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Specters of miscegenation: blood, belonging, and the reproduction of blackness

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SPECTERS OF MISCEGENATION
BLOOD, BELONGING, AND THE REPRODUCTION OF BLACKNESS

by
Jennifer Michelle DeClue

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2015

Copyright 2015 Jennifer Michelle DeClue

ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am overjoyed to have had the opportunity to learn and grow as a doctoral
student in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity (ASE) at the University of
Southern California. My world changed the day that Janelle Wong called me to share the
fantastic news that I had been admitted into ASE’s 2009 cohort. Just being selected was
incredible but when I met the other members of this cohort I realized that I was in for an
incredible, soul stirring, life-changing ride. I am full of gratitude for the patient and
steady wisdom of my advisor Kara Keeling who taught me how to ask meaningful,
critical questions about blackness and visuality and then ruminate in the uncertainty of
problematics that have no neat solutions. Kara has genuinely welcomed me into her
academic life, among other kindnesses; she invited me to participate in an American
Studies Association panel that has since been published in GLQ. I am tremendously
grateful for Kara’s guidance over these years and I am proud to have been the first
student to come to USC to work with her.
I am deeply moved by the belief that Jack Halberstam has had in me, even before
I was officially an ASE student he allowed me to participate in his legendary Gender
Studies seminar. I am honored to have had the chance to study with Jack, his laser sharp
observations have refined my own critical thinking. The intensity and pace with which
Jack works is inspiring, and I carry that fire with me in my academic pursuits. Through
their dedicated mentorship Kara and Jack have shaped me as a scholar by encouraging
me to conduct boundary-pushing research that is theoretically adventurous and
historically sound. They have taught me how to learn from culture and how to balance
being provocative with academic rigor. Nayan Shah is an astounding mentor whose quiet,
iii
gentle way has encouraged me to pursue research questions that stir me, no matter how
challenging. He has guided me through nail-biting times on the job market and given me
sage advice that will hold me throughout my career in academia. I am so thankful that he
agreed to work with me. This is a dream team – Kara, Jack, and Nayan – I am forever
grateful and humbled by their genius, grace, and generosity. Thank you for being my
ASE dissertation committee and for offering me your bountiful support.
Diana Williams and Michelle Gordon have each helped attune my approach to
history and literature; their astute critical instincts will stay with me in every project that I
undertake. Arlene Keizer has been a brilliant mentor whose comments and intuition insist
that I question more and read a little bit closer. I thank her for doing the extra work of
mentoring me from UC Irvine -- I will always cherish our Long Beach coffee meetings. I
learned about the field of American Studies from the incomparable Ruthie Gilmore
during my first year in ASE, our cohort was lucky enough to have her introduce us to the
field. I remember with great fondness the gigantic Race and Ethnicity seminar that Ruthie
taught, everyone who so desired was allowed to enroll -- and that room was packed. I
value Lanita Jacobs’s insightful feedback; her generous pedagogical style demonstrates
the value of levity and the art of being vulnerable in a room full of wide-eyed students.
I have become dear friends with members of my cohort and developed bonds with
students in ASE from cohorts before and after my admittance. Jih-Fei Cheng, Treva
Ellison, Umayyah Cable, Shriya Shrestha, and Deb Al- Najjar have spent hours with me
on the phone, in my living room, and in ASE meeting rooms thinking, talking, laughing,
and positing the radical transformative potential of our research projects, nighttime
garden parties, and queer love. I thank Roxanne Samer for reading the early versions of
iv
these chapters and always sharing detailed and insightful comments with me. These
colleagues are my friends and they have made my time in ASE both intellectually
stimulating and deliciously comforting. I am truly grateful for the tireless assistance that
Kitty Lai and Jujuana Preston offer to our department. They answer every question that I
ask and make sure that all runs smoothly for us in ASE, and that is no small feat.
Alex Juhasz answered my questions about pursuing a Ph.D. when I was beginning
this whole process many years ago. She was honest and encouraging and helped me make
one of the best decisions of my life. Alex invited me to publish my very first article for
the moving image review in GLQ, I am forever grateful to her for being a scholarly
beacon who showed me how to build a bridge from the film industry into academia.
I have the deepest gratitude to Alejandra Marchevsky, Melina Abdullah, Kelly Madison,
Dionne Espinoza, and Talia Bettcher -- the professors who introduced me to black
feminism, Stuart Hall, and women and gender studies. These magnificent scholars gave
me the courage to believe that I could stand at the front of the classroom and inspire
young women to follow their dreams. I thank Jian Chen who gave me patient and
rigorous guidance as I embarked upon the process of applying to Ph.D. programs. I thank
Susan Forrest for pulling me out of my “slavery” library to enjoy ice cream and laughter.
Jayna Brown has been incredibly generous with her time and intellectual capacity,
the conversations we have had about archival intricacies and absences of black
womanhood, and the importance and value of theorizing love have helped me find my
scholarly voice. I am grateful for E. Patrick Johnson’s invitation to publish my research
in his forthcoming black queer studies anthology No Tea No Shade: New Readings in
Black Queer Studies, his editorial grace and generative comments were encouraging and
v
deeply appreciated. Though I have not had the pleasure of formerly working with Rod
Ferguson, the moments that I have spent with him discussing theoretical questions or the
academic terrain are precious to me -- I keep his wisdom with me as I traverse this path.
I was welcomed to USC with an E.D.G.E. fellowship and I am appreciative to
Richard Andalon for facilitating that gentle entry into doctoral study. The USC Graduate
School Russell Endowed Fellowship as well as ASE summer awards and top off grants
have generously funded my dissertation research; I could not have accomplished my
research goals without these awards. I am grateful to the librarians and research assistants
who have helped facilitate my endeavors in the archives. I offer special thanks to those
who helped me at the Margaret Herrick Library and USC’s cinema school reading room,
as well as Damani Davis at the National Archives and Christine Lutz at Seeley G. Mudd
Manuscript Library who gave me dedicated attention in my archival digs.
The people who sustain me in my life outside of academia do so with open hearts
and patience beyond measure. Karla Zombro and Joaquin Lazo are my best friends and
make study breaks enticing and divine. My mother, Faye DeClue Young, showed me
that going back to school as a mother is not only possible but is a fabulous way to go!
Her support has enabled me to pursue this dream. My partner Vick Quezada is in it
through thick and thin, their presence in my life brings sweetness and laughter to the long
hours and late nights required of doctoral study. And Miles, the little girl who has grown
into a young woman during my years in ASE, is the light of my life and I am so proud to
be her mother. The unconditional love and support of my family and friends has made it
possible for me to be successful not only in ASE but in every aspect of my life, with them
the days and nights are rich and amazing.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ii

Table of Contents vi

List of Figures vii

Abstract ix

Introduction: Parthenia’s Ghost: Specters of Miscegenation in the 1
Making of the U.S. National Body

Chapter 1: And There She Hung: Spectrality and Negative Space 33
in Images of Black Women Lynched

Chapter 2: Pinky and the Big House: The Spectrality of Black Motherhood 91
in Miscegenation Will Contests

Chapter 3: Exile and Loving: Visualizing Anti-Miscegenation Legislation 136
in The Loving Story

Chapter 4: The Subversive Power of Love in Shirley Anne Williams’s 176
Dessa Rose

Epilogue: Specters of Miscegenation in the New Millennium White House 222

Bibliography 226

vii
LIST OF FIGURES AND APPENDICES

Figure 1 District of Alabama List of Murders 48

Figure 2 District of Alabama List of Murder May 30
th
“Mulatto Hung 48
by grapevine near roadside between Tuscaloosa & Greensboro”

Figure 3 “Mulatto hung by a grapevine near roadside between Tuscaloosa 50
And Greensboro” Kara Walker, Bureau of Refugees Series 2008

Figure 4 Wide Shot Okemah Oklahoma Bridge Laura Nelson Lynching 56

Figure 5 Close Up Okemah Oklahoma Bridge Laura Nelson Lynching 66

Figure 6 Still from Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates Lynching Scene 73

Figure 7 Still from Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates Rape Scene 74

Figure 8 Still from Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates Intertitle 75

Figure 9 Quality Cover Art (1947) 94

Figure 10 Pinky Movie Poster (1949) 94

Figure 11 Pinky Film Still Pinky and Dicey washing clothes 95

Figure 12 Ladies Home Journal Title Page “Quality” story 106

Figure 13 Ladies Home Journal Advertisements “Quality” story 106

Figure 14 Ladies Home Journal “Quality” story handwritten questions 107

Figure 15 Pinky Film Still Pinky on the balcony of the Big House 110

Figure 16 Pinky Film Still Pink and Tom embrace 130

Figure 17 Grey Villet for Life Magazine Richard, Mildred & Peggy 153
Loving at ACLU lawyers office

Figure 18 Grey Villet for Life Magazine Richard, Mildred & Peggy 157
Loving and Richard’s mother, Lola Loving

Figure 19 Grey Villet for Life Magazine Peggy, Donald, and 158
Sidney Loving playing in a field

viii
Figure 20 Grey Villet for Life Magazine Mildred and Peggy 158
walk in field

Appendix A Letter to Assistant Commissioner in its entirety 87

Appendix B Letter Assistant Commissioner in its entirety 88

Appendix C Letter Assistant Commissioner in its entirety (Page 1) 89

Appendix C Letter Assistant Commissioner in its entirety (Page 2) 90

ix
ABSTRACT

Specters of Miscegenation: Blood, Belonging, and the Reproduction of Blackness
examines the manner in which ideologies of black women’s reproductive lives permeate
antebellum anti-miscegenation legislation, then resurface and circulate through
postbellum Jim Crow laws, as well as historic and contemporary visual and literary
cultural texts. By tuning in to the specter of black women’s reproduction in the making of
the racialized U.S. body this project hones in on the gray areas - the ambiguities of race,
family, and community - that anti-miscegenation legislation and Jim Crow laws attempt
to disaggregate. This project pays particular attention to the ways that black women’s
bodies become vectors through which symbolics of blood, that are rooted in scientific
racism, circulate through literary and visual culture in postbellum generations. I look to
cultural texts that contend with anti-black vigilante violence and lynching, “mulatto”
children’s rights of inheritance, interracial couple’s right to marry, and domestic spaces
that clandestinely merge black and white bodies, then I examine the archival documents
and key legal cases that arise directly or exist in the backgrounds of these texts.
The central visual or literary text analyzed in each chapter of Specters of
Miscegenation responds to a moment in history in which issues arising from anti-
miscegenation law, anti-black violence, or enslavement dominate the American
landscape. I examine different aspects of the impact that anti-miscegenation laws have
had on black women’s reproduction, as well as ways that anti-miscegenation laws were
codified in response to black women’s reproduction of “mulatto” and ostensibly white
but legally enslaved children. The imposed upon “mulatto” and black mother figures who
surface in the cultural texts that I examine have to contend with the repercussions of
x
committing the crime of miscegenation, whether by force or consent, and thereby deny
white supremacy’s claim to blood purity in the film Pinky (1949) and the documentary
film The Loving Story (2011). This project also examines miscegenation by discussing
communities of black and white people that violently occupy the same space during the
volatile post Civil War era south in Kara Walker’s Bureau of Refugees series (2008), and
conversely how a “miscegenated” collectivity attains freedom by using the group to defy
the systemic racial and gendered violence of chattel slavery in Sherley Anne Williams's
novel Dessa Rose (1986).
This project looks closely at the affective dimensions of belonging by attending to
the complex of secrecy, shame, and violence engendered by miscegenated and
miscegenating bodies. I focus on ways that black mothers and “mulatto” women threaten
discrete racial and classed boundaries as their reproductive bodies expose the sanguine
entanglement between black/white and enslaved/slaveholding communities. The cultural
texts that I examine illustrate how generations of sexual violence, subsequent familial
ties, and racially indistinct collectivities blur putatively immiscible bodies, occurrences
that often escape dominant narratives of race within the U.S. Through this analysis I
explicate my notion of the culture of miscegenation, which depends upon and exploits
black women’s reproductive capacity while concomitantly obfuscating black women’s
reproduction of whiteness, blackness, and the various fractional taxonomies that have
been used to quantify racialized blood between these polarities through anti-
miscegenation laws and anti-black violence, erasure, and shame.
1

Introduction
Parthenia’s Ghost
Specters of Miscegenation in the Making of the U.S. National Body

i am accused of tending to the past
by Lucille Clifton

i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother's itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will. Toni Morrison “Be Your Own Story”
And besides, contrary to what you may have
heard or learned, the past is not done and it
is not over, it’s still in process, which is
another way of saying that when it’s
critiqued, analyzed, it yields new
information about itself. The past is already
changing as it is being reexamined, as it is
being listened to for deeper resonances.
Actually it can be more liberating than any
imagined future if you are willing to identify
its evasions, its distortions, its lies, and are
willing to unleash its secrets.

2
The monstrous unnamed baby that is waiting, that is history, that holds a past that
is still in process and changes upon reexamination, is the terrain tread in Specters of
Miscegenation: Blood, Belonging, and the Reproduction of Blackness. By analyzing the
Manichean relationship of dominance and sexual violence between enslaved maternal
figures and men of the slave owning class, Specters of Miscegenation theorizes the
paradox of miscegenation that I contend is the bedrock for the production of race in the
United States.
1
This analysis looks closely at the pathological contradiction of
miscegenation that permeates U.S. chattel slavery in which white men of the slave
holding class rape enslaved black women, own and increase their wealth with the
children born of this sexual violence, as they concomitantly develop a system of laws that
criminalize miscegenation and produce racist scientific studies which profess the dangers
of “mixing” white and black blood. This is the paradox of miscegenation that engenders
racial social codes that protect and encourage white supremacist sexual violence against
black women while severely punishing, usually with death by hanging, acts of
miscegenation suspected to be committed by black men. Through visual and literary
analysis this project tracks the culture of miscegenation through the epochal moments of
U.S. chattel slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, and the Civil Rights Movement.
The matrix of sexually violent miscegenation and anti-miscegenation legislation
depends upon a willful blindness to the rape of enslaved black women by white men and
the overlooking of children born of this violence who are also enslaved yet may have skin

1
Throughout this project I use the terms “black,” “colored,” “Negro,” and “mulatto.” I
use the antiquated terms colored, mulatto, and Negro in response to the language being
used in the cultural and legal texts that I examine. I work to have parity between the
racial term that I employ and the language used in the archival and literary texts with
which I engage.
3
as white as people who own them; I have called this paradoxical matrix the culture of
miscegenation.
2
My conception of the culture of miscegenation is a system of white
supremacy that depends upon the subjugation of blackness, in particular black
womanhood and black women’s reproductive capacity. The culture of miscegenation
deploys and codifies the racialized symbolics of blood through anti-miscegenation
legislation that then foments the production of blackness and whiteness in a manner that
protects white wealth and superiority while suppressing black freedom, vitality, and
prosperity. Specters of Miscegenation theorizes miscegenation as a process of
racialization, white supremacist wealth building, and black subjugation and is not
examining mixed race corporeality as theorized in critical mixed race scholarship. By
interrogating the contradictory history of miscegenation sexual violence, anti-
miscegenation laws and social codes -- through the vector of black womanhood and the
reproduction of blackness -- this research project provides a national counter-narrative
that asserts the U.S. national body is not comprised of racially discrete taxonomies but is
rather a miscegenated national body. The salacious history of the term “miscegenation”
makes salient the constructed nature of the concept race itself.
Miscegenation, Blood, and the Hoax of Race
Before the term “miscegenation” was coined in 1864 the term “amalgamation”
was borrowed from the scientific process of combining metals to signal the mixing of
Negro and white blood, a move that legitimated the concept of blood containing a racial

2
Literary melodramas such as William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or The President’s
Daughter; Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted; Emma Dunham Kelley’s
Megda; and Charles Chestnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition have protagonists that appear
to be white or believe they are white only to discover their lineage has a dark “negro”
past. These texts worked to expose the ills of slavery and white supremacy through
creating sympathetic “mulatto” characters.
4
property that could be mixed together. The use of the terms miscegenation and
amalgamation indicated both an anti-abolition position as well as a turn toward racist
science to prevent coupling between black and white people by characterizing this kind
of union as not only unseemly for whites to participate in, but biologically dangerous.
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century visual and literary texts were used to
construct the joining of racialized polarities of blackness and whiteness as abhorrent in
dominant society (Kaplan 1949). In an sly attempt to undermine emancipation and
Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, David Goodman Croly anonymously published a pamphlet
entitled “Miscegenation: the theory of the blending of the races, applied to the American
white man and Negro.” Croly coined the term and states that “miscegenation – from the
Latin Miscere, to mix, and Genus, race, is used to denote the abstract idea of the mixture
of two or more races” in his treatise that essentially asserts “emancipation means
amalgamation” and that the Republican Party is “the party of miscegenation” (Croly
1864, ii; Kaplan 1949, 282-283). In his seventy-two page pamphlet, Croly argues for the
use of miscegenation over amalgamation, as the latter was particular to metal and was
used only to meet an immediate need in discussions of black and white blood mixing
(Kaplan, 278). Through the deployment of muddled pseudo-scientific explanations, a
twist in eugenicist logic, and a plea for Christian charity and equality Croly contends:
It is clear that no race can long endure without a commingling of its blood with
that of other races. The condition of all human progress is miscegenation. The
Anglo-Saxon should learn this in time for his own salvation. If we will not heed
the demands of justice, let us, at least, respect the law of self-preservation.
Providence has kindly placed on the American soil for his own wise purposes,
four millions of colored people. They are our brothers, our sisters. By mingling
with them we become powerful, prosperous, and progressive; by refusing to do so
we become feeble, unhealthy, narrow-minded, unfit for the nobler offices of
freedom, and certain of early decay (16).

5
The unabashed encouragement and promotion of the commingling of black and white
blood by the Republican party, as Croly proclaims in his pamphlet, was meant to incite
outrage, strike fear in the hearts of Democrats, and defeat Lincoln’s reelection in 1864
(Kaplan 1949). By advocating for miscegenation in his pamphlet Croly levied a hoax that
would alarm white voters and families who may agree or simply accept emancipation but
who also resist Negroes being regarded as equal and abhor the idea of commingling of
black and white blood. By equating Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation with
amalgamation Croly meant to deter sympathy for emancipation and arrest the momentum
building toward racial equality (Croly 1864; Kaplan 1949).
The racialized language of blood used to assign superiority and purity to
whiteness while black blood was laden with degeneracy and inferiority. The use of blood
to carry these qualities was a visceral way to argue for the separation of the races and in
effect protect white supremacy; blood or sanguinity has marked commonalities and
distinctions between races, classes, and within a nation. The symbolics of blood as a
racialized metaphor for morality, intelligence, cleanliness, and quality circulates and
gathers meaning and legitimacy through culture and the law. Racialized blood is the basis
for the one-drop rule; one drop of black blood constitutes blackness, which still
undergirds our understanding of blackness and whiteness in the U.S. In Mixed Blood and
Other Crosses Betsy Erkkila writes:
It was in and through blood-and its real or metaphoric sources in the body and
flesh- that American culture, with the support of law, medicine, and science,
defined a temperate, industrious, and chaste republican self against the bodily
excesses of madmen, drunkards, onanists, (coitus interuptus and masturbation)
sodomites, persons of color, fallen women, adulterers, mixed bloods,
amalgamationists, foreigners, and other corrupters of both the individual and the
political body (8).

6
Since the time of the ancients blood has been understood as a life bearing fluid,
conception was understood as the joining together of blood between a man and woman,
the common belief of that time held that blood was located in the semen.
!
Over time the
symbolics of blood have been called upon “to naturalize the role of reproduction and
procreation in creating these family formations” (Lemire 2009, 37). As encounters
between Europeans and Africans occurred, especially during the Trans-Atlantic slave
trade, the dominant belief that race was imparted through reproduction and subsequently
through the blood emerged (Lemire 2009). Blood has been perceived as symbolizing
nobility, reproductive capacity, and race.
"
In a discussion about eighteenth century
European aristocratic sexuality that preserved its class distinction through blood and sex,
Foucault asserts, “for the aristocracy had also asserted the special character of its body,
but this was in the form of blood, that is, in the form of the antiquity of its ancestry and
of the value of its alliances…” (Foucault 1998, 124). The nobility was not only
concerned with where one’s blood came from but also whom one’s blood would join with
in continuing the familial legacy. The visualization of blood as a metaphor for race that
is associated with skin color points to lineage and breeding and conjures up the scientific
and the biological.
5
In his analysis of race as a medium WJT Mitchell asserts that blood:

3
For a detailed explanation of the way blood has been conceived in history see Chapter
Two “Rhetoric of Blood and Mixture” in Elise Lemire’s “Miscegenation:” Making Race
in America (2009).
4
Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1, 124.
5
Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in his 1883 publication Inquiries into Human
Faculty and its Development. The racist logic of eugenics links blood and race under the
guise of scientific discourse meant to prove that white blood is superior to all and that the
black race is degenerate and inferior. In a footnote Galton offers the etymology of the
term, which is the Greek eugene, that means “good in stock, hereditarily endowed with
noble qualities” (Galton 1883, 24n).
7
…is not especially scientific; it is more accurately seen as a metaphor for
kinship, which is exactly the parameter of race that turns it from a spatial, visible,
and physiognomic medium to a temporal one configured around narrative,
memory, history, and of course a genealogy with its tales of ancestry. “Blood” is
not a uniquely scientific category; it is vernacular biology and thus biopolitical in
the perfectly ordinary sense of parenting, reproduction, and filial relations
(Mitchell 2012, 25).

Mitchell argues that race is a medium and not simply the object of study in visual culture
but a framework through which seeing happens (Mitchell 2012).
!
The idea that race is
not an inherent quality around which meaning coalesces but that race is itself a medium
implies that seeing through race is a creative process of storytelling, or at least a mode of
communicating and exchanging information. The stories that must accompany the sight
of bodies that do not fit neatly into taxonomies of whiteness or blackness in the
antebellum era often incorporate a discussion of blood. (Gordon-Reed 2008, 50).
"
The
language of blood was called upon in antebellum debates over the intelligence and
character of Africans bound in slavery and brought to the United States. The flaws in the
pseudo-scientific logic of racialized blood that was used to justify slavery became evident
when black “blood” was no longer visible in enslaved bodies because of the sexually
violent acts of miscegenation that left enslaved women pregnant with babies by men of
the slave holding class for several generations. Legislative and scientific maneuvering
had to occur to insure that enslavable bodies, whether visibly black or having black blood
in their lineage, remained enslavable and inferior to non-enslavable white bodies.

6
W.J.T. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2012).
7
Oral history of Madison Hemings coupled with the Epps and Wayles slave logs indicate
that Parthenia was born in Africa and brought to Virginia as an enslaved woman. For a
detailed account of the history of the Hemings family in Monticello refer to Annette
Gordon-Reed, The Hemgingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2008), 46-52.
8
I have chosen to theorize miscegenation rather than amalgamation in my analysis
because of its prominent use of in legislative and culture debates and because of its origin
as a hoax -- the etymological and political history of the term “miscegenation”
exemplifies the constructed nature of race. The symbolics of blood that are deployed in
the definition of miscegenation, as opposed to amalgamation, which has an alchemical
meaning outside of discussions of race, makes “miscegenation” a more generative
theoretical term than “amalgamation” for this project.
8
By focusing on enslaved black
womanhood in this examination of the complex of miscegenation and sanguinity, the role
of black reproductivity in the production of blackness and whiteness is made salient.
Black Women’s Reproductivity and Plantation Paternalism
U.S. chattel slavery depended upon an ideology of paternalism that justified
enslaving human beings and profiting from such labor by conceiving of enslaved people
as subhuman objects that needed the slave owner’s protection and rule for their very
survival. Southern plantation paternalist slaveholders worked to convince those enslaved
that they actually benefited from being held in bondage (Camp 2004).
9
“Planters desired

8
Tavia Nyong’o’s The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of
Memory (2009) and Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the
Critique of Multiracialism (2008) both theorize the problematic of racial mixing through
the term amalgamation. While both of these texts have been informative for my project, I
have selected miscegenation rather than amalgamation as a theoretical concept. In
Amalgamation Schemes Sexton refers to the specter of miscegenation as a horror that
haunts whiteness, a kind of racial mud over which whiteness cannot exert control not
even through its systems of anti-miscegenation laws (224). This horror is consonant with
the specters of miscegenation with which my project is concerned, though my project
moves specifically through the vector of black women’s reproductivity. Black enslaved
maternal figures and victims of rape and murder at the hands of white men are the
specters of miscegenation to which my project attends.
9
For a discussion of the paternalism, time, and space in the antebellum south see “A
Geography of Containment: The Bondage of Space” in Stephanie M.H. Camp’s Closer to
Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South.
9
the affection and allegiance of their underlings, imagining an intimacy with their slaves
that patriarchs had not” (Camp 2004, 18). This perverse paternalism gave slave owners
absolute rule and complete access to the bodies they enslaved under the guise of
benevolence for caretaking chattel that putatively know no better. My employment of
plantation paternalism is informed by scholars who approach the study of chattel slavery
from varying entry points such as the slave market, pastoral performativity, and the
experience of women in slavery. Much of the scholarship that engages with paternalism
during chattel slavery responds to Eugene Genovese’s analysis of plantation paternalism
in Roll Jordan Roll that in some ways sympathizes with slaveholders by claiming that
reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationships existed between the enslaved and
slaveholders; this logic is the basis of paternalism itself.
#$%
The enslaved body works and
produces wealth for a Master who in return protects and provides for them. The
paternalistic slaveholder rationalizes his behavior by imagining and conveying that he is
acting out of the best interest of the one enslaved (Johnson 1999; Genovese 1974). In
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making In Nineteenth-Century America
Saidiya Hartman forcefully dismantles this contention:
…paternalism minimizes the extremity of domination with assertions about
the mutually recognized humanity of master and slave…the brutality and
antagonisms of slavery are obscured in favor of an enchanting reciprocity. The

10
Walter Johnson’s Soul By Soul discusses paternalism as it is enacted through the slave
markets; Saidiya Hartman examines the pastoral and performativity in Scenes of
Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America and
discusses the relationship between performativity and paternalism. Eugene Genovese
discusses paternalism and was later critiqued by scholars for being sympathetic to the
slave holding class in Roll Jordan Roll. Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women, Deborah
White’s A’rnt’ I a Woman, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation
Household focus on the experience of women, slaveholding and enslaved, during chattel
slavery.
10
pastoral renders the state of domination as an ideal of care, duty, familial
obligation, gratitude, and humanity (Hartman 1997, 52-53).

The power that is expressed as paternalism during chattel slavery forces communities of
enslaved people to obey a slave master’s demands enforced by the perpetual threat of
being sold away from their families to live in far worse conditions (Johnson 1999). Key
to this conception of plantation paternalism is the power that the slaveholding class
maintains over the reproductive capacity of enslaved women that grants them the
authority to value, price, bargain over, buy, sell and pass down their bodies through
inheritance (J. Morgan 2004).
$$
Slave codes and legislation such as the 1662 Virginia
code that states that a child’s freedom or bondage is determined by the status of their
mother, supports the practice of men of the slaveholding class violently impregnating
enslaved women. The children of such unions would always be enslaved and therefore
would not be entitled to the father’s name, inheritance, or other benefits of blood.
Dominant histories of chattel slavery were not contending with the particularities
of black women’s suffering during violent and brutal era. Angela Davis’s “Reflections on
the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” was able to break the silence in
the discourse of chattel slavery regarding black women’s positionality with her
discussion of the black matriarch, black women revolutionaries, no-wage laborers, and
victims of vicious physical torture and rape. Deborah Gray White’s intervention in her
foundational text A’rn’t I a Woman Female Slaves in the Plantation South assembles a
history of the labors, struggles, and strategies for survival of black women that expands
the history of U.S. chattel slavery that was predominantly universalized through the

11
In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery Jennifer Morgan
does not specifically theorize the term “paternalism,” I am drawing from the history she
has presented and thinking through her work with plantation paternalism in mind.
11
experiences of black men slaves. She discusses rape, concubinage, and the sexualized
nature of the torture suffered by enslaved black women at the hands of white slave
owners. In a tradition of scholars such as Angela Davis and Deborah Gray White who
focus on the particular ways that gendered power dynamics structured black women’s
oppression during chattel slavery, Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction
and Gender in New World Slavery examines ideologies present in U.S. and Caribbean
colonial images of black women’s reproductive bodies that solidified their difference
while slave owners naturalized the use of enslaved black women’s reproductive
capacity
12
(J. Morgan 2004). Morgan uses historical archival documentation, slave
records, bills of sale, wills, judgments, letters, and ship logs to locate enslaved black
women in the historical record and demonstrate how black women’s bodies were central
to the slave trade. Domestic and field labor were extracted from enslaved women as well
as reproductive labor; those enslaved women of childbearing age were known as
“increasers” which indicates how black women’s reproductivity was valued as potential
property and real estate of slave owners and their progeny (J. Morgan 2004, 82).
When planters looked to “increase,” they crafted real and imagined legacies. In
the absence of living slave children, their own children still inherited the promise
of future wealth. Slaveowners whose prospects might have seemed somewhat
bleak looked to black women’s bodies in search of a promising future for their
own progeny. With such demographic expectations also came an articulation of
the longevity of the slaveowners’ enterprises and a greater certainty of a future in
and for the colony. Though clearly there was no guarantee, a planter could
imagine that a handful of fertile African women might turn his modest holdings
into a substantial legacy. Black women’s bodies became vessels in which
slaveowners manifested their hopes for the future; they were, in effect, conduits of
stability and wealth to the white community (J. Morgan 2004, 83).

12
See also Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs:
Gender, Race, Power in Colonial Virginia for a discussion of the constructions of race
and gender roles in colonial Virginia.
12

Plantation paternalism is a constituent element in my conception of the culture of
miscegenation as it enables the sexually violent predatory behavior of white men of the
slave holding class, and all white men for that matter, to rape enslaved black women and
deny the children born of this horrific violation. The wealth produced from this
reproductive increase, the birth of children to enslaved mothers that effectively increases
slave owners wealth, is imbued with black women’s sorrow, shame, maternal labor
(affective and reproductive), and loss.
13
The mulatto children of enslaved women and
slave holding men often suffer, aside from the horrendous reality of being held as chattel,
because of the violence they represent to their mothers, the betrayal and infidelity of
which they remind the Mistress of the house, and the threat to white supremacist
patriarchy they present to the men who are responsible for their lives but not for their
lineage. The culture of miscegenation is hidden in plain sight through silence and willful
blindness on the part of men and women from the slaveholding class. White men are
expected to be disgusted with enslaved women and think of them as less than human,
which produces a culture in which the rape of enslaved women is so rampant that it is not
only accepted but expected of white men. The culture of miscegenation is tethered to
plantation paternalism, which protects white men’s production of and participation in
systemic sexual violence perpetrated against enslaved women.
14
The denial of paternal
responsibility of enslaved women’s children boosts slave owner’s wealth while also
propping up their position as patriarchs who are entitled to abuse their power and all

13
See Jennifer Morgan’s historicization of “increase” in Laboring Women: Reproduction
and Gender in New World Slavery, 3.
14
For further explanation of their concepts of paternalism see Walter Johnson’s Soul by
Soul, 108-109 and Eugene Genovese Roll Jordan Roll, 5.
13
those who do not share their race and gender taxonomy. Arguably the most prominent
familial relationship between a plantation patriarch and an enslaved mother, that
exemplifies the culture of miscegenation, is the relationship between Sally Hemings and
Thomas Jefferson.
The Archetypal Miscegenation Relation of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
In the Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781 and published in 1785,
Jefferson details his beliefs about the natural and fixed differences between blackness and
whiteness and makes an argument for the aesthetic superiority of whiteness.
Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the
skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf skin itself; whether it proceeds from the
colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other
secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause
were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the
foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races?
(Jefferson 1781, 145).

Jefferson wrote Notes six years before he would meet a young Sally Hemings but the
following text suggests that he had contemplated the mixture of color, the relationship
between blood and race, and attraction between species before engaging in miscegenation
with Sally Hemings.
$&
While there is no documentation that Jefferson was attracted to or
had a sexual relationship with another enslaved woman, it is very possible that he could
have as a white man of the slave holding class. Perhaps the following contemplative
passage below is in response to his attraction to another “mulatto” woman who was

15
Racist science or eugenics, which forwarded the belief that Negroes were a different
species than Europeans, and comparative anatomy that produced knowledge about
different species through comparison, were part of the logic used to understand race
during Jefferson’s era.
14
enslaved or simply his observation of the culture of miscegenation that was an element of
U.S. chattel slavery.
16
Jefferson ponders:
Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion
by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal
monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black
which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a
more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites,
declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the
Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance
of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses,
dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? (Jefferson 1781, 145-
146).

Jefferson’s discussion of inter-species attraction is indicative of the eugenicist logic that
that justified chattel slavery and produced knowledge about blackness in the antebellum
era and well into the twentieth century. Jefferson is grappling with the meanings of
blackness and the conception of skin pigmentation being located in the blood. As a
member of the planter class Jefferson would have been well acquainted with the practice
of slave holding men raping enslaved women and taking them as their concubines even
while being married. The unspoken custom among the planter class was to take any black
person that they wanted sexually, to not give their name to the children born of enslaved
women, and to allow miscegenation to occur as long as slave owners did not marry
enslaved women.
With Jefferson’s conceptions of white superiority and attempts to understand the
meaning of race in mind I will now move into a brief discussion of his relationship with
Sally Hemings as this archetypal relationship engenders the culture of miscegenation,

16
I am critical of the term “mulatto” as it has a derogatory etymology and connotation --
likening a “mulatto” to a mule that is non-reproductive and less sophisticated than the
horse, which contributed to its birth, but more proficient than the donkey. I use the term
mulatto to remain consistent with the language used during the eras in U.S. history with
which this project is concerned.
15
resonances of which circulate throughout Specters of Miscegenation. The literature
concerning Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is vast, contradictory, and salacious.
17

Whether or not Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s children has been
debated in the press and between scholars from the time that Sally Hemings’s children
were born and served the Jefferson family on the grand pastoral plantation, Monticello.
Jeffersonian scholars who disputed that Sally Hemings gave birth to Thomas Jefferson’s
children were forced to acquiesce when DNA testing made that fact indisputable.
$'

Despite the ubiquity of discussions about their relationship in popular culture I will
recount some pertinent aspects of their history because it is illustrative of the aspects of
chattel slavery and demonstrative of the culture of miscegenation in ways that are integral
to this analysis.

17
This chapter’s discussion of Monticello as a place, early colonial Virginian history, and
the intricacies of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson’s relationship is drawn from the
scholarship of historians Annette Gordon-Reed, Edmund S. Morgan, and Joshua D.
Rothman who expertly lay the historical foundation for this analysis. Annette Gordon-
Reed’s historicization of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’s relationship in Thomas
Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) and The Hemgingses of
Monticello: An American Family (2008) gives a thorough account of the antebellum
Virginian culture in which they lived and describes how the Hemings family came to be
the domestic labor for Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in Albemarle country Virginia.
Joshua D. Rothman’s Notorious in the Neighborhood (2003) details and contextualizes
the Hemings-Jefferson relationship by examining their family among other families who
were comprised of black and white members in antebellum Virginia. Edmund Morgan’s
American Slavery-American Freedom (1975) is a history of Virginia from colonial
territory to statehood that details Virginia’s foundational role in crafting legislation that
structures race and class in the United States.
$'
Annette Gordon-Reed’s Author’s Note in the second edition of Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, written after the DNA evidence was procured,
details the resistance and ultimate relenting among Jefferson scholars who denied that the
founding father could have had a relationship with Sally Hemings. According to her son,
Madison Hemings, Sally was pregnant when she returned to Virginia from Paris
(Gordon-Reed, 1997, 23).
16
In 1787 when Sally Hemings was a young teenager of fourteen years she set sail
for London as the enslaved servant of Thomas Jefferson’s daughter Mary. Thomas
Jefferson met Mary and Sally in London then traveled with them back to Paris where
Jefferson was living during his tenure as the U.S. ambassador to France. Despite the laws
in France that allowed an enslaved person to be free on French soil, Sally went back to
Virginia with Thomas Jefferson and his daughters, perhaps under the condition that they
would gain their freedom back in Virginia.
$(
In 1795 Sally gave birth to her first child
with Thomas Jefferson, Harriet, who died two years later. Sally would have five more
children, four of whom lived into adulthood. Sally was not the first Hemings woman to
be enslaved at Monticello. Sally’s mother Elizabeth, also known as Betty, came to
Monticello as a young girl with her mother. The family lore passed down by Madison
Hemings, Sally’s second youngest child, contends that Elizabeth’s mother was a full-
blooded African woman living on the plantation of John Wayles when a sea captain
named Hemings came to the plantation. Either through rape or something less vicious but
nonetheless saturated with unequal power dynamics, Captain Hemings left this enslaved
African woman, belonging to John Wayles, with child. Captain Hemings wanted to take
his baby and her mother back to England but Wayles, out of curiosity about the racial
experiment, wanted to keep the baby. Once baby Elizabeth grew into a young woman

$(
Sally’s brother James Hemings, whose was training to become a chef, was already in
Paris when Sally arrived. James also returned to Monticello with the Jefferson’s under the
condition that he would earn his freedom by training another domestic servant in the art
of French cooking before his manumission. Jefferson’s oldest daughter Martha was
already in France when Sally and Mary arrived. His is youngest daughter Lucy died of
whooping cough back in Virginia and this event precipitated Jefferson sending for Mary
to join him in Paris (Gordon-Reed, 1997, 160-163).
17
John Wayles would become the father of six of Elizabeth’s fourteen children.
)%
Madison
Hemings’s oral history has veracity but after much investigation Gordon-Reed was able
to fill in some of the missing details of the Hemings women’s genealogy.
Gordon-Reed discovered that Sally Hemings’s grandmother only existed in
historical accounts as an unnamed “full blooded African” and that her name was most
likely Parthenia. Born in Africa, captured, then sold into slavery mostly likely from
Angola, Senegambia, or the Bight of Biafra, Parthenia found herself in colonial Virginia
in the late 1720’s or early 1730’s. Archival slave logs indicate that Elizabeth, born in
1735, was actually not the property of John Wayles at the time of her birth but was
owned by a planter named Francis Epps. When Francis Epps’s daughter Martha married
John Wayles, young Elizabeth, and most likely her mother, were among the property that
Martha took with her into the marriage. John Wayles was twice remarried after his first
wife Martha Epps Wayles’s death. After being thrice widowed John Wayles began
taking Elizabeth as his “concubine.” Elizabeth gave birth to fourteen children whose
fathers were unnamed enslaved men, unnamed white men of the planter class, and John
Wayles.
)$
Sally Hemings, born Sarah, was the fifth of eight children Elizabeth had by
John Wayles (Gordon-Reed 2008). Elizabeth Hemings and her children provided the
domestic labor for John Wayles and his family. Despite Wayles being the father of Sally
and the rest of her Wayles siblings they all kept the last name Hemings, presumably
because the sea Captain Hemings did acknowledge Elizabeth as his child and fought to

)%
Before giving birth to John Wayles’s children, Elizabeth had children whose fathers
were enslaved men (Gordon-Reed, 2008, 27).
)$
Gordon-Reed notes that one of Elizabeth’s children, Mary, was never discussed in oral
history as being John Wayles’s child but was light skinned and presumed to be his
daughter. Mary could have been the child of another white man of the planter class (680,
n3).
18
purchase her from Francis Epps even though it was to no avail (Gordon-Reed 2008).
Keeping the Hemings last name also allowed Wayles to hide that he fathered many of
Elizabeth’s children. The sea Captain’s last name also allowed Thomas Jefferson to
obscure his paternity of Sally’s children, even though rumors of their sexual relationship
pervaded at Monticello and became a public controversy in 1802 during Jefferson’s first
term as President of the United States.
))
When John Wayles‘s daughter Martha married
Thomas Jefferson in 1772, after being widowed by her first husband in 1768, among the
possessions that she brought with her into the marriage were Elizabeth Hemings and
twelve of her children, including young Sally (Gordon-Reed 2008).
)*

Sally Hemings is in the middle of a genealogical trajectory that has moved from
her grandmother, a full-blooded African woman, to her own children two of whom
slipped into whiteness and two who settled into Negro communities despite their white
appearance.
24
Just before Jefferson’s death he was able to free Sally and her two
youngest sons Madison and Eston. Her only daughter Harriet and her oldest son Beverly
were allowed to run away without being pursued. Both Beverly and Harriet married into
wealthy white families of the slaveholding class (Gordon–Reed 1997). That Beverly and
Harriet became white after being held in bondage under a system of racial slavery
undermines the one-drop rule and raises questions not only about the constitution of
blackness but of whiteness as well.

))
James Callendar, a journalist that Gordon-Reed describes as nefarious and racist, at one
point admired Jefferson then after feeling spurned by Jefferson decided to exact
vengeance and thus began publicizing Jefferson’s relationship with Sally (Gordon-Reed
1997, 59-61).
)*
Elizabeth Hemings gave birth to fourteen children but two of her children died before
she moved to Monticello Sally (Gordon-Reed, 2008, 99-101).
24
Gordon-Reed, 2008, 47-52.
19
Sally’s tethering to Jefferson and Monticello and her children’s eventual freedom
tells a story of blood and bondage that inserts subjugated knowledge into the dominant
history. Jefferson did not free many of the people he enslaved, yet he freed his children
with Sally and eventually Sally did live as a free woman (Gordon-Reed 1997).
Jefferson’s affection for Sally and his children with her can be seen in retrospect through
his act of granting them freedom, which was the most resistance to the hegemonic system
of plantation paternalism and the culture of miscegenation that Jefferson could muster.
Three generations of Hemings women dating back to the arrival of Sally’s
grandmother, Parthenia, in Virginia have had their reproductive lives entangled with men
of the slaveholding class, men who had children with enslaved women while legislating
against miscegenation and producing knowledge about the superiority of whiteness and
the degeneracy of blackness. Sally Hemings’s relationship with Thomas Jefferson is
demonstrative for my analysis as it exemplifies the paradox of the culture of
miscegenation. Even though Jefferson was a powerful leader before he became the third
President of the United States, producing putative knowledge about racial distinctions,
and wielding his lawmaking capabilities he was still not able to legitimate his sexual
relationship with an enslaved mother of his children. The Hemings-Jefferson relationship
illustrates the fundamental contradiction of the culture of miscegenation in which white
wealth and superiority is protected. White men are sanctioned to rape enslaved women
and their affection for their enslaved “paramores” may even be overlooked by men of
their class, yet white men may not remain in their positions of power if they attempt to
advocate for the legitimacy of these relationships through marriage or extend favor to
their enslaved children through inheritance. On a large plantation like Jefferson’s
20
Monticello, the culture of miscegenation played out the grand scheme of contradictory
laws, customs, and silences that preserved his name, his wealth, and his whiteness even
while he reproduced children with a woman he enslaved.
By focusing on the genealogy of Sally Hemings’s domestic and reproductive
labor I lay the groundwork for my discussion of spectrality. Though Sally Hemings is the
most well known of the Hemings’s of Monticello, Sally’s grandmother Parthenia is an
historical figure whose presence emerges in my analysis of spectrality and miscegenation.
The enslaved reproductive figure, the black mother, is the specter of miscegenation with
which this project is concerned. Parthenia, the unnamed African woman of the Hemings’s
oral history, appears through the archival haze as the quintessential black mother whose
life is documented only in slave logs, whose body reproduces wealth for the men who
own her and rape her and father her children, their “increase.”
25

In Ghostly Matters Avery Gordon asserts, “specters or ghosts appear when the
trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or
blocked from view” (Gordon 2008, xvi). Gordon contends that when a haunting occurs it
shows us that an attempt to conceal something in the past is unraveling, the specter
refuses to be trapped. It is not dead but very much alive in the present, refusing to be
locked away (Gordon 2008). This project examines a past that begins to change when
enslaved maternal figures who suffered injustice, who are not at rest, who demand action
are given consideration. By tracing archival specters of black women who suffered

25
In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery Jennifer Morgan
explicates that enslaved women of childbearing age were known as “increasers” because
black women’s reproductive capacity was valued and their children were considered to be
potential property and real estate for slave owners and their progeny (82).

21
during U.S. chattel slavery, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era attention can be paid to
the fact of their lives, perhaps even their loves, and the horror of their untimely deaths.
Spectrality
The theory of spectrality that I produce with this analysis enables my examination
of the system of domination that structures the manner in which racialized blood becomes
recognizable and quantifiable as blackness. Through my concept of spectrality I make
temporal leaps and narrative connections that reveal a history of black reproduction,
which has produced a miscegenated national body. My theory of spectrality draws Avery
Gordon’s analysis of haunting together with Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the social
production of space and Katherine McKittrick’s examination of black women’s
cartography. In Lefebvre’s foundational text, The Production of Social Space, he
contends that, “(social) space is a (social) product” (Lefebvre 1992, 26). Lefebvre’s
theory of social space is comprised of three elements: spatial Practice (production and
reproduction of social space), representations of space (order imposed overtly by
relations of production), and representational space (covert codes and symbols moving
through social space) (Lefebvre 1992, 33). These spatial elements have a dialectic
relationship that structures and animates the production and use of social space. I look to
Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of
Struggle that makes an intervention into Lefebvre’s foundational concept of social space
by focusing on the particularities of black women’s geographies. McKittrick calls up
Lefebvre in her intervention by asserting, “[t]he interplay between domination and black
women’s geographies is underscored by the social production of space” (McKittrick
2006, xi). McKittrick discusses human geographies specifically examining ways that
22
black women’s bodies are imbricated geographically with systems of domination. Her
study focuses on “the interplay between geographies of domination (such as transatlantic
slavery and racial-sexual displacement) and black women’s geographies (such as their
knowledges, negotiations, and experiences)” (McKittrick 2006, x). Lefebvre discusses
the history of space as being filled with inscriptions of the past left by events and
societies but asserts that space is also produced in the present moment. McKittrick thinks
through spatial histories of black diasporic subjects as being constitutive of present
geographies (McKittrick 2006). The element of spatial analysis that addresses time and
conceives of space as holding both the past and the present within it opens up my theory
spectrality, which considers black women’s sexualized and reproductive bodies as spaces
of conquest. Building upon McKittrick’s intervention into Lefebvre’s social production
of space in this theory of spectrality, I bring in Gordon’s attention to ghosts within the
social world that point to places where history and subjectivity meet and produce
knowledge. Gordon contends,
Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way…we are
notified that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering
precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression
ceaselessly directed toward us (Gordon 2008, xvi).

Gordon continues, “It [haunting] always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained
by a social violence done in the past or in the present” (Gordon 2008, xvi). The
insistence of recognition and reckoning that ghosts of the nineteenth century demand in
the twentieth century materializes in archival documents and cultural texts examined in
this study. Gordon draws from Foucault’s concept of subjugated knowledges in her
23
examination of knowledge production, a theoretical lineage that is also productive for my
theorization of specters of miscegenation.
)!

Subjugated knowledge describes a way of knowing that can be seen but is
discounted or not valued because it is deemed naïve (Foucault 1980, 82-83). Foucault’s
use of genealogy to define the kind of research that joins together “erudite knowledges
and local memories” seems utterly apposite for my discussion of spectrality and
miscegenated genealogies (Foucault 1980, 83). The genealogical approach to uncovering
subjugated knowledges of the antebellum and Jim Crow era women who navigate an
oppressive system is meant to stimulate, as Foucault attests, an
insurrection of knowledges that are opposed primarily not to the contents,
methods or concepts of science, but to the effects of the centralizing powers
which are linked to the institution and functioning of an organized scientific
discourse within a society such as ours (Foucault 1980, 84).

My conception of spectrality is propelled by Foucault’s concept of subjugated knowledge
and his invocation of genealogy as a means of making use of this knowledge. The
genealogies of blood to which I attend have multiple and contradictory meanings that
draw from both erudite knowledge and local memories. Tracing Sally Hemings’s
genealogy back to Parthenia stirs up a ghost that haunts not only the Hemings’s legacy
but as I contend, makes Parthenia’s presence frighteningly salient. The horrors that
Parthenia and multitudes of other unnamed enslaved black mothers will never emerge
from the archive. The spectral presence of the systemic racialized sexual violence
suffered by black women and black mothers from the era of chattel slavery through the

26
Foucault’s discussion of subjugated knowledge is found in Power/Knowledge: Selected
interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977I (81-83). Raymond Williams discusses
dominant, residual, and emergent forms of culture in Marxism and Literature (121-127).
24
civil rights movement haunts this analysis, and the ghosts of these black mothers, like
Parthenia, are the specters of miscegenation to which this analysis unwaveringly attends.
A Note on Method
Specters of Miscegenation takes a cultural studies approach to examining literary,
cinematic, and visual texts that contend with pervasive and contradictory narratives of
race, specifically miscegenation, in the United States of America. This study’s attention
to black women’s reproductivity, symbolics of blood, values of blackness and whiteness,
and racialized space allows for a discussion of the haunting presence of slave era
plantation paternalism, legacies of sexual violence, public torture, and severed familial
bonds within the U.S. national body. This project focuses on blackness and whiteness in
the new millennium because even though the U.S. national body is comprised of a
multiplicity of racialized groups, this country’s history of anti-black violence and anti-
miscegenation legislation along with the legacies of chattel slavery structure racialization
through the polarities of blackness and whiteness.
27
The historical racial violence
deployed in the name of reifying the black-white binary has been buttressed through
legislation, racist science, public torture, racialized property rights, hierarchies of race,
and conceptions and values of blackness and whiteness. Specters of Miscegenation peels
apart foundational contradictions imbricated within national narratives of race by
focusing on ways that the U.S. national body is a miscegenated body.

27
In her article “On the Backs of Blacks” Toni Morrison discusses the way new
immigrants to the United States learn to distance themselves from blackness and move
closer to whiteness in order to realize the American Dream (1997). Claire Jean Kim’s
theory of racial triangulation in Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in
New York City examines ways in which racialized groups, such as Asian-American
people, are located between polarities of blackness and whiteness as either valorized or
ostracized subjects (2000).
25
Specters of Miscegenation analyzes visual and literary representations of state and
national legislative and judicial responses to the problematics of defining blackness,
prohibiting miscegenation, and securing or refusing rights of black citizens during
Reconstruction and the Jim Crow Era. The cultural analysis that I conduct grapples with
the shadow system of sexualized racial violence that produced “mulatto” children,
allowed white vigilantism, and overlooked extralegal interracial couplings that
engendered what I describe as the culture of miscegenation. I discuss the categorical
unseeing of black women’s reproduction of children born of men from the slave holding
class in significant legal cases and contend that this willful blindness shapes ideologies of
blackness and whiteness in the U.S. The reproduction of blackness that is theorized in
this work is most certainly attending to the process of biological reproduction and the
system of racial sexual violence in which black lives are reproduced. The reproduction of
blackness takes different shapes and valences in my analysis of literary and visual
cultural texts. This study examines the manner in which ideologies of black women’s
reproductive lives permeate antebellum anti-miscegenation legislation, then resurface and
circulate through postbellum Jim Crow laws, as well as historic and contemporary visual
and literary cultural texts. By tuning in to the specter of black women’s reproduction in
the making of the racialized U.S. body this project hones in on the gray areas - the
ambiguities of race, family, and community - that anti-miscegenation legislation and Jim
Crow laws attempt to disaggregate. This project pays particular attention to the ways that
black women’s bodies become vectors through which symbolics of blood, which are
rooted in scientific racism, circulate through literary and visual culture in postbellum
generations. I look to cultural texts that contend with anti-black vigilante violence and
26
lynching, “mulatto” children’s rights of inheritance, interracial couple’s right to marry,
and domestic spaces that clandestinely merge black and white bodies, then I examine the
archival documents and key legal cases that arise directly or exist in the backgrounds of
these texts.
The central visual or literary text analyzed in each chapter of Specters of
Miscegenation responds to a moment in history in which issues arising from anti-
miscegenation law, anti-black violence, or enslavement dominate the American
landscape. I examine different aspects of the impact that anti-miscegenation laws have
had on black women’s reproduction, as well as ways that anti-miscegenation laws were
codified in response to black women’s reproduction of “mulatto” and ostensibly white
but legally enslaved children. The imposed upon “mulatto” and black mother figures who
surface in the cultural texts that I analyze have to contend with the repercussions of
committing the crime of miscegenation thereby denying white supremacy’s claim to
blood purity. Each chapter in Specters of Miscegenation analyzes cultural texts that
document, archive, or respond creatively to complexities surrounding black women’s
reproductivity as well as anti-miscegenation legislation that occurred during chattel
slavery and continued beyond the era of Jim Crow.
The Chapters
Specters of Miscegenation examines cultural texts that represent and re-imagine
historic events of black women’s suffering and violence during the eras of chattel slavery,
Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. In Chapter One, “And There She Hung: Spectrality and
Negative Space in Images of Black Women Lynched” I use archival documents from The
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, particularly the Alabama district
27
field office and Assistant Commissioner reports from the year 1866, to support my
analysis of African American visual artist Kara Walker’s Bureau of Refugees series
(2009). The archive of Freedman’s Bureau reports that I call upon delineate post-Civil
War acts of murder, anti-black vigilantism, and refugee violence that Walker depicts in
her Bureau of Refugees series. My analysis of Walker’s work hones in on one colorful
silhouette from this series entitled, Mulatto Hung By Grapevine on Roadside Between
Tuscaloosa and Greensboro that illustrates a racially and figuratively bifurcated woman
suspended in space. This discussion of Kara Walker’s silhouette attends to the spectral
presences of black and mulatto women lynched that emerge by juxtaposing Walker’s
piece with the 1911 lynching photograph of a black mother, Laura Nelson, and the
lynching scene in Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 film Within Our Gates.
28
In this chapter I trace
a spectral relationship that moves through the vector of reproduction in Walker’s
silhouette, the photograph of Laura Nelson’s lynched body, and the cinematic
representation of a black women lynched in Micheaux’s film. By examining the spectral
resonances that a work of art, a photograph, and a cinematic representation of the
lynchings of black and mulatto women have with one another, this analysis forwards an
argument about the mechanical reproduction of black women’s death and the absence of
this history in the archive of lynching that their specters make salient.
The next two chapters are concerned with cinematic representations of anti-
miscegenation law and state violence enacted and rectified through judicial processes.

28
I am going to use the term “mulatto” without quotes for the remainder of this
manuscript, not as a reification of the racist scientific etymology and white supremacist
meaning, which cohere within this term. I use “mulatto” to call up the history from which
this term emerged and to keep the problematic racial polarization and challenging blurred
space of the miscegenated figure in play in my analysis.
28
Chapter Two, “Pinky and the Big House: The Spectrality of Black Motherhood in
Miscegenation Will Contests” examines Jim Crow ideologies of black degeneracy that
are masked as loyalty alongside conceptions of white superiority that attempt to pass as
benevolence, which together produce a veiled narrative of liberalism that courses through
Cid Rickett’s novel Quality (1947) and Elia Kazan’s adaptation of Rickett’s novel, Pinky
(1949). In this chapter I examine the short story version of Quality published in the
Ladies Home Journal in 1945 alongside Rickett’s novel, Kazan’s cinematic adaptation,
and the racially provocative 20th Century Fox notes that accompany each draft of the
screenplay, in order to discuss the absent presence of the rape of black women by white
men that haunts the legal battle at the heart of the narrative. In order to contextualize the
court battle that ensues in Pinky over the plantation property that the “mulatto” title
character inherits from the white matriarch in the film, I analyze antebellum and Jim
Crow era will contestations in which white testators attempt to leave black or “mulatto”
inheritors property only to have their family members usurp the process. By examining
the racial hierarchies and legal history present in the Quality/Pinky narrative and by
centering black women’s reproduction in my analysis, this chapter demonstrates the
manner in which black women’s reproductive lives haunt the narratives and the legal
decisions that erase them from the cultural and legal record. My analysis examines the
scant presence of black women’s reproductive bodies in historical, legal, and cultural
narratives of miscegenation. The black mothers of mulatto children are the specters of
miscegenation in the legal drama of will contests with which this chapter grapples.
The third chapter, “Exile and Loving: Visualizing Anti-Miscegenation Legislation
in The Loving Story” examines the aesthetics of visualizing anti-miscegenation law in the
29
2011 documentary film The Loving Story that introduces still and moving images of the
Loving family along with archival interviews that slip threads of affect into the landmark
Loving v Virginia case. By focusing on Mildred’s letters to Attorney General Kennedy
and the ACLU, which eventually ended the Loving’s exile from Virginia, I engage with
the spectral presence of Sally Hemings while positing a transhistorical and
transgenerational redemption through the Loving’s Supreme Court victory. A discussion
about Richard and Mildred’s place in the Central Point community in which they were
raised, from which they were exiled, and the contradictory notions of belonging that
developed among the townspeople and the local authorities, begins my analysis of The
Loving Story. I interrogate the narrative produced by The Loving Story in order to discuss
what seeing Richard and Mildred Loving demonstrates about the characterizations of
southern whiteness and blackness during the Civil Rights Era and to examine how
conceptions of blood purity emerges in culture and in anti-miscegenation legislation. I
contend that seeing images of Mildred and Richard Loving inserts a counter-narrative
about the south that is tethered to aesthetics of race. By attending to the complex of affect
that emanates from the archival footage assembled in this documentary I assert that
seeing and hearing Mildred and Richard in The Loving Story sheds new light on southern
blackness and whiteness and unearths what Michel Foucault describes as subjugated
knowledge.
In Chapter Four, “The Subversive Power of Love in Shirley Anne Williams’s
Dessa Rose,” I take a black feminist approach to discuss this work of historical fiction.
Williams was inspired to write Dessa Rose when she came upon two historical events of
slave resistance, one involving a pregnant enslaved woman who instigated a revolt and
30
the other concerning a white woman who harbored runaways while planning to stage a
rebellion. In Dessa Rose these two women meet and enact a scheme for resistance and
liberation. In this chapter I contend that Williams’s Neo-slave narrative engenders a
subversive politics of visuality and a dialectic of love that operates as a mode of survival
in service of liberation. By delineating the black feminist imperatives that emerge in
Dessa Rose my discussion tracks the subversive power of love that garners liberation for
a collective of renegade runaways during the era of chattel slavery. My analysis focuses
on the reproduction of blackness that occurs in Dessa Rose through the protagonist’s
biological reproduction as well as by recognizing the transformative potential that
coheres within love when it is reproductive of survival. Williams retroactively inserts an
imagined rebirth and liberation into an era racked with narratives of torture and death. I
situate Dessa Rose as a black feminist text that makes room in the urtext of black
women’s experiences of chattel slavery to imagine other aspects of life and posit the
possibility that love is a mode of survival.
Through examinations of the cinematic representations of contested belonging
and exile experienced by miscegenating figures like Pinky and the Loving family,
I forward an analytic of blood that makes salient the ruse of contamination and shame
projected upon “mulatto” bodies and “mixing” families, a tactic that belies the long
history of violent miscegenation wrought by men of the slave holding class. This project
also contends with miscegenation by discussing communities of black and white people
that violently occupy the same space during the volatile post-Civil War era south in Kara
Walker’s Bureau of Refugees series (2008), and conversely how a “miscegenated”
collectivity attains freedom by using the group to defy a system of racial and gendered
31
violence in Sherley Anne Williams's novel Dessa Rose (1986). I look closely at the
affective dimensions of belonging by attending to the complex of secrecy, shame, and
violence engendered by miscegenated and miscegenating bodies and collectivities. As
W.E.B. Dubois has written in his essay on the concept of race, studies that undermine a
belief in the natural separation of the races inspire fear and condemnation. Dubois
contextualizes,
…ever since the African slave trade and before the rise of modern biology and
sociology, we have been afraid in America that scientific study in this direction
might lead to conclusions with which we were loath to agree; and this fear was in
reality because the economic foundation of the modern world was based on the
recognition and preservation of so-called racial distinctions (Dubois 1940, 80).

By focusing on ways in which black mothers and “mulatto” women threaten racial and
classed boundaries, Specters of Miscegenation exposes the sanguine entanglement
between black/white and enslaved/slaveholding communities the national legacies this
history has engendered. With Specters of Miscegenation I explicate my notion of the
culture of miscegenation, which depends upon black women’s reproductive capacity
while it concomitantly obfuscates black women’s reproduction of whiteness, blackness,
and the various fractional taxonomies that have been used to quantify racialized blood
between these polarities through anti-miscegenation laws and anti-black violence,
erasure, and shame. By attending to apparitions of U.S. chattel slavery and the suffering
of enslaved maternal figures that haunt the U.S., Specters of Miscegenation demonstrates
that this country is not a racially discrete republic but a miscegenated national body. The
cultural texts that I examine illustrate how generations of sexual violence, subsequent
familial ties, and racially indistinct collectivities blur putatively immiscible bodies -- facts
of a racialized U.S. national body that often escape dominant history. With attention
32
toward Parthenia’s ghost and the lingering presences of enslaved mothers who lived and
died oppressed by systems of racialized violence, I invite you to engage with the specters
of miscegenation that are called upon in this analysis of blackness and whiteness and the
culture of miscegenation upon which conceptions of race were produced and enforced in
this country.
33
Chapter One
And There She Hung:
Spectrality and Negative Space in Images of Black Women Lynched

The War has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the
Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia
and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines. They came at
night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the
black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women, with
frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart
and gaunt, -- a horde of starving vagabonds homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in
their dark distress.
1

This description of the aftermath of the Civil War in Dubois’s chapter “Of the
Dawn of Freedom” in Souls of Black Folk illustrates the perilous climate that newly freed
men, women, and children had to survive or face the terrifying alternative. The violent
refusal of southerners, who lost the Civil War and their way off life that was dependent
upon dehumanizing blackness, had to recognize the humanity of the newly freed men and
woman. The southern white supremacist resistance to recognizing black humanity was
registered upon the bodies and within the hearts of those black people, who bore the
blows, wore the nooses, and died the horrific deaths.
The work of art, which opens the analysis in this chapter, Kara Walker’s Mulatto
hung by a grapevine near road side between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro, is a visual
interpretation of the mob violence and murderous acts committed against newly freed
men and women in the district of Alabama in1866.
2
This colorful silhouette is included

1
Dubois, Souls of Black Folk, 46.
2
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands categorized Alabama as a
district until February 1868 when it was categorized as a state. See Introduction to
Unbound miscellaneous papers July 1865-October 1867; Record Group 105; Roll M809;
National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
34
in Walker’s Bureau of Refugees series (2007), which uses phrases or entire sentences
from the Assistant Commissioner reports for the Alabama district field office of The
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands as the title for each piece.
3
The
post-war climate for freedmen and women in the southern states was volatile and
exceedingly dangerous, Alabama was a particularly lethal district. W.E.B. Dubois
recounts the lawlessness of Alabama in the early days of the Reconstruction Era:
From 1865 to 1868, and even later, there was for all practicable purposes over the
greater part of the people of Alabama, no government at all...From 1865 to 1874,
government and respect for government were weakened to a degree from which it
has not yet recovered. The people governed themselves extra-legally, and have
not recovered from the practice” (Dubois 1935, 489).

Walker’s Bureau of Refugee series visually reproduces and reframes the deplorable and
heinous acts of violence, an artistic choice that makes visible the suffering black women
had to contend with under extra-legal governance in the district of Alabama in 1866. The
mob rule and vigilante enforcement of white supremacist ideology worked to enforce
racial hierarchies of chattel slavery, extract of free labor, and prevent the attainment of
freedom for those newly released from bondage. These conditions exposed not only
freedmen to horrific and malicious beatings and lynchings but freedwomen as well.
This discussion of Kara Walker’s Mulatto hung by a grapevine on road side
between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro (Mulatto Hung) considers the spectral resonances of
black and mulatto women lynched that come through in her piece, by juxtaposing her

3
Walker’s choice to name this series Bureau of Refugees raises questions about the status
of the refugee in the United States during the era of Reconstruction. Though the term
refugee was predominantly used as an assignation for white southerners who
sympathized with the north during the war and were destitute and homeless, I found a
few instances in the National Archives Records for the Alabama District of the Bureau of
Refugees, 1866, in which the term “colored refugee” was used. The concept of a colored
refugee who is also a U.S. citizen during this era is a paradox worth investigating, one
that I may take up at a later date.
35
silhouette with the lynching photograph of a black mother, Laura Nelson, who was hung
from a bridge by a mob in 1911, and the lynching scene in Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 film
Within Our Gates. Through textual analysis of this silhouette I forward an argument that
black maternal specters move through the vector of reproduction in Walker’s work of art,
the photograph of Laura Nelson’s lynched body, and the cinematic representation of a
black women lynched in Micheaux’s film. This discussion pays special attention to the
distinct formal composition of each visual representation of black and mulatto women
lynched. Specters of miscegenation lurk in each of these visual representations of women
lynched enabling a discussion of the relationship between absent presences of sexual
violence, spectrality, and visuality to course through this chapter. By examining the
spectral relationship that a work of art, a photograph, and the cinematic representation of
the lynchings of black and mulatto women have with one another, I contend that the
absence of this history in the archive of lynching becomes palpable when the lingering
ghosts of the past make their living and their dying known in the present. This chapter
discusses the precarious position black bodies occupy in the archive, particularly the
black women who were lynched by white supremacist vigilante mobs. The anti-black and
anti-miscegenation violence that Walker’s silhouette awakens is contextualized by the
history of women who were lynched during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and held alongside the archival research that I conducted at the National
Archives.
The reproduction of blackness in this chapter considers the mechanical, visual,
and digital reproduction of the lynching of black women. Each of these images rendered
originally as a work of art, a photograph, and scene shot on celluloid are only accessible
36
to me in digital form. Through the digital I am able to access second and third generation
reproductions of these images of black and mulatto women’s injury and death. The
biological reproduction of black motherhood during the era of chattel slavery becomes a
specter in the visual reproduction of these images of black women murdered by white
lynch mobs during Reconstruction and the early years of Jim Crow.
Benjamin’s thesis on art in the age of mechanical reproduction offers an entry
point through which to make sense of the violent encounter that blackness has with
modernity and to theorize the photographic and cinematic reproduction of black lynched
bodies at the turn of the twentieth century.
4
This analysis of the reproduction of blackness
hones in on the violence of modernity for black bodies that produces and reproduces
racist scientific knowledge about blackness. The digital age haunts this discussion in
retrospect; the lightning fast access of contemporary digital imaging and reproduction is
an absent presence in this examination of the past. The impact of twenty-first century
digital reproduction of the photographs of Laura Nelson’s lynching taken in 1911 lingers
as a ghostly presence in my analysis of the collisions between blackness, modernity, and
white supremacy that these images capture and reproduce.
Along with a discussion of the multiple valences of black reproduction at work in
these visual representations of black women’s hangings, my analysis also examines the
racialization of black and mulatto women that emerges by examining these three visual
representations in concert with one another. That the woman’s body hanging in Walker’s
piece is mulatto opens up a discussion about the anti-miscegenation violence that erupted
during the Reconstruction era and raises questions about the relationship that mulatto

4
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217-251.
37
figures have within the context of anti-black violence. I argue that the mulatto figure in
Walker’s work suffers a miserable death because her corporeality represents a
commingling of blood that compromises white supremacy putative purity and exposes
sexual acts that were never supposed to be revealed. That the body of the mulatto hung is
also a woman indexes the long history of sexual violence thrust upon black women at the
hands of white men from the slave holding class and the poor southern planter class. The
reproduction of the mulatto woman figure is an absent presence, a nagging contradiction
that must be overlooked for white supremacist ideology to maintain its veneer of
superiority and purity. Racist science knowledge production attempts to evade but cannot
dislodge the ghostly presences of black blood, which lingers in a mulatto body that
threatens to reveal itself generations down the line. The presence of mulatto corporeality
in the U.S. national body during the era of Reconstruction compromises the belief in the
mutual exclusivity and absolute polarity white purity and black degeneracy. Walker’s
depiction of this act of violence in 1866 against a mulatto woman raises questions about
the figure of a mulatto woman hung, national belonging, and anti-miscegenation violence
within the context of the post-Civil War south.
Theories of negativity and black sexuality course throughout my analysis of the
echoes produced by Walker’s “Mulatto Hung” and the space that this mulatto figure
occupies as an embodiment of the transgression of racial boundaries. I forward the
concept of negative space to theorize the location of mulatto figures and black women in
the archive --Walker’s use of the silhouette extends the reach of this theoretical
framework as her cut out figures occupy negative space on the canvas. This chapter is
haunted by the ghosts of people whose deaths are enumerated by the Assistant
38
Commissioner reports of the Alabama District of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands and those victims whose names and murders do not even appear in the
archive. The black women who lived and died during this era, who were lynched by
white vigilantes are specters in this chapter as is the black mother whose mulatto child
was hung by a grapevine and left for days to languish in the hot Alabama sun.
The Early Days of Reconstruction
On January first 1863 President Lincoln issued and signed the Emancipation
Proclamation which stated:
That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight
hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated
part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United
States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.
5

This proclamation did not free all of those enslaved only those who were bound in a
southern state that seceded from the Union (Foner 1). Two years after Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation, slavery was abolished in all of the United States with the
passage of the thirteenth amendment, except as punishment for a crime for which one has
been convicted. The fury in the south over the abolition of chattel slavery mobilized into
white supremacist mob violence that saturated the promise of equality with the blood of
freedmen and freedwomen during the Reconstruction era.
6
In the post-Civil War

5
“Emancipation Proclamation.” NARA - Featured Documents. [Online Version,
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/transc
ript.html, National Archives and Records Administration, February 28 2015.]
6
After the abolition of slavery, black codes -- a set of laws that pertained only to black
people who could for example be arrested and convicted for the crimes of vagrancy,
drunkenness, petty theft, speaking disrespectfully to a white person, neglecting one’s
family, or not being under a work contract -- were used to punish the newly emancipated
by forcing them back into the regime of unpaid labor known as the convict lease system.
Postbellum restrictions limited where freedmen and freedwomen could live, and even in
freedom colored people were still not allowed to testify in court, unless the case only
39
southern states, including Alabama, no civil authority existed. Southern whites and the
former slave holding class were diametrically opposed to regarding the newly
emancipated as deserving freedom and could not imagine a world in which freedmen and
freedwomen would be treated equally under the law (Franklin 2000). The poor white
southerners of Alabama were reported to be “…ignorant and vindictive” and to:
live in huts, drink much, and all use tobacco and snuff; they want to organize and
receive recognition by the United States government in order to get revenge –
really want to be bushwackers supported by the federal government; they ‘wish to
have the power to hang, shoot, and destroy in retaliation for the wrongs they have
endured’; they have the ‘big nigger holders,’ whom they accuse of bringing on the
war and who, they are afraid, would get into power again; they are the refugee,’
poor white element of low character, shiftless, with no ambition. (Dubois 1935,
488).

The clash between the poor white element and the freedmen and women created a new
kind of battleground in the south, one in which white supremacist violence tried to
terrorize the newly freed people back into a system of subservience or meet gruesome
suffering and death. The barbaric history of lynching in the U.S. is filled with the horrific
tales of black men chased, bludgeoned, beaten, tarred and feathered, hung, and burned
alive most often for being accused of raping a white woman, committing a theft of some
sort, or becoming prosperous.
7

As exemplified in her pamphlet Southern Horrors, Ida B. Wells vehemently
protested the mob violence and lynching of black men that was considered fit punishment

involved other colored people. The convict lease system is discussed by Angela Davis in
“From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict
Lease System and W.E.B. Dubois in The Spawn of Slavery: The Convict-lease System in
the South.”
7
See Crystal Feimster’s Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and
Lynching, 2009; Ida B. Wells’s “Southern Horrors” in On Lynchings,[1892] 2002;
Jacqueline Goldsby’s A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature,
2006 for detailed analysis of lynching with emphasis on gender, anti-lynching advocacy,
and modernity, respectively.
40
for being accused of raping of a white woman.
8
Lynching was an acceptable practice that
was reported with regularity in leading mainstream newspapers. The brutality of lynching
was written about in newspapers and on the postcards of lynched bodies as testaments of
the recuperation of the honor of the white woman who was allegedly raped, when in fact
lynching was the method white supremacists used to recuperate their power, wealth, and
sense of superiority. The terror of lynching and the grotesque display of suffering that
was reproduced through the circulation of lynching photographs elicited white
supremacist redemption through black suffering while concomitantly insuring that black
people would never achieve any measure of social equality as free men and women.
9

The nation’s black newspapers vehemently protested the rampant lynching of
black men and in 1892 Ida B. Wells published in Free Speech, the newspaper of which
she was part owner, her outrage about a rash of lynchings in the south in the spring of
that year:
10

Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro
men rape white women. If southern white men are not careful they will overreach
themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be

8
Ida B. Wells was a turn of the century anti-lynching advocate and journalist, and a
leading figure in the movement to protect black lives and livelihoods from white
supremacist violence. No due process was granted black men accused of a crime against
a white man or woman or child, the mere accusation of a crime committed against and
white person was enough to have a black person tortured and lynched.
9
For more newspaper reports of lynching and Ida B. Wells anti-lynching advocacy see
“Writing ‘Dynamically’: Ida B. Wells” in Jacqueline Goldsby’s Spectacular Fiction:
Lynching in American Life and Literature. The concept of social equality is discussed in
more detail in Chapter Two of this manuscript in which I discuss the Jim Crow
legislation passed to keep the races separate in public places, schools, and modes of
transportation and to ultimately prevent social equality between the black and white
races. Social equality is a term that indexes that fear that white men have of black men
becoming educated, successful, rights bearing citizens who will infringe upon white
wealth and threaten white supremacy, and have sexual relationships with white women.
10
Wells, “Introduction,” 13-14.
41
reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputations of their women
(Wells 2002, 29).

Well’s indictment of white men and white women elicited the hatred of rough vigilante
types in concert with the well-to-do gentry who denounced “the black scoundrel” who
would “utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies” (Wells 2002, 30). The Evening
Scimitar printed one of threats to Wells life, in which the writers assume she is a man,
which in the end forced her to leave Memphis:
If the negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the
duty of those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies
to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him in the forehead
with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s
shears (Wells 2002, 30).

The mistaken identity of Wells by these lynch-mobs-in-waiting may have
protected her from being strung up at the intersection of Main and Madison streets. Her
womanhood would not have prevented her from the noose, though I am certain that after
being thwarted out of the satisfaction of performing the surgical procedure with tailor’s
shears the lynch mob would have enacted an equally vicious scene of sexual violence
with Wells as their victim; Wells knew full well that her womanhood was no protection
against a lynch mob. Though her anti-lynching advocacy predominantly addressed the
lynching of black men she lists the lynching of two unknown women and Mrs. Teddy
Arthur in the lynching record of 1894 in the Red Record.
11

A few decades before Wells was writing for Free Speech and publishing her
pamphlets, when the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante white supremacist mobs were
establishing their reign of terror, the bodies and lives of the newly freed were made
vulnerable to the southern venom unleashed upon them with the demise of the regime of

11
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “A Red Record,” 146.
42
chattel slavery. In order to provide aid to those newly emancipated from slavery and
white southern refugees – southern white sympathizers to the north – who were in need
of food, shelter, education, clothing, health care, and transportation to other states and
districts, The United States established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands.
12
The Freedman’s Bureau was established through the United States
War Department and was tasked with issuing rations to the destitute, establishing and
maintaining schools for freedmen, supervising labor contracts between white employers
and colored workers, and helping colored soldiers receive money owed them through
pensions, bounties, and back pay.
13
Many of the letters written to the Freedman’s Bureau,
as well as the reports drafted by the Assistant Commissioner, detail another aspect of the
Freedman’s Bureau duties that exceeded its primary purpose – protecting the newly freed
men, women, and children from the white supremacist violence.
14

12
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the
Freedman’s Bureau, was established on March 3
rd
, 1865. Information about the
establishment of the Freedman’s Bureau can be found in Introduction to unbound
miscellaneous papers July 1865-October 1867; Record Group 105; Roll M809; National
Archives Building, Washington, DC.
13
Some of the chief concerns of the newly freed were buying land, building a home of
their own, and finding their family members who had been sold in slavery and were
spread throughout the country. Apprenticeship laws allowed the owners of those who
were once enslaved to maintain extracting from labor from children, especially those
whose parents were either dead or sold away, under the guise of apprenticeship. See Joy
James’s captivating history To ‘joy My Freedom to learn more about the impact of
apprenticeship laws on black families. The Freedman’s Bureau also handled the exchange
and sometimes repurposing of abandoned property and land. Archival documentation
about Freedman’s Bureau duties in Alabama can be found in the Unbound miscellaneous
papers July 1865-October 1867; Record Group 105; Roll M809 (ii-iii).; National
Archives Building, Washington, DC.
14
My research at the National Archives of the letters to and from the Assistant
Commissioner of the District of Alabama in 1866 report in detail the violence that
southern white men inflicted upon freedmen and women, sometimes causing serious
injury and other times causing death.
43
In August of 1866 an outraged citizen in Garland Alabama, N.B. Markley,
reported that a man by the name of James Pryor arrested a woman, Winni, because he
suspected her of stealing some meat from him. Markley writes, “Pryor Hanged her until
nearly dead in order to make her confess the crime, failing in this, the woman professing
her innocence, he then tied her up and gave her some 2 or 300 lashes, the woman’s
husband, he knocked in the head with his gun injuring him severely if not fatally.”
15
A
month before Winni was hanged nearly to death then whipped savagely by N.B. Markley,
a black girl named Eliza was beaten to death. The murder was reported in another
correspondence between Captain Assistant Superintendent W.M. H. Peck and Assistant
Adjutant General, Major O.B. Kinsman, which reads:
Bureau Refugees Freedmen & A.L.
Tuskaloosa Ala July 16. 1866
District

Major O.D. Kinsman
Asst. Adjt-Gen’l

Major:

I have the honor to call your attention to the fact – that about a month since
Washington and Greene McKinny living near eighteen |18| miles west of town /white
men/ are reported to have beaten a black girl /Eliza/ to death for a trivial offense or
supposed offense –

I cannot learn that any steps have been taken by the civil authorities in the matter -

(unintelligble)
Very Respectfully
W.M.H.H. Peck
Capt. Asst. Supt.
16

These reports of unchecked violence against black women and girls in 1866 is a
testament to the lawlessness and ungoverned extra-legal conditions in which vulnerable

15
See Appendix A to view a reproduction of this letter in its entirety.
16
See Appendix B for a reproduction of the original letter.
44
newly emancipated women had to navigate and try to survive. In Southern Horrors:
Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, Crystal Feimster describes in detail the
circumstances of a selection of the one hundred thirty black women who were lynched
between 1880 and 1930 (Feimster 2009).
17
These women were accused of murdering or
assaulting a white person or destroying their property (Feimster 2009). For example, on
August 18, 1886 Eliza Woods was taken from the jailhouse in Jackson, Tennessee and
hung by a mob that was reported to be as large as one thousand people. Accused of
murdering the Christian woman she worked for, Mrs. J.P. Wooten by poisoning her food,
Eliza Woods was taken out of the jail cell, stripped of her clothing, hung from a tree in
the yard of the courthouse then shot five times after her death.
18
The Negro community in
Jackson was outraged by Eliza’s lynching and threatened to burn the town down.
19

This case garnered national attention, in mainstream newspapers Eliza Woods
was described as a “black female devil” which is akin to the descriptors like “fiend” and
“beast” that were used in reporting the lynchings of black men. The putatively objective
print media’s description of events and their white supremacist language choices worked
to justifying the horrific murders of black women and men. Although no photographs of
Eliza Woods have been recovered, images of lynched black bodies circulated widely
during the Jim Crow era. In the book and online photo gallery Without Sanctuary:

17
In Southern Horrors Feimster lists the years, names, alleged offenses, and states in
which black, white, and Mexican women were lynched between 1837 and 1965. Feimster
records that one hundred and fifty nine women were lynched between 1837 and 1965, the
majority of these women were black with a few white and Mexican women being
lynched throughout that period. A similar list of women lynched can be found at
Henrietta Vinton Davis’s Weblog
https://henriettavintondavis.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/recorded/
18
Feimster, Southern Horrors,158; Memphis Daily Appeal, 8/19/1886, Savannah
Courier 8/26/1886.
19
Memphis Daily Appeal 8/21/1886
45
Lynching Photography in America, a publication of images of lynched bodies that
exposes the atrocities committed by white lynch mobs during the Jim Crow, the lynching
photograph of one black woman, Laura Nelson, is included among the ninety-eight plates
in this publication.
20
The images of black women lynched, though rare, complicate my
analysis of the reproduction of blackness as it brings in a discussion of modernity and the
visual reproduction of blackness, which will be discussed shortly. For now, I would like
to hold on to the specters of Eliza Woods and Laura Nelson and remain in the
Reconstruction era a while longer, just a few decades before the advent of photography at
a time when written documentations and artistic renderings were the only ways to register
the injustice of a lynching.
Mulatto Hung By A Grapevine
The crisis of white supremacy that materialized in the violence inflicted upon
black bodies after emancipation was impacted by the loss of capital that was no longer
able to increase with the reproductive labor of black women’s bodies. This southern loss
of wealth particular to black womanhood exists alongside the violence that those
categorized as mulatto were subject to in the wake of emancipation. The anti-black, anti-
miscegenation violence of Reconstruction was largely not captured on film, though the
Daguerreotype was invented 1839 the first Kodak camera was not introduced until 1888,
a decade after the end of Reconstruction. The archive of violence of this era is largely an
epistolary one documented by the letters and reports written and received by the
Freedman’s Bureau. Newspaper reports of lynching were often simply outlets for white

20
James Allen, Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack collaborated
on the collection of lynching photographs, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in
America, published in the year 2000. The publication is also accessible online at
http://withoutsanctuary.org
46
supremacist ideology and thuggery, as documented by the published threats against Ida
B. Wells and the drawings or etchings that accompany the news articles. Through the use
of her signature and apposite stylistic approach to the silhouette, Kara Walker reaches
back in time with her Bureau of Refugees series to visualize the sadistic violations of
human vitality held within the collection of Freedman’s Bureau records.
The choice of the silhouette, as an antecedent to photography, brings with it the
aesthetics of the modern age to the field of phrenology, which used silhouettes to
illustrate pseudo-scientific findings (Rutherford 2010). For her Bureau of Refugees series
Walker incorporates color cut-outs and backgrounds, stepping away from the large wall
size pastoral settings made of black silhouettes on white background that Walker
employed in her much lauded series, which preceded this one.
21
The pieces in Walker’s
Bureau of Refugees integrates gauche into some of her colorful silhouettes which tend to
stand between two and three feet tall and measure around a foot and a half wide. Walker
writes in her introduction to the catalogue of her exhibition for Bureau of Refugees that
this project developed out of a frustration that she was having about the painting and
postmodernism, which she expressed first in written form. Walker snipped and
reconstructed elements of the admittedly “heavy handed letter writing” and created a set
of internet searches with the reconstituted phrases such as “a black man is a painting” and
“a hollowed out-construct” (Walker 2008, 3). This act of random internet searching led

21
Probably Kara Walker’s most well know series was her first major show, My
Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (2007). Walker also makes short
films which incorporate puppet shows using the silhouette, one of which I had the
pleasure to experience at the REDCAT in Los Angeles in 2005, “Kara E. Walker’s Song
of the South.” The film that was screened at this live performance is entitled 8 Possible
Beginnings: or the Creation of African-America. A Moving Picture by the young, self-
taught, Genius of the South K.E. Walker.
47
Walker to the National Archives database, specifically “The Bureau of Refugees,
Freedman, and Abandoned Lands – Records, ‘Miscellaneous Papers’ National Archives
M809 Roll 23.” This National Archives publication roll contains a list of murders in
Alabama in 1866 as well as descriptions of “riots and outrages” inflicted upon freedmen
and freedwomen by white supremacist mobs and individual vigilantes. Of the record that
Walker discovered on this roll of archival film she writes:
The writing style is blunt, suggesting that brevity was in the service of progress.
However, the short tenure of the Freedman’s Bureau and the long years of Black
Codes and Jim Crow segregation attest to the political failure of this progressive
legislation. For me, however, the endgame of Southern reconstruction reads like
short-form poetry. For this reason, “The Bureau of Refugees” takes the form of
simple cut-outs, responding solely to the economy of this descriptive language”
(Walker 2008, 4).

Using her signature approach to the silhouette in Bureau of Refugees Kara Walker
renders twenty-eight of the incidences recorded by the Assistant Commissioner in the
District of Alabama in 1866.
22
Walker’s silhouettes illustrate and interpret violent
eruptions that resulted from racial tensions that were boiling over in the district of
Alabama in the summer of 1866; these incidents were documented, delineated, and
explained with a brief description in the Assistant Commissioners Reports.

22
Alabama was not named a state until February 1868 National Archives Introduction to
Microfilm Roll M809 (iii).
48
23

Figure 1: District of Alabama List of Murders

Walker’s cut outs entitled “Mulatto hung by a grapevine near road side between
Tuscaloosa and Greensboro” is also the exact language used to describe the murder in the
Assistant Commissioner’s report.

Figure 2: District of Alabama List of Murder May 30
th
“Mulatto Hung By grapevine near
roadside between Tuscaloosa & Greensboro”

23
This is an excerpt from a longer list of murders in 1866 (50) in total recorded by
Assistant Commissioner. Unbound miscellaneous papers July 1865-October 1867;
Record Group 105; Roll M809; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
49
Archived among a collection of letters received, this letter dated June 4
th
1866
written by Assistant Superintendent Captain W. H.H. Peck reports an incident from the
Tuscaloosa Alabama field office.
24
The letter reads:
Tuskaloosa Ala. June 4
th
1866-
Major O.D. Kinsman
Asst. Adjt General
R.Y. & A.L. Ala.

Major:
I have the honor to submit the following statements. The affairs of the Office are
being prosecuted in a reasonably successful manner.
The call upon the Commissary Dept. is still great – and the number of destitute
people –especially white – is gradually increasing –
Today a resident of this city – stated to me, that last Wednesday 30
th
(wtt,) while
coming home on a by-road about thirty miles from here to the left going on the
Greensboro road, between Greene and Perry Counties, he saw a mulatto man of
ordinary size hung to a tree by a grapevine. The body, he said appeared to have been in
this position five or six days – It was off the road in the woods and several miles from a
house – None of the people living near knew of the circumstances connected with the
case.
Gen, Major
Very Respectfully
Your (Abdt. Sesst)
W.M.H.H. Pec
Capt Asst. Sutd
R.F& A.L
25

As this letter indicates the mulatto hung by a grapevine near a roadside between
Tuscaloosa and Greensboro was not a woman, as depicted in Walker’s silhouette, the
Mulatto hung was in fact a man. Walker’s artistic choice indexes the violence that
freedwomen suffered during this volatile era in U.S. history as well the polarizing racist
scientific conceptions of whiteness and blackness, specifically the vehement divide
between white women’s purity and black women’s degradation.

24
Letters Received; July 1865-October 1867; Record Group 105; Roll M1900; National
Archives Building, Washington, DC.
25
See Appendix C for a reproduction of the original letter. Parenthesis indicated that the
handwriting is unintelligible and this is my best guess as to what was originally written.
50

Figure 3: “Mulatto hung by a grapevine near roadside between Tuscaloosa and
Greensboro” Kara Walker, Bureau of Refugees Series 2008

“Mulatto Hung” freezes in time two halves of this figure’s whole – a genteel
silhouette of a proper white lady made of green paper with perfectly coiffed hair resting
atop the grapevine that is crafted of a combination of green and black cut paper. Walker’s
colorful silhouette visualizes a woman’s body racially and figuratively bifurcated. The
proper lady’s silhouetted bodice tapers off into a green messy misshapen form that
mimics a languid body, which twists down to and lightly caresses a splayed black
woman’s body that is cut out in burnt orange. Black roots entangle the head and chest of
the lifeless black women’s body that hovers above the ground, her right leg lifted above
51
her head by a thick piece of the black root that rises up to the white lady’s bodice creating
a spine along her backside that connect these diametrically opposed figures – the abject
and the exemplar -- whose meaning is dependant upon and productive of the other. The
abject maternal figure’s lifeless body was reproductive of the exemplar, who appears to
triumph over the wreckage.
Walker’s choice to visualize the fracture between black and white through the
vector of womanhood forces attention to be paid to the forced acts of miscegenation
perpetrated against black women during chattel slavery and the mulatto babies they
reproduced. The anxieties over miscegenation and social equality that fueled anti-black
violence and lynching after the abolition of slavery stem from the history of white men
violently raping black women and fathering children with them. Walker’s work is
haunted by the specter of miscegenation violence that produced the “Mulatto Hung” and
raises the specter of white womanhood that lingers as an albatross in the history of
lynching for black people. The mulatto man who was actually hung from a grapevine and
discovered by a passerby is a specter in Walker’s piece as is his mother, a black woman
whose body lays sprawled, exposed and defiled. The mulatto and his mother’s lives and
deaths are specters of miscegenation that demand that attention be paid to the violent
lives and horrific deaths they suffered. Their presences act as foils to white supremacy
because they are living proof of the hypocrisy – white men are the rapists, not the black
men whom they lynch for the atrocious act.
The space between the elevated proper lady made of green whose solid black root
is firmly affixed behind her, and the forlorn burnt orange corpse that is engulfed and
bound by a gaggle of black roots is tethered by a nebulous green body. This ghostly
52
emerald form haunts the silhouetted bodice. The apparition stretches out trying to mimic
the human form, filling the white space that separates these women yet joins them by
their roots. Walker’s use of green, a blend of the primary colors yellow and blue,
gestures toward the mixing of “race blood” that conjoins these women in the likeness and
representation of white beauty in the silhouette as well as with the depiction of black
death as the black woman’s body is being returned to the earth.
26
The elongated,
miscegenated green form stands in for the act of miscegenation while it excretes a
reproduction of white womanhood in the form of the silhouetted bodice. The comely
mulatto who can pass for a proper white lady but has “dark roots” or a “dark past” that
manacles her to her black mother who is exposed and vulnerable to white supremacist
violence and murder. The mulatto figure can hide her blackness behind her or within her
but her lineage, her life, and her death is forever tied to the blackness of her mother and
the race blood that courses through her veins. Walker’s use of green and burnt orange in
her depiction of the women’s bodies calls into question the value and legitimacy of
deploying the colors of “black” and “white” to describe racialized bodies and
experiences.
W.E.B Dubois argues that the mixing of white blood and black blood in the U.S.
is not a new phenomenon and that the white concern over miscegenation belies the long
history of rape and miscegenation perpetrated by white men since the first women were
held in bondage. Dubois contends:

26
In Miscegenation: Making Race in America Elise Lemire offers a genealogy of the
term amalgamation which was borrowed from the field of metallurgy, which provided the
theoretical framework to conceive of race “as a biological trait in the blood and race
blood was perceived…as a ‘mathematical problem of the same class with those mixtures
of different liquors or different metals’” (51).
53
We have not only studied race and race mixture in America, but we have
tried almost by legal process to stop such study. It is for this reason that it
has occurred to me just here to illustrate the way in which Africa and
Europe have been united in my family. There is nothing unusual about this
interracial history. It has been duplicated thousands of times; but on the
one hand, the white folk have bitterly resented even a hint of the facts of
intermingling; while black folk have recoiled in natural hesitation and
affected disdain in admitting what they know (Dubois 1940, 80).

The archival documents that record the “mulatto hung by a grapevine near road side
between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro” do not convey much of the circumstances of his
death. The climate of southern contempt for black freedom and anti-miscegenation
violence is fueled by white men’s exposure to financial loss and social damage by the
presence of generations of mulatto men who became rights bearing citizens with the
passage of the fourteenth (1868) and fifteenth (1870) amendments, and by the mulatto
women, men, and children who, after being legally recognized as human, become entitled
to familial inheritance. The subjecthood that freedom promised made white men of the
slave holding class and poor white southerners -- who raped black women and fathered
children through acts of sexual violence -- vulnerable to being held accountable if not in
the form of inheritance, at least by an acknowledgment of paternity. The embodiment of
the mixture of black and white blood inside the regime of chattel slavery was overlooked
yet also recognized as a demonstration of power and mastery over black women’s bodies,
a refutation of black men’s ability to protect black women, and a display of white men’s
sexual freedom and domination despite their marital status. Children produced during
chattel slavery increased the wealth of slave owners, no matter who the father was, as that
status of a slave followed the condition of the mother. The mixing of race blood through
sexual reproduction became problematic in the wake of chattel slavery for men of the
slave holding class who needed to remain legally unrelated to the children they fathered
54
by enslaved women.
27
Outside of chattel slavery mulatto bodies were evidence of
“miscegenation” and eroded the conception of white purity and absolute separation of the
races as a means to preserve the “sanctity” of whiteness. Mulattos threatened white
supremacy by blurring the lines between white and black and undermined racist scientific
claims that mulattos were non-reproductive like mules. In this racially tempestuous and
lawless post Civil War climate in Alabama in 1866 the mulatto hung could have simply
been killed for being an embodiment of racial mixing that threatened white supremacist
ideology and power.
The relationship between blackness and mulattos is rooted in the concept of “race
blood” and the one-drop rule, which contends that one-drop of black blood in a body
makes a body black, even if the skin is white. This kind of racial taxonomy erases the
violence that caused the mixing of the blood and removes the white perpetrator of
violence from the equation, making mulatto bodies racially coded as black and therefore
enslavable. This analysis means to dam up the epistemological current of sanguinity,
which directs the course of miscegenated blood into the river of blackness and pushes it
back upstream toward the bay of whiteness from which it flowed. Rather than worry over
taxonomy or authenticity, this reversal of course is meant to implicate whiteness in the
corporeality of mulattos and the violent acts of miscegenation from which they were
reproduced. While I resist the sanguine force that produces and codifies the one-drop
rule, I also resist reproducing an ontological no man’s land for the figure of the mulatto
and do not wish to erase or obfuscate the relationship that the figure of the mulatto has
with blackness, specifically with black motherhood. The ambiguity of race that the

27
In Chapter Two I discuss in depth the problematics of inheritance for mulatto children
of white fathers.
55
mulatto figure embodies requires that blackness and whiteness be held in tension, not in
order to advocate or produce some other separate mixed race racial taxonomy but in an
effort to refute, resist, and explode the confines of racial taxonomies as they produce the
lethal hierarchies that result in deaths of black men and women as well as those
considered mulatto.
The Lynching of Laura Nelson
The reproductive violence that black mothers sustained during chattel slavery
brings forth the specter of miscegenation like the one that lingers in Walker’s piece. The
actual event of the hanging of the mulatto in Alabama in 1866 by a grapevine on a road
between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro haunts Kara Walker’s visual interpretation of the
murder. I argue that the specter of miscegenation that appears in her piece haunts a
photograph taken in 1911 of Laura Nelson, a black woman who was hung from a bridge
in Oklahoma along with her son. In his discussion of phantoms and photography Tom
Gunning considers the role that vision and seeing have in the phenomena of spirit
photography and visually mediated experiences more broadly. Gunning characterizes the
frightening essence of the phantom or ghost:
The essential aspect of a ghost, its terrifying presence, comes from this
uncertainty, this problematic relation to the senses and therefore to our sense of
the world. One can, of course, discuss the uncertainty in terms of the ontology of
the phantom itself, its mode of existence ambiguously perched between the living
and the dead, the material and the incorporeal, rather than its mode of being
perceived (Gunning, 217).
28

The phantoms that are absent presences in the photograph of Laura Nelson’s lynching
swirl around in the space of uncertainty that surrounds this acts of violence captured on
film.

28
Tom Gunning, “To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision,” 207-244.
56

Figure 4: Wide Shot Okemah Oklahoma Bridge Laura Nelson Lynching
On May 25, 1911 in Okemah, Oklahoma Laura Nelson was lynched with her son
L.W. Nelson, who was accused of shooting and killing Deputy Sheriff George H. Loney.
Loney is reported to have entered their home, described as a shanty, in search of stolen
food.
29
Laura Nelson took responsibility for the shooting of Sheriff Loney to protect her
son, subsequently Laura and her son were both arrested and taken to the county jailhouse.
While in jail, a lynch mob gagged and bound the jailer then dragged Laura Nelson and
her son out to a bridge over the Canadian River. On this bridge the mob forced nooses
around Laura and her son’s necks, through them off of the bridge, where they died from
strangulation suspended above the water, as their lifeless bodies hung, the murders and

29
More details of Laura Nelson and her son L.W. Nelson’s lynchings can be found at the
Without Sanctuary site http://withoutsanctuary.org/pics_34_text.html as well as in the
book by the same name. In Southern Horrors, Feimster does not relate the conflicting
stories of this case but only reports that Nelson shot and killed the Deputy Sheriff, (171-
172 & 174). On a webpage that honors police officers killed in the line of duty called
Officer Down Memorial Page Deputy Sheriff George H. Loney is remembered as being
shot and killed in Okema by a 15 year-old boy as he searched his mother’s shanty for
stolen goods.”
http://www.odmp.org/officer/19605-deputy-sheriff-george-h-loney accessed March 1,
2015.
57
onlookers posed for photos to be taken with the hanging corpses.
30
Although none of the
newspaper reports of this lynching include the fact that Laura Nelson was raped by the
white mob, an article in the October 1911 issue of The Crisis reports her rape and
expresses outrage that none of the men responsible for the heinous acts had yet been
punished. In Southern Horrors, Feimster also recounts that the lynch mob raped Laura
Nelson before they through her off of the bridge to hang.
31
The photograph of Laura
Nelson and her son hanging from a bridge with a mob of spectators standing above them
on the bridge gawking at the hideous display was reproduced and circulated as a
postcard, serving as retribution for the Sheriff Loney’s murder. Two photographs were
taken of this incident, the other is a close up of Laura Nelson’s lynched body, and
apparently this photographic postcard was “unmaillable” as inscribed on the image.
Though Laura’s son L.W. was recognized by the white lynch mob as being the shooter,
the close up photograph taken of this lynching is of Laura Nelson, his mother, signifying
a reproductive culpability or perhaps a more insidious connection and depraved interest
in preserving her likeness on film, given that she was raped not long before the
photographer snapped the frame.
The practice of photographing the bodies of burned, shot, beaten, hung, mutilated
corpses had been occurring since the abolition of slavery, but subjects of these horrific

30
The lynching of Laura Nelson and her son was reported in the New York Times (May
29, 1911), the Omaha Daily Bee (May 26, 1911), and The Crisis (October, 1911). The
most detailed description of her death is found in the Without Sanctuary photo gallery @
http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html and book published 2000.
31
A letter from the Governor of Oklahoma appears in the August 1911 issue of The
Crisis. The letter from the Governor is an incredulous response to the NAACP’s letter
that they submitted to him which expressed their outrage about the rape and death of
Laura Nelson. The NAACP letter to the Governor demanded that those guilty of Laura’s
rape and the Nelson’s lynchings to be held accountable.
58
images were predominantly men. Laura Nelson may be the first image of a black woman
hung to circulate among the lynching photographs; it is the only photograph of a woman
published in the Without Sanctuary photo gallery and book. At the time of their
production these photographs were cherished as keepsakes by white southerners to
memorialize the black suffering that served as justice for a supposed crime, but more
appositely the image of a lynched black body was used as evidence of the punishment
waged upon unenslavable rights bearing black bodies that threatened white supremacy.
Photographs of lynchings circulated in white supremacist contexts to reinforce the
degradation dehumanization of black men who had won the franchise and were in the
position to capitalize on their freedom. (Raiford 2011; Goldsby 2006).
32
Among white
supremacists, and even in a tone of putative objectivity used in news reports of lynching,
these horrific murders were characterized as necessary acts that protected white
womanhood and the southern way of life. The men who carried out the lynchings were
often pictured in the foreground of a crowd of white onlookers, which numbered from a
handful to thousands of people gathered to witness the hanging. These crowds of
onlookers are generally depicted as well composed and calm which, in contrast to the
brutalized, mutilated, and lifeless body hanging from a tree or a bridge or a pole,
produces an image of white composure that reproduces a justification for white

32
Ida B. Wells-Barnett began writing vociferously against lynching after three of her
friends were arrested and lynched when they resisted white supremacist intimidation and
mob violence over their business, the People’s Grocery Company, which was becoming
quite successful. For more about Ida B. Wells see On Lynchings, a collection of her
essays and pamphlets, and Jacqueline Goldsby’s chapter “Writing ‘Dynamically: Ida B.
Wells” in A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature.
59
supremacy (Goldsby 2006; Wood 2009).
33
The barbarity of the lynching, burning,
dismembering, and corporeal souvenir keeping documented in these photographs of
ghastly public spectacles undermines rather than reinforces the logic of white composure,
modern sophistication, and superiority. As Jacqueline Goldsby argues in Spectacular
Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature, lynching was a function of modernity
in America not an aberrant anomaly (Goldsby 2006).
Jacqueline Goldsby’s volume offers a discussion of the complex relationship
between modernity and the visual and sonic reproduction of the lynching of black
bodies.
34
A Spectacular Secret examines lynching in the U.S. but steps away from the
dominant understandings and does not focus on the perpetrators of lynching atrocities.
She offers readings of the obscured history of lynching through literary texts that she
analyzes and by focusing on less well known aspects of historical figures through the
biographical narratives that she constructs, in order to produce a new relationship with

33
Jacqueline Goldsby’s central argument in Spectacular Secret about lynching
photography is that though lynching is now thought to have been conducted by aberrant,
irrational, backward white southerners, the lynch mobs were actually systematic bodies
performing a cultural logic that was a defining index of American progress and
modernity (6-7; 21-23; 26-27). Amy Louise Wood’s “Lynching Photography and the
Visual Reproduction of White Supremacy” examines the use of lynching photographs in
local southern communities and in national newspapers to justify the violent barbarous
murders of black men by lynch mobs. Though Wood’s article is an attempt to critique the
objectivity with which newspapers report lynchings, as they appear to sympathize with
white supremacist ideologies, this article often leaves the ridiculous logic and contrived
charges used to build a case for lynching a black person without sufficient interrogation.
Wood has published a book since the publication of this article, entitled Lynching and
Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940.
34
Lynching photography and modernity also arises in Leigh Raiford’s “Photography and
The Practices of Critical Black Memory” that engages Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness, in which Gilroy looks to W.E.B. Dubois’s
discussion of European Civilization and modernity as waging wars by forcing slavery
upon non-Western people in The Souls of Black Folk (Raiford 2009, 118; Gilroy 1993,
118).
60
that history (Goldsby 2006). Goldsby contends, “anti-black mob murders flourished as
registers of the nation’s ambivalences attending its nascent modernism, which we can see
on many cultural fronts” (Goldsby 2006, 24). Goldsby’s analysis of lynching
photography at the turn of the nineteenth century considers how the visual components of
lynching photographs – the lynch mob and onlookers, the brutalized black hanging body,
the rope, the tree branch or bridge – “link the deadly exercise of white supremacy to the
formations of modernity’s dystopia…” (Goldsby 2006, 221). Lynching photography
produced the conditions for people to participate in the modern luxury of looking for the
sake of looking amid other modern attractions such as world’s fairs, amusement parks,
and skyscrapers (Goldsby 2006). Another striking mark of modernity that Goldsby traces
out is the political impact that lynching photography imparted upon freedmen. Grotesque
displays of lynched black bodies communicated the unmitigated power held by white
mob rule and the inability of black citizens to protect themselves let alone enjoy the
rights of citizenship granted with the Fourteenth Amendment (Goldsby 2006). Through a
photographer’s production, marketing, and selling of their lynching photographs,
Goldsby asserts that the bodies of lynched black victims become “emblems of modernity,
or indistinct parts of an interchangeable mass (Goldsby 2006, 232). Goldsby’s concept of
the “cultural logic” of lynching disrupts the concept of the frenzied lynch mob and
replaces it with an image of a systematic body of men who use a concerted effort to
achieve their murderous revenge. Arguing the anti-black lynching did not occur in spite
of the progress of modernity Goldsby contends that this white supremacist mob violence
61
worked in concert with “America’s emergence into modernity at the start of the
Twentieth Century” (Goldsby 2006, 5; 23-24).
35

Incorporating Goldsby’s important work on lynching and photography Leigh
Raiford’s Imprisoned In A Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American
Freedom Struggle, contends that American identity is built upon consuming images of
black pain and her analysis argues that lynching is “wholly part of modernity” and was
not relegated to the southern United States. Raiford asserts as does Goldsby that lynching
photography was a sign of modern times, the images of black hanging bodies were able
travel the country and the world spreading the message of black suffering and public
death (Raiford 2009; Raiford 2011). Raiford’s analysis of lynching photographs in
Imprisoned In A Luminous Glare, offers a discussion of the way members of the anti-
lynching movement used photographs of lynched black bodies to expose the atrocities
that were taking place across the Jim Crow south and the rest of the country.
36
Raiford’s
project focuses on the manner in which photography captured images of violence against
black bodies that were leveraged in service of black liberation by activists in the anti-

35
Leigh Raiford’s Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African
American Freedom Struggle wrestles with the relationship between modernity and the
photographic representations of anti-black lynching in her chapter “No Relation to the
Facts About Lynching.” This chapter focuses on the use of lynching photography by
African American anti-lynching activists like James Weldon Johnson and Ida B. Wells.
36
I am drawing from Leigh Raiford’s article “Photography and the Practices of Critical
Black Memory” as well as the book she later published in 2011 Imprisoned in a
Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. In her
article Raiford forwards a concept of critical black memory by examining the relationship
between lynching photography and African American memory through the analysis of
visual art that incorporates lynching photography as a way to produce a different
narrative about lynching that can disrupt the putative truth with which a photograph can
be imbued. Since the publication of this article Raiford has published her book,
Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom
Struggle.
62
lynching, civil rights, and black power movements. These movements used lynching
photographs to make visible the terror waged by anti-black racist vigilante groups
(Raiford 2009; Raiford 2011). Quoting Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Raiford asserts:
lynching as a ‘regime of racial terror’ has played a formative role in ‘configuring
modern black political cultures. And the mechanical reproduction of lynching by
way of the photography has been central to the recounting and reconstitution of
black political cultures through the Jim Crow and post-Civil Rights era (Raiford
2009, 118).

Through analyses of visual art, Raiford contends “the archive of lynching photography
constitutes a site of struggle over the interpretation of the history of racial violence and
black citizenship in the United States” (Raiford 2009, 114). For example, Raiford
discusses a collage by Emory Douglass entitled “Freedom is a Constant Struggle” that
uses a photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in which a large
group of white men and women are entertained by the sight of the hanging men.
Douglass incorporates an antebellum slave advertisement for the sale of two people,
photographs of an elderly black man, and two young black boys not more than three
years old, to point to the ways that Jim Crow era lynching photography recuperates the
absolute domination and white supremacy of slavery for the enjoyment of the former
slave holding class, by drawing parallels between the lynching rope and hanging tree, the
auction block and future generations of black men (Raiford 2011). This collage conjures
up the specter of chattel slavery upon which lynching photographs produce a palimpsest.
Thinking with Raiford’s reference to Walter Benjamin’s foundational text “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and her invocation of Paul Gilroy’s
contentions that chattel slavery is a function of modernity and European civilization
alongside Goldsby analysis of the cultural logic of lynching leads this analysis to a
63
discussion of the spectral relationship that the photograph of Laura Nelson’s lynched
body has with Kara Walker’s “Mulatto Hung.” My analysis of Walker’s work and the
Laura Nelson photographs attend to the specificity of black womanhood in lynching
photographs and explore the relationality between black motherhood and the mulatto
alongside a discussion of the relationality between a piece of visual art and a photograph.
In an examination of the contention over the ontology and phenomenology of a
photograph Gunning relates, “[t]he ontological argument claims that photography not
only portrays things but participates in, shares, or appropriates the very ontology of the
things it portrays” (Gunning 2013, 214). The violent circumstances that engulf the
photograph of Laura Nelson’s lynched body haunt its mechanical and digital
reproduction. The specter of miscegenation that lingers in the photograph of Laura
Nelson’s body hanging from the bridge demands recognition. In the October 1911 issue
of The Crisis under the subject heading, LYNCHING, a brief update on the murder of
Laura Nelson and her son appear, this is the last of thirteen reported lynchings for the
month:
Nearly three months have passed since a colored woman at Okemah,
Okla., was raped by white men, and she and her fourteen-year-old son
lynched. No effort has been made to punish the lynchers (233).
37

A detailed account of this lynching is found in the narrative description that accompanies
the lynching photographs of Laura and her son in Without Sanctuary. According to this
description of events the Deputy George H. Loney was shot by L.W. when he entered
their home searching for stolen meat. In an attempt to protect her son, Laura claimed that

37
Laura Nelson’s son is reported to be fourteen years old by The Crisis (October 1911),
eighteen years old by the Omaha Daily Bee (May 26, 1911), and sixteen years old by the
New York Times (May 29, 1911).
64
she was the shooter; she was recognized as innocent weeks before she was lynched.
Laura’s husband, L.W.’s father, took responsibility for stealing the cattle and was sent to
the penitentiary. The description of the lynching reads as follows:
Next they went up to the female jail (a cage in the courthouse) and took the
woman out. She was ‘very small of stature, very black, about thirty-five years
old, and vicious.’ Mother and son were hauled by wagon six miles west of town
to a new steel bridge crossing the Canadian River ‘in a negro settlement,’ where
they were ‘gagged with tow sacks’ and hung from the bridge. ‘The rope was
halfinch hemp, and the loops were made in the regular hangman's knot. The
woman's arms were swinging at her side, untied, while about twenty feet away
swung the boy with his clothes partly torn off and his hands tied with a saddle
string. The only marks on either body were those made by the ropes upon the
necks. Gently swaying in the wind, the ghastly spectacle was discovered by a
Negro boy taking his cow to water. Hundreds of people from Okemah and the
western part of the country went to view the scene.’ (Allen et all 2000, 178-179).

While no mention of the rape appears in this account of the lynching, the specter of Laura
Nelson’s rape, the act of forced miscegenation, is an absent presence in this image.
Ida B. Wells worked to expose the inherent contradiction of white men’s
racialized sexual violence -- they raped black women while falsely accusing black men of
raping white women, then used these false accusations as justifications for lynching black
men. The sexual violence against black women and the mob violence and vicious
murders of black men instilled terror in black communities in the south and prevented
them from voting, owning property, prospering in their business, and enjoying their
freedom. Wells writes: in “Southern Horrors:”
The editor of the Free Speech has no disclaimer to enter but asserts instead that
there are many white women in the south who would marry colored men if such
an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the
clutches of the law. The miscegenation laws of the South only operated against
the legitimate union of the races, they leave the white man free to seduce all the
colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and
advances of a similar attraction to white women. White men lynch the offending
Afro American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs
to the smiles of white women (Wells 2013, 31).
65

The men who raped Laura Nelson are probably on the bridge looking down at her body
swinging over the river. The specter of miscegenation permeates this image with the
knowledge of her rape and the circumstances of her abduction from the county jail. In
the “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Benjamin contends that:
in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the
original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens,
which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And the photographic
reproduction with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or
slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision” (Benjamin
2007, 220).

Thinking of Gunning’s conception of the essence of the phantom as a terrifying presence
that exists somewhere between the living and the dead together along with Benjamin’s
discussion of what cannot be seen with the naked eyes enables me to trace the specters of
miscegenation that become detectable with the mechanical reproduction of Laura
Nelson’s lynching. Between the white supremacist onlookers -- some of whom are
responsible for raping Laura Nelson and hanging her and her son from the bridge over the
Canadian River while other’s present are complicit in her murder through their enjoyment
of the horrific occurrence -- and the lifeless bodies of Laura and her son exists the
terrifying rape that preceded her death. As the ontological contention suggests, this
photograph does not simply depict these lynchings but participates in the deathly act.
Raiford’s gesture toward Benjamin in her invocation of “the mechanical
reproduction of lynching by way of the photography” offers a way to think about the
reproduction of blackness during the modern age in which “truth claims” about blackness
and whiteness were being created, tested, and implemented through the law, social
contracts, and racist science. I am interested in what goes unsaid and unseen but remains
66
present in a photographic reproduction of a lynching (Raiford 2009, 118; 127). My
discussion of the spectral resonances that lurk in Laura Nelson’s lynching photograph
enters into a discussion about modernity and the mechanical reproduction of blackness,
which is propelled by Raiford’s incisive analysis:
Photography and lynching are at the heart of U.S. modernity, the former as one
of modernity’s triumphs, the latter as its shame; one as a key sign and symbol of
‘progress,’ and the other as a sign of atavism. Both have irrevocably mapped
modernity, defining the reaches and boundaries of progress, of technological and
industrial achievement, of social order, of racial and gender hierarchies” (Raiford
2011, 17-18).

Figure 5: Close Up Okemah Oklahoma Bridge Laura Nelson Lynching
This image produces the specter of miscegenation as well as the ghost of Laura
Nelson. Her frightening and frightened apparition exists in the uncertain place between
life and death through the photographic reproduction of her lynching. Laura’s biological
reproductive capacity, as well as the mechanical reproduction of her blackness, haunts
67
these photographs. Laura Nelson died for a crime her son was accused of, most likely
committed to avenge the rape of his mother, a murder that was precipitated by the crime
her husband confessed to committing, which doesn’t mean that he actually committed it.
The product of Laura Nelson’s reproductive labor hangs alongside her and can be seen
pictured in the wide-angle photograph of the lynching at the bridge. The mechanical
reproduction of her reproduction of blackness is a haunted compound frozen in the frame,
still yet insistent and beckoning for redemption and retribution, terrified and terrifying. I
return to Avery Gordon’s contention about haunting:
[h]aunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way…we are
notified that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present,
interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment
and repression ceaselessly directed toward us (Gordon 2008, xvi).

I attend to the frightening specters of miscegenation that sneer at the dead woman’s body
hanging from the bridge that cannot speak of the assault she suffered before her demise.
What this photograph produces, what the ghosts that live in this reproduction of violent
death insist must become visible, are the terrifying secrets of the past that are frozen in
time yet awakened in the present. The image of Laura Nelson’s body burned into film
that was captured and reproduced over a century ago still circulates to this day. Laura
Nelson is immortalized in death, forever hanging from a bridge, the persistently hung
figure puts pressure on the piece of art created by walker that represents events that
happened before Laura Nelson’s birth and death. In the reproduction of Laura Nelson’s
lynching remains a ghostly life in death, and in this ambiguous space between mortality
and immortality she is joined by Walker’s representation of the mulatto hung who lives in
the malformed not quite human shape that lurks between the bodice and the body in her
68
visual reproduction of the ghastly occurrence on the roadside between Tuscaloosa and
Greensboro on May 30
th
1866.
Kara Walker’s visual interpretation of the Assistant Commissioner’s report
demands that attention be paid to the history of lynching black women, many of whom,
like Laura Nelson, were killed for crimes that their husbands or brothers or sons were
accused of committing. Laura Nelson’s lynched body haunts Walker’s interpretation of
the archival documentation of the mulatto hung by a grapevine which performs a radical
revision of history that accounts for the rapes and deaths of black women at the hands of
white vigilantes during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era. “Mulatto Hung” consorts
with Laura Nelson’s ghost making visible this history of black women lynched. The body
in Walker’s piece, the death represented in the silhouette is that of a black woman. The
black mother is the wretched corpse in Walker’s depiction of the events. The mulatto
who ascends toward whiteness, or if this element of the work of art is interpreted as
representing the white lineage of the mulatto, the comely white lady - her diametrically
opposed counterpart -- lives on in pristine composure. The specter of miscegenation that
confuses and haunts Walker’s piece connects the violated black women’s body to the
preserved white woman’s beauty. The mulatto body hung is absent and haunts this
rendering of the historical occurrence that terrible summer in Alabama in 1866 on the
roadside. The photograph of Laura Nelson’s lynched body, which haunts Kara Walker’s
“Mulatto Hung,” raises a cinematic specter of the lynched black woman in Oscar
Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920).
38

38
Extensive and insightful analyses of Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates is conducted
by Cedric Robinson in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of
69
Lynching and Rape in Within Our Gates
Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 film, Within Our Gates, though a narrative feature film
represents an era in U.S. history in which lynching was routine and acceptable. Within
Our Gates documents the manner in which black women fell victim to lynch mobs for
crimes they did not commit but because of their relationship through reproduction, blood,
or marriage were found culpable and deserving of death by hanging. Within Our Gates
also represents the sanguine entanglement of miscegenation violence, and cinematically
binds these two archetypal acts of Jim Crow violence, rape and lynching, with scenes of a
mulatto character being sexually assaulted by a white man, and the lynching and burning
at the stake of the black mother figure.
Oscar Micheaux, who is often hailed as the first black independent filmmaker,
was if not the first “the most successful and radical Black filmmaker of the silent-movie
era” (Robinson 2007, 128).
39
Micheaux’s first feature length film, Homesteader (1919),
was in fact the first feature film produced by a black production company (Stewart 2005).

Micheaux’s second feature length film Within Our Gates (1920) has been discussed as a
film that directly responds to the racist characterizations of blackness as predatory,
bestial, lazy, and incompetent in Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith’s cinematic

Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II, 2007 and by Jacqueline
Stewart in Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Urban Modernity, 2005.

39
Comedies, romances and melodramas were being produced by black productions such
as The Lincoln Motion Picture Company and the Ebony Film Company using black
writers, directors, and producers (Robison 2007, 225-242). For more on the history of
black film production see Cedric Robinson’s Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks
and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II.
70
adaptation of Thomas Dixon novel The Clansman.
40
While a discussion of the cinematic
sparring between Griffith and Micheaux is outside of the scope of this analysis of the film
it is important to note because, as Robinson contends, Micheaux was committed to
revealing the truth about blackness in his films (Robinson 2007).
41
A man of modern
times, the notion that the truth could be revealed was not a foolhardy pursuit but rather a
tool of black survival. By contributing cinematic representations of egregious white
supremacist violence alongside black humanity at a time when images of black
buffoonery and black face minstrelsy dominated popular culture, Micheaux was inserting
the truth about white violence against black bodies that was not being reported in the
national newspapers or depicted cinematically.
42
In the context of the outrageously racist
representation of blackness circulating in popular culture in the first decades of the
twentieth century with films like Birth of a Nation, Edison’s short comedies in which

40
Jacqueline Goldsby’s discussion of lynching photography in Spectacular Fiction does
not enter the critical discussion that cinema scholars have about D.W. Griffith’s 1915
film Birth of a Nation and Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 Within Our Gates, whose lynching
scene she argues is a response to Griffith’s white supremacist blockbuster film. Goldsby
sets aside these two films in her discussion not because they are moving pictures but
because she has chosen to focus on images of lynching that are accessible to a wider
audience, 219. Cedric Robinson offers an analysis of Micheaux’s cinematic repudiation
of Griffith’s film in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 247; 256-261. In Migrating To
the Movies Jacqueline Stewart analyzes the cinematic responses to Griffith’s Birth of a
Nation that Micheaux makes with Within Our Gates.
41
In Forgeries of Memory and Meaning Robinson offers a quote by Oscar Micheaux
about the representation of truth in his work “I have always tried to make my photoplays
represent the truth, to lay before the race a cross section of its own life, to view the
colored heart from close range. My result might have been narrow at times, due perhaps
to certain limited situations which I endeavored to portray, but in those limited situations,
the truth was the predominant characteristic” (243).
42
In Cedric Robinson’s chapter “Resistance and Imitation in Early Black Cinema” in
Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 2007 he discusses comedies made by black film
companies which reproduce white supremacist violence and black buffoonery as well as
black film companies that used the medium to usurp racist characterizations and represent
black business, intelligence, and citizenry.
71
“black” characters were the butt of violent and humiliating “jokes,” as well as lynching
photography, Micheaux is using the narrative cinematic medium to resist these depictions
of black degradation, thievery, and buffoonery.
43
After a brief synopsis of the Within Our
Gates narrative this analysis will focus of two key scenes in which the specter of
miscegenation is present in which Micheaux cinematically documents the mob violence
that terrorized and killed black women and men for crimes of which they accused of but
actually innocent.
Within Our Gates is the story of Sylvia Landry, who is visiting her cousin Alma
up north and happens to be engaged to a black military man named Conrad. Alma is
jealous of the love that Sylvia has with Conrad and arranges for him to see Sylvia in a
compromising position with a white man when he returns from his post for a visit. Sylvia
is in the parlor with a white man who is making unwanted advances upon her when Alma
leads Conrad to witness this thwarted seduction. Even though Sylvia was resisting this
man’s sexual desire the incident ends the relationship. With the marriage off, Sylvia
travels to her hometown, Piney Woods, to teach at a Negro school. The school is
struggling and it will have to close because of lack of funding, so Sylvia travels back up
north to secure the funds. She has no luck in her pursuit to raise money for the school.
Despondently she sits on a bench on the sidewalk when all of a sudden a car careens and
nearly hits a young white boy. Sylvia rushes into the street and pushed the young white

43
Jacqueline Stewart opens her analysis of early black cinema spectatorship, Migrating
to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity with a description of the short film
comedy A Nigger in the Woodpile in which black characters, white men in black face, are
depicted as thieves stealing wood who in the end are blown up with dynamite hidden in
the wood pile (1-4). As Stewart notes, the phrase “a nigger in a wood pile” is meant to
index something amiss, but in the film A Nigger in the Woodpile it is also a euphemism
for a white person having black blood, here again is the specter of miscegenation lurking
in the shadows of this short film (39).
72
boy out of the way only to be struck by the car herself. The woman whose car hit Sylvia
becomes a patron to the school donating $50,000 ten times more than the original offer
she planned to give after conferring with a southern white woman who urged her to
donate nothing because she believed that negroes could not be helped and education was
wasted on them. On her trip up north Sylvia caught the eye of a Negro doctor, Dr. Vivian,
who falls in love with her. In a flashback, Sylvia’s background is revealed and this
element of the narrative will be the subject of the analysis of Micheaux’s film.
In the flashback sequence - which comes in the last ten minutes of the film - we
learn that Sylvia was raised by foster parents, a loving black couple that worked as
sharecroppers in the south. Sylvia was afforded an education, which she used to help her
foster parents with the books. One day when looking over her parent’s finances Sylvia
discovers that they have been cheated out of their income by the landowner Mr.
Gridlestone. The father figure, Mr. Landry confronts Mr. Gridlestone who threatens and
hits and kicks Mr. Landry out of the office. Mr. Landry complies but before he can leave
the room Mr. Gridlestone is shot and killed by a white man, another sharecropper,
through the window. Somehow Mr. Landry ends up holding a gun that Mr. Gridlestone
pulled on him and it looks like Mr. Landry shot Mr. Gridlestone; the “uncle tom”
character Efrem who promptly informs the townsmen that Mr. Landry killed Mr.
Gridlestone observes this rendition of the incident. Even though he was being a loyal
“darkie” Efrem is lynched by the white mob that then goes after Mr. Landry, his wife,
and their young son. Sylvia is not at home when the lynch mob arrives. The lynch mob
drags the family out to a field beats them and ties a noose around each of their necks. The
young son slips away, the mob shoots at him but he escapes on one of the lyncher’s
73
horses. Mr. Landry and his wife are strung up from the tree. This scene is one of the more
abstract scenes in the film, in that Micheaux shows a wide shot of the lynch mob holding
the couple with nooses around their necks followed by a close up on the ropes being hung
over a tree branch. Then two groups of white men are seen pulling the ropes, hoisting the
bodies, from opposite sides of the tree. Micheaux does not ever show Mr. and Mrs.
Landry’s bodies hung. He refuses to reproduce this image of the lynching of these two
innocent black people who were killed after they demanded their fair pay. The absence of
the reproduction of this lynching is a haunting presence in the film. Night falls and the
mob lights a “bonfire” in which they burn the Landry’s bodies.

Figure 6: Still from Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates Lynching Scene
In the meantime Sylvia is tracked and cornered into a home by a white man, Mr.
Gridlestone’s brother Armand. This scene, as Cedric Robinson notes in Forgeries of
Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film
Before World War II, mimics the rape scene in DW Griffith’s Birth of A Nation in which
the character Gus, a white man in black face, attempts to rape the white maiden Flora
74
who jumps from a cliff and would rather die than be touched by a black man. Micheaux’s
depiction of Sylvia fighting off the rapist, Armand Gridlestone, is a cinematic way to
refute the characterization of black men as rapists and expose a truth about the history of
miscegenation in which white men had been the predators -- not black men -- viciously
raping black women. In this quite prolonged rape scene Armand Gridlestone attacks
Sylvia, she fights him off but he is intent on ravishing her.

Figure 7: Still from Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates Rape Scene

Armand rips Sylvia’s blouse and discovers a scar on her chest. From this scar Armand
knows that this woman is his daughter. Through the use of an intertitle Micheaux
communicates:
75

Figure 8: Still from Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates Intertitle
This expositional slide and the melodramatic coincidence of Gridlestone being
Sylvia’s father, is another method of refuting Griffith’s representation of blackness as
predatory that comes in the form of a reversal in which the white man is the predator and
the “colored” girl is the victim to rape.
44
Micheaux contributes his own radical revision of
dominant history with these two scenes by depicting the reality of the sexual violence that
black women suffered at the hands of white men. The inclusion of Sylvia being his
Gridlestone’s “legitimate daughter” through this intertitle seems incongruous. The
melodramatic paternal plot twist seems highly unlikely as it suggests that the kind of man
who would violently rape a woman because she is black and rapable would risk his social
standing by marrying her black mother. As Robinson contends, Within Our Gates has the
trappings of a melodrama, the style of literary and cinematic narratives popular at the

44
In Migrating to the Movies Jacqueline Stewart quotes Toni Cade Bambara’s analysis of
the rape scene in Within Our Gates stating that Micheaux “set the record straight on who
rapes who” (Stewart 2007, 230).
76
time, but this film is actually a social drama that works to expose deep white supremacist
violence that was rampant in the south. Though improbable, the legitimate marriage plot
point opens up the issue of will contestations between mulatto daughters and their white
fathers, a thorny problematic that will be explored in the next chapter. As a piece of
social drama this narrative twist is recuperative, reparative for the many mulatto children
who were never acknowledged and certainly never had access to their rights of
inheritance.
In Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, Jacqueline
Stewart raises questions about whether this intertitle was in Micheaux’s original film or if
it was added later. The film print that is currently available to view was recovered in
Spain, and Stewart suggests that this intertitle was added for Spanish audiences. Stewart
asserts that given the publicity and press about the film that mentions “concubinage” it is
more likely that Sylvia’s mother was actually raped by Armand Gridlestone and not
married legitimately.
45
The digital reproduction that is readily available online is haunted
by the original and by the history that refutes the expository claim of legitimate birth,
which may have not been in the original film and which undermines the truth that
Micheaux was working to bring to light with this film and in this melodramatic paternal
twist.
Specters of miscegenation emerge in this film at the same time that the lynching
takes place; Sylvia’s white father, through an act of attempted rape, is reunited with his

45
Stewart cites analyses of this expository plot point in Within Our Gates in Jane
Gaines’s Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era and in Louise Bowser
and Pearl Spense’s article “Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent
Films, and His Audience” in which they each assert that this intertitle attesting to
“legitimate marriage” was not in the original print (Stewart 2007, 237).
77
daughter and provides her with the financial support she is entitled to as a bonafide
member of his lineage. This is a reparative fantasy through which the specter of
miscegenation reveals itself as a legitimate marriage that produced Sylvia, yet revealed as
a result of act of miscegenation sexual violence.
Sylvia’s black mother is also a specter in this film. Where is she? The missing
black mother is also a trope in miscegenation narratives like in the film Pinky, which will
be discussed in the following chapter as well. The absence of Sylvia’s black mother
makes her a specter in these scenes. If this rapist is Sylvia’s father did he also rape her
mother? This intertitle in Micheaux’s film explicitly states that her parents were
legitimately married, but the rape scene -- the absent black mother, and the history of
sexual violence that was reproductive of mulatto children, haunts this declaration. The
legitimate marriage plot point produces a radical revision of history in which Sylvia’s
mother was not raped but in love and married to the white father of her child, even in an
era in which anti-miscegenation laws were in violently enforced. Whether Micheaux
authorized this expository insertion of legitimacy or not, the desire to legitimate Sylvia
emerges in this version of a film that is readily available to screen through a digital
reproduction of early twentieth century celluloid.
Walker and Micheaux are both introducing radical revisions of history through
the repositioning of historical events, making the “Mulatto Hung” a woman in her
silhouette, and reversing the rape narrative by inserting a legitimate marriage between a
white man and a black woman in Within Our Gates. The death of Laura Nelson in 1911,
hung with her son, haunts Oscar Micheaux’s lynching scene of the Landry’s. As Feimster
documented in her book Southern Horrors, it was not uncommon for women to be
78
lynched for crimes that their fathers or sons or husbands were accused of committing,
crimes in which they were not actually implicated apart from their relationship with the
black men accused.
46
Micheaux’s narrative feature film represented twin horrors that
permeated the lives of black women, white lynch mobs and white rapists, from whom
there was virtually no protection.
Negative Space, Black Women, The Mulatto, and The Archive
The space that black women occupy in the archive and in the history of anti-black
and anti-miscegenation violence is actually an absence. I think of this absence as a
producing a negativity, which I call negative space, to index the expansive abyss into
which black women’s historic experiences of violence are subsumed. This engagement
with negativity looks to two significant texts by black women scholars, Saidiya
Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and Evelynn Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes and the
geometry of black female sexuality.” Conceptualizations of negativity have been
postulated in other academic quarters most notably with the anti-social turn in queer
theory and with the theoretical framework known as afro-pessimism. A leading scholar of
Afro-pessimism, Frank B. Wilderson, describes the antagonist approach as that which
raises questions about race without constructing answers to those questions. Afro-

46
According to Crystal Feimster’s appendix in Southern Horrors Women and the Politics
of Rape and Lynching, her “List of Female Victims of Lynching” includes four black
women who were lynched for crimes their father, sons, or husband committed. The
daughter of J. Hasting was lynched in 1892 in Louisiana because her father was accused
of murder, Meta Hicks was lynched in 1906 in Georgia because her husband was accused
of murder, Cordelia Stevenson was lynched in 1915 in Mississippi because her son was
accused of committing arson, and Mrs. Sarah Williams was lynched in Louisiana in 1924
because her son was accused of murder (235-239). Feimster lists Laura Nelson’s alleged
crime as murder, though there are conflicting accounts of the murder of Deputy Loney,
the report of the case found in Without Sanctuary documents that Laura Nelson took
responsibility for the crime but states that she did not actually commit the murder
(Feimster, 238; Allen et al, 179).
79
pessimistic scholarship recognizes that repression is a constant in black lives in the U.S.
47

Wilderson contends that:
…a lot of repression happens on the level of representation, which then infiltrates
the unconscious of both the black and the white person…Since these structures
are ontological, they cannot be resolved (there is no way of changing this unless
the world as we know it comes an end…); this is why the [Afro-Pessimist
relational-schema] would be seen as the only true antagonism (while other
repressive relations like class and gender would take place on the level of
conflict—they can be resolved, hence they are not ontological).
http://www.incognegro.org/afro_pessimism.html

The apocalyptic nature of Afro-pessimism can only see a reversal of course with the end
of the world as we know it, yet its attention to representation is productive for my
analysis of negative space, visual culture, and the archive of black women’s suffering.
The repression that happens through the circulation of white supremacist newspaper
reports and lynching photography is also resisted in Walker’s “Mulatto Hung” and
Micheaux’s Within Our Gates. These cultural texts antagonize the system of white
supremacist violence that produced the conditions for rampant lynching to go unchecked
for decades. Rather than await the end of time, the specters that haunt these images live in
no time, in a space of anti-time, which thrives in the negative space between death and
reproduction -mechanical, digital, and biological reproduction.
Lee Edelman’s notorious No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive takes a
psychoanalytic approach to denouncing the sanctity of the child and refutes the
expectation to reproduce as a measure of success. No Future calls for queer theory and
queer sexualities to embrace the negativity ascribed to queer non-reproductivity. In
dynamic contrast to Edelman’s strident queer negation of reproduction, this analysis of

47
For more on Afro-pessimism visit http://www.incognegro.org/afro_pessimism.html,
which offers suggested readings, interviews, and a kind of manifesto of Afro-pessimism’s
central concerns and approaches, accessed March 1, 2015.
80
negativity is routed through reproduction – biological, mechanical, and digital – finding a
way to discuss death and motherhood without looking to Freud or psychoanalysis but
reaching into the archive for the strange and fatally queer double entendre of
reproduction, visual reproductions of black mothers lynched. The image that is itself an
archival document -- the photograph of Laura Nelson’s body hanging from the bridge in
Oklahoma -- she hangs with the fruit of her reproductive labor, her son L.W. Nelson.
Jack Halberstam’s discussion of queer negativity in The Queer Art of Failure is
recuperative of a vitality that coheres within queer failure in contrast to the way that
Edelman’s conception of queer negativity is indelibly bound to the death drive
(Halberstam 2011).
48
The cultural analysis that Halberstam offers produces a kind of
relishing in failure, rumination in the very queer experiences that are inevitably tied to
failure and “unbecoming” (Halberstam 2011, 106). Halberstam holds on to a compelling
short description of life after the stock market crash of 1929 in which Quentin Crisp
describes the sky darkening with bodies of millionaires throwing themselves off of
buildings to their deaths. The dark never gave way to the light and Crisp simply “became
accustomed to the dark” (Halberstam 2011, 96). Halberstam conceives of Crisp’s
resignation to live in the dark, in a kind of negativity, which resists progress, to be
emblematic of a queer aesthetic (Halberstam 2011, 96). The negativity that Halberstam
describes is brought into conversation with black feminist theory in a way that lays the
groundwork for my conceptualization of negative space. Drawing in the diasporic loss,
postcolonial silencing, and antebellum political excess to track a queer feminist

48
Halberstam offers an incisive engagement with Edelman’s No Future in The Queer Art
of Failure that draws in the Sex Pistol’s invocation of “No future” in their song “God
Save the Queen” (106-108).
81
genealogy, Halberstam raises questions about the negation of the feminist subject
contending that:
…we must track it through territories of silence, stubbornness, self-abnegation,
and sacrifice. Ultimately we find no feminist subject but only subjects who cannot
speak, who refuse to speak; subjects who unravel, who refuse to cohere; subjects
who refuse “being” where being has already been defined in terms of a self-
activating, self-knowing, liberal subject. If we refuse to become women, we might
ask, what happens to feminism? (Halberstam 2011, 126).

What happens when the subjects are not actively refusing womanhood but are actively
being denied access to womanhood as black women were in the era of chattel slavery and
beyond? The negativity, the negative space grows up around them, subsumes them,
making them undetectable. The silence and the refusal of being, the negation, can be an
act of defiance, a weapon of the weak, but it is also an imposition hoisted upon the bodies
of black women by hegemonic white power structures which force them to be silent, to
occupy a negative space in the world, in print, in the archive, and in the cultural
imaginary of histories of violence that they have suffered, survived, and left behind
(Halberstam 2011, 88). The failure for the women whose bodies have been the object of
analysis in this chapter arrives in the form of death, of failing to survive, in the form of
absolute silence and stillness. Their failure to survive threatens to make their suffering
something that will never be registered as having happened or documented or
photographed. The “Mulatto Hung,” Laura Nelson, Mrs. Landry, they all failed to survive
yet the ghosts that will not be quiet, the apparitions which demand a reckoning become
the subjects which reach out from the darkness from the absence, from the negative
space. The specters of miscegenation, the haunting black mother figures who remain in
the space between life and death who cannot rest because of the hideous nature of the last
moments of their lives, in which they took the last breaths in their lungs would ever
82
breathe, seek out the light, make themselves known in the present because the injustice to
which they had to succumb continues. It continues.
Halberstam’s queer theory of negativity moves my conception of negative space
to meet with Saidiya Hartman’s archival negation in “Venus in Two Acts” and Evelynn
Hammonds’s concept of Black (W)holes. The negative space is a queer place where
reproduction and death meet in the photograph of Laura Nelson and her son’s lifeless
hanging bodies, in the negative space of the silhouetted form cut outs placed on a white
background, in the negative space of a motion picture in which the lynching of the
lynching scene is not captured on film, but it happened. It’s still happening.
In “Venus in Two Acts” Hartman puts into practice an aspect of the queer
negativity that Halberstam conceptualizes in her refusal to create a history where the
archive lacks in recounting the death of a young woman called Venus, who died on a
slave ship after suffering untold sexual violence and an ultimately death at the hands of
her captors (Hartman 2008, 1-2). The absence in the archive constitutes what I am calling
negative space, where a story desires to grow around and into, to fill in the gaps, to make
sense of the pieces. Hartman resists doing this because she does not want to romanticize
the past to make herself feel better about not knowing, about the loss of Venus in the
archive, and in the flesh (Hartman 2008). For Hartman the archive of Venus is a “death
sentence” (Hartman 2008, 2). Though Hartman can sense Venus’s presence she refuses to
commit words to paper because she does not want to invent a narrative that is not exact,
she does not want to make a romance out of this young girl’s rape and murder. Rather
than romanticize the specters that I pick up in the visual pieces with which this chapter
contends, I simply choose to acknowledge their presence, write that they lived and died,
83
register the injustice, and recognize the unrest. Like Wilderson I do not wish to answer
questions or find a solutions yet I do consort with the specters and let myself be led by
them into the negative space, into the darkness, where history repeats itself over and over
an over and over and over and over and over…
The negative space that subsumes black women as I have argued has a scientific
valence which can be attended to by turning to Evelynn Hammonds “Black (W)holes and
the Geometry of Black ‘Female Sexuality.” Hammonds draws upon her training as a
physicist to discuss the metaphor of a black hole, which was used by cultural theorist
Michelle Wallace to describe how black women’s creative expression is made invisible.
Hammonds’s explanation is instructive in shaping the concept of negative space that I am
forwarding here (Hammonds 1997, 149). Because a black hole cannot be seen by the
naked eye, it is detected by the impact that it has on the stars that surround it. Hammonds
relates the science of this metaphor to the specificity of black women’s sexuality.
In the case of black female sexualities, this implies that we need to develop
reading strategies that allow us to make visible the distorting and productive
effects these sexualities produce in relation to more visible sexualities
(Hammonds 1997, 149).

Hammond’s conception of black (w)holes tacitly calls for an archival approach in which
what is not readily visible can be attended to through strategic reading practices.
Hammonds follows this immediately with a resistance to advocating visibility as a
remedy for the lack of recognition and obfuscation of the heterogeneity within black
women’s sexualities and modes of creative expression. She asks the question, “what is it
like inside a black hole?” then looks to geometry for the answer (Hammonds 1997, 151).
The question is more generative than the answer for this discussion of black (w)holes and
negative space. The occupation of the negative space of the black hole puts pressure on
84
the light sources around it, through its relationality with light, the black hole is perceived.
Unlike Crisp, who relinquished his desire to find the light, the light finds the black hole.
The negative space and the specters that swirl around in it haunt the images and histories
of black women lynched. These women share the negative space in the archive, in a
photograph, a silhouette, and in an early piece of black cinema, becoming perceptible by
the knowledge that is produced around it. The space that mulatto figures hold in the post-
civil war southern imaginary was forced to recede and disappear, as their corporeality
was evidence of white supremacist hypocrisy, racist violence, and paternity.
Though Hartman refuses to construct a narrative of Venus to recover or re-present
an imagined past Walker builds a visual story to fill in history and add to the archive to
build light around to negative space, to draw attention to the place of suffering and loss
that has been undetected and unattended for centuries. Black maternal figures like Laura
Nelson in the post war era and early decades of Jim Crow occupy a negative space. The
resistance to domination that their reproductive bodies signify outside of regime of
chattel slavery represents a lack, a loss of capital and reduction of “increase,” their
wombs can no longer be mined, therefore they too must be beaten back into negative
space. Micheaux, making films which comment on the historical moment of which he is
an active participant, constructs a narrative that throws light onto the negative space of
black women’s murder, lynching, suffering, and dying.
Walker’s piece constructs the negative space on the canvas; she pulls the history
out of the miscellany, the last pages on the last roll of microfilm in the Alabama 1866
publications in the National Archive. The relegations of these horrific crimes to the
miscellaneous roll, points to the displacement of black suffering. There was no place to
85
put the murders and lynchings, no catalogue for the death, it was in excess of the
Freedman’s Bureau duties -- this was not its specified purpose. It is almost as if the
violence was a surprise to the Assistant Commissioners tasked with providing supplies to
the newly freed slaves and the destitute white refugees. The specters that haunt the
images of black women lynched direct our attention to the terror, the vulnerability, and
the vengeance -- the darkness of an era that promised so much light after centuries of
bondage.
As Avery Gordon contends in Ghostly Matters:
Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we
separate the past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear
when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or
repressed or blocked from view… Haunting is a frightening experience. It always
registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by social violence done in the
past or in the present (Gordon 2008, xvi).

I am attending to the ghosts of black women lynched whose unrest makes visible the
injustices of the past, which are still in process. The deaths of black women lynched over
a century ago haunt us in the second decade of the new millennium, in a moment when
sanctioned black death by state violence is rampant in cities and counties across the
United States. The murders of the unarmed black men Eric Garner and Mike Brown who
were killed by members of the police force that have gone unindicted, unprosecuted, and
unpunished, are being protested nationwide. The deaths of black women by police have
gone virtually unnoticed. Rekia Boyd was killed by a Chicago police officer in 2012 as
she sat in her car. The officer who was investigating a disturbance in the area pulled out
his gun to shoot his intended target, the black man who accompanied her, the policeman
shot her in the head. Rekia died. She was unarmed. In Detroit in 2010 a seven-year-old
girl, Aiyana Jones, was shot by a police officer that raided her home on May 16
th
looking
86
for suspect who did not live at that address. This raid was being filmed for a reality TV
show, First 48. Seven-year-old Aiyana was asleep on the couch with her grandmother
when she was shot and killed by the police. The remembrance of the lives and deaths of
Rekia and Aiyana are not made to detract from the national #I Can’t Breathe and #Black
Lives Matter movements that were propelled by collective outrage over the police killing
black men. I call attention to the deaths of Rekia and Aiyana at the hands of police
officers because they are not registered in our collective archive of pain; they have
slipped into the negative space. These specters of black women lynched are the light that
makes visible the black hole of black women’s violent deaths. The specter of black
women lynched in an era dominated by the lynching of black men haunts the
contemporary moment when the deaths of black men by the police make the deaths of
black women recede into the shadows. In a moment when uncheck policed violence is
reaching a boiling point in the U.S., the specters who agitate the negative space would
scream if they could. The gendered, racial violence pushes the deaths of these women
into the negative space and there they swirl unnoticed, not fought over, joining the others
who repeat this history over and over and over and over and over and over and over and.

87
APPENDICES
Appendix A: Letters Received. July 1865-October 1867; Record Group 105; Roll M809;
National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

88

Appendix B: Letters Received. July 1865-October 1867; Record Group 105; Roll M809;
National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
89

(Page 1)
Appendix C: Letters Received. July 1865-October 1867; Record Group 105; Roll M809;
National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

90

(Page 2)
Appendix C: Letters Received. July 1865-October 1867; Record Group 105; Roll
M809; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

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Chapter Two
Pinky and the Big House: The Spectrality of Black Motherhood in
Miscegenation Will Contests

Miss Em loathed the sight of her, banished her, because she was so near to being white.
Miss Em was shamed that she existed, shamed to see the secret sin of her own race
walking openly for all to recognize
– Quality, Cid Ricketts Sumner, 1947
1

There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at the idea of an
indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races…
--- Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Springfield, 1857

The putatively inherent nature of white disgust and shame about miscegenation,
and those bodies that are products of miscegenation, distorts and obfuscates the long
history of miscegenation that is imbricated with the new world project that is the United
States of America. Those bodies assigned the “mulatto” racial taxonomy are made to bear
white disgust and shame as they embody the dreaded mixing of white and black races.
Disgust and shame with miscegenation and mulatto people affords white men, who
participate in and benefit from the systemic rape of black women, the ability to ignore
and deny their pathological desire that has produced the culture of miscegenation during
U.S. chattel slavery which continued into the Jim Crow era and is the basis for racial
formation in this country.
My cultural and legal analysis in this chapter attends to the presence of black
women’s reproductive bodies in historical narratives of miscegenation that appear
sparingly in the literature and legal history that I examine. The estrangement of black
women from their daughters is a recurring theme in the legal cases examined here and in

1
This is an excerpt from the novel Quality written by Cid Ricketts Sumner, also known
as Cid Ricketts (1947). The passage from which this excerpt was extracted will be
analyzed in this chapter.
92
the cultural imaginary contributed to with texts written by white authors and produced by
white filmmakers. The inclusion of black mothers in narratives of Negro inheritance of
white property threatens to expose the reproductive theft and systemic rape of black
women during chattel slavery and Reconstruction. My analysis aims to demonstrate that
the specters in anti-miscegenation will contests, are black mothers. By engaging with
nodes of affect that become perceptible by examining the bits and shards of history that
document black women’s reproductive bodies, this chapter lays bare the legacy and
hypocrisy of the culture of miscegenation.
By examining the racial hierarchies and legal history present in Cid Rickett’s
novel Quality (1947) and the 20
th
century Fox adaptation Pinky (1949) and by centering
black women’s reproduction in my analysis, this chapter demonstrates the manner in
which black women’s reproductive lives haunt the narratives and the legal decisions that
erase them from the cultural and legal record. I trace the history of anti-miscegenation
legislation and anti-black ideology that emerges through the will contest at the heart of
the Jim Crow era novel Quality and the film adaptation Pinky set in rural Mississippi. My
analysis of Pinky and Quality is informed by two legal cases with decidedly different
outcomes, Mitchell v Wells (1859) and The Maggie A. Ross case (1921). I consider how
the legacy of southern family members contesting the wills of white testators, after
learning that property has been bequeathed to Negro inheritors, shapes the cultural
landscape of the Pinky/Quality narrative.
2
Ultimately, I contend that black women’s
reproduction, sexuality, and sexual violence rest at the center of this narrative, despite the

2
The legal term testator refers to a person who has written a last will and testament. The
term testatrix can be used to refer to a woman who has executed a will.
93
erasure of black mother figures and the absence of any discussion of white men’s sexual
violence against black women in the Pinky/Quality narrative.
By focusing on black women’s reproduction in historical legal disputes as well as
those represented in cultural texts, I intend to listen to and look for aspects of history that
are overlooked or misconstrued. My focus on legal battles over white landowners
bequeathing property to Negro inheritors draws together legal histories of anti-
miscegenation in the south with literary criticism that problematizes the legacy of anti-
black inheritance judgments, an approach that enables me to disrupt the instantiation of
dominant narratives of slavery. The violence inherent in the routine rape of enslaved
black women by white men of the slave holding class, that was reproductive of “mulatto”
children, is not only sexually violent but also forces a violent silencing and erasure of
black women in the archive of chattel slavery. I aim for this analysis to unearth the
presence of black mothers and their children about whom secrets, lies, and obfuscation
distort the history in which they lived. This historical context supports my argument
about black women’s reproduction by showing how the system of racial hierarchy that
structured the Jim Crow south was dependant upon black women’s reproduction and how
property inheritance is an arena in which the culture of miscegenation is made salient, in
part through the erasure of the system of racialized sexual violence which sustained it.
In the novel Quality the insidious nature of the culture of miscegenation which
protected white supremacy and exploited black women’s reproductive bodies is
described, but from a segregationist’s perspective. Reading the novel and viewing the
film with attention to black women’s reproduction exposes the culture of miscegenation.
The willful blindness to and silence surrounding the legacy of sexual violence that
94
reproduced white men’s “colored” daughters with white skin exemplifies mechanisms of
the culture of miscegenation. Another facet of the culture of miscegenation that emerges
in the Pinky/Quality narrative and the will contests that are examined in this analysis
revolves around open secrets and the shame that a miscegenated body has to absorb. The
culture of miscegenation manages to redirect condemnation away from the rapist and the
system that protects and onto the miscegenated figure that suffers as the symbol of racial
contamination.
Quality/Pinky Narrative

Figure 9: Quality Cover Art (1947) Figure 10: Pinky Movie Poster (1949)
Cid Rickett’s story Quality was first published in The Ladies Home Journal in
1945, the novel of the same name was published in 1947 and in 1949 Twentieth Century
Fox released the film adaptation of Rickett’s novel renamed Pinky. The film starred
Jeanne Crane as Pinky, Ethel Waters as Aunt Dicey, and Ethel Barrymore as Miss Em.
Although the story has been told in three different mediums the central narrative themes
95
remain in all of the iterations. When Pinky was twelve her grandmother, Aunt Dicey, sent
her up north for school. Aunt Dicey put Pinky in the colored section of the train for her
journey. There was a conductor shift change and when the next conductor found Pinky in
the colored section he moved her to the white section, from that moment forward she
began to pass as white. This backstory is explained in the literary narrative but not
visualized in the film. The film opens in 1944 when Pinky is an adult woman who has
just come back home to rural Mississippi after graduating from nursing school in Boston,
where she fell in love with a white doctor. Pinky fled Boston because of the classic tragic
mulatto bind, she couldn’t tell him and she couldn’t not tell him about the black blood
coursing through her veins. Upon her return to Mississippi Pinky learns that the matriarch
of the plantation, Miss Em, is deathly ill. Aunt Dicey hopes that Pinky will use her
training as a graduate nurse to bring Miss Em back to health. As we soon discover, Pinky
hates Miss Em and refuses to care for her. After much consternation, Pinky finally
relents, puts on her nurse’s uniform then heads up to the big house from Aunt Dicey’s log
cabin shack to care for Miss Em.

Figure 11: Pinky Film Still Pinky and Dicey washing clothes
96
In the novel Chester, the young white doctor, travels south to finds Pinky. He
manages to track her down and is confused when he finds her living in Aunt Dicey’s little
shack. Pinky painfully admits, “what she really is” to him -- an oft-repeated phrase in the
narrative that is incidentally the moral of the story. Chester is shocked and disgusted but
is willing to love Pinky anyway. Pinky sees that he is disgusted by her and tells him to
leave, and he retreats in a hurry. In the film the young white doctor’s name is Tom. Tom
travels south to find Pinky working as a washer-woman alongside her Granny, his love is
not shaken when he discovers what she really is, he stands by Pinky and still wants to
make her his wife even though she is colored. Pinky agrees to go back north with Tom,
but after she has seen Miss Em through her illness. When Miss Em dies she leaves Pinky
the Big House in her will. The will is contested by Miss Em’s sister in law, Miss Wooley.
A courtroom drama ensues and even though she is colored Pinky comes out the winner,
the Big House is hers. In the film, Pinky tells Tom to go back up north without her
because her place is with her people. Reluctantly, Tom leaves. Pinky opens a school for
colored girls in what used to be Miss Em’s plantation mansion, The Big House.
Two significant black men characters that appear in the novel are erased or
diminished in the film. Arch Naughton, a black militant agitator who attempts to
radicalize Pinky does not appear in the film at all. Dr. Canaday, a black Canadian doctor
who worked with Pinky in nursing school comes south to Mississippi in the midst of the
trial to find Pinky and work with her down south. Pinky and Dr. Canaday make plans to
convert the Big House into a hospital for colored people. Pinky begins to fall in love with
the black doctor, a move that depicts her acceptance of “who she really is” and of her
place among her people. The Dr. Canaday character is quite diminished in the film. There
97
is no burgeoning love story between Pinky and Dr. Canaday, in fact Dr. Canaday only
makes a brief appearance in the film and in this scene he mentions that he is married
which dashes any promise of a love affair between them.
There are different endings to the Pinky/Quality narrative in each of the three
versions of the story. The Ladies Home Journal narrative ends with Pinky winning the
lawsuit and being allowed to use Miss Em’s home as a hospital for colored people. The
novel Quality ends with Pinky being granted the inheritance of Miss Em’s mansion then
before nightfall a mob of white vigilantes sets the Big House ablaze. The white leaders of
the town, the judge and the Doc Joe, console Pinky and promise to raise money to erect a
hospital for colored people that Pinky and Dr. Canady can run together, as husband and
wife. Kazan’s film adaptation closes with Pinky wearing her nursing outfit while ringing
a bell on the lawn of the school located in what used to be Miss Em’s Big House.
Quality is not the first novel to grapple with the issue of inheritance across the
color line. A major plot point in Charles Chestnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of
Tradition hinges on a sisterly betrayal over inheritance. In Chestnutt’s novel a white
daughter knows that her now deceased father provided for his other daughter, her mulatto
sister, in his will. The white daughter’s knowledge is the only remnant of the mulatto
daughter’s inheritance because the will was thrown into the fireplace and destroyed. In
late nineteenth and early twentieth century literary melodramas the figure of the mulatto
was used to expose the sanguine entanglements that bound white and black people to the
same bloodline. Novels like The Marrow of Tradition, Clotel, or the President’s
Daughter, and Iola Leroy expose the secrets of sexual violence and the hypocrisy of anti-
miscegenation laws that officially made interracial sex illegal. These novels describe a
98
shadow culture populated by white men, many of whom wrote the anti-miscegenation
laws, in which black women were routinely raped and bore “mulatto” children as a
result.
3

In the realm of cinema, the ubiquitous film on the subject of the tragic mulatto is
Imitation of Life, an adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s novel (1933). Kazan’s Pinky was
preceded by John M. Stahl’s black and white version of Imitation of Life (1934) that was
later remade in Technicolor with Douglas Sirk’s 1959 melodramatic cinematic adaptation
of Hurst’s novel. Unlike Pinky, Imitation of Life includes the black mother in the
narrative who quickly explains away any suspicion that her ostensibly white daughter is
mulatto by mentioning that the young girl’s father was a very light skinned black man.
4

Rather than be excised from the record like Pinky’s mother is, the black mother in this
narrative disappears into the stereotype of the mammy who has no desire in this world
but to serve her white mistress and have a fabulous funeral. The mulatto daughters in
Pinky and Imitation of Life both face the dilemma of not being able to maintain a
relationship with the white men that they have fallen in love with because their black
blood gets in the way. In Imitation of Life the daughter’s name changes from Peola
(1934) to Sarah Jane (1959) yet their struggles remain the same. Peola and Sarah Jane act
out their rage with the stifling racial hierarchy that subjugates them, by being self

3
William Wells Brown published Clotel or The President’s Daughter in 1853 considered
to be the first novel by an African American writer. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted was
written by Frances Harper and published in 1893.
4
My contention is that the black mother character in Imitation of Life is ashamed of the
sexual violence that left her an unwed mother and has invented the story her daughter
having a very light skinned father to protect her reputation and provide a pathway for her
daughter to escape the plight of the tragic mulatto. As the melodramatic tragic mulatto
tradition would have it, her daughter could not escape her destiny in which the spoils of
whiteness and love remained perpetually out of reach, the pain of this reality made her
detest her mother and the blackness that she bequeathed her.
99
destructive and furious with their black mother in ways that Pinky cannot. Peola and
Sarah Jane do not accept their place as inferior, they do not wish to be servants to white
wealth as their mother does but they do choose to leave home and pass for white. Pinky,
who returns home after having passed as white, relinquishes the fight and accepts her
position at the bottom of the racial hierarchy as her birthright. Her grand finale is
stoically taking her place as a black woman who is uniquely qualified, because of her
near whiteness and her training as a graduate nurse, to uplift her people out of degeneracy
and into the light.
Pinky was produced during the Post WWII era in which films like Gentleman’s
Agreement (1947) and Lost Boundaries (1949) also reveal elements of the racial tensions
that coursed through the U.S. during this era.
5
Pinky has been discussed as one of two
passing films of 1949 in Gayle Wald’s Crossing the Color Line in which she theorizes
the visual aspect of passing and the cinematic double take. Judith E. Smith’s Visions of
Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960 offers
the historical context in which Kazan’s Pinky was produced, including a discussion of
Rickett’s novel. Smith’s discussion of Quality and the initial story that appeared in The
Ladies Home Journal contemplates Rickett’s intentions as a southern woman whose
narrative champions segregation and condemns interracial love relationships. While
passing is an important aspect of the narrative and the Post-World War II context of the
film is significant, Wald and Smith’s work cover that ground expertly. My discussion of
these texts builds upon their scholarship by delving into anti-miscegenation legal history

5
20
th
Century Fox Executive Producer Darryl Zanuck, who produced both Gentlemen’s
Agreement (1947) and Pinky (1949), links these films because they both contend with
race but Zanuck thinks Pinky pushes the racial boundaries further and is therefore more
effective (USC script notes).
100
of Mississippi and accounting for the subjugated knowledge to be found in inheritance
disputes that cross the color line.
In Power/Knowledge Foucault describes subjugated knowledge as “a whole set of
knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently
elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required
level of cognition or scientificity” (Foucault 1980, 82). The knowledge possessed by
black mothers who have given birth to mulatto daughters, as a result of rape or coerced
sexual relationships, is located on a subterranean level not only because of the racialized
gendered hierarchy that inscribes them as low down but because their knowledge
threatens the system of plantation paternalism that makes them vulnerable to rape and
torture on a daily basis.
6
The judicial system in southern courts that have denied
inheritance to mulatto children of white testators participates in the burial of subjugated
knowledge about the children that white men have had with black women and their desire
to provide for them, despite their mulatto children’s illegitimacy.
My understanding of legal histories of anti-miscegenation legislation and judicial
decisions at the state level is informed by texts that convey the racial, familial, and
national implications of significant anti-miscegenation legal disputes and anti-

6
Angela Davis’s “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,”
Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South and
Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery
are seminal texts which focus on the particular ways that gendered power dynamics
structured black women’s oppression during chattel slavery. In brief, plantation
paternalism was a system in which white slave owners believed that because black people
were naturally inferior they needed to be provided for as if they were children because
they were inept to handle the task on their own. Slave owners imagined, as a way to
justify slavery, that enslaved people benefited from being held in bondage.
101
miscegenation legislative acts.
7
I approach the history of black women’s reproductive
capacity and rape during chattel slavery and the legal battles over property inheritance
across the black-white color line from the antebellum period to the Jim Crow era, with an
analytic framework that joins together literary and social theorists. The gap and the space
between life and death, between preservation and being forgotten is theorized by
Hortense Spillers who looks critically at the place of black women in the historical
American imaginary and in feminist discourse. Spillers contends that black women in
narratives of chattel slavery occupy the space between what is human and not human, and
black woman’s representation in cultural texts demonstrates to the social group that she
populates the realm of the not human (Spillers 2003, 155).
8

In her discussion concerned with the difficulties of writing about history with a
woefully incomplete archive Saidiya Hartman acknowledges that “narrating counter-
histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of present, by
which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the ex-slave, a
condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of
violence” (Hartman 2008, 4). Hartman’s ruminations on the archive recover something
radically different than dominant historical narratives of slavery are willing to

7
The particular judicial landscape of antebellum anti-miscegenation laws and inheritance
has been addressed in Bernie Jones’s Fathers of Conscience: Mixed Race Inheritance in
the Antebellum South in which she explicates the intimate details of will contestations
that expose sexual relations between white men of the slave holding class and enslaved
black women, as well as the legal entanglements that confound manumission and rights
of inheritance. Ariela Gross’s What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in
America, covers a wide breadth in her analysis of law suits brought to prove a litigant’s
whiteness from the colonial era to the contemporary moment that focuses on the tension
produced by indicators of race like blood, aesthetics, and comportment used to
demonstrate the putative morality and civility of whiteness.
8
Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” 2003.
102
acknowledge. When it comes to preserving the lives and experiences of an enslaved black
girl Hartman likens the archive to a tomb, or an inventory, or an asterisk, or “a few lines
about a whore’s life” (Hartman 2008, 2). The approach that I take to contend with the
barrenness in the archive of black women’s experiences during chattel slavery slips into
the places that Hartman will not; I use a theories of spectrality and affect to address the
archival emptiness.
My contribution to the discourse of black women’s ontology, reproduction,
sexuality, and suffering during chattel slavery and beyond draws upon Avery Gordon’s
theory of spectrality in order to account for the concomitant presence and erasure of black
women’s reproductive bodies in the archive. Gordon describes haunting as “an animated
state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known,
sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely” (Gordon 2008, xvi). The figure of
black reproductivity in which rape and exploitation cohere is the animating ghostly agent
that propels my analysis of historical and cultural representations of will contests between
white testators and black or “mulatto” inheritors. An examination of black women’s
reproduction has the potential to reinforce the ubiquity of heterosexuality. As a way to
attend to the non-normativity and queerness of black women’s sexuality, and to support
my conceptualization of black women’s spectral presence in the archive, I integrate queer
theories of temporality into my theoretical framework.
9
In her essay about temporality in
black queer films, Kara Keeling describes two impulses that the films she analyzes

9
Heather Love’s Feeling Backward, Jack Halberstam’s In A Queer Time and Place, and
Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds all impact my discussion of temporality and approach to
the archive.
103
respond to in their organization of time.
10
Keeling’s approach is consonant with ways that
Foucault and Gordon imagine that studies of the past can reveal something constructive
about the present. I follow the method that these studies undertake in examining the
manner in which history is recorded, an approach that exposes something about the era in
which a legal judgment was made or a cultural text was written (Keeling 2009).
Keeling’s discussion of cinematic organization of time and attention to the past as
engendering a queer visibility is instructive for my approach to black women’s
reproductive bodies in the archive of chattel slavery, anti-miscegenation legislation, and
representations of black inheritance of white property. Keeling’s interest in the visibility
of the queer subject in the past that emerges in contemporary films informs my analysis
of black women’s reproductive bodies. My approach to the archive does not wish to
impose contemporary logics of sexuality, agency, and desire upon women who survived
the sexual violence of chattel slavery and the Jim Crow era, rather my attention to history
intends to demonstrate ways that the past changes upon reflection and is re-imagined in
subsequent eras. Keeling’s treatment of the disappearance of M, a subject in Daniel
Peddle’s documentary film The Aggressives, directs my understanding of the erasure of
black women’s bodies in historical and cultural narratives of inheritance disputes.
Keeling contends:
The fact that s/he must disappear from the film’s narrative highlights the ways
that a critical apparatus predicated on making visible hidden images, sociocultural
formations, ideas, concepts, and other things always drags what interests it onto
the terrain of power and the struggle for hegemony. On this terrain, the benefits of
visibility are unevenly distributed (Keeling 2009, 576).

10
Kara Keeling discusses the politics and temporality of queer visibility in the films
Brother to Brother, Looking for Langston, and The Aggressives in her article “Looking
For M-- Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future.”
104
The benefits of making visible the reproductive lives of black women who are often only
named in lists of property and in farm books along with their children are recuperative,
yet reading the archive for narratives of women whose existence absorbs all of what is
not human and immoral risks imposing my desire for their personal triumphs, sexual
agency, and the possibility of sexual pleasure upon them (Spillers 2003, 155). I bear these
risks in mind as I enter the archive because I take seriously Toni Morrison’s contention
that, “the past is not done and it is not over, it’s still in process, which is another way of
saying that when it’s critiqued, analyzed, it yields new information about itself.”
11
I enter
the archive recognizing that the subjugated knowledge of black women’s reproductive
lives can only be perceived by looking into the past with a willingness to hear its stories.
Rape and the Culture of Miscegenation in Quality/Pinky
The narrative arch in the Quality stories and the cinematic adaptation Pinky are
essentially the same but the secrets surrounding Pinky’s conception that are found in the
short story are only hinted at in the novel. In the film adaptation the plot points that
would explain how Pinky is “colored” but looks white were completely excluded. In The
Ladies Home Journal publication of Quality Pinky’s blood relation to a paternal figure of
the Big House is made explicit. In subsequent iterations of this narrative, the novel and

11
I opened this manuscript with a quote by Toni Morrison that I excerpted from a
commencement address entitled “Be Your Own Story” that she delivered in 2004 at
Wellesley College:
“And besides, contrary to what you may have heard or learned, the past is not done and it is not
over, it’s still in process, which is another way of saying that when it’s critiqued, analyzed, it
yields new information about itself. The past is already changing as it is being reexamined, as it is
being listened to for deeper resonances. Actually it can be more liberating than any imagined
future if you are willing to identify its evasions, its distortions, its lies, and are willing to unleash
its secrets.”

105
later the film, Pinky’s parentage becomes increasingly more nebulous. The absence of
Pinky’s father and mother in the narrative allows for the instances of sexual violence
inflicted upon the black women in Pinky’s family to be ignored. Yet Pinky’s presence,
her body and her blood, her being named in Miss Em’s will, and her Grandmother’s
blackness open up a transgenerational history of rape that is silenced with the novel’s
vagaries and film’s narrative choices. The initial version of Rickett’s narrative in the
Ladies Home Journal explicitly addresses the sexual violence that gave Pinky her skin
color and explains why she would be entitled to inherit the white testatrix’s property; in
Quality the explanation becomes more oblique and in Pinky the issue is left completely
unaddressed.
The print layout of “Quality” in the Ladies Home Journal demonstrates exactly
whom the intended readers of this story are, with advertisements for baby food,
appliances, and products that promise to make housewives more appealing to their
husbands. On the second page of the story in the Ladies Home Journal above the small
typeface arranged in three columns is a sentence that looks as if it has been handwritten
in cursive: “Why did she look so much like little Miss Lucy that she had to be kept out of
sight? Why was the big house forbidden to her? And the love of a man like Chester?”
The short story version of “Quality” answers these questions and exposes how
commonplace the culture of miscegenation was in the south. Ricketts was not attempting
to hide the practice of white men raping or coercing black women to have sex with them
but rather accepting this as a fact of southern plantation life. Despite the uneven power
dynamics and the violence suffered by the black women in this narrative, the figure of the
mulatto who can pass for white is the one who is blamed and the one who is expected to
106
remedy the bind of her racial ambiguity. The Ladies Home Journal banked on the
sensational nature of Rickett’s story about the betrayal of a southern matriarch that
conjures up the nostalgia of plantation life, which is reminiscent of Gone With the Wind
(1939), to appeal to their 1940’s readership. Rickett’s story represented a white southern
woman’s point of view to the ladies reading The Ladies Home Journal, and reproduced
an idea of white women’s superior quality as exhibited through Miss Em’s benevolence
to Aunt Dicey and the forgiveness and charity she offered Pinky.

Figure 12: Ladies Home Journal Figure 13: Ladies Home Journal
Title Page “Quality” Advertisements “Quality” story
107

Figure 14: Ladies Home Journal “Quality” story handwritten questions

Despite the point of view of white southern charity that drives the story, my
analysis of the narrative catches the excess, the unintended consequences of exposing the
culture of miscegenation. A conversation that Pinky has with her Grandmother, Aunt
Dicey, printed in the Ladies Home Journal publication mentions slavery, the master of
the plantation, and Pinky’s mother and father in a way that links these set of
circumstances to Pinky’s birth. Pinky asks her Granny to tell her about slavery and Aunt
Dicey tells Pinky that she was born just before freedom came and that she would rather
not stir up the past. Aunt Dicey admits that Pinky’s question does remind her of Mr.
108
Ham, the master of the plantation who passed away before Pinky’s time. Pinky watches
her Granny do the laundry and asks her whom her father is, to which her Grandmother
admits that no one knows. The only information the Aunt Dicey has about Pinky’s
conception is that Pinky’s mother went away to Chicago, came back home, had Pinky,
and died in childbirth.
12
The conversation about Pinky’s mother and father ends there in
the short story but about halfway through the novel Quality Mr. Ham, Miss Em’s
husband, surfaces.
The discussion of the sexual violence along Aunt Dicey’s maternal line in the
novel is serpentine. When Pinky asks Aunt Dicey about the circumstances of her birth
Aunt Dicey can only describe how Pinky’s mother died in childbirth. She offers no
information about Pinky’s father. When Pinky asks Aunt Dicey to tell her more about her
mother Aunt Dicey, in a round about way, lets Pinky know that she was raped by Mr.
Steve, an overseer on Miss Em’s plantation. Aunt Dicey’s husband killed Mr. Steve by
“accidentally” dropping a bale of hay on him. We are led to believe that Mr. Steve is
Pinky’s Grandfather. Then one day when Pinky and Aunt Dicey are cleaning the log
cabin shack, Aunt Dicey laments over Miss Em having to suffer the deaths of her
husband, Mr. Ham, and her young daughter Lucy. It becomes clear from Pinky’s
reaction to Aunt Dicey’s recollection that Pinky has a deep animosity toward Miss Em.
Pinky finally confesses to Aunt Dicey that she has refused to enter the Big House and
nurse Miss Em back to health because when she was six or seven years old Miss Em was
cruel to her. Miss Em saw Pinky in the yard of the Big House and demanded that she
leave at once, never to return again. Aunt Dicey explains to Pinky that Miss Em was only

12
Ricketts, “Quality” in The Ladies Home Journal, 82;84.
109
acting out of sorrow because when Pinky was young she looked just like Miss Em’s
daughter Lucy, so much so that she “might have been Miss Lucy” (Ricketts 1947, 100).
The striking resemblance that Pinky bears to Miss Em’s daughter Lucy and the mystery
of Pinky’s paternity indicate that Pinky’s father may have been Miss Em’s husband, Mr.
Ham. I have included a passage from the novel Quality that illustrates the impact of the
clandestine sanguine entanglements on Pinky, who suffers the burden of shame, and Miss
Em who imposes it upon her.
“The japonica tree, it was covered with buds and there was just one flower that had
opened, one perfect flower. Pure white. I’ve never seen anything so white. I was reaching
up to pull it down – just to look at, not to take for my own. I knew better than that. I knew
it was not meant for me. Then I saw her on the gallery. She was in a long black dress,
and her hair and her eyes were black, and her face was white as the japonica. She just
stood there on the gallery with one hand – and it was white, too --- pressed against her
side. She had been watching me all the time, waiting for me to do something wrong.
When she saw me looking at her, she pushed at the air with her hands, as if she were
pushing away something horrible and --- and unclean. ‘Go! Go away from here!’ she
cried. That was all she said, but there was something about the way she said it---” Pinkey
shivered – “and as I ran I heard her calling you.
13
‘Dicey, Dicey, if I ever have to look at
the child again, I’ll send you away. I’ll---’ I don’t know what else she said, but I
remember her voice. I can hear her now.” Pinkey was silent at last. Then she added, “I
think I have been hearing her all my life.”
Granny was shaking her head, making little deprecating sounds. “Hmm-mm, and I
never thought you noticed nothing! But child, you can’t hold that against Miss Em. It
were only because you put her in the mind of little Miss Lucy. Anybody what lose a child
is bound to get a pain in her heart when she see another one about that size. That’s all it
were. Though Lord knows there was a time when you was little when you did kind of
favor Miss Lucy. And Miss Em, look like it were pure torment to her, seeing you well
and strong and her little darling dead and gone these many year. That’s why I kept you
out of her sight. And that day you remember, it was the pain in her heart make her speak
so. It ain’t right to hold it against her.”
Pinkey turned away, all her body stiff and stubborn. This was only part of the
truth that Granny was telling. She herself had read the whole of it that day on Miss Em’s
pale face though only now could she interpret it. Miss Em loathed the sight of her,
banished her, because she was so near to being white. Miss Em was shamed that she

13
In the novel the protagonist’s name is spelled “Pinkey.” In the press materials for the
film the title character’s name is spelled “Pinky.”
110
existed, shame to see the secret sin of her own race walking openly for all to
recognize.”
14

15

Figure 15: Pinky Film Still Pinky on the balcony of the Big House

Ricketts uses not so subtle symbolism in this passage to describe Pinky’s state of
contamination. Pinky recoiling from touching the perfectly beautiful white Japonica
flower, Miss Em’s rage couched in the stark contrast of a black dress, white skin, black
hair and black eyes, and the Garden of Eden reference all exemplify an ideology of
contamination that is produced by the culture of miscegenation and imposed upon the
miscegenated figure to protect the façade of paternalism. The confinement that Pinky
experiences as a child spatially illustrates what her blood symbolizes to the community.

14
This passage is found in Ricketts’s novel Quality 1945, 103-104.
15
This is a film still from Pinky the moment after Miss Em dies. Pinky, wearing her
white nurses uniform stands on the balcony of the Big House looking out on the spot
from which Miss Em once banished her. The cinematic reversal compounds that narrative
twist; Pinky wears white on the balcony while in the novel Pinky describes Miss Em
wearing black when she forbids Pinky from entering the garden. The visual reversal of
black and white clothing and the narrative reversal of Pinky becoming the matriarch after
Miss Em’s death visualizes that archetypal duality between white and black at play in the
cinematic adaptation of the novel. This scene takes place just before Pinky finds out that
she is to inherit the Big House.
111
She cannot play with the black children across the road and she is forbidden from even
being seen by the white family in the Big House. Pinky is forced to hide. She belongs
nowhere because she destabilizes racial classification and undermines the firmament of
white purity. Miss Em’s voice haunts Pinky in the flower shop with Chester, reminding
her that she is not allowed to touch the white flower, the young doctor. Miss Em’s
admonition reinforces the idea that Pinky is contaminated and needs to stay in her own
yard, by herself, in her place, which is no place. She is the forbidden fruit. The
generations of sexual violence that created Pinky haunts Pinky and Miss Em. Aunt
Dicey’s memory, or rather the repression, of her own rape and her daughter’s enables her
to skip over parts of her own story that implicate the perpetrators, that obfuscate the truth
of their family history in her account of who Pinky’s grandfather and father were. The
culture of miscegenation’s elaborate ruse of secrets and shame make speaking about the
rape of black women by white men impossible to express in this narrative. The legacy
rape that saturates chattel slavery is not made salient but rather haunts Pinky, Miss Em,
and Aunt Dicey.
Miss Em’s shame is more personal than this passage lets on. The secret sin that
infuriates Miss Em is her husband’s. The complete cinematic exclusion of rape and the
subsequent lineage of interraciality that reproduced Pinky make the mulatto figure
culpable for the discomfort her black blood and white skin causes the white people
around her. The absence of Pinky’s mother in the film and the slight mention of her death
in childbirth in the novel suggests that acknowledging who Pinky’s father is would
threaten the dominant power and the system of silence surrounding miscegenation in the
south, a fundamental component of the culture of miscegenation. Miss Em’s disdain for
112
Pinky and her banishment of Pinky from the Big House because she reminds Miss Em of
her daughter Lucy is another important indication that Pinky’s father is Miss Em’s
husband. The final narrative suggestion that Miss Em does acknowledge the familial
connection between her family and Pinky is that Miss Em left Pinky the Big House in her
will. In this Jim Crow era rural community that lives divided, the familial entanglements
between the women in Aunt Dicey’s family and the men within Aunt Em’s household are
indicative of the violent culture of miscegenation that is an open secret of the south.
The dilapidated Big House that Pinky looks at from the windows of her Granny’s
log cabin shack is trapped in time, haunted by ghosts of enslaved inhabitants whose free
labor kept the plantation house and the grounds trimmed and tidy. The space between
Aunt Dicey’s house and the Big House, in which Miss Em lay dying, is not distinct and
segregated but rather blurred and entangled. Miss Em’s edict that Pinky not enter the
gates of the Big House is her attempt to force a separation of the black and white parts of
her family without acknowledging their blood relationship. Pinky’s inheritance of a home
that she was never allowed to step foot in is an attempt in the narrative to redeem the
white woman who was cruel and blamed her for her birth. Despite her own commitment
to Jim Crow and the plantation slave economy that built her home, Miss Em recognizes
Pinky as an heir. Is this because she does not look black? Is it because she is educated
and has cultural capital, more than Miss Em’s white next of kin? The narrative means to
illustrate Miss Em’s goodness that has allowed her to share the wealth with Pinky so that
she could uplift her people by establishing a segregated school for colored girls. The
matriarch bequeaths the home, the lawyer represents her interests and wins the case, and
the judge lets Miss Em’s will stand. Pinky represents white leaders of this rural
113
community in the Jim Crow south as benevolent and just, a classically paternalistic
characterization that reifies black dependence upon white domination.
Social Equality, Eugenics, and Uplift
In an effort to continue extending equal rights to black citizens after the passage
of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Congress passed the
Civil Rights Act of 1875 that legislated equality between the races in public spaces:
16

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America
in Congress assembled, That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall
be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities,
and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of
public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and
applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition
of servitude.
17

The 43rd congress, which passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, was composed of black
and white delegates. It appears that this piece of legislation, which allowed black and
white people to occupy the same public spaces but did not explicitly protect marriage
between the races, raised fears and panic in southern white lawmakers. At the heart of the
opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was a fear on the part of white men that
miscegenation in public spaces would lead to marriage between the races.
18
For a brief
moment in history Civil Rights Act of 1875 allowed black and white people to occupy
the same public accommodations and systems of travel without racialized spatial
restrictions. The bill was introduced under the guise of equal protection under the law and

16
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 legislated equal protection under the law for black
citizens. The bill was first passed in 1865 but vetoed by President Andrew Johnson.
Johnson’s veto was effectively overturned when Congress reintroduced the bill that
passed and became law in 1866.
17
US Statutes at Large, Vol. XVIII, p. 335 ff.
18
Bank, “Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Dilemma of Symmetry: The Understanding
of Equality in the Civil Rights Act of 1875,” 307-309.
114
symmetrical equality as stipulated by the fourteenth amendment.
19
Members of congress
who opposed the Republican lead Civil Rights Bill of 1875 did so because they believed
that this bill was legislating social equality between the races, and social equality became
indelibly intertwined with miscegenation (Bank 1995). Though the Civil Rights Bill of
1875 bill did not address anti-miscegenation directly it incited outrage in opponents to the
legislation who believed that the desegregation of public spaces provided a legal pathway
to miscegenation and interracial marriage (Bank 1995). The great evil of social equality
was frightening to white legislators, businessmen, and property owners because they
believed that if black men and white women were allowed to frequent the same
establishments and sit next to each other on public transportation that they would
inevitably want to get married, have sex, and produce mulatto children (Bank 1995).
20

Social equality became synonymous with miscegenation and was a coded way to register
white men’s anxiety over black men sleeping with white women (Bank 1995). The fear
that black men would treat white women the way that white men treated black women
during slavery was the threat that social equality presented to the southern white
legislators who opposed The Civil Rights Act of 1875. The hypocrisy of the outrage over
social equality is subsumed along with the history of white men raping black women or
having coerced sexual relationships with them during chattel slavery and reproducing
“mulatto” children. Outright indignation with social equality was used to bring the

19
The Civil Rights Act of 1875 passed but the desegregation of public space was not
enforced and racial segregation persisted despite the passage of this Act of Congress. The
Civil Rights Act of 1875 was found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883.
20
Stephen Bank’s “Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Dilemma of Symmetry: The
Understanding of Equality in the Civil Rights Act of 1875” provides the legal history of
the battle over this Act of Congress (1995).
115
constitutionality of The Civil Rights Act of 1875 before the Supreme Court of the United
States.
In 1883 the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional
on the grounds that fourteenth amendment did not cover a freedman’s right to frequent
establishments such as theaters, inns, or public conveyances.
21
The Supreme Court found
that if a person felt that his rights had been infringed upon that person had to find redress
under state law, not federal law.
22
This decision by the Supreme Court ushered in the
putative separate but equal laws that divided black and white bodies during the Jim Crow
era. As long as states did not reinstitute slavery individual proprietors, landowners, and
transportation companies could rent, allow passage through, and accommodations for
people as they saw fit.
The concept of social equality and the acceptance of social asymmetry between
black and white men appears in a speech Abraham Lincoln’s gave on June 26
th
1857 in
which he spoke out against his Democratic political rival Senator Stephan A. Douglas’s
opinion of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s decision in Dred Scott v Sanford.
23
Lincoln’s

21
Justice Harlan held the lone dissenting opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford, asserting that
the courts ruling was “too narrow and artificial” and that Congress did not exceed its
power but meant to protect the rights of people to equal accommodation. 109 U.S. 3
(1883) Civil Rights Cases
22
109 U.S. 3 (1883) Civil Rights Cases
23
Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 US 393 Supreme Court (1857), is commonly known as the
Dred Scott Decision. Sanford was misspelled as Sandford in the Supreme Court record.
The Dred Scott case is a long and complicated legal battle; I offer a brief summary
below. Dred Scott was owned by a man named Emerson who moved from the slave state
of Missouri to the free state of Illinois, then later to the Wisconsin Territory, a free
territory. Dred Scott met and married his wife Harriet. Later the Scott’s sued the
Emerson’s for their freedom on the grounds that they should be considered free after
living in a free state. In 1850 Dred and Harriet Scott won their freedom. An Emerson
relative named Sanford who believed he was entitled to own the Scotts appealed the
116
outrage with the Dred Scott Decision is intertwined with a reification of anti-
miscegenation that rebukes social equality between black and white men and a
recognition that enslaved black women are entitled to earn wages for their labor but are
not entitled to certain kinds of equality.
There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at the idea of an
indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races…He finds the
Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence includes all men,
black as well as white; and forthwith he boldly denies that it includes negroes at
all, and proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend it does, do so only because
they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes! He will have it that
they cannot be consistent else. Now I protest against the counterfeit logic which
concludes that because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must
necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either. I can just leave her
alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to

judgment. Sanford eventually won his case and regained ownership of the Scotts. The
Scotts appealed to the Supreme Court where they lost their freedom for good when
Justice Taney’s decision to let the Sanford decision stand was handed down by 1857.
Taney’s decision, that interprets what the framers of the constitution had in mind reads as
follows:
“They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and
altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far
inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro
might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and
treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.
This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was
regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or
supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and
habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without
doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.”
This is the way that Taney understood the question before to court:
“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and
sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence
by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and
privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? One of which rights is
the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution.”
The answer to Taney’s question was decidedly negative; a Negro is not entitled to rights
of citizenship in Taney’s opinion.
117
eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else,
she is my equal, and the equal of all others.
24

Lincoln’s acceptance of and agreement with the natural disgust of “indiscriminate
amalgamation of the white and black races” along with his admission that a black woman
is not his equal “in some respects” is coupled with a liberalism that could overshadow the
segregationist ideology present in this speech. The mention of a black woman as a slave
or a wife in a passage concerned with amalgamation exposes the open secret of a century
and a half of miscegenation already having happened at the hands of white slave owners.
Later in the same speech Lincoln makes his allusion explicit.
... The very Dred Scott case affords a strong test as to which party most favours
amalgamation, the Republicans or the dear Union!saving Democracy. Dred Scott,
his wife and two daughters, were all involved in the suit. We desired the court to
have held that they were citizens, so far at least as to entitle them to a hearing as
to whether they were free or not; and then also, that they were in fact and in law
really free. Could we have had our way, the chances of these black girls ever
mixing their blood with that of white people would have been diminished at least
to the extent that it could not have been without their consent. But Judge Douglas
is delighted to have them decided to be slaves, and not human enough to have a
hearing, even if they were free, and thus left subject to the forced concubinage of
their masters, and liable to become the mothers of mulattoes in spite of
themselves,—the very state of the case that produces nine!tenths of all the
mulattoes, all the mixing of the blood of the nation.

Lincoln’s speech, though arguing against slavery in order to prevent further
amalgamation between the races, does register Black women’s reproduction of
“mulattoes” through “the forced concubinage of their masters” in the archive. Lincoln’s
seething condemnation of slavery and rape that appears as liberalism, is expressed in
tandem with a belief in racial segregation and reinforcement of the veracity of black
inferiority and white superiority.

24
This is an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s Speech on the Dred Scott Decision
delivered at Springfield, Illinois June 26, 1857.
118
The term “social equality” was still in use almost a century after Lincoln gave that
speech at Springfield and surfaces in the novel Quality. The author, Cid Ricketts, was a
southern woman born in Mississippi whose resistance to social equality is explicitly
expressed through the white plantation mistress Miss Em. The topic of social equality
emerges in Quality in a conversation had between Miss Em, Miss Wooley, and Doc Joe
in which social equality is bound up with ideas about blood and race. Miss Wooley
declares that God made black people to be servants and for this reason they lack in
intellect and motivation. Doc Joe agrees but acknowledges that beneath the skin black
people are the same as white people. Miss Wooley worries that if that attitude persists
that black blood will be allowed to mix with white blood at the blood bank and white
people will start growing kinky hair. Doc Joe offers Miss Wooley a corrective, “blood is
blood…no matter what color the skin” (Ricketts 1947, 126). Miss Em also contests Miss
Wooley by suggesting that if her logic were sound then if we eat pork roast we will turn
into pigs. Miss Wooley then accuses them of believing in social equality. Both Doc Joe
and Miss Em confirm that they do not believe that black people are their social equals,
because black people lack social skills and would never be able to sustain their own lives
up north. Miss Em insists that if small town black people do manage to make it up north
the “people up there will wish they had segregation too” (Ricketts 1947, 127). Although
the overtly eugenicist ideas expressed by Miss Wooley -- the jilted white family member
who contests Miss Em’s will --are dismissed in the narrative, eugenicist and white
supremacist ideologies still drive this story. Though the eugenicist logic of hierarchical
biological differences between the races is not wholeheartedly embraced in this
conversation, the idea that black people are inherently loud, slow, and unsophisticated is
119
accepted as fact. The social distinction and danger of black people mixing with white
people is made clear in this conversation and is reflective of the ideas about black
inferiority that were accepted during this era.
In both the antebellum and Jim Crow eras, social equality was understood to be an
infringement upon the freedoms of white business owners and pose undue burdens upon
white people who, the Supreme Court decided, should have the right to do with their
property and their businesses as they so choose.
25
The use of “social equality” in Quality
and in Lincoln’s speech are both uttered in support of only certain black civil liberties
and as such the speech and the novel both forward a segregationist agendas disguised as
liberalism. This contradictory combination of segregationist liberalism emerges in the
Pinky/Quality narrative through white characters that act benevolently toward black
characters in the service of plantation paternalism, a system that relies upon black
dependence and white superiority.
Although Pinky was thought by white critics to be progressive because it
highlights inequalities that Negroes face and illustrates the righting some racial wrongs
by allowing Pinky to inherit the property, black critics easily picked up on the
segregationist and stereotypical attitudes that pervade in the narrative.
26
Pinky is told by
black and white characters that she needs to be whom she really is, and that implicit
directive tells her that she needs to accept her blackness. Seeing her as only black erases

25
Contemporarily, this same logic is being used by state legislatures to argue for and pass
legislation that would grant business owners the right to refuse service to gay people on
the grounds that do so would impinge on their religious freedoms.
26
Walter White and his daughter Jane White read drafts of Pinky and gave notes to the
studio about being more explicit about rape and lynching. The Whites suggested that the
stereotypical representations of race be removed from the script, though Zanuck did not
take their advice.
120
the sexual violence that her grandmother and her mother suffered, which is the reason she
is light enough to pass for white. In the film Tom is not swayed by Pinky’s race but is
willing to marry her anyway, provided that she passes for white if she is to be his wife.
Tom’s willingness to love Pinky knowing that she has black blood contributes to the
liberal representation of whiteness in the film, communicating that decent white people
are not prejudice. Yet Tom’s condition for marrying Pinky does not allow for her
blackness to exist, she must pass as white, which actually undermines the films dominant
theme of benevolent whiteness.
The themes of health, hygiene, and racial uplift expressed in the scenes with black
townspeople, who are represented as ill, infirmed, dimwitted, criminal, and lacking in
moral character, communicate eugenicist ideas about blackness as innately inferior and
dependant upon whiteness to lift them out of their wretched state. Chester/Tom, Miss Em,
Doc Joe and the Judge who honored the will, all seem to be benevolent souls who are fair
and impartial but each of these characters express deeply racist views about black people.
The school for colored girls is meant to be a seen as a triumph but this plot point actually
reinforces eugenicist concepts of racial hygiene and offers segregation as the remedy for
the Negro problem. Celibacy is tacitly expressed as the solution for Pinky’s love
problem, a fate to which she appears resigned to accept.
In that conversation with Miss Wooley and Doc Joe, Miss Em states “there has
been plenty of amalgamation for the last hundred years. It doesn’t make any change in
the white race, but it has certainly lightened up the colored.” This belief that the mixing
of racialized blood has no impact on conceptions of whiteness is another component of
the culture of miscegenation that protects white wealth and bolsters a belief in white
121
purity. Within the rubric of racial contamination white blood that mixes with black blood
has to be recognized as only black. If Pinky is recognized as white but has black blood in
her then is she a contaminated white person? If the amalgamation that Miss Em admits to
in the novel is reframed without the premise of the one-drop rule then white families have
had black blood in them for hundreds of years. The culture of miscegenation creates a
system of power in which the victims of sexualized racial violence feel indebted to the
system that violates them. In this narrative wealth is transferred to Pinky only after the
spoils of chattel slavery are eroding and value has been extracted from the property.
Pinky’s contaminated body that was once quarantined by paternalism accrues a different
kind of value through the receipt of property. The last moments of the film capture Pinky
running a segregated school for colored girls. She has become an ambassador of
paternalism, a benevolent force that uses her new position as property owner to lift black
girls up out of the debt incurred by their blackness. Pinky’s role as benefactor and
schoolmaster demonstrates her acceptance of what she really is and erases what really
happened. Embracing her classification as colored releases Pinky’s father and grandfather
from being seen as perpetrators of sexual violence, Pinky is perpetuating the silence and
blindness that sustains the open secret of the culture of miscegenation.
In order to make sense of the cultural imaginary of “mulatto” property inheritance
illustrated in Pinky/Quality I offer a brief historical account of the progression of anti-
miscegenation legislation from the time that black property ownership was illegal during
chattel slavery until the Jim Crow era when black property ownership was putatively
protected. Given that Quality and Pinky are set in rural Mississippi in the late 1940’s and
contend with the specters of chattel slavery, Reconstruction, and the culture of
122
miscegenation, I look to state legislative acts passed during Reconstruction and to
antebellum and Jim Crow era will contests in Mississippi that make salient the erasure of
black women’s reproduction from the legal record.
The Culture of Miscegenation and Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in Mississippi
In 1865 Mississippi passed “An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for
other purposes”; “An Act to Regulate the Relation of Master and Apprentice, as Relates
to Freedmen, Free Negroes, and Mulattoes”; and “An Act to Amend the Vagrant Laws of
the State” which came to be known as the black codes. These three legislative acts
limited rights of newly freed slaves, regulations which in some cases refused rights
formerly granted to free people of color in the state. These laws limit inheritance and
property ownership and regulate apprenticeships, which in distinct ways show how newly
freed slaves were incorporated into white families. These laws provide the means for
former slave owners to refuse rights of inheritance of “mulatto” children in order for
labor, land, and power to remain in white families despite the histories of sexual violence
and mixing bloodlines between white slave owners and black enslaved women. Section
one of what is known as the Mississippi Black Code reads as follows:
Section 1. Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Mississippi, That all freedmen,
free negroes and mulattoes may sue and be sued, implead and be impleaded in all the
courts of law and equity of this State, and may acquire personal property and choses in
action, by descent or purchase, and may dispose of the same, in the same manner, and to
the same extent that white persons may: Provided that the provisions of this section shall
not be so construed as to allow any freedman, free negro or mulatto, to rent or lease any
lands or tenements, except in incorporated towns or cities in which places the corporate
authorities shall control the same.” (Italics are mine)

Mississippi Black Codes that denied the rights of newly freed black people
enabled the contestation and invalidation of wills that bequeathed formerly enslaved
“mulatto” inheritors property by white fathers. At the federal level the Civil Rights Act of
123
1866, which was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson whose veto was subsequently
overturned by Congress before his impeachment, gave black men the same rights that
white men enjoyed. When the fourteenth amendment to the constitution was ratified in
1868 by the 39
th
Congress it prohibited states from denying citizens “life, liberty or
property, without due process of law” thereby protecting the civil rights of potential
negro or mulatto property owners and inheritors. The Black Codes of Mississippi were
forbidden by the fourteenth amendment and the federal legislation that extended civil
rights to black citizens was made official. The legal denial of rights at the state level by
governing bodies such as the Mississippi legislature were undermined by the fourteenth
amendment that clearly allows black citizens the right to own property. Despite the
federal statutes, southern states like Mississippi eroded black civil rights by instituting
defacto black codes and lynch laws, and allowing mob violence to terrorize newly freed
slaves.
27

With the revocation of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the state of Mississippi was
free to deny black citizens their civil rights under the guise that social inequality was a
valid and permissible solution to the problem of newly freed slaves living among white
citizens. Mississippi’s Act To Confer Rights which was deemed unconstitutional a
decade prior was essentially protected by this Supreme Court decision that found the
Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.
28
The panic over miscegenation that was used

27
Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 because he believed that newly freed
slaves were not equipped to handle citizenship. Johnson’s veto was overturned by
congress and became law on April 9 1866. United States Statutes at Large, 38th
Congress, Session II, Chapter. 90, pp. 507–509.
28
After the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was found unconstitutional subsequent
Congressional bodies reflected the anti-miscegenation sentiments of that ruling by
convening the 50
th
Congress in 1887 without one black delegate. Black Congressmen
124
to justify the denial of social equality to negro citizens was codified in 1896 with the
Plessy v. Ferguson decision and enabled mob violence and lynching to be used as
extralegal punishment for perceived infractions of the permitted social inequality between
black and whites, until the Supreme decided the Brown v Board of Education in 1954.
29

During the Jim Crow era white supremacist and anti-miscegenation ideologies
were granted enough standing that the contestation of wills were allowed on the grounds
that black inheritors of white property were unnatural occurrences that would harm the
white community. The presence of the courtroom drama in Pinky and Quality over
willed property to a mulatto woman opens up ways that the culture of miscegenation
impacted inheritance disputes that crossed the color line. Anti-miscegenation will
contests make salient the material reality of blurred racial boundaries that developed
through the culture of miscegenation, which was a fundamental characteristic of the
antebellum south. The decisions in Mitchell v Wells (1859) and The Will of Maggie A.
Ross (1921) support my analysis of the legal drama in the Quality/Pinky narratives as
these cases exemplify the legality of contesting a will because of the race of the inheritor.

Mitchell v Wells

were elected to the 51
st
Congress but the numbers would steadily decrease until 1901
when the last black member of Congress, Representative George White of North
Carolina, resigned.
28
There would be only white members of Congress until 1929 when
Representative Oscar De Priest of Illinois was elected.
29
The Plessy v Ferguson Supreme Court (1896) decision made racial segregation
constitutional by codifying the separate but equal concept of public accommodations.
Brown v Board of Education (1954) was the Supreme Court decision that overturned
Plessy v Ferguson, finding separate but equal public schools unconstitutional.
125
Antebellum inheritance cases like Mitchell v Wells in Mississippi were often
bound up with manumission because slave laws forbade enslaved people from owning
property (Jones 2009). Before his death Edward Wells freed his daughter Nancy, whose
mother was an enslaved woman that he owned. Edward Wells sold Nancy’s mother when
Nancy was a young girl because she supposedly mistreated her mulatto daughter. Nancy
was raised in the Big House and was not treated as poorly as other slaves (Jones 2009).
When Nancy was a young woman Edward took her to Ohio to manumit her. He then sent
her to school for dressmaking in Ohio to study with a white woman seamstress. Edward
does not reveal that he is Nancy’s father in his will, even though this was common
knowledge among those close to him, and despite the fact that he did will her three
thousand dollars, his watch, and his feather bed. Her inheritance would not require that
Nancy move back to Mississippi from Ohio where she was living at that time with her
husband and risk enslavement (Jones 2009). Edward Wells’s will was contested by his
nephew William Mitchell who he appointed to be the executor. Mitchell was well
acquainted with the family and knew that Edward was Nancy’s father. The judge’s
decision in this case declared that Nancy Wells did not have rights of inheritance or any
civil rights, for that matter, that the court was required to respect. Even though her
inheritance would not require her to reside in Mississippi the court contended that a
person once enslaved in Mississippi, even if manumitted elsewhere, was not entitled to
rights of inheritance by virtue of their manumission. No formerly enslaved people were
allowed to reside in the state of Mississippi and all manumitted slaves were prohibited
from returning to the state without risking their freedom (Jones 2009). The refusal of the
Supreme Court of Mississippi to respect the will of Edward Wells and thereby deny
126
Nancy Wells the right to inherit wealth from her father, exemplifies the anti-black
sentiment present in the judicial history of Mississippi inheritance cases that blur the line
between black and white. Outside of slave laws that entangled manumission with rights
of inheritance, the right of a black person to inherit from a white testator landed in murky
legal territory. The courtroom drama in the Pinky/Quality narrative visualizes the
ambiguity of inheritance laws, which is the direct result of the racial ambiguity of the
“mulatto” inheritor, Pinky.
Quality, Pinky, and the Case of Maggie Ross
Cid Ricketts, the author of Quality, was an educated woman. Ricketts attended
Cornell medical school from 1914-1915 with an intention of becoming a doctor but
married Nobel Prize winner James Sumner who was at the time a chemistry professor.
They had four children together and divorced in 1930. In the 1920’s, while Ricketts was
still married to her husband and not yet publishing novels, she may well have heard of a
controversial 1921 North Carolina case that contested the will of Maggie A. Ross. The
Ross case was decided in a distinctly different manner than Mitchell v Wells. Perhaps
Ricketts was inspired to incorporate a similar legal battle in her story that would illustrate
her sentiment on the subject of miscegenation and segregation. The contestation of
Maggie Ross’s will had a similar outcome as in the Quality narrative but the manner in
which black inheritors became owners of wealthy white estates is different.
30
The Ross
family arrangement developed through a Reconstruction era set of laws that allowed
children of newly freed slaves to be apprenticed out to white families. Section one of

30
Gene Stowe’s Inherit The Land: Jim Crow Meets Miss Maggie’s Will (2006) delineates
the narrative, interprets the court transcripts, and offers historical contexts for the Maggie
A. Ross case.
127
these set laws entitled, “An Act to Regulate the Relation of Master and Apprentice as
relates to Freedmen, Free Negroes, and Mulattoes” reads as follows:
Section 1. Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Mississippi, That it shall be the
duty of all sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other civil officers of the several counties in
this State, to report to the probate courts of their respective counties, semi-annually, at the
January and July terms of said courts, all freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes, under the
age of eighteen, within their respective counties, beats or districts, who are orphans, or
whose parent or parents have not the means, or who refuse to provide for and support
said minors, and thereupon it shall be the duty of said probate court, to order the clerk of
said court to apprentice said minors to some competent and suitable person, on such
terms as the court may direct, having a particular care to the interest of said minor:
Provided, that the former owner of said minors shall have the preference, when in the
opinion of the court, he or she shall be a suitable person for that purpose.

In the Ross case, the sisters Maggie and Sally were raised with a black child
named Bob who came to live with their family when he was a young boy as an apprentice
to their mother Susan in 1874, under the Reconstruction era apprenticeship law.
31
Bob
grew up as a member of the Ross family. Although the apprenticeship laws were defunct
by the time Bob married and had a child, he still gave his daughter Mittie to Maggie and
Sally to live with them in the Big House. The sisters never married and lived together in
the large estate in Union County North Carolina. When Maggie Ross died, her sister
Sally preceded her in death; she left all of their estate to Bob and Mittie. Members of the
Ross family contested Maggie Ross’s will on the grounds that Maggie Ross was not of
sound mind. The larger issue raised by the community was that allowing Bob and Mittie
to inherit the Ross property was unnatural and the community would be harmed by seeing
black people occupy the largest most expensive home in the county. The Superior Court
decision that honored Maggie Ross’s will was appealed and brought to the Supreme

31
Sally and Maggie Ross came from meager beginnings and became the wealthiest
members of this community. They had a brother Dennis who died in 1868 in a cotton gin
accident. Stowe discusses their relationship in Inherit the Land (65-69).
128
Court of North Carolina, which also honored Maggie Ross’s will. Despite the furor that
overwhelmed Union County, the black members of the Ross family were allowed to
inherit the wealth of the richest white family. The reproductive violence in this case is a
result of Reconstruction era anti-vagrancy laws that allowed white people to take black
children from their mothers and use them as apprentices.
32

The parallels between the Maggie Ross case and the legal battle in Pinky are
striking as they demonstrate the interplay between anti-miscegenation legislation and
judicial decisions, and the cultural imaginary of anti-miscegenation will contests. The
history of anti-miscegenation legislation in Mississippi helped to codify the anti-black
ideology that is the basis for the contestation of Miss Em’s will in Quality and Pinky. The
will is contested by Miss Wooley who claims that Miss Em was coerced into naming
Pinky as the inheritor of the property. The idea that Pinky, a colored girl, would own the
Big House and possess more wealth than white people in this town was considered
unnatural and damaging to the community. In Rickett’s narrative, as in the Maggie Ross
case, Miss Em was found to be of sound mind and her will was allowed to stand, Pinky
inherits the property -- as did Bob and Mittie Ross.
The script notes written by Darryl Zanuck after each draft of Pinky that Phillip
Dunne penned strip away the details and intricacies of racial power dynamics and sexual
violence endemic to the southern plantation.
33
In the Pinky production notes the
marketing strategy for the film also reinforces paternalistic protections of white

32
In To Joy My Freedom: Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (1998)
Tera W. Hunter discusses the Apprentice Act of 1866 that tore black families apart and
placed black children back in bondage to white families (35-36).
33
The USC Cinema Arts Library holds the drafts of the Pinky script as well as the Darryl
Zanuck’s script notes written to Phillip Dunne.
129
dominance suggesting that this film would not disturb even the most anti-black viewer
such as a member of the KKK.
34
Among the production notes for Pinky is a letter from
one of Fox’s consultants on the screenplay, Francis Harmon. Harmon admits that he had
not read the book but suggested that “to be true to life in the south” the script should
clarify that Pinky’s father was a member of Miss Em’s family, not her husband but
possibly her brother. Harmon explained that he was aware of “case after case where just
such situations arose.” This exposure of “true” life in the south was in direct
contradiction to what the Hollywood system wanted to visualize on screen. The film’s
producer Darryl Zanuck replied to Mr. Harmon stating “I know that you have more
knowledge and are more sensitive to this whole problem from the southern point of view,
but I am inclined to believe that the larger good will accrue by making this a picture
dealing with tolerances rather than injecting the illicit miscegenation angle, although I am
sure that this would increase the box office of the picture by a considerable amount.”
Zanuck was so determined to avoid depicting miscegenation in a film about
miscegenation that he chose the white actress Jeanne Crain to play Pinky.
35
It is rumored
that Lena Horne and Fredi Washington both wanted to play Pinky but that casting choice
would have actually engendered acts of miscegenation between Pinky and Tom. After

34
The production notes for Pinky are held at the Margaret Herrick Library at the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
35
My analysis in this section focuses on 20
th
Century Fox and Darryl Zanuck, it is
important to note that Zanuck’s point of view was not aberrant. The Hollywood system
was uniform in resisting representations of miscegenation at this time. The Motion
Picture Producers and Distributors Association Production Code expressly forbid
depictions of miscegenation in films.
130
reviewing the production list of actresses to be considered for the role, I saw that Zanuck
only ever had prominent white actresses in mind.
36

Figure 16: Pinky Film Still Pink and Tom embrace
The correspondence between Harmon and Zanuck about the representation of
miscegenation in the screenplay exposes the nexus of the culture of miscegenation.
Zanuck’s refusal to let the screenplay reflect the existence of the long history of black
women being raped, becoming pregnant, and having children by white men further
obfuscates the history of miscegenation in the U.S. The insistence by Harmon to
explicitly include acts of miscegenation in the screenplay in order to remain authentic to
southern life at that time, demonstrates the pervasiveness of the culture of miscegenation.
Zanuck’s refusal to include acts of miscegenation in the screenplay makes not seeing
Pinky’s parents in the narrative an acceptable choice.
37
The exclusion of any mention of

36
Zanuck’s casting preferences are found in a casting list contained in the Pinky
production notes held at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences.
37
There is a scene in Pinky in which two white men in a car realize that Pinky is colored
and attempt to rape her. Pinky escapes them and is not raped. This may have been
Zanuck’s way of acknowledging the culture of white men raping colored women, but this
131
Pinky’s mother or father in the film was vital, as Zanuck believed this omission would
benefit the greater good by not exacerbating racial tensions with depictions of
miscegenation. The omission of the cinematic representation of Aunt Dicey’s rape or
Pinky’s mother’s rape only benefits white male power by concealing white men’s violent
participation in the production of the culture of miscegenation. After many revisions, the
final script had extracted the legacy of rape that connects Pinky’s maternal line with the
white men of the Big House. The narrative departures found in the cinematic adaptation
excise any discussions of race, histories of sexual violence, and white vigilantism from
the visualization of Rickett’s novel. Pinky becomes a film about a Negro girl so light
skinned that she can pass for white, which does not address the generations of sexual
violence that gave her white skin.
Black Reproduction and Spectrality
In her article “Venus in Two Acts” Saidiya Hartman wrestles with studying the
archive of chattel slavery and asks “[w]hy risk the contamination involved in restating the
maledictions, obscenities, columns of losses and gains, and measures of value by which
captive lives were inscribed and extinguished? Why subject the dead to new dangers and
to a second order of violence?” (Hartman 2008, 5). Walter Benjamin offers a succinct
opinion on the subject of contending with the past that is instructive for Hartman’s
quandary, “[f]or every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its
own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin 2007, 255). By following
the trace of enslaved mothers of mulatto daughters in this chapter, the haunting of U.S

does not address the impact that the legacy of systematic racialized sexual violence had
on families like Pinky and Aunt Dicey’s.
132
whiteness and blackness by the suffering of black maternal figures becomes palpable. As
Gordon has attested:
the whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real
presence and demands its due, your attention. Haunting and the
appearance of specters or ghosts is one way…we are notified that what’s
been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with
those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly
directed toward us (Gordon 2008, xvi).

Rather than forcing a narrative upon women whose lives are sparsely recorded in the
archive and inflicting another kind of violence, this analysis acknowledges and
recognizes their presence so that they do not disappear.
In Pinky Aunt Dicey lives to serve white wealth and reify the place of
subservience meant for black bodies. Pinky’s mother is absent. The rape of Pinky’s
mother by Miss Em’s husband, Mr. Ham, is never mentioned. Pinky’s mother is unnamed
and unrepresented in the film but her presence becomes visible through her daughter’s
blackness. The curious absence of Pinky’s mother opens up questions about the
circumstances of her conception. The secrets linger in the cramped space of Aunt Dicey’s
shack, hover near the high ceilings of the Big House, and haunt the sanitized version of
Zanuck’s passing film – a film which refuses to acknowledge the reality of rape in the
south that engenders the conditions for a black person to pass for white. In Quality
Pinky’s mother did something, she left the south for a big city up north, came back had
Pinky then died. The truth about her mother and her father is withheld from Pinky but the
knowledge of what happened is present in the narrative. Pinky’s inheritance, Miss Em’s
disdain, and Pinky’s light skin all disclose what Pinky’s mother could not and what Aunt
Dicey refuses to say. The history of rape on southern plantations that lead to legal
disputes over inheritance place black mothers in the archive but barely, quite silently.
133
In Mitchell v Wells Nancy’s mother, who is referred to briefly but not named in
the court transcripts, is reported to have mistreated Nancy when she was a young girl.
Edward Wells, Nancy’s father and owner, sold Nancy’s mother who was most likely a
fieldworker, because of this mistreatment and from that time on Wells raised Nancy in
the house with him and his wife (Jones 2009).
38
In the case of Maggie Ross’s will, the
inheritor Bob Ross was given to Maggie’s mother as a young boy during Reconstruction
under the apprenticeship laws. Bob’s mother Rosa emerges in the narrative momentarily.
Rosa was a slave of the Ross family until emancipation came. After Emancipation Susan
Ross petitioned to have Rosa’s son Bob apprenticed to her. Rosa sued Susan for the right
to keep her son and lost. Susan took two-year-old Bob from Rosa in 1874. Susan lived in
a tenant farmhouse on the Ross property and many years later married a man named
Samuel (Stowe 2006, 53-56). Rosa’s place in the record marks her desire to keep her son
and registers the pain of losing him. Her reproductive labor, her loss of maternal rights
and civil rights is a judicial, social, and racial violence that exists and can be felt now.
The presence of black mothers who lost their children through judicial decisions or were
sold away and belittled in judicial transcripts help build the case for Pinky’s mother’s
life. Pinky’s mother haunts the film, insisting that attention be paid to what happened to
her. What happened to her becomes evident in Miss Em’s bequest.
The specter of Nancy’s enslaved mother and Bob Ross’s mother Rosa Ross haunt
the court cases and accompany the fictitious mother of Pinky in her sorrow, loss, and
silence. The specters of Pinky’s mother, Rosa Ross, and Nancy Wells’s mother all give
information about the reproductive, sexual, and racial violence that constituted and

38
Jones, Fathers of Conscience, 115.
134
propelled the culture of miscegenation in the south. These black mothers make their
presence known through affect. The feeling of being known as immoral and lascivious
because a white man desired you, raped you, and caused a baby to grow in your belly, the
feeling of caring for a child who has the face of the man who raped you, the torment of
having a judge allow a white woman to rip your child from your arms as you both weep
inconsolably, becomes palpable through attention to the spectral affect of these mothers.
The words used to place black mothers of mulatto daughters in the archive are minimal
and pungent yet the scarcity also communicates affect.
In his speech at Springfield in 1857 Lincoln recognizes the central position that
enslaved black women play in the culture of miscegenation and he recognizes the
hypocrisy of those white men who legislate against amalgamation while fathering
children with the black women that they take sexually by force. The disgust that Lincoln
attributes to the notion of having a black wife is a social violence that circulates through
the law, through the culture of miscegenation, and through affect. Pinky is expected to
understand that she is disgusting, that her black blood makes her reprehensible. She is
supposed to accept this as the truth about her and receive the benevolent gift of property
to uplift her race with the school for colored girls. Pinky’s acquiescence of her own
revilement allows her to be among her people and lift them up. This acceptance of black
degeneracy is a reification of the white supremacist logic of segregation, yet subsumed in
this narrative as benevolence. The contradictory liberal act of white charity and white
supremacist social hygiene cohere within the closing frames of the film in which Pinky
rings the morning bell for “Miss Em’s School for Colored Girls.” The apparition of
Pinky’s mother haunts the plantation house turned school. The necessary separation of
135
black and white people during the Jim Crow era, as exemplified in the closing shots of
the film, is undone by Pinky’s presence in them. Pinky is a symbol of white men’s secret
and pathological desire for black women’s bodies. Her mother’s absence is a
disembodiment of the hypocrisy that Lincoln acknowledged in his speech. By paying
attention to affect engendered by the violent legal decisions that violate black women’s
reproductive and maternal lives, the culture of miscegenation is made visible. The realm
of affect makes perceptible the insult and injury deployed by the culture of miscegenation
that would blame Pinky for her skin, make her mother’s trouble her own to bare, legally
steal Rosa’s son from her to give him to a white woman, and justify selling Nancy’s
mother away because she treated Nancy the way she had most likely been treated. The
sparse mentioning of the black women’s maternal bodies in Mitchell v Wells and the will
of Maggie A. Ross along with Lincoln’s acknowledgment of the systemic rape of black
women by white slave owners makes black women visible in the archive but barely, and
still quite silently. Black women’s maternal bodies are felt in the archive and the
violence of their lives become visible through their haunting presence in the legal record
and in the miscegenated blood of their daughters. With inspection, the past does change
and black women’s presence in the archive does tell a story that white slave owners and
agents of patriarchy wish would remain buried and gone.

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Chapter Three
Exile and Loving: Visualizing Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in
The Loving Story

“Challenging the anti-miscegenation laws was the most serious threat to the white racists
and even those whites who were not racists but very pro-establishment” - Bernard S.
Cohen

The 2011 documentary film The Loving Story (dir. Nancy Buirski) introduces
Richard and Mildred Loving by using archival black and white film footage of the couple
dressed in their Sunday’s best holding hands walking away from the camera toward a
news frenzy awaiting them on the steps of a federal courthouse that looms in the distance.
A man’s voice is heard reading an excerpt from the decision handed down by Judge Leon
Bazille, who convicted Richard and Mildred of the crime of miscegenation.
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he
placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his
arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he
separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

The antiquated language in Judge Bazille’s decision that espouses debunked racist
scientific beliefs about God’s intention for racial separation, made evident by skin color
and continental placement, was inflammatory enough in 1963 to warrant a hearing before
the Supreme Court of the United States. The underlying conception about blood purity
and racial distinction in Judge Bazille’s opinion is not only noteworthy because of the
language but because miscegenation, the crime for which he convicted Mildred and
Richard Loving, was described as commonplace in Central Point -- the little Virginia
town that the Lovings called home. Judge Bazille’s decision exemplifies the deep
contradiction that is at the center of anti-miscegenation legislation -- that white men rape
black women while they publicly denounce and actively legislate against miscegenation.
137
Director Nancy Buirski provides a narrative of Richard and Mildred Loving’s life
in exile during the years preceding the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v.
Virginia that bears their name. The Loving’s victory in the Supreme Court overturned
anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited white and non-white people from marrying in
Virginia. The documentary narrative reveals that in 1958, two weeks after Richard and
Mildred Loving were married in Washington D.C., they were arrested and charged with
felonies for breaking anti-miscegenation laws. Their twenty-five year sentences were
suspended under the condition that the Lovings leave Virginia and not return to the state
as long as they remain married. It took nine years of living in exile in Washington D.C.
and sneaking back into town to visit their families under threat of arrest until the Supreme
Court ruled in their favor on June 12
th
1967, overturning anti-miscegenation laws and
thereby allowing the Loving’s marriage to stand in the state of Virginia.
In my analysis of The Loving Story I use theories of affect to attend to the
haunting presence of racialized sexual violence enacted during chattel slavery,
Reconstruction, and the early Jim Crow era that resurfaces in the mid-twentieth century
legislation and Buirski’s twenty first century documentary film. Affect theory enables me
to attend to the spectral presence of generations of sexual violence suffered by black
women at the hands of men from the slave holding class that reemerges in the judicial
resistance to the Loving’s marriage. The affective work that The Loving Story does today
reintroduces the still and moving images and sounds of the Loving family into the
historical record which, from our place in history, carries the presence of generations of
black women and men who suffered and died under the weight of black codes and anti-
miscegenation laws. Through conceptualizations of affect I engage with theories of
138
visuality and spectrality in order to address the contradictions of miscegenation upon
which this nation’s governance and formations of race were founded.
Cinema studies scholar Kara Keeling uses affect theory to account for the kind of
labor required to handle sensations that arise from engaging with images in the world - a
labor that is bound up with “capitalism’s drive toward globalization” (Keeling 2007, 25).
1

My analysis follows Keeling in considering the aesthetic and visual components of the
affective labor associated with seeing the Lovings. The ambiguities present in their
community that was both segregated and productive of racial “mixing” creates a system
of seeing or overlooking that at first fostered Mildred and Richard’s relationship then
punished them for it. As Gregg and Seigworth contend in their introduction to The Affect
Theory Reader “[a]ffect marks a body’s belonging to a world of encounters or; a world’s
belonging to a body of encounters but also, in non-belonging, through all those far sadder
(de)compositions of mutual in-compossibilities” (Seigworth & Greg 2010, 2). This
notion of affect drives my analysis of The Loving Story that raises the specter of the long
history of sexually violent miscegenation that is not directly addressed in the
documentary itself.
Given the resistance to finding truth or definitive answers in documentary film
studies, as exemplified in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s article “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning”
in which she asserts that “[t]here is no such thing as documentary,” I ground this
discussion of The Loving Story by asking what it means to introduce visual evidence of
the Loving family into the historical record of the Loving v Virginia Supreme Court case

1
In The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common
Sense Keeling engages with Deleuze, Marcia Landy, Antonio Gramsci, and Franz Fanon
to formulate a theory of cinematic reality that structures ways of seeing black queer
subjectivities which require affective labor on the part of the one who sees.
139
(Minh-ha 1993, 90). It is tempting to allow the visual documentation of the Loving’s
case to stand in as “the” visual record, but the truth of this moment in their lives exceeds
the still photographs and 16mm film that captures them in time. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s
article troubles the tradition of documentary filmmaking as producing truths when really,
she argues, what is being produced is “a meaning” not the truth (92). The meanings
produced by the images of the Loving family struggling through a private, small town
battle that grew into an historic and monumental case, could produce a sense of closure.
The images, the interviews, the personalities captured on film supplement the legislative
record not only by offering scenes of the young Loving family together but by
documenting the presence of the culture of miscegenation in this twentieth-century rural
community.
As I have outlined in the previous chapters, the culture of miscegenation is a
complex of legislative and social power used by white men of the slave holding class to
dominate black bodies, which created a contradictory system that depended upon the
willful blindness to and silence surrounding the rape of black women that reproduced
“miscegenated” enslaved children who had no inheritable rights of their father. As
discussed in Chapter Two a damaging facet of the culture of miscegenation revolves
around open secrets and the shame that a miscegenated body absorbs. Rather than
condemn the rapists or the system that protects them, the miscegenated figure has to
suffer as a symbol of racial contamination.
2
Part of the complex of affect that emerges
with Mildred’s subjectivity as a black woman living in Virginia who had children with a

2
I use the term “miscegenated” not to legitimate the concept of distinct races and
racialized blood that commingles inside the child with a black mother and white father,
but to index the impact of the system upon bodies that are not clearly black or white yet
enslaved.
140
white man while anti-miscegenation laws were enforced, is the spectral presence of Sally
Hemings.
3
I posit a spectral relationship between Sally Hemings and Mildred Loving not
to conflate the circumstances of their lives but rather to consider the sensorial
implications the emerge by recognizing that the same anti-miscegenation laws which
circumscribed Sally Hemings criminalized Mildred Loving.
This chapter also discusses Mildred Loving’s self-advocacy that initiated the
historic legal battle that was able to turn a personal struggle into a federal case. By taking
into account Mildred’s letters written to then Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the
American Civil Liberties Union, subjugated knowledge emerges about the power that a
black woman’s words can have on destabilizing a system built upon violence, silence,
and shame - a crippling triad that coheres within the culture of miscegenation.
4
I close
with a consideration of Mildred Loving’s changing self-identity that at times does not
include blackness at all but rather Rappahannock Indian and whiteness. I discuss the
spectral relationship that “Indian” has with blackness in the U.S. by engaging with
Andrea Smith’s three pillars of white supremacy, namely the concepts of indigenous
disappearance and the inherent enslavability of black bodies.
5
Mildred Loving’s shifting
racial self-identity is evocative of the multifaceted composition of U.S. blackness that
encompasses whiteness and indigeneity.

3
I discuss Sally Hemings’s relationship with Thomas Jefferson in detail in the
Introduction of this manuscript.
4
In Power/Knowledge Michel Foucault describes subjugated knowledge as a way of
knowing that can be seen but is discounted or not valued because it is deemed naïve (82-
83).
5
Andrea Smith, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” 1-13.

141
Conditions of Belonging
As The Loving Story demonstrates Central Point, the small community in Caroline
County, Virginia where Richard and Mildred were born and raised, produced the
conditions of belonging and set tacit rules of engagement with regard to love
relationships that broke anti-miscegenation laws. Richard could be sexually involved
with Mildred as long as their relationship remained private and quiet and did not enter the
public domain through public displays of affection or demand state legitimation through
marriage. The theoretical framework of belonging that I use to analyze The Loving Story
draws together Katherine McKittrick’s examination of cartographies of struggle and
black womanhood in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of
Struggle and Hortense Spillers’s notion of incomplete “Americanization” raised in her
essay “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your
Mother’: Psychoanalysis of Race.” I use this framework to consider ways that the
cinematic representation of Central Point and the community that populates it exist within
a paradoxical system in which racial segregation was both enforced and disrupted. The
Loving’s marriage aggravated Central Point’s governing racial system leaving them
vulnerable to the racial state violence that banished them from home.
As Hortense Spillers attests “[n]egotiating the ground between forms of exile and
belonging captures precisely the historic vocation of communities of individuals on the
periphery of the dominant order…” (Spillers 2003, 382). Introducing racialized power
dynamics into this discussion of affect and belonging means discussing the age-old job
that bodies of color have been charged with, managing the perforated line of racial
inclusion that is always threatened with expulsion through disenfranchisement, violent
142
force, or death. The language of belonging is grounded in the discourse of place. My
analysis of The Loving Story brings in McKittrick’s theory of black women’s
cartographies that I engage with in my discussion of Shirley Anne William’s Dessa Rose.
I use the politics of place in this chapter not only because of its apposite imagery but
because, as McKittrick exposes and The Loving Story demonstrates, dominance is exerted
through positionality and place. The theory of spectrality that I deploy as a method of
positing a connection between Mildred Loving and Sally Hemings is routed the place,
through Virginia as a foundational place in the history of anti-miscegenation legislation, a
place where both of these women lived and died. Using spatial analysis to make sense of
black women’s relationship to geography McKittrick contends:
The history of black subjects in the diaspora is a geographic story that, is at least
in part, a story of material and conceptual placements and displacements, segrega-
tions and integrations, margins and centers, and migrations and settlements
(McKittrick 2006, xiv).

With this in mind I turn to The Loving Story as it illustrates the contradictory conditions
of belonging and exile that Richard and Mildred Loving were forced to navigate.
The Loving Story narrative documents the culture in Central Point by including
several interviews with people from this southern rural community. A voice over of an
unnamed Central Point farmer describing the racial climate of his community during the
time of the Loving’s courtship, marriage, and exile is heard while images of lush green
pastures and small white farmhouses that pepper a country road pass by on the screen:
I mean we just grew up all as a family together. We never knew nothing about
all of this racial stuff that they talk about. And if the ah, if the government had left
them people alone, it would never been no problem there. There was no
difference in ‘em you know, they were all working trying to make a living. And
just ‘cause they didn’t go to the same church didn’t mean that they weren’t good
people.

143
This farmer suggests that race was not something people in their community were
concerned with, that a difference was never made between black and white people in
Central Point. He blames the government, perhaps the local authorities for causing a
problem in the community, not Mildred and Richard for marrying. The local authorities
are represented in the film with Deputy Sheriff Ken Edwards, who served in Caroline
County from 1967 until 1980 during the time that Richard and Mildred were banished
from Virginia. He discusses the expectation of secrecy that interracial couples like
Richard and Mildred had to abide by while anti-miscegenation laws were in effect.
Richard lived down in the community where most of the Indians lived. I don’t
know if Mildred had any Indian in her or not, possibly could have. And if they did
get romantically involved or whatever, they kept it to themselves. Because every-
body knew that that was a no-no. That was against the law. So I’m not saying it
didn’t happen, I’m saying they kept it under cover.
6

The contradiction that is produced with these two statements exemplifies the bind in
which Richard and Mildred found themselves. Their marriage made them vulnerable to
state violence, as their romantic relationship was no longer under cover. The statements
by the anonymous farmer and Deputy Sheriff Edwards exemplify a fundamental
component of the culture of miscegenation -- the willingness of local and state authorities
and leaders within the social landscape to overlook white men having sexual relationships
with black women and their children together, as long as the couple kept their
relationship a secret. Richard and Mildred were not so bold as to apply for a marriage
license in Virginia, they went to Washington D.C. to get married, but somehow the
Caroline County police force discovered their matrimony and arrested them for the crime
of miscegenation.

6
Later in this chapter I discuss the presence of Indigenous people in Central Point,
specifically Mildred’s self-identity that includes “Indian.”
144
In a rare interview shot on color film, presumable while the Lovings were living
in their clandestine Virginian residence – which violated their state mandated exile,
Mildred and Richard are seated on the front porch of their house looking at large format
color portraits of themselves that Grey Villet’s shot for Life magazine. Mildred discusses
her understanding of the law:
You know we went to Washington to be married and I guess that’s why you know
we went there. People had been mixing all the time, so I didn’t know any differ-
ent. I didn’t know it was a law against it. You know the white and colored went to
school different, things like that you know. You couldn’t go in the same restau-
rants. I knew that, but I didn’t realize how bad it was until we got married.

Mildred’s not knowing is curious and may be a function of living during the era of Jim
Crow in a community that seemingly decriminalized or overlooked racial mixing.
Mildred Loving also expresses an understanding of fixed racialized regulations of public
space but carries a sense of unknowing about the sentiments that undergird the Jim Crow
laws. The acceptance of Jim Crow segregation in schools, restaurants, and churches while
also accepting that “people had been mixing all the time” demonstrates the contradictory
culture of miscegenation at work in this community. White men in the community
tolerate white men mixing with black women, which takes on the guise of liberalism,
while they participate in and benefit from Jim Crow segregation. Mildred’s not knowing
how bad it was in her community is akin to Deputy Sheriff Edwards’s not seeing
interracial couples as long as they kept their romantic involvement “under cover.” The
seemingly open minded unnamed Central Point farmer’s point of view typifies the
ambiguity produced by overlooking miscegenation in a segregated community. The
farmer’s statement that “just ‘cause they didn’t go to the same church didn’t mean that
they weren’t good people” seems to attribute divided religious communities to different
145
religious preferences, but after hearing Mildred’s understanding of the racial system in
Caroline County, this farmer’s words take on a new meaning. People may have attended
different churches not only because of their religious preferences but perhaps also
because the churches were segregated. The blindness to the impact of segregation and the
appearance of liberal racial views in a town that publicly adheres to Jim Crow
segregation while privately overlooking “mixing” produces the culture of miscegenation
in the twentieth century.
A narrative that is told and corroborated throughout this documentary by the
white, black, and ambiguously racialized residents of Caroline County who were
interviewed for Buirski’s film explicates that miscegenation was a common practice and
not an anomalous or shocking occurrence that was particular to Richard and Mildred.
That interracial relationships were happening in this town and happened to go unpunished
by the authorities, until the Loving case, inserts some new realities into an era that seems
already understood. The documentation of people acknowledging that interracial
relationships happened regularly, along with the visual evidence of an interracial couple
in love and determined to stay together in this rural southern community opens up the
past to new ways of understanding and remembering. Mildred and Richard’s marriage
was not an act of protest or civil disobedience staged to combat Jim Crow laws. As the
documentary illustrates, Mildred and Richard were high school sweethearts who wanted
to make a life together. When they married Mildred was pregnant with their oldest son,
Sidney. The pressure for Mildred and Richard to be married was certainly amplified
during this era in our country in which marriage was expected when a couple had
children together. The repercussions of their marriage surprised Richard and Mildred, as
146
it was unexpected and uncharacteristic of other people’s experiences in this town. In a
particularly verbose moment for Richard he explains how relationships between white
and “colored” people were a common occurrence in their community, his sentiments are
consistent with the Deputy Sheriff Edwards and the Central Point farmer who address the
issue in the documentary.
The thing, the way I feel about is, it’s just a few people that lives in this commu-
nity, there’s a few white and there’s a few colored. And we all, we grew up and
as they grew up they all helped one another, you know. We was all, as I say,
mixed together you know to start with so it just kept going that way. It’s been
that way for years down here. It’s a lot of it down here, but we’re the only ones
been bothered about it. It’s a lot of the same down here…It’s just some people
that didn’t like us they just talked see and it started, start rolling.

The documentary does not establish whether the other folks who were not “bothered
about it” actually got married or if they were living together without the legitimation of a
state sanctioned union. It also remains unclear, after viewing this film, whether intimate
relationships between black men and white women also went overlooked or if the
practice of white men dating black women was the only configuration of miscegenation
that was de-criminalized, short of marriage. If the practice of miscegenation was only
overlooked when white men and black women partnered then what does remain alive is a
remnant of Virginia’s long history of miscegenation that makes not seeing or overlooking
white men having children with black women a part of the common sense understanding
of race and sex.

147
Buirski’s Slip and the Insidious Nature of the Culture of Miscegenation
Buirski uses the cinematic examples: Birth of a Nation (1915), Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner (1967), and The Great White Hope (1970) to illustrate the resistance to
miscegenation that circulates in popular culture. The short excerpts of these films are
shown consecutively and in the above order, after a series of archival interviews with
everyday white townspeople, including proud members of the KKK, all of whom
champion segregation and vigilantly denounce miscegenation. Buirski selected the Birth
of a Nation scene in which the “negro” soldier, a white man in black face, chases Flora, a
young white girl through the woods in an attempt to rape her. Flora leaps off of a cliff to
her death rather than suffer the outrage of a black man touching her. In Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner, Sidney Poitier’s character and his young white fiancé ride in the back
of a taxi, she turns his face toward hers and kisses him. We see the taxi cab driver watch
them from his rear view mirror with quiet shock. Finally there is The Great White Hope
scene in which James Earl Jones, playing Jack Johnson, is naked from the waist up
wearing only a white towel. With great excitement Jones climbs over the footboard into
bed with an eagerly awaiting young white woman.
7

These cinematic excerpts and the context in which they appear represent the
cultural imaginary of interracial relationships in which black men eagerly pursue either
frightened or desirous white women. While the film clips play an historian, Edward
Ayers, is heard describing the manner in which members of the white community,
particularly white men, needed to protect their concept of white purity and superiority

7
DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation does not depict a relationship between a black man and
a white woman but rather the visualizes black men, using white men in black face, as
rapists who will take any opportunity to perpetrate acts of sexual violence against white
women.
148
with anti-miscegenation laws and segregation. Ayers elucidates a central yet submerged
reality of Jim Crow segregation and anti-miscegenation laws:
Segregation from the very beginning was fundamentally about sex. It was
designed to prevent men and women of different races, black and white
from occupying the same spaces in which they might be tempted. And so
the more intimate a space was, a railroad car, a parlor, a restaurant, a
schoolroom, the more likely it was to be segregated. Ironically the Loving
case being about love and being about sex is actually what segregation
was about all along.

Buirski’s choice to include this selection of film clips reinforces the logic of the culture
of miscegenation in that they keep white men’s attraction to or rape of or love for black
women out of view and thereby perpetuate the common sense notion that miscegenation
means black men having sex with or threatening to rape white women. Because of the
proliferation of images of black men with white women in popular culture and the erasure
of centuries of white men’s violent and possessive interest in black women, the racial
configuration that Richard and Mildred represent is overlooked, made anamolous, or
lifted from history entirely.
The secrecy that shrouds the long history of sexual violence by white men against
black women makes visualizing this configuration in popular culture less obvious, which
reinforces the hidden nature of the culture of miscegenation. The presence of the culture
of miscegenation in the production of this twenty-first century documentary film, a
cultural text that is tacitly exposing the contradictory practice, exemplifies the
machinations of not seeing generations of white men’s participation in the culture of
miscegenation. The visualization of white men with black women escapes the cultural
imaginary even in the cinematic clips chosen for this documentary about a love
relationship between a black woman and a white man. The silence that protects the
149
culture of miscegenation presents itself even within a cultural text that exposes the
practice, which epitomizes the power of not seeing generations of white men’s
participation in the culture of miscegenation.
Taking into consideration the tortured legacy of black men dying because of their
romantic entanglements, real or imagined, with white women and the legislative power
used to prohibit these relationships that concomitantly protected and denied white men’s
rape of black women, it makes sense that the couple who could change anti-
miscegenation laws would be a white man and black woman. Seeing Richard and
Mildred together disrupts assumptions about southern white men and black women that
circulate through civil rights imagery.
8
Richard and Mildred’s ability to achieve justice in
the Supreme Court and dismantle anti-miscegenation legislation is haunted by a perverse
and vicious history that saw leagues of black men tortured and lynched for being accused
of raping white women, while black women were routinely raped by white men.
The dynamics of secrecy, belonging, and expulsion that structured the culture of
miscegenation in the antebellum south was at work in twentieth century Central Point,
Virginia.
The politics of Place and Virginia’s Culture of Miscegenation
As the first colony established in the new world, Virginia played a central role in
legislating the symbolics of blood as they were visualized and structured in space. In
order to support a discussion of the politics of place, I offer a brief history of Virginia’s

8
Documentary films like Eyes on The Prize that chronicle the Civil Rights Movement
present a narrative of this era that captures the horror of being black and resisting Jim
Crow laws. Men who look like Richard Loving perpetrate horrendous act of violence
against black people and freedom fighters, who are white and Jewish as well. Images like
these reflect a narrative that seems like the only narrative of this era, The Loving Story
offers another set of images that produce knowledge about this time in U.S. history.
150
legislative influence on the culture of miscegenation. Virginia’s legislative branch of
government that drafted and passed anti-miscegenation legislation was an integral
regulatory tool in the system of chattel slavery that allowed white slave owning men to
participate in miscegenation while insulating them from financial and familial reprisal.
9

Slave codes and anti-miscegenation legislation that protected slavery from abolitionists
and putatively preserved whiteness was crafted in colonial Virginia and disseminated
throughout the colonies. Were it not for the widespread understanding that slave owners
did practice miscegenation despite laws against it, seeing enslaved people who looked
white and bore striking resemblances to their owners would have caused alarm. Anti-
miscegenation laws protected white wealth and prosperity from being allocated to black
women who had slave owner’s children, thereby reinforcing their bondage and
subjugation.
The notion that a child’s freedom is determined by the condition of the mother
was not always axiomatic but had to be legislated into being by the Virginia Grand
Assembly in 1662, which did so with ACT XII. As written the law decrees “Negro
womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother.”
10
ACT XII in the
Laws of Virginia for 1662 illuminates the degree to which the practice of miscegenation
on the part of slave holding men and the children born to enslaved women through rape
or a more coerced and less overtly violent sexual act, presented a problem for the planter

9
See Higginbotham and Kopytoff’s “Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of
Colonial and Antebellum Virginia” in Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in
American History, Literature, and Law (2000) for a detailed discussion anti-
miscegenation legislation in Virginia.
10
The eleven volume set in which this law is recorded is entitled The Statutes at Large,
Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature
in the Year 1619: Published Pursuant to an Act of the General Assembly, Passed on the
Fifth Day of February One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight.
151
class that needed to be rectified through the law.
11
The law of 1662 makes a slave
owner’s children born to enslaved women also enslaved bodies.
Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman
upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and de
clared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in the country
shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother, And
that if any Christian shall commit ffornication with a man or woman, hee or
shee soe offending shall double the ffines imposed by the former act.”

Through legislative acts and court decisions concerning racial slavery as well as a famous
treaty on the state of Virginia written by Thomas Jefferson, the symbolics of blood
associated with race work their way into official discourse and national understandings of
blackness and whiteness, even while this land was still colonized English territory. In
later editions of the Statutes at Large the title for ACT XII reads “An Act for mulatto
children being bond or free, to serve according to the condition of the mother.”
12
As the
note to ACT XII indicates the word “mulatto” was not used in the original text and was
not a term that was circulating in the colonies in the year 1662.
13
In 1785 Virginia passed
a law that stated:
Every person of whose grandfathers or grandmothers anyone is or shall have
been a Negro, although all his other progenitors, except that descending from
the Negro shall have been white persons, shall be deemed a mulatto, and so

11
As Saidiya Hartman argues in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making
in Nineteenth-Century America black bodies do not possess agency under a system
chattel slavery. A sexual act between an enslaved body and a man of the slave holding
class would not be consensual because an enslaved woman does not have control over her
own body, she has no agency as an enslaved entity (40-41, 55-56).
12
In the volumes of The Statutes at Large printed in 1733 and 1752 the world “mulatto”
is used.
13
While acts that pertain to miscegenation are the concern of this chapter, it is important
to note that during the late 1600’s the Virginia Grand Assembly passed laws that being
baptized as a Christian would not make a Negro free, that a master could beat an enslaved
person for running away, and that if a slave owner killed a slave it would not be
considered a felony.
152
every person who shall have one-fourth or more Negro blood shall in like manner
be deemed a mulatto.
14

The unspoken understanding that was later codified by Virginia legislation that declared
slavery follows the condition of the mother along with laws banning interracial marriage
all demonstrate the pervasiveness of slave owners having children by enslaved women.
Anti-miscegenation laws really meant to keep black men from have sexual relations with
white women. The preoccupation with blood and racial purity by men of the slave
holding class belies the practice of slave owners entangling their bloodlines with enslaved
women. Legal definitions of racial categories and degrees of blackness naturalized
meanings associated with putatively inherent qualities of blood and race. Anti-
miscegenation laws exemplify the pervasive contradictions that saturate the legal system,
knowledge production, and symbolics of blood in the United States of America. The
practice of overlooking the families that white slave owners had with black women is a
central function of the culture of miscegenation, which is carried into the twentieth
century through anti-miscegenation laws, as The Loving Story demonstrates.
Aesthetics of blood and affective dimensions of visuality work through state
power in bodies of legislators and law enforcement officers who unevenly enforced the
anti-miscegenation laws that declared that Richard and Mildred no longer belonged in the
Commonwealth of Virginia for the crime of miscegenation. The visual evidence of the
Loving’s case documents not only a couple very much in love but also the common
practice of “mixing” taking place the Loving’s community that does not enter the

14
From Black Laws of Virginia accessed online at
http://www.balchfriends.org/Glimpse/BlackLawsofVA.htm
153
historical record of the south or the civil rights movement through cinema, popular
culture, and certainly not in Virginia legislation.
Aesthetics, Affect, Visuality

Figure 17: Grey Villet for Life Magazine Richard, Mildred
and Peggy Loving at ACLU lawyers office

Richard and Mildred’s place in the archival record is sealed in print.
15

Knowledge about the Lovings could have been confined to the judicial transcripts of the
Loving v Virginia case and the 1966 Life Magazine article that featured their family, and
despite Buirski’s reliance on cinematic images that reinforce the erasure of white men in
relationships with black women, this film is able to depict how the Loving’s defied
expectations of blackness and whiteness. The moving and still images of a southern white
man and black woman in love and raising a family together during the zenith of the Civil
Rights era inserts a counter-narrative into our collective memories of the south and
narratives of segregation.

15
This photograph was taken by Grey Villet and published by Life Magazine in the 1966
article “The Crime of Being Married.”
154
Through the use of recovered film footage and still photography, The Loving
Story places Richard and Mildred and their three children in their rural Caroline County
home and introduces their images and voices into the archive alongside the statutory law
that bears their name. The documentary footage that circulates from the Civil Rights era
usually depicts men from the south, who look like Richard Loving, fighting to defend
segregation and inflicting violence upon black men, women, and children.
16
Phil
Hirschkop, one of the ACLU attorneys who represented the Lovings, admits his first
impression of Richard Loving:
I had a natural first negative reaction to Mr. Loving because I had been in the
deep south and I was very suspicious of people who looked like red necks. And he
looked like a red neck. He had a red neck and a crew cut.

Seeing a white man who looks like Richard Loving unabashedly in love with a black
woman creates a dissonance that disrupts common sense understandings of southern
white men.
Although the state used their power to punish Richard and Mildred, Richard
Loving’s whiteness meant something to the state. His whiteness meant that he was
expected to hide his attraction to and love for a black woman and his whiteness also
meant that he had rights that had to be protected by the state. The privilege of Richard
Loving’s white manhood carried ideological weight, or cultural capital.
17
Richard
Loving was a white man whose civil rights had been impeded by the Commonwealth of
Virginia when they arrested him. The Supreme Court made a decision that protected his

16
Documentary film series such as PBS’s Eyes on the Prize assemble news footage of
violent clashes between white segregationists and civil rights demonstrators.
17
Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital refers to knowledge and skills that can be
leveraged for personal gain, something that is usually inherited and determined by social
class. See The Forms of Capital (1986).
155
right to marry as a white man, a decision that is consonant with white supremacist
ideology as well as a disruption of it.
18
The Loving case was successful not simply
because it was right for consenting adults, no matter their race, to marry but because it
was right for a white man to have his civil rights protected.
The images of Mildred and Richard together make legible an aesthetics of race
that collides with contemporary expectations and memories of the Jim Crow south that
have been constructed by violent images of civil rights protestors facing white
supremacist vitriol.
19
Seeing Richard Loving’s devotion to his wife on the screen and in
print at the time of the Life magazine publication exposed the culture of miscgenation and
destabalized its power that surges through the rubric of secrecy, shame, and violence. Phil
Hirschkop discusses the feeling that surrounded Mr. and Mrs. Loving as a couple:
What came through about the two of them was just what everyone says, they were
very much in love. This was a guy if you took the character of him he would have
left her. He didn’t need all that grief. He was a white guy who was in the ruling
class. It never was an issue. It never was a question. It never was a possibility.

The feeling of love between Mildred and Richard attested to in interviews with an older
Phil Hirschkop and their now adult daughter Peggy Loving–Fortune is also palpable in
the archival footage of the couple included in Buirski’s film. Peggy Loving – Fortune
remembers her parents, “It was love at first sight. To marry someone then have to go
through all that they went through. It was nothing but love.” Not only is the love

18
It is important to remember a well that the Loving v Virginia case was decided on the
heels of Civil Rights Act of 1964 which paved the way for the Supreme Court to decide
in the Loving’s favor.
19
I am thinking of the PBS Eyes on the Prize documentary series that includes black and
white photographs of police officers shooting waters hose on black children and white
men with crew cuts spitting at black protestors. Most recently Ava Duvernay’s Selma
(2014) visualizes anti-black racism that civil right’s protesters succumb to or had to
withstand.
156
between Richard and Mildred perceptible in the archival footage but the tension of being
filmed and the anxiety of being the object of the state’s condemnation is also evident.
The photo essay “The Crime of Being Married” that was published in Life
Magazine in 1966 puts alternative imagery of the rural south and miscegenation into
circulation with Grey Villet’s photographs. At the time that the archival footage was shot,
as the documentary film demonstrates, a random sampling of white men and women of
the south felt that segregation was the proper way to handle the race issue and thought
integration would lead to miscegenation, which would corrupt the purity of the white
race. The sentiment of “The Crime of Being Married” article in Life Magazine promoted
a sense of tolerance and compassion as it documented the tension and fear that the family
was living under while in “hand-to-mouth exile in Washington” (Core 1966, 85).
Images of Mildred, Richard, and their three young children Peggy, Donald, and
Sidney smiling together are juxtaposed with portraits of Richard and Mildred looking
pensively away from the camera and candid shots of the couple with their integrated
group of friends at the drag strip -- where Richard and his buddies raced cars on the
weekends. The grit and tenderness that surfaces in the Loving photographs is reminiscent
of Dorothea Lange’s depression era portraits of impoverished families.
20
The Villet
images have the same haunted quality of inequity that made Lange’s images so
captivating yet rather than capturing the impact of displacement because of abject
poverty, the Loving portraits are evocative of exile and suffering because of anti-
miscegenation laws. The tenor of the Life Magazine article communicates the simplicity

20
Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer who captured the
hopelessness of the Great Depression with photographs of destitute families. The most
famous of Lange’s images is probably Migrant Mother taken in 1935.
157
of the Lovings hardworking family that deserves to be left alone, yet the author manages
to create a sense of oddity about the family as well.

Figure 18: Grey Villet for Life Magazine Richard, Mildred
& Peggy Loving and Richard’s mother, Lola Loving
The narrative mentions that Richard’s mother is a midwife and delivered all three of
Mildred’s children. Beneath a photograph of the Loving children laughing and playing
with flowers in a field the writer notes that despite Peggy’s “pure white” appearance and
their oldest son Sidney’s “heavily Negroid” features, the rural community accepts these
children and treats them all the same (Core 1966, 86). Peggy does have very light skin
and blond hair and is featured in four of the six images of the family portrayed in Life
Magazine article.
158

Figure 19: Grey Villet for Life Magazine Peggy, Donald, and
Sidney Loving playing in a field

Figure 20: Grey Villet for Life Magazine Mildred
and Peggy walk in field

159
The spectacle of Peggy Loving having a pure white appearance seems almost
cautionary in the article as it subtextually expresses an uneasiness in not being able to
trust white skin and blond hair to be indicative of whiteness. The essay handles this story
as if a black body that looks like Peggy’s is anamolous. In 1966 narratives in print and in
film have already made the passing black body a part of the cultural imaginary.
21
The
caption next to an image of Mildred holding Peggy’s hand as they walk along a grassy
path reads “Of the girl’s future, Mildred says, ‘Anybody she loves, that’s what I want her
to have” (Core 1966, 86). What hovers beneath the surface in his statement about
Peggy’s future is a question: will she pass for white? The specter of the tragic mulatto, as
I haved discussed in my analysis of Elia Kazan’s Pinky and the Imitation of Life films in
the previous chapter, surfaces in the attention paid to young Peggy in the Life Magazine
article, as well as in Hope Dryden’s archival footage of Peggy as a young girl that Buirski
includs in The Loving Story.
Early on in The Loving Story Buirski shows a few scenes from Hope Dryden’s
archival black and white 16mm footage of Mildred and Richard in their home with Peggy
and Sidney, just a glimpse of Donald passing through the room in one scene is included
in the film. The voice of Peggy as an adult is heard describing how her mother acquired
the nickname Bean from her father while footage of Mildred searching for a pair of socks
in the closet for young Peggy appears on the screen. The cinematographer focuses on
Peggy as she moves about playfully keeping Sidney’s belt away from him above her
head. Peggy follows her mother from the bedroom to the living room where she sits on

21
By 1966 Nella Larsen’s novels Passing and Quicksand were published, and Pinky as
well as both cinematic versions of Imitation of Life had been released. These cultural
texts present narratives that contend with the tragedy and sorrow of black women who are
light enough to pass for white.
160
her lap. The focus on Mildred’s brown arms and hands putting socks on Peggy’s very
light feet shows the contrast of skin color. Dryden’s focus on Mildred and Peggy’s skin
through close ups of their arms, hands, and feet produces the spectral presence of the
“condition of the mother” law that determined that childrend born to enslaved mothers
would be born into slavery themselves. This scene of maternal affection passing from
Mildred to Peggy is haunted by the law that had to bend racial slavery to apply to white
bodies that were reproduced by black women. Visualizing Peggy and Mildred’s
mother/daughter bond taps into a history of black mothers caring for children whose
father’s denied them during chattel slavery.
The preoccupation with Peggy in Hope Dryden’s documentary footage and in the
Life Magazine article is haunted by the narrative of the tragic mulatto. Young Peggy is
unaware of the feeling of unease or the root of the fascination that she stirs inside of
white people when they see her light skin and blond hair with the knowledge of the black
blood that courses through her veins. The Life Magazine article and the Hope Dryden
footage raises suspicion about whiteness - that it could really be blackness. These still
and moving images of the Lovings demonstrate the reality of an interracial family with a
devoted father, beautiful mother, and promising children. Their presence in popular
culture usurpts the secrecy that undergirds the culture of miscegenation and burdens
“mulatto” figures with shame.
Mildred Loving presents an image that produces new knowledge or raises
subjugated knowledge about blackness and black womanhood through her literacy and
agency. I am not suggesting that Mildred, as a black woman, is singular in her ability to
navigate the world of lawyers and press with sophistication and intelligence. I am
161
however attending to what is being produced about blackness through this visual
evidence of the erudite, poised black womanhood that Mildred Loving possessed. By
1966 The Moynihan Report had been published which asserted that the black family unit
was unable to assimiliate because black women had usurped the position of head of
household.
22
Expectations of southern rural blackness, as Hirschkop acknowledges, did
not account for the literary ability or self-possession to write to the Attorney General of
the United States to ask for help. Mildred Loving made herself visible to the state through
her self-advocacy which produced a vision of black womanhood that had to be reckoned
with by Robert Kenney, by the ACLU, and ultimately by the Supreme Court of the
United States.
From Mildred’s pen to the Supreme Courts Gavel
As The Loving Story demonstrates, Mildred Loving did not think of herself as an
activist. She was a mother, a small town woman used to fresh air and plenty of room for
her children to play.
23
Mildred is recorded in the documentary admitting that she hated to
see her children stuck inside like they were caged while they were living in exile in
Washington D.C. The catalyzing event for Mildred was her son Donald being hit by a

22
In 1965, sociologist turned politician, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote The Negro
Family: A Case for National Action, which tried to determine the reason why black
families were not assimilating into American culture well one hundred years after the
abolition of slavery. One of the central reasons, Moynihan believed, was that black
women had too much power in the household and deposed black men of their rightful
place as the head of the household; this idea is incredibly problematic as it reinscribes
stereotypical notices of black women as aggressive. He writes that black men are the
ladies of the races. Roderick Ferguson offers an insightful critique of this document
commonly known as the Moynihan Report in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of
Color Critique (119-23).
23
Arica Coleman conducted an interview with Mildred Loving in 2004. In her article
“Tell the Court I Love My [Indian] Wife” Coleman draws from her interview in which
Mildred Loving states that she did not then and does not think of herself now as an
activist (76).
162
car. He was not badly hurt but this event made getting out of the city and back home to
Virginia an urgent matter. Mildred was encouraged by her cousin to write Robert
Kennedy, the Attorney General at the time, to inquire about the new Civil Rights Bill.
She wrote to Robert Kennedy asking if there would be provisions in the new bill about
anti-miscegenation laws. Robert Kennedy wrote back to Mildred informing her that the
Civil Rights Act would not address her problem but suggested that she contact the
American Civil Liberties Union, which she did. Philip Hirschkop and Bernard Cohen
were the ACLU attorneys who answered Mildred’s plea and took the Loving case to the
Supreme Court.
Phil Hirschkop offers his impression of Mildred Loving:
She spoke very little but when she spoke she was very articulate, Mrs. Loving. If
you saw what she wrote, she wrote in a very neat hand and [had] excellent writ-
ing. It wasn’t what you saw of people in the south who had been so oppressed as
the minority people were of the south and she was instantly likeable.
24

The documentary uses archival footage of a young Bernard Cohen reading the letter that
Mildred wrote to them, this is the letter that began the legal process of overturning the
anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia and in the United States more broadly.
Dear Sir:

I am writing to you concerning a problem we have. Five years ago my husband and I
were married here in the District. We then returned to Virginia to live. My husband is
White, I am part negro and part Indian. At the time we did not know there was a law in
Virginia against mixed marriages. Therefore we were jailed and tried in a little town of
Bowling Green. We were to leave the state to make our home.

The problem is we are not allowed to visit our families. The judge said if we enter the
state within the next thirty years, that we will have to spend one year in jail. We know

24
The term “articulate” is often used to describe black people who have a command of
the English language that disrupts a common sense notion about black undereducation
and illiteracy that surprises the dominant group.
163
that we can't live there, but we would like to go back once and awhile to visit our families
and friends. We have three children and cannot afford an attorney.

We wrote to the Attorney General, he suggested that we get in touch with you. Please
help us if you can. Hope to hear from you real soon.

Yours truly,
Mr. and Mrs. Richard Loving

Mildred’s self-advocacy—through her written word, through her neat hand,
through her desire to go back home—not only began the process of liberating her family
from exile but eventually led to a judgment that ended a perverse legislative legacy of
private concubinage and public disdain. Mildred Loving’s letter writing to Robert
Kennedy and the ACLU garners her a place in the lexicon of Civil Rights. The Hope
Dryden footage that Buirski includes in The Loving Story contains an interview with
Mildred in her home with Richard and the kids. On the subject of the Civil Rights
movement Mildred admits:
I knew Dr. King was out there, I never met him. I would have loved to but I
didn’t. I wasn’t in anything concerning Civil Rights. I was, well WE were trying
to get back to Virginia. That was our goal, to get back home.

The knowledge that Mildred’s letter produced about black womanhood during the era in
which it was written is noted in Dryden’s footage. When Mildred recounts that she took
her cousin’s advice when she suggested that she write to Bobby Kennedy about her
problem, the filmmaker’s surprise is heard off camera.
25
The notion that the Attorney
General of the United States, a Kennedy no less, would correspond with a simple
“colored” woman from Virginia who believes that her civil rights have been violated,

25
After much effort, I have not been able to locate the correspondence between Robert
Kennedy and Mildred Loving.
164
shifts the value placed on black womanhood. When asked about her letter writing
Mildred demurs:
It’s not so much of me and Richard, because we could go away, but it’s the prin-
ciple. It’s the law. I don’t think it’s right. And if we do win we will be helping a
lot of people.

The self-possession needed to draft and letter and mail it to the Attorney General
communicates that Mildred already had a sense of her value, her entitlement to have her
civil rights respected. The groundswell of change that was sweeping the nation in 1963,
Dr. King, The March on Washington, the anticipation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
changing “colored” people’s lives, all created an opening for the possibility that the anti-
miscegenation laws would be dismantled as well. Mildred Loving’s query to Robert
Kennedy and the ACLU initiated the momentum needed to make that potential a material
reality. The affective complex enmeshed in Mildred’s letters invites the spectral presence
of Sally Hemings into the conversation.
26
Attending to Sally’s spectral presence in this
analysis of Mildred Loving’s letter writing campaign is not meant to conflate their lives
but rather make visible the spectral presence of chattel slavery in the twentieth century
U.S. as well as the material presence of the antebellum slave codes that criminalized both
Sally and Mildred’s relationships with the men who fathered their children.
Sally and Mildred
As Annette Gordon-Reed chronicles, Sally Hemings and her mother Elizabeth
were treated with special consideration and as a result may have seen themselves as “a
caste apart” because of their beauty and their aesthetic and social proximity to whiteness
(Gordon-Reed 2008, 55). Sally and her siblings were trained to serve in the house and as

26
I discuss Sally Hemings’s relationship with Thomas Jefferson in detail in the
Introduction of this manuscript.
165
such had to be able to speak and interact with white members of the family and guests in
the manner to which they were accustomed. Sally saw her mother Elizabeth serve as the
mistress of Master Wayles of Virginia and as a result receive a measure of preferential
treatment within the plantation household for herself and her children with him (Gordon-
Reed 2008, 55-56; 80).
27
A spectral presence that emerges when considering the lives of
Elizabeth and Sally Hemings is Parthenia, Sally Hemings’s grandmother, who existed in
the historical record only as an unnamed African slave on a Virginia plantation ledger
until Annette Gordon Reed recovered her name (Gordon-Reed 2008, 51-52).
28
The best
inheritance that Parthenia could offer her daughter and her granddaughter were privileged
places in the Big House that would cost them their wombs, but their wombs weren’t
theirs to own anyway. Parthenia and Elizabeth handed down the possibility of freedom
that was fulfilled with Sally’s children. Parthenia and Elizabeth and Sally haunt the
images of Mildred Loving and her daughter Peggy that appear in The Loving Story.
The Dryden footage that documents Mildred caring for Peggy raises the specter of
Elizabeth caring for Sally, and conjures up images of Sally dressing her young daughter
Harriet. How must Elizabeth and Sally felt when they prepared their daughters for their
daily activities while knowing that they were not equipped to protect them from a world
that believed they are only valuable because of their potential as reproductive property?
Mildred’s desire for Peggy to have the chance to love who she loves, as expressed in the
Life Magazine article, may reach back in time on the spectral plane to Parthenia and

27
Elizabeth had fourteen children, Wayles fathered seven and the other of her children
were fathered by men other than Wayles (Gordon-Reed 2008, 101).
28
In The Hemingses of Monticello Annette Gordon-Reed is able to deduce from
examining slaveholder Francis Epps’s will, that Parthenia also known as Thenia was the
name of the unnamed African slave who was the mother of Elizabeth and grandmother of
Sally Hemings (2008 50-51).
166
Elizabeth and Sally’s hopes for their daughters. Sally entered into her relationship with
Jefferson with the knowledge that the position of the Master’s mistress would provide the
best possible circumstance within the system of chattel slavery. Did Sally despise
Jefferson and his hypocrisy and think him a coward? Did Sally love him? Did she wish to
marry him?
Sally’s feelings do not appear in the historical record but the archive does reflect
that her life with Jefferson produced something uncommon at the time, freedom from
bondage for her children three decades before Lincoln signed the Emancipation
Proclamation. Sally’s life as Jefferson’s mistress enabled her daughter Harriet and her
son Beverly to escape from slavery, to slip away from Monticello without the fear of
being captured (Gordon-Reed 1997, 26-27).
29
Sally and Jefferson’s youngest sons
Madison and Eston achieved freedom through Jefferson’s will when they each turned
twenty-one (Gordon-Reed 1997, 39). As can only be imagined, the sorrow of a mother
witnessing the oppression of her children had to be a great burden and motivator to wrest
any type of power or bit of freedom from within the system of chattel slavery. Holding
this image of Sally Hemings alongside Mildred Loving beckons ghosts of generations of
enslaved mothers who did not send their children off to freedom, whose children were
torn from them, held in bondage, maimed, tortured, or killed during chattel slavery. These
antebellum maternal apparitions appear with Sally as ghostly palimpsests upon Mildred’s
letter. Mildred accepted the sentence of exile for her crime of miscegenation, yet later

29
Jefferson allowed Beverly and Harriet to leave and sent no search party to collect them,
though he did not write manumission papers for them. Because of the “condition of the
mother” provision of the slave code, which Jefferson himself helped to protect, he could
not simply free Harriet and Beverly as his children, children he did want to not
acknowledge were his own.
167
decided to fight for her children using the rights and abilities that she did posses. Mildred
possessed the ability to communicate with legislators through her written word in a
manner that elicited an official response, which generations of enslaved mothers who
came before her never could have done, but first there was exile.
Exile and Belonging

While in exile, Richard, Mildred, and the kids took up residence in a
predominantly black community in Washington D.C. Archival black and white film
contextualizes Washington D.C. in the mid 1960’s with images of a city plagued by
poverty, unemployment, and lack of resources including footage of an empty store front
window with a stray dog occupying the space, black men with liquor-bottle-shaped
brown paper bags in hand milling about on a street corners, dilapidated tenement
buildings, abandoned wrecked cars, children in ill-fitting clothing hanging out on porch
stoops. These scenes create a sense of captivity, of longing and unmet need. The
underlying anti-black racism that is consonant with danger and degeneracy foments
within this representation of Washington D.C. as an unsafe place that is unfit for this
family. Rather than offer a critique of urban poverty that is tied to systemic racial
violence and unequal allocation of resources, the film uses these images to illustrate an
unsavory racial landscape in which the Loving’s were forced to live. Moving inside the
Loving home after showing these images communicates the idea that the Loving family
does not belong here.
Katherine McKittrick’s discussion of racialized politics of place offers a deeper
understanding of how the naturalization of difference through placement makes seeing
certain kinds of people in certain kinds of places axiomatic. McKittrick argues that, “the
168
placement of subaltern bodies deceptively hardens spatial binaries, in turn suggesting that
some bodies belong, some bodies do not belong, and some bodies are out of place”
(McKittrick 2006, xv). Because of the racialization of this family, their intimate relation
to whiteness, the idea that they do not belong in Washington D.C. is communicated
through the editorial choices. The Loving Story illustrates a spatial dilemma in which this
family does not belong in Virginia because of their visible disruption of anti-
miscegenation and does not belong in Washington D.C. because of their relationship to
whiteness.
The geography of racial violence that is enacted by state-mandated banishment is
part of a legacy of forced displacements the have allowed white supremacy to cordon off,
lock up, torture, and kill black bodies that threaten white superiority. McKittrick asserts:
The displacement of difference, geographic domination, transatlantic slavery, and
the black Atlantic Ocean differently contribute to mapping out the real and imagi-
native geographies of black women; they are understood here as social processes
that make geography a racial-sexual terrain” (McKittick 2006, xiv).

The use of space and forced non-belonging as a punitive measure by the state is not
incidental but rather evidence that “black women’s lives and experiences become visible
through these concepts and moments because they clarify that blackness is integral to the
production of space” (McKittrick 2006, xiv). The violent contention over shared public
space that was Jim Crow segregation had been legally resolved with Civil Rights Act of
1964. Integration was the new normal in the American south. The fear of generations of
white men legislators and citizens, as presented in Birth of A Nation and echoed in
archival interviews of southern white men used in The Loving Story, was now beyond the
scope of the legislative power. The “incomplete Americanization” that Spillers theorizes
as inherent in black experiences of America was inherited by Richard Loving through his
169
marriage to Mildred and the unequivocal acknowledgment of his paternity of their
children (Spillers 2003, 385).
The marriage between Richard and Mildred forced the Commonwealth of
Virginia to publicly acknowledge that a white man chose to been seen as loving a
“colored” woman and would risk bringing the power of the state upon him for breaking
the rules that protect the culture of miscegenation. The agents of the state who arrested
Richard and Mildred in the dark of night and Judge Bazille who convicted, sentenced,
and banished them were all forced to either recognize and legitimate an interracial union
between a white man and a black woman, or condemn them for it. In an interview with
Richard and Mildred, the interviewer asks Richard what the state demanded he do after
being convicted of the crime of miscegenation. Richard states with incredulity that he
was told to leave the state and so he left. He then emphatically declares, “That’s the way I
feel about it again, if it’s necessary I’ll leave again and take her. I’m not gonna divorce
her.” The battle of wills between a white man citizen and the state forced a contention
that had to be settled by the Supreme Court.
Mildred Loving is not Black
Throughout this chapter I have referred to Mildred Loving as black or “colored”
yet her self-identity changed over time. As Arica Coleman demonstrates in her article
“Tell the Court I Love My [Indian] Wife,” Mildred Loving’s self-identity changed from
being part negro and part Indian as attested to in her letter to the ACLU, to thinking of
herself as not black at all and not having any black family members
30
(Coleman 2006,

30
Mildred Loving discusses her self-identity with Arica Coleman during an interview
conducted in 2004, as documented in Coleman’s article “Tell the Court I Love my
[Indian] Wife,” 2010.
170
75). As Deputy Sheriff Edwards acknowledges, Caroline County had a community of
“Indians” that lived in a particular part of town, where Richard lived as well. The notion
that Mildred Loving was not black is a bit shocking considering that she is known as the
“colored” party in the landmark anti-miscegenation case that changed the course of U.S.
history with regard to interracial marriage between black and white people. A subtler
dissonance that arises with Mildred Loving’s self-identification as “Indian” is the history
of separation or mutual exclusivity between Native American and African American
people.
The presence of Native Americans or Indigenous people is often not accounted
for in histories of U.S. chattel slavery and early Virginian life. Many important histories
of colonial and antebellum Virginia document the lives of white slave owners and
enslaved Africans and descendants of Africans by focusing on historical figures like Sally
Hemings and Thomas Jefferson or lesser known slave owner/enslaved couples who lived
together and raised families despite the social ostracization shouldered by the slave
owner.
31
These histories focus on the relationships between enslaved black women and
the slave owning men who fathered their children. Mildred Loving’s identification as
Indian demands that attention be paid to the presence of Native people in Virginia during
the twentieth century and the multiracial legacy that dates back to colonial Virginia.
32

31
This study relies on both of Annette Gordon-Reed’s groundbreaking historical volumes
that document the Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson relationship as well as Joshua
Rothman’s Notorious in The Neighborhood which rigorously recount the worlds in which
Sally Hemings, her mother and Grandmother, and her children lived, labored as slaves.
32
Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery and American Freedom as well as Peter
Wallenstein’s Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, An Law – An American
History take up the complex racial landscape in their documentation of early colonial
Virginian society. Given that Virginia was the point of contact in 1619 for the first
enslaved Africans who were forced into slavery by British colonials and that the land was
171
The complex racialization is relevant to my analysis because Mildred Loving’s
identification as “Indian” reflects the layers of racial identity that has been a part of
Virginian society from the colonial era.
Virginia has a long history of legislating the difference between Native American
and Negro people with regard to chattel slavery and marriage. The Caroline County judge
who convicted Richard and Mildred Loving of the crime of miscegenation cited
Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. According to section five of Virginia’s Racial
Integrity Act of 1924:
It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save
a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and
American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term "white person" shall apply
only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than
Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the
American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be
white persons. All laws heretofore passed and now in effect regarding the
intermarriage of white and colored persons shall apply to marriages prohibited by
this act.

Virginia’s distinction between “American Indian” and those with “non-Caucasic blood“
in the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 comes at the end of a trajectory of distinguishing
American Indians from people with African blood in their assignation of rights and
freedom. In 1705, a statute was passed which repealed the enslavement of Indian people.
After the passage of this Virginian statute people who identified as Indian and found
themselves bound as slaves were able to successfully sue for their freedom (Wallenstein,
2002).

already occupied by Indigenous people when the British arrived, the mixture of African,
British, and Indigenous bodies and bloodlines is a defining factor in this region during
that era.

172
In her article “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy” Andrea Smith
offers descriptions of the ways that white supremacy differently racializes black and
native people. As is demonstrated in Virginia law, Smith outlines three pillars of white
supremacy: slavery/anti-black racism, genocide, and orientalism (Smith 2010). She
contends that white supremacy racializes black bodies as inherently enslavable and after
the abolition of slavery white supremacy continued to ensnare black people into
oppressive labor relations such as sharecropping as well as the prison industrial complex.
Smith argues that the white supremacist logic of slavery that racializes black people as
property, is rooted in capitalism, and communicates to non-black people “as long as you
are not black, you have the opportunity to escape the commodification of capitalism”
(Smith 2010, 2). Genocide, as Smith contends, is an aspect of white supremacy that
conceives of indigenous people as disappeared or disappearing, which makes them
unable to claim their own land leaving the land to be claimed by non-Native colonizers
and their descendants. Smith asserts that as capitalism is the anchor for slavery, so
colonialism is the anchor for genocide (Smith 2010). Smith critiques Jared Sexton’s
discussion of Native people in his analysis of multiracialism arguing that he collapses
Native people within an immigrant taxonomy which erases their presence as indigenous
people of this land and extends the logic of settler colonialism (Smith 2010).
33

As Smith critiques, Sexton’s discussion of multiracialism does not address settler
colonialism directly or treat the Native American experience as fundamentally distinct
from the immigrant communities that fall along the plane of racial hierarchies between
the polarities of blackness and whiteness. A central element of Sexton’s critique of

33
Smith is critiquing Jared Sexton’s argument in Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness
and the Critique of Multiracialism (2008).
173
multiracialism is focused on the anti-black racism that is an integral, sometimes tacit
sometimes explicit, component of multiracialism that arranges communities of color
along a racial hierarchy that ascents to whiteness and distances itself from blackness.
Both Sexton’s critique of multiracialism and Smith’s discussions of the three pillars of
white supremacy keep separate Native people and black people. The history of
multiracialism in Virginia, that opens up when Mildred Loving’s self-identification is
acknowledged and taken seriously, reveals a connection between black and Native
American communities that bridges the distance between these communities that laws
like the Racial Integrity Act legislated against.
In the area of Virginia in which Richard and Mildred grew up, the Rappahannock
Indians, white people, and black people lived and worked together. The boundaries
between black, white, and Indian were crossed with such frequency throughout Virginian
history that physical markers of race were largely ineffective (Coleman 2006). Before
1860 all non-white people, black and Native people were categorized as colored, or
mulatto (Coleman 2006). The racial boundaries between African and Native people in
early Virginian society were not clear and this history continued throughout the twentieth
century in Caroline County. Richard and Mildred were raised in racially blended
communities of black, Native, and white people in Caroline County. Coleman argues that
when Richard Loving married Mildred he was marrying an Indian woman and not a black
woman and yet in periodicals that featured stories about the Lovings, in the Supreme
Court Case, and in subsequent scholarly work on the case, Mildred is consistently
represented as black or Negro or Colored. Overlooking Mildred’s identification as Indian
is convenient for the Loving v Virginia Supreme Court case in which black/white
174
intermarriage was being litigated yet attention to Mildred’s identification as Indian opens
up a history of black-native families and marriages that are often obscured and kept
separate in critiques of anti-black racism, multiracialism, and settler colonialism.
Although in 2004 when Coleman interviewed Mildred she did not identify as black in any
way, only as Indian and white, her parent’s identification as Negro and the long history of
mixing in Caroline County enables me to hold open the possibility that Mildred has some
African American, Native American, and white ancestry (Coleman 2006).
The tenet of white supremacy that needs native people to not exist coupled with
the historic mutual exclusivity of black and native blood creates a spectral presence of
indigenous disappearance within Mildred Loving’s narrative of self-identity. No matter
the amount of Indian blood Mildred had in her family tree, her identification points to a
presence of the supposedly disappeared indigenous people. To identify this way means to
make alive what is considered dead; yet bound up in Mildred’s identity as Rappahannock
is an anti-blackness that disappears her African American ancestry. The Racial Integrity
Act that separated Indian and Black bodies on a racial hierarchy and reinforced black
subjugation, was embodied in Mildred’s conception of her own racialized blood.
The archival, visual, and legislative evidence of miscegenation and the resistance
to recognizing the legitimacy of interracial marriages by the state of Virginia, and at the
time twenty-four other states pulls a loose thread in the fabric of our national narrative
unleashing the secret of commonplace southern miscegenation and integration. With
attention paid to secreted narratives of the past that reveal commonplace interracial
relationships, I argue that the national body is in fact a miscegenated body. Even though
she did not consider herself an activist, Mildred’s resistance to anti-miscegenation laws
175
upended the codified contradictory racial boundaries that structured her life. Mildred
posted her letter to Robert Kennedy with the hope that the Civil Rights Act of 1964
would provide her family protection, which it did not, but her query found the support of
the ACLU. By writing her letters Mildred began the process of writing her way out of
exile and back home to Virginia. Mildred was able to change her present condition and
her daughter Peggy’s future by using her agency to craft a document that would lead to a
Supreme Court decision handed down in a black woman’s favor, a ruling that would
change the course of U.S. history.

176
Chapter Four
The Subversive Power of Love in Shirley Anne Williams’s
Dessa Rose

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand;
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Lucille Clifton, The Book of Light

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:

Audre Lorde, A litany for survival (excerpt)

I begin this chapter with epigraphs written by foundational black feminist writers whose
poetry contends with the dialectics of love and epistemologies of survival that
177
emerge in my analysis of Shirley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose.
1
My analysis of Dessa
Rose examines Williams’s black feminist approach to historical fiction and the Neo-slave
narrative as it engenders the subversive politics of visuality and a dialectic of love that
operates as a mode of survival in service of liberation. By situating Dessa Rose within a
black feminist tradition and attending to the black feminist imperatives that emerge in
this narrative, my discussion roots out the subversive power of love that is at the bedrock
of this text as it produces the conditions for liberation during the era of chattel slavery.
Williams’s narrative offers significant historic reversals, critiques of white feminism, and
an indictment of the historical license afforded to white patriarchal figures to authorize
history. This examination focuses on the reproduction of blackness that occurs in
Williams’s work of historical fiction through black maternity and love as a mode of
survival. With Dessa Rose Williams imagines a past that contains successful slave revolts
and the wresting of power by those enslaved which then culminates with the ultimate
boon, black liberation.
My analysis contends with specters of miscegenation that are raised throughout
the narrative. I argue that Williams’s black feminist approach to Dessa Rose pushes back
dominant narratives of sexualized brutality and rape that black women suffered during
chattel slavery in order to make room to imagine other aspects of life and to posit the
possibility of love during this time. In her narrative Williams de-centers rape, not in a
way that excuses white patriarchal violence but in a way that destabilizes the culture of

1
Sherley Anne Williams published the short story Meditations on History in 1980, which
is essentially the first section of the novel Dessa Rose. I have cited the reprinting of
Meditations on History published in the anthology Midnight Birds: Stories of
Contemporary Black Women Writers (1990). A musical version of Dessa Rose was
produced and opened at Lincoln Center in May of 2005.
178
miscegenation.
2
This narrative is shrouded with an immanence, a pregnancy, a period of
waiting that feels haunted by the absent presence of the Master of the house --the symbol
of patriarchy and plantation paternalism -- but that ghost, in Dessa Rose, is impotent. The
acts of violent miscegenation are pushed to the periphery of the story and when they
appear the acts are held firmly in past. The specters of enslaved women who suffered
sexual violence at the hands of men from the slaveholding class become traceable in the
narrative through the “mulatto” characters that bear the mark of white supremacist sexual
violence in their blood and on their bodies. In the world of Dessa Rose the narratives of
rape and total domination are suspended and subverted. The horrific racial violence in
this narrative takes place before the story ever began, instances of miscegenation violence
are conveyed through character’s recollections of them. Only in memories and in
retelling the horrors of slavery do these violent acts appear in the narrative, the
characters, those enslaved or subverting slavery, decide when to speak about it.
Williams’s reconceptualization of the past and the production of a space where the
horrors of chattel are suspended, posits an epistemology of survival and produces a
dialectic of love that enables those who were held in bondage to use their resources to
wrest their freedom from a system that demanded their lives.
In this chapter I argue that through the enslaved maternal figure Williams’s black
feminist approach to historical fiction and the neo-slave narrative inserts love as a mode

2
In the introduction I described the culture of miscegenation as a matrix of sexually
violent miscegenation and anti-miscegenation legislation that depends upon the willful
blindness of the rape of enslaved black women by white men and the overlooking of
children born of this violence. The culture of miscegenation is a system of white
supremacy that depends upon the subjugation of black women’s reproductive capacity,
which codifies racialized symbolics of blood through anti-miscegenation laws that protect
white wealth and superiority while suppressing black freedom and vitality.
179
of survival and utilizes the subversive politics of visuality to produce the conditions for
liberation. A function of the black feminist approach to recovering history or re-
imagining the past allows the past to be infused with possibility. Williams’s use of space,
the terrain of the visual, and the deployment of historical events as a catalyst for her
narrative conjures up rebellious figures from the era of chattel slavery who enact slow
moving resistance in plain sight. The theoretical framework that I employ for this chapter
uses black feminist conceptions of love, the politics of visuality, and the production of
space to attend to the specters of miscegenation that haunt this story of black
reproduction.
Dessa Rose: Narrative and Critique
In Williams’s work of historical fiction we meet the protagonist of Dessa Rose on
June 19, 1847 who is pregnant and being held as a prisoner in a cellar on the Hughes
farm in Marengo County, Alabama. The baby that she is carrying is the only reason that
Dessa is alive. After being tried and convicted Dessa was sentenced to hang and is
awaiting execution as soon as her baby is born. Through a set of interviews between
Dessa and a putative authority on the ways of slaves, Adam Nehemiah who made his
literary mark with the publication of his first book The Masters’ Complete Guide to
Dealing with Slaves and Other Dependants, we learn that Dessa is thought to be the ring
leader of a slave revolt responsible for the deaths of five white men. The first section of
the novel entitled “Darky” is told from the Nehemiah’s perspective. Nehemiah is
determined to leverage his expertise on slaves and slavery to write another book, The
Roots of Rebellion in the Slave Population and Some Means of Eradicating Them and
hopes to ascertain the truth about how the slaves escaped the coffle from Dessa before
180
she is put to death. Rather than answer Nehemiah’s persistent questions about who had
the file that freed them from their manacles on the coffle, Dessa recounts the story of her
love for Kaine, the father of her baby.
Through a meandering tale Dessa describes the love she shared with Kaine and
her complete and total belief that the baby she is carrying is his and not Master Terrell’s,
the man who owned Dessa and Kaine before his death and her imminent demise. She
hints at the procedures women used to prevent or terminate pregnancy and the contempt
that oozed out of the Mistress into Dessa’s belly because she, along with Kaine,
suspected that Master Terrell was the father of her child. In the end we learn that Kaine
was an artist, a musician, a farmer, and the love of Dessa’s life. He played a beautiful
banjo that he crafted himself. One day, because he could, Master Terrell smashed Kaine’s
banjo to pieces. After being devastated by this loss Kaine took after the Master with a
hoe. The Master did not succumb to Kaine but rather the Master returned the blows and
beat Kaine to death with a shovel. On the day that Kaine died the Mistress slapped Dessa
across the face because she would not admit that the baby she was carrying was the
Master’s. The Mistress could not fathom any other reason why the Master would kill
Kaine, since he was the best gardener they ever had. The Mistress told Dessa that she was
going to sell her and her bastard child down south for the worst kind of slavery to punish
her for the infidelity of which she suspected her husband. Dessa recalls squeezing her
hands around the Mistress’s throat, strangling her, the white skin on her neck and face
turning red, blood under her finger nails. Dessa didn’t kill the Mistress that day but she
wishes that she had. Dessa was sold to a slave trader named Wilson who had an enslaved
man that lead the coffle named Nate (Nathan). While on the coffle, Dessa became friends
181
with Nathan and Cully -- a slave on the coffle who looked white except for the kink in his
hair. One night one of the slave drivers got drunk and unlocked Linda, a mulatto slave on
the coffle who was raped every single night in the bushes by one or another of the slave
drivers. On this night the slave trader forgot to relock the manacles leaving all of the
manacles unlocked. When all of those on the coffle felt their chains loosen, Nathan,
Cully, and Dessa made their escape bringing all willing parties along with them. Linda
made her escape as well; she killed the man who was raping her with a rock to the head.
A few days later Dessa was captured along with other fugitives. Nathan and Cully were
never caught and were presumed dead.
After escaping from the coffle, Dessa was captured by Sheriff Hughes and his
posse then taken back to his plantation to await the birth of her child and her death by
hanging. Dessa never tells Nehemiah the real story of how the coffle escape occurred,
Williams only shares that element of the narrative with the reader. One early morning
while Hughes and Nehemiah were out searching for a maroon colony they had heard of
in the vicinity, Dessa is broken out of that damp cellar prison on the Hughes farm by Nate
and Cully.
Much of the novel takes place in a plantation house, Sutton Glen that is in a state
of ruin in which the Master is absent. The Mistress, Rufel, has a young daughter and a
son and is providing sanctuary for those who have runaway from slavery. The second
section called “The Wench” is a foray into the perception of the Mistress Rufel, a
nickname for Ruth Elizabeth. When Dessa arrives at the house she is unable to nurse the
son she had, who has deep brown skin and is clearly Kaine’s child as Dessa had
emphatically declared. Dessa is horrified when she wakes up in a featherbed, the
182
Mistress’s bed, and finds Rufel nursing her newborn baby, Desmond Kaine whom they
call Mony, pronounced money. The formerly enslaved men, women, and children who
live in this plantation community work the land, cook in the lean-to kitchen, and keep the
house. From the looks of things it appears that the black bodies on the plantation are
slave labor but in fact they are able to enjoy the fruit of their labor in this household.
Sutton Glen is an isolated plantation home that sits on a hill six miles away from
the main road. The house is dilapidated. It is an unfinished project. The kitchen is just a
lean-to but has a fancy stove that doesn’t work well. Only two rooms in this house are
inhabitable, the parlor and the Mistress’s bedroom. A staircase leads up to a second floor
that does not exist and the slave quarters are likened to a chicken coop with one side for
women and one side for men. The Master of the house is disliked by his neighbors as
well as his wife’s family. He is reportedly a gambler who has been estranged from Rufel
and the plantation for over a year; he has been gone for two cotton seasons. Rufel expects
that he will come back but she and the runaways who occupy the home move about their
daily lives as if they do not expect him to return anytime soon. He may be dead or he may
come back at any moment. As Dessa recovers, the community of black women embrace
her and tension between Dessa and Rufel arise. It becomes especially heated in this home
when Dessa discovers that Nathan is having a sexual relationship with Rufel. Dessa feels
betrayed but stuck in this place.
The third section of the novel, “The Negress,” is told from Dessa’s point of view.
In this section the great escape unfolds. One of the most knowledgeable members of the
community, Harker, is able to make plants and cotton grow on land that the Master was
never able to make fertile. Harker devises a plan, along with Nathan, to make money by
183
selling a few of the stronger men, himself included, and one woman back into slavery as
they trek across the south toward freedom in the west. After being sold to plantations that
they happen upon, the renegades will immediately escape and meet up with the others at
a designated location. On this road to freedom, Dessa is pretending to be Miss Rufel’s
lady’s maid and Mammy to her baby girl Clara and Nathan pretends to be the driver. This
double cross will earn them tens of thousands of dollars and the ability to travel west to
begin their lives in freedom. Just when they are nearly finished with their antebellum
freedom ride, Nehemiah of all people spots Dessa. Nehemiah, who has been slowly
losing his mind since Dessa escaped, has been relentlessly pursuing her. He arrests Dessa
on the street and hauls her into the sheriff’s station. He demands that the sheriff look for
the identifiable scars on her thighs and buttocks but the sheriff refuses. He calls for
Dessa’s Mistress. Rufel comes to Dessa’s aid and is able to save her from Nehemiah’s
grasp. The band of runaways and rebels are able to complete their journey and enjoy their
freedom in the west. Though she longs to leave with Nathan and join her compatriots in
the west, Miss Rufel goes back east to her family in Charlotte. Harker professes his love
for Dessa Rose and they make a family together. Dessa passes on their story of escape
and freedom to their children and grandchildren to remember and share with generations
to come.
In the Author’s Note found in the opening pages of the novel, Sherley Anne
Williams, contextualizes her narrative by offering a brief description of the two historical
events which inspired her novel. In August of 1829 an enslaved woman escaped from the
coffle she was chained to as she walked from Maryland to Kentucky, along with ninety
other men, women, and children. The shackles of each man bound to the coffle had been
184
filed through. Several white men were killed and injured in the escape attempt. The
leaders of the revolt, five men and one woman, were sentenced to death by hanging. The
men were hung on November 29
th
1829 and the woman, who was pregnant, was kept
alive until May 25 1930, after the birth of her child (Aptheker 1943).
3
In 1830 a white
woman in North Carolina was caught not only harboring runaway slaves but planning an
uprising with them and was stockpiling guns and ammunition to facilitate their plans. Her
son was confronted by authorities on the road leading to the house who, when questioned,
informed them that his mother fed runaway slaves. The firearms and food were
discovered on her property and eleven structures were burned to the ground. Her
punishment, if any, is not documented. It is reported that several Negroes were killed
(Aptheker 1943).
In Dessa Rose Williams wanted to imagine a scenario in which these two
rebellious women, one white and one black, could prevail in their attempts to subvert the
system of chattel slavery and enact a successful slave revolt. Another impetus for
William’s work was her desire to address the outrage that she felt over William Styron’s
The Confessions of Nat Turner, a book that travestied the legacy of the leader of the
famous slave revolt in Virginia in 1831. I seems clear that Williams’s work of historical
fiction was positing a past in Nat Turner’s honor in which a smart black man with a
brilliant plan could work with a collective to execute a successful slave revolt, to

3
Williams writes in her Author’s Note to Dessa Rose that she learned of the enslaved
woman’s escape from the coffle in Angela Davis’s essay “Reflections on the Black
Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” then followed Davis’s source and
discovered the story about a white woman who was harboring runaways (1986).
185
recuperate Nat Turner’s bravery and rebellious spirit from historians like Styron who
worked to diminish his contribution to the pursuit of freedom in the antebellum south.
4

In his book Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form
Ashraf H.A. Rushdy situates Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 work of historical fiction
Dessa Rose within the African American literary tradition of Neo-slave narratives.
5

Rushdy circumscribes this literary movement between 1966 and 1994, beginning with
Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and ending with several novels published that year including
J. California Cooper’s In Search of Satisfaction (Rushdy 1999). In Rushdy’s conception
of the Neo-slave narrative, the work of fiction must have a social and intellectual
investment rooted in the tumultuous decade of the 1960’s while also having a stake in the
social and cultural moment in which it was published (Rushdy 1999).
6
Rushdy’s
conception of a Neo-slave narrative finds that works of African American fiction
concerned with U.S. chattel slavery published in the 1970’s or 1980’s happen also to be
responding to the social, political, cultural imperatives of movements from the 1960’s.
The authors of the texts Rushdy examines were themselves members of a generation that
was shaped by the issues, upheavals, and promise of the 1960’s (Rushdy 1999). Rushdy

4
In her article “(W)riting the Work and Working the Rites” Mae G. Henderson argues
that William Styron with his The Confessions of Nat Turner is “a kind of literary
interlocutor” for Williams’s short story Meditations on History upon which she
expounded for the novel Dessa Rose (632). As Henderson notes Williams’s lifts her title
for the short story from Styron’s Author’s Note in Confessions in which he describes his
work as not a “historical novel” but a “meditation of history” (632).
5
Along with Dessa Rose Rushdy analyzes the Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976),
and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990) in Neo-slave
Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (1999).
6
In Black Subjects Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery Arlene
Keizer argues that black literature that contends with slavery is not simply work to be
theorized about but that the texts, the contemporary narratives of slavery, are theoretical
works, themselves (1).
186
discusses Williams’s investment in responding to the publication of William Styron’s
inflammatory book, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the year prior to her beginning to
write Dessa Rose in 1968.
7
Rushdy contends that with Dessa Rose Williams is:
Creating strategic culture-specific filters as a kind of performative prophylactic
for her own narrative – using fantasies of slave love as ‘a prism’ through which
tales of slave suffering ‘must be read,’ using accounts of slave cultural
activity…Williams undertakes the dual but imbricated tasks of demonstrating that
racial roles are performed and developing a narrative form that contests and
prevents the appropriative acts of would-be literary masters (Rushdy 1990, 135).

In “(W)riting The Work and Working the Rites” Mae G. Henderson also addresses
Williams’s literary indictment of Styron with a detailed analysis of Williams’s critique of
Styron’s Confessions that she issued in Meditations on History, the short story Williams
published that would later be expounded into the novel Dessa Rose. With Meditations
and Dessa Rose Williams enacts a form of literary resistance by responding to the sort of
literary and archival violence that Styron wages with Confessions through a narrative that
also foregrounds that experiences and rebelliousness of black women during chattel
slavery.
As Rushdy is interested in excavating the historical, social, political, and cultural
parameters of the Neo-slave narrative literary tradition to which Dessa Rose belongs, I
am drawn to exploring the black feminist tradition that is expressed in Williams’s novel.
With Rushdy’s periodization of Dessa Rose in mind, I trace Williams’s lineage as a black
feminist writer and locate her work of historical fiction within a tradition of black
feminism. Williams’s contribution to African American literature with her short stories,

7
Rushdy points to the outrage among black political figures and intellectuals to William
Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner as a flashpoint of black criticism of white
representations of slavery and the genesis of the Neo-slave narrative tradition. In his
chapter on Dessa Rose in Neo-slave Narratives (1999) Rushdy offers an analysis of the
parity between Dessa Rose and Confessions.
187
poems, and this novel offer something that she found lacking as a young reader--
representations of black women’s experiences. In the preface to Meditations on History
Williams remarks upon the significance of the formative relationships that she had with
black women, many of whom were in her own family. These women were the inspiration
for characters that she developed in her work, namely her first published piece the short
story “Tell Martha Not to Moan” that was anthologized in Toni Cade Bambara’s The
Black Woman. Williams acknowledges:
But nowhere did I find stories of these heroic young women who despite all they
had to do and endure laughed and loved, hoped and encouraged, supported each
other with gifts of food and money and fought the country that was quite literally,
we were convinced, trying to kill us (Williams 1990, 225).

After being disappointed with the critical reception by members from the Black
Power movement who disregarded her work because it was not enough like Richard
Wright’s literary contributions, Williams became disenchanted with that particular
element in the struggle for black liberation, yet she remained committed to black
consciousness and the black aesthetic (Williams 1990). Rather than simply reproduce a
power dynamic with a female leader atop the hierarchical pyramid, Williams develops a
narrative through which resistance to dominant power prevails. She sees herself in her
characters and is invested in leaving a legacy, a kind of archive of black women’s
epistemologies for the generation who succeeds her (Williams 1990). When asked in an
interview what the purpose of her novel is, Williams replies:
The first purpose was the story. I thought I had a good story—of the woman who
had participated in the uprising on the slave coffle—that was important and that
needed to be told, and I wanted people to be as excited about it as I was. As I
began to explore that character more, I could see other issues that were worth
talking about, such as some positive possibilities for relations among Black men
188
and women. People were working actively for survival in ways that perhaps didn't
make the history books, but that were real nonetheless (Greene 1986, 34).

This approach to narrative storytelling enacts imperatives of black feminism that
demonstrate the value of black womanhood, recover black women’s historical resistance
to domination, mobilize love as a mode of survival, and deliver a critique of white
feminism -- all vital components of black feminist imperatives to which this analysis of
Dessa Rose will attend.
Black Feminist Imperatives

Above all else, our politics initially sprang from our shared belief that Black
women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct
to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy
(Hull, Scott, and Smith 1982, 15).
In the foundational black feminist anthology, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks
are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, The Combahee River Collective contributes “A
Black Feminist Statement” which offers an origin story of twentieth century black
feminism, a history of the organization, issues and problems they have encountered,
statements about what the collective believes, as well as transformative practices in
which they engage. In my analysis of Dessa Rose I trace black feminist imperatives that
emerge in the narrative. This approach finds connections between the issues pertaining to
black women’s lives during chattel slavery and those that black women faced during the
time that William’s is crafting this narrative, which spans from the 1960’s to the 1980’s.
Following Toni Morrison’s conception of the past that she understands as not
complete but rather “still in process, which is another way of saying that when it’s
critiqued, analyzed, it yields new information about itself,” my analysis of Dessa Rose
189
examines Williams’s imagination of the past in her narrative.
8
Williams’s deployment of
the past, through the device of character’s recollections, offers a different conception of
the past -- one that loosens the grip of dominant histories and unearths secrets that reveal
something new in the archive of women’s experiences of chattel slavery. The black
feminist approach that I employ reads Dessa Rose as generating an epistemology of black
feminism that was not found in the books that Williams could check out from the library
when she was a little girl. Williams is publishing stories that center black women while
keeping the horror at bay, stories in which the black people triumph and the women save
themselves sometimes. The critiques of white feminism, dominant history, and the
subversion of white patriarchy and paternalism that Williams levies with Dessa Rose are
relevant during chattel slavery as well as during the Civil Rights Era, the Black Power
Movement, and in the new millennium. I read Dessa Rose as a black feminist text that is
imagining a past for black women that is other than demeaning, depressing, and mired in
loss and grief. I argue that this black feminist text produces is a dialectic of love that is
able to achieve freedom for the collective under a regime of terror and plantation
paternalism whose presence is imminent and seems inescapable.
The struggles and the triumphs that Dessa faces are emblematic of the imperatives
of black feminism. Williams’s use of the historical events that she discovered as a result
of reading Angela Davis’s article “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the
Community of Slaves” as the catalyst for Dessa Rose, demonstrates the importance of
recovering revolutionary black women from history. In the short story iteration of Dessa

8
This quote is an excerpt from the 2004 Wellesley graduate commencement speech that
Toni Morrison delivered entitled “Be Your Own Story.” A longer excerpt from
Morrison’s speech opens the introduction to this manuscript.
190
Rose entitled Meditations on History Williams uses a quote from Davis’s “Reflections”
as an epigraph.
9

The myth [of the black matriarchy and the castrating black female] must be
consciously repudiated as myth and the black woman in her true historical
contours must be resurrected. We, the black women of today, must accept the full
weight of a legacy wrought in blood by our mothers in chains…as heirs to a
tradition of supreme perseverance and heroic resistance, we must hasten to take
our place wherever our people are forging on towards freedom.

Williams then “respectfully and affectionately” dedicates the short story to Angela Davis.
With Meditations on History and Dessa Rose Williams enlivens Davis’s black feminist
call to action to repudiate the myths of black womanhood and recover black women from
the ossuary of dominant history. Through her imagination of the past Williams literally
registers the manner in which black women fought the systemic codification of
oppression that persisted from the era of chattel slavery through time in which Williams
was writing. Davis’s invocation “of a legacy wrought in blood by our mothers in chains”
reproduced in Williams’s epigraph and illustrated with her pregnant enslaved protagonist
who was shackled through the first third of the novel, conjures up images of black
women’s suffering that Davis and Williams are determined to recover from history’s
abyss. Davis’s invocation of “blood” in this phrase calls up the many valences that blood
takes on in the context of slavery, from the bodily fluid that flowed from lacerations born
by enslaved bodies to the metaphoric racialization that circulates through the rhetoric of
sanguinity.

9
Meditations on History is essentially the first section of Dessa Rose in which Dessa is
pregnant awaiting the birth of her child that will quickly be followed by her execution for
her role in the slave revolt that killed white men. While in the cell a white man, Adam
Nehemiah, who is a writer and a putative expert on slaves and slave culture interviews
Dessa in an attempt to discover how she was able to escape the coffle.
191
The foundational nature of Davis’s “Reflections” for black feminist thought and
praxis abounds, The Combahee River Collective also looks to this text in their discussion
of the origin of their collective in “The Black Feminist Statement.”
…we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women’s
continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. Black women’s
extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of
white male rule) has always been determined by our membership in two
oppressed racial and sexual castes. As Angela Davis points out in ‘Reflections on
the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,’ Black women have
always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to
white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their
communities in both dramatic and subtle ways (Hull, Scott, and Smith 1982, 14).

Davis’s foregrounding of black women in “Reflections” brought attention to the lack of
scholarly examinations of black women’s experiences of chattel slavery. The historical
accounts up until that point conflated the gendered politics of slavery and obscured the
particularities of black women’s bondage. The call to resurrect black women from history
urges black women to document to their histories and to collect the smatterings of black
women’s archival presence. The black feminist imperatives that emerge in my analysis of
Dessa Rose address Williams’s use of historical events to extract black women from the
rubble of the archive which absconds their place in history by imagining a past in which
survival is possible and freedom is attainable. The narrative device of using character’s
memories to recall the horrors of slavery, rather than having them take place in the real
time of the novel, pushes the violence that dominates the discourse of black women’s
experiences of chattel slavery to the periphery, both temporally and substantively, of the
novel. The figure of the black enslaved pregnant woman enables a resurrection of the
particular horrors black women experienced during chattel slavery, being bred for
increase and the maternal sorrow that the runaways of Dessa Rose evaded.
192
The particularity of black women’s experiences make visible the systemic
racialized sexual violence perpetrated by white patriarchal power that would go
unnoticed and unchecked without focusing on gender and race in studies of chattel
slavery. The adversarial positionality between black women and white men is a theme
that runs throughout Dessa Rose with Dessa’s relationship to the writer Nehemiah,
Master Terrell, and the absent presence of Rufel’s husband, Master Vaughn of Sutton
Glenn. William’s explicit critique of Styron’s Confessions and the unraveling of
Nehemiah at the end of her novel demonstrate a black feminist desire to depose the white
patriarchal authorial power to construct the narrative and structure the discourse of black
women in history. Williams also recognizes and discusses the fraught relationship
between black feminism and black political movements, her own relationship with the
black power movement exemplifies the tension that The Combahee River Collective is
concerned with:
Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for
Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of us
were active in those movements (civil rights, Black nationalism, the Black
Panthers), and all of our lives were greatly affected and changed by their
ideology, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. It was our
experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well
as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need
to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and
antisexist, unlike those of Black and white men (Hull, Scott, and Smith
1982, 14).

As Rushdy contextualized, Williams’s work on Dessa Rose spans the tumultuous decades
of the 1960s and 1970s and moves into the 1980’s. The resistance of black rights
movements to foreground the particular needs of black women and the assertion, within
and outside of these movements, that black women undermine black progress is
193
addressed in Williams’s use of a gender inclusive black collective as a unit of resistance
and liberation in Dessa Rose. The refusal of black feminists to separate themselves from
black men, as the lesbian separatist movement called for, is a political move that attends
to the particular needs and desires of black women to include men in the struggle for
liberation -- not at the expense of black women’s rights but rather in service of liberation
for all (Hull, Scott, and Smith 1982, 16).
10

Williams’s narrative exposes the systemic violence that engendered the
stigmatization of blackness and the debilitating racial hierarchies that it reinforces. Her
representation of black womanhood helps to counter the construction of black women as
the root of the black problem that circulated during the 1960’s when Williams was
coming of age as a writer (Williams 1990). In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan published
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action that is commonly referred to as the
Moynihan Report. Moynihan, the sociologist turned Senator, found that the family
structure was the fundamental problem with the Negro family and the female-headed
household was the outstanding culprit (Ferguson 2004). Moynihan declared that, “As a
familial formation that ‘retards progress’ because of its nonheteronormative conformity,
the female-headed household impedes the march of civil rights” (Ferguson 2004, 122).
11

The Moynihan report shifted the blame off of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy and onto
the backs of black women. During the 1960’s in the United States members of the black
power movement used findings in the Moynihan report that asserted black single working

10
See the Radical Lesbians’s manifesto “Woman Identified Woman” for their treatise on
the reasons and demands for women to exist outside of the power of men in The Second
Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, 153-157.
11
Roderick Ferguson offers a detailed analysis of the Moynihan Report and black non-
heteronormativity in his analysis of the systemic pathologization of the black matriarch in
Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique (2004).
194
mothers were the demise of the black family. Black nationalist leaders like Eldridge
Cleaver demanded that the women who successfully maintained their female-headed
households give black men back their rightful place as leaders in the home (Ferguson
2004, 123–124; Collins 1990, 75). In her article “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare
Queens” Cathy Cohen also discusses the pathologies of black womanhood outlined in
The Moynihan Report that blame black mothers for the demise of the black family. “The
stigmatization and demonization of single, mothers, teen mothers, and primarily, poor
women of color dependant on state assistance has had a long and suspicious presence in
American “intellectual” and political history” (Cohen 1997, 40). In the 1980’s when
Dessa Rose was published, Moynihan’s overly aggressive matriarch had morphed into
the welfare queen.
12

In a campaign speech given in 1976, the same year that he lost the Republican
primary to Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan described the infamous welfare queen as using “
80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security,
veteran’s benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her
tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year” (Levin 2013). Patricia Hill

12
Though Reagan is thought to have invented to the term “welfare queen” he did not coin
this term, but made it famous in the 1976 speech that he delivered while campaigning for
the Republican Presidential nomination. Reagan lost the nomination for Republican
candidate to the sitting President, Gerald Ford, who became President when Nixon
resigned in 1974; Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter. “Welfare queen” first appeared
in the Chicago Tribune in 1974 in an article “‘Welfare queen’ jailed in Tuscon” by
George Bliss, written about Linda Taylor, the woman that Reagan described but did not
name in his speech. See Josh Levin, “She Used 80 Names: The Real Story of Linda
Taylor, America’s Original Welfare Queen” Slate.com, December 19, 2013, accessed
March 27, 2015,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_
queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html

195
Collins’s examines the damage that the assignation of the welfare queen can wage upon
mothers who need public assistance asserting, “[a]t it’s core, the image of the welfare
mother constitutes a class–specific, controlling image developed for poor, working class
Black women who make use of social welfare benefits to which they are entitled by law”
(Collins 1990, 78). Collins argues that the welfare mother is a reincarnation of the
breeder woman, an enslaved black woman thought to be more suitable to bear children
than white women because of her ability to produce children the way that animals do.
Both the welfare mother and breeder woman images allow the state or dominant group to
insert themselves into the lives and reproductivity of black women (Collins 1990, 78).
These constructions of black women as breeders and welfare queens were being produced
while Williams was crafting her narrative, the depictions of black women in Dessa Rose
work to counter limiting and damaging representations of black womanhood. Williams
crafts narrative threads in Dessa Rose that expose and destabilize the system of racial,
sexual, and class oppression codified during chattel slavery, which persists centuries later
in the oppression of black people, black women, black mothers. What follows is an
analysis of what I recognize as Williams’s resistance to the limiting and damaging
representations of black womanhood produced during the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s, as
well as her critique of white feminism, that produces a subversion of the culture of
miscegenation engendered during the era of chattel slavery.

196
A Critique of White Feminism and the Culture of Miscegenation

In her examination of Dessa Rose Elizabeth Beaulieu addresses aspects of the
novel that have been less discussed in the literary criticism of Williams’s.
13
Unlike much
of the African American literary analysis of Dessa Rose, Beaulieu discusses the love
relationship and the reversals that Williams produces with this novel, particularly the
white Mistress Rufel breastfeeding Dessa’s son Mony and Rufel’s sexual liaison with the
runaway named Nathan.
14
My contentions are not consonant with and at times directly
counter to Beaulieu’s, in fact her analysis is demonstrative of what I see Williams
critiquing about white feminism with her narrative choices for the white Mistress
character, Rufel. In my conception of the culture of miscegenation the paradigm casts the
burden of sexual violence upon the victim of rape and insists that she must have incited
the violence that is systematically visited upon her. Through the suspicion that the white
Mistress characters, Mistress Vaughn and Rufel, hold about enslaved women seducing
the Master, Williams levies a critique of white feminism.
15
When Rufel first learns of
Dessa’s story of being sold to a coffle even though she was so far along in her pregnancy
she crudely speculates, “I bet she was making up to the master; that’s why the Mistress
was so cruel” (Williams, 136; 1986). The runaway slave character who brings Dessa to

13
See “Cause I Can: Race, Gender, and Power in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose”
in Elizabeth Beaulieu’s Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative.
14
In Nathan’s backstory we learn that he was the enslaved lover of his first mistress who
used her position of power over him to make him have sex with her. This mistress would
threaten Nathan with sale or death if he did not comply or did not perform to her liking.
This relationship gave him the experience and confidence to open the door to a sexual
relationship with Rufel. I see this plot point as Williams critiquing the historic power that
white women wield in relationships with black men in which black men become
vulnerable to torture or death as a result.
15
In Dessa Rose Mistress Vaughn is Master Terrell’s wife. Dessa lived her whole life at
the Vaughn plantation. Mistress Vaughn had Dessa sold to the coffle because she
suspected that the baby she was carrying was her husband, Master Terrell’s.
197
the plantation sanctuary, Harker, defends Dessa to Miss Rufel reminding her that Dessa’s
baby does not look like he could be the Master’s child because of his dark complexion,
yet Rufel is unconvinced. Through Williams’s rather outrageous wet nurse reversal, in
which the white Mistress nurses Dessa’s son, she disrupts the culture of miscegenation
and disturbs Dessa, whose baby is latching on and nursing from a white woman’s breast.
Williams describes Dessa’s shock:
Dessa knew the white woman nursed the baby; she had seen her do it. It went
against everything she had been taught to think about white women but to inspect
that fact too closely was almost to deny her own existence. That the white woman
had let them stay- even that was almost too big to think about. Sometimes it
seemed to Dessa that she was drowning in milky skin, ensnared by red hair
(Williams 1986, 117).

The culture of miscegenation forbids the intimate touching between a white mother and
black child; the nursing would be anathema to the system of chattel slavery, which
demands that black bodies not be recognized as human, not be nurtured, and be treated
only as property. In Beaulieu’s examination of Rufel nursing Mony she suggests that
Rufel’s willingness to suckle this black baby without thought of his color or the propriety
of her actions is a kind of gateway to accepting the sexual relationship with the runaway
named Nathan (Beaulieu 1999). Beaulieu characterizes Dessa’s contempt and sense of
betrayal after finding Rufel nursing her son as “reverse prejudice” (Beaulieu 1999, 39). I
contend that this reading is simply missing the point of this narrative thread and actually
enacts the white feminist self-centered blindness that Williams critiques in her novel
through the white Mistress character Rufel (Ruth Sutton). Beaulieu’s reading equates
Dessa’s oppression with Rufel’s, making the rather preposterous claim that “Ruth
Sutton’s story parallels Dessa’s, drawing attention to the fact that gender inequality in
antebellum America had little to do with race” (Beaulieu 1999, 43). The pains that
198
Williams takes to depict the ways that the compounded oppression of race and gender
structure black women’s suffering during slavery are overlooked with this reading. I
argue that Williams is actually levying a critique of white feminism with the relationship
between Rufel and Dessa not simply drawing a parallel of oppression between them.
The encounter that Rufel has with Mr. Oscar in the novel enacts a reversal that
makes the white Mistress not only experience the violence of the white patriarchy herself
but forces her to realize that the enslaved black women she refused to believe actually
were victims of lecherous white men’s violence. Rufel and Dessa encounter Mr. Oscar
while they are in the midst of enacting their scheme to sell a few of their number back
into slavery, who will then escape and rejoin the group down the road. Dessa, performing
the role of lady’s maid and mammy, and Rufel, playing the part of a well-to-do plantation
Mistress, spend the night at the home of Mr. Oscar, is a southern planter. Rufel and Mr.
Oscar have dinner together and drink and flirt, then after much merriment Rufel retires
for the evening. In the middle of the night Dessa, who is sleeping on a pallet on the floor
next to the bed, is awakened by the sounds of Rufel fighting off Mr. Oscar, who has
drunkenly entered the bedroom. Rufel is trying and failing to resist his sexual demands
when Dessa jumps up to help her. Together they force Mr. Oscar off of Rufel and out of
the bedroom. While I do agree with Beaulieu that together Dessa and Rufel “subvert
patriarchal authority” when they fight off Mr. Oscar, I contend that rather than simply
illustrating a bond between black and white women through resistance to a white man’s
199
sexual violence, this narrative node levies a black feminist critique of second wave white
feminism (Beaulieu 1999, 47).
16

Reading the passage in which Mr. Oscar attempts to ravish Rufel with black
feminist imperatives in mind makes salient the critique of a willful blindness to racism
that a resistance to oppression, which focuses solely on gender, inevitably enacts. This
experience of sexual violence forces Rufel to recognize the depravity of white patriarchal
power that she refused to acknowledge prior to this event. If we can recall, when Rufel
first meets Dessa she insists that she must have enticed her Master, to be carrying what
must undoubtedly be his child. When Rufel thinks back upon the day when Ada confides
in her that she and her daughter Annabelle ran away because their Master, a man who is
Ada’s father and Annabelle’s grandfather, was trying to tried to rape Annabelle, Williams
writes:
Rufel still itched sometimes to throw the lie back in Ada’s face (White
man indeed! Both of them probably run off by the mistress for making up
to the master)… (Williams 1986, 93).

16
In “Meditations and Mediations: Issues of History and Fiction in Dessa Rose” Nicole
R. King examines the relationship between the enslaved woman and white mistress in
Dessa Rose. She brings the title character, Dessa, into comparative analysis with the
historical figure of Celia, an enslaved woman convicted of murder in the case State of
Missouri V. Celia, a slave. For analyses of the relationship between the white women in
two significant works of African American fiction see Patricia Ferreira’s “What’s Wrong
with Miss Anne: Whiteness, Women, and Power in ‘Meridian’ and ‘Dessa Rose.’”
Deborah McDowell analyzes Dessa Rose in “Negotiating between Tenses: Witnessing
Slavery after Freedom – Dessa Rose in the volume she edited with Arnold Rampersand
Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Doris Davenport reviews Dessa Rose in her article
published in the Black American Literature Forum, 1986. Elizabeth Beaulieu analyzes
the relationship between Dessa and Rufel positing a feminist relationship and subversion
of patriarchy in her chapter on Dessa Rose in Black Women Writers and the American
Neo-Slave Narrative.

200
By experiencing the violence that white men are capable of Williams forces Rufel to
know that white men routinely rape women who they see as accessible and unprotected.
Dessa and Rufel do share a moment of solidarity in which they depose white patriarchal
power but more saliently, this is a moment when white feminism has to recognize the
validity of black women’s violation by white men, without equivocation.
Williams’s representation of a love affair between a white woman and a black
man, during the era of chattel slavery, is a subversion of the culture of miscegenation in
which white men rape black women while pathologically “protecting” white women from
black men, all of whom they characterize as potential rapists. But more importantly
subverting the culture of miscegenation through the depiction of a white woman and
black man having consensual sex, this storyline registers a black feminist desire for
recognition and understanding of the betrayal that this love affair instigates for black
women.
17
The betrayal that Dessa feels about the sexual relationship between Rufel and
Nathan exemplifies a sense of rejection and loss that circulates in black womanhood with
which Williams contends in Dessa Rose. Of the relationship between Rufel and Nathan
Williams explicates her intention:
In the relationship between Dessa and the white woman, Rufel, I wanted to see
whether there was a basis on which Black women and white women could relate
to each other, with respect, despite the fact of interracial liaisons between white

17
I do recognize that all black women do not experience a feeling of betrayal when they
encounter love relationships between black men and white women. What I am working to
articulate here is that Williams wants to call attention to the sense of betrayal experienced
by some black woman who learn about black men in relationships with white women. I
am interested in noting that as a black feminist text Dessa Rose is registering a source of
pain that is particular to black womanhood, that is historic and aroused by witnessing a
black man loving a white woman.
201
women and Black men. For Dessa Rose it is painful—she sees Nathan's
relationship with Rufel as a personal rejection of her (Greene 1986, 34).
In the end the personal rejection that Dessa feels does not get in the way of her working
with Nathan and Rufel to achieve their liberation from slavery but it is a stumbling block,
and it is important to recognize the rejection that Williams is articulating that would be
circulating in the social and political climate in which Williams is living and crafting this
narrative. The relationship between Rufel and Nathan is illustrative of the fear of
miscegenation, which men of the slaveholding class worked diligently to thwart through
legislation, and severe punishment or death for black men who were merely accused of
crossing that racial boundary. The machination of miscegenation between Rufel and
Nathan is the image that struck fear in the hearts of white men -- this is not the
configuration of miscegenation that I am contending is being produced and hidden by the
culture of miscegenation. The sexual relationship between Rufel and Nathan is the kind
of pairing that the culture of miscegenation is working to prevent at all costs, while the
rape of enslaved women, and the threat of rape by her grandfather that young Anabelle
fled are acts of sexual violence that the culture of miscegenation makes illegible or
unbelievable. The culture of miscegenation produces the conditions in which a white
Mistress would only believe that a pregnant enslaved girl must be carrying the Master’s
child, after “making up” to him of course. While the character Dessa was never sexually
assaulted by the Master, the specter of miscegenation violence shrouded her pregnancy.
The Mistress Vaughn suspected that the baby she was carrying was her husband’s, and
even Kaine, the baby’s father, believed that the baby Dessa was carrying could be Master
Vaughn’s. The culture of miscegenation would make the probability of Dessa carrying
the Master’s baby most probable. The acts of sexual violence perpetrated by slave owners
202
upon enslaved women appear in Dessa Rose at the periphery of the narrative through the
memories of supporting characters.
The literary redress that Williams issues with Dessa Rose exercises her authorial
power to combat white patriarchal misrepresentation such as that committed by William
Styron with his The Confessions of Nat Turner, which she alludes to in her Author’s Note
to Dessa Rose. Williams uses this authorial power to not only craft a successful slave
revolt with her literary license but relegate the dominion that the planter class had over
enslaved women to the margins of her narrative and into the memories of her characters.
The acts of violent miscegenation existed as a suspicious haze surrounding Dessa’s
pregnancy and emerged as expository notes in some periphery character’s histories in
Dessa Rose. Williams’s choice to include descriptions of character’s paternal lineage
that reach back to slave owning men conjures of the specters of miscegenation and the
rape of black women --black mothers-- who do not appear in the narrative.
The violence of miscegenation was made evident in the personal narratives of
these enslaved people yet not made central the narrative of Dessa Rose. Williams
redirects attention to elements of black women’s lives that are not centered around white
men’s violence against them, she puts these in the past and they emerge in the novel only
through a character’s memories.
18
Kaine, the father of Dessa’s son, remembers that he
saw his mother sold when he was a young boy, he was so young when she was sold away
that he would not recognize his mother if he saw her. Of Kaine’s father Williams offers,

18
For a discussion of memory and slave narratives see Arlene Keizer’s Black Subjects:
Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. See also Salamisha Tillet’s
Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination.
For a discussion of antebellum performance, time, and miscegenation see Tavia
Nyong’o’s The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and The Ruses of Memory.
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“And sometime he think maybe his first masa or the driver or maybe just some white man
passing through be his daddy” (Williams 1986, 38). Ada and Anabelle, a mother and
daughter who were runaways living at Sutton Glen when Dessa was introduced to the
community, made their escape because of the violence of miscegenation coupled with the
threat of incest. These women became Dessa’s confidants as she recovered from
childbirth, the horrors of the coffle, and being chained in the damp cellar awaiting her
death. Williams describes the violence that Ada and Anabelle fled:
Ada was her master’s daughter – though it didn’t get her no special favor; she just
happen to be one the children’s he kept. He didn’t have nothing to do with
Anabelle – only white on her had come from Ada – and Ada might would’ve been
there still hadn’t been the master started looking at Anabelle. That was his
granddaughter, mind, and she not even thirteen. Ada tried to get the mistress to
stop him, but mistress say, don’t bring that kind of talk in her House (Williams
1986, 176).

While Dessa was recovering she also was able to bond and commiserate with Harker,
Nathan, and Cully, the three men who helped her escape that cellar prison. They had
escaped the coffle together and then once these three found out where she was being held
prisoner, they broke her out of the cellar prison on Sheriff Hughes’s farm and brought her
to safety at Sutton Glen. In these talks with Dessa as she recuperated, Cully would joke
about his Master who was “trying to raise him as a slave and like a son – teaching him to
read but not to write, to speak but daring him to think” (Williams 1986, 169).
The authorial choice to include the violence of miscegenation in the narrative at
the margins of the stories only to be expressed as memories, usurps the culture of
miscegenation by centering black women’s histories without having them be dominated
by the violence of rape and the agony of children being torn away. This narrative device
also provides a gateway for the specters of miscegenation to make their appearance and
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not be relegated to the shadows. Williams makes a place in her narrative to acknowledge
the routine miscegenation violence suffered by black women who would become mothers
through these racialized sexual horrors while making room to imagine other aspects of
black women’s experiences of chattel slavery, namely love, community, and liberation.
The act of miscegenation sexual violence that does enter the narrative and effect
change in the story revolves around the character Linda. Dessa recalls that Linda, a
mulatto girl who was on the coffle with Dessa, Harker, Cully, and Nathan, was forced
into the bushes every night by slave traders who would viciously rape her. Every night
those enslaved would hear Linda’s pitiful screams. On the night of the escape, the white
man who unlocked Linda from the coffle forgot to relock the chains and they fell away
from the men, women, and children bound by them. On this night, Linda had fought back
and bludgeoned the man who was raping her and killed him with a boulder. This is the
night that Dessa, Cully, Harker, and Nathan made their escape from the coffle (Williams
1986, 61). This triumph of the mulatto victim of rape finally reversing the violence and
freeing herself from the lecherous clutches of a drunken slave trader and the simultaneity
of the coffle chains falling away from the hundred or so men, women, and children who
made the twenty mile a day walk across the southern United States, exposes the routine
nature of the culture of miscegenation. Williams’s narrative choice to let the coffle chains
fall away while Linda, undoubtedly the product of the sexual violence of miscegenation,
is fighting off a lecherous agent of the culture of miscegenation provides a release for the
victims who always bear the blame for the violence inflicted upon them. The centrality of
the culture of miscegenation to the system of chattel slavery is made salient as the victims
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of this regime are finally able to experience freedom, victory, and release – even if it is
short lived.
This story of the escape from the coffle and Linda’s self-determining vindication
is communicated to the reader through Dessa’s private thoughts and memories of that
night. Williams’s use of memory enacts a black feminist imperative in which she
resurrects the history of black women’s struggle and freedom while resisting the violence
of miscegenation that looms as a threat to enslaved women’s sexuality and
reproductivity. Rather than have the rape of enslaved women be the central conflict of her
novel and carry an overdetermining representative weight in which sexual violence and
exploitation are the totality of black women’s experiences of her imagination of slavery,
Williams uses the past and peripheral characters to hold those burdens. Williams uses
memory as a literary tool of black feminist resistance that makes room in the present for
the actualization of survival, liberation, and love.
19

A Memory Of Liberation and Space of (Un)Freedom
The site of memory is a powerful black geography because employing it assumes
that the story of blackness in the diaspora is actual and possible, and that the
discursive erasure of black peoples does not eliminate how they have been
implicated in the production of space. Reconstructing past interior lives of black
people in the diaspora is an important geographic act, which brings to life new
ethnicities and different senses of place; by humanizing black subjects who are
otherwise bound to the historio-racial schema, it situates the geographies of the
black diaspora in a time when this was considered impossible; it allows past and
present black geographies to be believable” (McKittrick 2006, 34).

19
Andree-Anne Kekeh analyzes Williams’s use of memory in Dessa Rose that works to
evade the historical violence of the white author while also countering the
misrepresentation and stigmatization of the “mammy” figure in “Sherley Anne Williams’
Dessa Rose: History and the Disruptive Power of Memory.” My interest in Williams’s
use of memory focuses on her foregrounding black resistance and pushing to the margins
the violence of the white plantocracy, patriarchy, and paternalism.
206
This quote from Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the
Cartographies of Struggle conceives of black women’s memory as geography, a
deployment of black feminist imperatives that is at work in Dessa Rose. In her study
McKittrick contends that the spatial process of geography is not static but “an alterable
terrain,” and asks us to recognize that the movement between and within the present and
the past is an inherent component of black women’s geographies (McKittrick, xvii).
McKittrick’s conception of geography resonates with Toni Morrison’s contention about
the past not being over or done with but still in process.
20
Williams uses the past in the
form of character’s memories and the geography of a plantation cellar, the architecture of
Sutton Glenn, and the suspenseful journey west toward liberation in Dessa Rose to listen
to the interior lives of black women who survived chattel slavery. Williams’s
deployment of the past and her treatment of geography in this novel carves out space for
the black women characters to express desire, to strategize survival and to harness the
transformative power of love to achieve liberation. The authorial command that Williams
wields delivers a Neo-slave narrative work of historical fiction that performs a historical
recovery through black feminist imagination, which depicts a field of emotional
possibilities not recorded in histories of chattel slavery. In “The Site of Memory” Toni
Morrison considers the relationship between fiction and memoir, and literature and slave
narratives to offer what she considers to be her responsibility as a writer. She discusses
slave narratives in the context of memoir, and the book she was working on at the time
Beloved, to consider the ways in which writers like Harriet Jacobs and Fredrick Douglass
had to resist expressing too many horrific details:

20
Morrison, “Be Your Own Story.”
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But most importantly - at least for me - there was no mention of their interior life.
For me - a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not much more than a
hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman - the
exercise is very different. My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over
"proceedings too terrible to relate." The exercise is also critical for any person
who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we
were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic
(Morrison 1995, 91).

Through geography for McKittrick, literature for Morrison, and the Neo-slave narrative
for Williams, these producers of black feminist thought access the interior life of black
women during the era of chattel slavery with their work. My analysis of the use of
memory in Dessa Rose looks to McKittrick who contends that memory can be conceived
of as a geography of the interior and to who Morrison insists that a black woman writer
must trust her recollections, the recollections of others, and utilize her imagination to
access “the interior life of people who didn’t write it” (Morrison 1995, 91- 93).
21
A
driving imperative of McKittrick’s analysis disputes the belief that space “just is,”
arguing that conceiving of geographies as transparent and natural discounts black
geographic epistemologies. She refutes the naturalization of space that relegates black
femininity to the realm of the unknown, a realm that does not produce knowledge, is not
a vital part of space, and as such is out of place (McKittrick 2006). McKittrick identifies
the auction block and Harriet Jacob’s occupation of the garret in her grandmother’s house
as generative sites for her analyses of slavery
22
(McKittrick 2006).

21
McKittrick incorporates Sylvia Wynter’s conception of the demonic, not in the sinister
way this term is commonly understood or even in the Shakespearean sense of lack, rather
through the mathematical usage that is described as “a working system that cannot have a
determined, or knowable outcome” (McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xxiv).
22
In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century
America Saidiya Hartman theorizes the ascription of enjoyment upon enslaved
performing bodies on the auction block, on the coffle, and on the plantation and places
affect in McKittrick’s three-dimensional geographic theory of black women’s history of
208
The scale of the body, then, necessarily identifies the ways in which the
historical and geographic particularities of the plantation are socially produced
through powerful material technologies…the technology of slave auction block
‘scales’ the body, differentiating it from those not on the auction block, and those
areas surrounding the auction block (McKittrick 2006, 74).

By not locating black women in space and by discounting their knowledge, black
women’s geographies of sexual violence can be willfully occluded from traditional
geographies. The occlusion of black women’s geographies that obscure white,
patriarchal, sexual depravity and rape is disrupted by attending to cartographies of
struggle in narratives like Harriet Jacobs’s, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as
Written by Herself, that both McKittrick and Saidiya Hartman analyze. The lecherous and
pernicious rape of black girls during chattel slavery forced Jacobs to take refuge in the
garret:
Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children,
will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and
such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child’s own mother is among those
hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help
understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil
things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. She
will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed has
bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands
admiration in the whit woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave. I
know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their
position; but many slave feel it most acutely, and shrink from memory of it. I
cannot tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, nor how I am
still pained by the retrospect. My master met me at every turn, reminding me that

domination. As Hartman conceptualizes, the terror of pleasure provides language for the
affective register of performances of blackness in the pastoral theater enacted by “going
before the king,” or on auction blocks being forced to make oneself attractive to potential
masters (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 28; 32; 36). The pleasure of terror enables the
master class to interpret the violence they inflict upon enslaved bodies as merriment
when they “strike up lively” on the coffle marching to the auction block (Hartman,
Scenes of Subjection, 32; 36). Hartman’s analysis of affect in scenes of terror in U.S.
chattel slavery fills in some of the bodily geography that McKittrick points to in her
discussion of scales of the body.

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I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to
submit to him (Jacobs 1861, 27).

I look to Hartman’s theorization of Linda Brent’s paradoxical crisis of mobility in Scenes
of Subjection to reconceptualize McKittrick’s spatial analysis. Hartman provocatively
proposes that seduction can “serve as a weapon of the weak or a vehicle for the
articulation of needs and desires” (Hartman 1997, 103). Hartman’s exploration of the
ruses of seduction used by Linda Brent as a vehicle to mobilize her freedom and the
liberation of her children rethinks McKittrick’s geography of the garret and Linda Brent’s
body. The spaces within and between Linda Brent’s body and the body of her chosen
lover forge a path of freedom, both imagined and real, that travel the circuitous route of
seduction. Hartman’s analysis of Linda Brent’s giving oneself to a man other than her
Master, in order to achieve a measure of freedom, produces a second paradox outside of
the paradoxical confinement and escape within the garret. Seduction as a mobilization of
liberation enlivens the overriding paradox of black women’s sexuality in slavery, the bind
between sexual desire and sexual violence (Hartman 1997). Reading seduction as a
vehicle of liberation in an era saturated with sexual violence and public humiliation
makes visible spatial struggles for survival on black women’s bodies and in the space of
enslaved confinement and prolonged retreat. Attending to the mobilization of seduction
in this narrative locates alternate black women’s geographies that are obscured by
traditional geography. Hartman’s reading of Brent’s ruse of seduction theorizes an
alterable terrain of geography that is worked out through black women’s sexuality and
sexual domination that are inextricably linked in time and space. McKittrick uses the
calculus of the demonic in locating cartographies of un-representable black women’s
histories in time and space. She insists that mapping black women’s geographies does not
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recover something lost, chart a new map, or only locate difference and absence but that
the demonic ground of black women’s geographies demonstrates ways that place is an
unfinished project and this transforms human geography (McKittrick 2006). With
Hartman and McKittrick’s discussion of Harriet Jacobs in mind I move to analyses of the
epistemologies of survival that are expressed through spatiality and architecture in Dessa
Rose.
Sutton Glen provides sanctuary for a community of people who have escaped the
clutches of slavery and I argue is a literary and architectural inverse of the garret in which
Harriet Jacobs hid for seven years while she planned her escape. The home at Sutton
Glen is a temporary haven that serves as a space for the runaways to hide in plain sight
while they conceive of their master plan to escape the south and the grips of chattel
slavery. The plantation home Sutton Glen is in a state of disrepair, there is a flight of
stairs that lead to a second floor that does not exist. Given that one of the most
remarkable facets of Linda Brent’s narrative is her seven-year long confinement in a 9 x
7 x 3 foot space, her cramped immobility and isolation compound the paradox of her time
in the garret, she is confined yet she has escaped the pathological desire of her Master Dr.
Flint (McKittrick 2006). McKittrick contends, “[t]he garret can be conceptualized as
useable paradoxical space, which opens up a different way to observe slavery and
underscores the geographic shape of mystery” (McKittrick 2006, 42).
Williams’s use of space and temporality in Dessa Rose, that imagines and
constructs a past in which a black community has the resources and the ability to wage a
successful, slow moving revolt calls up Harriet Jacobs’s garret. The hovering, looming
figure of the Master of Sutton Glen is an absent presence unlike Dr. Flint whose physical
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presence impedes Harriet Jacobs’s movement outside of the garret. Williams’s
spatialization of Sutton Glen enacts an architectural reversal of Harriet Jacobs’s garret
and imagines a space in which an escape from slavery could involve a community, could
allow mothers to be with their children, and could prove that desperate isolation is not a
precondition of freedom. Williams’s choice to push the sexual violence against black
women to the periphery of her narrative, only to be told through the memories of the
characters, coupled with her construction of this safe haven in which a community of
renegades support and love one another, reaches back in time and offers a literary redress
for Harriet Jacobs.
Though the spatial configuration of Sutton Glen is an inverse of Harriet Jacobs’s
garret, the paradox of Harriet Jacobs’s condition in the garret can also be read into the
runaway’s condition at Sutton Glen. The freedom of those who are enslavable at Sutton
Glen depends upon those from the slave holding class believing Rufel is holding them in
bondage. At Sutton Glen Dessa, Harker, Cully, Nathan, Ada, and Annabelle are both free
and unfree. The freedom they experience only exists as long as they are perceived as
being enslaved. The politics of visuality within the context of plantation paternalism can
only regard black bodies as enslavable, lacking knowledge, and helpless to craft a life for
themselves without the Master. A significant architectural feature about the Sutton Glen
house is that a flight of stairs leads up to a second floor that remains incomplete, that does
not exist. Williams’s architectural depiction of the plantation house, the unfinished
second floor, enacts a refusal to finish the project of white supremacy. Though those
perceived to be slaves are laboring on the land and in the house under the guise of
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slavery, they are finishing their project of liberation, not completing the white supremacy
project of slavery – or the second floor of the plantation house.
As Dessa is gaining her strength during the early days at Sutton Glen with Ada
nursing her back to health she learns about the home in which she finds herself. She
wakes up terrified in a featherbed because she realizes that the room she is sleeping in
must be the Mistress’s bedroom. Dessa asks Ada if they are all free? And Ada let her
know that, “I wouldn’t zactly call if free…we runned away…White folks think we hers
but didn’t none of us never belong to this place.” Dessa does not like to sleep in the
Mistress’s bed, sometimes she wakes up in the night frightened to be laying next to a
white lady and annoyed to be entangled in the Mistress’s red hair. She asks Ada if she
and Mony can sleep with her and Annabelle but Ada disabuses her of that notion.
“Honey, me and Annabelle sleeps in that little lean-to they calls a kitchen; it just barely
big enough for us and it ain’t no wise fitting. You ain’t even out of childbed--” (Williams
1986, 116). When Dessa insists, Ada informs her:
…these some poor white peoples. Oh, this room and the parlor fine enough, but
you know what’s outside that door? A great big stairway lead straight up to
nothing cause they never did finish the second floor...’Sides…she the only
nursing woman on the place. Even if you go, you ought to leave the baby here
(Williams 1986, 116).

The second floor that leads nowhere and the laborers choosing not to finish the home,
electing not to invest in fixing up that place but rather putting their attention toward
farming, nourishing themselves, and preparing to make their escape west, is a refusal to
complete the project white supremacy. Williams’s conception of a dilapidated plantation
house that creates a protected space of concomitant freedom and unfreedom are the
precarious conditions in which the runaways live at Sutton Glen -- in the shadow of the
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Master. With this time and space those who were once held in bondage subvert the
regime of chattel slavery by repurposing their labor for themselves and using the
transformative power of love to catalyze their survival and liberation. The absent
presence, the imminence of the Master of the house puts pressure on the enslavable
people there to use their intellectual and material resources to devise and execute a plan
to escape chattel slavery. By refusing to build the home in anticipation of the Master’s
return they resist the white supremacist project of chattel slavery and direct their attention
toward the reproduction of a black community and their own libratory project of
becoming unbound by the chains of slavery.
In my analysis of the epistemologies of survival used in Dessa Rose to transform
bondage into freedom at Sutton Glen I focus on the dialectics of love that produce the
conditions for this community of slaves to become free. In the shadow of plantation
paternalism these rebellious laborers shore up their energy, bond with one another, and
learn to trust the members of the community in order to prepare for their journey. These
actions both require and mobilize love. Through love they plant vegetables, grow cotton,
and repurpose the crops for their own nourishment and material benefit. Their energy and
love is not expended only to support the Master and his family but to support this band of
renegades who managed to survive until this point. Williams makes a point of including
in her narrative that Master Sutton tried to grow cotton on the land even though all of the
farmers in the area grew corn. The land, under Sutton’s control, was never able to yield
much, the plantation floundered and the Suttons were deeply in debt. Without the
presence of Master Sutton and under the direction of Harker – the runaway whose
knowledge of agriculture could make cotton grow in corn country - the land became
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fertile and yielded cotton, corn, potatoes, and oats, enough food to feed all who lived
there (Williams 1986, 149). Together in this time and in this place the runaways devised
a plan to head west, selling themselves back into slavery -- then escaping. From the
outside looking in this appears to be a community of slaves working for a Master but
what keeps them alive and enables them to achieve their libratory goal is the love that
they transform into freedom. While the main character, the rebellious pregnant enslaved
woman who becomes a young mother during the course of the narrative, must contend
with the violence of miscegenation even if only waged through suspicion and conjecture,
what she thinks about more than anything is love; the love she had with Kaine and lost
when the Master killed him. I will now move into a discussion of the epistemologies of
survival and the dialectics of love that course through Dessa Rose and emerge through
the production of spaces of resistance and the subversive politics of visuality on the
runaway haven of Sutton Glen.

Love: A Black Feminist Imperative
I have chosen to use the term “dialectics” in my discussion of love as a mode of
survival with its Marxist lineage as this conveys the transformative, mobilizing aspect of
love that I wish to invoke. Rather than focus on the affective quality of love I prefer to
consider the movement-building propensity of love -- love as action. In Ludwig
Feuerbach and The End of Classical German Philosophy Friedrich Engels remarks upon
dialectical philosophy:
For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the
transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it
except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless
ascendancy from the lower to the higher (Engels 1886, 360).
215
Williams’s imagination of a past that is not done and is in process along with her
mobilization of love to subvert the bondage of chattel slavery destabilizes the absolute
finality of the condition of chattel slavery. The transitory quality of love as an action
produces an ascendancy from lower to higher, from bondage to freedom. The
epistemologies of survival that the runaways of Sutton Glen employ involve using their
agricultural skills to provide nourishment for their collective, the ingenuity to devise a
plan to gather capital for their escape, the ability to value the resources and materials at
hand to transform their condition from enslavable to liberated. Love is one of the
resources used to mobilize their transformation that actualizes black feminist imperatives
in Dessa Rose.
In “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality,”
Jennifer C. Nash offers a genealogy of black feminist love politics and works to decouple
black feminism from intersectionality as a method of demonstrating the heterogeneity of
black feminism (Nash 2013). Nash’s conception of black feminist love politics tracks
back to second wave black feminism, as does my conception of love as an imperative of
black feminism. Nash looks to Jasbir Puar’s critique of intersectionality and her concept
of assemblage that foregrounds affectivity and futurity as another way to think of love
outside of intersectionality and its enmeshment with identity politics (Nash 2013).
Although love certainly has affective qualities, perhaps even predominantly so, what
resonates for me about black feminist love, especially in Dessa Rose, is less about feeling
and more about resistance, action, and freedom. The work that Nash has expertly
contributed to the discussion about love and black feminist politics look critically at the
problematics of identity politics, transcending the self, and the importance of self-love for
216
black feminism, while my investment in love is drawn to the ways that black feminism
calls upon love as an action that produces the conditions for survival and liberation.
The black feminist imperatives that were circulating while Williams was
conceiving of and crafting Dessa Rose, the 1960’s and 1970’s, emerges in her novel. The
relationship between the historical, political, and social context of that era and Neo-slave
narratives of the 1980s is an important tenet of Rushdy’s conception of the Neo-slave
narrative literary tradition. This era is also important in Nash’s theory of black feminist
love politics, which looks to “a ‘second-wave’ black moment when pleas for love were
consolidated into a sustained call for a black feminist love-politics” (Nash 2013, 13). The
kind of love that Williams depicts in her work of historical fiction occurs most obviously
as romantic love. In an interview Williams discusses the love depicted in her novel:
The relationships grew. I started out with this thing between Dessa and Kaine. It
was really important to me to be able to imagine romantic love among slaves. I
really wanted to say that slavery had not killed the passion and tenderness and
gentleness in us (Greene 1986, 34).

Upon closer inspection, Williams’s depiction of love in the community of runaways at
Sutton Glen becomes a mode of survival and as a transformative tool for liberation.
While Dessa was being held as a prisoner at the Hughes farm, being questioned by
Nehemiah about how they all escaped the coffle, she resists his questions by telling him a
love story, a tragedy. As a mode of resistance to white patriarchal power’s literary
authority that means to circumscribe her existence, Dessa refuses to answer Nehemiah’s
questions. He wants to hear a confession. He wants Dessa to give away her secrets and
break her solidarity with her fellow resisters but rather than a confession, she tells him
what she wants to think about. Love. Instead of a confession Dessa tells him the story of
217
how she ended up in that cell, her love for Kaine. What haunts Dessa’s love for Kaine is
the culture of miscegenation but despite the suspicion of Mistress Vaughn and Rufel,
Kaine is the father of her baby, not the Master. Dessa and Kaine’s love manages to resist
the culture of miscegenation, which makes it all the more special. What began this whole
chain of events, which put her on antebellum death row, was her love for Kaine and her
desire to avenge his death. The bond, the love that developed between Dessa, Nathan, and
Cully on the coffle, along with their ingenuity and cunning, broke Dessa out of that cellar
jail cell. Williams creates a beautiful irony in which Sheriff Hughes and Nehemiah
leaving the farm to look for a supposed maroon colony while in their absence their
prisoner escaped with the help of members of a maroon colony, Sutton Glen, that was
unrecognizable as such. Dessa tells Nehemiah stories of Kaine, how he loved her, how he
chose her, how he played the banjo for her, how he loved that banjo and how the garden
loved him; he was the best gardener on the plantation. Dessa’s love for Kaine and the
memory of Kaine’s love for her keeps her alive in the dank cellar prison. Dessa slips in a
hint of the kind of action that black women took to end or prevent a pregnancy when
she’s telling tales about love and Kaine to Nehemiah. Dessa’s memory of how enslaved
women loved each other by making brews of herbs and roots that would foreclose an
unwanted life growing inside sustained her; remembering collective resistance to the
Master’s seed kept Dessa alive.
At Sutton Glen when Dessa arrives she is too weak to nurse her child, so the
white Mistress Rufel nurses him. Eventually Dessa realizes that she has no milk for her
son and Rufel needs to nurse him whenever he is hungry. The white woman’s milk
entering the black enslavable child’s body is an act of miscegenation. It could be argued
218
that Rufel has love for the boy and this is the reason she breaks the convention and nurses
him. From a black feminist perspective, the wet nurse reversal could also be a
demonstration of the love that Dessa has for her son. She loves him so much that she
allowed this white Mistress, a woman in a position that has only had contempt for her, to
feed her child when she could not. That is a love in action that allows her child to survive.
Dessa’s relationship with Rufel is a relationship that does transform over time and
enables the master plan for liberation to succeed.
Ultimately the love of community and the bond among these renegades makes
them a unit in which they trust one another, perform their duties, sustain one another with
they crops they grow, rooms they clean, and children they tend with an appearance of the
strictures of chattel slavery being in tact. In reality liberation is slowly occurring, love is
transforming slavery into freedom. At Sutton Glen the enslavable members of this group
took the time and utilized the resources needed, love included, to develop the strength to
wrest their freedom from the regime of chattel slavery. On the road toward the west and
liberation, this collective puts their performance to the test playing the mammy, the
Mistress, the trader, the slave, and the driver. The stakes are high, the anxiety is great but
they rather enjoy the pleasure of subverting the system and profiting from their own
bodies and their own risk to actualize their freedom.
Nash’s analysis does the important work of addressing the limits of the wounded
subject whose grievances can be expressed through identity politics and brings our
attention to the way that black feminist love politics “crafts a collectivity marked by
‘communal affect,’ a utopian, visionary, future-oriented community held together by
affiliation and ‘public feeling’ rather than an imagined –or enforced sameness” (Nash
219
2013, 18). In my conception, love is central to the black feminist imperatives made
salient in second wave black feminist literature from Davis’s “Reflections,” to the
Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement,” to Williams’s Dessa Rose.
There is an immediacy in love as actions in these texts that are not so much about affect
and is not reserved for an imagined utopic future, but rather mobilized through the
quotidian love that is activated and is necessary for surviving the day. With enough
consecutive days of surviving and planning and using their resources amassed, time is
transformed in Dessa Rose and liberation occurs. Rather than look to utopia, this analysis
looks to imagination as a place that holds the possibilities of love, a place from which the
transformation is launched in the present.
Through her Neo-slave narrative, the impetus for which was learning about an
enslaved woman causing a slave revolt by reading Angela Davis’s “Reflections of the
Black Woman’s role in the Community of Slaves,” Williams drew upon several black
feminist imperatives. With Dessa Rose, Williams answered Davis’s call to resurrect black
women’s stories from history and practiced The Combahee River Collective’s insistence
on recognizing the inherent value of black women as well as their political commitment
to love. As expressed in the Black Feminist Statement the Combahee River Collective
contends that, “Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our
community which allows us to continue our struggle and work” (Hull, Scott, and Smith
1982, 16). Williams was able to draw upon her own resources, her imagination,
intelligence, and creativity, as they are imbricated with these black feminist imperatives,
to produce a narrative that catalyzes love as a mode of survival and liberation during
chattel slavery, yet as Dessa Rose is read in the post-civil rights era and the new
220
millennium her work posits love as an act of resistance and liberation to be utilized today.
I look to Audre Lorde’s rumination in “A Litany for Survival” with Dessa Rose in
mind as it demonstrates a love that is “seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in
our children's mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours.” Lucille Clifton’s
celebration of the fact that everyday something has tried to kill her and has failed is a
celebration in which Dessa and the renegades can all rejoice. Something tried to kill all
of them, Dessa was awaiting her death by hanging and yet she survived. Those
fictionalized black lives whose bodies mattered enough to each other that they risked
them to save her, managed to survive. Black readers who can enjoy Williams, and Davis,
Lorde, and Clifton can celebrate with Dessa that something has tried to kill her and them,
and has failed. Death’s failure is in the here and now and love is not deferred for a utopic
future. Love can only happen in the present and that is what makes survival happen, that
is what makes the act of surviving and the snatching of liberation worth the fight. Love.
When the subversive power of love defies death, death fails. Even when death
prevails, love can persist because it existed; that is what black maternal specters of
miscegenation do, that is where they live, that place is their domain. The racial and sexual
violence and economic injustice that results in black death demands a reckoning, which
travels through the circuit of love; the specters of this violence live on lingering, insisting,
and silently waiting to be heeded. The culture of miscegenation is at the root of the racial
knot that produced blackness and whiteness in the United States. The specters of
miscegenation that are undead exist between this life and the next and cannot rest until
the circumstances that brought about their failing to survive are reconciled. Works like
Williams’s Dessa Rose that imagine life and liberation answers the call of specters of the
221
culture of miscegenation. Davis’s call to resurrect black women’s stories from history
attends to the specters of miscegenation that insist something be done about the wrongs
that brought about their death, about being forgotten, about being misplaced, about being
ignored, disrespected, and set aside. The black enslaved women who died trying to love,
trying to be free, trying to mother, trying to protect, trying not to be raped demand that
something be done and theirs are the specters of miscegenation to which this chapter
attends, through which this entire project tries to love despite their state of lifelessness,
because they are still here, bodiless, yet they still love and they are waiting to be
recognized and loved back. That love is an action and those of us inside bodies with the
ability to write and recall their memories, as Morrison recognizes as the province of
writers, are charged with trusting the unspoken, debunking the authority that tells us it is
not real because we cannot see it. We know just like Dessa knew her baby was Kaine’s
that the specters tortured, murdered, and humiliated by white supremacy deserve rest,
need love, and can be attended to with our words. Our love is action.

222
Epilogue
Specters of Miscegenation in the New Millennium White House

The antebellum archetypal relationship between the white man of the slave
holding class and the enslaved black mother has morphed into a recuperative cultural
rollercoaster in the new millennium with a primetime television show that has excited the
masses, Shonda Rhimes’s series Scandal (2012-present). Kerri Washington’s portrayal of
Olivia Pope, the show’s sophisticated D.C. insider protagonist, captivated primetime
audiences from Scandal’s opening episode. Olivia’s problematically passionate affair
with the married fictional Republican President, Fitzgerald Grant, stirred up the specters
of miscegenation so much so that Sally Hemings made an appearance, in the dialogue. In
the Season Two “Happy Birthday Mr. President” episode, Olivia speaks the name of the
antebellum apparition that has haunted the show since day one. Although the second and
third seasons of Scandal dipped so heavily into melodrama that at times the suspension of
disbelief was lost, the melodramatic cliff hangers and Olivia Pope’s prowess kept
viewership alive. Maybe Shonda Rhimes was channeling the spirits of nineteenth century
black women writers like Pauline E. Hopkins who penned Contending Forces and Emma
Dunham Kelley who wrote Megda – both magnificent melodramas that weaved together
complex tapestries of betrayal, deep dark secrets, and valiant rescues as well as the
intricate and elite concerns of the sanctified black literati. Part of the pleasure of reading
Hopkins and Kelley, a joy that counters the effect produced by melodrama, is the
knowledge that these black women were writing and publishing books that represent
black women’s lives in popular culture just a few decades after the abolition of slavery.
The pleasure of seeing Olivia Pope in command is recuperative and delicious. She
devours her enemies and upends centuries of black women’s subservience and
223
degradation by tossing out brilliant quips at lightning speed while brilliantly wielding her
power to get what Madame Pope wants. Olivia Pope seduces audiences into overlooking
the impossible narrative sidewinders that propel each episode of Scandal and allows
viewers to magically disidentify with her allegiance to and service of the Republican
Party.
The White House corridors, in real life and on television, are certainly populated
by spirits of scandals past. The most beckoning presidential scandal that Scandal calls
forward awakens the ubiquitous ghosts of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. In this
Season Two episode, a married President Grant -- affectionately known as Fitz -- is
flirting shamelessly with Olivia as she moves determinably through White House
corridors. Olivia rebuffs the President’s advances and insists that she wants to break off
the affair but the President does not relent. Sally Hemings makes herself known when
Olivia finally annunciates that she is “feeling a little, I don’t know, Sally Hemings-
Thomas Jefferson about all of this.” Olivia’s deep resistance to occupying the same kind
of space with Fitz that Sally Hemings occupied with Thomas Jefferson, places Sally
Hemings very directly in the narrative and in the White House. Yet before Olivia Pope
ever speaks of Sally Hemings the glaring parallel begged verbalization. While politically,
historically, and culturally the situation that Olivia Pope finds herself in with Fitz is in
stark contrast to Sally Hemings’s relationship with Thomas Jefferson, part of the pleasure
of watching Olivia in action is witnessing her reversal of Sally Hemings’s fortune.
Olivia’s control over her own sexuality, her own money, her own cabin in the woods, her
confidence and intelligence, her ruthless Washington insider clout are all haunted by a
history of enslavement and concubinage. The spectral presence of Sally Hemings and
224
Thomas Jefferson that haunts Olivia’s affair with Fitz reinforces the bind of black
women’s sexuality that Hortense Spillers discusses in “Interstices a small drama of
words.” Spillers’s now famous contention that, “Black women are the beached whales of
the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb,” is a problematic
that even Olivia Pope cannot escape. Olivia’s character uses her voice, she is regarded
with the utmost respect on capital hill, she routinely engages in life changing action but in
her “sexual universe” she is bound to the married white President and haunted by the
enslaved mistress, the concubine of a founding father. Olivia Pope is awaiting her verb.
She tries to break it off with Fitz yet even when she sleeps with her other lover Jake, she
is indelibly tied to the President. During an interview with Saidiya Hartman, Farah
Jasmine Griffin, Shelley Eversley and Jennifer L. Morgan about her paradigm shifting
article “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe” Hortense Spillers remarks upon the impetus to
write “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words”: Spillers says,
And I thought, you know what, before I can get to the subject of the sexuality of
black women I didn’t see a vocabulary that would make it possible to entertain the
sexuality of black women in any way that was other than traumatic. Before you
could have a conversation about sexuality of black women you had to clear the
static, clear the field of static.
1

Does Shonda Rhimes clear the field of static with Olivia Pope or magnify its frequency?
The violence, the ownership, the lack of agency, the shame that burdened Sally Hemings
persistently lingers in Olivia’s love affair with Fitz. But Rhimes manages to expose the
interior, the emotion of the haunting by exposing Fitz’s bind, his love for Olivia that will
not quit.

1
Hortense Spillers was interviewed in 2007 by leading African American women
scholars in “Whatcha Gonna Do?”: Revisiting “Mama’s Baby: An American Grammar
Book:” A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin,
Shelley Eversley & Jennifer L. Morgan. This quote appears on page 301.
225
After the scene in the White House corridor, Fitz finds Olivia in the White House
Rose Garden. In an impassioned and heartfelt retort to Olivia’s exhaustion with being the
other woman and feeling owned by Fitz, Fitz confesses to Olivia that he is not in the
position of ownership in their relationship, as Thomas Jefferson was with Sally Hemings.
Fitz explosively proclaims that “You own me, you control me. I belong to you.” The
language of ownership that Fitz and Olivia use is a direct comment on the relationship
between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Rhimes does not pretend that the violence
of slavery and anti-miscegenation can somehow escape this narrative, Rhimes is not
trying to rewrite history but she is offering a spectral affective suggestion through Fitz’s
proclamation. What does it mean that Olivia owns Fitz? Did Thomas Jefferson feel
owned by Sally Hemings? This encounter in the White House Rose Garden ventures into
that territory. If Olivia owns Fitz and Fitz is the leader of the free world then who owns
the free world? That is a pleasurable twist of history to revel in if only through an overly
dramatic primetime television show.
In reality, the White House is currently occupied by a black President who was
born to white mother and a Kenyan father, and is nearing the close of his second term in
office. President Obama’s ancestral lineage is rooted in slavery but on his white mother’s
side, not his father’s. President Obama’s mother has slave-owning ancestors, some of
whom could have participated in the production of the culture of miscegenation (Nitkin
and Merrit 2007). The specters of miscegenation that haunt the Hollywood White House
are alive in the “blood” of the first black President of the United States.

226
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Filmography

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Selma. Directed by Ava Duvernay. Paramount Pictures, 2014.

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Creator DeClue, Jennifer Michelle (author)

Core Title Specters of miscegenation: blood, belonging, and the reproduction of blackness

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 06/22/2017

Defense Date 05/05/2015

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

Tag anti-miscegenation law,Black feminist studies,Black reproductivity,chattel slavery,Cultural studies,haunting,Jim Crow,Loving v Virginia,miscegenation,OAI-PMH Harvest,Sally Hemings,sanguinity,spectrality,symbolics of blood,visuality

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Keeling, Kara (committee chair), Halberstam, Jack (committee member), Shah, Nayan (committee member), Williams, Diana (committee member)

Creator Email declue@usc.edu,jenniferdeclue09@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-577108

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Document Type Dissertation

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