. Fugitive
pedagogy, a Black freedom instruction–and here I am aligned with a UK scholar in education,
Laura Trafí-Prats (2)—is of course rooted in lived socio-historical practices, yet theoretically
unfolds through the work of Black male feminist theorist Fred Moten, as the very essence of
Blackness—how Blackness comes to be outside of racist tropes, chains, and lynch rope—outside
of racist looks and words that bind us. Fugitivity offers the possibility to say no! in the face of
social death and death’s prematurity—while offering also, the possibility of breaking into a
social life. In other words, fugitivity is a psychic way out of a conclusion to Black existence;
fugitivity is a literal-figurative way out of the slave hold and into utopic alternative that Munoz
terms, that Keeling names. Yes, fugitivity is escape from the resounding psycho-geographic
spaces that seal Blackness in the Middle Passage ship, plantation, ghetto, prison—a threading out
of the grammar of buck, mammy, sapphire, animal. Fugitivity is Black resistance that flows and
falls outside of colonial maneuvers of containment. Fugitivity is also importantly, what political
theorist, Neil Roberts calls marronnage —a distinctly Black freedom from sites of bondage that
is necessarily active, tense, constant, on the run, a verb; fugitivity, ultimately is the marvelous

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event where in the words of Moten, Black objects, resist (1)—I contend, out of Black (self) love.
Indeed, fugitivity in its richness is what Wink offers his daughter; and this
epistemological wealth is a Black love. If fugitivity is situated as a Black feminist exercise that
enables Black women and girls to exceed the container and containable—to find life and living
outside of the white world’s barriers and eyes, versus being “put out” (an important distinction),
Wink is integral to the celebration of this Black feminist poetics in his daughter. Again, he
teaches love for Black flesh and love for Black space.
Focusing first on the power of Black flesh, I hold up Hushpuppy’s physical image—
because Hushpuppy’s freedom materializes in a very corporeal sense. Hushpuppy is free in her
flesh; she runs errantly without gendered regimentation in ways that sometimes upset the viewer.
She emerges as her best self with pants, boots, a white tank top, and hair uncombed, and
unplaited. She runs with dirt on her face, unoiled—wildly in a mucky clearing. Hushpuppy is
holding more than the weight of the world; she is more than a mule. She is joyous.
Hushpuppy’s appearance has been taken as a sign of neglect. A sign of the perennial
question, of who will protect the Black girl? But really, Wink’s lack of discipline regarding her
gendered legibility enables Hushpuppy to feel expansive in her body—to feel the power in her
raised arms. As Wink shouts “who’s the man” (Zeitlin 2012) like a coach in a boxing ring, this
does not rob Hushpuppy of her innocence and gendered integrity but reminds her of her
effervescence. She is not made to reflect the politics of respectability (Higginbotham 187) and
propriety that suppress Black girls and women, although they are often meant to protect. Wink
teaches his daughter fugitivity—a social life outside of the march of uplift—outside the fold of
the normative. She is a young girl that can race against, in a symbolic sense, the world’s gaze,
the world’s words, the world’s nets.

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Hushpuppy is a Black girl, who in the face of burdens of the Anthropocene, also learns
from her father a beauty, a joy, a pleasure, a Black social life. It is because of this, that
Hushpuppy’s flesh, like the flesh of her father, announces trouble in the swampy island, albeit
she is perhaps not what Saidiya Hartman has in mind in her refreshing new work on troublesome
Black women and girls in the emergent ghetto, named Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.
Hartman writes of the ordinary and extraordinary existence of Black girlhood and womanhood in
northern urban American slums as a beautiful instance of the struggle to survive (xv). And
although Hushpuppy does not come of age in a northern tenement, her troubling flesh announces
a similar striving and a similar social upheaval as Hartman’s recovered girls. She is peripheral
and yet enacts a rebellion in her choice to announce herself —to make us remember her.
Additionally, Hushpuppy learns flight, learns maroon, learns decoloniality through
Wink’s living example. A living example that is not perfect by any means—but an example that
is still useful. Consider the scene of the great storm that sets the filmic plot into motion—the
storm that floods the Bathtub and requires the blowing up of the levee to even out literally and
figuratively, the water flowing between island and mainland. Here, I stand in contrast to a cadre
of other readers, who have sighted this scene amid other scenes, as an embodied instance of
Black paternal un-care and pathology. By way of Moten’s fugitivity, by way of decolonial
theory, I reformulate this scene as a signification of Black resistance. As a signification of what
Moten calls the refusal of the sovereign order and an emphatic embrace of life otherwise.
Yes, Wink teaches his daughter to fish—to survive off of the land—to lay claim to space
not in a kind of sovereignty but in living alongside and among other things that are breathing.
Wink instructs his daughter in the manner of riding out a storm. The hurricane arrives and Wink
and Hushpuppy crouch inside Wink’s trailer; Wink, in an endeavor to protect Hushpuppy, places

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floaties on her before charging outdoors to face the storm’s eye. Wink, shoots his gun at the
sky—a shooting in the eye of the storm that resonates on socio-political and metaphysical
registers. In a metaphysical sense, Wink does not possess a sturdy ark like Noah or some other
tool of a spectral white paternal savior. He is not interested in rescuing his daughter by carrying
her into a grand vessel of salvation that will buoy her until the storm passes. Wink is invested
rather in guiding her to seize her right to survival—her right to this land. Guiding her towards
sovereignty of her Black body, mind, the earth upon which she stands, through the tools however
meager, at hand. Yes, Wink offers, then, again, through this gesture of facing the storm, a
maroon knowledge—a maroon stance that thwarts and returns the gaze.
In one vein, this scream that Wink screams into the night with his gun, is quite Fanonian—
a scream that decolonial theorist, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, states in his reading of Fanon is a
cry “out in horror” in the face of the...modern/colonial “death-world” that aspires – through the
decolonial praxis of love to create a transmodern world “in which many worlds fit” and where
the global dictatorship of capital, property, and coloniality no longer reign (244).
There is an insistence in this scream, then for Wink to not only rupture the colonial
command of his death, but to insight another world—to make another world possible for his
daughter. This is what Moten calls a refusal of the refusal, or the “ongoing refusal of standards
imposed from elsewhere” (viii). Barred from participation in the white world as its anti-
blackness literally pours down in the form of Man catalyzed natural disaster, Wink’s cry is pre-
lingual but also a vocal explosion of the logics of Western place that render the home he makes
for Hushpuppy unthinkable. That makes the world he paves for Hushpuppy unlovable.
Fugitivity, in its refusal of Black social death, is also about making a Black home—
shaping a Black world even in the throes of a racialized environmental doom. Yes, Wink instills

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within Hushpuppy, a sense of Black dignity, a sense of Black self(love), which becomes
accentuated through reclaiming the Black home-space of the Bathtub. A reclaiming of Black
space as what geographer Katherine McKittrick has deemed under Western nation-state
violences, “ungeographic,” “uninhabitable,” Black, dead (4). As our Western framed eyes tarry
on elongated shots of Wink and Hushpuppy’s swampy abode, separated from the polite, the
civilized in their mainland homes—breathing in a nether region of tin huts, crawfish, murky
water, and rusty boats, it might be difficult to process the island of Charles Doucet as a home —
as a lovable place to dwell. Yet, all the attentiveness to Wink’s lack and the lack of his island
home — his impoverishment both literal and figurative, swells a particular respectability
narrative. It swells an attachment to Western sensibilities of proper respectable living that denies
the realities of Black and Global South living — living that albeit bereft materially, still
maintains richness, beauty, joy, and dignity. How can the reader readjust their senses to look
after Wink and Hushpuppy’s positioning alternatively?
Wink does this work for us by framing for his daughter that she lives in “the prettiest
place on earth.” He does this work amid floating baggage, waste, mess, which Wink reformulates
for Hushpuppy as what Moten calls a wealth in lack and beauty in poverty (48). Just like the
slum, the plantation, the ghetto, the Gulf Coast and its watery beauty that faces, again, the
ravages of looming environmental disaster that disproportionately affects Black people. It is
important to note that Wink is not dreaming of America for his child, for America is positioned
here as a place that asphyxiates Black living possibility like the metaphor Hushpuppy applies.
American mainland is “a fishbowl with no water” (Zeitlin 2012)—there is no place for a Black
man to breathe. There is no space for a Black child to grow without being suffocated, squished
into a racist grammar, suspended under the sovereign’s eye. Therefore, no, Wink is not

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bemoaning his loss of place in the land of purported freedom, for Wink has already “enter(ed)
and inhabit(ed) the dream and the reality of revolution” (Sharpe 53).

Conclusion

Hushpuppy once stood in anger and fear of her chaotic father, longing for her mother, who
presumably left their home. Hushpuppy once, fearing the “chronic angers” of her Black father’s
world, spat out unforgettable words at Wink: “I hope you die, and after you die I’ll go to your
grave and eat birthday cake all by myself” (Zeitlin 2012). In this stinging phrase, Hushpuppy
hopes for her father’s death, so that she might celebrate her life. The words are punctuated when
she punches her father in the heart and causes him to collapse from the (emotional) pain.
But in the end, Hushpuppy comes to understand something else about her father and his
Black (paternal) love—after blowing up the levee, fleeing mainland capture, sitting across from
Wink, in the end of his life. Hushpuppy stands alive, and also armed with a spirit of defiance—
tools offered from her furious father, outside of the proverbial master’s house. At the end of
“Beasts” Wink is sinking into death on a white porch; and yet Hushpuppy is feeding her father,
hushpuppies, no less. And do we remember how Ollie fed Cora on the endless road to home-
freedom. This could be symbolic of the reality that for Wink as it was for Cora and Ollie, that
Hushpuppy is his sustenance—Hushpuppy’s aliveness, joy, refusal—is what motivates him. The
intimacy of this non-verbal scene of alimentation demonstrates a kind of fourth swell for us
then—Hushpuppy is no longer searching for love, but has recognized it, right here, before too
much time has passed. Hushpuppy teaches that we feed our Black fathers in a Black world—

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those Black men, fathers, objectified, alienated, and gutted from the inside out. We feed our
Black parents Black love, just as much as they feed us.

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Afterward

Where to now? When Wink is set ablaze for his funeral– returning to the sea, to home
maybe–a resting place, by his Black daughter. Where to now, when we are still, again, in the
words of Christina Sharpe, “in the wake” (4). We are still trailing the tracks left in the Atlantic
Ocean, still overrepresented in death both premature and social. Where to now, when Black men,
who already had one of the lowest mortality rates nationally, were the highest represented of
deaths during the Covid pandemic. Our families lost grandfathers and fathers to a healthcare
system that is desensitized to Black pain and vulnerability. Like Wink we continue to lose our
fathers from life stressors, environmental toxins, the health care system, and onward, early.
Where to now?
Christina Sharpe reminds us that the work of the wake is to witness, care, remind us that
“in the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death” we “must attend
to the physical, social, and figurative death and also the largeness that is Black life” (4). My
dissertation recognizes this death but it chooses rather, to put an emphasis on the largeness of
Black life–the largeness of Black paternal existence and experience. Black fathers might inhabit
the wake but they are not subsumed by it; we can discover them; we can go to the ocean water
and find their bones.
I want to re-emphasize that this study is just that–a “study”–what Fred Moten refers to as
call and response, the participation of the writer and reader in an ensemble that privileges
collaborative learning. This study does not by any means exhaust all potentialities, nor is it an
assertion of authority. I have offered here, just a handful of Black literary and cinematic texts
circling mainly canonical figures, with what struck me as the most pressing themes to enter into

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Black discourse. The purpose of course is to present a theory of the Black father, outside of a
habitual, naturalized capitulation to critique that ends in charges of heteropatriarchal limitations.
I position Black fathers in Black theory as a subject/object ripe for inquiry; this is the foundation
of a new framework –a new way of thinking with care for those we have not lacked but rather,
have always been here, in excess.
I end this monograph with a turn to James Baldwin, the daring visionary, who has
appeared several times in this dissertation. It is only fitting, for his literary formulations are
crucial to our understanding of Black paternal life. But here, I want to consider what he opens up
rather than what his writing forecloses. I thus turn to Baldwin on the other side of Civil Rights.
Baldwin’s novel entitled If Beale Street Could Talk written twenty years after Go Tell it on the
Mountain, is a story of outrage that prefigures the rise of U.S. mass incarceration as it bears
down on two Black families. Mass Incarceration is the stunningly terrifying proliferation under
President Reagan and continuing through the tenure of President Bush Jr., of Black men (most
disproportionately), reduced to servitude behind bars largely for nonviolent crimes. Appositely,
the plot features a Black man named Fonny or Alonzo, misidentified for rape of Puerto Rican
woman (diasporic woes) in lower Manhattan. Just before his incarceration, Fonny has asked his
childhood sweetheart Tish to be his wife. And he receives word that she is pregnant with his
child only after he is behind bars. Fonny is upfront with Tish from the beginning; he might not
have the capital means to provide but will always remain faithful to her. Now, as a victim of
racist misidentification, he can provide Tish with even less, as she must adapt her world around
making a home for her unborn amid this sudden removal, disintegration, and uncertainty of an
absent dad.
We might be inclined to read Tish’s Blues through a predominant framework in Black

170
Studies–one that has been critiqued heavily. Weaving through visions of Black nationalist
ideology that nationalize in the same breath, Black reproduction, we might be inclined to say that
Baldwin positions Tish as the sacrificial Black female surrogate for the ongoing project of Black
liberation. Indeed, Baldwin’s text does illuminate how a viable birth is needed–and this need is
representative of a larger freedom that even after Emancipation and Civil Rights, remains
disrupted–as power does not dissipate, but rather, morphs, always evading. This is a nod at least
in part to Saidiya Hartman’s positioning of Blackness as a site of “the incomplete freedom” (3).
However, staying dutiful to my preoccupation with Black interior life, I turn to scholar Marquita
Smith’s reading of these two Black families intertwining and unraveling. Smith claims: we begin
to understand the extent of “criminal power” and “the various ways in which the ongoing crisis
of incarceration disrupts the intimate sphere of African American life,” through the
affective struggle enacted within, around, and through the Black female pregnant body. Baldwin
is not simply speaking to national registers, but tying it back to the space of the Black home and
the Black women’s body in particular, as a space of crisis, coming together, and knowledge at
the dawn of a new era of white supremacist power.
The affective struggle that Smith refers to is a struggle around Black love and Black care
in the face of subjection–love withheld by Fonny’s mother towards Tish–Tish who bears the
stain of Fonny’s displacement and Fonny’s premarital sin. But love as well, that flows from
Tish’s family and Fonny’s father, towards her, the unborn child, and securing Fonny’s freedom.
Particularly the pregnant Tish who compares her care for Fonny’s health during imprisonment to
crossing the Sahara Desert. And Sharon who travels literally to Puerto Rico to confront a witness
who can attest to her future son-in-law’s innocence. Smith charges the trajectory of this care as
Baldwin’s impulse to maintain the heteropatriarchal family, while celebrating the overlaboring

171
flesh of Black women in service to Black men. But here I want to focus on Black fathers and
Black fathers to be more closely, for I think this readied critique belies something new here in
Baldwin. There is nothing wrong with wanting the Black father, with wanting to know him, with
valuing him. If we begin the process of hermeneutical reading here, it does not absolve him of
critique but it might get us a bit closer to finding him.
If love between father and son was an unknowable impossibility within some of
Baldwin’s other celebrated works, I am curious about his positioning of Fonny’s father Frank–
Frank as flawed and broken as he is. What can be said, first, of a Black father’s sacrifice of his
body in the most emphatic sense by way of suicide? As a result of his failure to free his son,
Fonny’s father takes his life when he is caught and fired by his boss for stealing to make Fonny’s
bail. Perhaps we would uphold this as an act of selfishness or a Black man’s inability to untether
his value from his financial prowess. Or even weakness in the face of Black women’s persistent
struggle to care. Perhaps we wonder how empathy could be stretched to an alcoholic and abusive
husband, but there is a particular vulnerability to Frank–a kind of love and expressivity to him
that I want to hold onto. What happens to Black fathers suffering from depression, from
hopelessness, who commit suicide when the rainbow never comes. What happens to not only
Black women but Black fathers and Black men in the wake of incarceration. What does and can
fathering amid this “plantation future” look like. Importantly what happens to Fonny, what
happens to him as he battles social death with the reminder that he has birthed life on the other
side of his cell; how does and can Fonny father as a modern slave. How can Fonny find life
through his naming as father. In the same way as Tish is reminded by the Rivers: “that baby be
the best thing that ever happened to Fonny. He needs that baby. It going to give him a whole lot
of courage.” Here I don’t mean to suggest that Fonny is simply a bearer of a seed that does more

172
service to himself than he can ever do for the child, but I want to know the potential for even
incarcerated fathers to father. What creative methodologies are available; what creative
methodologies do Black men work like “wood on stone” to shape their own pathways to paternal
freedom without defiling their kin.
Indeed, what sense do we make of Black fathers in becoming, Black fathers’ being and
relating while hemmed into the criminal justice system. This is what Baldwin leaves us to
ruminate on. Yes, its impact expands to asphyxiate an entire communal system, but what sense
do we make of the paternal position. I think of those friends of mine whose mothers brought
them to still foster connections with their fathers even when their fathers returned innumerable
times behind glass and bars. I think of a documentary I watched many years ago on Angola
Prison in Louisiana where on Father’s Day, children went to celebrate with their fathers in this
behemoth of a correctional facility. Did it simply wear on the souls of Black mothers and kin
while rejuvenating the lives of dead/dead-end/deadbeat fathers, or did the fathers give them
something generative. Is there any way to disentangle this type of home-making, vulnerability,
touch, and love, from shame?
I use Baldwin’s prophetic work and the figure of Fonny to think about a more intimate
future of Black paternal study. Inspired by Ruthie Gilmore’s more sweeping neo-Marxist work,
Gilmore is one of the first comprehensive studies to reveal the social phenomenon that Baldwin
foregrounds:

“Anglos dominated the prisoner population in 1977 and did not lose
their plurality until 1988. Meanwhile, absolute numbers grew across
the board—with the total number of those incarcerated approximately

173
doubling during each interval. African American prisoners surpassed
all other groups in 1988….Black people have the highest rate of
incarceration of any racial/ethnic grouping in California, or, for that
matter, in the United States.”

Although numbers of Black men in prison have decreased significantly within the past
decade, I highlight Gilmore’s work because although the majority of her study focuses on the
perfect storm that gave rise to prison proliferation in California, she devotes the latter part of her
writing to the mobilization of Black women on the ground to care for imprisoned men. I am
curious about Black women’s efforts to maintain Black familial ties, and this is what prompted
my interest in how Black men imprisoned on the other side/inside endeavor with whatever means
and tools they can craft, to maintain these ties as well.
Turning back to Baldwin and thinking of Gilmore, there is the sobering reality of Black
paternal precarity. But there is, too, what Kara Keeling calls the impossible possibilities that
begin even before a Black child’s birth. This is ripe for study–wide open potential for thinking
about not only these critical and rebellious relations as a child grows, but also about Black
fatherhood and childbirth. Black fatherhood and childbirth that includes pre-pregnancy as well as
the months long journey to life. I would relish integrating anthropological practice, in order to
explore this in a second project, finding ethnography after its many decolonial revisions, a site
that suspends critique, in order to privilege cultural knowing. A site that keeps that space for
knowledge production open and most significantly for me, intimate. Ethnography might help us
get at the beauty of Black father off of the page–the Black father in the flesh–woven into the
wonder of the everyday. Through anthropology, I would love to ask a series of questions: how

174
has Black father engagement with the pregnancy process, with the mother of his unborn
children/child, through pregnancy loss by way of stillbirth or miscarriage, shifted, stagnated, etc.
over time? To what degree has a Black father’s presence increased, decreased, or become more
substantive in relationship to the mother and child? What is navigation of the healthcare system
like? How do Black cis male birth doulas crop up in this process? How might we name them in
this as fathers–queering fatherhood/motherhood or the journey of becoming. And what of those
transBlack fathers who long to bear a child.
How can we continue to see the myriad ways that our fathers carry us too.

175
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Asset Metadata

Creator Richards, Nicole Danielle (author)

Core Title Peculiar poetics: towards a queer-feminist theory of Black fatherhood

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/27/2022

Defense Date 05/16/2022

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

Tag affect,alternative father,black child,black family,black father,black fatherhood,black fathers,Black feminism,black film,black freedom,black geography,Black history,black home,black household,black kinship,Black literature,black love,black motherhood,black mothers,black optimism,black otherwise,black parent,black paternity,black patriarchy,Black queer,black queer child,black social life,black soul,black spirit,Black studies,black study,emotion,feeling,feminist father,fugitivity,heteropatriarchy,Home,Love,Memory,Mourning,OAI-PMH Harvest,partus sequitir ventrum,patriarchy,peculiar,peculiar institution,peculiar sensation,post-intersectionality,quare,queer father,queer of color,respectability politics,sensorium,skin,Slavery,Soul,tactile,Touch,woman of color feminism,womanism

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Daniels-Rauterkus, Melissa (committee member), Jacobs, Lanita (committee member)

Creator Email ndrichar@usc.edu,rosepanafrica@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111375388

Unique identifier UC111375388

Legacy Identifier etd-RichardsNi-11008

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Richards, Nicole Danielle

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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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu